MONET, MONET

I just heard a artist interviewed on the radio.  He had spent more than $10,000 in material constructing sculpture somewhere in Michigan.  the value of his art did not include any of his time, much less his ideas. 

I wonder if those great Impressionists ever had a clue that their art work would sell for the megamillions, as a recent Monet was said to have attained.  Was there irony when collectors, not artistis, profited from art?  Was art, literature, music supposed to be about making money?  But when the creator, the producer, the performer, did not receive a fair valuation in their lifetime for the artwork in the first place, was art collecting the ultimate in illusion?

POLITICS & RELIGION: The American Past Time

“Concentration is such an important aspect of baseball,” Brooks Robinson said. “When there are 30 seconds between pitches, your mind has time to wander. You really have to fight that.”

 

Brooksy was talking about playing defense.   I thought of that Robinson philosophy when thinking about the department of defense.  He was IT. 

I thought of that Robinson philosophy when thinking about the department of defense or crime prevention because there was 30 seconds between pitches.  And for me a basic American philosophy did not allow in the name of crime prevention a perversion of the law, a perversion of the constitution.

 

The trends of the last 100 years involved urbanization everywhere.  And urban life was a secular life, first in Europe and America, now days in India and China.  There were fears that were played on by politicians who sought to be elected. 

 

History does teach lessons that leave young people scratching their heads how something had happened, if the world was civil, if a people were allowed to be educated.  One story of recent history seemed on a track to repeat itself unless something was done about it.

 

The real story for the Holocaust was the climax of one chapter of a people trying to cope in a secular world.  The secular world of Europe seemed to have become jealous over issues of possessions, of who was better read, better educated.  And because Karl Marx was a Jew and revolution had come to Russia over his ideas, Communists were to be feared, and the creators of the ideals of communists, the Jewish leaders within the movement, were to be feared.  Was it any different over stories in an informed age where too many believed Obama was a Muslim?  How did the uneducated Europeans respond to the Russian leader Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), when the masses were still illiterate?  And Jews were then in flight coming to Europe, refugees from the east bringing their ideas.  There was panic.  Fiddler on the Roof was not exactly fiction. 

Presently, the challenge in the secular world for the Jew, for the Muslim, for the Christian still was over integration.  Abram was called to be the father of a nation, people who had come together in prayer.  All people struggled with the same old question on how to pray, who to pray with, and how often.  But the majority seemed to be asking why?  Was it a worthwhile pursuit?  To about half the world of belief, that meant at the beginning of new life or the end of another.   And these were the people who lived in fear of those who had some semblance of God. 

 

The War on Terror was nothing but feeding on the fear of God by the secular world.  It was politicians playing on fear to win votes.  This war separated people on the basis of religion.  The truth is, no matter how awful the experience of September 11^th, how crushing to those who lost loved ones, politicians in the New Millennium continued to use the tragedy for political purposes, to divide and conquer. 

 

Terror and it causes as much involved individuals as it did nations.  Only in a declared war, killing was now allowed in the name of war.  Basic human liberty could be put aside in a declared war.  But the war on terror was always a war within, between good and evil.  And Islam was not about evil.  There was a true irony in the western world that had moved away from God, the same irony found in history when in 1492 Columbus sought a passage to India to the west so he did not have to go through territories of the Ottoman Turks.  They were tough fighters, those Ottoman Turks, with a fire within.  And in the current war on terror, the United States and Europe were afraid of radical components of Islam that had appealed to the poor, a component that called a people to prayer when in their world, a secular world, there was so much affluence and less and less organized prayer.  In the current EU, few people worshipped –less than 20% of the people in Belgium worshipped collectively on a weekend, as one example.  And in such an environment of nominal Christianity, Americans were willing to give up the foundation of civil liberties for what was called Homeland Security?  THAT was the underlying conflict that no one saw in the United States –the basis for so much fear was a religion, when religion was becoming something to be feared in the west.  

 

It was real irony that America was founded out of the fear of the Ottoman Turks.  We now seemed a people who, at least in the 21st century lived in a world without prayer, a people who seemed a lot more neurotic.  Prayer in the name of pluralism did not belong in public school.  But neither did the moral relativism that is now in the water that our youth swim in. 

With 30 seconds between pitches, when you are defensive, your mind still has time to wander. 

The Test Tube World

 

Timing.  It was everything.  The first test-tube baby was born thirty years ago this month.  And her parents got the equivalent of $630,000 to tell their tale to some British tabloid.  Since then there have been 3 million test-tube babies born.  The parents of the other 2,999,999 only got a test tube cigar. 

 

Timing is everything.  We lived in an age when it did not matter when the president lied to the people.  This was the age of moral relativism.  That was the difference between 1972 and 2008.  Nixon’s road to impeachment never would have happened in this decade.  It was a part of the environment of moral relativism.   What was the big deal about a break-in?  What was the big deal about a position paper from a CIA employee prepared in his final days, concerning the risks of going into Iraq, a month before the United Nations’ vote on weapons of mass destruction. 

And what was the big deal about tying Al-Qaida to Iraq, to a meeting in the Czech Republic, stirring up fear.  In times of war, everything would be permissible.  Let’s wage war on the basis of   weapons of mass destruction.  Americans were now so very tolerant.  Who would protest?  Speaking of cigars, what was the big deal about “sex,” saying “I never had ’sex’ with that woman.” 

 

Impeachment in 1973 only seemed possible because the vice-president was Gerald Ford and not Dick Cheney.   Moral relativism was why Scooter Libby will get a pass in the waning days of this presidency. 

 

We lived in an age of moral relativism.  And test tube babies.  It was all part of promoting diversity.  It was a mindset that made this all palatable, the way kids had been educated in the age of diversity.  

Timing. It was everything.

SOMETHING TO DECLARE

People looking for ritual.  They found ritual with their pets.  With their kids.  In how they spent their time. 

My Sundays had a sense of fullness that was missing the rest of the week.  My Sunday ritual involved worship, and a fullness mostly was in the readings.  This week there was a priest from the Phillipines whose plea for money really touched my heart. 

Sundays.  Family dinner.  It had always been a ritual in my life.  Reading the newspaper, with a fullness in the reading about the world.

Broken rituals.  What was it about this age that people no longer bought the newspaper?  Was the younger generation sick of all the bickering the news had presented in their lifetime.   The news seemed the foundation of the adversity between people.  Was it just about a failure in marketing for these media groups?  How did you market “classical” music, art, classical religion, or history?  Or the news?

Was it apathy or just laziness?  The human condition that had always sought labor saving devices, and if not machines, then people before that.  It was the human condition and the history of all people, forms of slavery.  It was all about laziness. It could not be about the coins

Looking for someone, something worthy.  Pleas that really touched the heart.  Looking for a leader was like looking for a charity, a cause, in a search for something worthy of my support.  So that I might be worthy too.  Worthy to declare, like in the ideals found in the Declaration of Independence, that I was alive and worthy of this liberty.  It was the reason I bought the newspaper.  

Things Inadvertently Lost

It was never supposed to happen.  But now I see it just the way the world was moving.  I had inadvertently lost the July posts.  When it was all over, when there was nothing from the past few weeks to read, I realized this was what it would be like to wake up one morning without a local newspaper. 

I went to bed tonight reading a novel by Colin Dexter.  He wrote that as a man grew older, the sights, the sound of the natural world grew even more important.   Life would be ever more impoverished if the birds quit singing.  His citation about birds could just as well apply to newspapers.  

“You holy Art when all my hope is shaken,

And through life’s raging tempest I am drawn,

You make my heart with warmest love to waken,

As if into a better world reborn.” 

(From An Die Musik, translated by Basil Swift)   

Victor Frankl wrote a book about his own experience in Germany in the period of World War II.  He was a psychiatrist.  In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he talked about his dilemma trying to save his life masterpiece that he was creating as he himself was taken to the concentration camp.  I never finished reading his book, but early on he called the question, “What would you save?”  Or what was the most important thing that you have been taught, that you wanted the next generation to have? 

Teachers probably have given this some thought when they elected a career in teaching.  But Frankl really called the question, “What are you doing about the thing worth saving?”  

Suffering

Suffering.  It was everywhere.  At the end of World War II, there had been silence about the suffering that the people of Europe had been through.  To discuss fresh wounds when everyone had suffered, until they had been healed by time, just was not done.  To hear the stories of what they had been through, beyond comprehension, was left for another age. Or maybe there was silence because the pain was everywhere and people who saw it did not want to hear about suffering.  

Earlier this year, I had heard a piece on NPR’s The StoryCorps from a veteran of WWI.  He never discussed with anyone that in his dreams since he returned home he frequently saw one moment of his life over and over.  He spoke in his 5 minutes on StoryCorps about seeing into the eyes of a German moments before he killed this soldier.  These were the eyes that he saw over and over for the remainder of his life.   He could not forget what had happened. 

Negro spirituals, it was said, were never heard for about 50 years from the start of the 20^th century.  That is, until the beginning of the civil rights movement.  It made me think of the stories of the Old Testament, of the wandering, suffering Jews.  And then in the stories from the Acts of the Apostles, those early days, the same suffering continued.  The growth of Christianity was all about suffering. 

Dysfunction: Most people did not want to hear about suffering.   Old people loved to discuss their current medical status, maybe just marveling at what their doctors could do to keep them functioning in a normal life.  But they also knew the young did not want to hear about the aches, the pain. 

God was to be found in current times in the suffering of others.  That was the theme of the Old Testament and the New Testament –suffering.   Now there were more than 6 billion people in the world and it was said 3 billion people lived in poverty.  The appeal of religion was to those who suffered.  Notice the lack of appeal in religion currently in Europe, where little suffering was visible to tourists. The growth potential in religion was to be found in Asia and the republics of what had been the Soviet Union.   There were a billion people in poverty of the 1.5 billion in Asia.  The ration in Asia was two out of three.  Most people did not want to hear about it. 

The response from God to the stories of the Old Testament was found in the suffering of the New Testament.  God had taken on the suffering, identified it as His, and tried to do something about it.  He died.  It was Sunday, and it was in the words found the Agnus Dei that stirred me again and again.  And then He rose.