How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  But there was something far more interesting in B. F. Skinner’s bag of pigeon tricks. The Harvard psychology professor had motivated pigeons to create strange rituals by varying the ways in which he rewarded them with food. Yes, Skinner was getting feathered bread-crumb-and-pellet lovers to create rituals, to develop the avian equivalent of superstitions. Maybe even to generate the bird-brained equivalent of religion.

  Let’s put you in the position once again of the pigeon. Skinner would reward you at random. So you tried to find a pattern in the arbitrary deliveries of food. Yes, pigeons, like humans and seagulls, are pattern finders. If you hopped on your left foot then food arrived, you’d continue to hop on your left foot to bring the next bit of food raining down from the sky—or from the feeding-chute. You hopped and hopped and hopped. That’s faith. Finally, food arrived. Proof positive that hopping on your left foot worked. What’s more, if you lifted your right wing for a second, then another bit of tasty treat came tumbling down the chute, you added the right wing maneuver to your left-foot hopping routine. And so on. You were so persistent in your ritual that eventually, while you were performing it the twentieth or the two hundredth time, food arrived. Absolute proof that your dance controlled the food supply.

  Yes, you, a mere pigeon, a creature with a bird brain, invented a ritual to bring the food pellets your way. You invented a tool with which to control your fate. What you failed to see was that the pellets arrived at random. There was no pattern.

  Skinner implied that religions are similar dances. Dances we humans do to control uncontrollable events. Dances we become devoted to because every great once in a while after we finish the dance, the reward we desire arrives. Which convinces us that our dances coax the reward to appear. Even though the dances—or the prayers, the church services, the gerbil sacrifices, the poisonous snakes coiling around your neck, the all-night ceremonies with sacred masks, or the readings from the good book—have nothing to do with it. And even though church buses on their way to prayer conferences with fifty of the faithful all busy practicing their supplications to the Almighty have a nasty habit of going over cliffs.

  One more thing. B.F. Skinner had created an educational invention he called “programmed learning.” And it was brilliant. Programmed learning was very simple. You take a topic, any topic. You break it up into a series of simple facts explained in short paragraphs. Paragraphs so simple and vivid that anyone with a brain moderately above that of your average pigeon can grasp them. You put one paragraph with one simple idea on a page. At the end of the page, you put a one-question quiz to test whether the reader understands the concept. If she does, you let her go on to the next page. But here’s the real trick.

  You test what you’ve written on some poor, innocent, passing person who knows nothing about the topic you are trying to teach. If that unwitting civilian fails on any page of what you’ve written, if she gets the answer wrong, you do not consider it the failure of the person plowing through your programmed learning booklet. You considered it the failure of the page. You consider it your failure. So you go back and rewrite the offending paragraph. You simplify, break it into two pages, give a more vivid example, whatever it takes. After twenty or more tests and twenty or more revisions, you finally refine your material to the point where just about anyone with the brainpower to walk from one college building to another in search of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup can whiz through it.

  Where do pigeons come into this?

  Remember the quick quiz at the bottom of each page? You refine your booklet until everyone who goes through it gets every answer right. Getting the answer right after each paragraph is the food pellet. It’s the reward. Getting the answer right engages the mind of your reader. And it makes her feel good about herself. Who can resist demonstrating omniscience and being patted on the head for it forty times in a forty page pamphlet?

  One more thing. Programmed learning demanded that the writer of a programmed learning pamphlet do exactly what Albert Einstein had called for—writing even the most complex concept so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence could understand it. And could get a kick out of it.

  So I took an existing book on the most boring topic I could find—the various forms of electrical circuits and their official names—and rewrote it as a series of simple pages with quizzes at the end of each, then tested it on as many kindly subjects as I could ensnare. I perfected it to the point where everyone who went through it got every quiz question right. Then I went off to meet girls.

  In those days, Rutgers had a girls’ college—Douglass College—whose campus was right down the street. That’s where I did my testing. Every girl who went through the short programmed learning booklet ended up an expert. She became adept at naming the various forms of copper wire connections that shuttle electrons. Programmed learning, it turned out, was a dynamite tool for hammering impossible-to-remember facts into Teflon-coated gray matter. Like mine. And possibly yours. Thus did the young women of Douglass College allow me to discombobulate their brains. But, alas, not a single research subject invited me to discombobulate her body.

  Programmed learning may have been working brilliantly, but my girl hunt was getting desperate. So desperate that I actually played four parts in a Douglass College production of George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra. Surely this would allow me to meet a girl or two. Right? Well, not exactly. The costume lady couldn’t find a tunic long enough for me in the act where I played a Roman guard. All I was wearing was a jock strap under my microscopic toga, and, since I had to perform most of the part with my back to the audience and the wind of the outdoor stage lifted my skirt at least fifteen times, I provided one of the first bottomless male exhibitions seen onstage in the Garden State. Unfortunately, that was before women realized they were supposed to reward such spectacles by rushing the semi-disrobed male and stuffing money and as many fingers as they could fit into his G-string.

  My veliger wandering was not working out. I was not coming up with a mate. And I was not discovering my place. Or was I?

  u

  Persistence is the key to everything in life. I finally got so desperate that I edited official reports on psychological symposia for the head of the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Dr. Sol Gordon. Those of us who have never known a moment of mental health have a unique perspective that gives these documents a special je ne sais quoi. Just shows you how low you go when you lose your sense of purpose, your sense of a goal. From this editing I learned a lesson. Dr. Gordon would hand me his original manuscript. I would find it incomprehensible. So I’d use a scissors and cut it up sentence by sentence and sometimes clause by clause. Then I’d look for a sentence with an overarching idea, with one of Dr. Gordon’s points. I’d make that a topic sentence, the lead sentence of an as-yet-non-existent paragraph. Then I’d gather together all the sentences that supported the idea proposed in the lead. Ahhh, an entire paragraph that made a point! Then I’d do the same with all the other random sentences and phrases of the original work. My job was to read Dr. Gordon’s mind and to help him express himself. Clearly and convincingly. In a manner that Albert Einstein would have approved of. So when I presented the finished result to Dr. Gordon, every word was his. And he was impressed by his brilliance.

  The lesson? Work hard enough and you may be able to find the message in even the most confusing patchwork of verbiage. But remember the ego of the person you are writing for. You want him or her to see the new thing you have put together as a manifestation of his own brilliance. Which it really is. Sort of. With the aid of this lesson, I would eventually lose a very strange job and get straight A’s. But that’s yet to come.

  u

  Was I getting anything out of this failed wandering. You bet. Knowledge. Insights into peculiar corners of the culture. Edna St. Vincent Millay-style insights. And these were the pointillist dots, the pixels,
that would someday help flesh out a big picture. But at the time, those future payoffs were hard to see.

  Another thing that I failed to see: I was ever so slowly approaching true love. And true love would be far stranger than it’s generally made out to be.

  u

  OK, there I was flapping around like one of Skinner’s pigeons trying to find a pattern in random deliveries of food. But a strange thing happens when you pursue your mission in life with a passion. When you follow the commandments of Edna St. Vincent Millay, T. S. Eliot, and Jack Kerouac. You sometimes leave a trail behind you. You sometimes leave a path on which others build a highway.

  In my case, the nameless movement that I had helped kick into motion on the West Coast a year and a half earlier was about to be discovered by, of all people, Henry Luce. And it was about to get a name. The Time/Life Wizard of Id was about to spot the next hot property with which to entertain prisoners of corporate employment. Yes, Luce was about to pinpoint the next band of rebels whose escapades would provide a weekly excuse to shovel sex into the open caverns of perpetually sex-deprived American minds. Sex delivered with a tone of outraged disapproval that would make its perpetual appearance appear prudish. Luce was about to give his newly discovered handful of seekers after Lord-knows-what a label—the “Hippies.” And in 1967, he would even put a story called “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture” on one of the most-coveted media locations in America: the cover of Life Magazine. Yes, thanks to Henry Luce, the movement I’d accidentally helped start was about to become the next big bohemianism. But that’s not all.

  The sugar cubes that had helped me learn the art of nude cliff-dangling were about to migrate to the East Coast, where two Harvard professors—Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary—would use them to make headlines. Thanks in part to Alpert and Leary, LSD would be the subject of nine articles in Luce’s Time magazine in just one year, 1966. The professorial pair would claim that the active ingredient of the sweetener could be used to redecorate even the drabbest mind. In fact, if you felt the breadth of your mental acreage was inadequate, Alpert and Leary offered the solution: the form of psychological enlargement you’ve run into before, the brain-stretch they called “mind expansion.” How very much in the spirit of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, “the world stands out on either side, no wider than the heart is wide.”

  Topping it all off, the sucrose cube’s obscure chemical additive would be semantically restyled by the intrepid Luce journalists to make it sound more zippy. Lysergic acid was about to be dubbed LSD, or “acid.” And within a year, a foursome of unlikely singers from Liverpool, England, who had stupidly named themselves after the world’s most abundantly varied insect, would invade the United States and start a trend in hairstyles that was eventually destined to make my coiffure the rage. My past was preparing to haunt me. The Sixties were about to officially begin.

  u

  Oh, and one more strange event would happen any month now. Barbara would appear.

  THE JOYS OF LIVING IN A CLOSET

  When we last left off, my French teacher, echoing my pistol-packing Vancouver wise men, had informed me that what I needed in life was a goal. My father had sent me to Israel, where I had found one…getting myself into a mental institution. Unfortunately, no mental institution would have me except for Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education.

  So I spun the wheel of fate, rolled the dice, tossed the I Ching, flipped a coin, and came up with the most obvious next big goal in sight—going back to college.

  In those days New York University in Manhattan was the only school interested in dropouts. Little wonder. Leaving school early hadn’t yet acquired a name. Remember, the term “dropout” was not in popular use. And we humans prize words more than we prize realities. Biologists in the early 1800s had names for the cell’s membrane and nucleus, so when they drew the cells that were under their microscopes, that’s all they drew—membranes and nuclei. There were lots of other dots in the cell, but the anally meticulous biological sketch specialists thought the flecks and smidgens were dirt and ignored them. Then someone came up with names for some of that dirt—chromosomes, mitochondria, and organelles. Now that the specks had names, the formerly invisible dots showed up in every sketch of a cell in sight.

  What’s worse, we run from phenomena so far off the beaten path that no one has yet dignified them with a terminology. People flee from a friend with a crippling illness that has no name. Or they insist that “it’s all in your head.” Which is a back-handed way of naming the unnamable while claiming that the unnamable illness does not exist.

  College admission officers are human. Yes, I know that comes as a surprise. So, they, too, flee from nameless things. Nameless things like, well, errr, me.

  But beyond the fact that NYU was the only school that would have a dropout like me, the school in the land of skyscrapers had another advantage. It was in one of the most cosmopolitan, global cities of the 20th century, a cesspool of strange people where a strange person like me could feel at home. At Reed I never felt I belonged. The school was small. And the students buddied together in tight little cliques. No clique I’d ever encountered had wanted me. And that included the brainy, bohemian cliques at Reed. In New York, you could dodge between the cliques and pick friends like wildflowers. If you wanted, you could put together a clique of your own. Your own private, personal, human bouquet.

  I got so excited about this fact that I would write an ode to it thirty-seven years later, shortly after the jolt of 9/11. Here’s how it went.

  New York is not just a city of concrete. It is not just a city of glass. It is not just a city with ribs of steel. It is not a city of mourning. It is a city aborning. New York is a spirit, a flicker, a flame. New York is a city whose brilliance is born in the strange. It’s a mega-nest for those who were too bright, too adventurous, too pregnant with imaginings. It’s a giant hive for those who did not fit back in Wilmington or Waterbury or Waxahachie. New York is a place for those who cannot squeeze themselves into the America of the everyday. It is a gathering place for those who cannot just be normal, joke around, party, and play, those who cannot be content with a life of nothing but beer and football games. New York is a city of those who find that something out of kilter with the ordinary, something odd, unnamable, teases and tickles their brains.

  Those who had no one to understand them come here and find they suddenly have a home. We New Yorkers are the oddballs, the misfits, the outcasts, the brilliant, the vision-ridden, the eerie, the nerdy, the incomprehensible, the bizarrely gifted, the ghosts of futures searching for a home, the restless souls who elsewhere have no grounding, who, without New York, are forced to roam. Here we strange ones, we too-swift-ones, we who open strange emotions, feelings haunting others but which today’s words won’t yet let them say, we who see new passions, new astonishments, new forms of theater, new ways to dance, new cinematic visions, new prose, new jokes, new poetry, new fashions, new ways to work and play, we gather here and find each other. Here we come together in strange packs, new kinds of tribes. Here those who had no place in the heartlands help give each other friendship, energy, brainstorming sessions, lives.

  New York cannot be shattered, it is a bonfire of the spirit, it’s a flickering twist of connectivity. I, the strange, find you, the strange, and together we set others free. I feed you when your soul’s on fire, support you when you drown in mire. And you, you do the same for me. What got you beaten up at home becomes a revelation when you say it not to them but to me. There’s brightness in your eyes as I spell out my visions, and in the brightness of your pupils, your attention sets me free. You power me with what you sense that no one ever saw in me.

  Yes, NYU’s biggest gift was New York City. But there was an arthropod in the academic ointment. NYU wouldn’t accept my previous French courses and was determined to stick me in some elementary class, a humiliation I couldn’t tolerate. A humiliation that would lead to l
ove. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  Miffed by NYU’s witless insult to my mastery of French, I went back from Rutgers to Buffalo for the summer and my dad used his political connections to land me a job. As a legislative assistant, a gofer for the mayor, a researcher on policy positions, or as the city’s monarch and budding commander-in-chief? Not on your life. My father secured me a sinecure as a garbage man.

  Since sanitation specialists work from six in the morning until noon, that left my afternoons free. When my work was over, I showered off the odor of deteriorating table scraps and spent the rest of my time writing position papers for a Congressional candidate who would later win against enormous odds…and perfecting my French.

  My major linguistic problem involved a serious gender mix-up. I perpetrated millions of tiny surgical operations in which I castrated male nouns and added testicles to feminine ones via a totally mangled sense of las and les. Fortunately, none of the words I crippled for life ever sued me for malpractice.

  Meanwhile, I had haughtily challenged NYU to give me the toughest French test it could muster. To pull off an improvement in my mastery of the Gallic tongue, I came up with a sneaky trick. A very B. F. Skinnerish trick. I bought one of those volumes of Voltaire with the French version on one side of the page and the English on the other. Every day, I covered up a French page, then set about translating the English on the facing page back into my best approximation of Francais. At day’s end, I’d compare my version with Voltaire’s. His was usually better. But after a full summer and 84 pages of this, I’d pretty well gotten the kinks out of writing like a genuine Frank, and could knock off a 3,000-word essay with nary a sexually-abused noun. What’s more, I was inspired to write a little book called Candide, for which I understand Voltaire has been hogging the credit. OK, this time I’m kidding.