[Leica] Documentary Photography Book Review

[george at imagist.com (George Lottermoser)]

Wayne Serrano5/18/04

>Excellent words.. I often wonder why all leaders of religion and government
>just don't speak out against war and conflict and oppose all efforts that
>turn us from becoming better human beings.

I found the answer to your question, which is also my question, and in fact their question, in a discussion between Toni Morrison and Cornell West:

MORRISON: What is this absolute obsession with violence? I mean, violence is two things. First of all, it takes a certain amount of courage, physical courage, but it also requires a certain laziness of intellect. So it's both easy and hard. It's such a child's view, as is the puny language that accompanies it. I guess I shouldn't dump that on children, but it certainly is not adult.

The language of literature that is bellicose, that is warlike, is the prized language. The White House likes the word "robust." Robust. It's carnal, it's sexual, it's sensual, whether it's The Iliad or Ulysses or Chanson de Roland, you know, that language, or the Churchillian language. Anything opposite that is understood to be weak, wimpy, appeasing, feminine. On the other hand, just in terms of language alone, it always seemed to me that the language of Gandhi, the language of Martin Luther King, the language of Mandela, that's seemed to me the most powerful, morally persuasive language around.

Now, it's true that after World War I, I think Hemingway and other writers, especially poets, who had been in the war all said, oh, you know, this is ridiculous; let's get back to precision. There are no such things as honor or glory in war. Those words they couldn't use anymore. But following that was World War II, and people needed everything they had, all the language that was available to them, in order to finally confront such horror. But after that, not just the gestures seemed anachronistic and sort of old, retro, but war itself seems retro somehow. Even though everybody is at war, it's somehow a genuinely outmoded idea. And the language that is produced by it is also outmoded and puny and uninspiring and trite.

I don't mean that people don't say "Yea!" but when you hear these people championing war, they almost have no recourse except lies and deceit. There's almost nothing else there for them. Because the old power of slaughter for whatever reasons--religious reasons, political reasons, tribal reasons, etc.--suddenly has lost real intellectual credibility.

WEST: I want to come back to your point about immaturity because I want to make a distinction between "childish" and "childlike." You see, the blues and jazz are childlike, the sense of awe and wonder and the mystery and perplexity of things. "Childish" is immature. And what we have now, we have the imperial elite who are adolescent and immature because they perceive their crude interests to be protected only by might, only by force.

So that you get this intersection between free-market fundamentalism, which is a market-driven capitalist society that's driven not just by profits but by ways of reproducing its own system, the oil in the Middle East and so forth and so on, but then you've got the escalating militarism, which requires a certain mentality. It's a machismo identity. The machismo identity is nothing but an insecurity and an anxiety, an inability to be human, so you have to protect your territory and so forth. And with that comes the increasing authoritarianism--Patriot Act I, and now they are trying to get Patriot Act II.

The blues tradition that goes, let's say, from Leroy Carr to your own work is not just music, it's an idiom; it's a way of being in the world, it's mature, and it takes unbelievable courage, persistence, practice, discipline, energy to be a mature, compassionate, decent person. And that's exactly what the blues fish is trying to get us to be because you can't have a democracy without it. And that's the problem with not just the White House but with Wall Street. It's the problem with City Hall; it's the problem with the Statehouse.

Fond regards,

G e o r g e   L o t t e r m o s e r,    imagist?

<?>Peace<?>   <?>Harmony<?>  <?>Stewardship<?>

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