On Boomers, Founding Fathers and Cultural Relativism

The Slippery Slope

Okay…remember money? If you’re a ‘boomer’ you do. If you’re not, you still suffer from embarrassing cultural delusions whether you want to admit it or not—which is what we 'boomers' did and is where you came from, so get over it!

Either way, grab your wallet and pull out a dollar bill. Lay it on the counter and take a good look at that sly guy glancing back at you. Is that not the condescending smirk of America's mythical version of Zeus? The all-knowing, paternal metaphor for financial security? The chiseled face of money, the only path forward for what has been considered possible on this continent since that "filthy little atheist", Thomas Paine (whose face isn't on anybody's money), outlined the democratic underpinnings of the American Revolution?

We live in an age when high-quality pictures and videos are readily available at the snap of an iPhone, and, as is typical with our species, we haven't been very thoughtful about it. In fact I think this ever-devolving fascination of ours with the visual image has all but killed off whatever remnants of organic perspective on the natural world we managed to drag into the 21st Century after 50 years of the mass-hypnosis experiment conducted by television producers whose credentials on mental health or ethical-hypnosis techniques were always known to be sketchy at best.

There comes a time, though, in most cultures at least, when its hubris outweighs its paradigms, and it needs to examine and re-arrange itself in order to survive. In the old days, before climate chaos, it was fine if this didn't happen. The composting culture just went extinct and a new one took its place. But this time the slow-motion arc of human evolution isn't an option anymore because...well...it's slow, and we've finally proved ourselves too stupid to manage our own destruction with enough aplomb to allow another culture to rise from our ashes. These are the times of not only climate chaos (which IMO includes the Covid debacle) but of nuclear-tipped oligarchs either warring with each other or propping each other up over resources, which is just another way of saying "money", and I think we've finally arrived. This is the point in our evolution as a species when no cultural icon is too trivial to snark at. Fair warning, but it beats feeling stupid. 

So, keeping these admittedly-arbitrary guardrails in mind, check this out:

This was the stoic fountain from which all those billions (and billions) of dollar bills sprang. It's Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait that Martha, who liked a previous portrait Stuart did of George, commissioned him to do for her so she could have one of her own. Stuart, however, didn't want to give up what became his best prototype (and moneymaker) to the First Lady so he never finished it, and kept it around to crank out future founding images with. Follow this story to its logical end and it's hard not to conclude that Stuart took Martha's money (which didn't include faces of George yet but whose Custis "dowry" included over 100 slaves who, along with their descendants, were never freed until the Emancipation Proclamation) but failed to deliver, placing him at a watershed moment in our country's history of canonizing cheats who can afford to get away with cheating, but never mind. No matter his intentions, his mythic image endures. Three years previous, though, in 1793, portrait artist Edward Savage had George looking like this:

Two years goes by, and in 1795 another American portraitist, Rembrandt Peale, gives us this one:

And then, later that same year, Rembrandt's father, Charles Watson Peale, did this one:

Seeing a pattern yet? If you're noticing that George's image was undergoing the same transformation our movie stars' images do today, of getting younger as they became more iconic, then you're seeing what I did when I accidentally stumbled on these portraits while walking through the American Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. 

I've been in D.C. since the beginning of the 2021-22 school year (more or less) accompanying my daughter who is going to high school on the campus of the first--and still foremost--deaf university in the world. Ironically, Gallaudet University was chartered by another American icon, Abraham Lincoln, who, coincidentally, did not get younger as his star rose. Maybe that's because Lincoln, like Tom Paine who also didn't get any iconic makeovers, actually believed in democracy, or at least his era's version of it, and acted accordingly, unlike a lot of old-time slaveholders and modern (mostly Republican) Montana politicians. In other words, I've been in D.C. most of the year instead of my beloved Montana because our once-healthy politics has been captured, hogtied and tortured by our inimical social warriors, like Montana's current Superintendent of Public Schools, Elsie Arntzen, who can't possibly give special needs kids what they need to have a decent adolescent experience because they believe Jesus was white. Really. No kiddin'.

So again, full disclosure. I'm a "boomer", as is Elzie Arntzen which, if that ridiculous insult to the future of Social Security means anything at all, means that I was:

A. Sitting at the Round Table in the school library when my 5th Grade teacher came into the room crying, informing us that President Kennedy had been shot and that school was out for the rest of the day and:

B. I was raised to believe that George Washington had false teeth made of wood and that his stern tight lips were necessary to keep them from falling out, which all of these portraits, I believe, faithfully represent. He could not tell a lie because he had to hold his teeth in. Ask any 5th grade teacher (which Elzie was in her previous life), or 18th Century portrait artist.

None of this is not to disparage false teeth, wood or 5^th Grade school teachers, God forbid. All have their issues and uses. But there comes a time, maybe in these times of oligarchs and their Final Wars of Choice over money, to point out this tiny yet obvious flaw in our linear thinking that forever leads us into such debacles. Ready?

The face of money is as absolute at myths, oligarchs and 5th Grade school teachers.

You’re welcome, and remember, you heard it here first.

             

 

Democracy (Socialism) vs Capitalism (Fascism): Our Choice

Today's news, once again, is all about war and nothing about climate chaos and, while climate change is yet to reach "visceral" status with our species, the atrocities of war have been consistent attention-getters ever since we started using our "smarts" to organize around it as a solution to problems. War, the vast majority of our species agree, is gruesome and no one in their right mind would want to be on the same continent as one. It's curious, then, when that supermajority of war haters dwindles to a mere plurality (or less) when a war is happening on a different continent. From a distance, that wonderful, atavistic revulsion of ours to murder, rape and torture somehow morphs into a good vs evil fantasy tale. How easy it's been for the warmongers (read: oligarchs) du jour  to sucker punch us over the ages, but we're story-based critters, after all. We love our epics, which usually include a war or two to get the juices going, which is to say that the thought of war is entertaining. In fact, as anyone who's subjected themselves to a writing workshop knows, good narratives are based around conflicts and, at times, their resolution. War is conflict writ-large and ready-made. No resolutions need apply, just winners and losers. Literally speaking, though, war as a narrative devise is shallow water by definition and should long ago have become a toxic cliche but, sadly, hasn't. 

Which brings me to the Azov Battalion that has been "heroically" defending Mariupol for the last six weeks. Members of this unit, which has been fighting Russia in Eastern Ukraine since 2014, are now trapped in the city's last holdout, the Azovstal Iron and Steelworks and threatened with annihilation--in real time on Twitter and YouTube--if they don't surrender. Their plight, along with the plight of the 200,000 civilians still trapped in the city, is the current cause celebre for shaming nuclear-tipped western democracies like ours into formally entering a regional conflict against another, equally-nuclear-tipped one. So first of all, let's recap: War is gruesome and anybody in their right mind, which probably includes the vast majority of people stuck in the hellhole that is now Mariupol, wouldn't want to be anywhere near one. What's being perpetrated there by Russian forces is surely evil if there's still a meaning to that overused word and no excuses need apply. But wouldn't a meaningful definition of "evil" also include those who choose war as their natural habitat and then force others to endure it as a consequence of their bad boy choices? That definition would include the Azov Battalion which, despite protestations from jingoists to the contrary, was formed and is no doubt still buckshot through with nazis. It would also include the Neo-Cold-Warriors of the west (NATO comes to mind) who chose years ago to fight Russia "to the last Ukrainian" with the help of the Azov Battalion.

I have zero doubt that there are dozens of Netflix screenwriters drooling over plot scenarios involving impossibly-muscled Ukrainian soldiers fighting the Russian invaders to the last "patriot", with the Azovstal Iron and Steelworks, which was already a dystopian, industrial deadzone before the war, as a backdrop. I'll just say "Rambo" and leave it for you to google up. Meanwhile, climate action, the narratives of which don't generally include musclebound "patriots" with bloody assault weapons and dysfunctional wartime love affairs, is dead in the water. Our story-based minds have, once again, led us to the edge of the existential cliff in the name of War and, just like so many times these last few millennia, we're f....d. What to do?

Well, I'll admit that maybe this time it's too late for hope. But how about we give at least a thought to where we'd be as a species if we were as capable of being viscerally-fascinated by, say, epic tales of saving our planet from Climate Chaos as we are by war. I'd call such a narrative paradigm shift akin to evolution, similar to approaching the consciousness of trees, who have learned to thrive over the eons with their network of root hairs and micorrhyza that communicate and help their fellow rooted beings for the good of the Whole. They've been here longer than we have, you know, and it's the height of hubris to ignore their example. Yes of course there's competition. Over water, sunlight and other existential necessities and "duh" to that. But please consider how much more cooperation there is than competition in their--and by definition, our--natural world. They don't "compete" with each other to the point where whole forests are destroyed for the sake of feeding their oligarchys' egos. There'd be no such thing as forests and the climate we all live within, would there be? They, and every other creature on this planet including ourselves if we gave ourselves half a chance, are hardwired to cooperate as a Whole and that is why there is life--and democracy--on this Earth. Fascism (Brazil in its current iteration) is the antithesis of healthy forests and Capitalism (the U.S. in our current iteration) is the antithesis of healthy democracies. Yin and yang so to speak.

What's happening now in Ukraine--which nobody in this country ever distinguished from Russia until a few short years ago--is despicable, just as what has happened to Iraq and Afghanistan has been. A better case could be made than not that these wars could have been avoided if we weren't inflicted with such creatures as arms dealers, mercenaries and craven politicians who've taken one too many Rambo movie to heart, but the dog's out now, and he's a runner who doesn't come to call. Good luck shouting our lungs out for the next, what? hundred years or so until the hatred and trauma being perpetrated before our e-eyes cools enough to at least be stored underground into perpetuity. In the meantime, I won't be presumptuous enough to offer any suggestions out of this mess except to pray for a miracle.

Or hug a tree. To me that's one and the same.  

On Ether

Think of Facebook like Mark Zuckerberg does, as a “rarefied, elastic substance that permeates all space including the interstices between the particles of matter, the medium whose vibrations constitute light and other electromagnetic radiation.” 

 

Actually, that’s the old-fashioned definition of ether before atoms, electricity and the armless abelisaur were discovered, but never mind. It’s a good description for what kind of toy these billionaires think our Known Universe is to them. 

 

A counter-point to the world view of bastards is the way I think of Facebook: it sucks, but people live and read in that airy reality Zuckerface and his ilk presumes to dominate, which is the very reality writers presume to occupy, too. So writers gotta go with the flow, move with the rest of the circus, be one with the elephants. Fine.

 

Of course, neither definition is correct, but the fact that we even have to ponder such mushy mush means I am free to bend and manipulate whatever archaic universal laws exist or don’t to my own, personal will. I’m doing this not because I’ve sussed out the secret to the distance between atoms or whether Greek gods really wear loincloths, but rather because my blog, after a solid $@%##! year of refusing to function despite my hours (nay, days!) wasted clicking this and that floating button of frustration into the Elon-Musk-polluted Universe, has healed itself, or at least its attitude, and I can post on it again. Why my blog decided to work again is the stuff of conspiracy theories (if you are a 21st century Trumpian) or crystal energy (if you're a 20th century hippy). Either way, the upshot is that, instead of firing off half-baked missives about a world gone wrong to friends and other innocent bystanders as “replies”, I’m going to condense, curate and, yes, edit them into blogposts, and use those posts as my Facebook presence. Zuckerface can still make money on my “content”, and I can still post my (hopefully more-fully-baked) rants on the great bulletin board of post-pandemic human interaction. It’s liberating to finally enter the 21^st Century, albeit kicking and screaming. Win, win, win, whether ether exists or not.

 

You’re welcome.