Gumption (20 page)

Meanwhile, as we discussed in chapter 10, those of us who don’t necessarily agree with the McDonald’s ads telling us that they “love to see us smile” have come to depend upon the comedy of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, and others of their redoubtable ilk, to deliver our “news”; polarized medicine prescribed with a spoonful of ribald sugar, in a fashion that is approximately 87 percent more truthful than that of the straight news channels. As John Lennon (and Yoko) deduced, “Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.”

The billionaire Koch brothers recently announced their projection to spend 889 million dollars on the campaigns of their candidates for the 2016 presidential elections. Has it come to this? The corporate interests are now so cavalier that they can publicly,
preemptively
announce the magnitude of their influence on our supposedly “democratic elections”? Jon Stewart, on
The Daily Show
, suggested that we should just give up the ruse and elect the money itself as president. As hilarious as that joke is, it’s even sadder in the amount of truth it contains.

John and Yoko set an admirable precedent in the humor they brought to the proceedings surrounding the public treatment of the Vietnam “conflict.” Their “War Is Over! If You Want It” serves as a constant reminder to us that we don’t have to be a part of this nefarious system. To this day, you can visit the movement’s website and print up posters and download computer wallpapers of the slogan in more than a hundred languages. Yoko has also recently given her blessing to a feminist movement that has appropriated the phrase for a campaign to further support women’s reproductive rights in particular called the “War on Women Is Over! If You Want It.”

So, given my appreciation for her art and her message, I became absolutely hooked on Yoko. A most beautiful spirit, she won me over with the empathetic envelope pushing she has practiced as a vocation for the past fifty-five or sixty years. Megan and I had such a lovely time meeting her and Sean, and we have been most gratified when our lives have brought us back into her orbit, which eventually, as fate would have it, brought us to the threshold of the Dakota.

Also known as the apartment building in which
Rosemary’s Baby
is set, the Dakota is where John and Yoko lived together when he was tragically gunned down by Mark David Chapman on the night of December 8, 1980. Rereading the events of that night has been emotionally harrowing, but one fact stood out to lighten the burden: Several witnesses at Roosevelt Hospital, where Lennon had been rushed after the shooting, reported that at the moment Lennon’s death was pronounced, the Beatles’ “All My Loving” coincidentally came floating over the hospital’s sound system: a small flower blooming in the carnage of the battlefield.

Here my ignorance cropped up once again. We were invited to have dinner with Yoko, and only upon our arrival at the Dakota doorway where John Lennon had been shot did I realize the enormity of the fact that Yoko never left. After fourteen or fifteen years together as a prolific artistic couple in a marriage that pursued mirth in the service of humanity perhaps more than any conjoined man and woman in the modern era, Yoko had lost her other half. And she didn’t just lose him but witnessed him torn from her in a most unspeakably violent manner.

Now, here is the thing about Yoko that blows my mind. She suffered the murder of her husband and, more, her partner in their life’s work: to promote the ideals set forth in his song “Imagine,” easily the most profoundly beautiful piece of song writing in history. That Yoko, after grieving, simply picked up her figurative picket sign and stayed staunchly true to the course that she and John had been sailing strikes me as supremely heroic. She did not flag nor fumble. She has carried on, utilizing the tools and resources at her disposal to continue the life’s work that she and John began together.

Many wonderful songs have been written encouraging us to be nice to our fellow people, but “Imagine” stands alone in its social penetration and relevance. “I hope someday you’ll join us. And the world will be as one.” John wrote the song, but it held the message they both shared. Just the simple phrase “Imagine Peace,” another slogan that has served as a sort of figurehead for so many of Yoko’s efforts, is such an effective message of positive thinking, when held up against the less effectual ilk of “No Nukes” or “Make Love, Not War.” The suggestive nature of the command “Imagine” allows the recipient to
quietly choose to follow the directive or not, of his or her own volition, in the privacy of the mind; a contest that is more likely to see a gradual and passive victory when compared to the number of people swayed by something more like, “Stop that!”

Yoko and John, when he was with us, always managed to make sense. Their activism has always had a charismatic quality of brattiness to it, but at the same time, they had done their homework. They weren’t just getting attention; they were
drawing
our attention to whichever simple message upon which they wanted us to focus.

When Nixon was scared of John in the early seventies, frightened that his popularity might actually create an antiwar groundswell that would see tricky Dick lose the upcoming 1972 election, he denied John a green card and insisted he be deported. Among the many methods John and Yoko employed to combat this treachery was their invention of a new country, one from which they were simply the visiting ambassadors. The country’s name, according to Yoko? “Nutopia. We announced the founding of a new country called Nutopia at a press conference. The flag was the white flag of surrender, and there is a photo of John and I waving the white flag.”

In the thirty-five years since John’s assassination, Yoko has not wavered in her mission to communicate a message of love and peace to the entire planet, utilizing a variety of creative channels. The Guggenheim’s Munroe said, “The sheer breadth of her output has taxed curatorial and critical skills. [Her] originality cannot be underestimated, even though it has often been unrecognized.”

Around the time that John first met Yoko, she had conceived of a
project that she called a “light house.” This was a hypothetical structure that would be ephemerally constructed of only beams of light emanating from prisms. John got wind of this idea and asked her over to his place for some luncheon (perhaps a bagism lunch?). He asked Yoko if she would consider a commission to build her “light house” in his garden.

“Oh, that was conceptual,” Yoko answered him. “I don’t know how to do it.”

For all these many years, Yoko Ono has been weaving webs of whimsy and compassion in front of our eyes, leaving the eventual outcome up to us and our willingness to see the gossamer wisps that trail her limbs as they arc through life. We are free to see, or at least imagine them. On the day we met Yoko, we bought a framed piece of eggshell paper upon which was written in her delicate hand:

KITE PIECE

Enlarge your photographs.

Make many kites with them and fly.

When the sky is filled with them, ask people to shoot.

You may make balloons instead of kites.

We also purchased one of the shuttered-window pieces. The series could be arranged so that the shuttered window slowly opened, revealing the sky and Central Park out her bedroom window at the Dakota, or the order could slowly bring the shutters together, representing the end or birth of day, or season, or life. The interpretation of
the chiaroscuro was, and is, as with all Ono creations, up to the individual viewer.

In 2007, possibly Yoko’s greatest masterpiece was unveiled in Reykjavik, Iceland. According to its press release,
Imagine Peace Tower
is “a tower of light which emanates wisdom, healing and joy. It communicates to the whole world that peace & love is what connects all lives on Earth.” This outdoor work of art, conceived by Yoko, was first illuminated upon the sixty-seventh anniversary of John Lennon’s birth. Every year it is fired up on John’s birthday, October 9, and it remains visible until the anniversary of his death on December 8. The tower of light projects upward out of a wishing well, upon which are inscribed the words “
Imagine Peace”
in twenty-four different languages. She finally managed to create John’s “light house” for him.

About to turn eighty-two at the time of this writing, Yoko, I believe, may be kicking more ass today than ever before. She played the Glastonbury Festival last year with the Plastic Ono Band. She recently collaborated with Lady Gaga and Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. She and her son, Sean, seem to be everywhere on the planet at once, raising money in benefit concerts for, among others, Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims, groups that are fighting the environmental abomination of fracking in the United States, and typhoon victims in the Philippines. She is hauling
and
whupping ass like a rock-and-roll ninja lady, dispensing wisdom freely like a sexy Asian Gandalf. She doesn’t expect it, but she certainly deserves our reverence.

John Lennon called her “the world’s most famous unknown artist. Everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually
does”—a pretty astute observation from her life’s partner, then and now. Asked in an interview with Daniel Rothbart what “is [her] most important legacy?,” Yoko replied, “They’re going to make it up anyway and I hope they’re a little bit kinder to me than now. But I don’t believe in the legacy so much. If my work is going to give people inspiration, encouragement, and joy after I pass away, then that’s beautiful, and I’m thankful. If it does that’s fine and if it doesn’t I can’t complain, that’s fine too.”

Oh, Yoko. I know we’re all human beings, and so, by definition, we can’t always be as mellow as that particular piece of erudition, but I am delighted that you sent it into the world for us to absorb in the hope that we’ll see our way to imagining a little more peace.

Let us relish this benediction from Yoko Ono with a final flourish of the heart:

“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”

MICHAEL POLLAN

O
ne of my favorite qualities in this delicious life is serendipity. The interconnectedness of the myriad facets of the world never ceases to delight me. All it takes is a bus driver in Tuscaloosa to put on Tom Waits’s “Lucky Day” or I discover that David Trachtenberg, the top-drawer film editor of both
Casa de Mi Padre
and
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
(two films I’m in), is best friends since childhood with American hero Tom Magill, who was the A-camera operator and then director of photography for seven seasons of
Parks and Recreation
, a television program upon which I was also an actor. The world grows ever smaller, but I can’t help suspect there is some magic in play as well.

One unexpected hub has turned out to be Michael Pollan. I earlier mentioned the swell author Witold Rybczynski, whose Olmsted book got me off and running on a few more of his titles, neatly followed, thanks to Amazon, by Michael Pollan’s
A Place of My Own.
Now, I would strongly encourage you to read all his books, and to do so in order if you can. They work wonderfully on their own in any order, but I really appreciate the train of thought traveling through his body
of work. Olmsted got me to Rybczynski, who got me to Pollan. There will be more to come.

A Place of My Own
is Michael’s recounting of the planning and construction of a one-room writing studio in the woods behind his house in Connecticut. If you know me at all, you know I’m sold on just that log line right there; no pun intended. Like Rybczynski and Bryson and some of my other favorite writers, Mr. Pollan delves into the anthropology of why we funny Homo sapiens build things, and then describes the ups and downs of trying his own hand at such an undertaking (he puts it, his own two “unhandy hands”).

Well, I was smitten. Michael Pollan has a very friendly yet intelligent and deeply researched style that renders any topic quite gripping. For example, if you were to try to pitch me a book about any writer building a cabin, I might rather just build the cabin. However, in those “unhandy” hands, the subject matter takes on a charm and a glow that lends a great deal of charisma to the given topic.

After
A Place of My Own
, Pollan’s focus turned to different aspects of food writing, and he penned important popular tomes such as
The Botany of Desire
,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
,
In Defense of Food
, and
Cooked
, among others. He doesn’t just drily write about food or a cabin or flowers; he tells us what it is about these subjects that makes them so irresistible to humans. In
The Botany of Desire
, he explores the relationship between humans and plants, specifically the apple, the tulip, the potato, and marijuana, unveiling the ways in which these four plants have made themselves desirable to humans, and therefore have become indispensable to us. It’s a fascinating look at the interconnected evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms. His work in
general explores the manner in which things like cooking and cultivating and nature are invariably intertwined with our human lives, quite often for the better.

But back to serendipity. It turns out Michael Pollan was an executive editor of
Harper’s
Magazine
, the very one behind the Wendell Berry typewriter essay/letter campaign hilarity. I only just learned this when I sat down to lunch with him at one of his favorite restaurants, Berkeley’s superb Chez Panisse (famously delicious farm-to-table grub). I had known that Pollan was a fan of Wendell Berry’s when Mr. Berry published a collection of older essays centered around his illuminating instructive phrase “Eating is an agricultural act.” Michael Pollan wrote the introduction to this collection, which caused me to think, “Oh, swell. These two writers whom I love have become buddies.” I suppose that was true, in the sense that Michael’s work had brought him into a more direct correspondence with Wendell, as though he had been promoted to a rank something closer to General Berry in the army of agrarian thinkers. Perhaps “Colonel Pollan.”

We met upstairs, which is the more casual half of the restaurant, as evidenced by Mr. Pollan’s short pants. We shook hands and he hit me with the blinding display of teeth that caused Wendell Berry, a few weeks later, upon hearing that I had interviewed Michael, to ask with an impish look in his eye, “He still grinnin’?” Mr. Pollan handed me an inscribed copy of
A Place of My Own
, asking if I had heard of it. He was surprised to hear it had been my first Pollan text, as he explained that it was his slowest seller. So, ladies and gentlemen, do please purchase that one first. Full-price hardback is the way to go, and you know, books also make great gifts.

Within minutes of sitting down, I mentioned George Saunders as one of my subjects, whose incredible
Tenth of December
I had just read on the plane, and Michael was very excited because he had also just read it and had some very astute things to say about Saunders’s incisive ability to satirize our society in a terrifying way, while simultaneously making us laugh until our guts hurt. More on him in chapter 18.

Michael ordered the soup and the eggplant entrée, and I got the garden lettuces and the pork
.
The food was exquisite, but incredibly clean and honestly presented. Mr. Pollan’s pal Alice Waters, star chef and author, and proprietor of Chez Panisse, has been advocating for forty years her philosophy that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest ingredients that are produced locally and sustainably. It shows. Michael pointed out that diners sometimes complain about the relative simplicity of the dishes, because of all the plaudits the restaurant has received, and I replied, “That’s America. If somebody says it’s ‘good,’ then it must be big and fancy. This just looks like pork!” (Note to chefs: Please stop with the salmon mousse.)

Obviously, Wendell Berry dominated the early conversation. In his introduction to
Bringing It to the Table
, Michael adroitly points out that a lot of the great “new” ideas in his own writing were questions that had been posited by Wendell Berry a couple of decades earlier; it’s just that not enough people were listening. What initially inspired Pollan was actually some Berry gardening wisdom, and of course the
Harper’s
typewriter broadside, but upon later rereading, he was agog at the number of notions in his own work that had been previously framed in some way by Wendell Berry and Berry’s own predecessors, such as Sir Albert Howard, the British botanist and organic food pioneer who died in 1947.

Fortunately for us, seeing his feelings and thoughts echoed by earlier thinkers only redoubled Michael Pollan’s interest in the relationship between us, as eaters, and our food. The biological, botanical, and sociological investigations he had already undertaken in his first (gripping) books served as the perfect foundation upon which to erect the tower of food conversation in his four later books.

We spoke more of Wendell Berry and of the quality and flavor of the Chez Panisse offerings. I revealed that I was terribly excited to meet Mr. Berry, a man whom I so admired, except there was one thing that had me scared shitless. Wendell Berry had agreed to speak with me for my second book, and so etiquette demanded that I send him my first book, so he would have the opportunity to see what I was about. Well, if you’ve read my first book, you’ll understand that while the idea of Wendell Berry reading most of its contents would make me proud, there are some rather ribald portions that I feared would offend even a reasonable sailor, let alone this paragon of decency.

Michael grinned and said that he understood my point of view but that I might be surprised. “Sometimes Wendell writes like a preacher, but I think he can appreciate every side of a story.” For the record, I took my book to Kentucky with me and handed it to Tanya Berry, Wendell’s wife, upon our meeting, along with the tribute of nice Colonel Taylor bourbon that had also been at the suggestion of Mr. Pollan. I did, however, ask her not to read it. Or rather, I warned her that it contained some blue material. If they have read it or not, I have as of this writing received no report. I sincerely hope from their silence that it didn’t kill them.

As I have earlier noted, Wendell Berry has achieved his particularly conscious perspective from remaining geographically within his farm, and his farming, for a lifetime. This has allowed him, and his talent for patient observation, to notice all the negligent, blind running our society has been doing dead in the wrong direction. Michael Pollan has lit his torch, partly from Mr. Berry’s flame, and brought the conversation down from the mountain into the trenches, where we are all huddled over our smartphones.

Here’s what I love about Mr. Pollan: In a time when we civilians are slowly waking, as if from a Twinkie dream, to the reality of what corporate interests have been feeding us—and we have been willfully and ignorantly swallowing, literally and figuratively, for decades—here is a scientifically minded, affable writer who is doing all the research I wasn’t even aware I had been wishing someone would do. He has connected the dots for us in a deeper way than the others, partially because he is one of us. Michael Pollan is the nicest valedictorian that ever went to school, because he has done all the homework,
and
he’s letting us copy down his notes with impunity.

My best friend, Pat Roberts, without whom I would be lost, has an attractive touch of the conspiracy theorist about him (I am not saying he’s not a Freemason). Among the many tips he has given me over our years together, for seeing through the fog of bullshit with which “they” have so artfully covered our eyes and ears, is a documentary called
The Century of the Self
, by Adam Curtis, and a terrifying/infuriating book entitled
Lethal but Legal
, by Nicholas Freudenberg.

The “they” to which I am here referring are the corporations
behind food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceuticals, and automobiles. In
Lethal but Legal
, Freudenberg solidly details the manner by which this group, the “corporate consumption complex,” circumvents decency entirely by controlling legislation pertaining to the harmful effects of all these products. American lobbyists (I wonder if any of them are white dudes?) have been shaping governmental policy for decades in a way that allows harm to the health of millions of us sheep, while lining their pockets.

How did this happen? We have certainly been asleep at the wheel, allowing our complacency to seep into every aspect of our lives, where it has taken root with tenacity. Wendell Berry sounded the alarm forty years ago. Eric Schlosser, author of
Fast Food Nation
; Morgan Spurlock, director of
Super Size Me
; and their ilk rerang the bell more than a decade ago. Slowly we have blinked our eyes open, even as we slowly chew our Western Bacon Cheeseburgers, and said, “Oh. Oh, wow. I have a mouthful of garbage.” If you’re anything like me, you think, “I really have to stop eating this,” while taking another bite. We’re in trouble, folks.

In his introduction to
The Century of Self
, Adam Curtis states, “This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” I was particularly astonished by the work of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who brought his uncle’s theories to bear upon the public with immediate results. Contracted by the tobacco industry in the early twentieth century to disarm the taboo against women smoking in public, Bernays created a public event at the 1929 New York City Easter Parade. At a preordained time, several debutantes on
a float pulled out cigarettes and brazenly fired them up, as forewarned paparazzi snapped their photographs.

The next day, the public was shocked to see the headlines referring to the young ladies and their “Torches of Freedom.” This maneuver was entirely successful for a couple of reasons: In later interviews, Bernays explained that he simply applied Freudian psychology to the situation, giving women the sense of having “a penis of their own” to brandish, a powerful incentive given the women’s suffrage movement afoot at the time. Even more nefarious, the term “Torches of Freedom” pandered to the public’s sense of patriotism, so that if one were to disagree with the idea of women smoking, one could be accused of un-American sentiments. Bernays had practically written the Fox News playbook in one fell swoop.

Our nation had come into a time of manufacturing prosperity heretofore unseen, with a surplus of products available for purchase but a frugal populace that pinched every penny. Edward Bernays was determined to convince people that purchases would make them “feel better,” and one of his investors, Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers, said, “We must shift the focus of advertising from ‘needs’ to ‘desires.’ People must be trained to desire; to want new things even before the old has been consumed.”

I don’t know about you, but I find that information and its clearly successful execution horrifying. Our national obesity and diabetes epidemic, our death rates due to alcohol, tobacco, and automotive- and gun-related incidents, have been ushered along by our friendly corporations entirely on purpose. In 1927, an unnamed journalist said, “A change has come over our democracy, and it is called
‘consumptionism.’ The American citizen’s first importance is no longer that of citizen, but that of consumer.” In 1927! That’s sixty years before Rogaine even showed up, and forty years before the advent of Doritos! By God, they had our number.