Monday, January 13, 2003


Eat Your Vegetables? Only at a Few Schools. School lunches have become a central issue in the national debate over why Americans are growing obese. By Elizabeth Becker and Marian Burros. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

 

The really scary and insidious side to this entire story is how children are further being trained brand consumers. Less money for schools. Lower taxes. And to pay for all the basics, schools have to rely on corporate sponsors and vending machines, further reinforcing the disintegration of our world into a market state.

I just finished reading "The Dream of Scipio" which deals with civilized collapse over three epochs - the collapse of the Roman empire in Gaul, the Plague in Europe and WWII, all located, roughly, in Vaisson and Avignon. The choices each of the protagonists makes are informed by classical education and the instinct of the heart, loyalty to friends, loyalty to the permanency of ideals, and how brutal those choices can be.

Today, the very institutions, like government and the church, that were once keepers of the flame, our core values, are leading the dismantling of what makes us human. Marshall Berman, in All That is Solid Melts into Air, expresses his optimism in humans' continued ability to define individuality in an increasingly reflexive society, telling a first-hand account about a poor young black girl proudly showing off her new pants.  I think of that essay often, and how, when it was written fifteen or so years ago, there wasn't the level of commercialism that exists today. The choices people make about constructing identity are so limited, so superficial, with mainstream evangelical Christian traditions, the mega-Churches, enforcing those consumer values, rather than challenging them. Their Mickey Mouse Christianity is itself emblematic of a lack of reasoned commitment, and their messages of prosperity being a sign of God's grace a rallying cry for insipid consumer-values based lifestyles.

What then, in today's world, to create community? Are pockets of anarchists throughout the globe the monks of this Dark Ages? And how to define, in this age of cultural pluralism, what mores, what societal artefacts we put in the ark? Two by two. The covenants, the still burning embers, to take until civilization encamps again.

Julien, one of Pears' characters in The Dream of Scipio makes the impassioned argument that Nazism wasn't a failed ideology, a losing side, but a demonstration of civilization at its most effective, in this case the end result the brutal efficiency of genocide. I don't believe that, that the ultimate result of civilization is simply more efficient destruction, barbarism under law, but a world where laws and civil society paradoxically support my belief that people are more important than ideas.

And especially brands.

 

 


9:31:16 AM    

The tree stump, the seasonally painted tree stump on the way to Castlewood was green with a silver ring painted around the top. What holiday is that? Some obscure Zoroastrian spectacle, maybe a Norse evergreen bris? I miss the snowmen. The turkeys. When did decorative art get so abstract? They've painted that thing for at least the past 9 years with recognizably iconic work. This, I don't get. Maybe it's been a gradual transition, an art class at the community center here, a Hockney book for Christmas, Modrian on your college kid's dorm room wall and then WHAM - no more cute pastorals. Just boxes and squiggles and color. Which is all good and fine in the Guggenheim, but not the tree stump on the lawn. Not my signpost to the seasons.

I asked David Margolis, who did, and may still, beautiful photo books of the rapidly diminishing whimsical art deco architecture in small town America, like those old pop stands in the shape of a soda bottle, or ice cream shops shaped like space ships, and places like St. Louis' own Coral Courts, where you pay for the room, the dalliance is free (not their real motto, I assume), if he felt any regret not doing anything to save the buildings. He shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn't his role. I remember being peeved. The same when I asked Harold Ramis about the increasing commercialism and cross marketing of Hollywood, which he didn't share my profound indignation for. It surprised me that the drama and arts folks invited me to their specific department soirrees, and maybe they did stop. I hope I run into a me someday if I'm presenting somewhere, just as poetic justice, some disheveled student winging what would be a fastball right at my head, if it had marginal relevance to the point of my lecture. I think I understand that now - he saved the images, which you can do a lot faster than saving buildings all over the country. And now that the tree is gone, or gone abstract, I wish I'd taken pictures over the years myself.

The Meramec was beautiful from above. As much as I envy some of those awesome bluffside homes, I can't help thinking of the Sierra Club's David Brower, in John McPhee's "Conversations with the Archdruid." McPhee took Brower and a real estate developer hiking, and on some beautiful vista, the developer says "What a beautiful place to build a house." And Brower says "What a beautiful place to NOT build a house."

The Meramec was muddied with human remnants from below, along the shore, from the floods of 1993. Tires still, washing machines. It's gotten better over the years, as some of it sinks below. Water is amazing. What a perfect motif for life and destruction.

And I swam today, Sunday, the day after, in a warm pool, with no hidden currents. Just instinctively, as a swimmer too maybe, I can't help but give Elaine Morgan's "Ascent of Humankind" credence - and I need to check out the exact title and author (the closer I get to just unpacking my books, the smarter I feel already, the recall of having them all out as visual references may make me never ever want to leave the study, make it into my little brain cave)  - humans didn't come from the plains to trees, but down to the ocean, to escape predation, draught. Makes me wonder if the Atlantis story is some primeval memory of that time, or a real race, with some of its genes still among us. Being in the water, from the womb to the swimming hole, are some of the times I feel most absolutely buoyantly alive.

With the knowledge we have of using liquid oxygen to pressurize divers for the deep sea, by having them actually immersed in it in their suits, makes me wonder if it would be possible to slowly train the lungs as gills, gradually reducing the oxygen content until trained swimmers, or an evolved human gene pool, could breathe in most underwater conditions.

More so than running even, my body craves the oxygen handling capabilities I had when I was competing. When I swim now, I feel like a poorly trained marionette, with really, really bad asthma, trying to control a broken down puppet.  I should see if I can bring those arms and lungs back where they once were.

Still, with that even, being in the water today, the tension and release later of being walked off my self-constructed boyfriend contest show set (THAT entire image is comedy, like a bad cable-access show, "Why I should be Felicia's boyfriend"), I feel at my most content and focused in a long, long time. Maybe from knowing I can breathe the ether of my dreams anytime I choose, like understanding breathing during the tricky poses, that the tricky poses aren't about muscles or stretching as much as they are about remembering always to breath. Which made even the drunken table at the end of the night bearable, if not so much fun.


1:19:17 AM