Orwell vs. Huxley

from the July 26, 2014, Writer's Almanac:

Brave New World is often compared with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), since they each offer a view of a dystopian future. Cultural critic Neil Postman spelled out the difference in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. ... In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us."

A bit disconcerting to think about nearly three decades later.

Independence Day 2014 Thoughts

When I raised our American flag this morning (as I do on national holidays), I was tempted to display it upside down. That's the universal signal of being in distress, which is what I think our nation is and has been for some time. But that symbol alone would be ambiguous: things that seem distressful to me may be signs of hope for you, and vice versa. Here's a short list of things that most stress me this July 4, 2014:

Our elected representatives act as if they have been elected to represent only those people who voted for them or who agree with them. Actually, they represent all the people within particular geographical entities, districts, or states. (The President and Vice President probably don't technically represent the nation in the same way, but they are responsible to and for all of us.) They represent people who did not vote for them, who do not approve of them, who do not like or agree with what they do just as surely as they represent their supporters. At the very least, they are accountable to them. But most now seem to operate as if they have only to please their own group and kind. That's called "the base," and to "the base" they must "appeal."

Those same representatives also seem limited to act in ways that benefit their own people in their own entity, district, or state. Local concern and interest is perfectly understandable, and few will stay in office long if they do not take care of things at home. But they are also to be responsible to the constitution of the United States, and through it to all the people. It's hard work to look out for your own interests while keeping an eye on the greater good for the greater number, but that's the kind of work we need done today.

The reason our representatives act as they do is because it's how many of us act most of time: only I matter, and the only real question is "what's in it for me?"

I'd continue to support the people I've voted for even if they negotiated away some of the things that benefit me in an effort to reach compromises with others that would solve our common problems. I'm thinking of Social Security and Medicare, from which I benefit greatly. Of course, they'll say they can't find anyone on "the other side" to negotiate with because no one "over there" will compromise their positions. I can't believe that. We need courageous leaders of both parties and all persuasions to do the work of governing together.

Shame on all who take pleasure in the premature conclusion that Obama's is a failed presidency. A failed presidency means a failed nation, a failed people, a failed government, especially when the legislative branch has also failed and the judicial branch (represented by the Supreme Court) is politicized and compromised. There's no joy in any of that...unless you want the US to be a failed state.

If Obama's presidency proves to have been a failure (and I don't agree with the conclusion, not yet), there's blame all around. He's contributed more than his share of his own failings, but at the same time many set out from the very beginning to make sure his administration failed.  There's more than enough blame to go around, none of it helpful.

The members of the Supreme Court should all be required to read and absorb Reinhold Niebuhr's 1932 classic, "Moral Man and Immoral Society." If I recall correctly, Niebuhr's point is that while individuals may be moral and ethical on their own, when they band together into a "society" (any kind of grouping) that has its own interests, that society inevitably tends toward doing things those very same individuals consider immoral and unethical. Therefore, it seems to me, the freedoms allowed to and restrictions placed upon societies must be different from the freedoms allowed to and the restrictions placed upon individuals. Example: Hobby Lobby's owners may be fine folks as individuals, but their society (Hobby Lobby, Inc, or whatever) is not the same as they are, will inevitably tend toward acting in ways they would not act personally, and requires different understandings of its rights and responsibilities.

States charter corporations. States grant corporations permission to exist in order to carry out activities and businesses the state does not or cannot take on for itself and to minimize risk to the individuals who invest time and money in them. Therefore, corporations bear responsibility not only to their particular stakeholders, but also for the common good. I am not able to work my way though the thicket of laws and regulations and precedents around all this, but at the very least it seems to me that the state is not doing its job if it allows corporations to do whatever the hell they want. Somehow we the people are allowing the tables to be turned upon the government that Lincoln said is to be of, by, and for us.

Hobby Lobby's "ministries" has a full page ad in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this morning that contains a bunch of quotes (all from the 19th century or earlier, I believe) intending to prove ours is a Christian nation, and inviting folks to come to Jesus. Perhaps emboldened by the Supreme Court, they are pushing the envelope further, and this is what they are saying: "Sorry about you Jews, Muslims, atheists, Wiccans, whatever: not only are you not wanted in Hobby Lobby, you are not welcome in this nation." Makes me want to burn my own Christian credentials.

Are we on our way to becoming armed camps of religious fanatics who cannot bear the idea of living with and working with and being friends with people who are not just like us? Is that what some want us to become: a failed state, individuals armed to the teeth, fearful of diversity and difference, on the march in the name of Jesus or whomever. Our world is not a better place because of such fundamentalist theocracies.

I want to do more than complain, than to express my distress about our state of affairs. But when I consider becoming active in movements and organizations that believe in the things I believe in, I fear contributing to the disfunction and gridlock that paralyze us.  I distrust quick and dirty and predictable responses to everything that happens the moment it happens, even when they come from people and organizations with which I basically agree. What can I do that will really help? Distress!

Institutions and Who and Where We Are

           Sometimes important ideas show up in unexpected places and challenge us.

I was recently waiting in a doctor's reception area which featured a vast array of current and recent periodicals–talk about unexpected! I picked up the April 7 issue of Fortune. I never read Fortune, perhaps because I think I am not very interested in what I presume to be its world view. The title of Editor Andy Serwer's opening essay caught my attention: "Ruled by Pop Culture." Likely a positive regime in his eyes, I thought. Pop culture makes huge fortunes for people of widely differing abilities and talents–including celebrities with none at all.

A quote Serwer attributes to novelist Philip Roth fully engaged me:

"The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy upon the populace, nor is it the totalitarian super state that imposes the fantasy, as it for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society's most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of power is not with them."

“Impose the fantasy?” I think I understand what Roth is getting at, but characterizing it as fantasy strikes me as needlessly combative. Institutions that Roth writes once had the power to impose the fantasy on society – Serwer points to organized religion, government, sports, and yes, big business – were and still are confident that what they were imposing is not fantasy, but fact, truth, reality.

I'd like to substitute "self-understanding" for Roth's "fantasy". In other words, who most compellingly and pervasively tells us who we are and where we are headed and in what context? Who wields the power to impose their understanding and vision of us upon us?

Serwer is less willing than Roth to view the overwhelming power of pop culture as sinister. But he claims to stand absolutely with Roth in his view that, like it or not, the power to impose fantasy/self-understanding now rests in less-than-thinking and often less-than-innocent hands, and that the clout of such people and institutions is multiplied many times over by technology. We think we are free when we can say and read and share anything it all on Facebook, Twitter, and the like, or Google the world, but in fact we are playing mindless games invented by those who have little motivation but to make money from us...invisible people whose "product" range and influence we barely appreciate.

Strangely (in a sentence that cries out for revision) Serwer nearly gives higher education a pass in the confrontation with pop culture: "One of the few institutions I could think of that even begin to rival the unfettered rise of popular culture is our colleges and universities…"

If I understand Serwer, I disagree. I do not share his confidence in higher ed's effectiveness as fantasy/self-understanding-imposer in competition with pop culture: consider Jim Tressel being named President of Youngstown State University, and almost of The University of Akron.

My real interest is organized religion, which wrote my paychecks for nearly fifty years, and now deposits my pension in our bank account each month.

Well before I began my service as a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), many of us were sneering at "the institutional church," some even longing for its demise. We, the young-growing-ever-older, continued our sneering as our mainline churches shrank like an iceberg under a polar bear. We actually called this reduction of institutional size and clout good, crediting Jesus himself with our slide into irrelevance and ineffectiveness..."right-sizing" under divine authorization.

Here's just one example of how the institutional mainline church I love shot itself in the foot through its choice of terminology: sometime ago my own presbytery stopped "meeting" and started "gathering." The change in words told us and the world that we no longer intended to meet to wrestle with one another to accomplish anything...as if it wouldn't be our fault if something challenging or important or noteworthy should happen on our watch. Now we gather to be social and festive and informal, to enjoy one another's company and quirks. Woe unto him or her who raises an unpleasant voice!

We sit in gathering after gathering where nothing happens that anyone, including ourselves, cares much about. We spend endless hours closing churches or dismissing them to other denominations. Oh! how we lament our loses! Lacking any sense of urgency or responsibility, we continue to create a vacuum where we once had stood, and then wonder why no one is paying attention to us anymore. Do we think conservative churches have been garnering all the attention by mimicking our passivity in the face of a hostile culture?

While we have been letting our beloved institution fail someone else has been putting together institutions of social media, popular culture, and technology that elevate the individual and his or her taste above the joy, responsibility, and challenge of significant human interaction. For these newer, technological institutions the ultimate measure of things is what I "like," not what is good for all or even for many of us. They are meeting and collaborating and strategizing...and we "gather."

Impose the fantasy, or impose the self-understanding: if responsible and intentional and transparent institutions are not strong to create and communicate positive and just understandings of public good and human flourishing, then all we will be left with are the cheap and momentary fantasies and understandings of ourselves created by outrageous celebrities and viral videos.  As much fun as they may be for the moment, we cannot build a strong or a good society upon their likes. We don't need no institutions (talk about needing revision!) – we need accountable, transparent, and effective institutions articulating visions of our common welfare. Including mainline churches.

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An postscript from Far as the Curse is Found: the Art of Scott Kolbo by Cameron J. Anderson in Image, No. 80 (Winter/Spring 2014), p. 27:

"Logged, tuned, or dialed in, our increasingly digital world is training us to consume the sound, images, and text that stream toward us. We have learned to fill our apparently empty hours with this nonmaterial spectacle – one that appears to us as an unending admixture of unremarkable postings, comments, and images that are shot through with vivid, though random, instances of wonder. These brilliant moments are so dazzling that we willingly sift through the residual flotsam and jetsam as if panning for digital gold. If you or someone you know spends countless hours on Facebook, watches sports around the clock, or plays video games to the exclusion of all else, then you have experienced – or are at least a witness to – this reality. While this spectacle is surely not all cultural pap, it tends to belittle history and routinely sidesteps the prospect of meaning. But so long as our 'disbelief' is 'suspended,' it no longer seems needful to speak of things as if they should or even could cohere.”

Somehow, it seems to me related to the main essay.

A Feeling in Music

Woody Guthrie got it right:

"There's a feeling in music and it carries you back down the road you have traveled and makes you travel it again. Or it takes you back down the road somebody else has come and you can look out across the world from the hill they are standing on.

"Sometimes when I hear music I think back over my days – and a feeling that is fifty-fifty joy and pain swells like clouds taking all kinds of shape in my mind. If it is joy it is of such a treasured sort and such a fine make that the thought of its passing is near to pain – and you can see you pain has paid you a profit in its own strange way – and the joy of that sadness is like a raindrop falling in the sun."

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them, 
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

It's About Time

I can always hope that my faithful followers and occasional readers have wondered what has happened to my blog. What has happened is that I’ve been giving my writing time to fiction. Writing fiction is much harder for me than writing essays and the like, but also a lot more fun. The couple of things I have finished do not seem very blog-like, so they wait for some other opportunity to see light. I will be participating in a fiction writing workshop in June, which may either make or break my desire to continue on this track.

So today I will count on others (called to my attention by Garrison Keillor, another other) to shove me back into the blogosphere.

Poet Jane Kenyon opens her “Walking Along in Late Winter” with this provocative comparison:

How long the winter has lasted—like a Mahler
symphony, or an hour in the dentist's chair.

To which I respond, Them’s fightin’ words! Yes, this winter continue to be long, but comparing an hour of Mahler ’s sublime music to an hour of someone’s hands wielding sharp instruments in my mouth…well, I’ll take the Mahler. (Or perhaps you’re satisfied with winter?)

Playwright Edward Albee said: "I take pretty good care of myself, and I have no enthusiasm whatever about dying. I think it's a terrible waste of time, and I don't want to participate in it.”

Or maybe you’d rather die than go through another winter like this one, or listen to Mahler, OR go to the dentist. Time’s a slippery thing.

Herbert Quick, Grant Wood, and Iowa: A Personal Essay

Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930) is one of the best-known and most-parodied of "great art" paintings. To many it faithfully represents my home state of Iowa. Well into our 21st century people tend to think it's how Iowa and Iowans looked then, look now, and always will look. That thinking is mostly wrong, although folks whose style and look are American Gothic can still be found on the American prairie lands.

In 1922 one of Wood's fellow Iowans, John Herbert Quick, published Vandemark's Folly. Quick had been born a generation earlier than Wood (1861 vs. 1891), but Vandemark's Folly precedes American Gothic by only eight years. It is the first of three historical novels Quick would write to tell the story of pioneer experience in 19th-century Iowa. Vandemark's Folly is commonly regarded as the best of the three, although the second, The Hawkeye, is often cited as worth reading.

Grant Wood's portrait of an Iowa farmer and his daughter probably depicts an Iowa two or three decades after the time in which Vandemark's Folly is set. The picture of my home state and its settled farmers that Grant Wood puts on canvas in American Gothic (and in many other paintings) seems to me to continue the story Herbert Quick commits to paper in Vandemark’s Folly. Both represent the passive, yet persistent character trait that Meredith Willson later identified in The Music Man as “Iowa stubborn.”

Quick had been born in Steamboat Rock, Iowa, near the line separating Grundy County from Hardin County to its west. He grew up on a farm in Grundy County. Vandemark’s Folly's importance culturally and historically is that it tells the story of first settlers from the perspective of one very close to being a first-person witness.

Like Herbert Quick I grew up in Grundy County, although I was not born there. And the town I call my home town, Grundy Center, claims Herbert Quick as one of its native sons. For decades the Herbert Quick Schoolhouse, where Quick taught early in his life, has stood on the north side of Highway 14 and 175 as it heads west out of town, across the road from the Park Place Restaurant and the swimming pool. It's a little white building that looks exactly like, well, a little white country school house. It is well-marked, so anyone who has spent any time in Grundy Center knows where it is. You might even notice it just passing through town on the way to somewhere else.

From his modest beginnings, Quick went on to live quite a cosmopolitan life, traveling as far as Vladivostok, Russia, in service to the Red Cross. He contributed to the American progressive political and social movements of the early 20th Century. He married, and he and his wife had a son and a daughter. Toward the end of his life he built a large and elegant mansion nearly Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, but looks from its pictures to be in need of repairs. Compared to the "little shanty" in which he said he had been born, and the school house where he taught, “Coolfont” is a clear sign of Quick's upward mobility.

If what I’ve shared about Herbert Quick has piqued your interest, you can find more about him online. Google around a bit.

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You may think that the people of Grundy Center are proud of and know more than a little about a man whose name is so prominently displayed in their town. Maybe they do now, but if they paid much attention to Herbert Quick back in the 1950's when I was growing up there, I missed most of it. About all I remember is that, during my short career in the Boy Scouts, our troop met in the Herbert Quick Schoolhouse. Even in the years since, despite frequent trips back home to visit my family, I knew little about Herbert Quick beyond the fact that he was a man who wrote books, Vandemark's Folly being one I could somehow recall, though I'd never read it and didn't know anyone who had.

Last time I was home I learned that volunteers now give tours of the Herbert Quick Schoolhouse. Hearing about those guides caused me to confess I'd never read anything by Quick, which lead my mother to produce her copy of Vandemark's Folly (published in 1987 by the University of Iowa Press, with introduction by Allan G. Bogue). I have just read it for the first time. Fifty years after moving away from Grundy County, I’ve not only read Vandemark’s Folly but I have also learned a bit about Quick himself. I hope the local population knows at least as much the man and his life as I do now.

Quick’s novel is set in 1850’s Iowa. It is about Americans from "back east" and first-generation European immigrants moving onto and settling that land. The story is told by Jacobus Teunis Vandemark (also known as J. T., Jacob, etc.), who through a series of deeply-personal events receives title to a quarter-section of land in Monterey County, Iowa, the county seat of which is eventually to be the town of Monterey Center. His farm occupies the lowest and therefore the wettest plot of ground in the county, which is the reason his place is called “Vandemark’s Folly.” But J. T. Vandemark works hard and prospers, turning his folly into treasure.

Many of the place names Quick uses are still on the map or at least remembered by local residents. But there is no Monterey County in Iowa today, nor is there a town named Monterey Center. Though Quick mentions Grundy County on one page in Vandemark's Folly as if it is another location, I am confident he means "Monterey" to represent “Grundy.”

(Side bar: What if my home town had been Monterey Center, not Grundy Center? I'd have received a lot less ribbing in my journeys beyond Iowa if my home town's name had conjured images of an exotic locale on the California coast.)

I am not going to summarize Vandemark's Folly further. Several editions are available from Amazon, and you can even downloaded a free version of it from the internet.

Neither am I going to critique it, beyond this: it is a fun read, filled with interesting characters, exhibiting flashes of genius, but it is not "great" literature. It’s often embarrassingly melodramatic, and J.T. Vandemark is a bit too good, even when nestled in a haystack with the love of his life. After its initial brief flirtation with commercial success, Vandemark’s Folly has pretty much disappeared. I understand that.

But if you live in or near Grundy County, or if you grew up anywhere in rural Iowa, of if you feel sadly uninformed about the settling of our nation's much-maligned but economically crucial "fly-over" mid-section, you will be glad to have read Vandemark's Folly. As a bonus, the book begins with an extended telling of Vandemark's early days in western New York State working on the Erie Canal, providing a fascinating look into another important, but often overlooked chapter in the western expansion.

Quick’s progressive idealism underlies the story Vandemark's Folly tells. Grundy Center and Grundy County could celebrate him in ways far beyond his late-in-life writing career. It would be interesting to develop a curriculum around Quick's life to teach about how the midwest was settled and about how our nation dealt with some of the challenges it faced at the turn of the last century.

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I will conclude this brief essay with a few quotes from Vandemark's Folly that struck me as particularly apt and illustrative of why he wrote about his native land and what I think you'd get out of reading the book.

Quick's descriptions of the prairie–the tall grass itself, the hills, the waterways, the abundant and incredibly diverse flora and fauna–evoke a world long lost and never to be seen again. This passage particularly moved me (pp. 139ff in the 1987 U. of I edition):

The Canada geese, except for the nesters, had swept on in that marvelous ranked army which ends the migration, spreading from the east to the the west some warm morning when the wind is south, and extending from a hundred feet in the air to ten thousand, all moved by a common impulse like myself and my fellow-migrants, pressing northward though, instead of westward, with the piping of a thousand organs, their wings whirring, their eyes glistening as if with some mysterious hope, their black webbed feet folded and stretched out behind, their necks stretched out eagerly to the north, and held a little high I thought as if to peer over the horizon to catch a glimpse of their promised land of blue lakes, tall reeds, and broad fields of water-celery and wild rice, with dry nests downy with the harvests of their gray breasts; and fluffy goslings swimming in orderly classes after their teachers. And up from the South following these old honkers came the snow geese (we ignorantly called all of them "brants"), with their wild flutings like the high notes of clarinets–and the ponds became specked with teal and coot.

Quick continues by describing prairie chickens' amazing courtship dances, concluding that:

Nobody ever drew from [the deep-toned sounds of the male prairie chicken], and from the howling of the wolves, the honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of the curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel, killdeer and the rest–day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and dusk-sounds–more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa in that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat packet of treasures in a little iron-bound trunk–among them a rain-stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe.

On page 228, Quick employs sexual imagery to describe the breaking of the prairie by the plow, including a cautionary foreshadowing:

The next day was a wedding-day–the marriage morning of the plow and the sod. It marked the beginning of the subdual of that wonderful wild prairie of Vandemark Township and the Vandemark farm. No more fruitful espousal ever took place than that–when the polished steel of my new breaking plow was embraced by the black soil with its lovely fell of greenery. Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of wedlock. Nothing like it takes place any more; for the sod of the meadows and pastures is quite a different thing from the untouched skin of the original earth. Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined end.

A final pair of quotes may be relevant to Iowa farmland today. On page 299 Quick writes about the panic of 1857 when land prices plummeted and everyone was in debt, and Jacob Vandemark offers this warning:

All financial panics come from land speculation. Show me a way to keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent financial panics.

And this final paragraph of the book (p. 420):

The prairies took me, an ignorant, orphaned canal hand, and made me something better. How much better is not for me to say. The best prayer I can utter now is that it may do as well with my children and grandchildren, with the tenants on these rich farms, and the farm-hands that help till them, and with the owners who find that expensive land is just like expensive clothes:–merely something you must have, and must pay heavily for.

Grant Wood, Iowa artist of the next generation, painted the Iowa Herbert Quick described in words. I am grateful for them both.