1 Boring Old Man

There’s an amazing thing on the The Huffington Post right now – an article by Gore Vidal. What’s amazing isn’t that he wrote it, or even what it says. It’s the quality of the thought. It’s even more remarkable to read through the comments. There’s an almost reverent tone as people thank him for posting. He’s talking about the decline of the American intellectual traditions, though that’s not exactly the way he puts it, and the effect it’s had on our whole country. But it’s not the content of his discussion that evokes the reverence, at least not from me. It’s the way he’s thinking about our current dilemma – his historical references, his reliance on the great thinkers in our culture. I suppose that’s it, culture, maybe even wisdom.

We’re in the midst of a cultural regression. Simplistic religious formulations have replaced  any serious approach to the complexity of modern society. The careful and measured thought of our forefathers is being ignored in favor of quick-fix demagogery. Our current leaders make speeches which are almost a syllabus of logical fallacies, and as I mentioned in my last post, rely on information that is so distant from the truth that it would be better thought of as disinformation. We have an amazing technology, which is being applied to video games and military hardware, yet medical care is increasingly unavailable to most. The societal attention to the wretched of the earth is almost laughed off as we measure our worth as a people by the DOW Jones Industrial Average [instead of the National Debt or the plight of our miners].

So when a wise man speaks out, we’re in awe. We’d forgotten they were there. As I think back to Al Gore’s speech on MLK day, that’s what made it so compelling. He was thinking, and  thinking well. He wasn’t ranting or reducing things to simple formulations. He was referencing the Constitution and the Federalist Papers as a person who had read them, thought about them, cared about them. He was quoting the words of our great Statemen. He was talking about the rule of law as it has evolved in Western Culture over the course of centuries.

We’re starved for leaders who are mature, knowlegable people who can think, who have taken their education seriously, who will dwell in the complexity of our reality long enough to understand it and help us deal with it in a serious manner. We’re poisoned by simplicity and false rhetoric in what should be another age of enlightenment. And about three of our young people are dying daily in an ill conceived war of conquest, gone awry…