Ah, so nice. I think Mark Morford’s latest column sums up the war and us quite perfectly. I do in fact believe he’s made my day.
He calls it “Iraq, Deep in Your Bones.” Go have a look, if you’re inclined. You’ll need to start at the beginning to understand the “two dueling Americas,” or maybe you won’t. What follows are the last three paragraphs.
Because truly, many in the alternative set, the lightworkers and the gurus and the healers and the deep teachers, those who think outside the war room and beyond the bland academic platitudes, these people tend see Iraq, BushCo, the American right and all the sanctimonious bleakness surrounding them as merely the inky remnants of a passing disease, the last, vicious gasp of a dying ideology, the violent struggle of resistance that always erupts before any great cosmic shift.
Which is to say: The screeching of the Christian right, the shrill alarmism from cultural conservatives regarding everything from sex and drugs and music to gays and nipples and creationism, the rejection of science, the attacks on women’s rights, the abuse of the environment, all the way up to the bleakest and ugliest manisfestation of all, a brutal and unwinnable war — taken as a whole, these can, if you so choose, be seen as merely the embers of a hugely failed — and yes, nearly extinct — worldview.
Here is the hesitant optimism, the hint of the new, the tentative suggestion that all is not lost: By many measures, the worst of it is over. There really is light coming, a new awareness, a shift away from the bleakness and the rot and the wallowing in bland violence. Perhaps you can feel it. Or perhaps you need to be ready to feel it. Either way, it’s there. You have but to do the most easy/difficult thing of all: you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice.
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I dunno about this, Johannes. I know you’ve got the gut feeling about this big thing on the spiritual horizon, whatever it is, that will lift us out of our dull human lethargy and make us – what, exactly? Something more than human? I myself don’t see much evidence of this sort of thing in our recorded history. Life has always been more or less unsatisfactory, politics more or less (well, less now than in the days of the Caesars) wretched. Prophets have come and gone. Inspiration has waxed and waned. We in our sixties who were young in THE sixties thought our society was about to turn a corner into some kind of enlightenment as the American Experiment dissolved into chaos. We didn’t have it quite right, did we? No, I don’t look for universal enlightenment much anymore. George Orwell had it right, I think, when he set the standard at a human scale – ordinary decency in daily life. That’s a big enough challenge for most of us. I might be missing the next big thing, I reckon, but until it knocks me off my horse or speaks to me out of the burning bush, well, the human scale will have to suffice.
I don’t think I said I see anything “out there” that’s going to lift anybody up. But I’ve changed a lot in the last few years, so the human scale is precisely what I’m dealing with here. It saddens me to hear what sounds like rationalizing, though. It’s like a little gray box: all we have is this little gray box, it’s all we’ve ever had and ever hope to have, so we darn well better like it. Hell, you can do better than that. Go back and read the first paragraph I quoted and tell me that doesn’t make you feel BETTER!
As for the ’60s, we won, Ken, we absolutely won. The culture expanded and evolved. In many quarters there’s awareness and responsibility that simply didn’t exist when we were growing up. Now we’re either making love or making war. Before then, no one thought we had a choice.
Anyway, it’s not enough to guilt-trip people into acting right, they have to be independently empathic. What if enough of us woke up in the morning without fear? What if we heard each other’s thoughts? What if we heard the trees?
A new earth, that’s what.
But, John, stuff like that isn’t new – it was being said in the late 60′s. It was just worrds. It expressed the mood of the times. Rhetoric may make us feel good, but is it more than wishful thinking? Is it more than moral grandstanding?
This is kind of a matter of temperament. What you call a gray box – and what might be a gray box for you – is for me a liberating insight. I feel freer when I no longer have to carry the baggage of human reformation – that of myself, the nation or the planet. For you these things matter. I can’t say you’re wrong – I don’t say it, indeed your take, my old high-school chum, fascinates me. There’s nothing wrong in my book in living out life on the terms that matter to you. How else can we live, and call ourselves sentient human beings? I have a more wintry disposition, in part because of experience, in part because of some little trick in some innermost gene that decreed that this was how I was meant to be. A gray box? No, a multicolored one, with lots of angles, more a kaleidoscope than a box, but, yes, a finite device anchored in my own actual experience.
Nietzsche divided the human race as between the Apollonians and the Dionysians. The former are contained, controlled and alert to the formalities of beauty. The latter are exuberant, boundariless, more alert to terror and grandeur than to beauty. It’s not a question of which is best, or which is right. It’s our destiny, he thought, to be one or the other. I reckon it’s my destiny, at least on my better days, to be an Apollonian, yours to be a Dionysian. But, if “the cowman and the farmer can be friends”, it seems to me the Apollonian and the Dionysian can be too.
The world is a richer and more surprising place than we in our high school days could ever have predicted. We unstrapped our slide rules a long time ago, we hypnotized our last horny toad, we stepped into the dangerous world – a world we’ll be stepping out of before we know it. We owe it to ourselves to be clear-sighted about life.