by Jon Foyt

The old adage is: Don’t yell Fire! in a crowded place. Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing: Yelling Fire! in this crowded place of the United States of America. For Fire is raging everywhere and consuming everything in sight and mind. What Fire? This FIRE:
It is the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sectors, known as FIRE in campaign finance jargon, according to Joe Garofoli writing in The San Francisco Chronicle.
FIRE is omnipresent in today’s political world, for it is the money given from these corporate sectors to candidates and office holders that is, dare we say “buying” the democratic process? This moneyed force is the beneficiary of a sell-out, making this force without doubt the most highly influential force in America today. Or is it?
You may ask: what about that good old American “grass roots’ force most of us all grew up with and came to admire as the backbone of this country’s democracy? Certainly popular opinion is still there, still at work, still a force. But what of the darkening shadow blowing in overhead, having emanated from corporate boardrooms, corporate treasurer’s offices on Wall Street and other denizens of American Capitalism?
Now, we all love capitalism. It’s America’s answer to world poverty, world turmoil, world trade, word finance and all the other worldly things. And so do those men and women running America’s corporations love capitalism. And aren’t they the ones who now seem to be running America’s elections by imposing their financial influence on every candidate through gifts. They’re not stuffing envelopes and licking stamps like we used to do in political campaigns. They’re financing the candidates.
Consider these situations if you yearn to run for public office, even today. What’s the first thing, or for sure the second thing you must do to jumpstart your political campaign for office? Raise money? Right? And where do you go. Well, after brother Joe and Aunt Matilda have been milked, and you still haven’t enough dough to pay for one little newspaper advertisement, you go your local neighborhood, or your distant Wall Street corporation and ask for a campaign donation. Just like you’ve heard the Supreme Court says they can make—just like Joe and aunt Matilda did. The corporation replies with “sure,” so long as you echo our side of the story, help us get our favorite earmarks passed, support the paying of our corporate bonuses, bail us out with your tax dollars when we bumble around and make big mistakes, and then save us from failing, for as everyone knows we’re too big to fail. Don’t you agree?
Oh, and by the way, don’t you think personal income taxes, as well as corporate income taxes, should be lowered? Yes, on our evaluation of your campaign—which political party did you say you are affiliated with? Makes no difference to us for we see that you have nodded your head affirmatively on nine out of the ten issues we’ve been telling you about. Haven’t you? Well then, Ms. or Mr. Candidate, here’s our check for your campaign and an engraved plaque suitable for framing that proclaims: “I, (Your name calligraphed here) am a certified friend of FIRE.”
Jon Foyt, a Rossmoor published novelist, posts his Blog at http://writerlygifts.wordpress.com/ and can be contacted at jonfoyt@mac.com

by Jon Foyt

Clio, the Muse of history, you may recall, is one of the nine ancient Greek muses who represent the varied categories of knowledge. Clio is usually pictured holding a parchment scroll. Her name translates into “recount.”

Today history may be recounted in a variety of ways. Thus we might picture a modern-day Clio holding multiple sets of scrolls, each representing a different way to read or recount history.

Last month in Rossmoor’s Fireside Room, author Ted Nace described one way to read history, that being via the Supreme Court decisions relating back to the birth of the Republic and the creeping legalized increase of corporate power. Supreme Court decisions also concern themselves with such vital issues as women’s rights, aid for the handicapped, Social Security, Medicare, historic preservation, and a multitude of issues affecting our lives. Pick your topic, and you can follow its legal evolution through relevant Supreme Court decisions. That’s one way to read history.

Remember those school days when we read about the reigns of European kings and queens? The study of royalty and its many dynasties was another historical path. Then there were the wars to read about and trace through time with the development of weaponry from crude to modern-day complex. We could follow the stories of ethnic groups and glimpse their cultural history, which leads inevitably to the story of human migration in which at varying times in history we, or our ancestors, all participated.

Migration suggests the study of time, and how different cultures view time, from Native Americans who think of time in a circular fashion, whereas most other Americans view time as linear…then…and then…and then. How each of us views time may influence how we read Clio’s scrolls.

Trouble is, most of these different ways of reading history avoid the emotional experiences of the “common” person, that is, the non-regal, non-super rich, non special interest group members wearing their corporate-issued cloaks. Unrecorded, except in personal memoirs or anecdotal media stories, are the everyday accounts of the anxious and the unemployed seeking jobs in a jobless market, and those trying to understand and cope with today’s mystifying medical world with its bewildering plethora of drugs and complex insurance codes.

Also unrecorded on any scroll are the challenge of addressing one’s marriage and family, along with the struggles for economic and emotional survival in a recession-era economy. More positive, but also missing, is the successful search by us common folk for the ringing melodies of happiness.

Robert Samuelson, writing in The Washington Post, compares Census numbers on American poverty, to previous data, observing, “The Great Recession is different… The standard trends measured by Census (income, poverty, health insurance) are incomplete. (These figures) don’t fully convey the recession’s effects on Americans’ welfare and psychology.”

He goes on to reference the “devastating housing slump, which has subtracted huge sums from people’s wealth,” and “parents’ fears for their children.” These sorts of concerns are yet another way to read that familiar American history which many of us in Rossmoor have personally experienced. Today, right in our secluded valley, we can’t help but recognize the vivid contrasts between past events and the dark sides of today’s economic nightmares.

It is these many “common” unrecorded stories that fall into this vast category that Clio should “recount” in one of her scrolls. She might then address a joint session of the Congress, directing her scrolls toward those conservatives who shy from solving the list of issues affecting the common people. After her Congressional address, Clio might virtually shake those distant and distracted politicians into recognition of a more enlightened and progressive way of reading the common people’s history.

Yes, Clio, dear Muse, do expose those whom we elect to pubic office to a closer look at the real world surrounding them, one that is populated with real people leading real lives. The result would be to instill in these representative accounts of individual stories with their worries, their hunger, their illnesses, their people buried in medical bills, past due mortgages and overdue rents, while haunted by their own joblessness. To see today’s true picture, multiply each account by millions to arrive at the truest way to read current pages of American history in the making.

Jon Foyt, a Rossmoor published novelist, can be contacted at: jonfoyt@mac.com

Sir: When I was in college some fifty years ago (and counting)—many years after your scientific work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London, 1859)—I was challenged by a revered professor who demanded to know: “Why, Young Man, are you here in this college?”

I voiced a stereotypical freshman response, “To learn…” and then I paused and added, “…ah…I guess.”

He stared at me with his cold, searching academic eyes and said, “If you’re not here to both search for the truths in society and science and to study the factors that make up the human capability, what I call the human equation—the two and the only two reasons to seek higher education—then you don’t belong in this institution or in any other university today.”

I’ve pondered his words over my next half century of living.

Now, Mr. Darwin, back to your esteemed theory as reported from two decades of tireless scientific research, I wish to pose this hypothetical question: How and why has the evolution of our species—homo sapiens—gotten so off track as to eschew the truths of society and the universally-accepted axioms of science, fundamental economics, as well as the truths about the human experience with its grand potential?

Sir, I know you did not intend to forecast the future of human development in 1859, but I have to ask, even if you are not here to answer, why, in the past century and a half of human evolution, have the truths about society and science gotten lost, befogged by biases and falsehoods, bigotry and rigid political party lines?

Have the multiple truths we seek become too grotesque in their starkness for any of us to accept? Have these universal truths grown too frightening for us to live with in our comfortable retirement lives? Have the truths grown too threatening to believe so that, in their stead, we substitute myths of all measure, along with folklore of the most ferocious kind and subscribe to unscientific and unproven doctrines combined with the awful distortions of our beloved American history? Have we in today’s chaos of wild and aberrant thought reverted to an alchemy of absurdities?

Sir—and I must ask this question, given the foregoing—has your evolutionary theory of mankind become distorted? Has our evolved species bifurcated into separate evolutionary branches—one retreating to our ancestors in trees who care not a twit about the truths of the world and, the other focused on bridging the chasm between today’s divided political parties?

Whence on your evolutionary tree sprout the “Young Earthers,” who, oblivious to scientific truths, espouse their six thousand year-old date for the birth of our planet? Whence descend the politicians who know only distortions about American history, or worse, advocate theories of economics repeated from mutant partisan groups? When and where and why, Sir, did the long road of human evolution fork into these two very different and opposing paths of mental evolution?

But wait! Of course, the species you have tracked down through the eons—ours—has the mental capacity and the freedom to believe anything it wants, to worship whatever or whomever it chooses, to promulgate such dogma as the earth is flat and the moon made of green cheese, and so on, and so forth. Yet, does not our human species—and is it now two divergent political “branches”? (like What’s the Matter with Kansas?)—also have the God-given capacity, indeed the spiritual mandate, to seek out truths? Indeed, does not our species have the obligation, as the epitome and culmination of your evolutionary story, to so do?

Alas, many of these other folks have attended college, are products of our American educational system, and have received one of more of its carload of degrees. But what gives with their lack of search for truths? Are they lured by the camaraderie of like-minded folks intent on joining the same political party? Has this particular political party demeaned the human equation to where human factors are subordinated to the golden chalice of corporate power? Has the search for truths been supplanted by efforts to control our national, state and local governments, with the support from well-funded special interest groups? Has the craving for wealth replaced the search for truths?

Could you, Sir, please drop by the Dollar Clubhouse for a scheduled appearance before an authorized Rossmoor group and give us an update on your theory of evolution? For we, like you, search for the truths around us and how they have come to evolve into what they are touted to be today, and we find ourselves alarmed by how misguided versions of social and scientific truths of the human potential may erroneously be shaping the world around us.

Jon Foyt, a Rossmoor novelist, can be contacted at: jonfoyt@mac.com

To research “Young Earthers,” who do not per se have a website, readers are advised to Google the subject and then click accordingly.

Y’all Come Together Now, Y’hear!

by Jon Foyt

Here’s some common sense advice for a nation deeply divided about its basic values, its future and its continued well being as a democracy: Hey, Dear Leaders all, y’all come together and craft viable plans for the nation so that we all can meet the future head-on and prevail.
Consider this exemplary event: back in 1808 in Upstate New York in a community near what today is the city of Syracuse but was then only a dark and dismal swamp, two men and the voters who elected them influenced dramatically the course of our nascent Republic’s development.
As background for this little historic scenario, y’all recall that in the early years of our nascent Republic two opposing governing and political philosophies were continually debated amongst the male property owners of the thirteen states. The Federalist had one philosophy and the Jeffersonian Republicans quite an opposite view. The arguments between these parties grew vitriolic, as well as being elegantly debated by orators of the day.
Loosely categorized, the Federalist point of view sprung from the dominant European tradition that those in charge of society, namely the kings, the nobles and the lords of the manor were somehow chosen by a Higher Authority to own the land and to run society. The opposite point if view prevailed, otherwise we might have had King George Washington and a court of noblemen instead of President George Washington and a popularly elected (albeit in those days limited to male land owners) body of the people.
Now back to our 1808 true story for your consideration: Joshua Forman, an avid Federalist, and John McWhorter, an equally avid Jeffersonian Republican, campaigned for the New York Legislature on a combined “Canal Ticket.’ Elected, they carried out their mandate and together wrote the speech that Joshua gave before that Legislature later that year, following which the body appropriated the first monies for the survey of what was to become in 1825 America’s First Super Highway, the Erie Canal, which opened up the then Northwest to cheap transportation and trade and kept the British confined to the wilds of Ontario.
During the ensuing years following Joshua’s speech, the nation entered into a brief phase devoid of political parties as we know them today, a sort of common unity of purpose for the expanding nation, an era during which the nation put aside philosophical differences about how to govern this new land and this fledgling country and turned its attention, politically and economically, toward the West and toward forging the beginnings of what today has become a great nation.
You may observe that 200 years ago was a much different, and perhaps simpler time, and of course you would be right. But looking back, these two Americans did what was needed to be done in their era. Jump ahead 200 years from today and look back and ask: did Americans of 2011 and 2012 do what was needed in what today is “our era?”
So, fellow Americans, how about the suggestion that we in Rossmoor, as matriarchs and patriarchs of this nation, have a mandate to come together as did Joshua Forman and John McWhorter, back in 1808, to look forward toward the future and not to join with much of the popular media and the down and dirty political debate that wallows in the weeds of a dark and dismal swamp of aberrant and caustic name calling, racial slurs, birth certificate challenges and religious attacks aimed directly at the President of the United States of America, accompanied by wanton character bashing. Such aspersions, as delivered to us daily only widen and deepen what has become a non-productive national chasm, its dismal depths clung to by a far right warped ideology that eschews the truth and an opposite and stubborn decades old political dress that needs a new and brilliant bow, or at least the addition of something cobalt blue and brilliant.
Couldn’t this year of 2011 be the appropriate time for us all to rise above the mundane media muck that we’re hit with daily and come together in common purpose as all of us did on the Fourth of July celebration in the beautiful Dollar gardens and reach out together to claim the brightness that our future surely offers?

Jon Foyt is co-author of The Landscape of Time, a novel about the creation of the Erie Canal. His email address is: jonfoyt@mac.com

Did William Shakespeare write his plays and sonnets with a collaborator? Perhaps his co-author was someone who had experienced the intrigues of the Royal Court, as did Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, who was at Court and who did travel to such foreign places as Venice and Verona. Or was his collaborator fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, or maybe the dramatist Ben Jonson? Oh, or maybe Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, her creative participation covered up in a conspiracy of authorship? To write, to compose, to tell a story, to express in blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter, is no easy matter for one person.

Shakespeare is Shakespeare. All you have to do is to undertake to compile a list of Shakespeare Festivals staging plays today across the country and around the world, even in China and Japan. You soon bag your endeavor because the list is virtually endless. All these productions, of course, require collaboration on the part of many, many talented people: the writer who adapts, skilled actors, experienced stage designers, effective directors, possibly musical background composers, even imaginative publicists creating websites to sell tickets. So today academia and audiences respect and praise the final draft and even the sometimes modernized setting of a Shakespeare stage or movie production.

Therefore, we should read or watch and enjoy Shakespeare, all the time imagining the Bard with his quill pen and inkwell composing away in some pub amidst the hubbub of turn of the 16^th century English, Bohemian and Italian life. It’s not that possible collaboration diminishes or advances; it’s the final production and the thoughts it conveys that we love.

As everyone knows—at least those within the halls of academia—narratology is the branch of knowledge or literary criticism that deals with the function of narrative and its themes, conventions and symbols. Ah, symbolism! Symbols are those hidden gems in literary expression within the narrative that is the storyline and the intrigue that is the plot. Fiction writers strive to put the meat on the bones with these precious jewels.

As to themes, a novelist only has to look to the Greek three-act template for inspiration. We structured our recent novel, The Landscape of Time, with 9 chapters corresponding to scenes within three acts. The theme words that served as the muses for writing these chapters were:

1. Defining                  4. Change                        7. Revelation

2. Discovering             5. Choice                         8. Vindication

3. Dodging                   6. Chance                        9. Collaboration

Literary conventions have raised long-lasting philosophical discussion. Academics have bounced their literary knowledge off the green ivy of university walls. Do they make their findings, their thoughts available to your local book club, to your local writers’ conference, to editors at publishing houses, to literary agents, to aspiring writers awash in the letters on their keyboards? Not that these academics write in a secret language—well, almost—they speak in a literary tongue far, far distant from the formula writing that dominates television, movies, children’s books and romance novels.

It looks like it’s up to literary novelists to pen the 21^st century social novel that can re-define narratology.

We both—(Lois Foyt ’79 and Jon Foyt ’53, MBA ’55)—received Stanford’s June 10^th missive and were flabbergasted by the announcement of the pricey Stanford Publishing Course: Writers Workshop.

As published authors we have been researching the history of creative writing programs since this commercial enterprise began after World War II. Universities got into the act after the Title II of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (GI Bill) when more than two million veterans, a much bigger number than anticipated, took up the offer. The key requirement of Title II was that tuition assistance be used only for study in degree or certificate programs, which is why creative courses grew into degree-granting creative-writing programs. Stanford inaugurated its writing fellowships (Stegner) in 1947.

Stanford’s “Calling All Writers to study the craft under the guidance of seasoned editors, to hone your craft and to promote your work” seems to us a dishonest scheme.

Our Stanford education taught us how to read and, building on that art, we progressed into writing without taking a how-to class. After all, isn’t literary expression a voice of the mind?

Our eighth literary novel, The Landscape of Time, has been received here in our newly-adopted community of Santa Rosa in a heartwarming success as evidenced by our recent sell-out book signing at Barnes & Noble.

Here is a review by Allison Carruth, Stanford Ph.D. ’08:

A Drama/Comedy of Family Origins and Erie Canal Legacies

The Landscape of Time by Lois Foyt and Jon Foyt offers a timely narrative that centers on PhD student Josh Foreman, who leaves a flailing thesis proposal on the history of American transportation when a grandfather whom he has never met bequeaths to him an ancestral home in Upstate New York.

While the story begins in the bustling academic halls of Columbia University, it quickly journeys to Syracuse, where Josh discovers a public controversy over his late grandfather’s alleged theft of folk art and monetary funds from the local art museum, where he served as curator.

As Josh struggles to resolve the contemporary mystery of his grandfather’s tarnished reputation, he also must unravel his family history, dating from an early nineteenth-century ancestor’s stewardship of the Erie Canal to his own father’s involvement in anti-integration rallies in the 1970s.

From the moment he steps off the train in Syracuse, Josh is variously thwarted and aided by a cast of characters that includes a local journalist and single mother, an African American reparations activist, a slue of lawyers and private eyes, a paralegal who knows everything about everyone thanks to her savvy online research skills, and a shifty Evangelical reverend with a gambling addiction.

The Foyts contextualize this postmodern drama/comedy of family origins and American legacies with an array of references (ranging from slavery to climate change). In the process, they reveal to us that the “Millennial” generation of Americans must confront the long history of race relations, geographic expansion, and global commerce that has shaped the United States while, at the same time, shedding the past in order to create a sustainable future.

Review by Allison Carruth, Stanford PhD, Literary critic, writer, and environmental studies scholar

In January, we established the Oakmont Algonquin Roundtable of 40 published authors, screenwriters, essayists and journalists who live in our community. We have a twice a month column in The Oakmont News, in which we have taken a lead from the 1920’s Bloomsbury Group to align with Oakmont writers in a post-creative writing program era, where observations on the status of publishing, the media, politics, the environment and the economy are penned by our member authors.

Please, oh please! Give us your comments for free.