The Tyranny of Politics: Scenes From a Season of Skyfall and a Christmas Meditation on the Imperative to Strike Another Match

So about that poem by W.H. Auden that I posted three months ago as a memorial to 9/11 (http://blackdogsnow.blogspot.com/2012/09/in-memory-unmentionable-odor-of-death.html). At the time, it seemed right to let the poem speak for itself. “Defenseless under the night our world in stupor lies.” Who did not feel that way eleven years ago on the night of September 11? But I didn’t want to pretend to be any kind of expert on Auden, or on “September 1, 1939” in particular, or for that matter on poetry at all. Or that I didn’t have to look up who “exiled Thucydides” was (classical Greek historian and general) or “what mad Nijinsky wrote about Diaghilev” (an extraordinary ballet dancer of the early 20^th century, Nijinsky fell in love with his impresario, Serge Diaghilev, then slowly went mad as Diaghilev dropped him both as a lover and a dancer in his company).

I’ve read that the “dive on 52^nd street” was a long-since vanished gay bar known as “Dizzy’s” and that Auden later came to despise this poem, refused to read it. (That’s the way it is with geniuses, they snub their noses at stuff the rest of us will spend our lives trying to imitate.) But the poem was written in his youth, when he was a Marxist and an internationalist (in later years he would become an Anglican) and its subject—I think—is the tension between the private life and the public or political life; between the prosaic life of the individual, the “sensuous man in the street” who seeks “to be loved alone” and the life of the activist compelled to—or forced into—action by “imperialism’s face and the international wrong.”

The private life: to tend your own garden, follow your own star, love who you want to love, raise your children if you have children, care for the people closest to you, do some reasonable work for reasonable pay, and be left alone. It’s this vision of the private life that is at the heart of what is truest about the conservative political vision. And the evidence of its truth is that this private life is the life that everyone—everyone—yearns to live. And the liberal agenda, let’s face it, does sometimes seem like an effort to conscript everyone into a massive government project to Improve The World.

Who needs it?

The problem is that…well, there are so many problems. And many of them won’t go away, let alone be solved, by individuals (or by the contemporary conservative fetish for “markets” as the answer to every social problem). And they can only be confronted, even if not solved, by collective action, by people being willing to forsake some of their private life to a public commitment. And by a marshalling of collective resources.

Such is the tyranny of history. Or maybe it is the tyranny of politics. We don’t really have any choice but to be public citizens, to be citizens of the world. Ignore politics, the poem tells us, and politics will come and get you, will come and obsess your private life—as it did on September 1, 1939 and again on September 11, 2001.

It comes to mind because I have been oppressed by a feeling that the world is way too much with us. Its casual violence--the Newtown shootings (and, almost as depressing, the vehemence of the gun lobby in the aftermath that it has nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, to answer for). The uncertainty of our futures—climate change and dire warnings of global warming, and the real threat of an impending war in the middle east that could become regional or global. And the foreboding that our own country has seen its greatest days, that we no longer seem capable of governing ourselves, that we are falling of fiscal and other kinds of cliffs. The wheels seem to be coming off of history. Everywhere, it seems, the sky is falling.

 

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And then the sky really did seem to fall.  It was already darkening on the morning of the 29^th of October, here where I live 350 miles plus from where Hurricane Sandy would make landfall that evening. I remember not being sure how seriously to take this warning of a “super storm” but by the night before it was clear the thing was real. I have family on the east coast and was genuinely worried about their person and property (in DC, they would be spared the worst of it). The rains began in the afternoon and the wind began to blow and by (I think) 5 o’clock my lights and heat were out. I raced to finish some piece of work before the battery on my laptop died, then hunkered down with a one flashlight, a couple of candles, and my dog. My cell phone wouldn’t last the night either, and besides the towers that bounce the signals around were down and out. Well, I thought, this is how the end will come to all of us: stripped clean of our devises, of all our machinations. (The next day, still without power, I had to try Carribou, Starbucks, Panera, and another Carribou before finding a place with wifi and an unoccupied outlet.) But in the full embrace of the storm we sat by the window, me and my dog (she was mostly baffled by the darkened house with its one lame flashlight) and looked out at the mournful, darkened and deserted street—a lone cop car would cruise by occasionally—and listened to the screaming wind.  

 

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And there was that other storm, the election. Although I was generally pleased with the outcome, it was exhausting. This was not so much the tyranny of politics, as the tyranny of journalism. Or maybe the tyranny of pollsters. (To be honest, the pollsters didn’t get to me because I have long since stopped answering my landline phone; the only reason I keep the goddamn thing is for those occasions—approximately twice a month—when I lose my cell phone.) The differences that divide the left from the right are true and real and serious, but I am convinced they are amplified and inflamed by 24/7 journalism and the echo chamber of “pundits” and cable news talking heads who act mainly as cheerleaders—Go Left Wing! Go Right Wing! They are a pox on our political life. For something different try Andrew Sullivan’s blog (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/). Sullivan recently made the surprising announcement that he would be charging for content on his weblog—a portent of where online journalism may go. Within 48 hours of his announcement he had garnered more than $400,000 in subscriptions at $19.99 per. I’m convinced it’s because he offers something that people crave: long-form journalism with a point-of-view but one that knows how to be critical of its own side.

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“At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth…”

Eleven years ago I got laid off of a job. There was a three-year-old at home and so we switched roles—my daughter’s mother went off to an office job, and I stayed at home. I approached the task with a naïve jauntiness and remember planning some activities for my first day “on the job.” I thought the agenda would get us through to noon at least.

I learned very quickly how a three-year-old’s attention span could shred anyone’s agenda. I recall looking at the clock with some alarm to see that my planned activities hadn’t gotten us through the first hour. Now what?    

It was a thoroughly enriching period, my short period as a stay-at-home full-time dad, but a disorienting one and aside from learning that tending to a toddler for 8 hours a day was a harder job than anything I had been doing in offices for the previous 20 years, what I remember most is the feeling (such is the narcissism of male careerism) of being cast out of the mainstream. Everyone in “the real world” was out doing something that made the earth turn on its axis while I was visiting the donut shop with a three-year-old.

But what really do we know about what makes the world turn? In those days Ceasar Augustus issued a degree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to their own town to register.

In the shadow of all that accumulated power, a pregnant teenage girl hurries to the “hill country” there to meet with her cousin who is also expecting. The cousin’s aged husband Zecharias is a high priest in the temple, a leader of his community, but it is this pillar of the community who is rendered dumb when he doubt’s God’s message about the child to be born to his wife.  And it is the pregnant teenage girl who is given the gift of speech. “My soul doth magnifiy the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior..." What a speech, encompassing the entirety of salvation history.

(Imagine a teenager today texting the Magnificat. “OMG! Thnx b 2 G!”)

The birth narrative of Jesus (and much else in the Bible) seems to speak to the fact that the real power to shape and remake the world lay outside the huge structures of politics and power and dominance and authority that humans create. The world is remade in the hollows and empty spaces where mothers and fathers care for babies and children, where spouses and lovers and friends care for each other in times of trial, where volunteers give up their private lives to be public servants, where anyone in the faraway hill country of what seem like hopeless causes (when weighed against the darkness of the world) decide to strike another match, resolve to put their shoulder to the wheel. 

That, at any rate, has to be the hope of this expiring Christmas season. The people living in darkness have seen a great light! So in the spirit of striking a match in a time of darkness, I offer up this classic Bob Dylan song, probably my favorite. I was disappointed to find that the original recorded version of this song is copyrighted by some entity that has forbidden its use on YouTube, but I found this live recording. At his best (and here I’m paraphrasing my favorite writer Christopher Hitchens) Dylan was no 60’s sentimentalist, but warned us to grow up, or at least to get real. And to get over ourselves. The world is always falling apart (The sky too is falling over you!) is always dangerous (“the highway is for gamblers, you better use your sense”).

I always love the last verse, and Dylan’s defiant cry to “Strike another match, go start anew!” So here it is: go strike another match!