Sunday Morning

Like I wrote the other one, this blog entry won't be done well. In other words, I'll write it, totally stream of consciousness, without one singel rewrite. The research will be on the fly, jumping from the primary source to Google searches in another window. So please kind reader, be lenient in your judgement.

Last night on TV, American Beauty starring Kevin Spacey and Anette Benning was on TBS. The retired Army colonel tells his son, "The country is going to Hell," as he reads the paper. Turns out he's dealing with repressed homophobia and he eventually blows Spacey's character's (Lester Burnham's) brains out. The movie is really all about repression. Quite a masterpiece actually.

Interesting that today's interview has a strange and eerie connection to American Beauty. I think all things have this mysterious connection, even more poignent than the thin and nearly dried-up squirt of glue which fastens these seemingly unrelated phenomena.

I returned to one of the interviews in the double "X" issue of the mossless gathering catalogue (in 2006 it published its 1000'th issue) Rolling Stone. It was with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. There won't be too much to write about but it is vastly important to reflect upon. I just tried to find it on-line, unsuccessfully. If you actually read this and want to see it, ask me and I'll scan it and email it to you.

The connection by the way is three years after the article, Hayden and Fonda were divorced (if my math is right, they were married for 20 years) and she later married (I guess for a little while?) Ted Turner. I watched American Beauty on TBS. I know, a lame connection, but it is there. And if I'm not mistaken, it has way fewer than 6 points of separation. There's a bunch of other connecting dots to the interview, but I'd have to unravel way too many cobwebs....

I look at the black and white of the couple, smiling cheek-to-cheek, with their perfect teeth and their inherited good looks, her jazzersized shoulder and his two top buttons openned intentionally and it is hard for me to admit what warriors they were. They weren't the man standing in front of the tank in that unforgettable snapshot or the naked screeching Vietnamese girl racing away from the napalm, but they were there, sacrificing their own reputations to tell the story with trips to Hanoi. They were there behind the camera and in front of it, campaigning for the truth.

Here are a few striking snippets:

HAYDEN: As a generation we've been through more traumatic and important change in these twenty years than most generations in American history. And it's not over. It's hard to know whether the twenty years is a prelude to something biggeror whether it's just a subject for nostalgia and rumination.

RS: Which one do you think it is?

HAYDEN: Prelude.

uh, yeah.

Later, we read this:

HAYDEN: The key to progress in the Sixties was when you had the possibility of an alliance between a movement, say, for civil rights, and an administration that gradually would support the objectives of the movement. One without the other leads to despair or stagnation. The deadly quiet of the Eighties can be related to the absence of anyone in the White House who cares.

We're only a few months into Obama's administration. Curious how so much importance is poured into each passing day for which to judge his effectiveness (see http://1461days.blogspot.com/2009_03_22_archive.html). But we supporters seem to be well rooted in our confidence, even though the extent of the damage will require supersonic ability. Not to mention the puppet masters are hard at work switching cables and inventing new puppet skills, while messing with the eye glass prescription of the audience, who may actually see something quite contrary to what appears to be the first and second act.

Still, let us take a sip of that refreshing wine which Hayden served us, namely the prediction that progress will come when there is an alliance between a movement and the administration. I guess the question...the bigger question is, does even the alliance and the administration have a large enough faculty to interpret the devious nature of the forces at play?

It isn't just greedy (Wall) street-walkers. It isn't just the absence of WOMD. It isn't just over-inflated home prices and melting glaciers. It is the foggy haze of distorted vision, the crisp inability to walk away from a world heading nowhere except toward perpetual self-esteem, self-respect, self-importance, self-love. Narcissism. Ah yes, Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity.

Stop. Someone throws water in his face. Slaps him around. Asks him where all that joy went. All that skill at making people laugh. Knock knock. Are you in there Dubby? Peeks through his eye windows. Looks in his ears (ooh waxxy build-up!). Pries open his mouth. Looks up his nose. Knocks again, until finally I say. Huh? What? What's going on? Oh, back to the interview...

HAYDEN: The pertinent thing is that the shadow of the Sixties seems to prevent people from taking on lofty projects, because they think those will fail. Many kids think their parents blew it. They think it didn't work. For others, the Sixties have been reduced to an image, a graphic. The Sixties graphis sound and fury signifying nothing. All you saw on television and experienced in your life was a clash. I think that curbs people's level of utopianism--their sense that everything is possible. If you don't have that, then you're maybe more realistic, but you won't entertain the same ambitions that our generation was fueled by.

there is quite a bit of bite to his very last quote--"All the recent scandals, from Irongate to the religious right to Wall Street, have diminished the magnetism of the conservative agenda (oops--guess the poles got all charged up again later). I sense the public wants change in 1988 (sounds familiar). We've had twenty-eight years of failed presidencies and wrong roads. We've lost some of our better qualities. Much of our thinking has become obsolete. The world is more desperate (like by a thousand times more since then brother). We need to restore our idealism. It will take new leadership at all levels, but we'll never succeed without an effective presidency. Only our generation can make it happen.

Well we're here. I guess in the 50th anniversay issue, our great grandchildren will read about how we did. God help us.