Almost Breaking the World

         Luis Buñuel's 1962 satirical film "The Exterminating Angel" has been refreshed this year by Thomas Ades' operatic version at a time when the plot seems pointedly allegorical.  It tells of a group of elegant guests who attend a formal dinner party then discover they cannot leave at the end of the evening. They bed down for the night but in the morning, inexplicably, they are still unable to leave. Days pass, desperation grows, one man dies, a young couple commit suicide. Near the climax a herd of white sheep and a wild bear break in. The guests are freed from their terror only after they figure out how it all began.

        This nightmare is recognizable in the Syrian, Iraq and Afghan wars. As described concerning Syria by the UN High Commissioner for refugees, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein

"we have seen every conceivable atrocity being committed by most parties to the conflict... and it started from a severe violation of human rights and the rights of children. And from there, we have a crisis that is almost breaking the world in a very real, real sense."

       There is nothing more painful than the struggle of Americans to cope with their entanglement in this nightmare, for instance in Raqqa, where ISIS was embedded and where a report from the Washington Post tells of 11,000 to 12,000 buildings destroyed or damaged under U.S.-led airstrikes, where "the sentiment...is increasingly that the U.S. took part in this destruction, but is not taking responsibility for fixing it, for cleaning it up."

    

        As metaphor "The Exterminating Angel" pushes past our familiar historical landscape that documents the marriage of religion and political power, or the dominance of the wealthy one percent who define it as their godly reward. Even though millions of Americans have disabused themselves that the wars in Vietnam and Iraq made any sense the barriers to the next step seem to trap present generations, inexplicably blocking a path to find an alternative to mass destruction of the innocent.  

       This palpable pain and anxiety over the absence of a way forward has many sources that need uncovering if people are to find a way back to health: a toxic mixture of Protestant utopianism, tribal self-interest, Catholic atonement and Silicon Valley-style comfort is deeply embraced as a subconscious revealed secular religion: that the main purpose of societies is to accumulate and prosper against all others, usually understood as our enemies.

       After the guests are set free in The Exterminating Angel," they decide to attend a Te Deum in thankfulness for their freedom but find they are trapped once again inside the cathedral as chaos breaks out everywhere and finally the same flock of sheep enters the Cathedral as gunfire is heard. 

        In this surrealist drama let us say that the sheep represent the world's innocent who perish all around us; and let us say that because our pretty services and solemn assemblies are not focused on these millions in desperate need around the world, that it is not surreal at all to realize our world is breaking, and on a local and global scale. The answer is that a new mobilization never seen before is now necessary to break new paths of life and freedom for all.  That will mean a new era of consciousness-raising among us to clarify that the lies and illusions that demand our devotion must be dashed in pieces.

Bare Ruined Choirs

        As the USA's democracy project sinks further into chaos each day, the high school gun reformers are receiving a free graduate education about its fault lines. The cocktail of claimed virtue (read James Comey), received religion, imperial military power, irrepressible sex, and Wall Street influence peddling, provide a priceless learning curve. Lesson one is the gun violence issue is already off the table. Lesson two is that since no one has constructed plausible solutions to this mess young generations are going to have to build them from the ground up.

        If there's to be summer school this year it better be spent on that construction project. The ground is littered with lessons and obstacles. In Silicon Valley amidst all its riches inequality is growing. In 2014 the top 5 percent of the population earned an annual $428,729, increasing by an additional $60,686 in 2016 alone, while the earnings of the lowest 20 percent increased only $1,726. [Silicon Valley Index 2018].

        Social critic Pankaj Mishra characterizes this new reality where "the old style racial segregation has been replaced by sharply defined zones of prosperity and destitution." 

         Alongside this is the modern illness that confuses data with moral principles. This digital mythic obsession, with its big paydays, can be fairly described as the replacement for religion's tendency toward magical thinking. Since everyone is quoting Reinhold Niebuhr these days the irony he often pointed to is in this case the hard reality that the people shooting at young people may be the closest thing to being their allies.

        Such unfathomable truth at least provides clues J.K. Rowling could appreciate including what witchery led us to accept that economic growth would magically cure inequality. In Republican legislatures across the country this absurdity is being laid to rest as tax cuts for the rich impoverish state budgets.  

        Youthful political practitioners should note how denial often corrupts perception. We can note that the evil of Native American genocide is only cured by not remembering; that the continuing evil of racial segregation is often cured by blindness; that the deterioration of life in jobless communities cannot be cured except by Darwinian fantasies about survival of the fittest. The old fascist dream is risen again.

         Shakespeare gives proportion to the stakes in the loss of democratic practices:

That time of year...When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang....

Which by and by black night doth take away.

        As it turns out then, to get gun control requires the major revolution that the resignation of the Republican party leader Paul Ryan may foretell. Meaning new generations whose illusions have been shredded by bullets turning unabashedly to a lifetime of political engagement, fortified by the sure and certain truth that to share the next meal the whole community must decide. 

        Neither wizards, nor miracles, nor data can replace that common good. Until then the men and women here and around the world who need a share of our bread will be shooting.  

 

[Shakespeare Sonnett 73]