That’s what I can’t stand.
As soon as someone comes along who offers to do things differently, who speaks to me like I’m a grownup, who’s tapped into a universal desire for positive change, then come the killers of hope. Every so-called “realist” comes out of the woodwork, saying things like:
It’s a dream!
You’re naive!
The world is SHIT!
You have to FIGHT!
What makes you happy is IMPOSSIBLE!
Etc., etc.
This is horrible and spiritually corrupt. This is like locking your children in the basement for 20 years. (No, no, you can’t have a president who makes you feel good, because it’s bad to trust your feelings.) Where do these people come from? What mother abandoned them on an ice floe? Have they no souls? I’m serious. That’s very bad boojum. One has to stay centered and not be sucked in by the fear.
What makes me happy is possible, because I’ve felt it. The hope killers make me feel dirty inside, and I will certainly never vote for them.
Comment by K.J. Webb
1 April 29, 2008, 4:49 pm o'clock |
William James - a great American pragmatist - believed that we could never know what was real except by imagining what didn’t yet exist. No man is able to do a great thing, he said, unless he is first able to imagine a thing not yet doable. Imagining leads to doing. It engenders a new reality.
This is stirring stuff, even if I don’t quite believe it. It is a dialectic driven by a gut sense of optimism. James was in the great American tradition of boosters and puffers. He was a guy who never doubted he could jump any ditch, no matter how broad. He was not unlike his contemporaries, John D. Rockefeller and Horatio Alger.
A lot of what Barack has to say - and what you say, John - puts me in mind of James, voiced in a language of 21st century disenchantment. This fascinates me. My own personal intellectual tradition is grittier, grimier and more working-class - a bleaker view of human possibility. A century ago these differing attitudes would have made us, respecitively, a Marxist (me) and an entrepeneur (you). Today they have morphed in entirely opposite directions. You dream of a benevolent state, I cast a cold eye on the state.
It’s fundamentally a matter of temperament. There are those of us who love the cold waters of disillusionment, and there are those of us who cling to a hope of transcendence. That’s a pretty dream, I admit. Dreaming has never given me much sustenance.
Comment by david in maine
2 April 29, 2008, 7:27 pm o'clock |
small world, i’m sitting here reading, “William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism” by Robert D. Richardson…
‘hope’ all is well with you, John, and your friends - enjoy your trip!
david in maine
Comment by Number 6
3 April 29, 2008, 10:06 pm o'clock |
“BREAK THE LAW
By order of the King of the United States
It is now illegal to dance in this place
Please do not dance
By order of the Law of Coincidence
It is now illegal to sing and dance
Please do not dance
This is a story about love and glory
Everybody’s doing it now
Break the law Break the law
It’s mandatory for love and glory
Everybody’s doing it yeah
Break the law Break the law
Break break break the law
By order of the King of Reality
It is now illegal to live for free
Please do not dance
This This This
This is a mystery about the end of history
Everybody’s thinking it now
Break the law Break the law
It’s mandatory for love and glory
Everybody’s doing it yeah
Break the law Break the law
Swing your partner round and round
Break the law and hit the ground
You don’t need no alcohol
Break the law and crawl the wall
Dose–ee–doe and yes means no
Break the law and go go go
By order of the Law of the Nightly News
It is now illegal to tell the truth
This is a story about love and glory
By order of the Law of Your Mom and Dad
If you feel too good then you’ve been bad
Everybody’s doing it now
Break the law Break the law
According to what your teachers taught
You are not allowed to think these thoughts
It’s mandatory for love and glory
By order of your evil alter ego
Your own brain is now illegal
Everybody’s doing it yeah
Break the law Break the law
By order of the Queen of the Earth and Sky
Break the law Break the law”
-World Entertainment War
(Rob Brezsny’s old band)
Comment by Byron
4 April 30, 2008, 5:11 am o'clock |
Yes, your own brain will be illegal under yet another still another Republican reign of fear, derision and paranoia.
John’s remarks led me to the eulogy by Ted Kennedy for his brother Robert Kennedy. He said “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”
Comment by K.J. Webb
5 April 30, 2008, 10:57 am o'clock |
Christopher Lasch wrote a very provocative book back in the early 90’s called “True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics”. Lasch was a man of the Left with a very large critique of American society. But he identified very presciently a certain developing problem with the Left: It had sold its soul to the gods (false gods, he thought) of Progressivism, Technocracy and Bureaucracy. He preferred an older populist tradition of the Left based on individual responsibility and free thought, which came down through the labor movement, cooperative societies, fraternal organizations, anarchists and churches. He thought the Left could regain some of that fertile ground if it only remembered where it came from and gave up on the sterile dream of endless progress through an ever-expanded organization of the state. Populism is never far below the surface in America, and populists have all the best political tunes. Those tunes have largely been appropriated by conservatives, and that’s a pity. I’d shove a few post-modernist professors and policy wonks overboard if that’s what it took to sing the old songs again.