Martin Gardner and the American Soul

This great American from the Midwest died yesterday. Oklahoma brings images to my mind of good English, Scottish, and Irish stock. L. Frank Baum, Warren Buffet, and   the American Soul.

I read the entry on Gardner yesterday in Wikipedia, the guy never got a Ph.D., but inspired many to get one, just like the Wizard of Oz, inspired Dorothy, and friends, to be all they could be, even if the powers that be, never gave them that recognition. America is a self-made country, autopoietic I will call it, using the precise term of Maturana and Varela, in a very loose sense.

Somebody dear to my heart, has been trying to understand this America, which periodically goes through awakenings.  The sixties, I am told, was one of those peak times, when Americans asked themselves collectively, what is it that they are. It seems to me that the populist movement going on now, which first put a black man as a President, and then inspired the Pauls to run for office, signals another one of those crucial moments of the American saga.

 Here in Mexico, there is also soul searching of our own kind. The tension here is between the Real Americans, that got here thirteen thousand years ago, and the newcomers, like myself, with only five hundred years residency.

Both our countries though, can become a powerful unit, never seen before on the face of the Earth. That is the theme of another note, however.

The City upon a Hill, is been observed by the whole world. Let us not disappoint humanity, something new is been born here, and as Bob Dylan, the American Prophet says: "That he not busy being born is busy dying"


Keep on trucking America!