Culture in the U.S.-- Where We Stand

THE ABSURD TIMES

          Some more interesting things than the political have been going on, so why not pause to reflect on them?  Never mind, that’s a rhetorical question.

          After we posted the interview with the @Neinquarterly, several facts have emerged in conversations.  For example, Berlin alone spends more on the arts than does the entire United States.  Priorities.  The clods of the world.

          In 1595, only about 100,000 people were literate in London, or was it Great Britain?  Today, in the U.S., about 250,000,000 are literate.  They had Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Sidney, and others.  We have, er, well … people.

          We have more drones than did Great Britain or Germany. 

          I think we had two relatively productive periods in our literature: The Transcendentalists, or Thoreau, Melville, etc. (for want of a better term) and the Realists such as Lewis, Dreiser, etc.  All together, not as much quality as produced in London during 1595-1600.

          Perhaps the two fairly distinctive contributions (if that term applies) to music in the States have been Jazz and Country and Western Music.  The two cultures often clash with contempt for one another with the exception of the acknowledged greats such as Jimmie Rodgers and Charlie Parker.  Rodgers made a recording with Louis Armstrong and either “Fatha” Hines or Mrs. Armstrong on piano and Parker was often found in a bar listening to Hank Williams songs “Listen to the stories, man, the stories,” he would say when questioned by other musicians.  I am not convinced that the entire corpus of those genres measure up to the production of Beethoven alone, much less other German composers. 

          But we have more drones and nuclear weapons.  We spend more on “Defense” than all the other countries in the world combined, but not as much on culture than Berlin.  Priorities, after all.

          I suppose we could talk about popular culture such as movies, comedy, and so on, but only the Redford Film Festival is a force in that area other than the profit motive, so we had best skip over that.  I would say that Mel Brooks is at least very funny.

          Well, here is a reconstruction of one day in the life of Beethoven (not all his days were quite like this, of course):    

This time of the year, especially this year, leaves less and less to celebrate. In fact, there is hardly and reason to celebrate anything anymore. There may be a few happy moments here and there, but the senseless killing that continues leaves no ritualistic period untouched. This particular week, we have seen only stock market reports and airline delays as well as major highway shutdowns and deaths on our interstate highway system, all precipitated by a few days off for those fortunate enough to still remain employed during which they are obligated out of habit to spend money they do not have to send things to people they have no real use for and whom they would just as soon never see again.  

We do have a lot of weaponry, however.

One wonders how many Beethovens, or potential Beethovens, or great artists have either been killed by war or aborted by poverty or economics. This coming winter solstice is the anniversary of Beethovin's premire performance of his fifth symphony, and his sixth, as well as his fourth piano concerto, all at the same concert, with Beethoven as conductor and pianist. How often in the history of the universe does a phenomenon such as that occur? Yet I know of no mass celebration of what is clearly one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. Beethoven spent his life yearning for international peace and brotherhood and eventually expressed in in his 9th symphony which you may hear this season, complete with the text of Schiller's "Ode to Joy". I shudder to think how many people may sit through a performance of it out of a sense of duty.  

With the weather such as it has been, many of us are longing for the winter solstice.

Is it too much to believe that such accomplishments can be paralled? In 1595, in England alone, perhaps 100,000 people were able to read and write English, and this is being generous. Out of this came Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Nash, Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon, and many others whose literature survives and lives to this day. Imagine any city or town with a population of 100,000 and imagine what would come out of it today? In addition, at that time, 95% of everything written was written in Latin, the remaining 5% in the various "living languages." The King James version of the Bible was to follow as was John Milton.

And it was not a matter of these people, these great artists, being unrecognized in their own time. Beethoven himself was widely praised, most prominently by Haydn who had also praised Mozart. However, Goethe and Beethoven were reportedly walking together down a street and passersby would wave. Goethe lightly observed that these people should stop flattering him with the recognition and Beethoven reportedly asked "How do you know they are not waving at me?" There was no contradiction.

So we can think of Goethe and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Spenser, and look for our modern parallels. Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he said that Darwin had it wrong, that "survival of the mediocre" is the rule. Even more of a warning is the thought that they both were right -- the fittest are the mediocre.

Even the mediocre can use weapons.