We’ve seen it all before. The way people look for a little bit of turf sufficiently unplowed so they can register a claim, protect their turf from claim jumpers, find someone with money to back them, then work away in protected bliss. They belabor the little corner they’ve painted themselves into, self promote by degrees, become their own experts, and add to the pile.

Having lived in Southern California nearly all my life, nearby adjacent to Caltech and JPL and just down the street from UCLA, I’ve seen the government fund contracts snapped up for research by hungry feeders, a 1950s working man dream of who thus can afford a house in the suburbs, a pool, and a wife.
Some have been friends of mine. I, who know nothing, would hear stories regaled, the earthquake detection, a good idea, focusing by triangulation on a distant source and measuring the almost imperceptible raisings and lowerings of the earth’s crust just before tremors, precursors to quakes, that would give precious seconds of warning to turn on the sirens and save lives. Results inconclusive, funding in jeopardy, try to convince the government those seconds of warning are worth the price, get Japan interested, keep it all going so you don’t have to sell the house and downsize your life style.

Progress is hard. And it isn’t easy.

You make a widget, spend your life and career making, researching, developing, producing, selling, you become the widget man, rest on your widget laurels, write the slogan for your tombstone which you can see well enough as the end to your future and pretend that’s enough.

We all want to draw sweetness from the bitterness of life, the gold from the dross, the grain from the chaff. We want to make enough to keep us going.
English Major that I was and am, I didn’t want to play the game, saw it played: find an author not yet played to death, stake a claim, mine it for all it’s worth, requisite publish, expert of your little turf, and students people come to sit at your feet so you can pontificate.

Well, it’s a life.

Not for me.

Sometimes it has value, sometimes it works. And isn’t everything incremental anyway?

But sometimes you misstep, go wrong. You may try to surround yourself with postulants, sycophants, adherents to support and allow you to defend the claim you’ve staked and manufactured your reputation on.

(Notice how comfortably I end a sentence with a preposition, now that it’s been officially sanctioned. Things can change.)

I, who know nothing, or know very little, am neither courageous nor combative. I am critical, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, often irreverent, sometimes obstreperous, and sometimes I bite my tongue to hold back, partly not to hurt, partly because I’m shy and self-effacing and unself-aware, (did you notice?), partly defensive, partly because things seem too obvious to mention. But that’s where I’m wrong. What’s obvious to me isn’t always to others. I don’t just want to say, “c’est la vie.” I want to make the obvious more obvious, enough to be obvious to more. I want to poke what needs poking, deflate the inflated, right the wrong, teach the less-learned, save the world, for and from itself. That’s a tall order. But the life of a gad fly is limited, and I’ve already lived a long time. So when someone oversteps the claim that they’ve staked, sometimes I speak out, sometimes in writing.

Here, for example, since one example should be enough as caution or template:

We were joiners of causes and organizations and cultural institutions, so we were admitted into the outer circles of the inner circles, and attended lectures by experts who kicked the dust on the turf of the claim they had staked, and when the dust settled, we could see clearly. It may have been the Norton Simon Museum, it may have been the Getty, but an expert on “Changing Attitudes Toward Snow in Art” staked his claim and drove it into the ground. He proclaimed and prognosticated that winter was cold. And people always hated and feared it and painted it as dark and forbidding negatively, or avoided it altogether as a subject for art. So man learned how to start fire because snow was cold and came with winter, and it wasn’t until the end of the 19th Century and never before when men were able to burn coal in the house and socio-economic comfort allowed them to go outside and make snowballs and slide down hills and ride in sleighs and play and have fun and winter was no longer just a threat to endure, and there was Santa Claus, I rest my case.

Never before? We had in our dining room a mural we had laboriously glued on an entire wall, a snow scene, iconic, one of Bruegel’s marvelous winter scenes, cottages surrounding a frozen lake where people were talking and eating and drinking, convivial, and children were playing in the snow, making snowballs and skating on the ice, a joyous picture of winter that doesn’t freeze the spirit, but frees it.

I may have pointed this out to the self-inflated speaker expert defending his newly staked claim. I may have, because I tend to be empathetically kind, not pointed out that Pieter Bruegel died in 1569, and the Flemish certainly knew winter, and we in the audience know how to count and subtract. I may have remained silent. Or I may have muttered in the audience loud enough to be overheard.

In any case, the message is clear enough to think about, to extrapolate, to draw conclusions, even if you draw no better than I do who admit I can’t draw, though I go on drawing.

So, obviously, many experts standing on their turf have feet of clay.
Too many lessons to be learned: If/when you stake a claim, understand and respect the boundaries, don’t look down on your audience, stand on solid ground, etc. and etc.

I can learn from myself.

I look at my own feet again.