12:09 p.m. - 09.21.2003
To Care or Not to Care - This Is A Call
Excerpt from the October issue of Rolling Stone:
"We understand that the best possible response to all the badness in the world - the botched war in Iraq, mindless tax cuts for the rich, looming oil shortages, GW Bush and his cronies, Fox News, chart-topping American Idol winners - would be a "renewed sense of activism" or some equally noble shit. Which is fine for some people.
But let's be serious for a second. When all your hopes rest on the governor of Vermont, doesn't even cautious hope feel a little excessive?
Sometimes it seems that the only thing to do is withdraw in disgust and wait for the whole bad dream to pass. What else is there to do - buy a Prius? Start a blog? Problem is, disgust turns to despair pretty quickly. So maybe you should attend the next Dean meet-up - at least they're held in bars. Or you can learn to stop worrying and love Clay Aiken."
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The above editorial comments (suggesting an increase in ambivalence and post-modern ennui in the face of heightened governmental irresponsibility and dangerous unilateralism, in an every growing cultural and creative vacuum) appeared in a magazine that featured a positive plug for this book - in the same issue:
"Hot Diatribe: A new book tackles the dumbing-down of the USA.
At first, Curtis White's The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves looks simply like this season's lefty screed against what he calls "the deep vacuum that is American life, culture, and thought." But where White, a fifty-two-year-old English professor and novelist at Illinois State University, departs from most liberal ranters is that he doesn't blame the stupidizing of America on brainwashing politicians and sinister corporations. He blames you and me: "It's not like an external force has to do anything to us," White says. "We've internalized all the mechanisms for that kind of management. We ask for it."
It was very different back in the late Sixties, when White came of age. "For a moment," he says, "the imagination was at large." He wants to bring that moment back: "The Sixties happened because things were so awful, people just couldn't stand it. Things are similarly awful now. The sad thing is that people don't see it."
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Basically, this book is dealing with a subject near and dear to me: personal accountability. But I'll stay off the tirade tip today.
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I wonder if the beefy spiders in my apartment are becoming just as fed-up with dying as I am of killing.
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