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From here in the San
Francisco Bay area in the most recent month have come a
couple more exhibitions of the finger-pointing good
liberals like to indulge. In the Sunday, April 10
edition of The San Francisco Chronicle, Margee
Ensign, a dean at the University of the Pacific, had an
op ed piece lamenting the extents of American ignorance
of the world. As dean of the international studies
program at her institution, she had excellent turf
motives to signal her laments – that more Americans
could attend programs such as she leads. She also
wanted to drum up attendance for an event at her school
that evening, when a president of an African country
would be appearing as honored guest.
A few days later,
Wednesday evening, April 13, at the main branch of the
San Francisco Public Library, Orville Schell took the
stage to receive a lifetime achievement award from a
conglomeration of local literary groups. In his
comments on receiving the award, Schell spoke as the
chair that he is of the graduate program in journalism
at the University of California Berkeley campus, just
across the Bay. "Why don't they listen to us" was the
gist of his remarks – for which he had no answer, just
chagrin that "they" – mainly those in power in
Washington – don't listen or don't need to listen to
anyone outside the corporate classes that Congress
serves. Schell's plaint: that "they" should listen to
people like "us" – especially in view of the ongoing,
badly-planned war in Iraq, the out-of-control national
debt, middle-class job drain, deeper ruts for the
working poor, badly broken health care system, worse
dependence on sprawl-addicting fossil fuels, and
deteriorating public sectors of schools, parks,
libraries, and transport.
The fact that "they"
won't listen to "us" glides into the facts of how the
super rich of our corporate classes are getting
astronomically richer. These facts show in how
Republican and Democrat alike in Washington go on
serving an agenda that, as Jonathan Alter wrote in the
April 25 Newsweek, "comforts the comfortable and
afflicts the afflicted." In the first months alone of
the new Congress, it has closed bankruptcy protections
to the working poor and middle class, restricted lawsuit
actions against corporate powers, refused to raise a
minimum wage keeping millions of working poor sinking
further, and gutted environmental regulations to please
the corporate polluting interests. Congress meanwhile
gave itself another pay raise, gave fossil fuel
industrialists billions in subsidies, and lobbyists and
the very rich more billions in tax loopholes.
University of the
Pacific Dean Ensign and UC-Berkeley chair Schell have
good reason to point their fingers. We indeed live in
cliché scenarios of craven exploitation. But will
extended fingers help? – especially when both good
liberals made their remarks also exhibiting their own
good elevation? Schell made no effort to connect his
concerns to any individual in the audience in front of
him – as if the room were empty of anyone with related
concerns. Ensign made no effort to cite any cultural
life in any countries of the world, where she laments
Americans as being deficient in excitement.
Writing in the recent
March-April Mother Jones, Garret Keizer noted his
chagrin at those with fingers extended. More a liberal
lefty himself, he admitted that those with far right
righteousness understand posturing much better than do
those on his side. A former Episcopalian minister, now
living in the remote, rural, northeastern corner of
Vermont, Keizer respects how, whatever else they do,
fingers on the far right point to values for which most
Americans hunger – values many feel lacking in modern
life. Never mind that the millions of those who hunger
for values do so while tootling about in expensive cars
and SUVs, in sprawl culture, where "community" gathers
primarily in WAL*MART and similar consumerism oases.
Bush-Cheney-Rove-Frist-Delay-Limbaugh-Fox News have
reserved "values" for their side, and have been geniuses
orchestrating fingers at "liberals" as if this other
side's secular humanism, trust in science, and love of
foreign films, food, and related multiculturalism have
only been afflicting us with anemia.
The Pope – the new
one, former Hitler Youth, now Benedict XVI – joins the
conservative righteous chorus. In his first remarks
assuming office, he lashed out at the "emptiness" of
much of the modern world, as if, again, materialism were
a global miasma with no values, or only false ones, in
thrall to Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and those secular
humanists with their evolution, genetics, and love of
rain forests.
So great to play the
pointing-fingers game.
But let's look a bit
more closely at the clichés about materialism. Those
"things," sure, may be empty – if we isolate them as
objects. As parts of our lives, however, "stuff" morphs
into parts of our stories, no longer empty of values,
nor superficial or ornamental. Especially cultural
stuff. All of us everywhere in the world live by our
cultural tools, resources, and instruments. They reveal
us. They tell our stories. They locate and can
re-direct our humanity. Cultural "stuff" is as vital
for humans as oxygen and water are for vegetable life
and fetuses, with five categories mediating every one of
us: 1) landscape architecture, 2) clothing, 3) food
presentation, 4) building architecture, and 5) travel
modes. We may choose these styles, or others may for us
(the rub of fixing these choices = our individuality),
but no one can inhabit these five categories free of the
dynamics of how they mediate us. The Pope, bless his
privileged heart, may look at the massed items of the
material world and fail to see the human spirits they
propel. He may jump instead to finger spiritual
emptiness – in others. For him there's lots of
emptiness apart from how he takes for granted his
paintings, choral music, sculpture, mosaics, cathedrals,
jewelry, and vestments of long-flowing skirts in white,
gold, and scarlet.
The Pope flatters
himself. We all do when we look at others and fail to
see that they, too, have stories – human dimensions and
spiritual hungers and tensions – all quite necessarily
interwoven in the stuff all inhabit. The person on
whom the Pope's church was founded spent a good amount
of time in his day among people who did not live
cushioned in the cultural opulence this Pope casually
equates with spirituality. But, then, that person of
two thousand years ago never pointed fingers merely to
show his elevation over the rest of us. He asked
instead that we try to see others as we might ourselves.
Priests, politicians,
and pedagogues, as normal authorities, model for us the
pointing of fingers in generalized denials of humanity
they do not want to see. Others excel, however, in
finding life rich in the spirits of surprise, nuance,
and multiply-leveled complications. We call these
others artists. And we rely on them – we rely chiefly
on our musicians, film makers, writers, and poets – to
tell us how our different landscapes, clothes, foods,
buildings, and other parts of material culture harbor
and propel souls.
Our normal
authorities, tenured in their systems and hierarchies,
love to pretend guarantees – and they're right: they do
marvelously well in turning out those who similarly want
to be careerist clones. But there's no guarantee that
any of us can be artists – and certainly not that we can
be better humans – merely by focusing on cultural
stuff. Landscape, clothing fashions, fast food or long,
leisurely meals, and buildings animate us – as do cars:
just think of how we went car-crazy into sprawl with
hymns as various as "Rocket '88," "Maybelline," "Beep
Beep," "Teen Angel," "Tell Laura I Love Her," "Little
Deuce Coupe," "Dead Man's Curve," "G.T.O.," "Little Old
Lady from Pasadena," "Last Kiss," "Nadine," and "No
Particular Place to Go." Cultural items animate us, but
they do so in no formulaic ways anyway can track (though
some good critics catch good glances). "It's not about
technique," wrote Lester Bangs. The great rock critic
who died in 1982 – lately renown as the character played
by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the Cameron Crowe film,
Almost Famous – writhed at suggestions that
protocols, routines, and other methodologies could
distill art. In "Notes for Review of Lost Highway"
Bangs wrote, "It's not about virtuosity, twenty-five
years at Juilliard, contrapuntal counterpoint, the use
of 6/8 time in a Latin-tinged context." Great music –
the first bridges to unite the races in America – most
vitally came about, Bangs said, at Sam Phillips' Sun
Records in Memphis. This was more than 50 years ago, in
the late 1940s and early e50s when, "Everybody at Sun
was white trash." But the music began to shake the
country. It opened us up with the unorthodox logic
that, "The whole point of American culture is to pick up
any old piece of trash and make it shine with more
facets than the Hope Diamond." No guarantees by
stations of the cross or rosaries. No guarantees by
research protocols or advanced degrees. None for
polling or lobbyist pay-offs.
Homage to Lester
Bangs. The person who edited Bangs' essays into book
form (Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung)
was Greil Marcus, who himself has a book just out. His
new Like a Rolling Stone continues Bangs'
championing of the bravery it takes to break out of the
molds of conventional thinking. The great Bob Dylan
song, "Like a Rolling Stone," whose history Marcus
recounts, itself was perhaps rock'n'roll's greatest dare
to all its listeners to face the fact that most of us
spend much too much time and energy sucking up to power,
to the securities of hierarchy and orthodoxy, the
comfort of repetition, and conventionality's soporific
promises and dead soul authorities. "How does it feel?"
asked Dylan, when we awake from our narcotizing lies.
Can we access the
scenarios of people, the spiritual hum in public roles?
Essaying Differences says yes, that it
starts with looking at real people inhabiting cultures.
We may not be artists yet, but on that road, essaying
such arts of literacy as may yet connect us. |
