The Continuing Saga

Darwyn Van Wye,

Quin County Lawyer,

Real Estate Broker,

Writer, Eccentric

by

Craig Chambers

Culley Jane Carson and Craig Chambers at the Tattered Covered Writer's Group discussing his Halloween Column. Looks like she's really into it.

The election is just around the corner. I’m on the edge of my seat. I’ve blackened the little ovals and slipped my ballot into the mail box in front of the King Soopers down the street. For the first time in my life I’ve voted for somebody other than Lyndon Larouche. So I’m feeling kind of nostalgic.

I first met Larouche in 1978. At the time, I was a reporter for a major Detroit metro. At the time, Detroit was sinking fast. The oil embargoes had sent the price of a gallon of gas sky high, like overnight. There were long lines at gas stations. Fistfights. “Peak Oil” entered into the vernacular. “Limits to Growth.” “Small is Beautiful.” An Energy Czar was appointed in Washington. A rocker burst out… “I can’t drive 55!!!”

Everybody started buying small Japanese imports. A wave of layoffs swept through the big car factories — Pontiac Motors. Cadillac. Buick. Oldsmobile. Suddenly, Motor City, Motown, the Technological Mecca of the World had the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Nerves were on edge. You could feel it in the streets I roamed as a reporter – We were running out, out of something as vital as water and air… Energy. We might Conserve to buy a little time, but the end was near.

I wrote lots of human interest stories about young couples expecting their second — the war was over, they had family connections in the union, a good paying job with a secure future.

I sat at their kitchen tables after they’d learned their factory was being closed.

I was also working on the Hoffa case and got to know people who knew him and the dock workers and truckers living middle class lives because of Hoffa’s Master Freight Contract and one thing led to another and that’s how I met Lyndon Larouche.

Larouche was in Detroit to meet with Teamster leaders and was staying in a room on the sixth floor of an older downtown hotel. Two armed security guards were stationed at his door. I’d been told they’d been trained at Mitch Werbell’s paramilitary camp in the swamps of Louisiana.

Greeting me, the first thing Larouche did was to offer me a Macdonald’s burger from a sack he had.

We started the interview.

Without denying the distressing facts on the ground, he said that none of it was necessary because we were not running out of energy. Everything was energy, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. So it couldn’t be true what everybody was saying, that we were running out.

I was hooked. If (and it was a big if), if it was true that we weren’t really running out, it would be the biggest story in the world, especially in Detroit. People would be cheering and parading in the streets. The story had Pulitzer Prize written all over it. I’d be famous. I’d get on the Johnny Carson Show.

However, the august New York Times, itself, had labeled Larouche a Trotskyite, a Communist, a Fascist, a Cult leader crackpot Conspiracy Theorist, or whatever else they could come up with. Henry Kissinger sent a secret memo to the FBI saying that Larouche was dangerous and should be dealt with. (I have a copy of the memo, which was declassified a few years ago)  As a seasoned reporter, I knew I had to find out for myself if Larouche was also a bull shitter, or worse.

As founder of something called the Fusion Energy Foundation, he had contacts with contacts and I was able to get a telephone interview with Edward Teller, the so-called “father” of the hydrogen bomb, who was then heading up efforts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to control thermonuclear fusion reactions.

I think Teller liked me. He asked me things like where I had grown up and was it true that Lake Superior is always too cold to swim in.

He told me a little bit about growing up in Hungary.

He then said something that changed my life. He said fusion was not science limited, but funding limited. He had solved the science, but was baffled by money. I suddenly realized how baffled about money that I was, too. There was no scarcity of energy anywhere in the universe we think we know about. There was only a scarcity of money. Could it be that money was more powerful than the laws of the universe? It sounded crazy.

It sounded crazy to Larouche, too. He had served in India during World War II and had witnessed the squalor and the desperation of the lives lived by people who did not have what they needed just because money was scarce and they didn’t have enough of it for anything better, like the lives lived by the few on the side of the hill.

After the war, Larouche became a heterodox economist and thought up an economic system where money was not a limiting, but a liberating factor so we could build fusion reactors and high speed rail from New York to Moscow across the bridge over the Bering Sea.

Back in the 70s he revealed to me what was possible.

He was thrown into prison. I was merely exiled from the Press.

He’s gone now but not his ideas. He used to say that ideas were what grants us temporal immortality.

After his death in 2019, his wife, Helga was honored at a Chinese State Dinner recognizing her husband as one of the intellectual founders of what’s today called the Belt and Road Initiative, which, back in the 70s, we called “The New Silk Road Project.” He had also long supported the fundamental concepts of BRICS and today half the people in the world are within its fold.

I always felt good voting for Larouche, even though people said I was being foolish and I said that it feels good to vote for something you believe in.

But this year it’s different and I don’t feel so good. I don’t know what I voted for. I know what I hope I voted for. Still, I’m depressed, though I know I’ll get over it because I still believe in the Idea of Progress. As Leibniz said: “Whatever is Possible, Demands to Exist.”