How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  Psychotherapy in Israel cost a mere $8 an hour, so six months earlier my father had allowed me to find a shrink and indulge in two double-sessions per week. There may have been further reductions in cost to compensate for the fact that my kindly psychotherapist could see me twice a week but could not see me at all. Why? He was blind. When I began to liquefy, I called my sightless psychological healer in a panic and gurgled my problem. The expert in mental muck could see this was trouble. Well, that’s an exaggeration—remember, he was blind, and I was speaking to him on the phone. So he packed me on a two-day trip to the Negev Desert—either to keep me occupied or to dry me out like a laboratory specimen, it’s hard to tell which. While I was touring the ash heaps that had once been Sodom and Gomorrah and the pillar of salt that was supposedly Lot’s Wife (if Lot had looked back, would Jehovah have turned him into a pillar of pepper?), my professional cranial reducer—my blind therapist—arranged to send me back to the United States on the next available flight in the hope that someone in the land of stars, stripes, and straightjackets would put me in a loony bin. Ahhh, admission to a lunatic asylum, just what I needed, a goal. And one straight out of David and Lisa.

  The Negev was fascinating, even to a bubbling blob of solvents like me. The desert around the Dead Sea was even more alien than the Mars of Ming the Merciless, arch-demon in the Flash Gordon TV serials of my youth.

  Then came the airport, and the interior of a Pan Am jet. When I entered the plane, a strange transformation overtook me. I heard people speaking like Anglos and Saxons on every side. I was in an environment where my basic tools for coping with the world—my vocal chords—could work at full capacity again. (Believe me, even if a foreigner speaks “brilliant, erudite Hebrew,” he sounds like a total fool.) My sense of liquidity vanished in a puff. I was solid again. This was a problem. Remember the myth of Sisyphus and the gift of goals? I’d just been stripped of mine: obtaining admission to a mental institution. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

  A LITTLE B. F. SKINNERING

  How do you find yourself? By poking, probing, and adventuring. And what is your self? In some small part, it’s a goal. A goal that engages your deepest passions. A goal that uses your strange constellation of talents. A goal that plugs what you have to offer into the lives of your fellow human beings. A goal that helps you use your strangeness to fill others’ needs. And a goal that gets others to value you. A goal that gets you, if you are very lucky, admiration. And love. A goal that gets T. S. Eliot’s mermaids to stop “combing the white hair of the waves blown back,” to focus their eyes on you. And a goal that even gets those of the sex you prefer to desire you.

  It all comes down to the veliger stage of life. What in the land of God’s underarm deodorant is a veliger? It’s the offspring of a clam.

  Think of a clam. Visualize it hard. How mobile is it? How much walking, sprinting, shooting, or scooting does it do in an hour, a day, or a lifetime? How many marathons does it enter just for the heck of it? How many cross-seabed hikes does it undertake? The answer? None. A clam has no arms, legs, or tentacles. No dedicated propulsion appendage. Nada. Zero. The most it can do is stick an edge of its body out of its shell and push itself around pretty much the way you’d try to shove yourself around if you lost your legs and arms and were told to get from the bedroom to the bathroom three times a day using your tongue. You could stick your tongue out and make floor contact—ignoring the taste and the questionable sanitation—and move a quarter of an inch or two. Unlike you and me, who restrict our tongues to spitting syllables and moving chewing tobacco from one cheek to another, some clams are so good at this lingual propulsion that they can shoot themselves three feet in an emergency. With a flick of the tongue and a spit of water. But long marches like the twenty-five miles a day tromped by Napoleon’s troops would be just a tad out of the question. So the clam is the very picture of immobility. It counts on food coming to it, not the other way around.

  Meanwhile, what sort of children do clams crank out? By the tens of millions? Do they cough out kids as frozen in place as the Washington Monument? Not on your life. The clams’ kids are the very opposite of their parents. They have tiny whips that work like propellers. A ring of these whips girdles each baby’s body. And that girdle is designed for zipping, speeding, and racing—it’s built for non-stop swimming. It’s built for transport. Yes, the lucky veliger wears a propulsion girdle, a racing corset. Why? A baby clam has a problem—finding its place in life. Literally. Finding a spot in which it can settle down and feed. A spot so rich that the food will come to it, almost begging to be swallowed. A spot whose food supply will last a lifetime.

  So a veliger is built to find its fortune by adventuring. And its adventures will be dangerous. On its wild scoot to find a home, it will be regarded as a tasty morsel by just about every ravenous creature of the sea. Look up pretty much any ocean animal in your thirteen-volume Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia. I kid you not. There is such a thing. Started by German zoologist and zoo-director Bernhard Klemens Maria Grzimek in Frankfurt in 1967—yes, in The Sixties. Apparently, Grzimek studied animals instead of people because creatures with fur and fins didn’t constantly mispronounce his name. Dig into Grzimek’s massive reference set. Look up a water-living animal. Any water-living animal. Let’s say the baleen whale. The baleen whale is named for a massive screening apparatus in its mouth, a huge sieve like the grill of a car. And in the same way that the grill of your car picks up many a splatted insect if you take a long drive—let’s say to visit a tornado factory in Kansas—the mouth-screen of a baleen whale picks up plankton.

  What is plankton? It’s clouds of foodstuff composed of microscopic creatures. Yes, plankton is made up of creatures as individual as you and me. Creatures just as focused as you and I are on survival. And how does nature reward this microorganismic lust for life? This zest for dodging pains and tasting pleasures, for feasting, flitting, and fleeing? She turns so many septillions of her enthusiastic micro-children into sacrificial victims that she can feed a 210-ton whale. Actually, she offers up the lives of so many micro-beasts that she can feed roughly a million 210-ton baleen whales. Plus, a vast passel of other water-cruising beasts. Nature is kindly and caring, isn’t she?

  If you are a veliger—the young infant of a clam—you are a speck in one of these clouds of plankton. You are a pixel, a zit. So if you are going to find a place to settle down, you have to dodge an almost impossible obstacle—becoming an ingredient in a protein drink for a vast zoo of aquatic smoothie addicts out for a bite to drink.

  In other words, the veliger stage of life is tough. The only way you can find where you belong is by adventuring, by doing the clam equivalent of a T. S. Eliot and an Edna St. Vincent Millay. But under it all is a purpose. To find a place where you can settle down. A place set apart from the location in which your mother and father have found their homes. A place that will fit your needs and feed you. From now until the time you die.

  Clams are not alone. We humans go through the veliger stage. Alas, without the propulsion belt. We start it when we are eleven or twelve as our hormones kick in and we begin to toss ourselves out of our parents’ home. What our friends think of us becomes more important than the opinion of our mom and dad. What’s worse, our parents come to smell bad to us. And our armpit odors become unendurable to them. In other words, our biology is telling us it’s time to go. And we don’t end the veliger stage until our twenties or early thirties when we find an occupation and a mate and set up a home of our own. Which means that two goals underlie our wild meanderings: finding a mate and discovering a place where we belong.

  And under my adventures, though I didn’t know it, were these biological imperatives—to find a mate and a place where I fit. Two goals on which I’d make giant steps of progress just a bit further down the line. But first…

  I was still in the veliger stage. Poking, probing, scooting, and shooting to find a place where I was welcome, a place
where I might fit in. A place where I wouldn’t be eaten alive. I would do a good deal of that hunting and adventuring in, of all places, New Jersey.

  u

  When I touched down in the USA, I tried to arrange things so that there’d be several hundred miles separating me from my parents. You recall that when I got anywhere near them, my identity mysteriously disappeared, my backbone went limp, and I turned into an overcooked egg noodle. I’d tell you that I softened and sagged like a boiled leaf of spinach, but I’ve run out of vegetable metaphors.

  It would take years for my feeble mind to rearrange itself in such a way as to realize that my parents were human just like I was and, in fact, they were even shorter. Meanwhile a New Jersey cousin offered to take me in. So I moved my sleeping bag into his garden apartment in Somerville, New Jersey, with his wife and infant daughter.

  Which brings us back to Sisyphus. You recall that I’d gotten to America with only one goal in mind—obtaining entrance to a mental institution. This was a problem. On the plane from Israel, my liquefaction had ended and I’d become somewhat solid again. Which means I was a rough approximation of sane. Very rough. This was disconcerting. I’d get on the ferry from New Jersey to New York City day after day. I’d trudge around Manhattan, seeing shrink after shrink after shrink. And each one would conclude that there was no question about it—I was a little odd. But there wasn’t a single way in hell that I was institutionalizable. My only goal was totally thwarted, and I was in danger of falling back into the existential pit of emotional poison—the void. The emptiness devoid of goals. The foggy hell of angst and anomie.

  Then the cousin in New Jersey, let’s call him Len Kuker, since that, believe it or not, is his real name, cooked up something even better than a home for the mentally deranged: Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  u

  Cousin Len was teaching high school, taking grad-school-of-education night courses, teaching himself how to chart stocks, raising his six-month-old, and bossing around his Holocaust-surviving young wife. She’d been one of those Polish infants adopted by Catholic farmers, generous people of the soil who pretended she was a Christian haystack. Len not only had astonishing family loyalty and acted as my savior, but possessed the ability to convince an Eskimo to buy a lifetime subscription to the Ice Cube of the Month Club. So Len persuaded the head of Rutgers Graduate School of Education to take me in as a sort of spare paper weight around the office. The department head, Dr. Merrill Harmon, one of the founders of an educational approach called “values clarification,” took me into his office, gave me space to work, said I could do anything I wanted, and tossed a few books by Piaget and B. F. Skinner at me. He clearly didn’t realize that I can’t catch. Then Dr. Harmon let me loose in the domain of advanced academia. So I found myself quite by accident doing research at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

  I soon discovered that I had stumbled into a termite nest where the foundations of the American educational system were being eaten away. I read the books my professorial mentor and the mentor’s friends were using as texts. None of them taught facts. This wasn’t surprising. All proclaimed that facts were insidious obstacles to learning. Students didn’t need information, they needed to learn how to think. Little did it occur to the featherheads who wrote these enlightened tomes that without facts you can’t think.

  Look, for example, at the guys who wrote the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. Great thinkers, every one of them. How did they do it? They knew their history—especially the history of ancient Greece and Rome. They reasoned their principles—from the balance of powers on up—by deducing lessons from a vast store of historical data. Facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.

  But the folks who’d written the revolutionary new bibles of education had never read the Federalist Papers. In fact, I got the distinct impression they’d never read much beyond Dick and Jane. Oh, and a few tomes on psychotherapy. Which means that I was afraid that Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education’s gullible professors, who were exceptionally kind to me, were not exactly towering literati.

  What did values clarification suggest that you insert where the facts should have been? A positive self-image. Thus was a new breed of teacher brought into being.

  I was a little shocked by all this. I was even more shocked when my department head benefactor took me to one of his classes. Remember, I was a college dropout who hadn’t even finished my freshman year. I was seated in a room with grad students many years my elder. Yet most of them had heads filled with feathers. If you wanted a pool of good-natured, well-intentioned humans too ill-informed to succeed even in a career as hotel pillows, all you had to do was draft the entire graduate student body from Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education.

  However, the notion that facts were the enemy of education was perfect for these poor souls. After all, they didn’t KNOW any. Except maybe how to drive a car from their home to the shopping center to buy a suit from Robert Hall—the McDonald’s of early 1960s tailoring.

  Thirty years later, in the 1990s, a series of articles would appear in journals in cross-cultural psychology. What would they show? American kids had miserable test scores in science and mathematics. Somewhere around fifteenth in the world. Japanese and Korean students, on the other hand, had fantastic scores in science and math. They led the kids of all other nations. What was the difference between us and them? Japanese and Korean kids had lowly, miserable, appalling self-images. A tiny number even committed suicide when they got mere B’s on exams. So they kicked themselves mercilessly to achieve. American kids, on the other hand, had high-flying, weather-ballooning, soaring self-images. They didn’t have to tackle the impossible. They were already perfect.

  Any good thing in excess can be a poison. And Dr. Harmon’s positive self-image was poisoning American students.

  Apparently, the quality of teachers and what they’re taught hasn’t changed much since those dim and distant days of 1963 and 1964 at Rutgers. No wonder we’ve had half a century of youngsters with heads so empty you could fill them with helium and send them into the stratosphere. Their teachers were trained to use bilge pumps on their brains!

  u

  One biologically implanted goal of the veliger stage of life in us humans is the imperative to find a mate. Veligers do not have this problem. When they grow up, become clams, and settle down, they send out sperm or eggs. Then they let their sperm and eggs take care of mixing, dating, and mating. Yes, clams outsource romance to a generation that’s too young to know better. Cruel, right? But we humans wait until we hit puberty and it hits back. That’s when the dark force of biology sends us out to find either a companion who can last a reasonable facsimile of a lifetime, or sex, whichever comes first. In fact, we become so obsessed with this hunt that we listen to songs about it, watch movies about it, read novels about it, soak in ads about it, dream about it, cream about it, and use 90 percent of our waking and sleeping brainpower on it. Clams let their sperm and eggs do this legwork. Human sperm and eggs turn the legwork over to you and me. Not to mention turning over the agony. And the brief seconds of ecstasy, if you are lucky enough to have any.

  The result was simple. I entertained myself at Rutgers in a variety of ways designed to help me meet girls. Unfortunately, none of my clever ploys worked.

  It all began with the books Merrill Harmon had tossed at me. Piaget was fashionable and mildly interesting, but didn’t kindle a fire. B. F. Skinner did. Which is strange. You’d think it would have been the other way around. As an Edna St. Vincent Millay acolyte, I was on a quest for the extremes of passion and soul. Not to mention the gods inside. Surely Piaget, with his focus on humans, should have lit a fire in my heart. But it was Skinner who grabbed me. Skinner and his pigeons. Why?

  What was Jean Piaget all about? The Swiss psychologist was looking for the stages that our reasoning ability goes through as our brain goes
from baby to toddler to teenager. For example, take two identical pints of water. Show them to a child. Ask if each of your measuring cups contains the same amount of water. The child will generally say yes. Now pour one of your pints of water into a tall, skinny laboratory beaker. Pour another into a flat, pizza-sized petri dish. Suddenly the two pools of water look very different. One is flat, shallow, and close to the ground. It’s short and humble. The other is tall, slim, and imposing. At what point in a child’s life does it realize that the two pools of water may look very different, but that the amount of water in each piece of glassware is still precisely the same? Piaget tried to answer questions like this by observing such things in real, live, tripping, smiling, crying, and cookie-loving children. What’s more, Piaget was all the rage. And, for whatever reason, wildly popular things were not attractive to me. They still are not. I liked to dive off the beaten track and head for the strange.

  B. F. Skinner, on the other hand, was doing things that seemed inhuman. Which should have had less appeal. I mean, he was teaching pigeons to do circus tricks by rewarding them with appallingly dull-looking food pellets. In fact, he managed to teach pigeons to play ping pong. He even taught them how to read. No kidding. Check it out on the Smithsonian’s B. F. Skinner website. Skinner was accomplishing this bit of bird-showmanship with what he called “successive approximation.” Let’s say he wanted you, a pigeon, to climb a pigeon-sized ladder. Every time you moved in the direction of the ladder, Skinner rewarded you with a food pellet. Soon you were moving in the direction of the ladder on a regular basis. Once you’d learned to walk all the way to the ladder, Skinner waited. He waited until you flapped and fluttered by random on to the ladder’s first rung. Then, finally, he rewarded you. Step by step, he very carefully paid you off until you’d gotten the hang of the whole maneuver that Skinner wanted from you—walking over to the ladder and climbing to its top. Then waiting for applause. Applause and another food pellet.