The Return of the Tower of Babel, Chapter Three, Cancel Culture, Parts 11 and 12

The Incident and The Dismantling of the West

         11. THE INCIDENT

I know. I experienced cancel culture directly when Lindy’s and my five-decades-long publishing company was lost.

This is a big story for me. It will always be a big story, lifetimes from now. It would have to be. When you and your partner work for fifty-five years to create an archive and then watch it get dismantled, seemingly without respect and remorse, it is a life-defining lesion.

This is not a simple story either, so I want to confine my telling of it here to its cancel-culture implications and my own depression. To my mind, “social justice” has been widely appropriated as a cover for forms of activity, having little to do with the marginalized people it purports to serve or with reversing systemic racism. It is, however, an effective strategic use.

My “incident” meshes with similar ones involving college professors, publishing executives, journalists, and blue-collar managers. What you will read is my subjective account of a complex event that has many facets. Readers should seek the counter-narrative, draw their own conclusions. In fact, I hope that some folks audit me on this. Everyone is a hero in their own story. What am I missing? Am I an innocent victim or did I commit crimes to which I am not owning up or don’t recognize from entitled myopia. There is always a counternarrative. We are always missing something. That’s how we grow.

Everything I say henceforth is, in the Buddhist sense, “view” or, as playwright Arthur Miller vernacularized, “the view from the bridge.” It is my bridge, my view, and there are as many bridges as there are people and views.

Lindy and I began our publishing modestly and inadvertently as sophomores at Amherst and Smith Colleges in 1964. A detailed account appears in my book New Moon: A Coming of Age Tale.* Initially our journal Io (named after the inner moon of Jupiter) was a medley of literature and the occult. Then in 1967 while we were newly married and living in Ann Arbor, we assembled an alchemy-themed issue based on a work of our mentor at the time, poet Robert Kelly. The Alchemy Issue came out at the start of the first counterculture and took off at once, getting recognition in the Canadian Whole Earth Almanac. That expanded our subscriber and bookstore base and making it possible to keep publishing without the college funds that launched us. Curating issues on diverse topics combining ethnography, myth, and literature, we put out 23 issues in 11 years, turning an annual into an irregular (as libraries re-catalogued us). Themes included Ethnoastronomy, Oecology, Dreams, Baseball, four Earth Geography Booklets, Mind Memory Psyche, Biopoeisis, Vermont, and two Olson-Melville Sourcebooks.

During those ten years, I went to graduate school in Michigan in anthropology, Lindy in English; I did ethnographic fieldwork with fishermen in downeast Maine; and we both taught at the University of Maine in Portland and Goddard College in Vermont.

In 1974, sponsored by the Vermont Arts Council, we applied to a new National Endowment for the Arts program for publishing. We named our press North Atlantic Books, partly for regionality—five straight years then (and counting) in Maine and Vermont—and partly in acknowledgment of Ed Dorn’s epic poem “North Atlantic Turbine”: “. . . the turbine is only movement, / the current of the Atlantic swirl . . . / continents break before it / they pull apart . . . .” That was our intent, a swirl beyond history, a turbine of truth.

For its first few years, the press was purely literary, mostly poetry, and grant-supported. We published books solely on Arts Endowment grants. Authors included Diane di Prima, Bernadette Mayer, Gerrit Lansing, Theodore Enslin, Bobby Byrd, and Robert Kelly. In 1977 Lindy and I left Vermont and teaching careers and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area without jobs and two young kids. Publishing became a luxury as tried to earn a living, although the first Io anthology, Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life,” a literary and cultural collection I co-edited with University of Delaware professor Kevin Kerrane, was such a success in 1978 that we sold it to Doubleday (where it became Baseball Diamonds) and bought six months Bay Area survival after unemployment checks ran out.

For a while, Lindy did arts-management jobs, then worked briefly for Shambhala Publications before putting in over a decade teaching technical writing and ethics in the engineering school at Cal/Berkeley. During that time, I got advances from Doubleday, Sierra Club, Shambhala, and Avon to write books on alternative medicine, astronomy/cosmology, and embryology.

In 1980 we incorporated North Atlantic Books as a nonprofit in order to continue getting Arts Endowment grants without a fiscal agent taking thirty percent. Because of technical requirements too picayune to detail, we created an anthropological society and donated the press to it. Nonprofit status got us a quick three-year grant for multicultural distribution under sponsorship of novelist Ishmael Reed. That included a half-salary for me and bought some more time while I continued to look for an interdisciplinary college teaching job I never found.

Three years after we received nonprofit status, Arts grants dried up, but writing Planet Medicine had put me in the heart of the alternative-medicine world. Holistic health and psychospiritual modalities gradually replaced avant-garde literature. Many of the books came naturally from my taking courses and trainings and recruiting my teachers. With my book advances and being the one who stayed home for the kids’ return from school, I had lots of time. I studied homeopathy, bioenegetics, shiatsu, Lomi, Jungian dream analysis, rebirthing, Breema, craniosacral therapy, polarity, and Feldenkrais. I found authors in all of them. A day-long intensive in Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and three weekend intensives in Continuum micromovements with Emilie Conrad helped me built somatics lists because I not only learned the systems first-hand but met practitioners of various modalities taking master classes.

Our initial books and Planet Medicine itself led to other authors, several of them founders of their own systems. These led to other authors and systems along with their students, colleagues, and friends.

My t’ai chi classes similarly led to practitioners and teachers: Cheng Man-Ch’ing, Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Paul Pitchford, Terry Dobson, Peter Ralston, Wendy Palmer, Richard Strozzi Heckler, Bira Almeida, Nestor Capoeira. Holistic health and martial arts opened our press to a wide range of modalities that synergized energy medicine, shamanism, ethnobotany, and movement and dance.

In a different arc, my writing The Night Sky put me in touch with amateur exobiologist Richard Hoagland. His book, The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever, became our first bestseller and extended our spectrum to forbidden archaeology, sacred geometry, critiques of science, and science fiction.

For the next thirteen or so years in Berkeley, Lindy and I built North Atlantic into a trade publishing company, as we became a respected Mind Body Spirit imprint as well as one of the leading publishers in English of books on internal martial arts and somatics. We innovated lists on ayahuasca, food as consciousness, healing trauma, and dozens of other topics ranging from Peruvian whistling jugs to Appalachian dance and Quonset Huts on the River Styx, a compilation of satirical bomb-shelter designs. These arose out of interconnected networks leading back to our original literary world, which itself had a shamanic and mythic component, and my studies. Paul Pitchford, author of Healing with Whole Foods, our second bestseller, was my initial Berkeley t’ai-chi, diet, and meditation teacher.

Amid growing numbers of New Age and Mind Body Spirit presses, none made the particular synthesis we did of martial arts, alternative medicine, the occult, anthropology, and avant-garde literature that we did. It was a rich juncture, and it gave us a high standing in an industry in which we had to compete for authors with well-funded commercial houses.

During those thirteen years of exploration and expansion, Lindy and I ran the entire operation except for book design (our kids even packed books and helped cart them to the post office after school). For production, we paid a freelance designer, Paula Morrison, initially the girlfriend of one of our t’ai-chi authors. Lindy did most of the editing until we added a freelance editor, Kathy Glass.

We mostly didn’t pay ourselves; we donated our time. North Atlantic was more a hobby or art than a business or revenue source. I thought of it as an authors’ collective, an energy field, and a hermetic torch through an epoch of materialism, later a living hermeneutical process. Our IRS mission statement for the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences summarized our founding goals: “to increase awareness of nonmaterialist, noncommercial activities in the areas of gardening, sacred texts, recreation, self-healing, meditation, and experimental art forms so that individuals are oriented toward the depth and richness of their own practices and community; to discover and develop values implicit in technological society for the creation of ecologically cohesive communities with a commitment to the hidden properties of materials and systems; to bring together the ancient lost and the yet unborn, to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.”

It was an attempt to allay IRS concerns about publishing; they didn’t like to grant 501c3 status for commercial products. Dance, theater, and music were okay, but not books.

Nineteen years after storing inventory and shipping from a Vermont barn and various Berkeley garages, basements, and a converted swimming pool, we moved North Atlantic into a downtown office and hired our first staff. Lindy left her job at Cal/Berkeley and joined me on full-time basis. We established a payroll with withholding tax and began a second life as a business. She and I were fifty years old.

During the next seventeen years, we built the company, expanding the list in quantity and range. It took four turns and six years to assemble a staff of fifteen, another six plus three more turns (and three office moves and a switch of distributor from Publishers Group West to Random House) to establish ourselves as a Mind Body Spirit imprint on a par with mainstream competitors. During the transformation we put out sixty, seventy, then eighty new titles a year: graphic novels, esoteric novels, Zen philosophy, translations of the Dalai Lama, high-school football, contrarian AIDS, medicinal herbs, prenatal memories, gay tantra, esoteric anatomy, channeling, healing PTSD, astral travel, and a bestselling children’s book, Walter the Farting Dog, as well as a widening spectrum of alternative medicine, martial arts, bodywork, shamanism, ethnopharmacology, spirit-walking, and New Wave literature.

Around 2008, we began to increase the staff, surpassing 20 once we moved to Random House in 2007 and raised salaries to industry standards. The majority of our early employees were folks who answered newspaper ads. Few of them knew or cared about our esoteric themes or even publishing as such. We needed literate workers, and they needed a job for which they had skills. North Atlantic was often a second or third choice after digital and video didn’t pan out. During the late nineties and aughts, a few martial artists, Buddhist practitioners, poets, and aspiring magicians showed up for stints. All of them left for the next phase in their careers. I described my unsuccessful attempt to hire my early-nineties martial-arts teacher Ron Sieh in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:

An incorrigible trickster, if he sent the wrong books or missed a conference deadline, he said stuff like “Want perfection, hire robots.”

One afternoon, as he was dissing yet another customer on the phone, I headed his way. There was a reason this guy was unemployable.

“You’re not firing me, are you?” he preempted.

“Ron,” I said, reprising a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie we both admired, “I owe you everything, but not a job.”

“Golly gee,” he replied, “it’s a sad day when the burghers take over from the samurai!”

Between 1993 when Lindy joined me and 2010 when she retired, we employed close to 400 people, maxing at 24 at any one time, with a wide range of ages, ethnicities, races, gender orientations, and temperaments, far more women than men. We oversaw romances, feuds, emotional collapses, an arsonist, a kleptomaniac, a Swedish fashion model, two rock musicians, an unemployment scammer, a girlfriend of an Oakland Raiders’ lineman (he sent her flowers at work), a late sleeper who came in pajamas, and a few “sacred office” practitioners. We hired our Czech UPS driver to work in the warehouse where he ended up in a fistfight with another employee, the singer for a local punk-rock band. One woman threw a desk computer over a balcony at her estranged boyfriend waving a gun. Another guy had an affair with his otherwise gay female supervisor and, after she broke up with him, quit. At the door, he turned with a parting call, “This is a coven of witches!”

Another departing male dubbed it a “gynocracy.”

Antonio Cuevas was a gay chicano artist from LA who went on to write for Variety. Harry Um was a gentle Korean intellectual from New York who moved to academia. Jeremy Bigalke was an introverted computer whiz who left to run his own publishing company. Anastasia McGhee was a Dzogchen devotee who oversaw work-place mindfulness and inspired spiritual activist author Andrew Harvey, a bi guttersnipe who could mime a bitchy British lord, to declare on one occasion, “Don’t cry for me, Anastasia!”; on another, “None of your Buddhist bromides, baby.”

Yvonne Cardenas was a Cuban cultural historian. Jess O’Brien was a Socratic philosopher and qigong student. Hisae Matsuda was a Japanese translator by way of England, India, and service to Mata Amritanandamay, the hugging saint; she went on to become publisher of Parallax, a Berkeley Buddhist press specializing in the work of Vietnamese teacher Thích Nhát Hanh. Brooke Warner, a changeling from Southern California by way of D.C. politics, left North Atlantic to do feminist publishing at Seal Press, then started her own imprint, She Writes. Nick Sanchez was a gay half-chicano, half-First-Nations media whiz from Colorado who liked to note that his family had been on their land so long that it was the border that moved and made them Americans.

One by one they left, for different lines of work, different lines of books, more money, Silicon Valley, L.A., the East Coast. Jason Kaneko became a union electrician; Zoe Marshall became a docker at the Port of Oakland. Allegra Harris got a marketing job at Proctor & Gamble, Nick got a marketing job at RealClearPolitics.

When Lindy retired in 2010, she stayed on the board, and we began the process of slowly transitioning the press to the staff. It was a nonprofit, so it couldn’t be transferred or sold.

Drop back to 1994, a year after we moved North Atlantic out of the house. We started a second imprint, a for-profit called Frog, Ltd. (honoring an endangered species); we ran it from the same office with the same themes and different book-keeping.

In 2007, after North Atlantic hit a cashflow meltdown during the Publishers Group West bankruptcy—they were our distributor—and our move to Random House, we donated Frog and its $2 million bank account to the nonprofit, an act I found inconceivable fifteen years later—people at our economic level don’t give away two million dollars. But we were younger, the mindset in the country and world was more benign and trusting, and our community of North Atlantic authors was meaningful to us (plus our adult kids by then had independent careers). We thought that donating the money was the best use of it and, if we hadn’t, the press would have folded before getting to Random House.

In 2002, we were warned by a labor attorney that we were an attractive target for theft. His words were something like, “You’re running a multimillion-dollar bullet train like hippies on a Casey Jones track.”

We had hired him over an employee dispute. A marketing guy had figured out how to corral most of the revenue from Walter the Farting Dog, as it rose to number 1 on the New York Times Children’s Picture-Book bestseller list. Everything the staffer did was legal, but it didn’t change the fact that he bamboozled us with a commissions scheme such that we were paying him more than the rest of the staff and ourselves combined. That was one reason the lawyer thought we were in over our heads.

His advice and that of others was to convert the whole operation into an S-Corp. The guidance went past us; instead, we gave away the S-corp to the nonprofit. We were still in a fifties and sixties mindset, a midsummer-night’s dream that preceded the election of Donald J. Trump. When the scrim was ripped off an obsolete reality, not only were crimes of all varieties possible but the feared authorities had little power to stop them. We were playing by vanished rules.

Lindy and I began spending more and more time in Maine, finally moving there in 2014. We returned to the Bay for a month or two each winter on home exchanges. Our accountant and attorney, both board members, urged me to appoint someone else publisher.

The young man I chose brought into play a social-justice agenda to which most of Lindy’s and my milieu had pledged fealty since our youth. With our assent, he began to recruit a new more racially and politically diverse board, folks he met in local gardening circles, though who had, at best, peripheral or superficial affinity with our books and understanding of the complexity of the weave. It didn’t seem to matter. Lindy and I had long thought of the board as an artifact rather than what it was, the legal repository of the company. We blended with our protégé’s liberation theology. He didn’t stay around long.

The staff also gravitated toward social justice as a more amenable rubric than Lindy’s and my hard-to-bundle arcana. Identity politics and critiques of white privilege and neo-colonialism trended with the academic and intellectual bias of many of their peers.

About that time, a thirty-year-vested author of alternative-medicine books, a homeopath and acupuncturist, was accused by a patient of inappropriate touching; the guy said he was set up by the pharmaceutical industry. The resulting brouhaha made the local papers. To this day, almost seven years later, so far as I know the case has never gone to court and the author is still practicing. The issues around the event are far more tangled than my description, but given the trajectory of this book, I will leave it here. (Since making this post, I have been told that this author was more recently tried, convicted of improper touching of three patients, and sent to jail—18 years! Whether he was set up is an issue more pertinent to the next chapter. His being in jail relates back to my immediately previous wetiko post. It doesn’t affect my argument, just makes me sad for him and our unfinished world.)

Several other of our authors had been accused of far worse sexual misconduct through the years, mostly along the lines of unwanted advances but rape too. I never considered it our place to act as their judge and jury. It was a slippery slope. Some of the great works of Western literature were written by people with similar or far worse peccadillos. Carry this yardstick over to the rock and rap worlds and, by citing inappropriate touching and unwanted advances, you can pretty much wipe out the albums and CDs of the last century.

Yet all of the accused’s books were put out of print. The author’s advance for his next book was eaten. The annual cost to the press was in the range of a full annual salary, but that wasn’t the whole price because sexual impropriety wasn’t the lone issue. The victim (or victimizer, depending on your perspective) was a pediatrician as well as a practitioner of alternative medicine. He had written about the relative merits and risks of each common vaccine. His vaxx relativism did not sit well with the staff.

As reconstituted, they didn’t care all that much about energy medicine; it wasn’t part of their daily lives. Plus like months named Thermidor and Fructidor during the French Revolution, words like “alchemical,” “spiritual,” “liminal,” “shamanic,” even “native arts and sciences” could be reinvented and repurposed.

After I was finally removed, North Atlantic cancelled a genre-creating book I acquired on spirit marriage near the end of my tenure, though they kept the author on hold for more than a year. She told me, “I pinged the dude when I didn’t get a contract. He said, ‘Sorry, we changed our mind.’ I asked why. He said, ‘The staff doesn’t believe in spirits and they think polyamory is immoral.’ What the fuck? They said my book was immoral because I was advocating sex with spirits they don’t believe in.’”

There was a bigger issue for me. I had fallen into a clinical depression with insomnia after my sister’s 2016 suicide, which followed the suicides of my mother (1975) and my brother (2005). Her death wasn’t the sole cause, but it was a catalyst.

My 1960s Amherst friend, Dorey Fliegel, a writer too, described depression well. I have my own accounts in other writing (see Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms) and but I will go with Dorey’s here to universalize the state. It comes uncannily close to my own experience:

Unless you have been there—you cannot know—for what can never be known is the lived feeling of it. 

So, too, was it with that loosely-used word, ‘depression,’ about which everyone thinks they know a little something, just as I did, until the real thing showed up at my door and with a sudden, indifferent, rolling pitch, threw me man overboard. . . .

I had assumed, out of my unknowing, that with time it would gradually slacken—that all I had to do was outlast it. 

What did I know?  An apple does not slowly fall.  It ripens and it rots.  On any given day it either drops or it does not

Until you have been there you cannot know the cold that takes control until you succumb to a summons that no sane man or woman can yet imagine, a torment taking you a hundred times a day to the edge of a despair so great the thought of ending it all sneaks over you like a welcome thief, bringing its split-second respite of blessed relief.

You inhabit a remote, unearthly landscape light-years away, without beginning or end, color or shape, a gray, cold place drained of all living warmth, bound by a gravity that has no name, the only constant a steady, gnawing pain and—in the background—that incessant, hellish refrain—a perpetual reminder of a life gone terribly wrong.

Impossible to conjure or explain—just as it had been for me when I lived so blithely on the other side, before life served notice and took me for its little detour beyond the reach of time, where one by one you give up on the days and tacitly surrender to the weeks and months, until the years no longer matter.

Depression gradually removes you from that cruel human illusion of time.90

         In James Boswell’s, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), he wrote:

My mind is filled with the blackest ideas, and all my power of reason has forsaken me. I run frantic up and down streets, groaning from my innermost heart. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking. O good God! What am I enduring? I have no inclination for anything. All is good for nothing and dreary. I am old, wretched, and forlorn.91

The election and early Presidency of Donald Trump put my depression on steroids. It wasn’t so much the politics as having the Government in the hands of a mentally disturbed person and mafia don. It was as though one of the Mexican cartels or a Hungarian junta were suddenly running the nation. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, I posted on Facebook: “Note to Republicans: Telling yourself that you can stage-manage four years of a Trump presidency without major catastrophe to the country and the world is like kidding yourself that you can persuade Mohammed Atta to land the plane safely.”

Yes, I have Trump derangement syndrome. It’s like paranoia. Is it still paranoia if someone is really out to get you? Is it “derangement syndrome” if an actual deranged person is in change?

Depression, or any so-called mental illness, is a psychospiritual crisis with multiple causes. It is overdetermined, so particular events and co-factors mingle and synergize in unpredictable and undiagnosable ways.

But, as Dorey’s description so poignantly shows, depression is not extended sadness, as I once imagined; it is the half-life of terror, a total loss of volition and ground.

The convergence of concerns and crises—plus exigencies of aging—led Lindy and me to try to return to California where our children lived. We spent six weeks in Berkeley in 2017 and again in 2018 while conceiving how to move back for good. Most of 2019 and half of 2020 we rented at $6800 a month, before deciding, given the expense, smoke, power outages, crime, chop shops, pandemic, and situation at North Atlantic Books, that Maine was a safer place after all.

Some say the human-potential movement was a result of geomorphic pressure along the Hayward Fault converted into thoughtforms, continental plates grinding. California forces you to ride theta waves, to find yourself. Everything is available, though nothing is what it seems.

Thirty-six years prior at our Saturn return, we had left the stormish seasons of our Rocky Mountain and Eastern Woodlands upbringings and New England youth to live in those theta waves in winter-less paradise and make a living and home for ourselves and our whelps. It worked until, like all magic, it dissolved into the spell out of which it came. In the backdrop of gardener-tended yards and streets traversed by E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, “irie” reigned, the sense that none of this is really real.

We had lived in a fancy bed-and-breakfast, surrounded by scions of the new economy. Sprawling dot.coms and high-tech planets were re-colonizing the landscape as if computers could compel continental plates forever. It was soporific, yet a jackpot as well as a minor coat of arms for folks like us who arrived with little equity and no jobs.

When police and fire officials held a meeting to tell us that we lived on the most dangerous sector of the Hayward fault and our houses wouldn’t survive a minor temblor, Lindy started a Yale Avenue earthquake-preparedness group to raise money for supplies. She enlisted me to go door-to-door and give some of her failures a second shot. Canned spiels were her skill set not mine; she was a born performer and a riveting, cheery presence. I hated door-to-door even at Halloween; it activated my autism.

I convinced one reluctant woman to sign but quit after a guy with a “Semper Fi” hat in the eastern-most house before Oberlin Street said, “I’ll join if you agree to buy guns and ammunition because that’s what we’ll need when the folks arrive from Richmond and Oakland to kill us or, if we’re lucky, kick us out of our homes.”

California was the ultimate fool’s gold, though it took much of half a lifetime to figure that out. By 2014, gourmet-ghetto appreciation added up to community-less confetti and fill. That’s when we moved to Maine.

We came back to a very different situation in 2019.

Young people—and we ourselves were young for a very long time—think they can pull off anything that their elders can and improve on it, override their endemic blind spots and limitations. I felt as though they were operating on the premise that Lindy’s and my curation hid white theft, privilege, and nepotism and that they could come up with just as good books with racial and sexual diversity mainly by googling.

I was trying to transition the press effectively, and I had a bit of Stockholm syndrome. Throughout my childhood and youth, I found it safer to play wimp and dufus than to let the authorities know the extent of my apostasy. I couldn’t hide from my mother or a pedophile counselor at Camp Swago, but the tendency was as instinctive as a snail carrying a shell. Plus, I did eventually escape both of them, the former by whooping cough, the latter by growing up.

Submission and obeisance were no longer possible, and I was too old to hide who I was.

I was graded poorly—for using the meme “tar baby,” for interrupting a woman while she was talking, for “name dropping” black authors and citing transsexual themes Lindy and I innovated years earlier. All were deemed racism, false entitlement, unearned license. In this new world, the most recent hire on his or her (or their) first day in the building had as much claim to relevance as me. They had it by applying a measure that decreed my career and generation blind to the power structures behind it. It didn’t matter that the tar baby was African-American-generated and was black because it was made out of tar.

I wanted North Atlantic to survive and thrive. Lindy and I had hired enough of the staff to consider them our people. The press was our legacy and the reservoir of five decades of work. I tried to adjust to the change by bringing books from local Filipino, chicano, and black practitioners, shamans of color and trans healers, trying to fulfill the priorities of the new editorial group. I found most of them at a fair at which our office manager played saxophone in a band. These were ignored or turned down, considered an attempt to hold onto power. Plus my depression left me with little spunk and was amped by the situation at the press. It was painful to realize that I was an exile in my own company.  

A world launched in New York City and Colorado prep schools and Ivy League colleges, in a 1960s alchemy salon and through initiations by tarot cards, push-hands, fascial palpation, and aura reading was being rejected by its latter-day stewards. It took Lindy and me most of a lifetime, from our late teen years well into our seventies, to create a living archive of personal transformation, radical healing, and liminal realms, to blend indigenous arts and sciences with futuristic paradigms. But we was old, they was young. As Chip Taylor put it in the London Sessions, 2008, “we was wrong and they was right / and somebody’s gotta pay.”

Somebody had to pay.

I was told I had unfairly received an education that others hadn’t. The word “reparation” was used.

I hadn’t considered that times would change such that reparation would be required, let alone by a grandchild of Polish and German Jews from whom strangers took possessions, businesses, art, children, dignity, and the right to live a generation or two ago.

My pedigree as a cross-cultural author and publisher from an Ivy League college with a liberal-arts education and an anthropology PhD served me about as well as, sorry, a Jewish musician in 1939 Germany or a professor trying to explain Confucian philosophy and class dialectics to Mao’s Red Guards.

My celebration of African American and First Nations peoples going back to my sixties’ and seventies’ publishing of Hopis, Somalians, and poets sent my way by Amiri Baraka was dismissed as summarily and cruelly if not as fatally as Daniel Pearl when his plaint of empathy for Muslim aspirations was repudiated by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s sword.

As an anti-Zionist and supporter and colleague of real-life Palestinians, I never would have thought that a friend and confidante would turn against me like a capo in a death camp to affirm his solidarity with the woke. When I experienced that, I felt like a piece of meat. It wasn’t Kristallnacht, but I had a glimmer of the moment when your equally Jewish neighbor says in front of the Reich, “I love the guy, but—”

You don’t hear it because you don’t believe it’s possible. Try it out. Imagine someone you totally trust turning against you at a critical moment of your life. Sherri Mitchell, my First Nations author, later said, “Now you know what it feels like to have your identity and land stolen.”

Other long-time friends and staff—hip, compassionate people—abandoned me in fear of being dubbed racist or in their wish to prove woke.

My idylls on Hopi mesas, in a Navaho hardball game, and with Cree guides were consigned to name-dropping, self-dealing, and intellectual theft. My support of and by African American and First Nations peoples, from the union rebellion at my father’s hotel (1964) and my dinner that summer during the Democratic Convention with Damita Jo, Bitty Wood, and Dick Gregory at an Atlantic City restaurant, to a perilous road trip through Nebraska with Welton Smith and his white girlfriend (1965), to bearing white witness before a Black Muslim congregation at the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York (2010)— from Pine Ridge Oglala Dakota Vine Deloria, Jr.’s blessings at Lindy’s and my wedding (he was a friend of her father), to a ghost dance at Hotevilla (1967), to reading as a white guy at Andy Hope’s Tlingit-Eskimo powwow in Anchorage in 1976, to a prayer at a Penobscot portal—were dismissed as peremptorily and humorlessly as the Khmer-Rouge dismissed their enemies. My self-aggrandized pleas were dismissed as whitesplanation; I was like any white guy saying he had Black or Asian or Native American friends.

They would have sentenced me to the firing squad or gas chamber if they had had the power. That wasn’t an option, but it was the energy I felt and, if you had heard the language used against me in person, which I didn’t in my myopia, you would have been just as stunned and felt just as unreal.

No one is immune to this, however radical and true to the “cause”—no artist, no intellectual, no spiritual seeker, no first responder, no herbalist or healer.

Once again, I remind you, there must be a counter-narrative. There has to be. How else to explain this behavior? Human beings don’t act this way unless they are justified.

My age was cited, but even with my depression, it was irrelevant. I was at the height of my career with a lifelong network of contacts and a steady stream of books. All of that went to Inner Traditions.

If you don’t have to build something from scratch, you don’t realize how difficult it is. A leaked internal memo I saw revealed the self-congratulatory mood, as folks joked about getting rid of authors X, Y, and Z (whom they named) “for basically being douchebags and spreading misinformation.”  

Ehud Sperling, publisher of Inner Traditions, was a fierce competitor of our press going back decades. Yet he said, upon hearing what transpired, “The only reason I can think of for this terrible thing happening to you is that we were meant to work together in our seventies.”

And so it was.

When my successors put my books out of print and pulped the inventory I didn’t buy, he said, “Presses need their legacy. Well, they just fucked theirs. They should hang your picture on the wall and thank you every day for providing them with a living.”

They basically discarded a successful working press with the notion that, by ending white privilege, they could make a better, more inclusive organization and gain a new readership. Maybe they can, but it would have been more honorable to start their own company. To me, it is a rudderless vessel driven by stale precepts, manned by pirates, towed like a dead barnacle by Random House.

Inner Traditions helped get me out of my depression by giving me effectively unlimited resources to build a new imprint. I named it Sacred Planet Books. Other changes helped, including relocating most of the time in Bar Harbor back in Mount Desert Island’s synchronicity sinkhole. I am esoterically and psychically oriented by now, but it would be a diversion to try to explain that here. Most of my writing on depression is unpublished, though I have a fairly substantial account of the phenomenology of coming out of an abyss in Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms along with a discussion of the relative roles of healing practices and intention. Honoring the desire to heal, separate of psychospiritual practices, proved more important than all my practices, though I don’t believe I could have done it without them. I wouldn’t have had enough space inside me. My trauma author Peter Levine, who lives in Maine part of the year, was pessimistic after spending time with me in the fall of 2020. After I emerged, he said, “You must have core resilience.” If so, I credit my guides; it’s a karmic and ancestral gift.    

After I joined Inner Traditions, I found new authors at a rate rivaling the early days of North Atlantic Books. I got to represent modern templars, alchemists, and magicians. Multiple authors and locutions appeared—Wiccan, psychic, hermetic, ecofeminist, shape-shifting, Yezidi, Cathar, Magdalene, interdimensional, etheric, dragon. They brought dream palaces, Chaldean oracles, meteoric moldavite, lunar kings, transspecies magicians, time loops, a peacock angel, aetheric alignments, the extracellular matrix, feline keepers of the spiritual world, sacred menstruation, Bon monks, Egyptian astrology, the Universal Christ. I curated projects from London, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Dallas, Omaha, the Carolinas, Italy, South Korea. Book stars Jeff Kripal, Anthony Peake, and Emily Shurr became my scouts. It was as if a dam had broken once I was free.

I acquired over 100 books in two-plus years: Samantha Treasure and her dream cyborg cartoons, Sophie Strand and her Book of Luke as told to Mary Magdalene, Anne-Marie Heckel and her death nesting, Bernie Beitman and cosmic synchronicity, Taylor Keen and an indigenous history of Turtle Island, Keith Thompson and archetypal UFOs, Anu Dudley and Nicolette Miele on Norse runes, Ruslana Remennikova on activating our 12-stranded DNA, Efu Nayaki and Tanzanian-Brazilian family constellations. I curated Elyrria Swann’s How to Become a Mermaid: Embodying the Elemental Energy of Water; David Barreto’s Animal Karma and Reincarnation, Joel and Michelle Levey’s Awakening Warrior: Insights for Living in Turbulent Times from the U.S. Army’s Secret Jedi Warrior Program; Stephanie Mines’ Embodying Resilience: Climate Change, Alchemy, and the Embodied Healer; Matt McKay’s Luminous Landscape of the Afterlife and Love in a Time of Impermanence. Barreto, a Brazilian working as a hotel clerk in London, wrote how when an ant reincarnates as a mineral it is usually rose quartz, as a plant it chooses a lifetime as a rose.

In time, I have come to recognize a tactic to which my progressive roots and habits inured me. It has become widespread in Western culture: elitist white accusers pretending to renounce their racial privileges as a strategy for extending white power.

Removal or marginalization of long-functional members from organizations and universities by social-justice inquisitions has become commonplace. The methods are usually the same: targets are accused of racism, sexual misconduct, or abuse and disrespect. If they haven’t committed anything overtly—no problem, everyone has baggage; just do a deep dive and find it.

Fools don’t even have to have committed the likeness of a crime or gotten a legal warning. All someone has to do is point a finger and say, “He or she triggered me,” and bang they’re dead! Who needs a gun? But if the woke have access to a gun, usually metaphorical or psychic, they may try to use it. The dead are easier and cheaper to dispose of than the living.

In Babel, progressive ideologies like feminism, social justice, and critical race theory get turned into instruments of oppression and control. Language police twist any incipient belief or slip of the tongue into accusations of privilege and revanchism. While feigning diversity and multiculturalism, culturally vanilla imposters, consumer politicos, and uninitiated imitators infiltrate formerly edgy organizations. Like a termite infestation, they hollow out the structure while disposing of anyone they deem inconvenient, unworthy, or more informed than they are. Then they pad their nests, virtue-signaling for cover. It’s a racket, from time immemorial.

My sense is that wokeness armed with cancel culture removes the need for any other ethics, compassion, respect, fairness, virtue, decency, or good will. But I don’t think that it can bring real reparation or understanding.

Early in my tenancy at Inner Traditions when my depression and insomnia made me dysfunctional, I wrote Ehud apologizing, offering to depart. He sent back a simple text: “I’VE GOT YOUR BACK. CHILL.”

On his show, “Astrology for the Now Age” host Robert Phoenix, declaimed in 2020, “Looking back on the coup staged at North Atlantic, it seems more than just random and the result of some social trend. Grossinger was targeted and marked in true revolutionary fashion, they stole his press for the current siege.

“He was chosen to have his company taken from him as a prize for the cultural revolution and to use NAB to publish Marxist polemics wrapped in racial theory and identity politics. . . .  It's not about race or being woke. It's about the wholesale dismantling of the West. ”92

He and I don’t have exactly the same politics or world view, but he touches on the big picture through a glass darkly.

I have no use for football coach Tommy Tuberville, MAGA Senator from Alabama (except to joke about him and Herschel Walker trying to execute the game plan), but when he said, referring to Democrats, “They're pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,”93 it resonated with me though I am registered and still vote Democratic. It is why so many from the working class, blacks and Hispanics too, have switched party affiliations.

                  Endnotes

90. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 1791.

91. Dorian Fliegel, May the Rock Its Silence Break, unpublished.

92. Robert Phoenix, “Astrology for the Now Age,” June 15, 2020.

93. Michael Hiltzik, “Overt racism and antisemitism have become part of our political discourse. How did that happen?” Los Angeles Times, reprinted in Yahoo Finance, October 21, 2022.

12. THE DISMANTLING OF THE WEST

What concerns me now, as it didn’t a few years ago, is that elements of the Left and Right equally want to end civil society, intellectual and empirical discourse, classroom dialogues, art that comes from heart and soul, and the healing and brotherhood of a respectful, communal earth. The woke seek blood as eagerly as Joey Gibson and the Proud Boys; they are ready to have at it: revolutionary war and civilizational collapse—then there will be no more Daniel Pearls, beat poets, Banksy graffito artists, or surrealist playwrights. The woke are bored with climate and sustainability too. 

Before you assume that eco-stewards can turn this planet around sanely—and I do still assume it, we are hope machines—realize that the morally righteous, reinforced by their own self-congratulatory rectitude, will not allow butterflies in Tokyo to begin vibrating their wings or storehouses of indigenous seeds and medicine bundles in St. Paul to go untorched or the innocent young in Yemen, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon to have a life before they are given guns, opiates, and the license to kill. 

The agrarian, shamanic civilization that was converted by the power of agriculture some four thousand years ago, its chiefdoms and bitcoins, beads and shells, always had pockets of spiritual and aesthetic freedom up to yesterday. Large sectors of Earth were permitted high culture within the State, and not as the State’s enemy. These days, cancel culture is not limited to toppling statues of the Confederacy or erasing names from islands and photos from gym walls. We face a depleted future, not paradise lost but margin and happiness hijacked by warlords, assholes, sociopaths, and Potemkin punks. Under Hobbesian entropy, they run more durable regimes than democracies.

The 2020 uprisings against property and civil order were camouflaged initially by the revolt against a Trumpian republic of wealth, pomp, and peremptory power. After the death of George Floyd on a Minneapolis sidewalk, Black Lives Matter marches turned into ritual corteges. Folks in good will and solidarity stood in choruses of raised fists, as they chanted off the seconds that Floyd was being choked by Derek Chauvin. That was the alchemical transmutation before carpetbagger militias and demonic superfly magicians took over.  

In New York, St. Paul, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, and elsewhere, marches against police brutality and institutionalized racism flipped from social-justice ceremonies to kites’ tails of gang members looting the malls of the empire. Store windows on New York’s Fifth Avenue and Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive were smashed and their shelves were picked clean: Saks, Tiffany’s, and Louis Vuitton of San Francisco. Gangs chanting “Eat the Rich!” and “Hit a Mothafucka!” burned down Oglala museums and youth centers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The fire knew no philosophy at Alexandria; it did not read Parmenides or Plato, only the elemental structure of worlds that had been, worlds that were to come.

Laptops, backpacks, and purses were snatched on the streets of Oakland and Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Swarms of smash-and-grabbers overwhelmed mall guards and fled with their loot before the constabulary could arrive. Home invasion became as fashionable in Los Angeles, Houston, and Orlando as in Baghdad or Tegucigalpa.

Hit-and-run ransackings were always possible, but neither cops nor robbers viewed the moral equation as cynically as they do now. The police don’t choose to police the petty shit—nothing to gain and everything to lose. Why risk shooting the wrong dude while breaking up a flash swarm and ending up in a Coen Brothers adaptation of “he’s in the jailhouse now”?  

 On the other side of duplicity, “defund the police” activists and their apologists quickly hired their own private security forces.

Those same mobs—Right or Left hardly matters—will sack Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, Wal-Mart, and Microsoft before the great fires and floods. Yesterday it was the Islamic State detonating idols, churches, mosques, and neighborhoods of Mosul and Aleppo as well as the last remnants and talismans of Yezidi/Zoroastrian civilization. Tomorrow it will be the French Revolution and Red Guards in Boston and Baton Rouge. Libya is not as far from Miami as it is from Alpha Centauri.

I want the police unions curtailed too, but government agents and blue coats are the ones who are going to have to escort the next Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office when he locks the door and summons his praetorian Proud Boys to load up and stand by. Those beat cops are whom you are going to have to call when someone shows up at your Echo Park condo or Vermont rutabaga-and-radicchio farm and says, “Reparation time, honky, it’s my house now.” Hit 9-1-1 and hope there’s someone left to answer.

---

*The rewritten 2016 paperback as opposed to the 1996 hardcover.

I have held off for a while on posting comments sent to me. I don’t want it to sound like a personal cheering gallery. I finally decided to add them, a few at a time, and let them stand on their own. I will post negative ones too if I get them.

Comments:

Jennifer Conghalaigh, shamanic teacher

I just finished reading your most recent post about the loss of your company, and I just want to say thank you for writing it, and that I'm sorry that happened to you.

It sounds like you got swept up in the tides of some very wounded and self-righteous souls who used you as a pawn and scapegoat.

I feel like your story is so important in this now moment, because the whole point of all of this is to come together as one, one "Rainbow Tribe". If those people surrounding you had a clue they would respect you so much for curating a variety of wisdom for the public.

From a wider soul perspective, from what I see in my work, souls can incarnate into various different genetics throughout time. I have met several people who were white this life but had more indigenous or black soul experience. It's almost as though to balance things out, the colonizers will come back as indigenous and the supposed indigenous will behave as colonizers. It seems as though it's a very delicate balancing act.

But for you to go through this experience feels like on a deeper level you've chosen to come into mastery THIS life. It must mean your soul is big and powerful enough to do it.

Just some thoughts, sending some support and gratitude for what you do!

Jerry Kantor, homeopath:

I could not stop reading this incredible account. So glad you put it in words after hearing it from you in conversation. Tried to summarize what you've been through for my wife and just got tongue tied. Will say this: my admiration for you what you and Lindy have done is immense.

Dana Ullman, homeopath:

I just read your amazing screed on the dramas and traumas of NAB.

You were too kind . . . .  Other stories tdeserved to be in the mix here...but it is hard to say if more facts and experiences would have made your tale any stronger.

Sid Schwab, retired surgeon and Amherst classmate:

That’s a terribly sad story, Richard, and I’m glad (sort of) to have finally had it explained (more or less). That kind of “woke/cancel culture” is why I hate the far left as much as I do the far right. It’s no more an example of liberalism than Trumpism is of conservatism. Hyping it is also a major part of Republican election campaigns, and why there’s now, evidently, an “anti-woke” caucus in the R-controlled House. One could argue that on some level, at least, “woke” is aimed at protecting the vulnerable while Trumpism is aimed at hurting them. But, to misquote Barry Goldwater, “extremism in defense of minorities can be a vice.” 

I’d be depressed, too. I had something happen, in the same general area, I suppose, but far less impactful. My clinic, to which I devoted far too much of my time at the expense of being a husband and father, and in which I was the first and for a while the only doc to have received 100% positive patient reviews, and to whose establishment of its outpatient surgery center I contributed important ideas for its enormous success, and to which my much-higher-than average production contributed significant $$ to lower producers as I took home less than ⅓ of what I brought in compared to those lesser producers, who could keep as much as 75%, cut me out of a payoff after they sold themselves to a private corporation for half a billion dollars. Something which, as a board member for a while and a partner for many years, we’d resisted for many good reasons. Current partners collected a million each. Recently retired (until they won a lawsuit and got the whole million, too) got about $300K. Having retired 6 months outside the “window” of opportunity, I got nothing, and they blocked my email and demanded no one respond to me when I appealed to fairness.

Not as life-altering as your situation, but a slap of disrespect for what I’d done for them that still stings when I recall it. 

I have to say that even after reading this latest edition, I’m not entirely clear how that board was granted the power to have treated you as it did. Your and Lindy’s earlier generosity and naïveté, I guess. You seem to have rebounded well, though, which is impressive. 

Luke Lafitte, litigation attorney, my author at Inner Traditions, and philosopher of consciousness:

One of the greatest thinkers of our time!

Junius Williams, Civil Rights activist and attorney in Newark, New Jersey, Amherst student a class ahead of me, author at North Atlantic Books (see his podcast, “Everything’s Political”:

I'm not sure I follow all your many twists and turns but you seem to be back on your feet and that is good.    I hope you are well and will always be thankful for what you did for me by publishing my book.  Thank you. Junius

David Wilk, poet, publisher consultant, and a friend since 1970:

1.19.23

Richard

Your piece reminded me of Ishmael Reed’s still resonant book, Mumbo Jumbo, published in 1972. In it, Ish recounts the cyclical battle between the Dionysian cultural phenomenon of “‘Jes Grew” and its Appollonian opponents, the rigid “Atonists,” who, through history seek to control the chaos and wildness of art, creativity and human passion. In Reed’s telling, it’s a cyclical thing that has been going on for centuries of human history. The Atonists are always seeking to contain and suppress what scares them the most. And command and control style politics and culture gain traction when people are most fearful - of change, the unknown, of anything different that feels threatening to the established order of things. Remember that in Germany in 1933, the Nazis were a minority party, allowed to take over because of apathy sure, but also because they promised certainty, safety, and allayed the fears of the bourgeoisie. Trains running on time and food on the table, close your eyes to the Jews being rounded up next door. And this is not a right versus left thing all the time. The Bolsheviks were all about command and control, ready to dispose of the Mensheviks and the entire intelligentsia of Russia as threats to their top down authoritarian approach to “freedom.”

I do not like and will not use both the terms “woke” and “cancel culture” because they are intellectually dishonest and by now are so often used as shorthand by those who are not engaging with actual ideas and discourse. They paint over real issues by condemning anyone who dares to be different from their expressed views of reality.

Freedom and creativity cannot exist within rigid structural systems whomever is applying them and right now it feels like the creative is being squeezed between two equally abhorrent forces that each want to crush anything they disagree with. So one side uses their slang terminology for their enemies and the outliers on the other side uses their own (we can’t identify them as the left and right because that is just not applicable, it’s all about the control freaks on either end of the spectrum, whatever we call them now), and anyone in between who wants to foster, produce or celebrate creativity, disagreement, exploration, fluidity, and uncertainty, is either silenced or attacked or both. We can see where this is headed and it’s not a good place

David

PS - This story from today’s Washington Post is apropos:

“Last October, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor teaching a global art history class, included a masterpiece of 14th-century Islamic art depicting the Prophet Mohammed receiving Koranic revelations from the archangel Gabriel. Recognizing that some Muslims regard depictions of the prophet (and in some extreme cases, anyone at all) as blasphemous, she provided repeated advance warnings to her students, both in the course syllabus and in class,” Hussein Ibish writes for Bloomberg News.

“According to reports, no one appeared concerned before the online class, and she shared the work of art, along with many others. Afterward, a Muslim American student complained to the university, others not enrolled in the class piled on, and Hamline declared that exposing students to this significant masterwork of Islamic art was ‘undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.’ López Prater has now been told her contract will not be renewed and, as a disposable adjunct, has no defense other than the fact that she did nothing wrong.”

I will expand on David’s themes later in this book, particular in the Ukraine chapter, since Russia’s invasion seems another version of the authoritarian attack on spiritual freedom and the imagination. In an earlier version of this book, I had this passage; maybe I will find a way to add it back:

Poet Diane di Prima wrote, “The only war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” Because once everything else is up for grabs, under attack, addicted, adulterated, mandated, monetized, or gated, the imagination is what we still have.