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bill c. davis
Award-Winning Playwright, Longtime Common Dreams Contributor Bill C. Davis Dies at 69
Mar 04, 2021
Award-winning playwright, artist, political activist, and veteran Common Dreams contributor Bill C. Davis has died at the age of 69 due to complications from COVID-19.
According to the Washington Post, Davis' death on February 26 at a care facility in Connecticut was confirmed by his sister, Patricia Marks. The newspaper reports that the celebrated author of numerous plays--including the Tony-nominated "Mass Appeal"--had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last month, shortly after being hospitalized with the coronavirus.
As the obituary posted in Deadline details:
Born in Ellenville, NY, and raised in the state's Hudson Valley, Davis attended Catholic schools and, after graduating from Poughkeepsie's Marist College, worked at a residential community for developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed adults in Rhinebeck, NY. He wrote Mass Appeal, about the conflicting personalities of a stern, conservative priest and a younger, rebellious seminarian, during his time in Rhinebeck.
Davis also wrote the screenplay for the 1984 film adaptation of "Mass Appeal" directed by Glenn Jordan, with Jack Lemmon taking the role of the elder priest and Zeljko Ivanek the young upstart.
Discussing the subject matter of "Mass Appeal" in a 2012 interview with the Irish Independent, Davis said beyond the tensions manifested by the life within the Catholic Church, the play is "about what the life of an artist might be. I have a tension within me between the desire to say what people want and to say what they need to hear."
Bill ran an unsuccessful congressional campaign in Connecticut in 2005 as a Green Party candidate.
Starting in 2001, Davis began contributing op-eds and columns on a variety of subjects to Common Dreams.
For more information about his life and works and a Celebration of his Life in the spring, please go to his website: www.billcdavis.com.
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Up Against The Hard Break
Cable news an accomplice to all we have been through these past four years, up to and including January 6, 2021
Jan 06, 2021
Cable news is the default place to watch events, such as the January 6th, 2021 eruption in Washington DC. Apart from bearing witness to the human avalanche flooding the Capitol, we were also subjected to the cliches and shallow phrases being coined on the spot and then repeated by the next hired hand at all cable stations. The insufferable posturing of the well-paid anchors (an ironic appellation for these persons) wears thin quickly. They have been signaling their virtues as they have posed being stunned by the president for four years. In fact, they aren't stunned - or shocked - or speechless, but grateful in their own perverse way. They mug for the camera as they report, "what he has done this time" and under their breath, they thank him for giving them a show for the night.
Gore Vidal called us - the United States of Amnesia. And this isn't about remembering the Russian or French Revolution. Sure - the extreme disparity between rich and poor sets the stage for a siege of government buildings. Yes - feeling for decades that we do not have representative government can become the parched underbrush for a flash wildfire. The current hysterical analysis is aimed at the spark - this strange, bloated man who spit fire at the dry underbrush, and who is, in truth, not an anomaly. He is a logical conclusion of decades of government distrust, and January 6, 2021 was a flaming whirlwind.
So when I hear the indignation and horror from the likes of Tapper, Cooper, Lemon, Todd, Joe, Cuomo - I say, please. You and your handlers and bosses made the monster - gave him air and validity day after day - hour after hour. Cable and Network news stood this man up for all the months leading up to the election and then used him as programming in the ensuing four years.But as the cable stations and their copywriters and personalities reported breathlessly about what was happening before their eyes and their lenses I thought back to 2015/2016 and remembered the months and months that these same stations and personalities had this unbalanced word salad spinner on their "shows" nonstop. He had 2 billion dollars of free air time and an open line to every well-paid personality on every cable channel and network news. Hell - he was a guest on SNL - dancing coolly in a blue light.
He was not a worthy news story - he was entertainment. He had nothing really profound or constructive to say. He was Howard Stern and Jerry Springer and Judge Judy rolled into one inarticulate oil slick. But because Cable and network "news" is NOT commercial-free the powers that be there must book the adrenaline rush. They would cut away to every rally - they let him call in - they bemoaned how unlikable Hillary was - they booked and booked this certifiable case study of a narcissist again and again.
Anderson Cooper regularly would have on his show this very odd spokeswoman for Trump - Katrina Pierson. Also - Kayleigh McEnany would be on with him often. Both were photogenic in a Fox kind of way and Anderson let them say any crazy off-the-wall angry rant they seemed to have prepared. They would spew insane garbage about Hillary - unchecked or even queried by the hapless host, whose only job was to let them unravel in their coiffed, robotic well-spoken way. He kind of smiled in a bemused "get a load of her" way. My question was, what qualified them to be on any show? "Trump campaign spokesperson?" Maybe once - but somehow the bookers at CNN et al thought they were arresting and provocative and somehow the station could measure how much the viewers stayed with the show.
And of course, the main act himself was the crackpot who was the jackpot and all the stations and networks kept pulling the one-armed bandit. Were they unaware of the kindling that populated America? Were they oblivious or indifferent to what toxicity they were piping into the dilated eyes and ears of the malcontents? He was the high-pitched avatar of a certain kind of demented tribal patriotism and it played.
Any media news company's only responsibility is to make sure the ads they sell, mostly to drug companies, are viewed by as many people as possible. So when I hear the indignation and horror from the likes of Tapper, Cooper, Lemon, Todd, Joe, Cuomo - I say, please. You and your handlers and bosses made the monster - gave him air and validity day after day - hour after hour. Cable and Network news stood this man up for all the months leading up to the election and then used him as programming in the ensuing four years.
There needs to be a law. If you call yourself a "NEWS" network, channel, or show - No commercials - No musical underscoring. CNN - Cable NEWS Network - if you are NEWS you are not programming for adrenaline rushes. You report events. Emotions may happen on their own but that cannot be your agenda. Fox NEWS - no commercials. MSNBC - no commercials, graphics, or underscoring. I know this has been well-trod territory but it needs to be revisited. The same way you cannot call certain things medicine - or food - you cannot call what you serve up to the American public NEWS if your eye is on the hard break for the ten things you have to sell before you return to the "urgent" matter at hand.
Trump is just one consequence of this current model. Overall, the statement to all of us with this way of presenting vital, civic, national, international, and political information to us is, your main human value is as a consumer - not as a thinking citizen. In fact, we don't want you thinking, we want as many emotions as we can manipulate out of you. We want you in a state of vulnerable receptivity to products - again, mostly drugs.
I repeat - this needs to be a law. In the meantime, all personalities on these networks, please stop performing and posturing - spare us all your ire and indignation and try to understand how the umbrella under which you function is, with your consent and participation, an accomplice to all we have been through these past four years, up to and including January 6, 2021.
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An Alternate National Food Mandate
America seems to have a romance with disease.
Nov 11, 2020
Here is my National Mandate. Close all fast-food chains. Put orange cone roadblocks on all Dunkin' Donuts drive-thrus. Ban the sale of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The war was not between those two Colas; it was a war against the human body.
The masks mask the elephant in the room. No human being can make a potent immune system with a diet of processed food and sugar. This promiscuous virus seems to have a field day with the obese and the immune-compromised. The national and worldwide addiction to sugar presents a feeding frenzy for a virus that, like all viruses, feeds on sugar. Where are the scientists and leaders who can guide the populations of the world to actually combat the virus by starving it and also by strengthening its targets? We are told to behave like boxers in a corner with our gloves up to our faces as we are pummeled.
We need to resuscitate the slogan Resist and put it at the center of our actual physical bodies. The Thymus gland makes T-cells. Thymus is a Greek word for courage and anger; two strong words that will strengthen resistance.
Ireland determined recently that the rolls produced by the fast-food chain Subway have too much sugar in it to be called bread. This just begins to tell the tale. Biden, Fauci, and the posse of "experts" say nothing about what evolution and nature has made clear - T-cells are our Personal Protective Device. You cannot make powerful T-cells from a Big Mac, fries and Coke or a cream filled, white flour doughnut. A virus can present itself to a human body and a human body armed with healthy T-cells will most likely evict it quickly and not give it a chance to colonize and inflame. The primary exhortation from the top should be about about this aspect of human health.
Government guidance and a support stipend is the best path forward. Like Victory gardens during WWII, there ought to be individual citizen projects of cultivating potent health as the wall of resistance to this virus which, like a predator, will pick out the weak targets in a herd.
I can't speak for the rest of the world but America seems to have a romance with disease. Cable stations exist to sell drugs and as they do, they romanticize disease. The wistful looks of the stricken, the sentimental music, the loving looks of spouse and family on the patient all work to make the disease seem to be a pathway to love and enlightenment, and the patented drug you must take forever will keep you alive long enough to bask in this glow. Hopefully one day we will look at these commercials the way we look at doctor-recommended cigarette ads from the 1950's we now watch on Youtube with horror and macabre amusement.
In the case of COVID, we are presented with numbers and charts and interviews with beleaguered hospital workers. Experts tell us what they know and what they don't know both ending up by the end of the interview to be useless. By omission or myopia, these experts seem to be saying to all of us is, "Eat any junk you want and live any way you care to but wear a mask and wash your hands and stay six feet apart." This has always had the echo of six feet under - a distance that has the hint of death to it.
The ultimate infantilizing of the citizenry - mask, wash up, and go to your room. Not to say that these prescriptions don't have a place at this moment but to me, if this is all you've got, it smacks of impotence and surrender and a serious abdication.
Driving here in Connecticut in the morning I will pass a line at the drive-thru at Dunkin' Donuts - 20 cars long. Burger King will do "no contact delivery." It's not the contact that's the real or only risk factor it's what is being delivered. Processed, sugar-laced food is like sludge in a human body and a human body can only make new cells with what it is being given. The revolution does indeed start in the kitchen.
Until the feckless and myopic experts begin to take this point as seriously as they do the mask instruction, no matter how much obedience they are able to influence, we will continue to have more spikes than the shoe franchise at a Trump golf course.
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A Criminal Trump, GOP Complicity, and Hitler's "Chimera of Conscience"
The forces keeping this chaotic, renegade organism in place are oblivious to the harm they are doing to themselves and indifferent to the harm being claimed by others.
Oct 04, 2019
"I emancipate man from the humiliating chimera which is called conscience. Conscience, like education, mutilates man. I have the advantage of not being restrained by any considerations of a theoretical or moral nature." This from a speech in 1941 where the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin ostensibly quoted Adolf Hitler to exhort those gathered to take the same advice.
"The humiliating chimera of conscience."
In this country, there has been a political and cultural romance with persons who have emancipated themselves from the "humiliating chimera of conscience." Whether it's Santa or God or an internal moral parent figure that audits your actions when no one else is watching, whoever is able to evict that figure from their inner consciousness emerges as a hero in American culture. Lovable gangsters from James Cagney to Tony Soprano to Michael Corleone--getting away with it is the only rule to be honored. When caught: Attack. Rant. Divert. Accuse. (If ever you want to know what Trump is guilty of listen to his accusations. In 2016 saying if he loses it's because the system is rigged--and saying it as he knows the system is being rigged in his favor. Nepotism? Paraphrasing? Treason? Low IQ?)
"Trump is a tumor resulting from toxic elements. It's spreading as Republican senators, congresspersons and voters insist that this is not a disease but a cure."
Getting caught becomes an external problem. There is no internal vexation or examination. People who trouble themselves with conscience do not win. Whether Trump has emancipated himself from conscience or it was never a struggle to begin with is a brief discussion. It's a genetic code it seems enforced by an enabling racist father figure. Money is the only force that will guarantee loyalty. There is no love or moral order. The only verb is grab. Whether money or land or pussy--grab. The humiliating chimera of conscience is either a speed bump or a fatal folly.
The Republicans around this black hole may have liberated themselves from conscience. Being in awe of someone who never had that struggle seals the deal. If there was a doubt in these people that there is a higher moral order or an afterlife, they have chosen to land on the convenient side of, this is it. What you can grab and what you can get away with rules. Lip service to evangelicals adds a certain kind of scum to the pageant.
The loyal voters to this pied piper of chaos are fans, not citizens. I am reminded of a childhood playground experience hearing two young fathers discussing their sons. The son of one of the fathers was with a group setting off cherry bombs the day before in the playground. The cops came and they ran. The one son was the only one nabbed by the cops and brought home to the father. And this father said to his friend, "I didn't punish him for what he did, I punished him because he got caught." That father absorbed a certain American ethos and gave the commandment to his young son.
The chorus of the base is, "Let him get away with it. We wish we could." When Nixon was told there's a cancer on the presidency the allegory implies malignancy. It spreads. Trump is a tumor resulting from toxic elements. It's spreading as Republican senators, congresspersons and voters insist that this is not a disease but a cure.
The only cure is in the hands of the congress--like a pumped up immune system it needs to evict the congealed toxin. The civil war being threatened is a body divided against itself. The operative part of the phrase is: "against itself." The forces keeping this chaotic, renegade organism in place are oblivious to the harm they are doing to themselves and indifferent to the harm being claimed by others.
Conscience means a moment of apology is required. This is not forthcoming from the current criminal at the dock. A verdict of guilty as charged is the remedy. Whether he apologizes or is ushered out of the territory where he is little more than a squatter matters not. The national and international bodies need to know that we are on the mend.
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Time Bombs: A Meditation on Walt Whitman's 200th Birthday
Jun 01, 2019
Trickle down theory applies here. America has a death penalty. America has the largest military in the world and in history. America will not stand being crossed. These moments of spasm and orgy are threads in a cultural fabric. Americans have a right to be enraged because of being crossed or challenged or humiliated.
Of course the question to be asked and rarely answered: what prescription drug was this current killer on? Without an answer to that, the basic anthropological truth about human beings is they will strike depending on the perceived depth of a threat or insult. The intensity of the strike is ratcheted up based on a cultural citizenship where the phrase "shock and awe" has become a national cornerstone. It's a phrase concocted because Americans would get it and accept it and in some cases make it part of their interior weapon stash.
The hardware is always debated. The core nuclear reactor is the subtle and pernicious permission to access this aspect of human nature. Prior to a duel the classic phrase is "I demand satisfaction." This phrase has not been retired in America. It's not pistols at dawn it's a weapon of war whenever.
One has to assume within these human time bombs is a hiss or a scream of "I hate everybody." Or "I'll show you if it's...the last thing I do." A gun settles scores. A gun satisfies the rage of indignation. There must be a sense of relief as a killer sees his targets fall dead. Is it that Americans feel more of a right to that feeling than other nationalities?
When we strap ourselves in at a movie we hand ourselves over to the fantasy of killer justice. The antagonist will get either a bullet in the head - or an arrow in the chest and in a crowded theater--cheers. Each audience member wants to be that person who delivered justice. Above all else - this is how you get justice. Kill.
Today is Walt Whitman's 200th birthday. A friend observed it's better he's not seeing what's happened to his country. He was a wound dresser during the civil war so he knew what men tend to do to each other. I suppose a war of sorts is in progress here - the enemy gets chosen not by geographical location but by a roulette wheel of sudden psychotic combatants. Background checks? First question. Are you a human being? Yes. Sorry--no gun for you.
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On Catholic Boys, Kavanaugh, Women, and Belief
It seems to me now, the way men perceive women is how they perceive life itself.
Sep 24, 2018
Having been one, and having been exposed to Catholic 17 year old young men in Our Lady of Lourdes high school, Dr. Ford's account sounds accurate. As a writer, I was preternaturally inclined toward observing. Also, having been raised with two dynamic sisters I found myself, even then, horrified at the way 17 year old Catholic young men, who were given religious instruction every day, would talk about "girls."
A vivid memory I have was at a senior high dance. In the "boys" room Mike G. was at the urinal and he extended his middle finger for his pal Doug S. to smell, letting his pal know that he had just fingered a girl. Doug S. was awestruck - "Oh Man!" (Much like Billy Bush was enthralled with the way Trump talked about women.)
I thought about the girl - I thought about my sisters. I thought, did this girl like Mike G. - did she trust him? For Mike G., as far as I could tell then, the girl was simply a proving ground; a kind of merit badge to proclaim manhood of a certain kind to a supplicant.
In retrospect, I wonder how much religious training helped to shape young men's views of sex. I also observe now, culturally, what women mean to men. It seems to me now, the way men perceive women is how they perceive life itself. Is "grab" a guiding and noble approach to women - or life?
At 17, I would hear Catholic boys/young men, talk about girls and grade their looks - their breasts - how easy they were. This somehow, as far as I could tell then, secured a level of masculinity in the eyes of cohorts. Catholic boys were often at a disadvantage in the wider urban, secular universe and felt, by the time they reached the age of 17, they had more to prove. And sometimes they needed booze to cancel out the religious scruples that might interfere with their plan of attack.
Culturally, at the time, and I'm not sure how much has really changed, girls were meant to submit. As far as I could tell, this was the thinking: "Men need to dominate and girls want them to dominate and if you don't show your natural ability to dominate, no girl will want anything to do with you." Protests to the contrary from a girl was just a posture to be overcome by the young man. As we've seen in movie after movie a man will grab a woman, kiss her, she resists, he persists - she slaps him - he kisses again - she pushes but finally her arms relax around him and then she is pulling him into her and returning fiercely his kisses. "She just needs to resist to be respectable but really....."
Putting his hand over her mouth, as described by Dr. Ford, sounds likely. You're here for one reason only - to be used as a marker of emerging "manhood." You barely exist. You're here so my pal, Judge, can see what I've got. I'm doing this for him actually, the way Mike G. needed to demonstrate something to Doug S. about his capabilities by letting him get a whiff of his conquest.
The actual truth of the event that has been planted in our mind's eye this past week may or may not be provable, but from my observations on the front line, it is believable.
Soft Targets: The Muddled and Anti-Intellectual American Brains That Made Election Meddling Possible
Has the ability for critical thinking been drummed and drugged out of just enough of the American population?
Jul 18, 2018
Putin asked an interviewer - "Do you think the Russian state could get into the minds of millions of Americans and affect how they will vote?" It's brilliant he asked an "absurd" question he knew the answer to years ago. Yes. Trump voters were soft targets. Who knew there were so many of them? Someone did - and knew which states they were in and the point value of those states.
The covert campaign to confuse and stampede an adequate portion of the American voting population, in a cunningly chosen number of states, had its origin in strategic contempt for the people who have come to be known as, the base.
Whatever verb: meddle, attack; disrupt; insert; interfering; the covert campaign to confuse and stampede an adequate portion of the American voting population, in a cunningly chosen number of states, had its origin in strategic contempt for the people who have come to be known as, the base. (Which, by way, is the English translation of, Al-qaeda. The base.)
Trump voters were the target before they were Trump voters. The prerequisite for expending energy on such an initiative was an analysis of the fears, appetites and intellectual wattage of the targets. These are the people who could be seduced into bad mortgages, Jimmy Swaggart, Colonel Sanders, cabbage patch dolls, Mitch McConnell, the Kardashians, and styrofoam.
It's the soft, muddled collective anti-intellectual center that made success possible. Yes - something sinister did get into the minds of, if not millions, the smartly located thousands. The soft spasmodic brain is now at the head but it was put there by the soft spasmodic guts of the country being fed whoppers. Even the expression - red meat - speaks to this. Feeding his base, "red meat." Disgusting imagery for a metaphysical reality.
It's a daily question - how did this happen? How did someone so persistently referred to as moronic and imbecilic seize the reigns of power? It's what the Mueller investigation is meant to find out. How could this have happened? Is the country that self destructive? Has the ability for critical thinking been drummed and drugged out of just enough of the American population?
The current and feverish fight to protect the American voters from Russian or any manipulation is something that should have happened decades ago. Too late? Poor education, a pervasive vapid culture and a constant massage of the collective lower instincts has spawned a juicy target for whoever or whatever want to bring the classic columns down. A large part of the body politic has been depleted of immunity. It can't resist.
Perhaps this is why the one word which has emerged as a defensive weapon to protect an ever softening target is - resist.
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A Kiss For the Coach - Jim Jordan on the Mat
These "men" should not be in government. They don't respect or feel a need to protect children.
Jul 04, 2018
We had a coach at the Catholic high school I attended - dead now, who treated the boys he coached and to whom he taught gym as if they were there for his pleasure. Hands everywhere - fingers in students' mouths and down pants. He would talk and say goofy things as he allowed his hands to do what he wanted them to do to the obedient and submissive, and in his mind, clueless boys. He was big - brutish - an ignorant swagger.
On a retreat, 40 boys copped to the fact that this was going on. Returning to the school with this reality now exposed the monsignor in charge of the school gathered us all in a classroom and let us know that no one in the years past ever complained about this. He made it clear this man's life would be ruined. He said you will have to sit on a witness stand and have to tell what you say he did. He suggested we all misinterpreted or imagined intent and touch.
One of the basketball players he coached quoted him saying to him often, after the team won a game - "A kiss for the coach?"
Jim Jordan, although a former coach, did not request a kiss from anyone, but silence. He had the role of the monsignor. Whatever he knew or was told, he decided, it seems, to file it away as harmless even though he knew, if anyone believed it, everyone goes down. He could have told himself the boys really thought nothing of it. "Toughen up. Don't get too sensitive for Chrissake. The guy is harmless - really."
But he, like the monsignor, like his behavior now, has one overriding principle: Protect the franchise at all costs. In the minds of people like Jordan, boys are dispensable - an opportunity for dominance, or indifference. He accepts the Darwinian model and male hierarchy.
Whenever I have had the misfortune to watch him enter the ring of discourse, he speaks like a machine gun - "must win this point - must pin you." Thoughtless rattling of bluster. His energy and ethos reminds me of former Representative Grimm saying to a young male reporter who asked the "wrong" question, "I'll break you in half, like a boy."
These "men" should not be in government. They don't respect or feel a need to protect children. This revelation, if proven, is consistent with everything he is apart of now. The doc fondles wrestlers - well - what are my options? Protect the boys or the franchise? Who pays my salary? Question answered. Priorities set. Then, and now.
We can extrapolate this to all the cast of dishonorable characters around the hollow vortex of the current embodiment of the franchise. As coach, Jordan used silence to protect the franchise. As cohort, sidekick and aspirant, he uses word Stroganoff. A kind of rat-tat-tat-tatouille. The priority remains the same - his character and the boys are necessary sacrifices. His character is his business. The boys and children are ours.
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A Man Without Honor
The irony of a man who only sees price tags being a price tag to the people making a cottage industry of being appalled by him, is rich.
Apr 25, 2018
As I watched and listened to Emmanuel Macron speak to the US congress while being an American in Paris at the moment, two words kept occurring to me: Fraternite and honor.
Liberte/Liberty is shared by the mottos of the US and France. France has egalite/equality - and fraternite/brotherhood - to round out their mission statements for national existence, while the US pitches Life and Pursuit of Happiness. Rather than focus on the life and equality potential contradictions, which has fertile possibilities, I found myself contrasting fraternite and pursuit of happiness as Macron advocated, endorsed, pleaded for multilateralism, which sounded like a cumbersome and legalistic synonym for, brotherhood.
Pursuit of happiness versus brotherhood can be a battle, of course depending how one defines happiness. What are the compromises that need to be made to brotherhood in the pursuit of happiness? And vice versa. Macron made the point that these values are not necessarily in the blood of succeeding generations, but need to be imbued over the course of education and life in a society.
The French mottos are engraved in most buildings here in Paris. Not quite like subliminal advertising but it says to the eyes of growing minds, this value is from and for the ages. Pursuit of happiness is not carved in stone in many places in America but is stitched into every message - from "you deserve a break today" and "have it your way" to "what each and every American wants is," which is the hollow mantra of most candidates and office holders, many of whom the French president was addressing.
The statues in public here don't hide their full humanity unlike in Washington where fig leaves cover the facts of life. Being less giddy about sex is a byproduct of growing up with that around you, and understanding social systems is a byproduct of seeing the other fact of life - brotherhood/fraternite, carved in stone. Pursuit of happiness is like the vapors of wall street or the one-armed bandits of Las Vegas.
Brotherhood, Macron seemed to be saying, has now moved from a national guide word to a global imperative.
The Paris Climate Accord is an outgrowth of fraternite and the infantile resistance to it is a tantrum. Pursuit of....happiness? Happiness? The pursuit of chimeras - because without fraternity, real happiness and balance is impossible. Happiness as a momentary diversion is a model for a high strung economy, but it's not going to create the world that is beckoning unified thinking and action.
Honor. I see thinkers, composers, writers, philosophers honored in stone and brass throughout the city of Paris. Plaques where they lived - statues - names of streets and buildings and metro stations named after poets and saints. There is the "legion of honor" where various citizens of the world are invited to join. It's a tradition that honors poets and artists and THINKERS, and that honors honor itself. As loathe as I am to invoke his name, but as the current face and figurehead of a certain American ethos, Trump is a man without honor.
To him, everyone and everything has a price. There is no invisible standard or way of looking at the world and each other. There are only price tags. He is a dishonorable man who will say anything and doesn't need to mean it. It only needs to work to get the price he wants. I felt anger and empathy for Macron as he makes an impossible calculation with America's current shame. It is not up to him to unseat this personification of a culmination of a limping culture, so anger and contempt were softened by my empathy for him.
In light of that, if there is any empathy for global brotherhood and honor, I exhort all media making a killing by analyzing our president and dissecting tweets or imagining his moods, to shift gears and look to other leaders - analyze other intelligent and visionary people. Lead us to other notions. Stop enjoying your ratings as you display your indignation and disbelief. This is a self-aggrandizing exercise and it may be paying big time but where is your honor? The irony of a man who only sees price tags BEING a price tag to the people making a cottage industry of being appalled by him, is rich.
Being dismayed and horrified by him as performance art, is over and not funny. Next. Move us to what's next now. Take his power away by not giving him the oxygen of any attention other than what is absolutely necessary. Like a holistic therapy, guide our eyes and ears to anyone in America, and beyond, who speaks to honor and brotherhood.
The Worm Was in the Fruit
"The consciousness of the American population is fragmented as major issues are discussed and reported only to be interrupted by the more important matter of what you need to buy."
Feb 11, 2018
In the 1969 documentary The Sorrow and The Pity, a young German worker says about Germany prior to World War II: "The worm was in the fruit." I was thinking about this here and now from a cultural perspective. What is/was the worm in America's sweet plum?
For this government, and its voters, look to the culture. Look to the prevailing posture of anti intellectualism--indifference to beautiful architecture and humane city planning. Look to movies produced with weekend box office bonanza as the only barometer for meaning. Look to television series mass produced by slick cynics. Look to news programs that break for commercials, which primarily sell drugs, and by necessity suggest, and in some pernicious way, invite disease.
"The collective mind of the American population is seduced daily, hourly, into simplistic adrenaline rushes and trivialities."
The collective mind of the American population is seduced daily, hourly, into simplistic adrenaline rushes and trivialities. The consciousness of the American population is fragmented as major issues are discussed and reported only to be interrupted by the more important matter of what you need to buy.
Television shows that aim to sell junk as it presents approximations of human behavior are the midsection of the worm.
As much as America loves her, and even though she is on a stamp, what do we make of I Love Lucy episodes ending with Ricky (a husband) angrily spanking Lucy (his wife) after her lies catch up to her? As America laughed and still laughs at this sight while jaunty music plays can we assume no signals were/are being sent to adolescent boys and girls? The worm in the fruit was/is that men are honest--women lie--and a man can physically punish a woman because she lies. And it's funny.
Or how are we to interpret an episode of Friends where the two main girl composite characters, by way of bribing or rewarding one of the main composite guy characters, make out with each other in front of him, for his pleasure, not theirs, we assume?
What can anyone make of a show in which some blonde "Ubermensch" fires people. He gets to say it and a wide audience for some reason tunes in to watch the crestfallen face of the loser. Thrilling. Great ratings. Jerry Springer--the joy of watching "lesser low class humans" parade their infidelities and unresolved attractions or pregnancies. Big hit. Sponsor bonanza. Judge Judy snapping at hapless plaintiffs and defendants as she is rude and riled with antipathy. Isn't she smart? She doesn't let them get away with anything.
Parody at this point is an opioid. And it's a drug not coming from across the border--it, along with all the other trivial and inane cultural offerings that saturate the market and American consciousness, is in the fruit.
During a debate a Republican candidate said, "We need more welders and less philosophers." Wild applause from the Republican audience. The idea that these two things are not mutually exclusive never enters the conversation. Be a welder and a philosopher.
Christian philosophy, or culture, if one accepts there is such a thing, might want to be the guide for the current administration and its posse even as they pose at a prayer breakfast. But what would they do with this quote from Christ: "The first shall be last and the last shall be first" when you're braying "America first?" A mulligan on this one too? "He who exalts himself will be humbled, he who humbles himself will be exalted." Whether he's the reason for the season or not, these are keen observations from the putative Salvator Mundi. His image may be sold for 450 million dollars but his philosophical thoughts are free and priceless and for the regime American citizens have just elected, useless.
Parody at this point is an opioid. And it's a drug not coming from across the border--it, along with all the other trivial and inane cultural offerings that saturate the market and American consciousness, is in the fruit.
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