LISTEN. WATCH. I've long been captivated by Jay Gatsby's green light, "the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us... tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Is it a symbol of hope, futility, perseverance, Sisyphean absurdity, foolish optimism, melioristic pragmatism, all or none of the above?
The thing about symbols is that they're outer projections of our inner lives and our inchoate aspirations, which are variable and changing. So I'll opt for all, though not all at once.In Environmental Ethics yesterday we were discussing the symbolic importance of American participation in, and withdrawal from, international climate protocols like Kyoto and the Paris Accords. Trump announcing that we would not abide by such toothless statements, says Hope Jahren, was like her declaring that she'd not rule Britannia after QE2. It was never going to happen, so what difference does it make?
But symbols do matter. American "leadership" used to matter, now it would matter if American actors and actions on the world stage simply stopped making us cringe in embarrassment. It would matter if our elected representatives were not racist, nationalist, xenophobic, misanthropic morons.
Sure, from the perspective of systemic revolutionaries who want to replace the current system entirely the difference between Republicans and Democrats seems slight. But the day-to-day experience of living in the shadow of Drumpf and the Deplorables, the constant trepidation and quite palpable fear of what could possibly be next, the worry that they'll somehow top themselves again today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow... the terror that a distracted semi-educated electorate will give them four more years of rope to hang us with, the grinding psychic toll of the steady drip drip drip of disaster looming... That matters.
So today the green light symbolizes my fervent hope that they shall soon go.
Today is the birthday of F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author), born Francis Scott Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minnesota (1896), who said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” WA
Fitzgerald's favorite poet was John Keats, whose notion of Negative Capability must have planted that thought. "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" BP
Well said. It is the daily assault on our political and social norms, the undermining of our institutions with an authoritarian objective, that leads to actual physical stress. "The horror, the horror." Make it stop! Take that one aspect of life away. Clearly we can do better as a society, but we can do so without this constant threat to our ability to solve our problems.
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