TORNADO: CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

I hear the Republicans are planning a committee hearing to investigate President Obama's responsibility for Monday's tornado in Oklahoma.  What did he know, and when did he know it?   Why did he not do more to prevent this tragedy from occurring in the first place?

Republicans believe that Obama's inaction prior to the tornado was politically motivated, in order to distract attention from the more important issues of Benghazi and the IRS scandal.

They accuse the Obama administration of failure to avert a predictable catastrophe, and the CIA of failure to provide adequate advance warning.  The President, they say, should have used his executive powers to halt the tornado before it reached a residential neighborhood, and cited his inaction as yet another example of his ineffectiveness as President.

At the same time, they accuse him of allowing the tragedy to take place, in order to increase his tyrannical power over the nation.

Republicans also wish to investigate reports that the tornado was in fact the work of Islamic terrorist extremists, as some have claimed, and whether the President, himself a suspected closet Muslim, was in anyway involved in the plot to attack our nation.

Committee hearings are scheduled to start next week.

TORNADO

Terrible to see the loss of life and devastation caused by the tornado that touched down yesterday in Moore, Oklahoma.  Once more, we are brought to our knees by the immeasurable power of nature.  It's also another tragic reminder, as if we needed it, of the necessity to respect that power and harness our own desires and needs, as but one species on the planet, in service of our only home.  I realize that one tornado may not be a symptom of the climate change evidenced by the vast preponderance of science; but it does seem, anecdotally at least, that the storms grow exponentially stronger and more destructive: tornados, hurricanes, floods, wild fires and blizzards... should we not be learning something from all this?  Is nature trying desperately to have us pay attention?

I have not actually seen a tornado, but I have lived through tornado warnings and have seen the destruction at first hand--driving through an area in southern Wisconsin, years ago, just after a tornado hit.  Fortunately, it was not a populated area, but it was astounded to see trees stripped of limbs, leaves and bark, and farm buildings destroyed.  In Iowa City, once, I recall tornado weather, with hail the size of your fist thundering down and leaving every car in town dented, its glass smashed.  I recall the eerie, deep black sky that seemed back-lit by neon green, and the gusting winds.  We were spared a hit, that time.  Would that the good citizens of Moore had been similarly spared...

LLYN FOULKES: A MODERN MASTER

Anyone with the guts to stand up to Mickey Mouse and call him out has my respect.  The Mouse, along with his creator, Walt Disney, has done more than anyone to remove the heart, spine and guts from American culture.  With his bowdlerization of perfectly good fairy tales and fables, myths and legends, Disney deprived the children of America of important lessons in what it means to be a human being, substituting superficial moralizing for profound morality, cuteness for true beauty, and contingency for truth.  Disguising the dark side of sexuality and violence with a veneer of winsome brightness, he made it possible to ignore the bothersome complexity of life in favor of a happy tune and the illusion that everything is breezy.

I'm glad to have showed up at least for the last day of the Llyn Foulkes retrospective exhibition at the Hammer Museum on Saturday, and wished I had gone sooner--so that I'd have the opportunity for a return visit.  Foulkes is one of the few artists in the past fifty years to have taken serious responsibility for addressing troubling truths about humanity, in particular American humanity, and to have devoted his work to the uncompromising exposure of the dark side of its values: the greed and materialism, the violence and repressed sexuality, the shoddy "dream" based on money, acquisitiveness and ruthless  self-advancement at the expense of one's fellow citizens.

Lucky Adam (1985) Mixed media. 50 x 35 x 4 in.

That he hated Disney-ism with a passion is evident in the recurring image of Mickey in his work, a constant, lurking presence who surveys the ruins of a society in decay.

Deliverance (2007) - Mixed Mediums 72 X 84 in.

If there's anger in Foulkes's visual work, his satire takes an irreverently exuberant turn in his music.  We were fortunate to catch him on Saturday in rehearsal for a scheduled show-closing performance the following day, setting up his justly famous one-man band and testing the sound.  The Machine...

Llyn Foulkes Performing on the Machine at the Church of Art, 2008

...as he calls it, is a fantastic assemblage of xylophones, percussion instruments and cowbells, all fronted by a cluster of ancient car horns that blare out tunefully when squeezed.  At the center of this display sits the artist with a spray of drumsticks and strikers sprouting from each hand, a sprightly master of his instruments and a vocalist of surprising authority and range.  His songs are, well, exuberantly irreverent, a mix of music hall comedy and rock, and he belts them out with a glint in his eye and a sometimes benevolent, sometimes mocking grin.

It's good to see this modern master get his due.  The price he has paid for an uncompromising vision is the kind of marginalization to which the art world too often subjects those who ignore the dictates of its trends and -isms.  His contribution is an important one--and one that reminds us that artists, at their best, are those who hold human and aesthetic values up for scrutiny, and not those who toady to the market or the current fashion.  To paraphrase the saying, if we didn't have a Llyn Foulkes, we'd sure need to invent him.

I DON'T BELIEVE IN HELL

Here's a short piece from the novel I'm working on.  As you can see, it has an autobiographical element to it.  It envisions a kind of dialogue between an 18th century Englishman, and an English-born writer living in 21st century America--whose thinking is much influenced, but not expressly so, by the dharma.  

         I don’t believe in hell.  I actually don’t believe in heaven, either.  My 18^th century literary friend (the main narrative voice of the novel) seems caught between belief and disbelief.  Though brought up, like myself, by an Anglican priest father, it was a different time, and the struggle between rational thought and religious beliefs must have been a tougher intellectual and emotional battle than it is today.   The prospect of an after-life in hell would have seemed more real to someone exposed, from childhood, to blood-and-thunder preaching from the pulpit of a domineering father.  Clearly, for him, the concept of sin is not mere theory, but personal and loaded with emotional freight. 

         Not only do I not believe in hell, I also don’t believe in sin.  It’s a foreign concept to me.  I don’t think it was belabored by my father, though it must have belonged in his teaching somewhere.  He did gift me, at the time of my confirmation, with a “St. Swithun’s” prayer book which listed every conceivable sin, and urged me to go regularly to confession.  Which I did, for a while.  At thirteen or so, I did not have a great deal to confess, and I fudged a bit around the embarrassing parts.  But by the time I was fifteen, or perhaps sixteen at most, I had already pretty much given up on the whole idea of religion.  I continued to go to chapel at school, and church, at home, but it was more out of reluctance to offend my father, who worked so hard at it, than out of piety or conviction. 

         I do still value much about my Christian background, though.  The rituals in which I participated were not wasted on me, and I believe that I carry them around with me to this day: baptism, confirmation, communion, confession—these have deep roots in the common humanity that we share with every other human being, no matter their religious affiliation.  Participation in such rituals gives meaning and context to our lives, and without them we would be left with the—to my way of thinking—ultimately empty rationalism and materialism that threaten to destroy the spirit of humanity.

         As much as the rituals, my life is enriched even today by the memory of the senses of my religious childhood: the psalms and hymns we sang, the sound of my father’s voice from the lectern or the pulpit, the peal of the church bells; the feel of the sculpted knights laid out on ancient tombs, of knees on hassocks, of my hand in my mother’s hand on the way to the communion rail, or that of the verger who led me down to the church basement to stoke the furnace; the smell of the coke we shoveled there, of smoldering candles, of lingering incense.  These are things that stay with me.  They are a part of who I am, so many years later.

         My friend from the 18^th century would perhaps have no other way of interpreting feelings of guilt and shame than to attribute them to his sinfulness.  For myself, today, I tend to see things in a different, more pragmatic light: thoughtless, hurtful actions lead to the kind of results that cause those feelings.  The price we pay is not the wrath of God, but rather the pain we bring down upon ourselves, whether acknowledged or not.  It is we ourselves who mete out our own “punishment” for the harmful things we do. 

         But perhaps this is just a different, God-less way of saying the same thing.

LUKA DAY

It's a Luka day today.  He spends each Wednesday with us, when we're in town--and he's a full-time occupation for the day.  This little guy never stops!  I'm looking forward to the time when he's old enough to snuggle down for a few minutes with a book, but he doesn't yet have the attention span for reading.  But his vocabulary grows apace.  Amazing how quickly he'll seize onto a word and store it in the memory bank.  His comprehension is much greater than his ability to actually say the words he knows, but he's clearly learning to communicate with the ones he has.  Miraculous to watch!

I have been looking forward to getting back to some writing, but that's not going to happen before tomorrow.  Meantime, my head is so filled with ideas and images for my new project, I have a hard time keeping focused during meditation.  Words for me--as for Luka--are quite insistent.  Whole phrases and sentences present themselves in my mind while I'm trying to maintain my concentration, and won't leave for fear of being forgotten.  And very often, they are.  When I sit down to write and try to recall the exact wording of the brilliantly-phrased insights I received free and clear in meditation, I find myself struggling to replicate them.  The best thing, I've found, is to consciously let go of them and start anew.

The word "adventure" came to me last night, as we sat with our artists' group and talked about art and writing.  If writing isn't an adventure, it's hardly worth the trouble.  If I know where I'm going, half the fun is gone.  Better to be lost in the woods than following the highway.  Again, little Luka is an inspiration.  Everything for him is an adventure, even words.  "Fish" is an adventure.  "Pocket," an adventure.  "Tree" and "grass," adventures--just to make the sound and feel the power of naming.  So even though there will be no writing time today, it will be more than compensated by the learning time for me.