Listening beneath the rhetorical sound and fury of the Republicans a pattern can be heard in stark relief to their counterpart.
There you go again, says the Ronald Reagan in me, with the "us" and "them."
The scolding voice of the punitive parent is echoed by the brimstone of the preacher and gains full throttle in the mouth of the fiery conservative talk-show hosts and sadists like Dick Cheney. In the alchemy of the psyche fear is converted to hatred. Their vocabulary ranges from menace to blame.
Don't tell me all Republicans are malicious and all Democrats are nice guys.
Did I say that? Only most of them. Those who were damaged early on. They must be descendents of the cave-dwellers who lived in terror of the next thunder or fire or attack from a fanged-beast. Woe is me became war on them.........the next tribe who didn't quite look like theirs.
FDR's We have nothing to fear.... can be contrasted to a century of Republican alarm. Nativism in the twenties was a movement damning the foreign-born as if they were barbarians at the gate. The national scare was a companion to rampant lynching and anti-Semitism along with the threat of a Chinese yellow menace. The Russian revolution was yet another bogeyman which whipped up hysteria and a virulent xenophobia.
Don't absolve the Democrats from joining the racist or jingoistic spirit of the times.They were just as virulent if not always as loud. The White Anglo-Saxon idyll scorned Eastern Europeans (Jews) and olive skinned Southern Europeans (Italians and Spanish).
Ironically these same forces didn't recognize a true menace when they saw it. They were the last to acknowledge the inhumanity of Franco's fascism and they resisted the Nazi abomination, indifferent as they were to Jewish extermination before war was declared.
So powerful is the instinct for survival that we are quick to strike back at the closest suspect without giving much thought to our acts. Roosevelt, himself, got swept up in the campaign of fear with his internment of Japanese-Americans.
There you have it. The liberal patrician shows his true colors. Maybe FDR had nothing to fear but his own avenging angel.
Following the war Joe McCarthy led the charge against the new enemy...atheistic communism and their godless atomic bomb. McCarthy was an alcoholic, paranoid demagogue who finally fell into disrepute after reigning over Cold War hysteria.
This was a bi-partisan effort as well. Plenty of blame to spread around. And who got us into Southeast Asia and escalated the bombing? It takes a lot of hate to carpet bomb a country and defoliate their crops.
Maybe the Republicans are just a tad more practiced at the game. Smear and scare is the way they talk to their base who recognize the code words that incite those down on their luck to join the militia, man the border, roam the streets and check for birth certificates. It's the same old song. The same American brand of tribalism. The pathology of racism that gnaws at our soul. An evolution of consciousness remains a distant hope; that thread of humanity that joins us rather than the differences that separate us; to consider forgiveness, starting but not ending with ourselves.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
Someday But Not Soon
I was talking to James Madison the other day and he agreed something went wrong with Washington. Yes, the influence of corporations, buying of votes etc.... Yes, the former imperial presidency. Yes, the conservative ideologues on the high court. But he put his finger on a problem more structural. It was enough to upset his constitution.
It's our anachronistic bicameral legislative branch; specifically the United States Senate. Madison recalled how it all came about; a concession to those tiny hunks of territory such as Delaware and Rhode Island which were really land grants from British royalty, just to get them to ratify the document.
Whereas the House of Representatives is directly apportioned to the population, the upper house reserves two seats for each state regardless of whether it has more cattle than humans or if it is smaller than a large crowd. James M. admitted that at the time the Senate was regarded as the “wealthiest and wisest” institution while the House was seen as more “passionate and fickle.” Not so and probably never was.
Why does Montana with a population less than a one million have the same two votes as California with its 37.5 million? This is the American version of the House Of Lords. Jimmie Madison agreed.
Consider this: The so-called Red States, comprised of the former Confederacy plus a few scattered others have elected forty senators. These 37 men and 3 women represent less than 30% of the population of this country.
Short as he is at 5 ft. 4 in, my new best friend, Jim, loomed over me, incensed. He was appalled to learn how thirty percent of the electorate, through the threat of filibuster, control the passage of all legislation. I had to explain to him how the rules of the Senate usurped his intentions.
He also rose to his feet upon learning that the average age in the Senate was 68 years (before Robert Byrd's death) while the national average comes in at 35. Furthermore we have seventeen women standing in for 51% of the general population. There are now three Hispanics, two Asians and one Black in the Senate. Hardly representative governance, the Senate looks more like an Old Boy's club than the demographics of the line at Costco or Target or the DMV or a Dodger game.
J.M. and I agreed that it was time to recall the entire senatorial body and make do with a single legislative branch. Let them do their work for five or six years so their primary job is not fund-raising. Let the majority rule. Let them take back their mandate of declaring war .....or nay. Let them advise & consent. It should be noted that there are 39 Black Congressmen and women which comprises nine percent of the entire body, very close to the national average,
Was he just being agreeable or did I convince him that the Senate was an ill-conceived body of the elite; an institution well-suited for a convocation of the privleged whose purpose was to push back against social progress?
The two of us then sat down over a jug of cheap wine and I told him my next modest proposal: Since we've done away with the Senate is there really any reason for all these states? Why are the Dakotas divided horizontally? What is the difference between Kansas and Nebraska or the Carolinas? Can we not consider dividing the 48 continental states into four or six regional sections? At this point he slipped under the table and I thought I heard him dialing his more radical friend, Tom Jefferson, who said something about refreshing our system periodically.
It's our anachronistic bicameral legislative branch; specifically the United States Senate. Madison recalled how it all came about; a concession to those tiny hunks of territory such as Delaware and Rhode Island which were really land grants from British royalty, just to get them to ratify the document.
Whereas the House of Representatives is directly apportioned to the population, the upper house reserves two seats for each state regardless of whether it has more cattle than humans or if it is smaller than a large crowd. James M. admitted that at the time the Senate was regarded as the “wealthiest and wisest” institution while the House was seen as more “passionate and fickle.” Not so and probably never was.
Why does Montana with a population less than a one million have the same two votes as California with its 37.5 million? This is the American version of the House Of Lords. Jimmie Madison agreed.
Consider this: The so-called Red States, comprised of the former Confederacy plus a few scattered others have elected forty senators. These 37 men and 3 women represent less than 30% of the population of this country.
Short as he is at 5 ft. 4 in, my new best friend, Jim, loomed over me, incensed. He was appalled to learn how thirty percent of the electorate, through the threat of filibuster, control the passage of all legislation. I had to explain to him how the rules of the Senate usurped his intentions.
He also rose to his feet upon learning that the average age in the Senate was 68 years (before Robert Byrd's death) while the national average comes in at 35. Furthermore we have seventeen women standing in for 51% of the general population. There are now three Hispanics, two Asians and one Black in the Senate. Hardly representative governance, the Senate looks more like an Old Boy's club than the demographics of the line at Costco or Target or the DMV or a Dodger game.
J.M. and I agreed that it was time to recall the entire senatorial body and make do with a single legislative branch. Let them do their work for five or six years so their primary job is not fund-raising. Let the majority rule. Let them take back their mandate of declaring war .....or nay. Let them advise & consent. It should be noted that there are 39 Black Congressmen and women which comprises nine percent of the entire body, very close to the national average,
Was he just being agreeable or did I convince him that the Senate was an ill-conceived body of the elite; an institution well-suited for a convocation of the privleged whose purpose was to push back against social progress?
The two of us then sat down over a jug of cheap wine and I told him my next modest proposal: Since we've done away with the Senate is there really any reason for all these states? Why are the Dakotas divided horizontally? What is the difference between Kansas and Nebraska or the Carolinas? Can we not consider dividing the 48 continental states into four or six regional sections? At this point he slipped under the table and I thought I heard him dialing his more radical friend, Tom Jefferson, who said something about refreshing our system periodically.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Sequels, Prequels and Re-Makes
Ever since the New Testament, sequels have been problematical. (Right away I'm getting myself in trouble). However as testaments go, this was arguably the most successful …. based on the Amazon rankings.
I'm going to lump together the three categories because the lines among them are rather blurry to my fuzzy brain.
When it comes to movies, for the most part, they should have stopped while they were still ahead. How come I know that and you know that but the studios keep throwing money on the cutting room floor?
A re-make would be a bright idea if they got it wrong the first time. But Hollywood sees it otherwise. If a movie is a smash hit they do it again two decades later and generally fall on their face. When a ballplayer reaches such heights they retire his uniform. The studios would do well to just re-release the original. I suppose the impoverished imagination reverts back to the old cash cow and milks it dry.
One of the funniest films we've ever seen was The In-Laws. Peggy laughed so hard I was ready to administer CPR. Peter Falk and Alan Arkin played off each other to perfection. The re-make was doomed from the opening credits
We recently watched a new version of Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Wouldn’t you think they’d know enough that these two are inimitable? At least in this case they changed the name to, The Truth About Charlie, perhaps so no one would notice the abysmal failure.
In all fairness, Sleepless in Seattle was a worthy makeover of An Affair To Remember just as You've Got Mail updated the original 1940 classic A Shop Around The Corner. As a sequel Godfather-2 was a superb follow-up to the superb original but the third ranks up there with one of the worst films in memory.
Sometimes they are able to re-invigorate the storyline along so it's a fit for today's audience. More often, in their zeal not to be dated, they fumble away the soul or spirit of the original. The difficulty they have in general is a basic misunderstanding of what makes a movie iconic. It's not the plot; or at least not just the plot. As a collaborative art form a film is the coming together of fresh dialog, imaginative direction, chemistry of the cast, lighting and editing….. and perhaps the music. Anyone one of these, under or overwrought, can destroy the project. It's an irreducible whole, greater than its parts.
If sequels answer the universal, and then what, prequels attempt a stab at the pre-narrative. The Saturday matinee serials stretched our limits of disbelief. I could have sworn that car went off the cliff last week and now here it is screeching to a stop. Or the bullet our hero took in the heart resulted in a mere flesh wound to the shoulder. The back-story became the illusion that kept the narrative alive. But does anyone really care what Casablanca's Ric did when he was eleven years old or even the day before he met Ingrid Bergman? They've always had Paris and that's enough for me.
In the thirties Hollywood made six sequels to the Thin Man, even if Dashiell Hammett never wrote any. Fortunately we didn't have to watch William Powell grow a middle-age paunch. Mickey Rooney lived outside of time, as Andy Hardy. He had a serious case of arrested development; he never grew up. Nor did the studios. They still can't resist the wonderment of the winning formula and they are likely to continue making sequels and re-makes until Spiderman-86 gets to be eensy-weensy and tangled in his own web, then finally washed away by the rain.
I'm going to lump together the three categories because the lines among them are rather blurry to my fuzzy brain.
When it comes to movies, for the most part, they should have stopped while they were still ahead. How come I know that and you know that but the studios keep throwing money on the cutting room floor?
A re-make would be a bright idea if they got it wrong the first time. But Hollywood sees it otherwise. If a movie is a smash hit they do it again two decades later and generally fall on their face. When a ballplayer reaches such heights they retire his uniform. The studios would do well to just re-release the original. I suppose the impoverished imagination reverts back to the old cash cow and milks it dry.
One of the funniest films we've ever seen was The In-Laws. Peggy laughed so hard I was ready to administer CPR. Peter Falk and Alan Arkin played off each other to perfection. The re-make was doomed from the opening credits
We recently watched a new version of Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Wouldn’t you think they’d know enough that these two are inimitable? At least in this case they changed the name to, The Truth About Charlie, perhaps so no one would notice the abysmal failure.
In all fairness, Sleepless in Seattle was a worthy makeover of An Affair To Remember just as You've Got Mail updated the original 1940 classic A Shop Around The Corner. As a sequel Godfather-2 was a superb follow-up to the superb original but the third ranks up there with one of the worst films in memory.
Sometimes they are able to re-invigorate the storyline along so it's a fit for today's audience. More often, in their zeal not to be dated, they fumble away the soul or spirit of the original. The difficulty they have in general is a basic misunderstanding of what makes a movie iconic. It's not the plot; or at least not just the plot. As a collaborative art form a film is the coming together of fresh dialog, imaginative direction, chemistry of the cast, lighting and editing….. and perhaps the music. Anyone one of these, under or overwrought, can destroy the project. It's an irreducible whole, greater than its parts.
If sequels answer the universal, and then what, prequels attempt a stab at the pre-narrative. The Saturday matinee serials stretched our limits of disbelief. I could have sworn that car went off the cliff last week and now here it is screeching to a stop. Or the bullet our hero took in the heart resulted in a mere flesh wound to the shoulder. The back-story became the illusion that kept the narrative alive. But does anyone really care what Casablanca's Ric did when he was eleven years old or even the day before he met Ingrid Bergman? They've always had Paris and that's enough for me.
In the thirties Hollywood made six sequels to the Thin Man, even if Dashiell Hammett never wrote any. Fortunately we didn't have to watch William Powell grow a middle-age paunch. Mickey Rooney lived outside of time, as Andy Hardy. He had a serious case of arrested development; he never grew up. Nor did the studios. They still can't resist the wonderment of the winning formula and they are likely to continue making sequels and re-makes until Spiderman-86 gets to be eensy-weensy and tangled in his own web, then finally washed away by the rain.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Shoulders
It is hot; Italian hot. The headline reads, Caldo Record, record heat. If this keeps up cypress trees will wilt and statues return to their quarries. We are here in the parched Umbrian hill town of Assisi.
The spirit of St. Francis is in the air and in the dust. We can almost see him up ahead communing with stray dogs. There are birds nesting in his hair. He has shed his raiment for rags. He is walking barefooted just as the man in the square selling Gelato is bare-chested.
Peggy and I are glad for this slow and quiet place after hectic Florence where I gave up our car, unable to solve those streets of changing names. A sea of frenzied tourists blocked passage on the road and when I found a clearing it was because a pushcart had been over-run by a motorist.
Here in Assisi we walk. We walk up a hill to a castle ruin. On our way a family stops us offering grapes in a kind of communion. We bless them as if...
Down in town we are at the great door of the Basilica, I, in my T-shirt and Peggy in a sun- dress with her bare shoulders, smoldering. We are stopped and refused entrance by the friar at the gate. He cannot allow the sacrilege of her shoulders. As if Francis had never seen flesh or Cimabue and Giotto clothed all their immodest frescoes. As if he is protecting naked Jesus.
The friar may have lost his way in the smoky incense of confession and absolution. He doesn't see the nape for nave., what is sacred in front of him; forbidden contours of a body, her holy shoulders with the wings of a windhover in her blades and the parchment between. He has missed the swan of her neck sculpted for the glory of God.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Tongues
Consider all the tongue can do. It probes, it wags and sometimes lodges in our cheeks. Without it I couldn’t say my name. It’s the most inquisitive organ we have as it pokes into spaces only it remembers, patrolling our teeth for remains of lunch.
I have a dim, enduring, memory at age four or five being unable to say the el sound. Levine was tough enough but Lillian, with its double el, was insurmountable. I had to ask my tongue to make a swift, return trip to the roof of my mouth. For the most part the tongue knows to get out of the way but try saying, the dog without calling it into service.
Without it the ice cream cone would never have been licked. We stick it out for doctors and stick it in to French kiss. We leave ideas on the tip of it. Discretion asks us to hold our tongue while fundamentalists go into a trance and speak in it.
When we’re most at home we speak our mother tongue and when we can’t find the right words our tongue is tied. When we can barely get them out of our mouth its because our tongue is twisted.
I haven’t had a tongue sandwich in years but there it is, under lamination, on the menu at Izzy’s Deli, Frieda’s Tongue Sandwich, $11.95, probably served with Russian dressing and mustard and a side of slaw.
A cow’s tongue is edible only if I don’t think about where it came from. But consider a giraffe’s tongue which is about two feet long. Or a blue whale's which is the size of one and half elephants.
American Indians discovered how tongues can be forked; a necessary division for politicians who speak out of both sides of their mouth. I prefer plain speak over the silver-tongue orator except for the Bard who has enriched our tongue………..
"That man that hath a tongue, I say is no man,
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."
The tongue is our ready lyre, the instrument we are never without to contact the muse and convey words, trippingly, in our inimitable, mellifluous tones.
I have a dim, enduring, memory at age four or five being unable to say the el sound. Levine was tough enough but Lillian, with its double el, was insurmountable. I had to ask my tongue to make a swift, return trip to the roof of my mouth. For the most part the tongue knows to get out of the way but try saying, the dog without calling it into service.
Without it the ice cream cone would never have been licked. We stick it out for doctors and stick it in to French kiss. We leave ideas on the tip of it. Discretion asks us to hold our tongue while fundamentalists go into a trance and speak in it.
When we’re most at home we speak our mother tongue and when we can’t find the right words our tongue is tied. When we can barely get them out of our mouth its because our tongue is twisted.
I haven’t had a tongue sandwich in years but there it is, under lamination, on the menu at Izzy’s Deli, Frieda’s Tongue Sandwich, $11.95, probably served with Russian dressing and mustard and a side of slaw.
A cow’s tongue is edible only if I don’t think about where it came from. But consider a giraffe’s tongue which is about two feet long. Or a blue whale's which is the size of one and half elephants.
American Indians discovered how tongues can be forked; a necessary division for politicians who speak out of both sides of their mouth. I prefer plain speak over the silver-tongue orator except for the Bard who has enriched our tongue………..
"That man that hath a tongue, I say is no man,
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."
The tongue is our ready lyre, the instrument we are never without to contact the muse and convey words, trippingly, in our inimitable, mellifluous tones.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Baseball and The Gods
There is something about baseball that attracts poets and writers. Is it the statistics or the pastoral pace? My guess is the divinely-inspired proportions of the field, or so it seems.
The game has a certain logic which is overturned, the more you embrace it, by an illogic. Unlike all those oblong sports, played against a ticking clock and the suggestion of opposing armies gaining real estate or aiming a projectile, baseball runs on a kind of squared-off circle and proceeds heedless of the clock. In fact a batter hits a ball and runs counter-clockwise, as if unwinding the clock. The duration of a game is measured in innings and intervals theoretically stretching to infinity.
The pace of the game and layout of the stadium allows the tactician to chew on a multitude of contingencies. Consider the precision of the infield diamond contrasted with the indeterminacy of the outfield grass. The game is a metaphor of human possibility.
Every so often a player comes along who seems to possess the fast wrist and the eagle eye to make it all look simple. When this happens we, as fans, are lifted vicariously as if it translates to our reaching the unattainable.............even if he happens to be on the hated Giants. Such a player is the rookie, Buster Posey who inspired this poem.
Buster Posey
Did your mother name you that
or did you pick it up to show the world where to get off?
Sorry but as a Buster you just don't pass muster
Never mind Buston Brown or Keaton,
my idea of a Buster is a greasy guy with a Fu Manchu,
weighing in at 240, the guy in the subway
no one wants to inhale,
hanging on to an overhead strap.
But you, look at you. You're no Buster
I’ll bet you never swore, spit or shaved.
Can you really be a catcher with a choir boy’s face
and a voice that hasn’t changed?
You are the Boy Scouts of America, still tenderfooted,
yet you soar so near the sun
and your wax isn’t even sweating.
You’ve got the gift of the great eye / hand
returning me to that season of ‘41
when DiMaggio hit for a string of pearls
and Ted batted over the white cliffs of Dover.
Buster Posey, Buster Posey, our jaw drops
and we all fall down when you hit it on the nosey
and run a ring around the rosy.
Are you Malamud’s, Natural, Roy Hobbs
or are you Mudville’s Casey?
Do you realize, Posey, how you have busted in,
flaunting Euclid’s geometry?
Suddenly, sixty feet, six inches won‘t do.
In your unshaven innocence you have trampled
on the mathematician’s elegant, divine dimensions
but on Phythagorean metaphysics and the Platonic ideal.
The gods are gathering on the mound,
scratching and hitching their belts
reconfiguring what were once sublime proportions.
There could be hell to pay for your hubris
or they might etch your Posey on Olympus.
The game has a certain logic which is overturned, the more you embrace it, by an illogic. Unlike all those oblong sports, played against a ticking clock and the suggestion of opposing armies gaining real estate or aiming a projectile, baseball runs on a kind of squared-off circle and proceeds heedless of the clock. In fact a batter hits a ball and runs counter-clockwise, as if unwinding the clock. The duration of a game is measured in innings and intervals theoretically stretching to infinity.
The pace of the game and layout of the stadium allows the tactician to chew on a multitude of contingencies. Consider the precision of the infield diamond contrasted with the indeterminacy of the outfield grass. The game is a metaphor of human possibility.
Every so often a player comes along who seems to possess the fast wrist and the eagle eye to make it all look simple. When this happens we, as fans, are lifted vicariously as if it translates to our reaching the unattainable.............even if he happens to be on the hated Giants. Such a player is the rookie, Buster Posey who inspired this poem.
Buster Posey
Did your mother name you that
or did you pick it up to show the world where to get off?
Sorry but as a Buster you just don't pass muster
Never mind Buston Brown or Keaton,
my idea of a Buster is a greasy guy with a Fu Manchu,
weighing in at 240, the guy in the subway
no one wants to inhale,
hanging on to an overhead strap.
But you, look at you. You're no Buster
I’ll bet you never swore, spit or shaved.
Can you really be a catcher with a choir boy’s face
and a voice that hasn’t changed?
You are the Boy Scouts of America, still tenderfooted,
yet you soar so near the sun
and your wax isn’t even sweating.
You’ve got the gift of the great eye / hand
returning me to that season of ‘41
when DiMaggio hit for a string of pearls
and Ted batted over the white cliffs of Dover.
Buster Posey, Buster Posey, our jaw drops
and we all fall down when you hit it on the nosey
and run a ring around the rosy.
Are you Malamud’s, Natural, Roy Hobbs
or are you Mudville’s Casey?
Do you realize, Posey, how you have busted in,
flaunting Euclid’s geometry?
Suddenly, sixty feet, six inches won‘t do.
In your unshaven innocence you have trampled
on the mathematician’s elegant, divine dimensions
but on Phythagorean metaphysics and the Platonic ideal.
The gods are gathering on the mound,
scratching and hitching their belts
reconfiguring what were once sublime proportions.
There could be hell to pay for your hubris
or they might etch your Posey on Olympus.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
I'm Of Two Minds
With one eye I see nefarious plots hatching and hear the whisper of conspiracies. With the other eye I’m looking into a mirror.
One agrees that religion is the opiate of the masses. Just as TV is the myopia of the asses along with other entertainments such as movies, video games pennant races, March madness and Raves. We are being unwittingly manipulated; bombarded to numbness by media moguls; told what to buy, how to vote and what wars are to be fought in our name. This is the voice of the conspirator.
I still can’t let go of the notion that Oswald wasn’t the lone assassin. Nor am I ready to reject the existence of a shadow government which renders the White House a side-show.
However on good days I believe that all these institutions, fashions, artifices and distractions arose organically, consciously or not, from some impulse or need deep in our entrails. Maybe we create our own form of narcosis as a defense against too much noise. Organized sports helps us sublimate our aggression on the couch and computer games develop our sensory apparatus to deal with life from a field approach rather than lineal sequentially.
I suspect that the truth wiggles between these two poles. We do act like sheep but we are also complicit in the political calculus. We live in a historical period without precedent. Politics has become an extension of public relations and mass media advertising. Yet at some point we have to own our folly and acknowledge the nit-wits, racists and corporate apologists, malignant as they are, as part of the American experience, like virulent organisms in our bloodstream.
I don’t think it serves us well to be distanced from what we may perceive as politically pernicious or commercially vacuous. The Pop culture today is probably no more alien to us than our era of swing music and urban life was to our elders. We, of a certain age, do not see through the new forms into the eternal verities. We are irritated by the unfamiliar as if it threatened us or invalidated all that we have lived for. It was ever thus.
Do the manipulators move us, sometimes to false paradise and sometimes off the cliff? Or have they simply tapped into our buried instincts? I have no answer other than I think it’s a bit of both. All the new forms of communication which technology has yielded are an extension of our need to touch one another. Yet few of us ever dreamed it possible and some among us resist it still and cling to the old-fangled.
Resistance to change is also hard-wired. We have a nose for trouble. Who knew what creatures lurked in that next cave?....or worse, the rival tribe might be ready to strike. Here is where the first conspiracy theory was planted.
Let’s not confuse the effect with the cause. If religion grew out of fear and superstition and acts like an opiate for the benefit of popes and ayatollahs it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are the dispensers of the opium. I’m ready to concede that religions have persevered out of a human need for sanctuary and transcendence. Maybe some day we’ll find that edifice and sacred space within ourselves.
In the meantime we might find reverence in the natural world, take responsibility for this dazzling, dystopic, sometimes enlightened, sometimes insipid society and take a deep breath.
One agrees that religion is the opiate of the masses. Just as TV is the myopia of the asses along with other entertainments such as movies, video games pennant races, March madness and Raves. We are being unwittingly manipulated; bombarded to numbness by media moguls; told what to buy, how to vote and what wars are to be fought in our name. This is the voice of the conspirator.
I still can’t let go of the notion that Oswald wasn’t the lone assassin. Nor am I ready to reject the existence of a shadow government which renders the White House a side-show.
However on good days I believe that all these institutions, fashions, artifices and distractions arose organically, consciously or not, from some impulse or need deep in our entrails. Maybe we create our own form of narcosis as a defense against too much noise. Organized sports helps us sublimate our aggression on the couch and computer games develop our sensory apparatus to deal with life from a field approach rather than lineal sequentially.
I suspect that the truth wiggles between these two poles. We do act like sheep but we are also complicit in the political calculus. We live in a historical period without precedent. Politics has become an extension of public relations and mass media advertising. Yet at some point we have to own our folly and acknowledge the nit-wits, racists and corporate apologists, malignant as they are, as part of the American experience, like virulent organisms in our bloodstream.
I don’t think it serves us well to be distanced from what we may perceive as politically pernicious or commercially vacuous. The Pop culture today is probably no more alien to us than our era of swing music and urban life was to our elders. We, of a certain age, do not see through the new forms into the eternal verities. We are irritated by the unfamiliar as if it threatened us or invalidated all that we have lived for. It was ever thus.
Do the manipulators move us, sometimes to false paradise and sometimes off the cliff? Or have they simply tapped into our buried instincts? I have no answer other than I think it’s a bit of both. All the new forms of communication which technology has yielded are an extension of our need to touch one another. Yet few of us ever dreamed it possible and some among us resist it still and cling to the old-fangled.
Resistance to change is also hard-wired. We have a nose for trouble. Who knew what creatures lurked in that next cave?....or worse, the rival tribe might be ready to strike. Here is where the first conspiracy theory was planted.
Let’s not confuse the effect with the cause. If religion grew out of fear and superstition and acts like an opiate for the benefit of popes and ayatollahs it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are the dispensers of the opium. I’m ready to concede that religions have persevered out of a human need for sanctuary and transcendence. Maybe some day we’ll find that edifice and sacred space within ourselves.
In the meantime we might find reverence in the natural world, take responsibility for this dazzling, dystopic, sometimes enlightened, sometimes insipid society and take a deep breath.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)