Greek Mythology, American Reality

Once upon a time, but not that long ago, a country was founded by some folks who wanted to throw off the yoke of monarchy and see if they could create a democracy or at least a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people.
It grew steadily for two centuries until it became the world’s leading country and leader of the free world. At the time it assumed this lofty status, it also declared that a thing called a corporation could be considered a person and would acquire some of the same rights and privileges that a real person in that society already had. These special “persons,” who had been mere corporations before they were blessed with personhood, began to grow and grow to such gigantic proportions that they began to assume positions in that culture that rivaled the powers of mythological gods of Ancient Greece, had those ancient gods been real.
Unlike those great titans of old, these new “gods” who claimed the status of persons but who were often faceless, unless they were called before Congress, grew in real power to such a great degree that they began to rule not only the country that spawned them but the world itself. Politicians around the world and especially in the homeland of these neo-titans began to serve the titans rather than the people. Eventually the former world nations acquired new names such as, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Exxon-Mobil, Pfizer, Halliburton, Health One, and even General Motors.
Some real people feared these titans and believed that they were conspiring to take over the world, but the reality was they were simply doing what they were born to do: make lots of money for their handlers and followers and eliminate the competition, usually by swallowing them whole.
The real people continued to worship their ancestral gods and prayed that these new “gods” would stop the warring or collapse of their own weight but they were too big to fail. Or they worshipped the products these new gods offered instead of praying to the old gods. Enough privileged real people kept betting on them and reaped great dividends until there were no more resources that the gods could extract.
Finally, these titans fouled their planet to the extent that it was no longer habitable to human kind and the planet died. All that was left was a vast wasteland of boiling water and desert without any sign of life.

Ozymandias (by Shelley, 1818)
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Pashtun Follies

Obama promised to shift our war efforts from Iraq to Afghanistan as a campaign pledge. This is one pledge I wish he had not made; but given the fact that it’s impossible, it seems, for a Democratic Presidential candidate to win by simply opposing war, he had to pick a battle somewhere. Democrats are constantly badgered by Republicans about being soft on the ism of the day. For the past decade it has been terrorism, until the recent health care debate unfolded when the Republicans also resurrected attacks about being soft on socialism. Therefore, it was not surprising that Obama chose Afghanistan, the unfinished business, the battleground country never mastered by East or West. Of course the idea of winning in Afghanistan is delusional, given its make-up, its history, and its arbitrary construct.
We can partly blame the British for the problem on two counts. The first is they partitioned what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1893 with the Durand Line, which they drew when the British Empire was at its peak in the region. It defined the northern frontier for British India but in the process managed to cut in half a people who would much rather have had a country of their own out of the deal but ended up on either side of a politically arbitrary and geographically challenging border. These people are the Pashtuns.
The other count is also historical: the Brits successfully brought the clans of Scotland together as a model of clan-nation transformation, albeit they did it mostly by serving as Scotland’s arch enemy and eventual conqueror for a considerable stretch. This success has served to feed the notion that such nation-building can be done elsewhere, even in impossibly difficult terrain in remote locations, not just next door. However, the actual means of that nation-building has been forgotten or ignored.
The very word Pashtun gets a red line under it on my Microsoft Word program, which means that it is not even an official word in the Microsoft dictionary. That’s no wonder, because Pashtuns haven’t gotten much recognition or respect from the West up to this point. We hear a lot about Afghanistan and Pakistan but only occasionally hear about Pashtun regions, which have no Karzai or Zardari to hold accountable for their actions. What the Pashtuns want, of course, if they have to belong to a country in the first place, is a Pashtunistan, not serve as second class subjects of two different foreign nations. If there was any place where “we don’t need no stinking badges” applies, it is Pashtun territory. The Pashtun regions make troublesome areas in Iraq look like Amish settlements in Indiana.
Don’t expect to be ordering Pashtun equivalent of tartan clothing or bedspreads from LLBean any time soon. Bringing them under control will make herding cats look like synchronized swimming. I downloaded the Wikipedia information on Pashtun tribes and found that there were twelve pages of named tribes, clans, sub-clans, fractions, and sub-fractions that encompass the 40 plus million Pashtun people in the region. The idea that General McChrystal and company will make a lasting impression on that population has as much chance as a stone thrown into a mill pond. It will ripple for a bit and then disappear. This war is sheer folly and the result of a continual misunderstanding of the needs and hopes of the region as well as how to prevent terrorism in the U.S. Chasing Al Queda operatives back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan isn’t the solution.
The region is not primarily about the Taliban or Al-Queda but more about Pashtun sovereignty. If we chase Al-Queda out of Afghanistan, it will set up shop in Pakistan; if we do the reverse, they will too. At best we’ll cobble together an exit strategy that gets us out “with dignity” but we should not look for any real success in the region. The Pashtuns have to deal with all three adversaries: the Taliban, Al Queda, and us. We will not win the hearts and minds of a people who have been promised, ignored, and meddled with for centuries. And we surely won’t be waiting around to meet Karzai’s timetable of five years for developing his security force capacity and fifteen years for financial self-sustainability.
I guess if the new surge had a remote chance of succeeding, McChrystal would be an appropriate choice to lead. After all, his Scottish heritage contains some elements in common with the Pashtuns, but I don’t think the Pashtuns will be hosting a golf tournament let alone paying homage to or willingly joining an alien government, namely Karzai’s, any time soon.

Retarding the Spark

What is “retarding the spark” you may ask? Mechanically, it is asking the engine spark plug to fire after the piston has reached full compression, not before. Retarding the spark was something you did manually to get a Ford Model A started. Also, backing off on spark advance under conditions of severe load was standard practice - e.g., climbing a steep hill with a heavy load. Today’s modern combustion engine runs most efficiently when the spark is advanced or preemptive (ignites before the engine piston has reached full compression) resulting in greater power, better fuel economy, and less pollution.
My hypothesis in this essay is this: if we backed off a bit in how we operate our cultural and human engines and “fired our plugs” in a way that took into account the steep ascents we often encounter, we would not have to run so hot all the time to be efficient and fire our human cylinders in a surge-like fashion.* In firearms terms, the advance (preemptive) ignition sequence is FIRE-AIM-READY. If we retard the spark, we have the more deliberate READY-AIM-FIRE. I am not suggesting that we go back to the Model A as a means of transportation. I am merely suggesting that as human beings we have something to learn from the model A as a saner approach to life when things get heavy. Today, we tend to surge when we ought to be more mindful of timing. We have been conditioned to believe that nearly everything in life has to be done as a preemptive strike.
The day after Thanksgiving is now called Black Friday, the most glaring evidence yet that we have elevated consumerism to a god-like status. Its ritualistic aspect and participation numbers easily eclipse those of Good Friday, a Christian sacred holiday associated with Easter, a time of reflection for Christians. The whole thrust of Black Friday is to get consumers out buying Christmas presents at bargain prices so that they get into the mind set of shopping for holiday gifts until December 25th. That kick-off of the holiday shopping season produces a full month of activity characterized by greater than normal buying frenzy. Black Friday is so named because merchants hope they will end the year “in the black” or, profitably. The stores open well before dawn to ensure consumers that they are participating in something special, almost sacred, like a sunrise Easter service, but more active, like, say, the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Black Friday is turbocharged by the faith in the laws of supply and demand. If everyone wants a particular item, it must be good. That’s the operating value in a culture that ostensibly values values.
In Colorado we finally have a law outlawing texting while driving. What precipitated the law was a form of multi-tasking that produced carnage on the highway. While we like to see ourselves as a nation of multi-taskers, we have finally met a situation where multi-tasking needs to be strategically thwarted. The researched truth about multi-tasking is that nothing ever gets done as well as if it had been done as a single-focused task, but don’t tell that to Americans who believe first and never mind the facts that conflict with those beliefs. We Americans as a culture are in a hurry to get somewhere, go to the next level, climb the ladder, eat, exercise, achieve, acquire, all because we operate with the illusion that standard of living is synonymous with quality of life. If we have more, we somehow are more. ”He who dies with the most toys wins” served as the mantra of the ME generation. The ME generation has now blossomed into the ME culture.
Our politicians need to get something done because they must have some achievements under their belt or they will be turned out in the next election. Obama has not been in office for a single year and yet for months he has been criticized by the right and left for not accomplishing anything substantial yet. His trips abroad, the economy, the wars, health care, all have signaled no tangible results so far. The public wants results the way it collects purchases on Black Friday. It wants them, and it wants them now. We have become a data-driven society that is more interested in what we have to show for ourselves rather than how we live.
American culture needs to retard the spark. It needs to slow down and take another look at what quality of life really means. It is not solely based on GDP or interest rates or granite counter tops. Quality of Life is not even a derivative of Standard of Living. It is the measure of happiness and meaning a people has from its day-to-day existence on this earth, and it assumes not only personal budgets are in balance but that actual lives are. Research has demonstrated that Americans don’t become any happier when they rise above middle class status. A large portion of America has surged in spending without the actual income to pay for the surge. A focus on quality of life would suggest the only debt people should live with indefinitely is their debt of gratitude for that quality life.
What I am suggesting is heretical to ACM or American Cultural Momentum. Our collective ethos has been bigger and more is better, sooner is better than later except when it comes to paying for it, and surges are good for everything except computers and other small appliances. We can surge in Afghanistan, surge on the gridiron, surge at the fast-food drive thru, and surge in the polls. We can put on a surge and win at NASCAR, and we can surge out of the pack and win a golf tournament. Some of us can even surge our way into a White House state dinner if we have the appearance of surge power. Or we can surge out our driveway and into a fire hydrant and a neighbor’s tree, if things get too hot on the home front. Surging has become our mode of accomplishment, just as surfing (the internet) has become our preeminent pastime.
I urge us as a nation to slow down a bit and retard the spark. We could do without the surges and sloughs of Wall Street and their derivatives; we can avoid being trampled like runners in Pamplona by staying home on Black Fridays and shopping with greater deliberation rather than speed; we can be more than less by doing more with less. We have been on a power surge as a country since the 1960’s, and we are tired and worn out by the extraordinary energy our ACM has demanded and extracted from us.
Will the surge in Afghanistan be the surge that breaks our cultural back? I do not know. I look back on Vietnam and in the midst of its throes how wrong our leaders were about the long-term outcome and how close we came to our own cultural meltdown. It seems the lessons of history are never learned until the long view back is available, and even then our theories are subject to continual revision. The surge might work or it might not. As a concept it is more acceptable to the American psyche than simply going to war because our whole culture thinks in terms of surges and splurges. Right now it seems we are about to splurge on a surge that may turn into our scourge.
Perhaps it is time for our culture to take at least a small dose of Thoreauvian philosophy and begin to live a little bit more deliberately by retarding our cultural spark, and living consciously, less impulsively, and a little cooler in the process. It’s all right to drive a highly tuned machine: It’s not all right to become one. The end does not warrant the means. As Socrates so wisely offered thousands of years ago: “Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty.”

Vitality

Earlier this week David Brooks, a moderate conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote how the health care debate is about values, namely two specific ones: security versus vitality. He presented those values as mutually exclusive at worst and like a soft balloon at best when it comes to health care specifically and the country in general. I’ll take the soft balloon analogy just to give him the benefit of the doubt. In that analogy, if you squeeze one end, you enhance the other. In any case, he sets up the classic false dichotomy or dialectic between two goods when there truly isn’t any at all. The country does not face a choice between security and vitality.
The premises he operates from are conservative: people are essentially lazy and are motivated by fear or need; necessity is the mother of invention; providing security undermines vitality in the individual and in the country. The philosophy borrows from the first Newtonian law of physics: objects stay at rest unless a force acts upon them to overcome their inertia.
What conservatives seem to forget, including David Brooks, is that an awful lot of accomplishment that occurs is motivated by desire to accomplish, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the need to create. All of those are best nurtured from a place of security where the essentials of life are provided for. In the world of conservatives, the starving artist always produces the best art.
For example, kids learn better when they have been provided breakfast. That’s been established as a fact, not a theory. Athletes perform better when the coach has made a decision that they are the starters. Entrepreneurs are more successful when they are fully capitalized, not when they are scrambling around looking for money.
I spent a part of my professional life coaching. The sport I loved most was rowing. What I observed over the nearly three decades I coached was that all boats went faster once I had determined the line-ups. In other words, once the oarsmen knew what seat they were occupying, the boat settled down and got faster. They became a team, pulling for each other and themselves, and the whole nearly always became greater than the sum of its parts. If I kept seat-racing well into the racing season (pitting one oarsman against another by having them switch seats from boat to boat and race over a fixed distance for time) both boats more often than not got slower rather than faster. The team psyche and commitment to each other was more important to outcome than whether or not I had actually assembled the individually strongest oarsmen in one boat. Chemistry seemed to transcend logic, and the chemistry came out of and produced the trust and commitment which teamwork becomes and is in a beautiful example of micro- evolution.
I would contend that providing health care for all Americans would produce a more vital and vibrant work force, a more focused managerial workforce, and a more vital, dynamic economy. Taking that one ball (health care) out of the juggling act for everyone would allow all of us to focus more on the love of work for the sake of accomplishment rather than choosing a company for employment because it has good health benefits. How many disgruntled workers are doing a job they hate only because it offers a good health care program? Is that any way to manage or motivate a work force? Talk about productivity. Have you ever seem a winning team that hates what it does but does it anyway for the money? I think not. If they don’t love the sport first and the money second, they don’t win.
Most of whatever has been accomplished or invented has been done so out of love, not need. If necessity is the mother of invention, the father is love of inventing (What a role reversal that is!). A certain amount of security is necessary for productivity to occur. Encouraging teamwork in the workplace can only enhance productivity, not detract from it. And people can feel a part of a team only if there is a certain amount of security in place: sinecure, no; but security, yes. The guy who invented Microsoft did so out of his parents’ garage; the guys who invented Google did so out of their dorm rooms at Stanford. They didn’t have to scrounge for their own health benefits or put food on their tables; they came from families with means. They had more than a basic sense of security.
And that brings me to dispel the still existent myth of the self-made man, the myth that conservatives will seemingly believe in as long as the last one is standing. Guess what: there is no such thing. Every man who ever made it big has a lot of folks to thank, like it or not. The myth of the self-made man is easily dismissed by John Donne’s famous line, “No man is an island” no matter how hard conservatives work to leave you “on your own.”
Security is the basis for vitality, and security is a social concept, not an individual one. We can only be secure in relation to others. Once that is established, we can then be full of vitality and energy because we have nothing vital to lose. We can go on offense rather than remain stuck in a defensive mode of thinking. In short, security provides the defense from which we can launch our offense. The Japanese figured that out a long time ago, and their factories are the model of efficiency, vitality, teamwork, and security. A new idea or improvement can come from anywhere in the workforce, not just from the top down.
Conservatives would do well to begin looking at what actually works, rather than rely on old aphorisms that have been handed down from generation to generation like the neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” who won’t go behind the saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Honor and Honesty

I once taught in the South at an old fashioned, southern gentleman’s prep school located just below the Mason-Dixon Line. The culture of the school was fiercely southern, I imagine, because it was located so close to “Yankeedom.” It was a long time ago, but as I watch the Republican remnants and their fellow travelers like Joe Liebermann rant and rave about the need to preserve free market capitalism in all its purity, I am reminded of some of my students from the southern landed gentry stock who challenged me whenever I confronted them about looking over on Beauregard’s or Hampton’s paper for an answer to a quiz question. Their response was inevitably, “Are you questioning my honor, sir?”
I would answer with, “I don’t know exactly what you mean by honor, but I am certainly questioning your honesty.” What I saw was a complete disconnect between honesty and honor. The latter was some abstract notion of reputation that must be defended at all costs, while the whole concept of actual honesty seemed lost on these young men. Fortunately I was never challenged to a duel during my three years of exile in that disturbing land, and finally I escaped back to New England.
I see the same disconnect in the southern Republican defense of free enterprise. They insist it should be defended at all costs no matter what. There is in them the same false chivalry I witnessed as a young teacher. Their notion of integrity is to defend principles no matter what, even if they have proven themselves to be worthy of questioning, as evidenced by the latest bubble and bust scenario acted out on Wall Street. Their sense of absolute integrity in defense of pure market economies as the only way to conduct business falls right in line with the history of the South as a whole: they were adamant about maintaining the institution of slavery in the face of its obvious immorality and growing economic disadvantages for the region; they were adamant about preserving Jim Crow; they were adamant about the idealization and paradoxical subservience of their white women; and now they are adamant about maintaining the deregulation of free markets at any cost. Everything becomes a last stand against the undermining of principle by Yankee liberalism and pragmatism.
Even The Economist, probably the best weekly news magazine in the world and a defender of market economies, sees the need for some kind of regulation by governments in the wake of the unregulated market debacle, but the southern Republicans will stick to principle and frame issues in terms of Thomas Paine-like absolutes, although they would not cite Paine because he was a nominal Yankee.*
The southern Republican is not the last vestige of a culture that simply will not die. NASCAR is another. Born of whiskey-running, revenuer escaping outlaws, Today’s NASCAR is the epitome of the institutionalization of red-neck southern values, and it has grown to the point that it has become mainstream American entertainment. The vast majority of its contestants are white as are most of its viewers. It celebrates a modern version of the single combat warrior of old who lives outside the law, risks his life, and maneuvers through obstacles (other drivers) to attain victory. Although there are rules and regulations governing among other aspects the size of engines and the horsepower, the spirit of single combat in that individual contestants duel it out for huge cash prizes is preserved. Fatalities do occur from time to time, so the liberties they take can result in death. The illusion, at least, of unregulated, all-out-aggression and individually heroic life-risk is preserved.
The reality, however, is that NASCAR is regulated. It is not a place where anyone can bring any kind of car to the track and do anything he wants. There are rules, restrictions, and constant revisions as technology and safety issues evolve. If the quintessential modern southern sport has rules, why can’t Wall Street? Is it just another disconnect that sport should have rules but real life should not? Maybe it’s just confusion between freedom and license that the South never sorted out except in NASCAR. Real freedom is not doing whatever you want until you get caught and then retreating into self-righteous indignation when confronted or blowing blue smoke out your exhaust pipe to escape the revenuers.
One of the definitions of integrity, in fact the first, is honesty. But then again, the southern mind has always been able to compartmentalize in ways that astound, such as the disconnect I witnessed long ago, between honor and honesty. It appears that the modern southern Republican mind’s focus on principle is so strong that it is blinded from honesty in any real sense.
*Actually, he lived in Philadelphia for a rather short period of time and then New Rochelle, New York, although he spent a good deal of his life abroad and was born in England.

Manifest Destiny 2009

The shooting at Fort Hood is beginning to look like another story in the long history of manifest destiny narratives. What they all have in common is that some kind of god told a person (or a people) that he should listen to the voice in his head (presumably the voice of God) and do what it says. Whether it is a voice telling Israelis to keep building their houses on occupied Palestinian lands, or Christian settlers usurping Indian lands in the settling of the American West, or Islamic Jihadists detonating suicide bombs, or right-wing Christians killing abortion doctors, they all have the voice of God as their navigator or inspiration.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.

Grace

The word grace has had religious connotations for centuries. Religion has presented it essentially in two forms: something earned from or something freely given by a god. In either case, the human being on the receiving end of supposed divine grace was better off than those who were not. Grace was seen as a blessing, an advantage, or a desirable elite status.
I would contend that we would be a lot better off if we simply recognized the concept of grace as a desirable human characteristic and sought to maximize its existence among us. After all, it is we who gave our gods the capacity to bestow it in the first place so why not own it ourselves to produce as much of it as we can. Of all the shortages we can see around us today (jobs, money, happiness, civility) grace is the least present of all.
But just what is this humanistic grace of which I speak? And what is it not? When we think of it at all, it is usually in the form of an adjective: graceful. The dancers who appear on So You Think You Can Dance are often viewed as graceful in their movement even when they are dancing a very rigorous tango or salsa. But the program itself is not at all graceful in that it emphasizes judgment and competition as the measure of success, thus producing a pair of winners and a host of losers. There is little grace in the outcome. There is also no grace in the name of the program which throws down a gauntlet-like challenge and dares you to prove that you can do what you think you can. It’s no encouraging set of words like The Little Engine That Could.
When I was coming of age in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, American Bandstand captivated a whole generation of teenagers who admired the dancing skills of the cast members who were never put in the position of becoming winners or losers. They were all winners much the same way the Mouseketeers were on the Mickey Mouse Club created by Walt Disney. The viewing audiences in both cases were given a variety of personalities to admire and even emulate. The dancing was good, but as a viewer I never felt the need to see a showdown in order to determine who the best dancer was on either program. Must everything be reduced to winners and losers? Was not the grace of it the fact that they were dancing?
Discourse has suffered the same fate of late as dance. Diatribe has replaced dialogue as the means of communication. The win-at-all-cost monologue championed by self-appointed and self-righteous talk show hosts whose might- (following) makes-right attitude has replaced the measured, nuanced rhetoric of well-mannered and thoughtful pursuers of truth like Walter Lippmann and William F. Buckley. Blind certitude is asserted in the face of complexity with a vehemence that precludes any humility or doubt. It is about winning, the truth already having been established. The idea of being graceful is brushed aside as a sign of weakness.
A friend once remarked that if we, as human beings, were completely uninhibited, we would sing to each other rather than talk. Life would be a combination of opera and ballet. It would be about the grace of it all, not the meanness. It would be about bringing out the best in each other in everyday life, which would mean bringing out the grace each of us has inherent in us as human beings. Grace, by my definition, goes beyond mere civility or generosity or art. It is the combination of all human qualities that produce goodness in all its forms and facets. It is the combination of qualities that help us harmonize with our habitats and sing the song of life. It is about singing rather than bickering; dancing rather than trudging; skipping rather than plodding. It is about painting ourselves out of corners rather than into them, and being the am and drinking the tea in team.
The Puritans thought they knew what grace was and believed that you either had it or you didn’t. They had located it in their god, personified it (he) and then doled it out to the select few whose crops did not fail or ships did not sink. We’re still seeing the remnants of that legacy in those who tell us that because they are materially successful or know (for certain) how that happens, that they are the elect who must convey their wisdom to their hopeful followers. Ultimately it is self-serving rationalization, not true grace.
The question is not “So you think you can dance?” The question is will you.