we the sheeple

I came across this phrase in a letter to the Eugene Register and thought it was pretty appropriate to the American state of mind in 2006.  Next week’s elections may be one of our last chances to work within the system and pull the flock back from the abyss.

Here’s one way to do it, by makng calls for MoveON.  I’ve got to admit, making phone calls is not my forte.  Three weeks of telemarketing eight hours a day when I was sixteen just about did me in.  But for those more comfortable with the phone, Move ON is a very effective organization and your calls could make the difference between a Democratically controlled Congress or the continued demise of our democracy.

To check out their Call for Change program visit http//www.callforchange.org  and click the want more infor? link on the bottom.

I’m not laughing

The other day my daughter sent me an irate email about a fellow graduate student who plans to dress up as Jon Benet Ramsey for Halloween.  Her roommate and close friend found this hilarious.  I mentioned it to my husband–he thought it was funny too.  I agree with my daughter.  I think it’s disgusting.  What is so amusing about a murdered child?

My daughter has been long maligned for having “no sense of humor”, and I know a sense of humor is a good thing to have.  It’s always one of the perennial characteristics, along with liking long walks on the beach, listed in personals ads.  But I’ve always thought of a sense of humor as the ability to laugh at yourself, to not take yourself overly seriously.  I don’t think it has to do with not taking the suffering of other people seriously.

People in this society–even otherwise caring, intelligent people–have grown very abstracted in their perception of events outside their personal universe.  It’s as if the media representation of a person or event has gotten confused with the physical reality of the person or event. When physical reality becomes virtual then everything becomes a story, and by definition, entertainment.  Don’t like it? You can always change the channel or put down the book.

People rarely feel that flippant about something that actually touches their own lives.  That’s why a true “sense of humor” is such a rare quality.

It’s a frequent comment these days that a lot of people are getting their news directly-and only–from political humor shows like Jon Stewart.  I don’t know whether this is actually true or not, but if it is, I find it disturbing.  Don’t get me wrong–I’ve got nothing against JOn Stewart.  He’s a very astute and funny guy.  But he’s not a journalist.  If he wants to be one, let him be a serious one and make jokes in his free time.  Humor might be a way of coping with a devastating reality, but it also has the effect of distancing that reality and allowing people to laugh about it instead of taking any serious action to resolve the situation.

Some things just aren’t funny.  Som things are.  Dick Cheney shooting his hunging mate in the face was definitely worth a few laughs.  Even Foley’s pedophilic emails are semi amusing.  But murdered children are not.  And while it might be funny to watch the Bush administration flail about making excuses for the mess in Iraq, real people are dying.  No amoung of jokes are going to make me laugh about that.

dead white males

Since I wrote my last post concerning the battle for Western Civilization I’ve read some interesting articles in the New Yorker.  They’ve done a good job of explaining some of the theoretical underpinnings of the neoconservative worldview:  writings by Alqaeda that do plot out plans for world domination; references to a “caliphate” as a step in those plans; and a definition of “Islamist”.  This term, which struck me as a perversion of the English language on the order of “Christianist” or “Judaist”, apparently refers to membership in a specific Islamic Brotherhood organization.  I’ve even discovered the origin of the term “Islamic fascism” (dissected in a previous post) .  Its an invention of writer Christopher Hitchens, an armchair warrior who transitioned from “socialism” to neoconservatism after Sept. 11 2001.  Hitchens, an Oxford graduate, should have at least retained his grasp of the English language, if not his political intelligence.

Even the AlQaeda operatives refer to their battle with the “West”.

So I must be operating under a different concept of Western civilization than all these folks.

I think of Western civilization as having its roots in the stuff you study in Humanities 101, such as:  all those classic myths that laid the basis for the foundation of Judaism (the root of both Christianity and Islam); scientific inquiry and the primacy of rational, linear thinking; the will to explore and the idea of  manifest destiny; materialism; the belief in the value of technological progress and indeed, of progress itself; belief in the importance of the individual as opposed to the group.  Many of these ideas were prevalent in the Middle East when NOrthern Europe was still full of club-thumping barbarians.

Even in Eastern nations like China and India,  where the predominant religions, such as Buddhism, contradict many of these assumptions, that doesn’t appear to affect how many citizens of these nations live their daily lives.  Those Humanities 101 ideas predominate throughout the world.

The conflict that I see, is not between the “West” and the ”East”, but between the relentless pace, anonymity, and often scary choices of the modern technological world, and an impulse to retreat into a slower, simpler, more defined world where our choices have already been made for us.  That impulse is not unique to Islam.  You see it in the fundamentalist branches of all religions, and sometimes minus any organized religion at all.  It’s an impulse I empathize with, more on some days than others.

Lots of people who choose this way of life, the Amish for example, bother no one.  The problem arises when members of a particular belief sect decide that their way is the only way,, and that the rest of humanity consists of infidels who need to be converted or destroyed.

That’s where the battle truly lies, between tolerance and intolerance. It’s between true believers like George W and true believers like Osama. I wish we could throw them together in some far corner of the universe, where they could collide, matter and antimatter, and  cancel each other out.

passion and pickup trucks

First, a correction.  The “cradle of Western civilization” I referred to in my last blog is Mesopotamia, not Babylonia.  But the locale is still Iraq.

When I contemplate the red and blue map of the US, I often think Lincoln should have forgotten about the Civil War.  Countless lives would have been saved, slavery would probably have ended anyway, and we would be free of a lot of ignorance, bluster, and religious fundamentalism.

Trouble is, while the South is home to a preponderance of hideous attitudes, its also home to many of my favorite things.  Palm trees, for one.  Barbeque, for another.  And country music.

Country music is melodic.  It’s based on simple chord progressions that are kind to the ear.  Sometimes I think if I were more musically talented, I’d gravitate to more complex, less accessible music.  To an extent that’s true.  I do tend to gravitate to more complex literature and movies, for example. But at some level they still have to be accessible and emotionally potent for me to like them.  Technique without heart is artifice instead of art.

You can hear the words in country music, and I like words, and the magic way lyrics plus music can convey more than either alone.

Country music is passionate.  I’m not talking about the commercialized pap that’s marketed on country music radio stations.  I’m talking about the genuine article–Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash–or what’s now known as alt. country, music that’s expanded on those roots without getting corrupted by blandness and cliches, artists like Gram Parsons (probably the father of them all), Emmy Lou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and James McMurtry. 

There’s a scene in Walk the LIne where a struggling young Johnny Cash is given great advice by his first music producer.  I don’t remember what he said exactly, but it was something on the order of “sing as if your life depended on it”.

I like people who sing like their life depended on it, who distill all that passion into a song, whose faces and voices are weathered with life, whose music is unashamedly raw and genuine.

I used to keep a Garth Brooks tape in my car to punish my children with if they misbehaved.  Even that, (yeah, I know it fits in the commercialized pap category) wasn’t too bad.