#6. This | That | The Other

Inside my '63 Meatmobile | Remembering Eric Boehlert | Ontogeny vs Cosmology

ISSUE SIX

1963 Chevrolet Bel Air

Inside my ‘63 Meatmobile

There were five distinct socioeconomic classes in the neighborhood where I grew up on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio in the 1950s and ‘60s. Generally speaking, and in ascending order, families were either Chevrolets, Buicks, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles or Cadillacs.

Of course there were people, White and Black, who owned no car at all and had to ride the bus to get where they were going, but I don't recall being aware of that as a child.

There were also Fords, to be sure, if you were Christian, but Jews in those postwar years didn't much traffic in products manufactured by Adolph Hitler's pal Henry. There were also admittedly Chryslers, but those didn't really register in my imagination except for rare top-of-the-line New Yorkers and Imperials.

Foreign cars? When I was a kid that meant a VW Beetle, which was even more verboten among my people than a Ford.

Our family were base-model Chevrolet folk, firmly situated on the lower-middle rungs of the class ladder.

My father Manny ran a small kosher meat market with his brother Isadore and their brother-in-law Max. Dad always kept a layer of clean butcher paper in the trunk of our brand new beige 1963 Chevy Bel Air, which was both work car and family car.

Several days a week, he would get up at 4 am and drive across the city to the kosher slaughterhouse. There he would choose a couple of their best hanging "fours of beef," whole, skinned forequarters of a ritually-slaughtered cow, minus head, hoof and innards. These he would hoist onto his back, then into the Bel Air’s trunk, and return across the city to the butcher shop. After a cup of coffee with Max and Issie, they would open for business at 7 am and start breaking down the fours of beef into steaks, chops, roasts, and ground chuck.

That Bel Air was the car my older brother Bob drove me downtown in to see the Beatles live at Cleveland Stadium in 1965, when I was 14. It’s the car I learned to drive in when I got my own license two years later. I drove and drove and drove that Chevrolet, delivering meat to customers, my guitar and amplifier to band practices, and girlfriends out on dates. It was still our family car when I left Ohio for good and headed to the West Coast at age 22.

I never saw that damn car again, or my dad, who died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 57. I still think of him whenever I see one of those fine old Chevys on the road.

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— NY Times, April 6, 2022

Remembering Eric Boehlert

A longtime colleague and friend of mine was killed last Monday when his bicycle was struck by a suburban commuter train in New Jersey. Eric Boehlert was so young, about the same age as my father when he passed. That’s a crushing thing. My heart goes out to Eric’s family.

Those of us in the progressive media world of course knew Eric for his pioneering work with Media Matters. Over more than a decade he — along with David Brock and colleagues — built up from scratch an influential, state-of-the art, 24/365, media tracker, right-wing lie detector, and castigator of lazy and venal journalism.

Eric gave the lie, day in and day out, to the myth of alleged liberal bias in the media, a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. He consistently countered right-wing lies with actual researched facts, another thankless endeavor.

So let’s all say it: Thank you Eric. You were a first responder for democracy.

And more important, let’s each recommit to continuing our own work toward that goal.

Eric and I crossed paths professionally a number of times back in the day, mostly around net neutrality issues and assorted Fox News perfidies. Recently, as I planned to launch RealityReport here on the Substack platform, I reached out to Eric for advice (his hugely successful newsletter PressRun is featured as a best practices scenario for aspiring Substack publishers).

Eric was, as always, generous with his time and continued to give me great advice; our last email exchange was just four days before his death. Rest in peace, brother.

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The elegant, mind-bending complexity of life is brilliantly revealed in this danceable music video. It’s far more miraculous than “pro-life” fundamentalists will ever know. Please watch.

Ontogeny vs Cosmology

I don’t have religious faith but I do have a scientific theory of the universe, including our likely ultimate demise as a species, how to avoid it, and a possible Plan B should we fuck things up beyond redemption.

Homo sapiens has been around for roughly 300,000 years and that's just a blink of an eye relatively speaking; earth's first multicellular animals date back some 800 million years!

After all this time, are we really going to be the ones to bring down the curtain on this whole humanity thing, simply because we can't learn to live with each other?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Obviously you and I care a great deal about this. But does the universe itself ultimately give a damn one way or the other? Not so much.

Here’s my theory, a product of near-total scientific ignorance coupled with considerable paranoid thinking:

Think of an egg. A chicken egg. An embryo safely develops inside its thin protective shell, which contains, on its underside, a layer of nutrients to support the bird’s growth and development until it’s ready to hatch.

The chick’s constant pecking for sustenance eventually weakens the shell until it cracks open. Time to live or die. That’s ontogeny in a nutshell (er, egg shell).

I believe that a similar phenomenon operates at the planetary level.

Our earth is protected, and life made possible, by the existence of a thin atmospheric layer that keeps deadly ultraviolet radiation out, holds critical oxygen in, regulates temperature within acceptable limits, and fosters the existence of liquid surface water.

Are we grateful for nature’s services? Hell no! Like ravenous chicks in overdrive, we’re hacking away at our protective shell like there was no tomorrow… and someday there won’t be.

If and when that day comes, whether through climate catastrophe or thermonuclear war, Mother Nature won’t even send a condolence card.

Now the good news: The jury is still out on humanity’s future. Our people and our planet are stronger and more resilient than you think. Many, many things are getting better and better even as some others get worse and worse.

Hope does spring eternal… and it is springtime. So be well, be safe, practice loving kindness and keep on fighting for what’s right, because there is no Plan B.

— Art