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The Sixties

Investigating conscientious-objector status, attending a rock festival, plucking strychnine tufts from a bag full of peyote buttons

A Good Life

We were in the kitchen, listening to the radio — Norma preparing dinner, Mara studying for exams — when the bulletin came over the air. The United States had just gone to war with Iraq. Mara, not quite fifteen, looked up in astonishment. Norma put down her knife and wept.

Bobo And The Devil

Bobo looked up. The devil took the opportunity to slip out of his grasp and go rest by the wall. He had a huge black cloak, and purple sneakers, and came across as very urbane, but he bit in close situations. Bobo had learned to avoid his teeth.

Dear Michael

Kevin Murray, retired, one-time police chief of a small midwestern city, turned on his electric typewriter and began his third letter of the day. “Dear Abbie Hoffman, It says in the newspapers you killed yourself because you weren’t getting enough attention. Makes sense. More sense than most of what you said. . . .”

Why Schools Don’t Educate

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and W.R. Harper of the University of Chicago and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and others to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

Selected Poems

Cosmic Mysteries, Cosmic Hype

A Hard Look At The New Age

There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.

Plain And Simple: A Journey To The Amish

I had always devalued Hestia, the peaceful goddess of the hearth. I thought poor, dull Hestia, the ugly duckling goddess, was stuck by the hearth, while my favorites, Athena and Artemis, were out there in the world, slaying dragons. But when I learned that the Latin word for hearth is focus, something clicked.

Scavenger’s Run

In Guangzhou, China, I once saw two men row through the muddy waters of the Pearl River to pick up floating leaves of cabbage. Now, a few years later, that’s what I do: make the scavenger’s run.

Flying

We keep trying to find out. We look at the present and wonder about the past, about how we got here. It’s a question much asked; most people don’t think it’s possible to answer. But the answer is simple. It was Father.