Been reading an old blog (hence the uptick in posts: things reposted) and it's almost totally embarrassing. The (like-me-dammit) tone is off-putting and the jokes aim but miss. The below is my longest post (to the point at which I've paused reading, chronologically) and... it's not that bad. It's clumbsy and needs editing, sharpening, but the points I was trying to make I made well enough. (This may be a case of expectations: when I started reading it, I expected to be fully embarrassed by the end, but I mostly made it thru unscathed, which surprised.)
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Edith Hamilton wrote that every generation that has ever lived has claimed things were worse than they have ever been. While it's true that certain things are worse than they've been in recent years, lots of things have improved and continue to improve. The rich and corporations have a greater say in the direction and greater pull with the leadership of this country than does the typical voter (or bloc of voters even), but it hardly compares with the 1890s. We're wantonly making wars all over the world, but it's hardly the first time we've done that - look for example to post-Tonkin Vietnam. Minorities and women still have a long way to go to reach equality in this country, but look at how bad things have been. Hell, gay people can get married in Canada! [I'd full-on forgotten Canada was out in front on this, but of course they were. Sorry Canadians.] Things are getting, slowly to be sure, better.
I think America's greatest (endemic) problem is that we're so strongly capitalist. There's lots to admire about capitalism, but it does lead to the choices of the masses dictating everything. And dictating it into a kind of pure-form Darwinism: What sells rules; what struggles dies. This affects everything from movie stars to popular music to plastic surgery to home styles to clothing to news stories: That which the masses favor becomes the sole option (and the cheaper it is to produce - think reality TV - the better it is for those who are uninventive enough to pander shamelessly).
There are still true artists making true art – and probably to the same degree as before – but unless they're popular at the start, they're likely to remain cult hits to the finish. Mix Oscar Wilde's comment that The people will forgive anything but genius, and Emerson's Every hero becomes a bore at last, with capitalism's inherent distaste of anything erudite or esoteric and you've got a great chance for special people/products getting marginalized; and the outlook being less than brilliant for everyone who wants something transcendent – or at least novel. There are exceptions of course, but in this way, I will concede that things don't seem to be improving. (But is this new? How often has a truly great anything been popular? Remember: Van Gogh never sold a painting; Beethoven was ridiculed as a crazy old man; Kafka died unknown; Richard Strauss was a Nazi.
Sorry - it sounded better with four examples.)
All this is true, but it is also true that time passes: the leadership will change, the current crap fads will fade, Pontiac will one day stop producing the
Aztek. Things will improve.
Remember also that what gets reported is always the result of some agenda. Either an editor wants to see an article on a subject that interests him, or a company wants to push a new pop singer they've signed. Nothing makes news without someone first deciding it should. And in this way (at least), the media distort what is really going on. I listened to a radio show tonite where a lady from India spoke of the growing (Indian) opposition toward most things related to globalization and the abusive World Bank/WTO. Then she commented about how little of this growing opposition is making news in India. I assume that's the way it is in most nations of the world now. The people aren't bad, when you get right down to it, but their governments and forms of big-business media aren't representative of their better sides. So things continue to look bad – even increasingly bad – even when they might be improving. (But again, is this new? Think Hearst's papers pushing his agenda, and those of his friends.)
Or at least this is what I must tell myself so that I can get from day to day.
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20 years later, I'd write this entirely better (wasn't then, still not, a writer), but my view hasn't changed a whole lot, and I'm not ashamed of the, as we say now, take. For whatever that's worth.
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