I'll have a Machu Picchu Latte, please
Remembering one of the best headline writers ever
We interrupt this Substack for a brief anecdote from my years of newspapering. The winter solstice was just the other day, and it reminded me of a headline in the New York Daily News that was written by my colleague and favorite headline writer, Hal Frankel.
Hal was a throwback to an earlier generation, and he didn’t adapt well to the technological changes that were already sweeping the industry some four decades ago. He would disappear during our union-negotiated lunch break around 8 in the evening and return with a coffee cup that was half full but not with coffee, and a veal chop from the restaurant next door, not for himself but to take home for his cat, and he usually had one cigarette between his lips and another burning beside his keyboard, which was about 80 percent keyboard and 20 percent ashtray. He took a taxi to and from his apartment in Greenwich Village to the Daily News building in midtown because his legs couldn’t take the stairs to the subway, and when editing a story he wore two pairs of glasses, one over the other, and still hunched close to the monitor to be able to read whatever he was editing. I volunteered to sit next to him hoping some of his headline writing skills would osmose the foot or so between us.
This was in the days before smoking was banned in the newsroom, and when alcoholism was an occupational hazard, which it probably still is in some form or other. But give Hal a story to edit and he could write a headline that made it sing. And while it was the winter solstice that made me think of Hal, it was the summer solstice that was responsible for the headline of which I was reminded.
I forget what year it was. I worked at the Daily News from 1978 to 1988 and the first five of those years I was in the sports department, so it had to be after 1983 when I was on the main news copy desk, and more likely was ‘85 or ‘86.
Whoa! Thank you Grok, or ChatGPT, or Copilot or whatever form of AI runs on my browser, the year was 1987, and the story was not about the summer solstice but rather about the Harmonic Convergence planned for Central Park. The AI’s source was a 2017 article in Smithsonian magazine:
Thirty years ago, New Age believers, pagans, meditation practitioners, hippies and the spiritually curious gathered at “energy centers” around the globe to let out a collective “OM.” The two-day event, which began on the 16th, was dubbed the Harmonic Convergence and is believed to be the first multi-national, simultaneous meditation event ever organized, reports Margalit Fox at The New York Times.
The August 1987 events didn’t occur on some random days. According to astrology, the two days were when most of the planets in the Solar System formed “trines” or roughly 120 degree angles that supposedly promoted harmony. It was believed that this alignment of the planets would trigger a new age of peace and harmony and “a major unification of souls with purpose on this planet.” Also, it was humanity’s only chance, some believed, to prevent the apocalypse; also, aliens.
The brainchild behind the event and its hazy theology was José Argüelles born Joseph Arguelles, a New Age theorist based in Boulder, Colorado, who initially hailed from Rochester, Minnesota. According to Fox, he earned a doctorate in art from the University of Chicago and taught art history at Princeton and other universities. But a dalliance with the 1960s and ‘70s counterculture, a struggle with alcoholism and a little LSD drew him out of the classroom and into the mystic, and he soon changed his name from Joseph to José and added an umlaut to his last name.
Argüelles began codifying a set of spiritual beliefs based on calendars, in particular the Mayan calendar. Fox reports that he believed the Gregorian calendar, used by the western world, chopped the year into unnatural cycles, and that humanity suffered because it was out of line with the natural order.
Argüelles study of the Mayan calendar convinced him that the world as we know it would end on the winter solstice of 2012; or aliens would appear; or people would reach a higher spiritual plane (his views changed over time). According to the Associated Press, he believed if 144,000 people across the world meditated together during the 1987 convergence, it would be the beginning of a cleansing process that would last until 1992. The mass meditation, he told the AP, was needed “to create a field of trust, ground the new vibrational frequencies coming in at the time.”
According to another AP story, Argüelles also wrote that the convergence was an entry point for the return of the Maya, which some Convergers would experience as an inner light and some would see as “feathered serpent rainbows turning in the air.”
Harmonic Convergence celebrations took place at 200 sites in the United States, most notably at Mount Shasta, Central Park, Chaco Canyon and Sedona, Arizona. Fifty other celebrations occurred at sites worldwide including Ayer’s Rock, Mount Fuji, Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Participants danced, drummed, chanted and meditated together with celebrities including Shirley MacLaine, John Denver and Timothy Leary taking part in the celebrations. Johnny Carson even had his studio audience chant “OM” on the day of the convergence.
“What was amazing about it was … this is going on worldwide, all over the place,” Pat Hogan, who participated in the Convergence in Vancouver, told Bethany Lindsay at CBC News in an interview this year. “It was supposed to be a time when the planets were in exceptional alignment. The idea of it was to raise the consciousness of the planet to bring about an age of peace and ... that we were moving into the Age of Aquarius, which was an age of brotherhood.”
Argüelles had even grander expectations. “There may be UFO sightings, or there may not be,” he told CBS News, “but there will definitely be some type of communication of an extraterrestrial nature.”
It’s hard to say whether the Harmonic Convergence staved off the Apocalypse or spared humanity from decades of war, though it does not appear as if aliens made contact with Earth in 1987 or 2012. Sadly, Argüelles was not around long enough to see if his theories would come true. He died in 2011 at the age of 72.
The idea that mass meditation could have an impact on the world persists to this day, bolstered by the popularity of mindful meditation. In fact, the Global Consciousness Project has been investigating whether meditation can create a “coherent” human consciousness since 1998, and mass meditation events like The Big Quiet at Madison Square Garden and the Mass Meditation Initiative in Los Angeles draw thousands of participants. And of the course the biggest proponent of the idea that meditation can change the world is the Transcendental Meditation movement, which believes that if just one percent of a community practices its techniques, it can reduce crime and improve the quality of life for everyone.
As one of the locations for the Harmonic Convergence was New York’s Central Park, the Daily News naturally was all over it, and the newspaper’s best headline writer was tasked with the project. While I don’t have access to an archival photo of the actual headline and don’t remember how many points it was, probably about 36, the headline Hal wrote was:
Inca Dinka Do
That would have been in August and if memory serves me properly, Hal passed away that Thanksgiving. It was a long weekend, and when he didn’t show up at work a wellness check was performed, and even though he had given up drinking, his liver finally gave out. As I recall, his couch had to be taken apart to retrieve his cat, which I wound up adopting.
Not long after Hal’s passing, a story came across the news desk about some publicity mongering real estate mogul named Donald Trump promising to revive and redecorate Rockefeller Center’s famed Wollman Skating Rink. I forget which copy editor it was, I think the assistant copy desk chief, in tribute to the now late Hal Frankel, affixed to the story a headline that said:
Rinka Dinka Do
Thank you for your attention to this anecdote. World War 2 will resume in a couple of days.