There's an article in today's Globe and Mail
that I wanted to post to the list but, alas, could not find on the
website. It deals with "cutting-edgers", younger (25 to 49) people
who are far less likely to go to church, vote, marry and have children as
their parents. Though well educated, they do not acknowledge or even
recognize the importance of the various social institutions that hold
democratic society together. Their main interests are their personal
comfort and well being, networking with their friends either directly or via
the Internet, and the pursuit of novelty. They have enough money to
do these things and to insulate themselves from what they do not want to see
or deal with.
To me, these people represent one of the
outcomes of the growth of the middle class in a liberal democracy. In
many ways, a middle class is a good and necessary thing. Its growth has
resulted in a shift of power from the top downward and thus a decreased
possibility of corporate capital running the show or, as in South America, the
generals taking over. It should, and has, given people enough time to
become actively concerned with politics, the environment and the position of
the poor. The latter concern may be out of noblesse oblige, but that's
alright. Good things come of it anyway.
However, the "cutting-edgers" are
different. The G&M article suggests that there are now very many of
them and that they may even dominate the upper middle class. Politics,
the environment and the poor are of no interest to them, and certainly not of
any interest to their children, whose lives are a computer game. They
are like the Jews of Warsaw, as depicted in "The Pianist", happily isolated
from the storm on the horizon, not even letting themselve think the storm is
there. There is nothing essentially wrong with this except that, when
the storm breaks, they and their world may be swept away.
As a teenager, while working in a pulp and
paper mill, I encountered some of the people who had been swept out of middle
class Europe following World War II, and who had come to Canada as displaced
persons. Among them was a pianist. He may not have been as good as
Szpilman, but he had received a lot of classical training as a child
and young adult. And yes he was Jewish, not from Warsaw, but from
somewhere in Germany. How he escaped the death camps was his
story. He never told it. Mechanically adept, he had landed a job
as a millwright in the pulp mill. In the evening, he would go to the
ballroom of the local hotel and play the piano, largely for himself, but also
for the two or three people, myself included, who would go and listen to
him. At the time, I was no judge of musical aptitude (I'm still not),
but his renderings of Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin were absolutely wonderful
(remember, I was only sixteen at the time !). But what one also noticed
was the state of his hands. Because he had to apply them to wrenches,
hammers, chains and other tools millwrights use, they were gnarled and
swollen, and they would often make mistakes. We didn't mind. We
knew his circumstances. And I don't know if he would ever have become a
recognized pianist instead of a good millwright if his world had not been
torn apart, but there was that possibility.
Is there a moral? I believe it's already
implicit in what I've said above. People who are not aware of their
membership in, and bond to, their society are in danger of losing it.
They can lose it because, like the Jews of Warsaw, they were envied and hated
even if they wouldn't recognize it, or because, as in cases in Latin America,
the generals took over, or because, as in present day Canada, people simply
don't give a damn. And, much like the possibilities and
potentialities of my pianist, so very much may be lost to the
world.
Ed Weick
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2003 5:48
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] ADDENDUM:
Local living economies
The Italians do it better in
their beautiful little company towns like Siena. Can you imagine
abandoning Siena? I watched the movie the Pianist
last night and thought about how when first pushed into the ghetto the Jews
were still acting Polish or European, choosing to ignore their own dying in
the streets in favor of keeping up their class only to be herded into
the cattle cars with less awareness than the cow that bucks its way all the
way down the chute to the slaughterhouse. They failed to make
the soldiers recognize their humanity and pay for it by dying so
easily. But it is an even harder lesson when the
others claim a morality and righteousness in their
attrocities. In the end the Jews learned the lesson that to
kill one Jew is to hurt all Jews and that is why they are so uncomfortable
now for the rest of the world.
The Americans have been trying to
make American Indians be like those old European passive Jews for
200 years and government policy has driven a wedge between the "real"
government approved Indians and those who carry it within their veins and
habits. But that will change as it did with the
Jews.
The interesting dichotomy is: There
is loyalty amongst the Republicans to their class yet they treat their
servants as trash because the servants no longer are loyal to their
class or to their protectors, the unions. In this battle
economists are the quislings who preach the efficiency of death to
communities and class locked genius concert pianists spending their lives
carrying bricks for the walls of the rich. It
stinks.
Given the the greatness of European Art, that
carried Shakespeare out of the hovel of Henry's London with the rotting
flesh on the walls and the human shit in the streets, you would think they
would have learned what is eternal and of value.
Shakespeare kept the true horror of the street out of his
Art but Blake used the medicine of the Zuni and proved that Art was
even strong enough to report the contemporary attrocity and still
survive. Given that greatness and the sacrifice of Liszt, George
Sand and Chopin in the face of such blight, it is a wonder that they would
not appreciate it more.
How much the Jewish Pianist Szpilman truly
was Chopin and thus the best of the Polish heart in his actions and
the artist student Adolf Hitler the betrayer of
the implications and traditions of Western Art in his economics
and politics. Perhaps that is changing. We have made
the choice to accept Hitler's view of the materiality of humanity instead of
Szpilman and Chopin. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end
of Western culture? I suspect so. We are the
watchers? Must we keep our hands out of it and let
it play out or should we do as I am doing here, raise the alarm and try to
still the tide. I wonder.
Ray Evans Harrell
