Altered Visions: Rx for America in the 21St Century

By L. J. Rennenkampf

America has been a fortunate land, as Will Rogers noted. If we needed to build a house, there was all the wood at hand; if we wanted coal or iron, there was aplenty for the scratching, or if we sought oil, all we had to do was stick a pipe in the ground. But, as he said, we would find out how smart we were when all that came to an end. And that is what is happening. Nothing lasts forever except change, and denial that the future will be different is simply dysfunctional. There is Global Warming, pollution, and running out of resources, which will come to control us painfully if we will not face up to them. Altered Visions are not an option.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453567685

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Copyright © 2010 by L. J. Rennenkampf.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2010912855

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4535-6767-8

ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-4535-6766-1

ISBN:   Ebook   978-1-4535-6768-5

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Founding Fathers of our civilization

Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Mendeleyev, Marx, Marie Curie, Susan B. Anthony, Einstein, Planck, Gorbachev.

Contents

Comment

Chapter 1    Altered Visions

Chapter 2    The Orphaned Years

Chapter 3    Manhattan Interlude

Chapter 4    Jackson Heights

Chapter 5    The Jackson Heights Years

Chapter 6    Shifts and Changes

Chapter 7    Assay

Chapter 8    Conclusion

Appendix    The Real Adam Smith

Welfare Obituary    Dexter Victorious (Welfare end 08 22 1996)

Comment

Whenever I told the story of my childhood, people invariably urged me to write an autobiography. I have always been dubious about it as it is basically a refugee tale, and there are millions of them in our modern, civilized, and advanced world. Also, past childhood, my life took on the standard process of education, marriage, having children, pursuing employment as the necessary tasks of survival and retirement—nothing extraordinary.

But human life is a duality. More than a series of events, it is simultaneously an evolution, an unfolding of an inner world. In a very real sense, this is the factor of greater consequence. Without it we would be like cockroaches endlessly repeating an identical pattern.

Evolution is thought to be random, but on our planet, it has progressively and consistently moved toward greater complexity. Cumulative changes seem to have followed the law of transformation from quantity to quality. Nature’s latest invention is no longer a bigger dinosaur but the brain, a leap from the physical to the abstract. Whether this is a law or a random event does not change its implications.

Our physical selves evolve relatively slowly. Our civilization and worldview changes with explosive speed on a geological scale, in response to the developments occurring in individual minds.

As nature has invented the brain, so has the brain invented civilization with its vast complexity of politics, arts, economics, a vast and growing store of knowledge, and science. Science is humanity’s greatest and transcendent achievement. It is time binding, universal, self-correcting, collective, and like no other discipline. Scientists communicate and collaborate across enemy borders while conflicts rage. It is our best hope in the coming decades.

Newton, Einstein, Planck, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony changed our world because they changed their views from those received in childhood. The ethos of humanity equally exhibits a tendentious historical pattern. Ever since Christ pronounced a poor man as good as the rich, it has consistently zigzagged to the left despite the interventions of dark ages and collapses.

Analogously, its most fundamental philosophical soul is moving from Platonic idealism towards scientific materialism. The West, which has at least partially embraced this, became the dominant societies in contrast to those clinging to dysfunctional religiosity.

The oil age is coming to an end. How we will deal with this depends on whether it will be with the mind-set of a Galileo or the seven cardinals who sentenced him. Our best hope is that if A. Greenspan, high priest of laissez-faire, could say that his whole intellectual edifice collapsed, others too could move towards more functional views.

At age 94, I do not perceive the world as I did in the beginning, so the process of change is interesting to me and might be to the reader. As René Descartes noted, It is unfortunate that so much mental effort is required to rid ourselves of the lies and fallacies foisted on our innocent minds by parents, school, church and state.

Throughout this narrative, I reserve the right to time travel, that is, to inject latter-day views.

Chapter 1

Altered Visions

My full name is Leonid Edler von Rennenkampff. The earliest known forefather, a burgher of Riga, dates back to 1575. The title Edler, equivalent to baron, was granted by Emperor Charles VI in 1728. There is a family association in Europe, and members meet annually in some castle on the Rhine.

According to an entry in the records of the Church of the Resurrection, in SimferopoI, Crimea, I was born on the fifth of February 1916 to Maria and John Rennenkampf.

All my documents attest to this time of my birth. However, when the entry was made, Russia was adhering to the Julian or old-style calendar by the grace of the Orthodox Church and its partner, the State. Despite clerical insistence, the earth circled the sun according to its own schedule, and by the twentieth century, the old calendar had accumulated an error of thirteen days. This was quite obvious from the occurrence of equinoxes. Why the good priests refused to go along is not clear. Perhaps it is some product of their universal principle to stick to the old in a static universe, or maybe they just were not about to follow a Papal action of reform. People in power regularly try to impose their erroneous views on reality. They have not learned or stopped yet.

So I was not born on February 5, 1916, but on January 23. I don’t think this should impinge on anything in my life because either way I remain an Aquarius. According to astrological traits, that makes me friendly and humanitarian, original and inventive, independent and intellectual. There is also the dark side, but the reader can look that up himself. How the time of birth controls one’s traits has never been explained to my knowledge, but lots of people believe it does. Famous and important men and women use astrology to help guide their life and even important political decisions. There was President Reagan, for instance. Surely, if horoscopes were generally regarded as frivolous and might even lead to some grievous action, like going to my war, people would not tolerate such and perhaps disqualify the man for their own safety. I mention all of this in recognition of the fact that millions respond to the advice of their horoscopes.

Other than being Aquarius, my time of birth was not propitious. It was about halfway through the First World War. By this time, the art of war had evolved into trench warfare that consisted of a contest as to which side could take the more casualties from being shot like fish in a barrel without retreating. What made it possible were words and concepts like patriotism, glory, bravery, God is with us, and the flag. The cause of this perversely acceptable horror was, historians tell us, the assassination of a Duke, or rather the belief on the part of a terrorist organization, the Black Hand, and its member Gavrilo Princip, that killing this important personage was going to ameliorate conditions unacceptable to them.

The effectiveness of terrorism is moot. Consider two brothers, Vladimir and Alexander Ulyanov (Lenin). One was a terrorist, and his career, aimed at the termination of a czar, was swiftly ended in the Peter and Paul fortress—an obvious failure. The other rejected terrorism, and his approach to changing the world was to explain, explain, explain! He was the one who succeeded in moving societies in new directions, and not just temporarily as some would have it. Ergo the accepted view that terrorism does not work. But then, did not Gavrilo precipitate changes flowing from the war even greater than he envisioned? And did not the U.S. go into convulsions and futile war from the pinprick of 9/11, far in excess of the blow, using its strength against itself as in jujitsu? The Patriot Act and Homeland Security mentality has done serious damage to its image and economy, no doubt delighting the abominable Osama. It can be argued, then, that terrorism triggers changes far in excess of the investment in it and is effective—but only with the unwitting cooperation of societies. On the face of it, to go to war because a duke was killed was clearly not a sagacious response.

What impacted my life, however, was not terrorism but revolution. Societies behave in a way like a mechanical servo. When operating properly, the system moves in the right direction to eliminate a malfunction or error signal. If, however, there is too much friction or resistance to change and the system does not respond, the error signal keeps getting larger until it finally breaks, resulting in violent reaction and overcorrection. History bears out this analogy, as in the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.

My father, John Emil Rennenkampf, was a captain in the Imperial Navy, where he distinguished himself by sinking German submarines in the Baltic theater and earning the highest award of St. George’s Cross. Revolution was hardly a gentle orderly process. Discipline broke down in the Navy, as in the Army, and sailors occasionally turned on their officers and executed them summarily. My father’s crew, on the contrary, liked him. In return for his good treatment of them, they provided him with a pass through the strife-torn but already Red-controlled country to rejoin his family in Crimea. There he continued to captain various vessels, both military in the disintegrating White (loyalist) forces, and commercial forces.

My grandfather Smerchek was quite a patriarch, and his house was the center of a large family life. There were five daughters, one of which, Maria, was my mother, and two sons. He immigrated to Russia from Czechoslovakia late in the nineteenth century, in reaction to unwelcome Germanization in his native land, and became a successful entrepreneur, acquiring several hundred acres of land, which he developed into various fruit groves. The business was highly successful. The original house was soon replaced with a new one that was up-to-date and spacious, with a pool in the forecourt big enough to float a dinghy. He named it Nevidimka, meaning Out of Sight, from the main highway to Simferopol, and accessed it by a poplar-lined lane some third of a mile long. A man of vast energy, he had enough of it for work and social life. In evaluating workers, he watched how they did in a proffered meal and hired the energetic eaters. He loved to entertain, and there were many gatherings and celebrations under his motto guest in house is God in house.

It was a fallout of this that two brothers met and married two sisters.

My mother married John Emil Rennenkampf, and her sister, Milla, married his brother, Vladimir.

I don’t remember much about Nevidimka, except that everything about it, shops, stables, machinery, was impressive and not just in childish eyes. Nor was I aware at age four of the world-shaking events about to transform our lives. The Revolution was not over with the taking of the Winter Palace. On the contrary, the real struggle was just beginning. Those opposed to the Bolsheviks (meaning the majority in the communist party led by Lenin) took up arms against the new government. At one point, the Red army, organized by Trotsky, was fighting on six fronts with the enemy, under various leaders (some foreign, some Russian) pressing to retake Moscow. In addition, fourteen countries invaded the beleaguered land, besides providing aid to the opposition. General Graves, who led an American contingent in Siberia, withdrew his forces when he saw the fervor in the eyes of the local communists when they were being executed. It seems incredible that the Soviets, underequipped and weakened by famine, won out against such odds. But then history records many similar instances, such as the American Revolution or the Vietnam War, in which barefoot peasants defeated the contemporary superpower. America was taught this lesson then, but it did not learn it. It is now repeating the course in another Asian-land war. The bottom line is a lot of destruction, slaughter and a damaged economy, and no glorious victory.

At a particular moment in history impacting my life, the Red army had routed Denikin’s remnants on the Southern front under Baron Wrangel and was well on the way to driving them into the sea, occupying all of Crimea. My mother was in a quandary as to what to do in these circumstances. I was temporarily in Nevidimka for safekeeping. She was in Sebastopol sharing an apartment with father, and he happened to be in Constantinople. It was too late to retrieve me because events had developed much faster than anticipated. She could stay in Sebastopol and eventually rejoin me or get on one of the departing ships to Turkey. In desperation, she turned to my nanny for advice. The Bible says Cleave to your husband was the answer. She boarded one of the refugee ships to join him in Constantinople.

The consequence of this decision was that I was separated from my parents for about eight years.

Their life in Turkey was miserable in poverty, surviving on dubious employment and American aid. Soon, their ambition became to immigrate to the United States. In this they succeeded and sailed to these shores in July 1922.

Chapter 2

The Orphaned Years

The stay in Nevidimka did not last long after the Reds took over Crimea. One might think that grandfather would have been left to continue managing the estate, having been demonstrably successful at it. After all, he was no aristocrat but a self-made man. But no, ideology dictated. He was evicted and put up in a shabby cottage in town.

Ideology, as Marx noted, is false consciousness and eventually contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today it is undermining the United States.

I lived in these lodgings with my grandparents and aunts until departing from Russia. There was a bare earth yard and a huge tree fronting on the street that was my playground and background for fantasies about being Tarzan until this was decreed to be too dangerous. Across the street was an abandoned mosque, pockmarked with bullet craters and shattered windows. The colored glass from them, when broken into small pieces, was used to decorate clay-coated vases. The grounds were forbidden territory but all the more fun to sneak into. There were expended rifle shells everywhere, a legacy of the revolution. They were used in some self-made toys as all my toys were. Hoops from a broken chair or rings from the mosque iron fence to roll, guided by a U-shaped wire on the end of a stick, twisted wires to launch a tin propeller. Odds and ends fashioned imaginary vehicles and airplanes.

If you turned right from our street entrance, you would go past some nice houses to the end of the street—and the world as far as I was concerned. A tramline ran toward our street and then turned left. I had no idea where it came from or went to, except that it was toward the center of the city. But of course, it was useful for putting copper kopeks on the rails to see what they became when rolled over. I was curious about what made the tram run. Electricity was the reply to my questions, which explained nothing as far as I was concerned. It was not until I was in college that I found a satisfactory answer.

To the left and some distance from the mosque, a leftover from czarist days, stood a shattered and abandoned building, which was once the site of a military academy. Further along you came to the edge of town and open fields.

Life was at subsistence level. Food and survival, keeping warm in winter were the priority preoccupations. There was famine in many areas of the country. But gradually things got better. I never went hungry, no doubt due to grandparent solicitude. Diet, however, was not optimal. At one time I was given cod-liver oil spread on black bread. Believe it or not, it tasted delicious until my body got enough of it. When just looking at it made me gag. Perhaps our bodies sense and communicate their needs, a notion refuted by the obese.

In the meantime, my parents applied to enter the United States and were admitted in July 1922. Mother worked with unflagging perseverance to reunite us. This required the consent of the Soviets to let me leave the country, which, surprisingly, was granted with my Aunt Nina to accompany me. But I could not go to the U.S. because of the quota. This threatened the whole project, so I would have to remain in Russia. Again, mother was successful in obtaining a visa for a six-month stay in Latvia.

My memories of Riga are virtually nonexistent. There were visits to forbidding-looking castles and fortresses, but the most impressive for