Move aside and let the man go through.
Let the man go through.
-- Soul Coughing
Ignorance is a privilege. It is the privilege you have when you own your own land, your own house, and you have enough Dosh to handle your business and that of your offspring. So you can ignore the rest of the world. I'm striving to be that kind of ignorant, so I don't have to fill my head with other people's news to feel at home in the world.
As Cobb readers know I'm on a quest to understand at a deep level, what Western Civilization is all about, and I hope with this knowledge to leapfrog in my children's generation, all the brambles and stiles that fence peasants in. If there was a moment to use the word 'sheeple' which I never have, this would be that moment. I don't want to share the bonds of the bondsman, and though my conscience recognizes his predicament, I don't want to be a part of it. I want to be a freer man than my father and my son to be a perfectly free man. I want that my daughters would marry such men. Let my drama be the human drama of the ordinary sins of ambition in men of ways and means, not the acts of desperation of those migrant prisoners. A free man never becomes a suicide bomber, but he'll try for your wife all the same. The more free men we have, the better our prospects for justice.
I come from a peasant place, and there is only the shame of ambition in me. I may be more Bilbo than Frodo. I've been after the ring of power on my own.
Over at the Respectable Negroes is some commentary about how the film 'Precious' is black pathology on parade serving as pornography for whitey. This to me is about caring about other people's news - other people's pathology. That cycle of dysfunction. "I hate that you hate me, so my hate is righteous." I smell that stink, the stink of a cistern of defensiveness, that deep well of resentment. Owning other people's pain, and playing a prevent defense that never quite brings enough happiness to score. A waking, walking wallowing that makes sane people go all frumpy and joyless. That is the fate of the superior mind defending the impoverished. It is not Christian.
As usual, I have no idea what the drama loving rabble love. So I know about as much about 'Precious' as I know about 'Lady GaGa', which is to say that they are both all the rage in Sherwood Forest and other intellectually downscale environs. You know, where the peasants live. But of course it is not beneath the erudite to ramble on about such popular entertainment phenomena. Ishmael Reed pipes up:
This use of movies and books to cast collective shame upon an entire community doesn’t happen with works about white dysfunctional families. It wasn’t done, for instance, with “Requiem for a Dream,” starring the great Ellen Burstyn, about a white family dealing with drug addiction, or with “The Kiss,” a memoir about incest — in that case, a relationship between a white father and his adult daughter.
Such stereotyping has led to calamities being visited on minority communities. I’ve suggested that the Newseum in Washington create a Hall of Shame, which would include the front pages of newspapers whose inflammatory coverage led to explosions of racial hatred. I’m thinking, among many others, of 1921’s Tulsa riot, which started with a rumor that a black man had assaulted a white woman, and resulted in the murder of 300 blacks.
Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with another kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like “Precious,” white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.
I've never seen anyone killed. So I'd imagine that being in Tulsa on a particularly dark night in American history would be pretty terrifying to me, were I there in person. But I did watch 9/11 on TV, and I know what it's like to feel the horror and revulsion of knowing ten times 300 people were wiped out in a matter of hours.
Black pathology. It has this sound of a cute disease that Pfizer has a pill for. Some little building on some college campus that has its own endowment and a government grant for clinical trials - and except for the several statistical thousands that have this rare disease around the world, nobody but the Alpha Professor, knows or cares. That is, until the CNN special or the stereotypical film. And so now there is a coterie of specialists attending the extraordinary arcanity that is this subject of study - creating its own gravitational well disturbing the space-time continuum with its dark energy. How not to get sucked in?
Now we have autism awareness. Black pathology awareness. Haitian earthquake awareness. So much to be aware of! This is the drama of education - or edjumacation drama. And we're all awash in it. It's all peasant porn, don't you see? The man who cannot endow a chair, gives to the Salvation Army pot and feels he's done for Tiny Tim what Scrooge would never - because he has such a sincere heart. The sincere peasant heart going out to those slightly more misfortunate and spreading awareness like so much parade confetti.
On my DVR are the recorded faces of sad anchorpersons telling me the heartbreaking sad news of the heartbreaking sadness somewhere not too far away. Film at 11. Oscar in February. Me. I'm a cranky, jaded old man. Mess with my family and I care. Otherwise, meh. I know that's not respectable negro behavior, but quite frankly Scarlet, I decide when I'm a negro and when I'm not. So, what do I do? How not to get sucked in? I repeat my first paragraph.
Ignorance is a privilege. It is the privilege you have when you own your own land, your own house, and you have enough Dosh to handle your business and that of your offspring. So you can ignore the rest of the world. I'm striving to be that kind of ignorant, so I don't have to fill my head with other people's news to feel at home in the world.
So I ignored 'Precious' from day one. I know it's out there, waiting to sink its melodramatic claws into the soft belly of America's middle-class morality. And today I am reminded that it's about incest - OK so that was the big deal - alright, then big deal! I don't care. I don't care about movies about autism or how eating at McDonald's every day is bad for you. I don't care because I can afford not to care. I'm handling my own business. All this social awareness. Where is the moral lesson we didn't have at age 12? One must stand above it.
Some kind of verb.
Some kind of moving thing.
Something unseen.
Some hand is motioning
to rise, to rise, to rise.
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