Pulitzer Prize-winning author, biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, a native of Alabama, appeared on Book TV’s “In Depth” August 5. If you missed it, you can see it on the late night and weekend replays, or on C-SPAN’s Website.

Mr. Wilson, who has taught at Harvard University since the mid-1950s was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by Time magazine in 1996. His books include: “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (1975) “On Human Nature” (1978, awarded Pulitzer Prize), “The Ants” (1990, awarded Pulitzer Prize), “The Diversity of Life” (1992), “Consilience:The Unity of Knowledge” (1998), “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth” (2006) and “Nature Revealed: Selected Writings 1949-2006” (2006) as well as “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (1975); “On Human Nature” (1978); “Genes, Mind, and Culture” with Charles J. Lumsden (1981); “Biophilia” (1984); “Naturalist” (1994); “In Search of Nature” (1996); “The Future of Life” (2002); “From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin’s Four Great Books” (2005); “The Creation: An Appeal to save Life on Earth” (2006); “Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006″ (2006).

And so too is America…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The era of the writer and the written word is over. Deader than dead.

And of course the American Century is long over, along with the ideal of what America could be, which is about as dead as Rome on the verge of its burning.

I am just now coming to the full realization of these facts, having finished reading New York Days by Willie Morris.

That is not to say that newspapers, magazines and books won’t be published a few years longer, or that U.S. politicians won’t get on the stump and try to convince us that “a new day is dawning in this city on a hill” or some such blather.

Publishing on ink and paper will go on awhile longer, maybe another 13 years or so. And with all the writing schools out there making money teaching writing, thousands of people will still try to learn how to write - for the dwindling audience that still gives a damn.

Oh, we will still get a Harry Potter series now and then, which the money people love, because it is a totally created world based on the idea that magic is real. There is no such thing as magic, people, or ghosts or vampires or zombies. But that won’t keep the movies and TV shows about them from being churned out and the little people following with their dollar bills, like a frontier mom to a snake oil salesman.

In reading Morris’s final memoir, I am struck most of all by how similar the world he describes is to the one today, with only one notable exception. Then, that is the 1960s, people were out in the streets protesting the Vietnam War and the slide of America into two classes of people, the rich and the poor, and for Civil Rights.

Now no one protests much. We just take it lying down.

I had never heard of Steve Erickson until reading New York Days, but when I read what he wrote about the American psyche circa 1970, I was left almost dumbfounded. I had to stop and read it again, for it is right out of conversations I’ve had in recent days with a few fellow travelers who also lament the “end times” we live in for intellectual thought, good writing and progressive politics.

“The American psyche of 1970 seemed split between those who hated and loved America simply - those who questioned everything about it, even what was good and reasonable; and those who served its authority and rules so blindly that not only their imaginations but their common sense became paralyzed.”

It is possible that America was as divided then as it was in the 2004 election cycle? Is our TV media culture so bereft of any knowledge of history that the red state-blue state divide is not such a new and saucy story after all?

Is it possible that even then, when the number of media outlets made it possible for a shared experience on the part of most Americans - who read a handful of magazines and watched the same TV shows - the divide was already there?

David Halberstam, a regular contributor to the Willie Morris Harper’s, wrote then: “We spoke in the same language, but we understood nothing that the other (side) said.”

That is clearly true today, and must be more so, for the further we are removed from the historical lexicon of the written word, the further apart our experiences grow.

I have a stupid girl e-mailing me anonymously these days under the name GOPGIRL@blahblah.com.

She doesn’t realize that she is stupid and uneducated and has no sense of history, and somehow for her, and thousands like her, the only written word they see are published on partisan blogs and sent around via e-mail. And since her tiny little peer group of people somewhere in the boonies of Alabama still stand by there man Lil Bush, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that his is the worse presidency in the history of the Republic by far, only goes to show just how far we are removed from anything resembling truth.

There is no truth to be found in America today; no justice either. We would all be better off just to throw ourselves on the mercy of the King Bush appointed courts, I guess, and hope they don’t indict us and shackle us all like they did Don Siegelman and Richard Scrushy.

Or, saying fuck that, if we cannot raise enough of a fight in the Washington Democrats or the protest movement, we may as well all pack up and move to snowy Canada or sunny New Zealand and let China go ahead and bomb this place into annihilation once and for all.

They control all our borrowed money now anyway, and they could pull the plug at any moment.

This will not convince GOPGirl or any of her ilk. It will take more collapsed bridges like the one in Minneapolis, perhaps with her trapped under it, for the realization to set in that America is dead. Caput. No longer viable.

I wish I could say it were not true and that there was still some hope. But at this moment I don’t see any.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

You can sit and smoke with a stoned William Faulkner in front of the Oxford, Mississippi, City Hall. I wonder what he would think about the death of writing and America? Would he still deny the doom of man?

In his day, William Faulkner said, upon his acceptance of the Nobel prize for literature and in the days when all-out nuclear war seemed a real threat, “I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.”

But that was in the days when a writer had to tell the money people what they wanted to hear since no one likes or funds a pessimist.

For the American left, which has failed again, 2007 is much like 1967.

As Hunter S. Thompson, writing from Haite-Ashbury, said then: “The thrust is no longer for ‘change’ or ‘progress’ or ‘revolution,’ but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been - perhaps should have been - and strike a bargain for survival on purely personal terms.”

Since this story has already been written, what’s the point of writing it again? And since some of my writer friends even say these blog columns are too long, what’s the point of going on and on?

If you can still read, and really like doing it, get thee to a library - before they burn all the books and turn it into a cyber café complete with a Starbucks coffee stand.

Pretty soon, the Bush royal family will abolish government altogether and privatize everything. And when they do, there will be no place for democracy or the written word - with the possible exception of the press release. What would Karl Rove and Bill Canary and the federal courts and the chain newspapers do without the press release?

I wonder how the Chinese feel about the press release? How do you write a press release in morphemes?

Photo by Glynn Wilson

The room of a real writer in the heyday of writing, William Faulkner’s office at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, when the writing instrument of choice was the manual typewriter. I still have one, for when the power grid goes down and the Internet stops flickering and cell phone towers stand mute in the pastures. Maybe I’ll start an old fashioned journal and print it on a manual press and pass it around by hand.

Former CIA Director George Tenet has made the rounds of the talk shows flacking his semi-tell-all book and insisting that he really did believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. However, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes, the evidence actually shows that Tenet and his superiors in the Bush administration knew better.

For the full story of how George Tenet lied, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

George Tenet’s memoir sheds new light on the Bush administration’s failure to act aggressively on alarming intelligence in summer 2001 about an impending al-Qaeda attack.

Not only did the CIA demand an extraordinary meeting with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in July and send a blunt briefing paper to George W. Bush in August, but Tenet followed up with a personal visit to Bush’s Texas ranch.

However, that meeting slid into small talk about the ranch’s “flora and fauna.”

For the full story of how presidential incompetence helped set the stage for 9/11, go to the independent ConsortiumNews.Com.

Hands down, no one did more to inspire, entertain, refresh, and invigorate eco-activists and environmental defenders in the latter half of the twentieth century than Edward Abbey, according to the editors of Orion magazine.

The earnest, witty, cantankerous scribe captured the imaginations of many lovers of things wild and free, his words entering our hearts like a scramble through a wild place when the trappings of society have become too overbearing, like that first swig of beer after a long hard day at work.

As a tribute to the man and his influence, Orion magazine has unearthed and run some unpublished letters from Abbey’s collected correspondence. They supply a unique window into the inner thoughts of a legend - a man who gave many of us something to latch onto, a vision to believe in, and countless quotes to be scribbled in journals, tacked to bulletin boards, and lodged in our musings and advocacy writings to this day.

The Unpublished Letters of Edward Abbey