1914-1989:
Look at the current crop on Capitol Hill. Listen to them. Be realistic. Is there anyone there who gives the slightest hint of potential to speak from and for the heart of America as Barbara Jordan did? I don’t think so. Even Jacob Lieberman’s sermonette on the floor of the Senate, however well-intentioned, sounded a bit too much like the high school principal dressing down a student body president. Recalling that glorious day when Jordan’s voice—a voice that didn’t just fill a room, it filled a massive void in the country—brought us to our senses, I got to thinking about those who have come after her. All in all, with a few exceptions, a pretty sorry lot of leaders manqués when you look back over the last 25 years. Just look at them. Nixon, Ford, Carter. Reagan, Bush, Clinton. Sort of takes your breath away. This is the best a very rich nation of 250 million can come up with? Hold on. I’m just getting started. Nobody’s really happy with that lot. And citizens whose thought processes are acutely tuned to frequencies between 530 and 1600 kilohertz fill the airwaves daily by blaming their own un-faced shortcomings on one or the other of our end-of-millennium leaders. That’s too easy, and gets us nowhere. If we start instead from the possibility that a nation gets the leadership it deserves, then the depressing chain of N-F-C, R-B-C becomes, if not more bearable, at least more understandable. Think of it like this. Most every period in history sees itself as the cat’s pajamas, a glorious time to be alive. And in retrospect, the popular culture even turns massive disasters such as wars and depressions into times of fond nostalgia which "tested" us and proved our mettle. (How fondly the generation now dying off remembers the "glorious" music from WW2.) But looking back with clearer vision we can see the disasters for what they were (just more examples of the varied results of avarice and violence). And we can also see that not every age is golden, not every age is teeming with Jeffersons and Washingtons, Bachs and Shakespeares, Platos and Sophocleses, Lao-Tze’s and Gandhi’s. Whether history is cyclical or circular, cyclonic or chaotic, our experience of it is that change is the only constant. So constant and so confusing—given our limited understanding—that it becomes ever more difficult to counter the argument of the cynic in scientist’s clothing that all is finally random. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I tend to think not, because patterns of excellence do become apparent if we look back with calm judgment. But alas, patterns of mediocrity also become evident. And if we compare the last quarter century to what we know of history, we find the best congruence with past ages of true mediocrity, when, for whatever reasons, people acted massively and individually from expedience, when self-interest was the true and only law, and devil take the hindmost. Close up, this century seems divided into periods of grinding war, and beneficent peace. Imagine how it will look 500 years from now. Will it not seem that a long-running European hegemony (with, to be sure, massive exploitative flaws) began to crack in 1914, and continued until 1989? Just as the 17th century became known for its "30 Years’ War," perhaps the future will come to speak of the 20th century’s 75 Year’s War. No wonder we are tired, exhausted, frightened, insecure, and above all, greedy. And just at a time when the technological advances driven by this long war have given us the means try to sate our greed on a global scale. Remember, we were so tired, insecure, and greedy that we could be frightened almost out of our pre-millennial wits by a tiny computer glitch. The last estimate I saw was that in the 20th century, through war, revolution, and politically driven famine, we have killed around 200 million people. And here, in the economic sunlight at the end of the century, we go about our self-interested, self-fulfilling business as if nothing untoward had happened. It won’t work. Can’t work. It is truly delusional behavior. Even the materialist, the hard-core scientist must see that such a large loss from the gene-pool will have massive, deleterious effects. The humanist must take into account the incalculable emotional and psychological effects of such an extended killing binge. No wonder we wound up with N-F-C/R-B-C. Not to mention Thatcher-Deng-Kohl et al. Or (to get away from the too-easy targets of political mediocrity) Disney-Lucas-Spielberg, Warhol-Glass-Schnabel-Lloyd-Webber, ABC-NBC-CBS-CNN, and so on and so on. Casting about in the slushpile of history, if we look for a similar period of over-achievement in truly consistent mediocrity, we find only one lengthy period. The second half of the 17th century. In the first half, Europe exhausted and decimated itself in the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), a politico-religious exercise between the Protestant north and the Catholic south which reduced the population of several countries by two-thirds. While science and technology continued to thrive, culture (and politics) afterward wallowed for decades in a mire of mediocrity throwing up a series of names known today only to academic specialists in the baroque. It wasn’t until the early part of the 18th century that recovery began. The second half of the 17th century was, like ours, an age mostly of pygmies, full of themselves, out for themselves, aping larger figures from the past. Clinton quotes Kennedy. Reagan quotes Roosevelt. Bush… well, Bush throws up in the lap of the Japanese prime minister. Glass quotes himself, endlessly. Warhol quotes Madison Avenue. Starr paraphrases The Autobiography of a Flea. King does campfire tales, childish rip-offs from Poe. And so on, and so on. So I have come not to expect a latter-day Barbara Jordan to appear, to inspire us, to remind us of what we were and what we can be. I expect the sordid American drama of greed-ridden Puritanical and political expediency to play itself out down to the last dirty little historical whimper. Which is the best all the players have in themselves. How can we expect them, filled like ourselves with hollow dreams and false, grasping hopes, smaller than life, to speak with a voice for the ages. But also remember as the night goes on: Among other worthies, Handel and Bach were both born in that earlier age of clammy proto-capitalism. |
I kept waiting to hear a new