Sunday, March 06, 2005
To Kenny Werner at the Albright-Knox Art of Jazz series, a piano player touched by Bill Evans, among others, with a disconcerting resemblance, from the back, to my undergraduate advisor, Professor Kenneth L. Deutsch. Werner swung hard, and improvised with wit: it was a completely enjoyable performance. He made a mild joke about Republicans in the early going, which sent my mind down a rabbit hole.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted a link to this troubling essay several days ago at Electrolite, and it has been gnawing at me: as Americans we think of ourselves as being at the pinnacle of civilization, but the reality is, perhaps, somewhat less exalted. It seems to me that I am more in love with the potential of our country-- the first to be founded on an idea-- than I am with its reality, or its history. A taste for genocide can't be erased, nor can the taint of slavery and racism-- America's Original Sin. As I sat listening to Werner play music that derives from that taint, I tried to think of a time when the US has ever lived up to its fabulous potential, and I kept coming up blank. We think of the World War Two generation that way-- or some people do-- but I can't get away from the fact that that war, however justified, however righteous, was fought by a segregated armed service. The Civil Rights movement that percolated in the Post-War period, and came to a boil in the '60's took place at a time when America was embroiled in a series of imperialistic misadventures that hardly do credit to Benjamin Franklin. The idea that the struggle against racial bigotry has been succesfully concluded has to insult the intellegence of anyone who cares to look around, and it hardly counts as a triumph of right thinking to have merely set out on the long road that has brought us to the place where we are now.
Perhaps the thing that most disturbs me about the bunch that are running our country is that they seem convinced that the way we are represents near perfection, requiring only some tinkering to dismantle our rudimentary social services system to become complete.
And yet, it is still a society that wants to recognize and reward individual achievement, in a way that does really distinguish it from just about every other culture on the planet. My modest accomplishments would probably not have been possible for me to realize had I been raised anywhere else, and the potential that my daughters have is even greater. Anyone anywhere with an entrepreneurial instinct yearns to come to the United States. The artists that so obviously touched Kenny Werner overcame incredible obstacles, including being born black in the United States of America, to produce some of the greatest art of what we call, in our hubris, "The American Century". (Went by quick, didn't it?) Some of them even got rich doing it-- the American Dream, I guess that is. I don't know why we can't have that, and also have a society that protects the vulnerable , and stands as a beacon for the rest of the world, but it certainly seems to me that in this dark hour we have managed to elect leaders that stand opposed to that very thing, and it troubles me deeply.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted a link to this troubling essay several days ago at Electrolite, and it has been gnawing at me: as Americans we think of ourselves as being at the pinnacle of civilization, but the reality is, perhaps, somewhat less exalted. It seems to me that I am more in love with the potential of our country-- the first to be founded on an idea-- than I am with its reality, or its history. A taste for genocide can't be erased, nor can the taint of slavery and racism-- America's Original Sin. As I sat listening to Werner play music that derives from that taint, I tried to think of a time when the US has ever lived up to its fabulous potential, and I kept coming up blank. We think of the World War Two generation that way-- or some people do-- but I can't get away from the fact that that war, however justified, however righteous, was fought by a segregated armed service. The Civil Rights movement that percolated in the Post-War period, and came to a boil in the '60's took place at a time when America was embroiled in a series of imperialistic misadventures that hardly do credit to Benjamin Franklin. The idea that the struggle against racial bigotry has been succesfully concluded has to insult the intellegence of anyone who cares to look around, and it hardly counts as a triumph of right thinking to have merely set out on the long road that has brought us to the place where we are now.
Perhaps the thing that most disturbs me about the bunch that are running our country is that they seem convinced that the way we are represents near perfection, requiring only some tinkering to dismantle our rudimentary social services system to become complete.
And yet, it is still a society that wants to recognize and reward individual achievement, in a way that does really distinguish it from just about every other culture on the planet. My modest accomplishments would probably not have been possible for me to realize had I been raised anywhere else, and the potential that my daughters have is even greater. Anyone anywhere with an entrepreneurial instinct yearns to come to the United States. The artists that so obviously touched Kenny Werner overcame incredible obstacles, including being born black in the United States of America, to produce some of the greatest art of what we call, in our hubris, "The American Century". (Went by quick, didn't it?) Some of them even got rich doing it-- the American Dream, I guess that is. I don't know why we can't have that, and also have a society that protects the vulnerable , and stands as a beacon for the rest of the world, but it certainly seems to me that in this dark hour we have managed to elect leaders that stand opposed to that very thing, and it troubles me deeply.
// posted by Bill @ 10:47 AM 
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