“On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, ‘I decline to accept the end of man’. I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”
In an earlier post, Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, I announced an experiment. Following my wife’s efforts to suspend negative thinking and speech during Lent, I decided to refrain from critical posts through Easter. Here is the first of several observations I will share.
Avoiding negative and pessimistic topics leaves me a lot fewer subjects to blog about! Many of my posts begin with news stories, but often it seems, to paraphrase the old Hee-Haw song, “If it weren’t for bad news, I’d have no news at all.” More nights than not, when I’ve checked my usual source websites (CNN, NPR, USA Today, etc.), I haven’t found a single upbeat or funny or quirky post that I wanted to write about. Sure, there was the girl scout who sold 12,000 boxes of cookies, but even if it’s a good thing for a kid to become a marketing wizard, that isn’t my kind of story.
The real question for me, however, is not the content of this weeks’ or that weeks’ news, but the systemic nature of our news media, which makes trials and tribulations endemic. These are news stories, after all, and a good story demands tension, upping the stakes, and all that. The question is not whether these are gripping stories, but the degree to which they mirror “reality.”
I’m thinking of a book I have often cited here, Neal Gabler’s, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (2000), in which the author says we are not just a post-modern culture but a “post reality culture.” Gabler locates the beginning of news-as-entertainment in America as “the penny press.” Prior to 1830, newspapers were single page “broadsheets” which appealed to the upper classes. Most of them cost six cents and the average daily circulation in New York City was 1200. Beginning with the Sun, which cost a penny, newspaper sales exploded. Gabler cites various reasons for the success of the penny press, but says that above all, it meshed with other sensational forms of entertainment:
“…for a constituency being conditioned by trashy crime pamphlets, gory novels and overwrought melodramas, news was simply the most exciting, most entertaining content a paper could offer, especially when it was skewed, as it invariably was in the penny press, to the most sensational stories. In fact, one might even say that the masters of the penny press invented the concept of news because it was the best way to sell their papers…”
In it’s first two weeks of publication, in 1835, the New York Herald ran stories that centered on “three suicides, three murders, the death of five persons in a fire, a man accidentally blowing off his head, an execution in France by guillotine and a riot in Philadelphia.” Needless to say, the Herald became wildly successful.
If it’s true that what we think of as “news” is an “invented concept,” we have to ask to what degree it mirrors reality and to what degree it creates it? Think about that the next time you open the paper or check your Tweets.
What I have discovered is how deep the contagion goes, even though I normally limit my sources, never watching the local news on TV, for instance. I confess that while I have cut negative posts from theFirstGates since March 7, I’ve probably doubled the number of depressing subjects I’ve posted on Twitter. In a way, I feel like I did a month after I quit smoking, and found that a nasty cough was still there. This is more serious than I thought at first. I’ll have more to say about it, but meanwhile, let’s change the tone as we end with a classic that came to mind at the start of this post.
We are a week into a major home reconstruction project that has about 2/3 of our living space sealed off against dust. Bedroom, study, kitchen, and bath are available. Internet too, since I carried the modem down to this end of the house. A little cramped at times, but overall, just fine for a short period of time.
What surprises me is how little I miss TV. More than that, it’s refreshing in many ways not to have it. The sound was on at one of the TV’s at the gym and I found it so irritating I moved away.
It hasn’t been a completely video-less week. One day we ventured out to the cineplex to watch Frozen. Another evening we viewed an Agatha Christie mystery on youTube (the 13″ screen of my mac was ample). On Friday, I watched a 20 minute Newshour segment on pbs.org. And last night, we clambered through the dust curtains, out to the living room where the furniture is clumped, to watch the finale of Downton Abbey.
I’m not going to waste any time with polemics against television. I enjoy several shows and of course, Turner Classic Movies. I expect to watch those when the house is back to normal. But a cautionary story came to mind as I looked for images for this post.
It’s possible some readers may not remember analog TV and the pre-404 no-signal pattern called “snow.”
Snow. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This always reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s visionary novel, Snow Crash. Published in 1992, Stephenson envisioned a post-nation state world in which people lived as citizens of corporate territories. The former United States still excelled at two things, computer micro-code and high speed pizza delivery, the latter because the mafia had taken over the business.
In 1992, the year I first got a windows computer, an 8K modem, and an AOL membership, Stephenson imagined virtual worlds where people created avatars to jack in and interact. Then someone launched a virus that messed with people’s brains. Anyone who opened this malware saw a pattern based on ancient glyphs that led to the Tower of Babel. Viewing these symbols scrambled their neurons, in essence, turning their minds to snow.
What struck me this past week were the parallels to our current media world. I can’t help thinking of all the ways that commercials, local news, political debates, and most of what passes for entertainment scramble our neurons, though much more slowly and in ways that leave us perfectly able to buy stuff.
I could say more, but this is enough – something to think about.
Lately I’ve been thinking about Kate Wolf (1942-1986), a singer and songwriter from this part of the country who was just beginning to draw national attention when leukemia took her at the age of 44. Growing up, she listened to Dylan, The Weavers, The Carter Family, and Merle Haggard (1). Her poetic lyrics celebrated backroads and small towns and her music wove the “high lonesome” sound of bluegrass into landscape of northern California.
Once I loaned a friend one of Kate’s albums. When she returned it she mentioned that her 10 year old son listened to several songs and said, “Wow, that music is really sad.” Pothos comes to mind, a Greek word I have used here before, that signifies a restlessness, an unrequited and unrequitable longing for what lies beyond the horizon. Pothos is the affliction of dreamers and it’s woven as a minor chord through much of this music, even when it seems most concrete:
Here in California fruit hangs heavy on the vines, But there’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you, And the hills turn brown in the summertime. – from “Here in California” by Kate Wolf
In April, 1986, Kate was diagnosed with leukemia. After chemotherapy, she went into full remission, started work on a retrospective album, and scheduled another tour. The disease returned in the fall, however, and we lost her on December 10. Her long time friend and touring partner, Utah Phillips covered the remaining shows she’d booked, including one in Placerville Mary and I had tickets for.
He led the crowd in singing her songs and said something I’ve never forgotten. “At the end of her life, Kate told me she knew why she’d gotten cancer. She took in people’s pain, the pain of living. It was the source of her art, but she realized too late that she never learned to let it go.” Phillips warned everyone to beware of clinging to grief and reminded us of the threads of hope and joy we also find in her music.
Kate’s music has been covered by musicians like Emmy Lou Harris, Nanci Griffith, and Peter Rowan. You can sample her songs on katewolf.com, a website her family maintains, as well as on iTunes. Once you listen, these songs find a home in your head and heart, for as Kate Wolf put it in “Brother Warrior:”
We are crying for a vision That all living things can share And those who care Are with us everywhere.
The Monuments Men, based on a 2009 book of the same name by Robert Edsel, tells of a small group of mostly middle aged men who risked their lives to recover thousands of looted works of art from the retreating Nazis in the final days of WWII.
George Clooney co-wrote, directed, and starred in the film. A Washington Postreview suggests why the project mattered to Clooney, saying the movie “continues his long-standing — even heroic — effort to preserve a certain kind of movie in the American filmmaking canon…the classical, even old-fashioned kind of film that, we’re so often depressingly reminded, Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.”
If you’re like me, that means movies that center on story and even dare to depict personal heroism. Explosions and digital effects, if present, are subordinate elements.
The Monuments Men has not fared well with reviewers. In an obvious comparison to Saving Private Ryan, another quest/buddy movie set in WWII, The Monument Men lacks tension at many points. The Post review gives a plausible analysis of the structural cause of a lack of focus in the central part of the movie, that resolves in the ending sequence where the team races to save several key artistic treasures from destruction by the Nazis and capture by the advancing Russian army.
Whatever its flaws, I enjoyed The Monuments Men and recommend it as a good story that poses key questions on the way a people’s art and history is central to their identity, something Hitler knew very well when he tried to erase it from the lands he conquered.
Between 1981 and 1984, I worked as a part time instructor at a community college in northern California. Like most part-timers, I dreamed of the tenure track. I was lucky. At one point during a faculty meeting, I looked at all the other hopefuls, did the math, and realized I was on, if not a sinking ship, one that was dead in the water. I started building a lifeboat and made my escape.
According to a recent NPR story, a million part-time, or adjunct professors, have not been so fortunate. That’s 75% percent of U.S. college teachers who are stuck in part time positions; like workers at McDonalds, many rely on food stamps to get by. Current pay for adjuncts is $2,000 – $3,000 a class with no benefits of any kind. “Freeway fliers” is what we called ourselves when I was in the ranks, zipping between nearby schools to pick up any available classes.
One adjunct interviewed in a parallel story on the PBS Newshour teaches six English classes at three Ohio universities. With a family to support, he couldn’t afford to stay home when he had pneumonia last fall.
At the time, I assumed the dismal prospects were my fault; I only had an M.A. and taught at a small town, two year school. The articles make clear that although the trend began at two year schools in the 1970’s, it soon spread to all types of colleges and universities.
Peter Brown, professor emeritus of the State University of New York at New Paltz says the average salary of adjuncts there is $12,000 a year – less than the custodial staff. “Between 1970 and 2008, the adjunct pay has gone down 49 percent,” says Brown. “The salary of college presidents has gone up 35 percent.”
In the 80’s we talked of organizing, and finally, three decades later, some colleges are granting part timers collective bargaining rights. Twenty-two percent of adjuncts now belong to a union. The death last fall of an 83 year old Duquesne University adjunct, who had taught for 20 years with good reviews, only to die impoverished, served as a wake-up call, as did a January congressional report that found adjuncts are treated like “cheap labor.”
In general, we get what we pay for, and as college students go ever deeper into debt, it’s worth asking what their education dollars are buying. Well-to-do college administrations. Top notch football teams. A lot of professors too sick or stressed or busy commuting to hold decent office hours. Ever fewer real-world prospects. And…?
If we don’t want to end up singing “Glory Days” when we think of the long-gone time when American education was the best in the world, something will have to change.
Recently I thought of a chain of events in my life that I first considered unfortunate, though eventually they led to better results than I ever imagined. This got me thinking of “happiness,” and how wrong our ideas about it can be.
A few years ago I saw one of those lists of “10 factors for happiness” that both confirmed popular hunches (good health is factor #1) and contained surprises (children or no children makes no statistical difference in life satisfaction surveys). Searching Google for “10 factors of happiness” led to 32 million hits.
I didn’t find the one I was after, but many of those I scanned were interesting. None pretended to guarantee a sense of wellbeing – there are too many intangibles, such as personal outlook. We’ve probably all known healthy, well to do, miserable people, as well as those who find satisfaction in overcoming adversity.
Public domain
I am also attuned to Buddha’s warning, that any sense of wellbeing that depends on outside conditions is subject to change because those conditions are subject to change. I view these lists not as suggestions on where to look for the ultimate good, but as factors that can improve our odds of feeling satisfied much of the time. The list I found most interesting gave five conditions for happiness according to Carl Jung.
Good physical and mental health.
Good personal and intimate relationships, such as those of marriage, the family, and friendships.
The faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature.
Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.
A philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.
I was especially interested to read “satisfactory work” in item #4, as “settling” for “satisfactory” work (rather than following my bliss) was the life choice I referred to at the start of this post. From what I’ve observed, following bliss is a slow, long term process, filled with trial and error, because most of us don’t know our bliss till we stumble over it in the dark – but that is a topic for another day.
In the Psychology Today article I’m quoting from, Jung observed that “No matter how ideal your situation may be, it does not necessarily guarantee happiness.” He also suggested that chasing happiness doesn’t work. I agree in part. I think happiness is a by product of other actions rather than something we can grasp directly, but I know from personal experience that numerous actions and attitudes can improve or worsen my odds. For instance, I find it helpful to limit TV news viewing to the PBS Newshour two or three times a week, and sometimes even that is too much. Dwelling on bad news we cannot change doesn’t appear on anyone’s happiness list.
Perhaps the best advice I received on happiness came from a high school English teacher, one the most important mentors I’ve had in this life. His was a one item list: “I think life is satisfying only when we’re committed to something greater than ourselves.” In the decades since then, I’ve found lots of elaborations, but nothing superior to that as a way to orient my inner compass.
What do you think? What works for you or makes your glass half full and occasionally running over?
In the key news event of the day, I’m sad to report that it was sunny in Punxsutawney, PA, spooking the groundhog and plunging us into another 6 weeks of winter.
This has not been a winter anyone wants to linger. A mini-ice age threatens the east, while 11 western states are morphing into Death Valley. And to add insult to injury, here in northern California, where legions of disgruntled football fans are settling in to watch those other teams play – all the while muttering that at least spring training starts soon – spring may be on hold!
So as the blues settle in like the overcast on this chilly, cloudy, but rainless day, only three suggestions come to mind: (1) book a flight to Hawaii, (2) drink some more caffeine, (3) watch a funny movie.
It just so happens that I have an idea for number 3:
“Don’t drive angry!”
PostScript: For readers outside our borders, who may not get all my topical references, here is a brief glossary:
February 2 is “Groundhog Day.” When the groundhog emerges (most famously, Punxsutawney Phil, in Pennsylvania), if he sees his shadow, it will spook him and he’ll return to his burrow for another 6 weeks of winter.
Here in the western US, where we have no groundhogs, it’s sometimes called Prairie Dog Day, but that hasn’t gained much traction in the media yet.
Local sports fans are disgruntled because our beloved 49’ers were knocked out of the playoffs by the devil-spawned Seattle Seahawks. No real rancor, although we hates them forever, my precious.
Let me know if I can be of any further assistance explaining my rant.
The First Gates 