Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. He warned, "From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
Among the conceits of our elite and media is the assumption that America, in the form that they wish to imagine it, is immortal. Part of this is the arrogance of the big, part comes from an admirable if naive faith in progress, part of it is pathological delusion. For a host of reasons, beginning with our own survival, it is long past time to permit the question to be raised: is America collapsing as a culture?
It is easy to forget that history is strewn with the rubble of collapsed civilizations, entropic remains of once sturdy cultures, societies we now remember only thanks to a handful of artifacts guarded in museums.
Our own country was built on the wreckage of Indian culture. Guatemalans use Timex watches rather than checking the Mayan Calendar. The European Union is a covert chapter of Empires Anonymous. And in the Peruvian desert there are huge spirals in the earth and straight lines that stretch for miles whose origins are totally forgotten.
Some sixty years ago, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber noted that elements of a culture do die out, "dissolve away, disappear, and are replaced by new ones. The elements of the content of such cultures may have previously spread to other cultures and survive there. Or their place may be taken at home by elements introduced from abroad. Or they may survive, with or without modification, at home, in the different configuration that gradually takes the place of the old one as a successor culture." Thus even if American democracy dies here; pieces of it may survive somewhere else, or we may become the largest latino culture in the world and, in any event, the Thais may keep the faith of the Ipod alive regardless of what happens to us.
As an example, Kroeber says that there came a time when the ancient Egyptians had clearly attained "the greatest military might, expansion, wealth, excellence of art and development of thought. The inherent patterns of their culture may be said to have been fully realized or to have been saturated then. After that, with pattern potentialities exhausted, there could be only diminished or devitalized repletion; unless the patterns can be reformulated in the direction of a new set of values - which would be equivalent to recasting the civilization into a new one or into a thoroughly new phase of one. This latter did not happen in Egypt; so more and more sluggish mechanical repetition within the realized but fully exhausted patterns became the universal vogue."
Does this begin to sound a bit familiar?
MUSIC AS A MARKER
Let's take the example of popular music, useful because music is a creative discipline with a mathematical base, thus lending itself to more objective analysis than some of its artistic colleagues. In fact, you can write a succinct history of western music by simply outlining the progression of chords used and their relationship with one another. This is what Ward Cannel, a journalist, and Fred Marx, a classical pianist, did in a remarkable guide, "How to Play Piano Despite Years of Lessons."
Charting the basic chords - separated by a common distance of notes and placed around a circle like guests at a large dinner table - you can describe the rise of western music by simply checking off which of these chords were being used by musicians at a particular time. Thus with folk music, children's songs, early hymns and Bach's Minuet In G, it was typical to use one chord and its neighbor on either side.
In later classical harmony, composers moved from the base chord to another, say, three or four seats away counter clockwise and then begin a slow procession home stopping at the other chairs. Examples would include Bach's Well Tempered Clavichord. It doesn't seem like much, but in the history of music, it was a revolutionary change.
Along the way, there were other variations such as starting at the second or third chair and moving back towards home as in Honeysuckle Rose.
If you really wanted to be wild, you threw in a chord not on the way home at all, but in the other direction.
Then came a new stage and the game was played on the clockwise side of the circle. Later a tune might work its way entirely around the circle. Or if you want to be really hip, you could leap across the circle to the other side.
Similarly, the baker's dozen of notes in the western scale have been rearranged over time in increasingly complex ways, starting with the simple chords we associate with folk music and moving on to add the 7th, flatted 9th, 13th and so forth.
If you were to take every piece of music in America ever written and categorize it by these standards - the number and placement of chords and their complexity - you would find that musical opportunity has grown with the rest of the republic.
This didn't mean that you had to use all these opportunities to make good music - bluegrass and the blues prove that - only that the potential for musicians and composers were ever expanding, a sign of a thriving culture. As Thelonius Monk put it, "I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently."
Unfortunately, however, there are only so many chairs at the table and there are only so many combinations of movement. Eventually you run out of chairs for chords, variations on the order you play them, and their complexity. You reach the point that Kroeber described: "With pattern potentialities exhausted, there could be only diminished or devitalized repletion. . . so more and more sluggish mechanical repetition within the realized but fully exhausted patterns became the universal vogue."
Which is to say, much of the music of today.
There is, to be sure, another major source of change: other cultures. American folk music, for example, is a history of immigration translated into notes. The blues, it has been suggested, originated in a blend of the western and African scale. As early as Jelly Roll Morton, jazz musicians were borrowing from latin sounds with perhaps the most notable recent folk example being the blending of Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 'Graceland.'
This continues today but in a critically modified form: Jelly Roll Morton and Paul Simon were inventive musicians seeking the best in another culture; Ricky Martin and Gloria Estefan are products of a huge anglo recording company looking for something new to exploit.
I suspect the decay of American music may have begun with the disco drum machine of 1970s, the beginning of percussion mechanicus to go along with Erich Fromm's homo mechanicus. Both share a problem: they aren't human. A live drummer is constantly listening to the other musicians, finding new ways to back them up, discovering a groove by intent or accident, making a two bar point, or just showing off. If you were to analyze the sound with lab equipment you might be amazed at how irregular it actually is - the inevitable result of being human rather than mechanical.
But that is part of the secret of real music. Much of the appeal of jazz, for example, comes from listening to the alteration, manipulation or distortion of the familiar. Thus a singer may hold a note longer than expected or lend it excruciating pain when you were expecting nothing more than a simple B flat. One writer described it as repetition just to the point of boredom - at which something new and unexpected happens.
As amplifiers replaced acoustic sound, there were other changes in music. The recording companies began dumbing down music, reducing the number of chords, replacing melody with repetitive phrases, emphasizing only the extreme end of the dynamic range, and in the end - with rap - doing away with the need for music almost entirely.
This is not to say that there was not merit within these forms - the pain and rebellion of punk, the soul of rap - but rather that for the most part the corporate monopolies had seized control of our ear drums and locked them down in a few tiny cells.
The result is telling. In 2002, ABC asked respondents for the top rock n roll star of all time. Elvis Presley got 38%, no one else got more than 5% and listed in the top ten were such golden oldies as Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springseen, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton. Michael Jackson got 2%.
A Zogby poll in 1999 asked for the best male singer of the century. Again, only one name got more than ten percent: Frank Sinatra, with Elvis Presley in second. Third place went to Garth Brooks, current but in an highly traditional genre. The rest were: Luciano Pavarotti, Elton John, Bing Crosby, George Strait, Nat King Cole, Perry Como, and Luther Vandross. Three were dead, one an opera singer, one a country singer, and Vandross an R&B singer who had been around for years but found a crossover audience in 1989.
A similar poll of women singers was far more current but with the leader, Barbra Streisand, getting only 14% of the vote. Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, Shania Twain, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, and Lorretta Lynn all came in under 10%.
A more contemporary list, to be sure, but heavily tilted towards the traditional sounds of black and country music and voices that, while unique, could hardly be called inventive.
Thus when you ask, what's been happening in American popular music over the past 25 years, a reasonable answer is: not much.
You find similarities in other arts. For example, a Modern Library critics' listing of the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century includes only one written after 1980: Ironweed by William Kennedy, written in 1983.
One list of the 100 most acclaimed films finds only nine post-1980. The American Film Institute's list includes only 13.
One may quarrel with such lists, but a culture that is truly thriving will tend, if anything, to overvalue its own contributions and downplay those of the past. You may argue, for example, with those who claimed to come from 'the greatest generation,' but you can't argue that they felt that way. Now, instead of bragging, we just order Butch Cassidy from Neflix one more time.
THE END OF GREATNESS
A vibrant culture will be spurred by what it considers greatness. This doesn't mean that it necessarily is, but the mere presumption affects how the society behaves.
For example, Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote that "Whether or not you agreed with them, university presidents used to be dignified figures on the American scene. They often were distinguished scholars, capable of bringing their own brand of independent thinking to bear on the operation and reform of their institutions. Above all, they took seriously the university's mission to seek and transmit the truth, and thereby to strengthen the free society that made such inquiry possible.
"But it has been a long time since Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchins (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard) set the tone for American campuses. Over the past year, four university presidents have been in the news - from Harvard; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Colorado; and the University of California, Berkeley. In each case, the curtains have briefly parted, allowing the public to glimpse the campus wizards working the levers behind the scenes, and confirming that something has gone terribly wrong at our best public and private universities."
Of course, Woodrow Wilson spread segregation in the government and James Conant may have done public education incalculable damage by setting it on a course of gargantuan factory-like school districts, but that is not the point. The point is that they were icons of a society that thought it knew where it was going and what it admired.
Today, with Larry Summers at Harvard or Benjamin Ladner at American University - such figures have largely been reduced to talk of their fundraising skill or excessive expense accounts. Few suggest that they are people we should actually admire.
Similarly, in the churches there is a stunning lack of models. This is not merely the fault of the neo-Gantries who have taken over much of American Christianity but of other Protestant sects that say not a mumblin' word about the theological hijacking by the right and who offer little alternative in such areas as social justice and world peace. Judaism, which once helped carry the banner for social change, has largely abandoned that field in favor of supporting Israel. As for the Catholics, the best they can do is try to find ways to prove that they're not a bunch of perverts. The best we can do is applaud a bishop from South Africa and a lama from Tibet.
The dearth of greatness is most painfully obvious perhaps in the nation's capital, in its politics, think tanks and media. To be sure, a pantomime is performed, but everyone knows it is just for television. Bush compares himself to Roosevelt, Koppel pretends he's Murrow, but nobody's really fooled. The disappearance of greatness - whether rightly or wrongly recognized as such - is common throughout American society - from football coaches to moral leaders. In the end we are left with Ben Affleck and Oprah Winfrey.
Part of the problem was identified as far back as the 1920s by Julien Benda in his book, The Treason of the Intellectuals: "At the very top of the scale of moral values [the intellectuals] place the possession of concrete advantages, of material power and the means by which they are procured; and they hold up to scorn the pursuit of truly spiritual advantages, of non-practical or disinterested values."
Instead of being outsiders, critics and moral observers, the American intelligentsia have become players accepting many of the values of the system they should be scorning.
Benda listed some of these values:
- "The extolling of courage at the expense of other virtues. . .
- "The extolling of harshness and the scorn for human love -- pity, charity, benevolence. . .
- "The teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt."
In my last book, Why Bother?, I wrote:
[Older Americans] remember the victories and their celebrations; they remember Norman Rockwell men standing motionless for the national anthem in baseball stadiums with fedoras held over their hearts; a government that did more than regulate or arrest you; politicians who were revered; newscasters who were trusted; and music that dripped syrup over our spirits and made them sweet and sticky. They remember when there was a right and wrong and who and what belonged with each, whether it was true or not. They remember a time when those in power lied and were actually able to fool us. They remember what a real myth was like even when it was false, cruel, deceptive, and the property of only a few.
Now, despite the improved economic and social status of women and minorities, despite decades of economic progress, despite Velcro, SUVs, MTV, NASA, DVD, cell phones, and the Internet you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. We neither enjoy our myths nor our reality. We hate our politicians, ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed natural habitats, created the nation's first downwardly mobile generation, stagnated their parent's income, and removed the jobs of each to distant lands. We have created rapacious oligopolies of defense and medicine, frittered away public revenues and watched indifferently as, around the world, the homeless and the miserable pile up. Our leaders and the media speak less and less of freedom, democracy, justice, or of their own land. Perhaps most telling, we are no longer able to react, but only to gawk.
Too be sure, many of the symbols of America remain, but they have become crude -- desperately or only commercially imitative of something that has faded. We still stand for the Star Spangled Banner, but we no longer know what to do while on our feet. We still subscribe to the morning paper but it reads like stale beer. And some of us even still vote, but expect ever less in return. Where once we failed to practice our principles, now we no longer even profess to honor them.
INDICATORS
If this seems like a somewhat backwards approach to naming the real villains, it is intended to be. Our politicians, bad as many of them are, in the end are mainly symptoms of our disintegration. A strong country would not have fallen for as flagrant a fraud as Ronald Reagan or George Bush, nor ones as cleverly corrupt as the Clintons.
It is fair to say, however, that much of our decline began with the Reagan administration and, without exception, has continued since. The evidence for this is strewn across the landscape, but here are just 25 things that have gotten worse in the past 25 years:
1. Real income of Americans
2. Decline in wealth of the bottom 40%
3. Number of older families with pensions
4. Foreign debt as a percent of GDP
5. Personal bankruptcies
6. Housing foreclosures
7. Annual personal savings rate of families
8. Corruption in politics
9. Number of people in prison
10. Drug induced deaths despite drug war
11. Civil liberties lost as result of drug war and war on terror
12. Pensions that include health care benefits
13. Number of families without health insurance
14. Numbers of corporations controlling most of the media
15. Public trust in major media
16. Time children spend playing
17. Divorce rate
18. Increase in wealth of wealthiest senators
19. Decline in voting participation
20. Number of registered lobbyists on Capitol Hill
21. Wages of recent male high school grads
22. Wages of bottom ten percent of workers
23. Ratio of executive to worker pay
24. Decline in real value of minimum wage
25. Harassment of young people for minor offenses
It is particularly telling that in the past thirty years, America has passed more laws than it did in its first two centuries, a sign of a country that has lost its way and trying desperately to compensate by making the results of its failures illegal.
CAUSES OF DECAY
There are innumerable contributing factors for what has happened to America, but here are a few that might escape notice:
ABUSE OF MYTHOLOGY - America has always been a high myth country. Only 13% believe that God was not involved in the evolution of human life. One poll found that 61% believed that Genesis is literally true, sixty percent believe in Noah's ark, and a third believe in ghosts. Americans believe that over half the people in the world speak English (actually it's closer to 20%). Ironically, Americans' mythological inclinations often have more in common with the currently hated Muslims than with many Europeans.
Such myths are not novel developments, so why is it that we find them mattering so much these days? One answer is that while the general populace chooses what to believe, they are heavily influenced by their leaders as to what these beliefs mean. Thus, while ethnic prejudice is a widespread human trait, it takes a Hitler or southern white politicians to give it an actively vicious role. In both cases, the argument blamed society's problems on a minority, pandering to myths and twisting them into a new and virulent form.
Similarly today, we find the Republican Party pandering to religious myths, but also manipulating them to its own perverted advantage to blame groups like gays or women who have freed themselves from traditional roles. We have always had fundamentalist Christians in this country; what is different is that they once voted the Democratic ticket. Today their myths have been rhetorically twisted against their own interests - including their substantial economic, educational, and environmental problems - and turned towards irrelevant targets that deflect the blame from those truly responsible. In a similar way, Hitler initially used Jews as a cause of Germany's economic problems, but in the end had them actually taking jobs from Germans by forced labor in concentration camps. In a similar way, poor southern whites were kept in their place by being convinced it was all the blacks' fault, which helped to keep down the wages of both groups.
Such cynical behavior can come to no good end. And in the process, the culture that accepts such a redefinition of its own myths becomes a prisoner of the myth twisters, causing it to turn - as in the present case - not to Christ but to a Karl Rove or George Bush for an understanding of what faith means. While plenty of cultures have thrived on mythological faith, it is impossible to do so when faith becomes a massive fraud.
TELEVISION - Television is attacked by both left and right for its values, but its deepest threat to American culture actually comes from its omnipresence. As Marshall McLuhan put it to Wired magazine: "The real message of media today is ubiquity. It is no longer something we do, but something we are part of. It confronts us as if from the outside with all the sensory experience of the history of humanity. "
The semiotician Marshall Blonsky called it a semiosphere, "a dense atmosphere of signs triumphantly permeating all social, political and imaginative life and, arguably, constituting our desiring selves as such."
Television makes all values its prisoner, whether the guard is Bill O'Reilly or Charlie Rose; and so ultimately, and inevitably, whatever culture is watching loses itself to the tube.
Television has had another bad effect. Before it came along, a good politician was typically someone with high social intelligence, someone who knew how to react to human beings and human situations. TV has largely eliminated that need, favoring (and encouraging) a form of high functioning autism in which political rhetoric becomes a continuous feedback loop often unrelated to the situation in which the politician is placed or the issues being raised. Thus, television has become the means by which leaders have escaped their own culture, and their culture has lost contact with them.
THE CORPORATIZATION OF CULTURE - Increasingly, the language and values of our culture are that of corporations, something that became fashionable in the Reagan administration and has been cursing us ever since. It is so rampant that even the band Metallica pondered whether it should have a mission statement.
Among the values of this corporate culture is the elevation of managers and salespersons to iconic status. Fifty years ago this would have been considered a joke, but today it is widely accepted. Inherent in this bizarre value system is the inference that those who make or create things are less important than those who manage or sell them. In other words, as a matter of government, economic, and intellectual policy, the content of our culture is no longer as important as how well it can be marketed. Any culture with such priorities does not have a long life expectancy.
FAILED COMMUNITIES AND FORGOTTEN STORIES - A functioning culture is full of communities and stories. But the dominant corporate values of our culture are opposed to both. As Wendell Barry told the National Trust for Historic Preservation, "Where we are is a world dominated by a global economy that places no value whatsoever on community or community coherence. In this economy, whose business is to set in contention things that belong together, you can do nothing more divisive than to assert the claims of community. This puts you immediately at odds with powerful people to whom the claims of community mean nothing, who ignore the issues of locality, who recognize no neighbors and are loyal to no place."
When developers announced plans for a neo-traditional "village" named Frijoles near Santa Fe some years ago, Olivia Tsosie wrote in Designer/Builder magazine about the difference between a true village and the proposed project: "A village is an autonomous social unit, with a reason for existing where it is. . . What is a suburb? A dependent social unit with no internal reason for its existence. . . Frijoles lacks work, resources, kinship, political or religious independence, and cohesion. . . A village is a not-for-profit, organic, open-ended, human-scale social event, which becomes visible in its buildings and pathways."
Try telling that to either your city's planning office or the World Trade Organization or even MSNBC.
A functioning culture also needs coherent stories. The struggle for civil rights, for example, gained new heart and substance when the black power movement began telling more stories and demanding that they be heard. But American culture, as Studs Terkel says, has become one of "forgotten stories." We have developed what he calls "national Alzheimer's disease."
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Dismal as all this may sound, we need look no further than the European Union to realize that while cultures may collapse, the life of those in them goes on, absent some more brutal cause such as war, disease or genocide. Besides, as Kroeber noted, "Even before they have come mainly loose pieces or skeleton, another and younger civilization is usually ready to step into their place; or, if there is none such in the vicinity, a new civilization may slowly integrate out of the debris of its indigenous predecessor."
The truly scary possibility - and remember Kroeber was writing long before the rise of television or economic globalization - is that a "single, essentially uniform, world-wide civilization" supplants all the ones of the past: "What then, when the exhausted, repetitive stage is reached, and there is no new rival culture to take over responsibility and opportunity and start fresh with new values. . . ?"
What is tragic about the disintegration of American culture is the promise it held, the freedoms it created, the hope it sustained. The single common thread behind the forces that led to its collapse was greed: national greed, economic greed, lust for a greater audience and so forth. As Jefferson predicted, "They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights."
On the other hand, the scattered remnants are still there - certainly larger in scale, say, than the early American colonies that adopted the Constitution yet still lost in the miasma of the paranoid, prevaricating, gluttonous parody of America the larger culture has become. Those who would preserve the better America and recreate from its damaged remains are not naive fools; they are the new founding fathers and mothers of a time and place still to come. Nor are they fantasizing. Any place, any community, any gathering can become what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, an oasis of freedom, decency and hope, in which a new culture can take sprout. Name it, enjoy it, use it. It's the best we have at the moment.
As for the rest of America, it is long past time to drop the pretense. As I was walking through one of our frightened airports I heard the real motto of our land repeated over and over: "Caution, the moving walkway is about to end." It's true. We're on our own now.
Showing posts with label CULTURAL DECAY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CULTURAL DECAY. Show all posts
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
GETTING READY TO DEAL WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA
It is now reasonable to think about Barack Obama becoming our next president. There are a number of significant virtues in this, such as the end of the dismal Bush-Clinton-Bush era of corruption, corporatization and cultural decay. Such as our first reasonably honest president in over 30 years. Such as a president desiring not just a more powerful America but a better one. Such as a president who might deal with other countries decently and not as a schoolyard bully.
On the other hand we will still have a president who supports the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind law, the basic fallacies of the war on terror, the continued abuse of the war on drugs and a medical industry controlled by profiteering insurance companies. He also appears largely indifferent to the collapse of constitutional government. There is nothing liberal, progressive or enlightened in any of these positions and it is a marker of the dismal state of liberalism that Obama has not been called on them.
Instead of mindlessly shouting "Yes, we can," liberals and progressives should be telling the Obama crowd, "Yes, but."
They could take a few lessons from the GOP rightwing which, even with the nomination all but sewed up, has still been able to force John McCain to change his positions on a number of key matters. Even when they lack a majority, they know how to stand their ground and shape the politics of the situation.
Liberals, on the other hand, not only never once forced Clinton to back down on one of his conservative moves, they never even tried. The same pattern is now clearly growing with Obama.
Liberals didn't used to be like that. They understood - as the GOP right does today - that politics is a two front war: one front takes on the other party and the second front confronts elements of your own party with which you disagree.
This was obvious when liberals had to deal with the likes of George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Richard Daley or Camine DeSapio. Today, however, this same constituency - so deep into iconic rather than programmatic politics - is happy to help any Democrat enter the White House with no questions asked as long as the candidate, like a fine wine or classy car, adds gloss to their own image.
The effect of this phenomenon is likely to be quite different with Obama than it was with Clinton. Clinton, after all, was a con artist who corrupted others even as he enjoyed his own corruption. Further, the falsely premised enthusiasm he inspired was largely used for the benefit of himself and those close to him.
Obama is a more traditional politician, flawed to be sure, but without the depth of cynicism that propelled the Clintons and their friends. I imagine at times that as president he might be a bit like Dwight Eisenhower, placidly non-productive, occasionally exploited by corrupt friends, but mainly running the country like it was the world's largest 7-11, adequate but unchanging. Hope will be replaced by calm.
The advantage of this is that you have a president who is not going to do anything as stupid as invade Iraq or start a war with Russia. On the other hand, when the Eisenhower administration ended we found ourselves at the beginning of an era we now know as the Sixties. Imposed tranquility can keep a lot from coming to the surface, but only for so long.
The other possibility is that Obama will be a Jimmy Carter-like transitional figure. Carter served as the bridge between New Deal-Great Society social democracy and the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush robber baron neo-capitalism that was waiting on the other side of the Seventies. In a similar way, Obama - far too careful and conservative to actually fulfill the hopes he has aroused - may at least ease us from the Reagan era in which we still suffer to something demonstrably better. Sometime after his tenure, we might actually discover a reason for hope.
We can, of course, only guess. A major recession could quickly raise the level of public impatience with the lies of neo-capitalism and put aside Obama's caution. America's fourth great awakening - the religious revival some believe began on the left in the Sixties only to end up later as a major tool of the right, could wear itself out. What we may actually be seeing in the fundamentalist fervor of Obama's supporters is a sign of the transfer of faith from God back to politics again. It has been noted that after earlier great awakenings, something positive happened: the American revolution, the abolition movement and later the rise of progressive politics.
We can only guess, but it is safe to say that the excessive enthusiasm for the gossamer promise of Obama suggests that something important is happening well beyond the candidate himself. He just seems to have been at the right place at the right time - exploiting but not controlling.
In any case, if all goes about as well as can be expected these days, beginning on January 20 we will be introduced for the first time to the real Barack Obama. Hope and other cliches will take a back seat to budget and bills.
It is reasonable to expect to find a man far more timid than we have been led to believe. It is interesting to learn only just recently from Vanity Fair that Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review on the 19th ballot, as the overtly compromise candidate. This compromise law student would grow into a man who would promise to put right-wingers like Chuck Hagel in his cabinet, notably without similar promises to Democratic progressives or members of the Green Party. Compromise is clearly his safe haven; he is far more concerned with not doing wrong than with doing right.
And he is a lawyer. It is popular to consider that an asset for a politician, even though nearly half the members of our dysfunctional legislatures are lawyers, a job otherwise held by less than one percent of our population.
Observers as far back as de Tocqueville have railed against the American tendency to overload its politics with attorneys. And if you look at the record of lawyer presidents it's pretty mixed. We've had 26 of them. With the exception of four founding fathers, Abraham Lincoln and FDR, the list also includes Millard Fillmore, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Hardly an argument you want to present to the jury.
My view is that lawyers in politics tend to be okay if they are clearly on your side. Otherwise they can be a pain in the butt. When people complained to me that John Edwards was a trial lawyer, I would respond, "Yeah, but he would be our trial lawyer."
The other good lawyers are those for whom the law is simply a part of their life, informing it but not inspiring or guiding it, as in the case of FDR and Lincoln.
But Obama appears to be a lawyer through and through, which is why, for example, his healthcare plan is so awful. A pointlessly complex miasma designed for no higher purpose than to keep the insurance industry off his back. If you watched that recent debate in which attorneys Obama and Clinton spent a half hour trying to wriggle around the politics of the issue, you'd had little idea that they were actually talking about a large number of ill people not being able to afford to be ill because of the insurance industry.
In short, lawyers like Obama are great for handling divorces and settling disputes at the Harvard Law Review - perhaps even in the Mid East - but you don't want them to lead movements. Their minds are too weighed down with caveats.
So if you want anything really good to happen in an Obama administration you will have break through the infinite subsections and footnotes of his brain and convince him that it is, on balance, better and easier to do the right thing.
Obama is an empty vessel. If liberals and progressives are as pathetically obsequious towards Obama as they were towards Clinton, that vessel will be filled with the desires of large financial institutions, health insurance oligopolies and foreign policy experts attempting to compensate for hormonal insecurities by invading this or that. And Obama will end his term with the status of Reid or Pelosi rather than of JFK.
It could be happen differently if liberals and progressives were to follow the techniques of the civil rights movement with the Democrats or the contemporary GOP right, a politically sophisticated blend of intramural pressure and cooperation.
It could begin with a list of no more than a half dozen demands that would become as familiar to the media and the public as have such rightwing nemeses as abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.
Single-payer healthcare and an end to American military invasions should be top contenders for the list because they already have sizable constituencies, media attention and are embarrassing to the Democratic Party establishment.
But first, an awful lot of people have to get their heads straight, starting with the poodle libs who have done so much damage to the cause of positive change by their loyalty to deceptive hustlers and their indifference to political substance.
We need a movement in which Obama is a key target, a healthy ally or a major opponent based not on warm and cuddly feelings but on the reality of his reaction to, and participation in, progressive change.
In short, the Obamania needs to die on Inauguration Day, replaced by a movement to end American imperialism, restore the Constitution, unravel the evils of neo-capitalism and instill some eco-sanity. It will be the strength of such a movement, and not the new president's virtues, that will largely determine whether he does the right thing and whether the right things happens.
If, on the other hand, we just wait for Obama, we will wake up one morning and the words on our lips will not be "Yes, we can" but "Why the hell didn't we?"
On the other hand we will still have a president who supports the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind law, the basic fallacies of the war on terror, the continued abuse of the war on drugs and a medical industry controlled by profiteering insurance companies. He also appears largely indifferent to the collapse of constitutional government. There is nothing liberal, progressive or enlightened in any of these positions and it is a marker of the dismal state of liberalism that Obama has not been called on them.
Instead of mindlessly shouting "Yes, we can," liberals and progressives should be telling the Obama crowd, "Yes, but."
They could take a few lessons from the GOP rightwing which, even with the nomination all but sewed up, has still been able to force John McCain to change his positions on a number of key matters. Even when they lack a majority, they know how to stand their ground and shape the politics of the situation.
Liberals, on the other hand, not only never once forced Clinton to back down on one of his conservative moves, they never even tried. The same pattern is now clearly growing with Obama.
Liberals didn't used to be like that. They understood - as the GOP right does today - that politics is a two front war: one front takes on the other party and the second front confronts elements of your own party with which you disagree.
This was obvious when liberals had to deal with the likes of George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Richard Daley or Camine DeSapio. Today, however, this same constituency - so deep into iconic rather than programmatic politics - is happy to help any Democrat enter the White House with no questions asked as long as the candidate, like a fine wine or classy car, adds gloss to their own image.
The effect of this phenomenon is likely to be quite different with Obama than it was with Clinton. Clinton, after all, was a con artist who corrupted others even as he enjoyed his own corruption. Further, the falsely premised enthusiasm he inspired was largely used for the benefit of himself and those close to him.
Obama is a more traditional politician, flawed to be sure, but without the depth of cynicism that propelled the Clintons and their friends. I imagine at times that as president he might be a bit like Dwight Eisenhower, placidly non-productive, occasionally exploited by corrupt friends, but mainly running the country like it was the world's largest 7-11, adequate but unchanging. Hope will be replaced by calm.
The advantage of this is that you have a president who is not going to do anything as stupid as invade Iraq or start a war with Russia. On the other hand, when the Eisenhower administration ended we found ourselves at the beginning of an era we now know as the Sixties. Imposed tranquility can keep a lot from coming to the surface, but only for so long.
The other possibility is that Obama will be a Jimmy Carter-like transitional figure. Carter served as the bridge between New Deal-Great Society social democracy and the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush robber baron neo-capitalism that was waiting on the other side of the Seventies. In a similar way, Obama - far too careful and conservative to actually fulfill the hopes he has aroused - may at least ease us from the Reagan era in which we still suffer to something demonstrably better. Sometime after his tenure, we might actually discover a reason for hope.
We can, of course, only guess. A major recession could quickly raise the level of public impatience with the lies of neo-capitalism and put aside Obama's caution. America's fourth great awakening - the religious revival some believe began on the left in the Sixties only to end up later as a major tool of the right, could wear itself out. What we may actually be seeing in the fundamentalist fervor of Obama's supporters is a sign of the transfer of faith from God back to politics again. It has been noted that after earlier great awakenings, something positive happened: the American revolution, the abolition movement and later the rise of progressive politics.
We can only guess, but it is safe to say that the excessive enthusiasm for the gossamer promise of Obama suggests that something important is happening well beyond the candidate himself. He just seems to have been at the right place at the right time - exploiting but not controlling.
In any case, if all goes about as well as can be expected these days, beginning on January 20 we will be introduced for the first time to the real Barack Obama. Hope and other cliches will take a back seat to budget and bills.
It is reasonable to expect to find a man far more timid than we have been led to believe. It is interesting to learn only just recently from Vanity Fair that Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review on the 19th ballot, as the overtly compromise candidate. This compromise law student would grow into a man who would promise to put right-wingers like Chuck Hagel in his cabinet, notably without similar promises to Democratic progressives or members of the Green Party. Compromise is clearly his safe haven; he is far more concerned with not doing wrong than with doing right.
And he is a lawyer. It is popular to consider that an asset for a politician, even though nearly half the members of our dysfunctional legislatures are lawyers, a job otherwise held by less than one percent of our population.
Observers as far back as de Tocqueville have railed against the American tendency to overload its politics with attorneys. And if you look at the record of lawyer presidents it's pretty mixed. We've had 26 of them. With the exception of four founding fathers, Abraham Lincoln and FDR, the list also includes Millard Fillmore, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Hardly an argument you want to present to the jury.
My view is that lawyers in politics tend to be okay if they are clearly on your side. Otherwise they can be a pain in the butt. When people complained to me that John Edwards was a trial lawyer, I would respond, "Yeah, but he would be our trial lawyer."
The other good lawyers are those for whom the law is simply a part of their life, informing it but not inspiring or guiding it, as in the case of FDR and Lincoln.
But Obama appears to be a lawyer through and through, which is why, for example, his healthcare plan is so awful. A pointlessly complex miasma designed for no higher purpose than to keep the insurance industry off his back. If you watched that recent debate in which attorneys Obama and Clinton spent a half hour trying to wriggle around the politics of the issue, you'd had little idea that they were actually talking about a large number of ill people not being able to afford to be ill because of the insurance industry.
In short, lawyers like Obama are great for handling divorces and settling disputes at the Harvard Law Review - perhaps even in the Mid East - but you don't want them to lead movements. Their minds are too weighed down with caveats.
So if you want anything really good to happen in an Obama administration you will have break through the infinite subsections and footnotes of his brain and convince him that it is, on balance, better and easier to do the right thing.
Obama is an empty vessel. If liberals and progressives are as pathetically obsequious towards Obama as they were towards Clinton, that vessel will be filled with the desires of large financial institutions, health insurance oligopolies and foreign policy experts attempting to compensate for hormonal insecurities by invading this or that. And Obama will end his term with the status of Reid or Pelosi rather than of JFK.
It could be happen differently if liberals and progressives were to follow the techniques of the civil rights movement with the Democrats or the contemporary GOP right, a politically sophisticated blend of intramural pressure and cooperation.
It could begin with a list of no more than a half dozen demands that would become as familiar to the media and the public as have such rightwing nemeses as abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.
Single-payer healthcare and an end to American military invasions should be top contenders for the list because they already have sizable constituencies, media attention and are embarrassing to the Democratic Party establishment.
But first, an awful lot of people have to get their heads straight, starting with the poodle libs who have done so much damage to the cause of positive change by their loyalty to deceptive hustlers and their indifference to political substance.
We need a movement in which Obama is a key target, a healthy ally or a major opponent based not on warm and cuddly feelings but on the reality of his reaction to, and participation in, progressive change.
In short, the Obamania needs to die on Inauguration Day, replaced by a movement to end American imperialism, restore the Constitution, unravel the evils of neo-capitalism and instill some eco-sanity. It will be the strength of such a movement, and not the new president's virtues, that will largely determine whether he does the right thing and whether the right things happens.
If, on the other hand, we just wait for Obama, we will wake up one morning and the words on our lips will not be "Yes, we can" but "Why the hell didn't we?"
Monday, July 09, 2007
FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: FIVE YEARS OF FAILURE
Sam Smith
In 1986, I was asked to give a toast at the fifth anniversary celebration of the DC Community Humanities Council. Here is what I said:
Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.
It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes, the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan.
It is an era when we propose to devise the most complex weapons system ever created, but when we go to explain it to people, our government feels compelled to use comic book stick figures on television. We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem.
It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that the market forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.
And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing left to manage, finalize and facilitate. And there will be no one left to build anything.
So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be "renewed by repeated exercises of the senses." If not, "the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen."
The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. It has engaged in repeated exercise of the senses with an integrity, decency, fairness, sensitivity and good humor rarely seen in this town anymore. In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more.
In 1986, I was asked to give a toast at the fifth anniversary celebration of the DC Community Humanities Council. Here is what I said:
Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.
It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes, the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan.
It is an era when we propose to devise the most complex weapons system ever created, but when we go to explain it to people, our government feels compelled to use comic book stick figures on television. We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem.
It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that the market forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.
And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing left to manage, finalize and facilitate. And there will be no one left to build anything.
So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be "renewed by repeated exercises of the senses." If not, "the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen."
The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. It has engaged in repeated exercise of the senses with an integrity, decency, fairness, sensitivity and good humor rarely seen in this town anymore. In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
A PHILISTINE AT THE GATES
ONE OF THE MORE enjoyable conspiracies in which I have been involved was helping to start the DC Community Humanities Council, which just celebrated its 25 years anniversary. At the time, every state as well as Guam, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico had a humanities council, but not the capital colony. This was not accidental. Beyond the normal indifference shown to the city by the federal government was the fact that DC was where Congress met and if the local humanities council did anything untoward it could hurt the humanities across the nation.
But the Marion Barry administration was putting on the heat, and finally the NEH began looking for some safe, responsible, non-trouble-making citizens to form the council. At one point they got the list up to 400 names, and I remember a worried looking NEH official coming to our office and interviewing me.
In the end, the vetting down to seven founding members wasn't particularly effective. Not only did they let me in but also Rod French of George Washington University, whose scholarship included a close look at America's free thinkers, the very freethinking author Sophy Burnham, the similarly liberated poet Ethelbert Miller and Del Lewis, later head of NPR and also ambassador to South Africa, who was frequently excellent even before they made him an Excellency.
At the time I noted, "I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions."
The group was - and remains - the only urban humanities council in the country. It consisted of three blacks, one latino and three whites, four academics and three philistines, and four men and three women. In another first for humanities councils, it had co-chairs, one black and one white.
So on paper in 1981 we looked admirably diverse. What the NEH perhaps wasn't expecting was that we were actually quite unified, got on exceptionally well, had lots of fun, and right under NEH chair William Bennett's nose funded things like a film on liberation theology and another on the role of the sleeping car porters in the civil rights movement.
As a philistine on the council I tried to explain to my readers what a humanities was: "It's probably worthwhile for a city with a budget of over a billion dollars to spend S300,000 on something that only our souls say is cost-effective. . .
"So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future as well as exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.
"If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along."
After five years of the Reagan administration I wasn't so sure. Speaking at the fifth anniversary I said,
"Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.
"It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan. . .
"We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem. It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that economics forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.
"And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing to manage, finalize and facilitate. There will be no one left to build anything.
"So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be 'renewed by repeated exercises of the senses.' If not, 'the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.'
"The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. . . In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more."
Twenty years later, we are still waiting.
But the Marion Barry administration was putting on the heat, and finally the NEH began looking for some safe, responsible, non-trouble-making citizens to form the council. At one point they got the list up to 400 names, and I remember a worried looking NEH official coming to our office and interviewing me.
In the end, the vetting down to seven founding members wasn't particularly effective. Not only did they let me in but also Rod French of George Washington University, whose scholarship included a close look at America's free thinkers, the very freethinking author Sophy Burnham, the similarly liberated poet Ethelbert Miller and Del Lewis, later head of NPR and also ambassador to South Africa, who was frequently excellent even before they made him an Excellency.
At the time I noted, "I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions."
The group was - and remains - the only urban humanities council in the country. It consisted of three blacks, one latino and three whites, four academics and three philistines, and four men and three women. In another first for humanities councils, it had co-chairs, one black and one white.
So on paper in 1981 we looked admirably diverse. What the NEH perhaps wasn't expecting was that we were actually quite unified, got on exceptionally well, had lots of fun, and right under NEH chair William Bennett's nose funded things like a film on liberation theology and another on the role of the sleeping car porters in the civil rights movement.
As a philistine on the council I tried to explain to my readers what a humanities was: "It's probably worthwhile for a city with a budget of over a billion dollars to spend S300,000 on something that only our souls say is cost-effective. . .
"So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future as well as exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.
"If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along."
After five years of the Reagan administration I wasn't so sure. Speaking at the fifth anniversary I said,
"Five years ago the DC Community Humanities Council was formed, charged with the diffusion of ideas, the encouragement of thought and the inspiration of rational discourse within this our nation's capital. This was a little like trying to sell Bibles in a brothel, and I think that any fair assessment of what has occurred around us since we began would indicate that we have failed miserably. The best efforts of the council and its sainted staff have failed to halt a national and local stampede towards what is perhaps the most anti-humanistic era of our lifetimes.
"It is an era, to be sure, not without ideas and a sense of history but what ideas and what history. It's as if the worst of the past had been resyndicated and put on Channel 20, with none of the other stations working. We draw from the economics of Morgan, Mellon and the British East India Company, the morality of Comstock, the civil liberties of Palmer and McCarthy, the civil rights of Tara, the lifestyle of Babbitt and Gatsby, the religion of Gantry, the political ethics of Teapot Dome, the business ethics of Ponzi, the gentleness of Nietzsche, the altruism of Ayn Rand, the ecological sensitivity of General Sherman, the spiritualism of Warren Gameliel Harding, the imagination of Rutherford Hayes the brilliance of Franklin Pierce, the expressiveness of Calvin Coolidge and the evolutionary theories of William Jennings Bryan. . .
"We have become the first society to know more about the external world than we do about ourselves. And now we even seem to be losing the ability to talk or write about the problem. It is an era in which, like the fifties, the man in the gray flannel suit is in the ascendancy, but unlike the fifties, when he was viewed with the ambivalence that economics forces upon us, he or she is now a cultural role model, and, unbelievably, even considered hip, charismatic and sexy.
"And it is an era in which we know how to promote, facilitate merge, network, manage, integrate, finalize and bottom line, but are losing the ability to make or to create. I have a nightmare that one day the country will awake and discover that there is nothing to manage, finalize and facilitate. There will be no one left to build anything.
"So we have failed -- here in the jaws of the lion -- but I would argue that given the powers arrayed against the humanistic ideal, failure has been the only sane and honorable course. And the failure, one hopes, is only temporary. Long ago, John Locke warned of the constant decay of ideas, and how they must be 'renewed by repeated exercises of the senses.' If not, 'the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.'
"The print is fading, but, thanks in part to this band of happy humanistic warriors, it could have been a lot worse. . . In a city that is obsessed with style, it is one of the few real class acts. So a toast to the Council for all it has done and will do and to the humanistic spirit. May we live to see it once more."
Twenty years later, we are still waiting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)