Bill Bartlett
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Yes, that was it, this sense. But imagine that sense as a shared experience, not just an isolated intuition, and one that was confirmed by others thinking, sensing, doing whatever along the same lines.
That's what I miss most. I used to feel like I had a good sense of reading, but I am afraid that when the political events and the communities that fought and lived them slowly dissolved, my own sense of things dissolved with them.
And now, with the rise of the Right and especially since US voters formally and unequivocally elected Bush, I have completely lost my bearings on the world. I know rationally, that is not the case. These movements of public mind have always been there in some nascent form or other, but now they dominate.
Digging back into my own past, going over all those empty roots of my suburban, upper middle class last years of adolesence, I think I can see where the heart of the Rightwing is, and it is in my view locked in a profound identity crisis of its own making and has suffered a prolonged torment for which there is no exit.
When I try to read the Right, that's how I have to approach them. They are scared middle class white guys in a world where they are the minority, where their assumptions about society, work, value, politics, power, tradition, and the proper order of the world has already dissolved and they can't get it back. They see their world like sand running through their fingers. It drives them crazy so they scapegoat everybody else.
What a Sergio Leone moment. The Right discovers the Middle East, Islam of all things. The blue-gray eyes, the weathered skin, the beard, the sweat running down the folds of cheeks. Shimmering heat demons dance in telephoto long shots that radiate off the scattered rubble in the desert foreground. Showdown in Baghdad. The eternal call to prayer falls in evening shadows of minor cords, desert birds loft skyward in panic, dark and forboding lines cut across ancient stones. Blood, passion, revenge, and honor, the darker side of classicism rises. The coolness of a stream running through an olive grove where Socrates and Phaedrus talked has disappeared. All that peace of mind is gone. There is only Aeschylus and Agamemnon, the consumate fool of power.
It's all there. Leone would have gone nuts with this material.
But most of all, what I don't want to hear is their cries and whispers. You ask for it, now take it, but for the gods sake don't whine, don't lie about your fate.
What despictable dogs. They are not even worthy enemies, pissing on themselves and snaping at the wind.
CG