Think It’s Time for a Change

I started doing this blog shortly after Obama was elected in 2008. I saw better times coming and wanted to talk about where I believed we should go after all the years of Reaganism. It hasn’t turned out that way. First there was the much-deeper-than-I-foresaw racist reaction to having a black male as president. And then there’s been Obama’s inclination toward Reagan-like policies. (Yes, things could be worse—like, say, a McCain or a Romney presidency. But we are still heading toward hell, just at a slower pace.)

Lately, things have gotten so crazy that I find myself constantly conjuring up comebacks to all the negativity in the form of posts that I end up not writing because I’m tired of writing about this stuff. It’s my intention to stop reading and thinking about the violent and greedy egomaniacs in our midst and to start talking about where I believe we should go, or, at the very least, where I want to go. There are solutions to what ails us, and it’s not too late. I don’t think many people recognize what those solutions are, though. We’ve become too frivolous and distracted. But this is where I am going to put my energy now.

A Clever Rejoinder

I’ve been edging toward putting up a more serious post on a subject that, since my return from Santa Barbara Island, has been taking up a lot space in my head. But I’m not quite ready to write it. So in the meantime…

I love clever rejoinders. We probably all do. This week I was reminded of one of my favorites. It’s a well-known rejoinder, but I repeat it out of affection for its humor and for those who might never have heard it.

Steve Earle is a singer-songwriter whose big inspiration was the singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. (Singer-songwriters were once extremely important to me. I wanted to be one.) Steve Earle was asked to write a blurb for a Townes Van Zandt album and came up with this: “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” When Van Zandt was asked about Earle’s blurb he replied (spontaneously, I hope), “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards, and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he is sadly mistaken.”

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

When I was a teenager and wanted to be a musician, I had two distinct phases. First, I had a gentle folky phase, and then one day I suddenly switched to harder, high energy music. I stopped listening to a lot of my old favorites. (I tell this story in my book Street Song.) During my  folky phase I was into Dylan’s more gentle songs (“Girl From the North Country,” “One Too Many Mornings”), Paul McCartney ballads like “Mother Nature’s Son,” James Taylor,  Donovan, and Simon and Garfunkel. I didn’t care much for Simon and Garfunkel as singers. In fact, I actively disliked Garfunkel’s voice. I found it cloying. But I did like their harmonies. I was mostly into Simon’s songwriting and guitar playing.

I haven’t listened to Simon and Garfunkel in more than 40 years, but a week or so ago I got one of their songs into my head—”So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright”—and it wouldn’t leave. That led to my becoming obsessed with another tune—”Song for the Asking.” Both songs are from the same album, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Eventually I needed a fix. So I went to YouTube where I found a video of Art Garfunkel doing a live performance of the song “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” It amazed me. It’s one of the most remarkable performances I’ve ever heard—and fascinating to watch.

In September of 1981 Simon and Garfunkel agreed to do a free concert in Central Park, and half a million people showed up. They hired some heavyweight studio musicians to back them up. The pianist was Richard Tee. The original piano part on the record was played by Larry Knechtel, a white studio player and it sounds like white gospel piano playing: nice and filigreed. Tee is black and the piano part has a different feel. He plays it on an electric piano and he funks up the arrangement just a little. There are more percussive, block chords than in the original, but he plays them tastefully. The first two verses are just Garfunkel and Tee playing a duet. You can tell they’re really listening to one another. Garfunkel is doing his choirboy thing, but he’s so pure, so devoid of any show biz pretense, and so musical that it’s very beautiful to watch. He’s intense, but restrained. He doesn’t get into any histrionics, which it would be very easy to do with that song. The way the melody is constructed and the key it’s in, he has to put energy into it to sing it at all, but he walks a very fine line. And, as the person who put up the video says, “He nails it.” It’s quite moving. He delivers the heart of the song and doesn’t make any mistakes, doesn’t fluff any notes, which is something very few pop singers can pull off in concert. They’re usually not disciplined or well-trained enough. And he does it in front of half a million people. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Art Garfunkel won my respect with his performance, and you can watch it here.

A Thought I Had While Sitting In Moonlight

I’m back out on Santa Barbara Island. Last night around midnight, I went outside to sit and listen and watch. I  heard sea lions barking, waves crashing against the cliffs, the peeping of some species of seabird, and the banging of the flagpole rope against the pole. I saw the stars, the moon, the reflection of the moon upon the ocean, and forty miles away the dim glow of Los Angeles. I thought to myself, “I ought to try to write a poem.” And then I thought, “Naw. Nobody reads poetry anymore. Poetry is dying.” A terrible thought, really, and I had to think about that for a little while.

What is poetry? When it functions correctly, it’s a people’s expression of its deepest convictions and insights. The universe has a constant poetry going that sometimes we see in the form of coincidence. Not accident, but coincidence—where things mysteriously coincide, that is, the workings of karma. Those levels are always there. So, poetry, or the poetic, never dies, but a people’s awareness of it can. We can lose our convictions and insights. If no one is paying any attention to poetry in America these days (perhaps you could even say the modern world), I have to think that it’s the culture that’s dying, not poetry.

Back from Santa Barbara Island

Judy and I have been back for a week now, and for me there’s been an unexpected development. As I said, when we were offered a third week on the island, we had to ask ourselves whether we could handle it. We decided to give it a go, and it was easy. The hard part has been coming back home—at least for me it has. Being on Santa Barbara Island was such a peaceful experience and we got settled in deeply enough that coming back to the chaos of the city has been unsettling. I dislike going outside right now. The city gets on my nerves more than it did before we left. I’ll adjust. I am adjusting. But this was unexpected. I’m speaking only for myself. Weirdly enough, just three days after our return Judy had to leave for another island: Manhattan. I’m eager to compare notes when she returns.

Why Obama

I recently received an email from someone in Canada who wanted to know why I had supported Obama’s reelection. He is angry with Obama and cited, specifically, Obama’s use of drones and his caving in to the Wall Street bankers. My answer to him was, yes, well…better him than the horror that was Romney. After watching a documentary on the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s, I’m reminded of another reason, a reason that I was well aware of in 2008, but less so this time around. Namely: It is so good for this country to have as president someone who is not lily-white—and who was re-elected to boot. That’s a fundamental and forever change, I think. And that’s good enough for me.

This Creepy Election

I haven’t been writing about the election. I find the level of debate extraordinarily discouraging, which reflects, I think, a certain naïveté on my part. For years, I’ve been watching the intelligence of the American people go downhill. What’s there to be shocked about? When you have this kind of worship of celebrity and wealth—classic decadent empire—it’s to be expected.  Self-government requires intelligence and engagement. We’re facing some extremely serious issues, none of which are being addressed. One example is human-caused climate change, which most scientists seem to agree does exist. Not to discuss it is crazy and dangerous. But neither candidate dares to touch it. Another example is the economy. It’s discussed, but not the real underlying problem. The truth is that we’re seeing the end of a fantasy belief, that of constant economic growth for generation after generation. It was always a logical fallacy, an utter impossibility. Neither candidate can save the economy—at least not the old-style economy that we’re used to. We’re entering a new era and we need to start looking at it realistically. Does Obama need to lose so that Romney can demonstrate that the Republicans’ ideas won’t work either? I have little doubt that if either candidate told the truth about what’s really going on, the people—who claim to want their politicians to tell them the truth—would turn on him. So democracy—self-government—is failing in America. If it were working it wouldn’t matter how much money any particular candidate raised. People would have seriously studied the issues and would judge a candidate on the clarity and truth of his or her ideas, not on their ad campaigns. Money would be irrelevant. I blame much of our current state on computers and the Internet. We have not gotten any smarter since their introduction. To the contrary. (I’ll be writing more about this in the future.)

In any case, I’ve already voted, and I voted for Obama. I have to wonder if the worst happens and Romney does win, will the Republicans, given the last four years, be so hypocritical as to demand national unity? I’m sure they will. All the old insanity, all the old lines like “why do you hate America?,” and talk of non-Republicans being treasonous will once again tiresomely fill the air. Our only solution is to step back and take a non-ideological, objective-as-possible look at who we are and what we believe. What we believe must correspond to what is true, not what we’d like to be true. We can still do it. It may take another economic crash and a few more monster storms, but we can still do it. It’s not too late.

Another Take on Freedom (Life’s Little Ironies)

One day back in the mid-to-late 1980s, I met an emigre couple from the Soviet Union. Having studied the Russian language in high school, I took a special interest in them. I don’t remember the details of their situation, other than that they’d become deeply dissatisfied with life in Russia and had gone to great lengths to come to the United States. When I asked them how they liked their new lives  in America, they looked at each other nervously, their eyes clearly saying, “Dare we answer him honestly?” I assured them they couldn’t possibly tell me anything that would upset me. This was the Reagan era, and I was profoundly disgusted with my country. After much reluctance on their part and much encouragement on my part, they finally managed to stammer out, “It’s so unfree here.” Not what I expected to hear! I laughed out of surprise and some confusion. I asked them to explain. They said that in the Soviet Union they could go wherever they wanted, that they could just start walking across the earth in any direction without restriction, save for, I assume, military bases and the like. But here, they were constantly encountering “no trespassing” signs and other private property issues. They said they felt like cattle being herded through a set of narrow chutes. I have never forgotten their perspective.

Freedom

One of the greatest difficulties in finding agreement on what to do about the problems facing this country is our idea of “freedom.” The great majority of Americans have the simplistic idea of freedom meaning “I can do whatever I want to do”—some adding “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.” In practice, “I can do whatever I want to do” really means “I can do whatever my ego wants to do.” And that’s not freedom. That’s slavery—to your ego. The ego is wild and doesn’t give a damn about others. It wants what it wants and it wants it right now. I’m familiar with this territory. When I left home my aim was to be free to do whatever I wanted. And I pursued that goal for several years—into a great, lonely emptiness. Fortunately, I was also interested in what is true.

At this point in my life I see freedom as being free from delusion and uncontrolled desire. You have to have that interior freedom before you can really be free in the world. A man who keeps shooting up dope because he can’t make himself stop is a slave. And I think a lot of what we do in our day-to-day lives is much the same as what that dope addict is doing. Each of us is unique and we have to be who we are. But I also believe that the universe is a cosmos and when you be who you really are, you’re brought into community with others being who they really are. We’ve got to junk this idea of each of us having our own stuff, that we’re entitled to all this stuff because we worked for it. The earth can’t take it anymore. Humanity can’t take it anymore. We have to find a collectivity that is graceful and true. It can’t be enforced from the outside; it has to come from the inside. But we do have to find it. We’ll do ourselves in if we don’t. And that’s the truth.

Quote of the Day

The new supposedly dazzles the old out of existence, and people of our era are encouraged to pity their ancestors who had not the good fortune to be as we are.

Wendell Berry