July 1, 2006
Revisionist Dreams and the Massacre at
Enchanted Rock
July 1, 2006. Saturday, 8am. Waynesville, North Carolina
I was dreaming of Jimmy Stewart. We were sitting in the back seat of a limousine, the motor running, the car sitting still, like a Mafia meeting. I was struck by how clear and milky white his skin was. Lots of hair on his bare arms, but his skin was as soft and delicate as any baby’s skin I’ve ever seen. Not a blemish anywhere. Almost transparent. He was his usual self. Gracious and slightly stuttering in his inimitable but oft impersonated, awe-shucks way. He was pointing across my lap at a stack of magazines and newspapers indicating for me to hand him a particular one. I handed over one that looked like a double issue of a New Yorker. “ Thaww..Thaww…thot’s the one,” he said. “I want to show you something.” The milky hands, ghostlike but full of vitality, thumbed quickly to a page printed with a hand-drawn map of the southwest. “We uhh, uhh, we were making a movie down here in San-Ann-tone,” he said, as his finger searched around on the map.
“Oh, I was born in San Antonio,” I thought to myself. “Well, I should have been,” I thought.
“I know,” he said, as if he could read my mind. “You really shoulda been,” he smiled. The idling motor purred. “Like a Rolls Royce,” I thought, trying to see the hood ornament. “Bearr-cat,” he said, without looking up. And then, “Here is where it happened,” he said, jamming his finger down hard and covering the whole hill country from Fredericksburg to Junction. And up and back down again for emphasis. He looked at me as if I ought to know exactly what he was talking about. And in a way I guess I did.
America's Nightmares
June 30, 2006, Waynesville, North Carolina. 7:30 am.
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the sermon on the mount.
--General Omar Bradley
Rains have flooded the Northeast. New Orleans still lies in ruins from last year’s flooding, it’s re-builders--greed, ineptitude and folly instead of a civilian conservation corps working with pride and honor. The summer coming now appears more ominous than winter. Apocalyptic visions of war and pestilence seem more and more like ordinary weather forecasts. Kafkaesque nightmares replace ordinary dreams.
Morris Berman posits the idea in “Twilight of American Culture” that American “vitality”—the very thing that makes America one of the world’s great “Destination Spots”—is an Empire with no clothes. The corporate lie is the talisman of the day. Marketing strategists have supplanted poets and statesmen as the visionaries of our culture. We pledge allegiance not to the flag but to Walmart. The monotheism of the almighty dollar has driven the enlightenment underground.
Berman’s hope lies in a metaphysical metaphor of the Irish monks of the middle ages who in a quiet corner of Europe preserved the wisdom of the ages for its eventual renaissance a thousand years later. What is needed now, he argues, is for thinking people to hold on to history. He quotes the sociologist Todd Gitlin as saying that the point of the nearly forgotten liberal arts is to counter “a high velocity, reckless and lightweight culture whose main value is marketability.”
“This value,” Berman continues, “cannot tell us who we are, because it cannot teach us anything about what really endures. Hence, faculty members in the liberal arts need to say something like the following to their lightweight, consumer-oriented students (or for that matter, their tediously ideological ones): Again, quoting Gitlan,
“Amid the weightless fluff of a culture of obsolescence, here is Jane Austin on psychological complication, Balzac on the pecuniary squeeze. Here is Dostoyevsky wrestling with God. Melville with nothingness. Douglass with slavery. Here is Rembrandt’s religious inwardness, Mozart’s exuberance, Beethoven’s longing. In a culture of chaff, here is wheat.”
Over a decade ago when I was turning 50 I signed up to teach adult education classes in Austin. I discovered very quickly what corporate idiocy had done to both public and private literacy programs in America. I published a paper in the Journal of Adult Basic Education which I called, “Pedagogy of the Depressed.” In it I outlined my theory, not unlike Gitlin’s, that “workforce development”--as adult education is now being called—should--and in my classes, did—involve a genuine education in the liberal arts.
My theory, then and now, is that high school dropouts, legal immigrants, illegal aliens, prisoners and the victims of worldwide corporate hegemony of every variety and of any age ought to have access to the same sources of our human cultural heritage as the children of America’s social elites.
Deborah Gaddy, my boss in Austin, was very supportive of my theory and in fact helped me present my ideas at a national conference of adult educators. She had watched over her twenty year career in adult education as the genuine educational vision of the war on poverty had slowly been co-opted by corporatism into “job skill training,” a model for teaching all adults, whatever their intellectual capabilities, that seemed to me for all the world to be based on the paternalistic “life-skill” curriculums designed for the “special education” of the mentally retarded. But like all educational administrators in these times—however enlightened they may be-- Deborah was, and continues to be, caught up in the maelstrom of corporatized school finance. In America, in order to survive, you have to follow the money. The money is never going to follow you. The money doesn’t come from the corporations. That would be far too expensive. The money comes from the common man in the form of taxation. It is controlled and doled out by politicians who are owned by the corporations.
Thinking is a skill, yes. But a skill is not necessarily thinking. A dog can learn a skill. A monkey can. Scientists have been trying for years (pretty much in vain) to teach the skill of thinking to lower animals. Now, it seems (in America anyway), we’ve stopped trying to teach the skill of thinking even to human beings. Thinking involves the analysis of values and meaning. Marketing is the art of exploiting the emotions of those who do not know how to think (or are easily distracted from thinking). In other words, marketing is the skill of knowing how to take candy away from a baby. Marketing rules. Or at least it “thinks” it does.
A new dark ages is not coming. It is already here. The underground monks of the middle ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the 1960’s in our very own time, were major events in human history. But so were the holocaust and Hiroshima. That quote from Omar Bradley, above, is truer now than when he said it. Our culture is so confused by the white noise of “corporazak” that no one knows what to teach, or how to teach, or even how to tell the truth. Or even what truth is.
Berman’s idea is for the knowers to go underground. But the knowers are already underground, buried beneath mounds of consumerism and corporate lies. But we're still alive down here and breathing. I’m writing. You’re reading. We’re thinking about it all. We’re like miners buried deep in the earth. Like viruses that can survive in boiling water miles beneath the sea.
I refuse to accept the end of man, Faulkner said.
Do not go gentle into that good night, said Dylan Thomas.
I can’t go on, I can’t go on, I must, said Beckett.
The half finished needlepoint wall hanging I found in the back of the junk store of broken dreams down in Hazelwood, said, “Bloom where you are planted.”
If a virus can bloom in boiling water…well…all things are possible.
Happy Fourth, Baby Blue!
--Larry L. Dill
Self-Portrait at Sixty-Two (June 15, 2006)
Complete Site Index
New Hope Journal Home Page
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2004, 2005, 2006 by Larry L. Dill
