The rich kid's little joyride
Information is now insatiable: many of us feel that what we're supposed to pay attention to isn't worth it, and what we aren't is. What we're supposed to pay attention to is so often distraction posing as information. We're mesmerized by spokespeople posing as leaders who wish to re-institute issues we thought we'd passed by and political causes that don't even pretend to aspire to democratic ideals. We've created a strange new kind of dictatorship--ourselves--that in no way resembles the dictatorship we thought we were creating. The trivia of disinformation floods the Midwest, following the course of our great rivers south. In the Northeast, Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, one of our foremost commentators on poetry, can write in 2015, "American culture is as yet too young to prize poetry--or, for that matter, any complex form of intellectuality except perhaps science (because science 'works,' and our New World history has made us pragmatists)." The democratic dictatorship we thought we were creating, the one that relied on a free press, the fair and open election processes of actual democracy, and an independent judiciary, has gone the way of the Second French Republic during the time of Flaubert in which only the very few make the connection between political actions and their consequences while the rich gather all power. Smaller and smaller men lead us: we, their followers, can't wait for their time to pass. For Everything we see and hear seems like a science-fiction novella in which the entire world is made of offensive and defensive military equipment and machinery, controlled by businessmen and women who've never heard of Plato. We elect leaders who themselves have been deprived of essential information, or are overwhelmed by the glut of it, who listen to what is small and mean and replace the truth with lies. Leadership is now in the hands of those who unknowingly subscribe to Flaubert's bleak statement about the "whole dream of democracy." It seems we're reaching a time when nothing can be believed, not even poetry, especially when poetry is all that is good and possible in man and the distinction between an idiot and a moral idiot can no longer be made. One imagines Donald Trump driving his daddy's car in the early 1960s, listening to the radio and trying to pick up girls in Queens. Listen up People: "Time is Tight" acc. Booker T & the MG's.