Photo from Newcastle-Emlyn anti-war site.
I've been chatting with good friend Jon Husband about weak signals, and he made the point that although Everybody Knows
deep inside that we're in deep shit, it is only the artists and
dreamers who talk about it in ways we can all relate to, transcending
our political beliefs and frames of reference. My response to him was:
The segment to watch, as you point out, is always the artists. When I
hear the black Toronto poetess saying that we will never interest the
people in the ghettos in planting trees as long as they can't get jobs
and as long as they live their lives in fear, and
when I read the lyrics of most rap music, I almost cry. The artists are
split into urban and rural factions. The rural factions paint and draw
lovely, moving natural scenes, which the urban birkenstocks come out to
buy because they can't relate to the urban art. The urban faction has
two subfactions: one infatuated by technology (artists and designers
with socially responsible underpaid jobs and tiny, environmentally
responsible homes with beautifully designed state of the art products),
the other by love (many women
poets and musicians) or violence (many men poets and musicians). Their
compositions are consumed, respectively, by women (urban and rural) and
by young angry mostly ignorant disaffected people (urban and rural).
Thus, they are all rendered impotent, transient. Irrelevant.
As for the exploding suburbs, there is no art there, and the artists flee as soon as they're old enough not to be dragged back.
When women poets and musicians start writing and singing about gaia and
the end of civilization, and when men poets and musicians start truly
raging against the machine (with an inevitable anti-technology and anti-logo bent), then
we will know we're starting to become collectively aware of the
inevitable future of our planet and the need for radical change.
There's a trace of this in so-called 'alternative' music and art, and
in anti-war poetry and photography, but the signal is still so weak
it's almost indiscernible in the overall media noise.
In
short, artists are the proverbial 'canaries in the mineshaft' of Planet
Earth -- they will be the first to sense, in large numbers, the looming
end of our civilization. They will be the first to fight, and to call
the rest of us to arms in defence of our planet, hopefully with some of
the success their artistic ancestors had in ending the Vietnam War.
They
will be the first to fall. Like Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, and so many
of the anti-war artists of the 1960s and 1970s who succumbed to
suicide, drugs or depression. Casualties of war.
I believe we
all have three ways of knowing: (1) rational knowledge, things we
deduce or induce from facts, (2) emotional knowledge, things we feel in
our bones by observing a million fragments of meaning and from their
patterns seeing and sensing the big picture, and (3) instinctive
knowledge, things we know intuitively because three million years of
evolution has coded into our DNA and taught us things that we have
neither the time nor the data to 'know' rationally or emotionally. Our
education system is designed to make us skeptical of and reticent to
display emotional intelligence (Martha Stewart: "Women in business
don't cry my dear"), and to completely renounce and sublimate any
intuitive ability that manages to survive our other social
conditioning.
Artists, somehow, seem to be partly immune to this conditioning. As a result, they have an ability to perceive and present, while the rest of us, having 'learned' to live inside our own minds, can only conceive and represent, a much less sensitive and weaker ability.
It
is not surprising, then, that the corporatists tend to prefer hack
actors and sports stars over artists to endorse their products. Most
sports stars seem content to sell their souls for a dollar -- most
professional golfers are little more than walking billboards, and most
professional race car drivers are billboards on wheels. There are a few
actors who have attempted to become spokespeople for progressive
causes, and that isn't a bad thing, though they remain outnumbered by
pretty but talentless members of the acting profession who donate their
absurd $20M salaries to lunatic cults. And many of the musicians who
have become activists and fundraisers for progressive and charitable
causes are way over the heads in the political arena, and get sucked in
or discredited when they get face-to-face with the media-savvy
corporatist machine.
What these actors and musicians should be doing instead is what they do well -- convey their message in their art.
Actors should be working with writers to finance and produce
independent productions with messages that the big risk-averse studios
won't touch. Instead of schlock like The Day After Tomorrow
we need films and songs that credibly portray a grim future that in the
end human ingenuity cannot avert or rectify -- cautionary, well-written
stories about The Eve of Destruction. Or stories and songs set in the future or on another world (or even a revisionist story set in the 'prehistoric' past) that show us a better way to live, that show us that there is any
other way to live, instead of reinforcing the cliches that human nature
will always spoil paradise and that heroes with the appropriate
technologies will always save us against impossible odds at the last
minute -- messages that defeat and pacify us.
The arts are
very powerful -- we relate to them in ways deeper and more visceral
than we ever relate to unaccompanied political messages. I would love
to discover how much of an impact Eminem's last-minute video before the
2004 election had on turnout and results (unfortunately the US
electoral system is incapable of giving us this information, or even
telling us who won).
Film, television and music are the arts
that have the largest audience, and the ones we most desperately need
to tap, but all of the arts can and must help. Poetry, the art of the
carefully chosen word, must find its angry voice again. Photographers must show us the truth the media dare not tell (like the photo above), and show us what we are missing. Artists of all varieties must portray things in strange ways that will allow us to see them as they really are.
Surely the artists of the world must be getting tired of the silent night?
Postscript: From this week's Nation:
Scooter Libby: A Republican Nursery Rhyme by Calvin Trillin
Scooter Libby told a fib. He
Shouldn't have told at all.
Though not slimy all the time, he
Has to take the fall.
Permaslimer all-the-timer
Rove has got away.
Naught to plea to, he's now free to
Slime another day.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
