This is something I started writing in 2004, just after the election that gave George Bush a second term. I was moved to begin this piece after a symposium I attended, in which liberals got together to discuss what went wrong and how things could be put right again.   It struck me that everybody was focusing on how close the election was:  everyone was fussing about what Democrats could do to get 51% instead of 49% in the next general election.  It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that people were failing to focus on the deeper deficit costing the Democratic Party (and liberals in general) elections: our lack of an archetypal narrative, a grand quest, a mythic sense of destination. I began to ponder what it would take to recreate such a narrative.  The piece that follows is incomplete; a mere fragment.  That’s why I’ve never published it. But I’m going to post it here in hopes of at least starting a conversation.

The Willoughby Factor

For the last twenty-five years, the Republicans have been remarkably successful at winning elections because they have articulated not just a direction for American society, but a destination. Over this same period, the Democrats have disintegrated into a fractious collection of factions, each one clinging to one or two narrow issues and constitutencies, trying desperately to win elections by cobbling together coalitions, and why? Because they cannot coalesce around some deep sense of where they want to take the country.
I emphasize the word “where.” I propose that broad political success for a national party must begin with a mythopoeic sense of a coherant future world to which the party will deliver us if we board their train. The Republicans have such a place, and I call it Willoughby.

Willoughby is a small town portrayed in an early episode of Twilight Zone about an unhappy middle-aged businessman plagued with a terrible boss and a shrill wife, suffering from battered self-esteem and deadly work pressures. One day, riding home from work, he dozes off and dreams that the year is 1888 and that the train has stopped in some quiet small town.

“Willougby!” the conductor chirps. Through the window, beyond the platform, the businessman sees a pleasant neighborhood of single-family homes with nice yards, kids playing baseball in the streets, and neighbors talking over picket fences. The town looks clean, and the pace looks slow. It’s obvious that no one in Willoughby feels any stress. It’s obvious, too, that Willoughby looks like this no matter when you happen to pass through. It’s beyond change.

The next day, the man has a nervous breakdown and quits his job. On the way home, the train stops in Willoughby again, but this time he decides to get off. As he strolls into a slower world of measured serenity, the townsfolk all greet him by name.

Even if you never saw that episode of Twilight Zone, you probably recognize the place: the Republicans have been talking about it for nearly 40 years. Maybe they don’t use the name, but Willoughby is the place that began to appear in Republican speeches in the seventies, the place that was crystallized in ads for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in the eighties, the place that he and other Republicans have evoked constantly in ever since in folksy anecdotes and banter.

It’s the hidden promise of a mythic Willoughby that has enabled Republicans to wrestle Democrats to the mat for decades. Democrats famously know they lack “some sort of vision thing,” but when they dig around for something visionary in their bag of ideas, they come up with tediously specific programs, annoyingly vague “directions,” or meaningless “themes.” That’s because a movement consisting of many cantankerous and contradictory factions must first of all give none of its rattle-trap parts a reason to defect. Thus, any Democratic attempt to craft a mythopoeic offering is crippled from the get-go by the requirement that it avoid evoking any specific image.

In 2000, for example, Al Gore ran on the promise of a “prescription drug program added to Medicare”—that was his grand “vision.” Four years later, John Kerry’s campaign centered on “strength.” Can you imagine living there…? Can you picture it—taste it? Can you fantasize how you’ll spend your days in a land called Strength or a town called Prescription-Drugs-Added-to-Medicare?

The Republicans counter all such campaigns by whispering, “Willoughby. Stick with us and we’ll take you to Willoughby.”

If the Democrats want to persuade the country to board their train, they must start by coming up with a destination of their own, a place so tangible they could create travel brochures for it. Because who’s going to board your train if you can’t say where it’s going?

Without a mythic destination of their own, the Democrats are reduced to saying, “Willoughby’s no good, who wants to go there, the trip’s too dangerous, you’ll never get to Willougby with the Republicans, their train is infested with cockroaches, the track they want to go on is broken, their engineer is blind and drunk, hey—let us drive the Republican train, we studied driving in college.”

“Willoughby” has been working for Republicans because it addresses two deep-seated anxieties in American life. Liberals may dismiss Willoughby, but they can’t dismiss these two anxieties and indeed do not dismiss them. People on the left are just as passionately concerned about these problems as people on the right; and yet the left has relinquished ownership of these issues entirely to its rivals.

Endless Random Change

The first issue is the anxiety of endless, random change. At bottom, this stems from our relentless progress in technology, which keeps overhauling our economy, which in turn incessantly transforms the social milieu within which each of our personal destinies must unfold.

Because of this incessant change, no one can make dependable plans for the future. On one level, this generates a simple brute material anxiety. You train for a job, but by the time you finish your training that sort of job has probably vanished. At a deeper level, the prospect of constant, endless, random change generates social, psychological, and (dare I say it) metaphysical tensions.

For example: as a young person growing up, you absorb the expectations of your culture and look ahead to dating, finding a mate, and fulfilling the normal human passions that are expected to result ultimately in offspring and family life; that’s a set of urges genetically coded into your biolgoical self. But by the time you get to young adulthood, the rules have changed, nothing you learned (usually at the cost of so much humiliation and such assaults on your sense of self-worth during your adolescence—just check out AmericanPie or any of a hundred other teen movies) applies anymore: everything you do is wrong, offensive, and “incorrect.”

Let’s pursue this theme a few steps further down the river of life-stages. Your parents and several generations before them painstakingly built up a structure within which it was possible to get medical treatment if you got sick and to retire when you got old. Those structures are vanishing. If you don’t have health insurance, you don’t know what you’re going to do if you get sick.

If you do have health insurance, you’re probably getting it through your job, which means you had better not lose your job–but this comes at a time when all jobs are subject to the anxiety of endless random change generated by (see above), since even the most solid-seeming companies can disappear in a twinkle, as can whole industries.

Or you might be one of those who have already flown or fallen out of the old economic structures: you’re operating as an independent now, a consultant of some sort, or a service worker with a skill, in which case you’re buying your own health insurance, and every year your rates shoot up catastrophically, and there’s nothing you can do but pay them, because you’ve got some pre-existing medical condition staining your record, everyone does eventually, perhaps as trivial as headaches you once complained about, or sedatives you once requested which marked “possible sleep disorder” on your record, allowing any insurance company to reject your application.

And you certainly don’t know how you’re ever going to retire, because pensions are vanishing and everyone tells you social security is going to go broke long before you get a penny out of it, even though you’ve been paying into it all your working life and are paying into it still.

Meanwhile, every physically familiar aspect of your landscape is undergoing a transformation. That field you played in as a kid, that stream where you once caught polliwogs, that house on the corner where the cranky neighbor lived, the bridge or park or parking lot where you tasted your first kiss, and son on through an endless list of sentimental moments fused into physical landmarks, all have been mulched by the industrial process into something else. The passion that lies behind a word like “homeland”—the attachment to land, to a plethora of sensations, to inviolate memories, to the sweat and blood of ones forebears—none of that applies anymore, for all of it stands in the path of the universal grinder of endless random change.

A young Republican told me one day that if you wanted a real, old-fashioned home-made pie, you had to go to a small town in America’s heartland to get it. Well, that sentimental idea doesn’t correlate to what’s actually out there anymore. I have occasion to spend a fair amount of time in at least one small town in Eastern Kentucky, and—there at least—every commercial establishment within hours of driving distance, purveying anything from hardware to restaurant food, is the local franchise of some mega-chain. The only place to shop for “dry goods” is Wal-Mart, the only “old-fashioned pie” you can get is at the local Wendy’s where “old-fashioned” is just the name of a product-line.

Big corporations have purchased the rights to whatever indigenous American culture used to exist in the small towns in America’s heartland, they’ve had designers in distant cities standardize it, and they have low-paid workers in some other country manufacture it for re-sale to the people in small towns at prices lower than those folks could possibly afford to manufacture the products themselves, and then the corporations hire them to vend those goods to one another for wages they can spend only in the local outlet of the big chain, because there is no other place to spend it, money which more or less instantly shoots off to general accounting in the head office, to be disbursed according to the budgetary logic of a sprawling multi-national concern.

There is no Willoughby. But Americans long for it, so they listen to the blandishments of the Republicans, because no other vision of a livable future is being crooned to them.

The Meaning Deficit

The other of the two critical anxieties plaguing American society, and indeed the post-industrial western world in general, is the emptiness of a life consumed by work and rewarded by goods. It’s the meaning deficit.

Ironically, the meaning deficit comes out of our very success in certain areas. Mainly: our society is very good at production. It can pour out goods and services better than any society in history and better than any other system in the world today. I’ve been to places outside the post-industrial West, and I must say, nothing rivals the profusion of goods available here. Go into any store, look in the yellow pages, look at the ads in any newspaper, in the magazines, on TV, on the Internet–anything you want exists out there; and once you have everything you want, you don’t stop wanting. You need only open your eyes, and you’ll soon find new things to want, and all of that will be be available too, if you have the money.

There is nothing wrong with prosperity per se. Prosperity is a good thing. It’s certainly better than poverty, shortages, boarded-up stores, empty shelves, and famine. Prosperity must certainly be one feature of any mythopoeic destination that liberals propose to American voters.

There are, however, two problems with prosperity as we now enjoy it. The first is: we can’t relax about our goods. Strictly speaking, it isn’t just greed that makes people feel they don’t have quite enough, no matter how much they have. The truth is, hardly anyone does have quite enough to feel justifiably secure. Very few American families are more than the loss of health insurance and one catastrophic illness away from living on the streets. At one time, at least in our mythic memory, people who crashed for one reason or another ended up relying on their families, friends, neighbors, and community. But the trend in our society for years has been toward independence and autonomy for every individual. Men always sought it; then women entered the workforce, and now many women have independent incomes too, even if they’re married; and in the last few decades, children’s advocates have sought autonomy and independence for children too, even ones still living with their parents.

We might debate the merits of this trend. I for one find much to treasure in autonomy, independence, and sovereignty for each individual. I would not want to give it up—but I do see the flip side of sovereign control over all ones own choices: if you get into trouble, you’re on your own. That haunting anxiety drives each person to dream of achieving so much economic clout that they will never have to count on the indebtedness or compassion of any other human being.

And that’s what brings us to the meaning deficit. Although most of us may chafe at interference in our lives and resent other people trying to define us, what we want in the end, as human beings, is not simply to be left alone. We’re social creatures. We derive our sense of humanity, our sense of worth, and our deepest sense of purpose from our connections with other people, from our place in a social network. We want to be needed and called upon. Our deepest hunger is to signify. And none of us can achieve the sort of significance all of us long for by mattering only to ourselves. We must matter to someone else, to many someone elses, to a community, to a world out there.

Advantage: Conservatives

Conservatives were well situated to exploit the anxiety generated by endless change, because the reflexive rhetoric of the Right has always glorified stasis and demanded the preservation of the status quo. The left was poorly situated to offer any resonant response because progressive rhetoric has always inherently called for overturning the old, forging into the unknown, embracing the new, and risking that which is different.

The trouble is that in the last half century, “the new” has been thrust upon all of us whether we want it or not. We don’t need politicians to bring us “the new”: the new keeps coming willy nilly.

Of course, when progressives speak of overturning the old order and trying something new, they mean overturning old power relationships, the ones that entrench injustice and keep the majoity of people dissatisfied.

But in a social milieu quiveringly sensitized to the disquietudes of endless change, a politician whose speeches are larded with words like “new”, “different”, and “change” can expect much of his or her audience to hear only those words. Lacking some sense of an ultimate destination, the progressive stump speech seems to consist merely of “more change”, “anything new”, “shake it up”, “forget the past”, “question authority”, “denounce tradition”, “lets try something different, don’t care what, don’t know the consequences, don’t care.”

In the first few decades after World War II, words like “change” and “new” had automatic allure because they lined up with the broad historical tide. All over the world, colonial powers had recently let go of their possessions. All over the world, people who had formerly lived under the boot of some foreign culture were emerging, so they thought, into self-definition and independence.

Besides, all over the world, in the wake of the most devastating war in history, the demographics of the world suddenly tilted toward youth. In the richest portions of the globe, those youth came of age in a milieu of not just comfort but luxury and leisure. The energy of youth and their enthusaism for risk combined with global elation about independence and a sudden efflorescencence of material abundance in the West to produce worldwide receptivity to exploration and adventure. Change was fun, new was glamorous, old folks were stodgy and dumb, tradition lacked respectability, and in every realm, from entertainment to sex to politics, social consensus began to value the theme of last-shall-be-first.

Authority had to prove it’s moral legitimacy and could rarely succeed. Rebels reflexively got the benefit of any doubt and could lose legitimacy only by committing the most outrageous crimes. As late as 1976, I still heard people saying that Idi Amin was a good guy whose reputation had been blackened by imperialists and that the genocide in Cambodia was actually a worthy thinning out of pre-revolutionary predators, the extent of which had been vastly exaggerated by the media.

But in that decade, various crimes finally burst the bubble of legitimacy that had protected revolution per se. One of these was Cambodia itself. Finally, there could be no refuting the mountains of skulls, the forced marches of ordinary innocent people to extinction. Then came the exodus of the “Boat People” from Vietnam. Then came Afghanistan. And so on.

What Reagan Did

Reagan rode the reaction to Cambodia, to Vietnam, and to smaller dramas such as the mass suicide of the supposedly utopian Jonestown community in Guyana. Of course he came to office with a political agenda—of course he did. He wanted to make the rich richer. He wanted to militarize American society. He set out to promote Christianity as a quasi state-religion of the United States, it’s true. And yes, he wanted to protect the freedom of big business to make as much money as it could in any way it saw fit. Check, check, and guilty as charged; but these goals had little to do with his immense popularity or his electoral success. Another president could have come in with all those same goals, submitted all the same bills to Congress, launched the same programs, and left office in midterm on a rail if he ever got in at all.

Reagan was popular because of another more subliminal message he broadcast to the American people. He said that change was bad, not good. He said, the traditional family model was good, not bad. He said a fixed social order in which everyone knew his or her place and kept to it was a blessed thing. Masses of anxious people let out great sighs of relief. Yes, they panted, thank God someone finally said it: change is bad. Make the change stop. Please make it stop.

As for the meaning deficit, conservatives of course had a ready-made answer to plug into that one too. They had that old-time religion—which, as an added bonus, dovetailed nicely with an infrastructure for political organizing already in place: America’s churches.
                                                    (to be continued)

 

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Worst movie of the year? No competition: it’s that “Bob Dylan” movie, I’m Not There.  Half an hour into it, I was wishing the title had been true.  Why was I there? Because some idiot writing for the New York Times praised it to the skies.  He couldn’t get over the brilliance of casting seven different people to play Dylan.  What could moviemaker Tod Haynes possibly have been getting at, casting many different people to play that one role?

Gee, could he have been saying there are many different Dylans, no single one of them the real Dylan? Gosh, once you think of it that way, can you think of a more bull-ahead, ham-handed, no-nuance way of expressing that meager point?

What’s more, once you’ve said that Dylan is many different people, what else can you do with this device? In Haynes’s clumsy fists—nothing. The other night, I was listening to a group of people talking about the late Heath Ledger, and someone noted that he played “one of the Dylans” in that movie.   “Oh?” said someone else. “Which one?”

A silence ensued: no one could think of any way to identify any of the Dylans except by the different actors that played them. Heath Ledger played the one that was, you know… the one that was played by Heath Ledger. 

Ah, but it gets worse. Dylan has an extremely distinctive voice and diction. It’s hard for anyone to play Dylan without doing a Bob Dylan impression. Not unavoidable, perhaps, but in this movie, not avoided. As an audience, therefore, what we’re watching here is a parade of actors doing their Dylan impressions.  We can’t focus on what the characters are saying because we’re too busy noticing how good or bad the actors’ Dylan-impressions are, how close they’re coming to the real thing. If you’ve talked to anyone who likes this movie, you’ve probably heard that Gwyneth Paltrow really looks and sounds like Dylan. That’s what the movie pushes into your face. Let me note, however, that when you’re listening to the real Dylan, you’re not marveling at how much he sounds like Dylan; you’re listening to what he’s saying. That’s the experience no Dylan impression can capture.

Then again, in this movie, anything that distracts attention from people’s actual words may be a blessing, because every single line in the movie that was not written by Dylan is astoundingly clichéd. It’s inherantly impossible for every word in a script to be a cliché, but this movie flirts with the impossible. I said “every single line that was not written by Dylan” because Dylan’s own words are very much present here: his songs constitute the soundtrack. But the words spoken by the various actor-Dylans all come from Haynes and his associates.  

And what words they are! I’m remembering one scene at some gallery in which the actor playing Dylan has behaved badly to a woman and sent her running off in a huff. The Dylan impersonator then leans over a banister. The camera catches him from below, framed in the stairwell, against the stark white of the gallery walls: get ready, says the visual setup, quotable quote coming up, a Dylanesque moment.

And then it comes: “Love and sex, man… are two things….” (wait for it) “that really …” (here it comes) “hang people up.” Oh! Ouch! Help! Too brilliant!  Please! No more—ah, but there is more. Shut up and drink in the wisdom: “And how they’re related…I’ll never fully comprehend.” 

Want it again? Here it is without my intrusive voice scoffing and sneering:

“Love and sex are two things that really hang people up
and how they’re related I’ll never fully comprehend.

I’m Not There gives you two hours of this crap, right alongside the actual Dylan singing things like:

Twenty years of schoolin’ and the put you on the day shift
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did–
don’t know when
but you’re doin’ it again–
man in the trenchcoat
wants eleven dollar
bills you only got ten!

Someone said to me, “Well, at least the movie has lots of Dylan music. That alone has to make it worth seeing. Doesn’t it?”

Look: if you get a slice of delicious lemon meringue pie served on a plate with somebody else’s leftovers, it ain’t great.

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Jon Stewart is back on the air but without his writers. I watched him a couple of times last week, and man, if I were him, I would stay home until the writer’s strike is over. He delivers all the familiar John Stewart mannerisms and timing, he sounds like he ought to be funny, I even feel my laugh reflex tingling because I’m conditioned to chuckle at his quips, marvel at his insights, and gasp at his dead-on skewerings of public figures; and his mannerisms tell me when he’s delivering one of those. His bottled audience certainly laughs on cue. But my own impulse to laugh never develops, because he’s delivering only the mannerisms, not the insights, quips, or skewerings.

In fact, again and again, in the course of last week’s shows, his jokes strayed just enough off-target to make me wince.

In one bit, he reported on the interaction between an American naval ship and several Iranian speedboats in the gulf. With his usual wry, understated manner, Stewart showed us how the Bush administration reported the event—shaky videos taken from the deck of the naval ship showing the Iranian speedboats buzzing around in the open sea, with voice of American officers issuing warnings and discussing the Iranians’ possible intentions …

Then Stewart said, “Ah, but Iranian reports of the same event were a little bit different.” And then he shows us shaky videos taken from the deck of one of those speedboats, with the American naval ship in the distance, voice-over of Iranians saying something in Farsi. After which we come back to Stewart who has that familiar impish gleam in his eye and who, with that familiar I’m-not-going-to-comment-the-video-speaks-for-itself air, says, “What really happened? We’ll never know.”

What has he shown us? That if you’re on the American ship, you see the speedboats; if you’re on one of the speedboats, you see that American naval ship. The Americans speak English, the Iranians speak Farsi. So what? This makes no point, and it’s not funny.

Stewart is taking a big risk, going on the air without his writers. He gets exposed, and that can’t be good for his career. Of course I always knew that someone wrote his lines for him, but in the past, I simply experienced the package, and that’s a necessary illusion. I feel like from now on, however, when I watch him, I’ll always experience him as a face and a voice mouthing someone else’s words. The illusion has been broken. That’s why I say, Stewart go out on strike in sympathy with the writers.

In fact, everyone in the entertainment industry ought to do that anyway, because what the producers are trying to deny to writers is unconscionable. How can corporate interests dream of deny writers any profit from their works published in new media. Do they think they’ll be able to get writers to work for them without paying them? Or is it that they think they won’t need writers?

That question ought to interest the rest of us, because corporate entertainment producers have in fact found a way to dispense with writers. It’s called Reality TV. All those grinning fools lining up to pose as bachelors competing for sluts or capering for Tara Banks in hoping of becoming America’s next top model are being paid, as I understand it, rat droppings for compensation. They’re capering in hopes of getting to suck up some of America’s top drug out of this: celebrity-status. In fact,, of course, most of them will go out with yesterday’s garbage when the show is over, just so much more chum fed to the animals. Entertainment producers find Reality TV a viable substitute for art because so many of us are gobbling up the product: why wouldn’t they keep shoveling it into the trough for us if we’re eating it?

That’s what the writer’s strike is about, ultimately. Corporate interests feel secure in denying writers any share of the profits in their own work because they’re confidant that in the long run, they won’t need writers at all. They will be able to make money by marketing consumers to themselves: that is, by plucking out random consumers, putting them in front of the camera, and debasing them, for the amusement of the remaining consumers. That’s what Reality TV is all about, and if the writers lose this strike, a day will soon come when there won’t be anything but Reality TV.

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[I meant to post this on Christmas Day, but my plans went awry again, as most of my plans do.] A couple of years ago, I proposed to my family that we bust out of the dog-eared old Christmas traditions and try something new.  “Let’s go to Las Vegas,”  I said.  The response was not good. My wife Debby asked if I was feeling okay, if I needed to lie down. This puzzled me at first. For one thing, is Las Vegas such a departure from our modern commercial Christmas? But also, why should Debby and I feel bound by Christmas traditions?  She’s Jewish, and I was raised in Afghanistan as a Muslim.Then I thought about it, and realized I have always celebrated Christmas. When my American mother married my Afghan father and moved to Afghanistan with him, Christmas was one thing she would not give up.  In Afghanistan, there was no sign of Christmas in the stores or on the streets, but we had our private Christmas at home—very private; very nearly secret, in fact.

Yet there was nothing exotic about our secret Christmas. We had a tree, we hung decorations on it, we exchanged cards, we sang Christmas carols and strung popcorn and drank hot punch.  My good Muslim of a father saw nothing to object to in all this.  On Christmas morning, my siblings and I woke up to the same Christmas miracle as my own kids do now: material goods brightly wrapped and heaped under a Christmas tree, presents delivered by none other than Santa Claus. 

Yes, Christmas supposedly commemorates the birthday of Christ, but there’s a whole other tradition of celebration at this time of year that even a Jewish/Muslim family can dive into.  Many pre- and non-Christian cultures—the pagan Germans, the Druids, and others—celebrated the winter solstice, that pivotal moment when darkness begins to ebb and light to swell. In fact, Christian officials in late Rome established  Christmas in part to pre-empt a pagan holiday known as Saturnalia, which honored Saturn, the God of Agriculture: Saturnalia began on December 17 and ran about about two weeks. During that festival Romans decorated trees with bits of bright metal and gave each other gifts. As Rome

In short, many streams have flowed into the river that is our modern Christmas–and what a rushing river it has become!   Every year the holiday stress seems to get more and more intense. For me, last year was the worst ever, but I got through it; I always do.  Christmas Eve arrives, and there I am, wrapping presents with my wife Debby.  The house is quiet. The kids are upstairs asleep, dreaming about presents. Debby and I are setting up the show. Mozart provides the soundtrack.  We’re feeling becalmed, like boats bobbing in a harbor after a storm. It’s a good feeling–cathartic even.

And then I realize I’ve been here before. I’m here every year, in fact, about this time. And  what is this catharsis about?  Is it just the relief of surviving a marathon, of feeling the stress let up?

Naw. There’s something more here.  For at least three weeks in this season, I feel like I have a second full-time job: buying presents for the people on my list. And of course, not just any old present will do—I feel driven to find the right gift for each particular person—which entails thinking quite deeply and intensely about that person. Who is she (or he)? What’s she interested in these days? What seems to give her joy?  When I look at it this way, I see that I was wrong to confuse the saturnalian spending spree of the commercial Christmas with Las Vegas. It’s really a concentrated meditation on what other people want. And boy, I’ll be the first to admit: that’s a worthy break from the other 49 weeks when I am (I’ll confess it) obsessing on what I want.

So now I’m thinking it doesn’t matter where the traditional  Christmas comes from—Saturnalia, the Christian Nativity, pre-Christian German rituals—whatever:   I’m giving up on the idea of a Las Vegas Christmas and sticking with the dog-eared old Christmas traditions of my childhood in Afghanistan.

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