Category: History

Hugh Hefner — 1926 – 2017

playboyHugh Hefner is dead, and I’m not feeling that well myself.  It’s too bad the old boy turned himself into such a caricature because, now, blinded by the neo-Victorian morality of the 21st century, all we can see is boobs.  However, I’m certain history will absolve him.

Hugh Hefner was a uniquely American phenom who, like Joseph Pulitzer and William S. Paley, saw an empty space in the media marketplace and filled it.

In the early American 1950s, World War II was still fresh, but the soldiers were home. They’d gotten the girl next door, a couple of kids, a corporate job, and a GI Bill of Rights house in the suburbs.  Life was ordinary again, and these aging ex-warriors found themselves losing their hair and their testosterone, sitting on the sofa night after night with Milton Berle and I Love Lucy.  Then came Playboy.  It was a full colour glossy, foldout fantasy of all the things a 30-something family man thought he shoulda/coulda/woulda done with his life.  It was urban cool — sweet jazz, dry martinis, deep-throated stereos, street muscle cars and beautiful women.  It set the standard for hip because anybody who was anybody appeared in the pages of Playboy.

There’s no doubt our world thinks Hugh Hefner belongs to a different time and his creation Playboy is a misogynist relic.  However, here’s something I wrote two years ago that shows just how large an impact Playboy had on our society.

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October 16th, 2015

Now that Playboy Magazine has renounced nudity, it’s become an easy target — a misogynist relic of the 20th century — more silicone than substance.  Perhaps — I don’t know — like most people, I don’t actually read Playboy anymore, so I’m in no position to judge.  However, I do know this.  If you’re over 35 and not dead, you’re part of the massive impact Playboy has had on our society.

Take a look:

The Playboy Interviews read like a history book of our times:

Malcolm X, Jimmy Hoffa, Federico Fellini, Fidel Castro, Orson Welles, Ralph Nader, Marshall McLuhan, Ray Charles, Germaine Greer, Tennessee Williams, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Streisand, David Frost, Marlon Brando, G. Gordon Liddy, Lech Walesa, Ansel Adams, Jesse Jackson, Carl Bernstein, Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, Yasser Arafat, Donald Trump, Martin Scorsese, Michael Jordan, Salman Rushdie and on and on and on.

In one single year, 1964, Playboy interviewed Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand, Jean Genet, Ingmar Bergman and Salvador Dali.  And Playboy didn’t just follow what was trending; it tried to understand.  It interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in 1965; Timothy Leary, when mainstream drug use was a brand new phenom in ’66 and Steve Jobs, immediately after getting booted out of Apple in 1985.  Plus, Playboy took some chances, like sending Alex Haley, the author of Roots, to interview George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party.

Yes, Alex Haley wrote for Playboy and so did Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Gore Vidal.  There were others too, but the list of fiction writers is even more overwhelming:

Joseph Heller, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Ray Bradbury, Bharati Mukherjee, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Ursula Le Guin, Martin Amis and, once again, on and on — including four Nobel Prize winners: Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Doris Lessing.  In fact, if it wasn’t for the boobs, Playboy would be considered a literary magazine — one of the best.

But what about those boobs?

Some of the most beautiful women in the world have voluntarily taken their clothes off for Playboy:

Farrah Fawcett, Olivia Munn, Robin Givens, Katarina Witt, Ursula Andress, Tia Carrere, Kim Basinger, Elle Macpherson, Kate Moss, Catherine Deneuve, Shari Belafonte and Raquel Welch among many, many others.  The numbers alone take Playboy pictorials beyond sleazy.  Besides, is there any great distance between Charlize Theron and Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” or Naomi Campbell and Goya’s “The Nude Maja?”  Argue all you want about objectifying women, but if you want a lesson in that, go to the pages of Vogue or Fashion or Harper’s Bazaar.  Rhetorically speaking, is a pouting, uber-skinny supermodel a more acceptable female image?  Or is it just that she’s covered up the naughty bits?

At 62, Playboy Magazine is old and grey and nodding by the fire.  In a one-click universe where the most outrageous porno is at your fingertips and few people are willing to wade through serious pages of unbroken prose, Playboy is passé.  Eventually, it will dissolve into history — the history it helped shape.  Like it or not, Playboy changed the world — no doubt.  But, mostly, it let us be adults about sex and it single-handedly transformed sexuality from Downtown smut to Uptown sophistication.  It made smart sexy, and that’s what made Playboy cool.

Happy Birthday, India

Everybody forgets about India.  We all know it’s there, looking like Asia’s sticking its tongue into the Indian Ocean, but generally, the world is so firmly focussed in on China that India gets a miss.

india

So why do people forget about India?

Perception.  When most Westerners think of India, they think of yoga, curry and Mohandas Gandhi.  They think of bearded mystics, bony cattle and television train journeys on the Beeb or PBS.  They think of tigers and tea, spices and flowers, and probably that chirpy voice at the other end of the tech support telephone.  While all of these things are true, none of them are 21st century India.  And boring old facts might not be as sexy as jeweled elephants and maharajahs, but they tell a better story about what’s going on in contemporary India.

It’s generally accepted that by 2025, India will surpass China and become the most populous nation in the world.  However, many experts believe that the Chinese have been fudging the numbers for years and India already has more people than the Middle Kingdom.  That’s one helluva work force!

More importantly, 50% of India’s population is under 25; 65% is under 35 and the average age on the subcontinent is somewhere around 29.  In comparison, the average age in all of China, the European Union and the USA is approximately 37.  (Japan’s is a whopping 48.)  Do the math!  While the developed world is getting older and closer to retirement, India is getting younger.

India has the largest middle-class in the world — over 250 million people — and it’s growing.  Economists say that it will double in the next ten years.  So, even though, in 2017, its economic, cultural and political power is nowhere near that of China, the European Union or the USA, with numbers this large, it soon will be.  That’s a lot of rupees, folks!

Oddly enough, even though India is not a member of the G8, it has the 7th largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world — with an average annual growth rate of 6.6%.  What does that mean?  India’s economy is actually growing as fast as China’s and more than twice as fast as the USA’s.

In all the traditional industries like metals, mining, agriculture and manufacturing, India’s production generally ranks in the top ten globally.  But, more importantly for the future, India has the second largest cultural industry in the world.  Nobody packs a bigger cultural punch that the Anglo-Americans do — but India is getting close.  Everybody knows that Bollywood has more studios, makes more movies and puts more bums in seats than Hollywood does.  However, India also ranks 2nd (behind China) in Internet use, 4th in YouTube accounts, 6th in online news views and last year (2016) passed the USA in Facebook profiles.  And the list goes on.  There are also over one billion mobile phones in India, and last year (2016) Google Play alone recorded 6.2 billion App downloads.  This is the Digital Age; information is power.

Unfortunately, despite its economic prowess, India still has some problems.

The fact is India is not a homogenous monolith.  It is the sum of some very different parts, and it’s strange to consider, but one of India’s greatest strengths is also one of its biggest problems — diversity.  It’s very difficult to get the entire subcontinent moving in the same direction at the same time — for several reasons.

There are over two thousand self-identified ethnic groups in India, and — although it’s officially frowned upon — a well-defined and seriously observed Caste system.  This makes social interaction and mobility difficult at best and, in some rural areas, practically impossible.  India is the world largest democracy, but it’s not a very dynamic one.

There might be only two official languages, Hindi and English, but (depending on who you talk to) there are at least 20 other semi-official ones.  Just to put things into perspective, there are more Bengali speakers in India than German speakers in Germany; more Telugu speakers than French speakers in France; and more Urdu speakers than Polish speakers worldwide.  Plus there are thousands of different dialects, so that, in some cases, villages 30 kilometres apart can’t understand each other.  Ideas don’t flow very freely when millions of people don’t know what millions of other people are talking about!

Furthermore, even though, India is mainly Hindu, the country has huge numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and every other religion on the planet — including Jews, Baha’is and Zoroastrians.  Plus there are so many religious sects, cults and factions that experts have never even been able to agree on how many gods there are in India.  Some say (preposterous as it sounds) they could number in the hundreds of thousands.  It’s very hard for a central government to effect social change with that many deities looking over your shoulder.  Chances are good any law you want to enact is going to piss somebody off!

And all this contributes to India’s most serious problem — grinding poverty.  The average income in India is still only $1,570.00 US, and nearly 200 million people are living on less than $4.00 US a day.  And although this is changing, it’s a very slow process.

Today, is modern India’s Independence Day.  Seventy years ago, the Raj ended when Great Britain hauled down the Union Jack and went home.  In three generations, India has gone from a colony, to a developing nation, to a country on the verge of becoming a great economic power.  Not bad!

And trust me, in ten years, nobody is going to forget about India!

3 Things That Rule The World

buildingsWe live in a marvelous age.  We carry the sum total of all knowledge in our pockets or our purse.  We can communicate around the world with the tap of a finger.  We can travel across time zones like a striding colossus and enjoy the styles and flavours from half a world away at a whim.   And even though we don’t do it, we have the ability to feed, clothe and house every person on this planet — 3, 4. 10 times over.  In short, we are the masters of our universe and sovereigns of all we survey.  Yet even though we live in a techno-Disneyland, our society is based on three simple inventions that haven’t fundamentally changed in well over a hundred years.

The Piston Engine — Find something that moves on this planet and chances are good it’s propelled by a piston.  Whether it’s internal combustion, hydraulic or steam, the piston is the thing that drives our world.  Trucks, buses, cranes, boats, trains and all the other mighty machines that shape our destiny (including the ubiquitous automobile) are all piston-powered.   Yet the contemporary piston mechanism hasn’t changed that much since James Watt radically improved the design of the steam engine in 1775.  Even that all-powerful genie in a fragile jar, nuclear power, is actually nothing more than the fuel that heats the water of a very conventional piston-powered steam engine.

The Dynamo — Turn the up-and-down motion of a piston in a cylinder into rotating motion by the use of a camshaft, and not only can you move things forward, but that same spinning rod can literally turn magnetic fields into electricity.  Michael Faraday discovered this in 1831, and by the late 1860s, industry had perfected his rudimentary dynamo to produce usable electricity — and the basic mechanics of that hasn’t changed since.  Today, 99.99% of all electrical energy on Earth is generated by some modern version of the 19th century dynamo.  And the simple fact is without electricity, our society would collapse within hours.

The Flush Toilet — It’s impossible to imagine modern megacities without the flush toilet.  The logistical nightmare of waste disposal without an automatic system would make contemporary urban life inconceivable.  In fact, the flush toilet was the product of the first megalopolis, London.  In the mid 19th century, London (like all cities in England) was a cesspool — literally.  Human waste was handled by “night soil men” who collected it, carted it through the streets and disposed of it in huge evaporation fields — or simply threw it into the river.  The whole place stank, and disease was rampant.  The flush toilet changed all that, and more importantly, forced governments to build modern sewer systems.  Today, every home has a flush toilet (sometimes 2 or 3) but the actual mechanism that makes it work is virtually the same as the ones perfected by Sir Thomas Crapper (and others) 150 years ago.

And the moral of the story is if you want employment in our contemporary world, forget the ever-changing technology market and go be a mechanic, an electrician or a plumber.  Those jobs are going to be around forever.