Stories That We Sing

Pastel by Daniel Lacroix

In May of 1846, Thoreau and Emerson had a discussion about the Mexican War. Thoreau had gotten himself arrested for refusing to pay his paltry taxes to support what he considered an imperial war of aggression. Emerson counseled his friend that one can supersede the transgressions of a well-meaning State by other means than getting oneself arrested. In Emerson's world, this "other means" meant the Muse, the telling of good stories that people would read and learn from. Literature in other words. Thoreau wasn't so sure that the State was so well-meaning or that the Muse alone would be enough to supersede it. But he redefined Emerson's "other means" to suit his own purposes and combined both the Muse and "other means" to our everlasting benefit. Ever since then, Civil Disobedience (or Applied Poetry as Thoreau pioneered it) has always been his child, in large part because he raised it to the level of Literature. Meaningful action requires a Muse to be lasting and effective, and vice versa. Thoreau only spent a night in jail, and his aunt bailed him out with the paltry sum he refused to pay on principle, but he wrote the thing down, eloquently, and so his lesson endured. How, Emerson seemed to challenge his younger friend, would anyone know what the hell you were trying to do otherwise, let alone emulate it, unless you wrote it down eloquently enough for other people to want to read it? Thoreau agreed, and it seems it's time that we should, too.

The problem with Progressives today, I think, is that we let other people, Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers (and Sun Myung Moon!), tell our stories, and their Muse doesn't mean us well. We don't plug our Muse into our political discourse very much, and that's a big mistake. Mark Twain, for instance, didn't make that mistake, and he was among the first American Writers to use the new-fangled typewriter. Why do we children of Twain, Emerson and Thoreau ( and fill in the blank) make that mistake now with our new-fangled computers? 

For all their faults, Murdoch, the Kochs (and Moon!) understood that people are story-based critters, like it or not, and I think we progressives should like it. By definition, people make many important social (read: political) decisions based largely on who's the best storyteller. It’s in our nature, and Corporate Media is a classic example of how Nature abhors a vacuum. We’ve collectively created a cultural ‘narrative’ vacuum by allowing ourselves to be so easily entertained by—Corporate Media! And Nature hates that. She’ll allow the same garbage responsible for the vacuum (Corporate Media!) to be sucked in and to rattle around until it ruins our cognative motors before she’ll let that sad state of affairs stand. Consider: Rupert Murdoch is from Australia and lives in China. Sun Myung Moon (The Washington Times, UPI) was from Korea with deep ties to that country's intelligence agency. The Koch Brothers, of course, are from the sheikdom of Texas. All obscenely rich, so much so they (apparently) believed they owned America because they paid for it, and we collectively let them define who among us are “real Americans”?! C'mon! 

Although it helps to strive toward the goal, progressives don't have to be great writers. We simply have to acknowledge that we have the better stories and we’re sitting on our best ones. Our truest ones. This is the decrepit state of latter-day Liberalism that we Progressives can fix. Liberal centrists (if you will) when given power, will negotiate our rights away from a position of capitulation, from an internalized sense that our stories don't count for much if they aren't vetted on Fox News first. We shouldn't put up with that. Why do we? 

Like any historic attempt, we need to find our Voice. Significant action will come only after our contemporary political muse matures, which it hasn't yet, notwithstanding funny memes on social media and that's the thing, isn't it? We depend too much on two-dimensional images to tell our stories for us, and Corporate Media has us outgunned in that arena. Stories, even as they're written down in two-dimensional form, or spoken in equal dimension, are three-dimensional beings. The reader has to use her imagination more than allowing special effects do it for her. And, by the way, if history's still a guide--and I hope it still is--when any given political Muse matures it has generally evolved into the baseline for much of Western Civilization’s meaningful and therefore lasting literature. 

I think we can (relatively-easily) reclaim the higher ground by simply elevating our critical modern discussions out of Fox-news-landia back to where intelligent Americans can find their feet and fight back, either with the Muse, by other means, or both. It’s not up to some talking head to write the narrative. That’s up to us. So by definition we still have as good a chance as we ever had. Maybe the noise is a little louder these days, but it’s always been that way, at least in literate societies.  

In other words, like Emerson advised and Thoreau partially agreed with: stories matter, and may the best Muse win.

Click to listen:    Stories That We Sing