The Zebra Storyteller

                Back in the day, when I taught literature classes using anthologies (I apologize), the Norton Anthology included a little story from Africa called the Zebra Storyteller.  In the story, a zebra storyteller was walking down the trail thinking about a recent spate of zebra killings by some unknown animal.  The storyteller imagined what it would be like if an ordinary cat had learned how to speak Zebra and used that skill to surprise its victims and kill them.  Just then, a house cat stepped out of the bushes and said hello in Zebra.  The storyteller, instead of being shocked and victimized, kicked the cat in the head and killed it.  The editors of the anthology said that the story was proof that literature and imagination were critical to living a good life.  I am writing this as your zebra storyteller.

                The news is full of more and more stories about the decline of Trump.  His behavior is more erratic (as if that’s even possible) and his poll numbers are sinking fast.  The pundit class is trying to figure out what possible strategy he can use to regain the presidency.  The narrow Electoral College victory he pulled off in 2016 (with the help of the Russians and voter suppression) looks less and less likely today.  Like the zebras killed by the house cat, they are making the mistake of thinking their adversary is going to use tactics they are already familiar with, like getting more votes in an election or at least more votes in the Electoral College.  But as I was walking down the trail the other day, it occurred to me that winning the election isn’t really what they are trying to do.

                I don’t think their goal is to win the election.  I think they already know they can’t (whether or not Trump knows it is debatable).  They will collect money, and spend it on themselves, and they will have campaign events and buy ads, but that is just for show.  They know they can’t win the election, but they have no intent of giving up their power.  They plan to either steal or invalidate the election.  Either is possible (note Moscow Mitch’s unwillingness to protect the election process), but the latter is easier.  It might be too much even for the most long gone Trumper to change votes or vote tallies.  It’s too bold and too easily detected.  All that has to happen is for enough doubt to be created so that his supporters  believe he was robbed.  Remember, these are people who already believe that millions of people were bussed into New Hampshire in the last election (where would they even stand?), and that cost Trump the popular vote.  In the midst of this confusion, Trump and Barr would suspend the constitution and claim power.

                If you think this is unlikely, ask yourself how many things you thought could never happened here have already happened.  We have a president who is owned and manipulated by Russian oligarchs that aided in his election.  We have a leader of the Senate who refused to fill an open seat on the Supreme Court or allow any legislation to protect our elections to come to the floor.  He has gutted the elections commission so it cannot intervene in next presidential election.  And our sister democracy in England is now run by its own Trumpian lout who is closing down Parliament to jam through an economically disastrous ‘hard Brexit.’  How much more has to happen before the cat that speaks Zebra starts its reign of terror?

                These are not normal times.  The mostly romanticized belief in American democracy we have been touting is in ruins.  Trump has already won that battle.  The alliances that protected us the last 70 years are now filled with nations that see us as an unstable partner.  The courts are packed with judges that are little more than political hacks intent on defending a partisan agenda.  The federal government is now in the hands of the most corrupt and inept (it’s hard to figure out which one of those should go first) group of appointees ever.  We are burning down the Amazon rainforest to sell soybeans to China.  Is invalidating an election really that much of a reach?

                Like all storytellers, I will leave you to your own thoughts, but don’t be surprised to run into a cat that speaks Zebra, and please don’t be afraid to kick it in the head and kill it.

               

A Democratic Ethics

                We have mostly thought about ethics as a rational enterprise.  Often ethics classes use scenarios or cases to deliberate and debate which action is more ethical.  Now those scenarios play out in automobile companies where programmers try to decide who dies in the crash, or they a resolved using algorithms to decide who gets medical treatment and who doesn’t.  But democracy isn’t a simulation, a game played in endless iterations seeking the best outcome.  Our interactions with people are often dominated by our feelings and senses more than they are by a rational calculation.  What modernity left out of democracy were the aesthetics of ethical choice.  A radical democracy is more about experience than objectification.

                When Dewey called art an experience, he was arguing for an aesthetic dimension to what he called “felt intelligence,” the mastery of feeling and technique developed over a lifetime of action and reflection.  That means we have to do more than rationalize our behavior, we have to experience the totality of its impact.  Dewey thought art was one way of developing the other experiential aspects of thought and action.  In that sense, perhaps it makes more sense to think of ethics as an art, developed over time, than it does to think of it as game playing in a poorly attended philosophy class.  I would argue that we know unethical behavior as much by how it feels as how rationally justifiable it might be.  In fact, we live in an administration that rationalizes the horrific and insane in the most mundane terms. Separating children from their parents is a matter of ‘immigration policy’ and degrading the environment is an ‘economic policy.’ 

                If we ground ethics in experience, we are grounding ethics in our bodies.  We are grounding our ethical choices not in abstractions but in the world.  Modernity has stripped the world of its cosmic significance, its connection to something we might consider sacred.  We’ve created a world full of things that are no more important or significant than any other random thing in the universe.  We don’t feel and do not act as if we were connected to the biosphere that sustains us or the social context that defines us.  We think of wealth as an arbitrary collection of abstract value that has nothing to do with the value of life.  In all these ways, we have constructed such a limited idea of ethics that it is hardly worth promoting it.  An ethics of experience resituates us in a world that is also alive.  It redefines us as part of a social nexus that values people and their existence.

                An ethical practice requires humility, the ability to see ourselves not as individual and independent actors but as interdependent beings who rely on other people and other living things for our being.  Diversity in modernity is mostly about advertising and marketing, about the desire and reproduction of difference.  Diversity in a radical democracy is a felt sense of entanglement grounded in the realization of our interdependence.  An ethical political and economic system wouldn’t burn the rain forests or lock children in cages.  The notion that a country or a religion can insulate us from the injustice supported by that country or religion is myopic.  Nothing that disconnects us from the larger context of life, some would call it a ‘deep ecology,’ can be considered ethical, no matter how many philosophers or corrupt Attorney Generals argue otherwise. 

                We will never value diversity among people if we cannot see the diversity in the biosphere.  We will never protect civil rights if we are not also protecting the environment.  Consciousness is not a distinctly human quality.  Our consciousness is shared by everything around us. The computerized out- sourcing of ethical decisions is a step away from a radical democracy and not an improvement.  The point of being ethical is not to be ‘right,’ the point of being ethical is to be in harmony with what sustains life.  Some of that life will confound and insult me, but it deserves its place as much as I deserve mine.  We cannot tolerate violence and greed.  If we want to live democratically, we have to accept the limitations of rational thought and embrace an ethics grounded in aesthetic experience.

The Road to the Right

                In the aftermath of WWII there was rift in American culture.  While the majority of Americans immersed themselves in the boom years following the war, a small cultural and literary movement mounted a protest to the suburbanized swirl of hula hoops, sit-coms, and mass marketing.  They eventually were called ‘The Beats,’ after author Jack Kerouac’s play on the word beat.  They became the cultural icons of the era, laying the groundwork for the iterations of the ‘counter-culture’ that followed.  They stood for a rebellious and idealized search for individual truth.  In On The Road, the main characters, Sal and Dean, go roaring across the country looking for “it.”   Rules were made to be broken, and the promise of a better world was only over the horizon.  Looking back on that period from the perspective of a President Trump and Proud Boys terrorizing Portland under police protection, the road looks a lot different than it did when Neal Cassady was driving a Cadillac a hundred miles an hour through the fields of Kansas.

                Road Lit was always a white male fantasy world.  There are so few examples written by women that each of them stands as the exception that proves the rule.  Only one road work, and it’s stretch to even call it a road work, was written by an African American.  It popularized the notion that it was the birth-right of every white male to take to the road, to somehow think of themselves as special.  The women, drugs and lack of responsibility were all part of the show.  Everything and everyone was fodder for the trip, but the trip never delivered the promised vision.  America never became the sacred land the Beats thought it could be.  Their original impulses to resist capitalism and crass culture of post-war America put their politics firmly on the left, but the privilege of their narratives drives us in a different direction today.

                Today, the ‘road’ is closed, but the internet is wide open.  America sustained a couple hundred years of narratives of limitless escape.  From the frontier to the wilderness, Americans, particularly white male Americans, could just leave.  There was always another adventure, another wife and job that would finally make everything okay and confirm just how individual and special the traveler was.  Sal ends up on a lonely pier in New Jersey romanticizing the America he failed to grasp but he felt was still out there to be found.  Today that trip takes place on the internet by people who never leave home.  Sal’s America was a fantasy, and their America is a digital fiction of air brushed porn and social media promising what no one can ever have.  Sal’s road led from the old culture of the East Coast to the opening of the West.  Today, geography doesn’t matter.  Those of us who followed in the footsteps of the Beats wanted to believe the gospel.  We wanted to believe we were resisting the establishment, even though the Beats sold their work and Kerouac ends up drunk on a bus to his mother’s house in Florida belittling the Beatniks, and presumably the Hippies, that followed.  In the end, it wasn’t the trip, it was the privilege that mattered.

                Today it is that privilege, the ingrained entitlement of white men to have a freedom and uniqueness just because they are white men, that is the political legacy of the road.  Escape is never an answer.  The rise of white supremacy in American culture and the grievance agenda of the Trump presidency is, I’m afraid, a logical extension of Sal and Dean.  The men driving and creating the hateful politics of the right believe they are entitled.  They should have the right to their own trip and their own vision, even if it’s nothing more than the pornographic fantasies of an Incel chat room.  They are no more willing than Kerouac’s characters to put in the work it takes to be real.  The fantasy that looks so appealing in On The Road, is pretty tawdry and worn in the age of internet.  White male privilege is a byproduct of the post WWII culture.  The Beats were never like the generation before them who never were allowed to think of themselves as all that special.  How dare women and people of color take that uniqueness away from them.  How dare anyone ask that they do what the Beats never did and take responsibility for what the do.  It’s no surprise then, that they follow the most relentlessly empty and vacuous politician in our history.  It’s no surprise that they see in him a model for political action.  Trump, who is nothing that he claims to be, is a perfect bookend to literary movement that never delivered what it promised.

Art, Education and Democracy

                John Dewey thought that the best way to think about art was to think of it as experience.  Like all experience, art creates knowledge and insight, so that the aesthetic was always already part of the cognitive and social dimensions of life.  If we think of art that way, it’s easy to make a case for the role it plays in educating people for participation in a radical democracy.  We encounter each other and learn to understand each other not through the contrived categories of social science data but through our direct experience.  Part of that encounter is aesthetic.  We react to the way people dress, what they listen to, how they talk and what they smell like before we even have a chance to think about the more abstract and intellectual markers we sometimes apply to others.  These senses are developed and fine tuned by the same experiential judgements we apply to art.

                I taught what was basically an ‘art history’ class for almost forty years.  I understand that the way we teach art now is exclusionary and colonizing.  The whole process of making canons of art and passing ‘universal’ judgements about high and low art is completely undemocratic.  Limiting art to the story and perspective of any one culture, religion, race, class or gender has less to do about art than it does an oppressive cultural narrative of dominance and exclusion.  But it doesn’t have to be taught that way.  It doesn’t have to be judged and ranked and limited so only a few tastes and perspectives, only a few experiences, are represented and explored.  Art in education is not meant, as Eliot’s reforms at Harvard in the 1870’s would have it, to train a few lower-class individuals to mingle with and work for the owner class.  We don’t need to study art to be ‘better’ or more sophisticated.  We need art to make us whole and to help us engage each other.

                Radical democracy is a contact sport.  It is more relational than it is rational.  We have tried building a democracy around rational and institutional practices.  It hasn’t really worked very well.  We are an extremely segregated society, in which we increasingly limit our contacts to people who are mostly like us.  The fear – and sometimes loathing – of ‘others’ makes it impossible to see a common good or a communal way forward.  Our democracy has become, primarily because of a broken economic system, a zero-sum game of groups waging political war over the few scraps left behind.  Education, particularly the vocationally oriented education we provide, merely reinforces the estrangement.  We still promote an ‘ideal’ culture, which means a white, patriarchal, protestant, heterosexual, European culture that excludes any other way of organizing the world.  We do not structure education as what Pratt calls a ‘contact zone.’  Mostly we teach folks that they don’t belong, unless they buy the right stuff, of course.

                None of us are the synthesized data-points we are thought to be.  The stuff that makes me interesting (Okay, cut me a little slack here) and human is not collected in an algorithm.  Our experience of the world and each other is primarily and initially an aesthetic one.  I’ve lost count of the number of times that music, dance, food, painting, tapestry or poetry helped me understand and value something that my abstract rational intellect just couldn’t comprehend.  The best things, the richest things, about a democracy are created in the intersections of our contacts with each other.  We create a world together and fill it with music and food and laughter and love.  We share pain and disappointment the same way.  Institutional democracy has lost the people that live in it.  We’ve stopped thinking about education as a fully human and life-long journey and settled for a hollowed-out and deracinated shell of ourselves.

                Dewey knew that art was an essential and irreplaceable part of an education.  He knew that if democracy was going to evolve beyond the crude forms it had started with and become an ethos and a way of life, then the aesthetic experience of our encounters and endeavors had to be part of it.  Art doesn’t make us ‘well-rounded.’  It doesn’t make us sophisticated, and it doesn’t make us cool.  It represents what every culture we have ever encountered already knew: art is how we understand life.  If that seems too obtuse or precious, ask the folks in El Paso or Dayton how the alternative works.