America - Heal Thyself
No Wonder Autocrats Hate Liberal Culture, They Can't Control People Being Themselves.
The King Of Rock ‘n’ Roll - Little Richard.
Before everything took on the allure of a selfie, photographs projected a quality that now appears to be candid. Candid Camera. The image may have been off centre or somewhat blurry. The people or things that appear are not posed or even directed towards the lens. There is so much more to take from these candid images because they are nuanced. Everyone wasn’t happy at Christmas. The house was a mess. We still have that lamp. The body language and the state of play set the stage and the story is complicated.
The word “back” is loaded. We’re not going back! Stand Back! Get back to where you once belonged. What’s holding you back? Back-lash. Back, back, back….
Back to what? Ethno nationalism, machismo, the subjugation of women? No thanks. Back to normal? What normal are we talking about? This isn’t just about memory either, because we know that memory is nuanced, to say the least.
But what about mother nature? Getting back to a more natural way of being. Letting the planet get back to being healthy. Like it was before. How the hell do we do that? We’ve got to find a way to get back to a ecological balance. Yet, when there was balance between humans and the planet, who were we as a civilization? It wasn’t all milk and honey. But there is also something regenerative and self generating about nature. We’ve known this for a long time and even when we didn’t, “know know” we still felt it and saw it in the symmetry of the natural word.
So, we’ve got to get back to some things, but we can’t go back to others?
Whatever this moment is now, is incomprehensible in its ubiquity. There is just too much to make sense of. Yet, there is also a 100 years or so, of liberal culture, since the dawn of the electronic age, that is frankly spectacular. Prodigious to say the least! Why even make the list, we all know it and what we don’t we’ll stumble upon or be directed towards and it will blow our minds in its quality and that we didn’t know of it in the first place. Prince! My god, how does that even happen?!
No wonder the autocrats hate liberal culture, how could you possibly control it if you really let people be themselves. If we look back and see what we did, I think we can see what we are missing. So celebrate that! The music, the movies, the novels, the plays, the musicals, the fashion, the painters, the sportsmanship, the athleticism, the comedy.
The autocrat has got to kill that comedian before they point out the thing that cuts to the heart of the matter and cuts authority down to size.
Intimidation, posturing, machismo. We’ve seen that before. Maybe we took for granted how much culture was a safe guard against intimidation. 100 years makes it feel like it was always there. Right now it feels like something has been lost. Some of us lose our wallet or keys 10 times a year. People say those cliches that only make you more frustrated. It’s the last place you look. That’s not what this is though. What we need to inspire and confirm in ourselves is right in front of us. It’s the album at the thrift shop, the old movie on late at night. It’s in Leonard Cohen interviews and Paul Newman movies and the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay.
The autocrats know the power of liberal culture and they know they can’t fight it with the same old tricks, they need to hijack it and own it through consumerism. Maybe the Chinese Communist Party controls consumerism or maybe now, consumerism controls the Chinese Communist Party. If they have their stuff they’ll let us run the show.
All the narrative struggle that we need is in the culture we created.
But it’s clear what we’ll lose if we start closing doors on each other and siloing culture away from each other in the name of appropriation. Let’s not take our greatest liberal asset and sterilize it with a clique. Correspondingly, back-lash is not a reason for fascism.
So we took it all for granted cause it all felt so normal and now we wonder where it went. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s right there behind you and in front of you. All those amazing things we created. How blessed are we to have them available to us now and forever.