It is January 1969. Fortune, one of the world’s most conservative business magazines, publishes a special issue about Youth in Turmoil. It then adapts the issue into a book, with an image of a flame on the cover.
The message is not, as you might expect, about how these ungrateful long-haired drug-addled rebels are destroying the country. On the contrary, the message is that these young people are trying to tell us something important and we should listen—before it’s too late.
Here is the introduction:
American youth is trying to tell us something important. The brightest of our young men and women are telling us that as far as they are concerned the choices for our society are narrowing rapidly. We can, at worst, look ahead to a future, very near, in which they lose all heart for our national effort, thus robbing it of its nerve, vitality, and point—a state of affairs in which they range themselves against us either in violence or in withdrawal. Or we can heed the cry of these young adults. Though often marred by shrillness, arrogance, and negativism, that cry is authentic and valid in its central message. It tells us that in our rush to well-being we have left much undone at the same time we have made so much more do-able. It tells us that we should rechannel our enormous energies to deal with the lengthening list of environmental and social grievances. If we can enlist these young idealists and they can enlist us, the nation will evolve toward a life style that once again sets a new standard for the world. I hope that this book, adapted from the January, 1969, special issue of FORTUNE, will contribute to that mutual enlistment.
LOUIS BANKS, MANAGING EDITOR, FORTUNE
Please read this word-for-word. It is extraordinary. This is a bible of the establishment, during one of our most anti-establishment times, acknowledging that many things are wrong—including environmental and social problems—and admitting that young people are trying to remind us of our responsibilities to make it right. If the establishment fails, Fortune says, “We can, at worst, look ahead to a future, very near, in which they lose all heart for our national effort, thus robbing it of its nerve, vitality, and point—a state of affairs in which they range themselves against us either in violence or in withdrawal.”
Consider how far we have come. Youth seems to be somewhat disaffected, maybe even having lost heart and been robbed of its nerve—but not exactly in turmoil. Much of the conservative establishment would now never dream of agreeing that we have justifiable environmental and social grievances, let alone that these should be aggressively addressed.
The Sixties are variously celebrated, trivialized, and even laughed at. Maybe it’s funny to see a Big Business publication like Fortune willing to open its eyes, look around, and decide that these kids just might have a point and we can do a whole lot better. Or maybe it’s a little sad that we don’t see more of that today.
Looking for comic book illustration for today, I found two options.
Everyone knows, or used to know, Smokey Bear.
Smokey Bear was created in 1944, in the face of wildfire threats during World War II. He was depicted pouring water on a campfire. The slogan “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires” was introduced in 1947. Popular ever since as a conservation influencer, kids could at one time become Smokey Bear Junior Forest Rangers, receiving a membership kit that typically included a membership card, a Smokey Bear badge and a certificate. For city kids who lived far from any forest, this was exciting.
If you want to take a selfie with Smokey Bear, National Park Service bookstores sometimes display full size models.
If you are wondering why the theme song (below) is “Smokey THE Bear”, which is what he is often called now, it was to add an extra syllable for a musical beat. But “Smokey Bear” is his legal name.
Speaking of city kids learning about conservation, there is Mark Trail.
Mark Trail is a comic strip created in 1946 by Ed Dodd, an outdoorsman with a passion for nature and wildlife conservation. Mark Trail is a writer and photographer working for Woods and Wildlife magazine. The strip focused on environmental and wildlife conservation, with stories about poaching, habitat destruction, endangered species, and other ecological concerns woven into the plots. Mark Trail was known for punching out villains who were harming the environment. Reading the Sunday color comics, long before Earth Day, gave those same city kids their first introduction to conservation, just like Smokey did. The strip continues to run to this day.
Happy Earth Day from Smokey Bear, Mark Trail and me!
The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. –Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges is an illuminating insight into AI. That may not be immediately obvious. The story is not didactic or directly germane to the topic, unlike the proliferating texts about the specific applications, opportunities and implications of AI. Consider the story obliquely but brightly enlightening about the meaning of AI.
Below is a brief excerpt from the story. Any excerpt does disservice to the genius of Borges. This is meant to offer a taste; please read the whole story in one of his collections, such as Labyrinths.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase….
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say….
This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s palm. . . They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves….
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variation with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): in other words, all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad. . . The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who perhaps are not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero….
The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned the suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. I have just written the word “infinite.” I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end — which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.
Some people love old cars. Others of us delight in old digital tech.
This is a page from the Neiman-Marcus Christmas 1969 catalog. The impeccably dressed N-M housewife is standing next to what appears to be an unusual table, but is actually the Honeywell Kitchen computer, which can be purchased for $10,000. (The apron will cost you another $28.) “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute.” Indeed.
Here is something completely different from the era, prophetic rather than silly. It is Isaac Asimov, a science fiction great, advertising Radio Shack’s TRS-80.
Note that in the spirit of what goes around comes around, this is a pocket computer almost exactly the size of a smartphone—or is a smartphone a pocket computer exactly the size of a TRS-80? Either way, Neiman-Marcus and Honeywell were clueless, but Asimov and Radio Shack were not.
That would be a pretty good close for this post. Except that the following ad is irresistible, telling us something else about the early days of computing.
Just as cars were, and to some extent still are, sold by using sex, sometimes so were computers. This is an ad for a plotter, possibly the least sexy of all peripherals. The copy is mostly bone-dry and technical. But then there’s the trio of the model with her dress open to her navel, the headline “New, Fast, and Efficient!”, and the lead “The TSP-212 Plotting System is a real swinger.” $3,300 COMPLETE. Well, almost complete, as the model is presumably not included. But you know, that cool plotter just might attract one.
The poet’s role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
If there was a National Food Month, what would we say, what would we do? We could talk about food, hear about food, make food, share food and, of course, eat food.
This month, read poetry, recite poetry, write poetry, share poetry. You have a lot of options.
The proper close for this post might be to include one of my favorite poems. That is too easy and too hard. Instead, follow up with one of your favorite poems. If you don’t have any, this month is a good time to explore and discover them. They are out there, waiting just for you.
Millions of Americans believe that America’s past is better than anybody else’s future—including America’s own. That is inherent in an obsessive turning away from progress, from failing to adapt to twenty-first century (or even twentieth century) realities, and a strong longing for the comfortable but mythical past.
The irony is that civilizations with much more history than the U.S.—the youngest of all global powers—have had a much better time moving boldly and successfully into the future. This doesn’t mean that countries East and West have met all or most of the Herculean challenges they may face. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people there looking back to the “good old days.” But for the most part, these countries have avoided being distracted by the substantial complexities of who and what they were, and focused on balancing that with who and what they can and must become.
The substantial past of some of those countries may actually be the antidote to nostalgia that has allowed those nations to move forward. After so many centuries of arguments between the backward-lookers and the forward-lookers, the very practical argument wins: seeing where you are going is the best way to avoid crashes, falling off cliffs, or just standing still while everyone else advances around you.
Maybe what America needs is a few more centuries of arguments, where the reactionaries and regressives hold sway and drive the nation into a crash or off a cliff. Maybe then America will know what the older heads in the world already know—that evolution moves forward and not back (if you believe in any kind of evolution), that you have to keep your eyes open, that you have to adapt or die. Unfortunately, those of us alive today, standing by helpless, won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of that learning. We may only be here for the hard lessons.
Record Store Day was conceived in 2007 at a gathering of independent record store owners and employees as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1400 independently-owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally. The first Record Store Day took place on April 19, 2008. Today, Record Store Day is celebrated at independently-owned brick-and-mortar record stores around the world.
For many years I posted about Record Store Day, but not recently.
I should feature it every year.
I would not be who I am without the hours spent in record stores, chain stores and independents. If you go to a concert, you are surrounded by people who love particular artists or particular types of music. In all those record stores, big or small, you are surrounded by people who love music.
The record stores of my youngest years included two different record buying experiences.
One was in the next town. The stores on the avenue began with a Woolworth’s on the north side and a tiny record store on the south side. The Woolworth’s was where I bought albums, the other was where I bought singles.
The other experience was the cavernous Sam Goody’s store at our local mall. Sam Goody’s still has mall stores, though these are mere storefronts. I am talking about huge. It wasn’t a store. It was a world of records. It wasn’t about what I had heard on the radio. It was about whatever was playing and whatever I could hear, what these dozens of other people knew about and were listening to. That was the formative lesson internalized. Music was legion and, in the words of the much later George Michael album title, I learned to listen without prejudice.
Back to Record Store Day 2026. Visit a record store today, talk to other music freaks, buy something. I hear that following the resurgence of vinyl, CDs are coming back too.
Music is good for us. Different kinds of music are good for us. Another back in the day music reference is to David Crosby. The first track on his If I Could Only Remember My Name album says “Everybody’s saying that music is love.” It is.
We need a break. So here’s something from the joke file.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t stupid, tragic and completely unnecessary things going on in this country and the world. That’s exactly what’s going on—but we still have to live. And laugh.
Great jokes don’t have to offend sensibilities, but they sometimes do. So a blanket apology in advance if you are put off or offended—maybe if you are sensitive about ducks or pharmacists, or are one yourself.
Duck walks into a drugstore, asks for some Chap Stick. Guy behind the counter says, “That’ll be fifty-nine cents.” Duck says, “Put it on my bill.”
Next day, the duck walks into the drugstore, asks for a package of condoms. Guy behind the counter says, “Would you like me to put that on your bill?” Duck says, “Hey, what kind of a duck do you think I am!”
We are experiencing mass obsession. Both Trump and AI have found their way/forced their way into seemingly every moment of lives in America and the world.
One major distinction is that while Trump is the same old Trump, devolving as he becomes omnipresent, AI is evolving exponentially.
Another distinction is that while Trump will not be with us forever, despite his attempts at legacy, AI will be with us forever in some form at some level of capability.
Which obsession is better for us?
For those of us able to resist, as much as our real lives make it possible, the less Trump the better.
On the other hand, our interest in AI, regularly approaching obsession, can be good for us if we approach it knowingly, intelligently and conscientiously. Knowledge and intelligence about developing matters always seems to lag and for some sometimes never catches up.
Think of learning about evolving AI and applying it beneficially as an alternative to learning about Trump, about whom there is nothing more to learn, no matter how obsessed we are.
There are plenty of ultrarich people in the administration. They could afford to buy any land they wanted anywhere. Or they could use land they already own.
Establish a commune on that land for the craziest members of the administration. Not a bare bones commune. More like a luxury resort. It could include whatever facilities are appropriate. A teleportation area. A museum with a collection of animal skeletons and genitals. A place to practice spiritual “doctoring”. Whatever.
The crazies will have a unique opportunity to exchange interesting ideas, where they are no danger to themselves or others. America will have a chance to live without them. Making America Sane Again.
Bob Schwartz 