Bill Meredith
"Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity." - Homer, ca. 750 B.C.: The Iliad.
"The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individual to mass movements." - Eric Hoffer, 1951: The True Believer.
(8/2018) The Old Farmer’s Almanac of 1792 says Dog Days begins on July 3. The Almanac’s description of that season must have been taken directly from Homer’s description of the march of Achilles toward Troy; it tells of a time when people believed in astrology, and thought the appearance of the Dog Star was "an evil portent bringing heat and suffering
to humanity" … as some folks still appear to do. I’m not sure where they got the date of July 3; it might be when the star appeared in 1792, or it could from ancient Greek or Egyptian calendars.
Before Homer’s time, the Egyptian Pharoahs adopted a uniform calendar around 1,000 B.C., and they defined Dog Days as the date when the Dog Star, Sirius, first appeared in the early morning sky… an important time then, because it predicted the annual flooding of the Nile… but when I tried to look it up on the internet, I couldn’t find the date when
Sirius appeared in Egypt back then. It might have been July 3; but, unfortunately, it happens on different dates in different places.
This year in the U. S., Sirius will arise for the first time on July 22 in San Francisco, but it won’t appear in Emmitsburg until more than a week later. Finally, I decided the exact date doesn’t matter, so I stopped looking for it. I can recommend if the air conditioning breaks down and you get hot and frustrated in a really funky, bored mood in the
next few weeks, try and look it up yourself. The technically reliable articles you will find on the internet are written in incomprehensible jargon, and the authors of the less technical ones appear to be more interested in selling summer clothing or heat-rash cures than in actually explaining anything… and apparently a lot of them still believe in astrology. So it’s a way to
pass a Dog Day afternoon. It’ll put you to sleep.
I’ve been in that kind of mood for the past few months… not because of Dog Days, but because of the news. I was taught from earliest childhood that telling the Truth was of paramount importance… capital T, period, end of lesson. But then I was taught that it isn’t always easy to tell what is true and what is not; and when confronted with that problem,
you should begin with an open mind and collect facts. That sounds obvious; but again, it’s not easy.
In science we are often confronted with two different explanations for a new discovery, and sometimes it takes centuries to find which is true. Likewise, in legal matters you may have two different accounts of what someone did, and evidence may be presented for both. The first time I had to consider the latter case may have been that Sunday-School
lesson where Pilate asked Jesus, "What is Truth?," and 80 years later, I’m still pondering about that one. But lately I’ve been bothered by a different version of the question: when it is obvious that someone’s explanations are not true and their evidence is invalid or clearly falsified, why do many people still believe them? I’ve been unable to comprehend that for the past
couple of years; but now I’m beginning to think I’ve found an answer.
Talking to my son back in May, I remarked that among the many books that I wished I had read was Eric Hoffer’s volume, The True Believer. It was a casual comment in a conversation, and I forgot about it; but a week later, he gave me the book as a birthday present. It is a small book, less than 200 pages, and it was written in 1951; but in it I found a
clear, detailed explanation of our present state of national turmoil. We are, it appears, in the midst of a Mass Movement.
Hoffer called the people who are taken in by the charismatic leader of a Mass Movement "True Believers," because they are willing to believe anything the leader says, even when it is obviously untrue, illogical, or simply beyond common sense. A few of them may have been fanatics from the start, but most of them begin as being simply disaffected with
their state in life. They may be poor, chronically ill, recently unemployed or unemployable because of alcoholism or other handicaps, including various injuries or military disabilities. They may be locked into careers they don’t like, and unable to change to other careers because they lack either the education or the talent to do anything but menial work. Being disaffected
and frustrated, they do not think logically, and they are willing to believe anyone who offers them easy solutions to their problems… in other words, any leader who is unscrupulous enough to tell the True Believers just what they want to hear.
Life in America is changing rapidly now, because new things are appearing every day. If you are young and well educated, this is exciting; you say "Bring it on! Gimme that new cell/phone that takes pictures and plays computer games!" … or, if you’re rich, you can say "Who cares?" But if you’re old, on a fixed income or retired, or if your job has just
been replaced by robotics and you don’t know how to use a computer, it’s not exciting; it’s frightening. Change has caused all of your problems, and more change is coming. So you become a susceptible target for a Mass Movement whose leader promises to return the country to simpler times and bring back jobs that no longer exist. In actual truth, it is not possible to go back
to "Good Old Days;" but many people are frightened and desperate enough to vote for such a promisor.
Even within my lifetime there have been many mass movements. The worst was Hitler’s rise in Germany by promising Aryan purity to anti-Semites. Not all movements were bad; the Civil Rights Movement did not end discrimination, but it resulted in legal rights and better economic opportunities. The New Deal didn’t cure the Great Depression, as President
Roosevelt promised, but it did tide us over and give us hope until the War revived the economy.
When the clouds of war began to loom on the horizon in the late 1930s, my father was working at an aluminum-rolling mill in Fairmont, W.Va. The plant ran one shift, five days a week, and frequently laid off workers when orders slacked off; but as the war revved up, sheets of aluminum came to be vital for building airplanes, so work was good and the
plant went to three shifts per day, seven days a week. Originally, Dad operated one of the rolling mills, but he was very good at it and soon was promoted to foreman. His work pattern shifted; instead of spending eight hours adjusting the pressure on the rollers as the aluminum sheets ran under them, he now had to make regular rounds through the plant from mill to mill,
dealing with problems when something broke down or jammed.
This often meant working overtime under pressure to get things running again so valuable time would not be lost; but at other times, when everything was running well he would have as much as half an hour of idle time between rounds. For some foremen, this idle time led to drinking; but Dad had creativity, and he spent that time whittling things from
bits of wood. Every day he came home with a new toy for us… a wooden chain, a pair of pliers carved from a match-stick, an interlocking puzzle… many if which still exist in my cousin’s collection. And he taught me to do it when I was big enough to have a pen-knife.
When Eric Hoffer wrote in 1951, he had never heard of cell-phones and hand-held computers, but he wrote that one of the groups of people most vulnerable to the leaders of Mass Movements were those who drop out of society and have no creative skills to engage their minds. They become followers. Today, in my dotage I sit on the porch and watch them
walking by, with wires coming from their ears and their eyes riveted on the gadgets in their hands, oblivious to both the beauty and the problems of the world around them. They are becoming part of the Mass that will follow the Leader toward oblivion.
