I have never witnessed in my lifetime a politician quite like you.
I feel like John McCain and his campaign mantra: “My friends, I’m constipated and I’m ready to go.”
This stuff has been building up within me.
Another conjunction this weekend: The mutual agreement with a friend to read Emerson at respective picnic tables thousands of miles apart on Saturday, the Adult Education forum at church today, talking of the Transcendentalists with their utopian experiments, the responsive reading in church authored by Henry David Thoreau that included the quotation: “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear,” the incessant political harangue which is beginning to infuriate me.
And so: “I gotta go!”
It is such a swirling cacophony in my mind, the events of the past few days and weeks.
The symbolisms. The words. The accusations. The shilling. The framing. The desperations. The handicapping of a horse-race. The jousting of political candidates, with their unutterable intent to inflict the killer political blow.
Bitter. Poverty. Jobs. Out-Sourcing to Overseas. Illegals. NAFTA. Columbia. Healthcare. The damning of America. Bosnia. Hope. Terror. Torture. Hate. Economy. Unemployment. Family Values. Traditional Values. Choice. Sanctity of Life. Gays Destroying Marriage. Amnesty. Corruption. Big government. Little people. The voters.
Yes. The voters. Voters who are bitter. Voters who cling to guns. To religion. To antipathy. Voters who want something better, something more. Present-day voters who Henry David Thoreau aptly described years ago as people “leading lives of quiet desperation.”
And to how many of us today does that describe?
For how many of us, do we have this primal, inner longing, for some transcendental utopian experience? Something. Anything. That transcends that life of “quiet desperation.”
Thoreau, in Walden, that chronicle of his solo utopian experience, remarked “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”
Living is so dear . . .
He had to be thinking of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his words: “I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities … The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable.” (Emerson, Experience.)
In today’s parlance, we hear concepts such as “The Audacity of Hope.”
In the course of our history, so many Americans have been drawn to the ideal of utopia—an ideal which may not be realistic or feasible or practical or even wise. The Shakers. Oneida. New Harmony. Brook Farm. Fruitlands. Utah. Battlecreek. And in recent history, Jonestown, Branch Davidians, YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, TX.
But for most of us, utopia is something more egalitarian. A simplicity and dignity to life and to our relationships within it.
And for some, it is a rationalization that “I am in this world, but not of this world.” And what happens doesn’t really matter, because my belief system says it will all end soon and this old world will be nothing but a smoldering moot point. And heaven will be my home. Utopia. For Ever.
But the likely reality is that it will “not end soon.”
And so politicians of today appeal to hope and to anti-bitterness. And to bitterness. And to religion. And to anti-religion. And to the status quo and to change. And to experience and the right kind of experience. And to double-speak. And to the flaunting of empty rhetoric and promise. And to the blatant falsity of hope.
And there is one politician who uses ideas and phrases and complex thoughts that sound 21st century transcendentalist to move this experiment called America into experiences that are “uncalculated and uncalculable.” He speaks of unspeakable things in political rhetoric.
And for that realization to take place, the process of the shattering of the status-quo will, by necessity, be filled with shock and awe. The goring of old political oxen will become a killing field And the old beast of politics-as-usual will not die . . gracefully or otherwise.
For the first time in generations, we have that kind of politician. It may be generations before one like this comes again.
And like those utopian experiments of yore with their predestined failure, their seemingly inevitable inability to sustain themselves, I have this gut-wrenching fear this current politician is also destined to failure. For the shock and awe of the change he calls for cannot be enough. The killing fields of gored political oxen will experience resurrection after resurrection. His hope will be smothered and drowned and eviscerated by the tentacles of entrenched fascism, corporatism, the unaccountable and uncontrollable military industrial complex, the multi-nationals that answer to no one, and a media of blathering talking-heads fixated 24/7 on exploiting missing blonds and the private misery of celebrities.
And the bitterness of Pennsylvania will return with a vengeance.
And America will be forever changed.
And it will be a wilderness of guns. Of religion of hate. Of a desperation of antipathy..
Mr. Obama, I admire you. I have never witnessed in my lifetime a politician quite like you.
But I have this fear.
That America is not ready for you.
And this epiphany will be wasted.
And the history books that our children will write, will say: “Damn you, America, for what you didn’t become.”
The Refectory Manager
This stuff has been building up within me.
Another conjunction this weekend: The mutual agreement with a friend to read Emerson at respective picnic tables thousands of miles apart on Saturday, the Adult Education forum at church today, talking of the Transcendentalists with their utopian experiments, the responsive reading in church authored by Henry David Thoreau that included the quotation: “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear,” the incessant political harangue which is beginning to infuriate me.
And so: “I gotta go!”
It is such a swirling cacophony in my mind, the events of the past few days and weeks.
The symbolisms. The words. The accusations. The shilling. The framing. The desperations. The handicapping of a horse-race. The jousting of political candidates, with their unutterable intent to inflict the killer political blow.
Bitter. Poverty. Jobs. Out-Sourcing to Overseas. Illegals. NAFTA. Columbia. Healthcare. The damning of America. Bosnia. Hope. Terror. Torture. Hate. Economy. Unemployment. Family Values. Traditional Values. Choice. Sanctity of Life. Gays Destroying Marriage. Amnesty. Corruption. Big government. Little people. The voters.
Yes. The voters. Voters who are bitter. Voters who cling to guns. To religion. To antipathy. Voters who want something better, something more. Present-day voters who Henry David Thoreau aptly described years ago as people “leading lives of quiet desperation.”
And to how many of us today does that describe?
For how many of us, do we have this primal, inner longing, for some transcendental utopian experience? Something. Anything. That transcends that life of “quiet desperation.”
Thoreau, in Walden, that chronicle of his solo utopian experience, remarked “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.”
Living is so dear . . .
He had to be thinking of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his words: “I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities … The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable.” (Emerson, Experience.)
In today’s parlance, we hear concepts such as “The Audacity of Hope.”
In the course of our history, so many Americans have been drawn to the ideal of utopia—an ideal which may not be realistic or feasible or practical or even wise. The Shakers. Oneida. New Harmony. Brook Farm. Fruitlands. Utah. Battlecreek. And in recent history, Jonestown, Branch Davidians, YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, TX.
But for most of us, utopia is something more egalitarian. A simplicity and dignity to life and to our relationships within it.
And for some, it is a rationalization that “I am in this world, but not of this world.” And what happens doesn’t really matter, because my belief system says it will all end soon and this old world will be nothing but a smoldering moot point. And heaven will be my home. Utopia. For Ever.
But the likely reality is that it will “not end soon.”
And so politicians of today appeal to hope and to anti-bitterness. And to bitterness. And to religion. And to anti-religion. And to the status quo and to change. And to experience and the right kind of experience. And to double-speak. And to the flaunting of empty rhetoric and promise. And to the blatant falsity of hope.
And there is one politician who uses ideas and phrases and complex thoughts that sound 21st century transcendentalist to move this experiment called America into experiences that are “uncalculated and uncalculable.” He speaks of unspeakable things in political rhetoric.
And for that realization to take place, the process of the shattering of the status-quo will, by necessity, be filled with shock and awe. The goring of old political oxen will become a killing field And the old beast of politics-as-usual will not die . . gracefully or otherwise.
For the first time in generations, we have that kind of politician. It may be generations before one like this comes again.
And like those utopian experiments of yore with their predestined failure, their seemingly inevitable inability to sustain themselves, I have this gut-wrenching fear this current politician is also destined to failure. For the shock and awe of the change he calls for cannot be enough. The killing fields of gored political oxen will experience resurrection after resurrection. His hope will be smothered and drowned and eviscerated by the tentacles of entrenched fascism, corporatism, the unaccountable and uncontrollable military industrial complex, the multi-nationals that answer to no one, and a media of blathering talking-heads fixated 24/7 on exploiting missing blonds and the private misery of celebrities.
And the bitterness of Pennsylvania will return with a vengeance.
And America will be forever changed.
And it will be a wilderness of guns. Of religion of hate. Of a desperation of antipathy..
Mr. Obama, I admire you. I have never witnessed in my lifetime a politician quite like you.
But I have this fear.
That America is not ready for you.
And this epiphany will be wasted.
And the history books that our children will write, will say: “Damn you, America, for what you didn’t become.”
The Refectory Manager
posted by The Refectory Manager | 10:28 PM
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