Skip to main content

Politics and Ordinary Life

 Politics today saturated with ideology....The ideologue believes in political solutions, changing the world fundamentally, overhauling the system, being on the right side of history, choosing progress, overcoming the nightmarish past... The activist mindset demands that people take sides on an infinite variety of issues - the underlying assumption being that one side contains the makings of a total solution - whereas resistance to "enlightenment and progress" augurs only backwardness and ignorance...Resistance, as such, of course can turn into a series of counter-moves with the same underlying assumptions about the omnipotence of the political...Draining the swamp is a rear-guard reaction to progressive promises. But at some point - usually in the midst of swinging wildly toward one side of the pendulum - we all bump up against the - terra incognita - the inscrutable aspect of reality - the underlying complexities which compound all political busybodies...This in itself should be the moment at which humility kicks in, where wonder and awe expose the feebleness of perception - here is the realm of the ineluctable that art is designed to probe ... a realization that the deeper problems are never fully solved - but only partially glimpsed...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Edgewood, 1973

We had made our way down busy Palm Avenue towards the crosswalk. after zigzagging the usual route from busy Bandini Avenue to Tower Road to Rosewood Place. Bret was our wild-man companion - a fifth-grader with a take-no-prisoners approach to life. The local crosswalk, that most mundane of enterprises was soon to become the scene of spontaneous absurdist theater when suddenly out of nowhere came the random yelp: Hey...Hey...What do you want with us lady? -  What do I want with you? said the most predictably normal gray-haired woman by whose ever so brief guidance we measured our daily jaunt to school.  Yeah - where are you taking us? -  There's only one way kid - It's this way... -  You're not really a crossing guard are you? came the cheeky interrogative.  The slightly bemused, limping, beleaguered  woman was dwarfed by her bright yellow uniform as she held up her STOP sign - showing Brett. The other smaller kids walked by us single file in the middle of th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Old Souls (Overture)

Q's  life fell apart on him at the very zenith of his career, back when he was a professor of Renaissance studies and official archivist of alchemical esoterica; it was in the wake of what became known on campus as the "le scandale de Vive" - a fleeting tragi-comedy which involved a modicum of good intentions,  some garbled miscommunication involving a troubled young soul, a sordid yet false accusation, formal inquiry ending with official demotion and blighted reputation; this needless and easily avoidable cosmic mishap sent Q 's previous good fortune into a tailspin, derailing both his career and his marriage and severing him from his daughter's love forever, the tragic aftermath of it all precipitating his nervous breakdown which gave way to subsequent years of despondency and embitterment, of generally being out of commission - years marked by days at a time of squatting in public lounge areas, staring out of windows, having fits  alternating between anger and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The "Endless Summer" Feeling a.k.a. "Time Stop Mechanism"

Growing up out west - we had what was known as the "endless summer" feeling - a moment in the summer when - not Time per se - but hectic, anxious, nerve-wracking time would come to a standstill. Change would still happen of course, things would continue moving, interacting, but at a slower, more predictable pace...the rhythms of summer would take over with sunny days giving way to balmy nights...a certain degree of repetition would lend structure to this seeming "pause" in the action...Clouds still move across the sky, waves still crash against the shore, traffic on the roads, people walking, biking, swimming - but all in a self-contained world over which one had some semblance of control..Long days at the beach, lying in the sun or playing tennis at the community college, watching the heat rise on the pavement, shooting baskets on the outdoor courts, sitting poolside at a neighbor's house, sitting on the lawn at dusk, staying outside on summer nights with no wi...
Post a Comment
Read more