Mike Macartney's Blog - Posts Tagged "essay"
Foundation, Empire, Second Foundation
With apologies to Isaac Asimov.
Back in the last century, about half way through, and just before the great war that laid the foundation of the American Empire, there were bad times. All over. Everyone everywhere was lost and in search of security and order - and empire. In the middle of that a little government agency, called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created. It was part of the government response to the Great Depression and tried to catch the falling collapse of agriculture, America’s biggest economy at the time. One of the things it did was to send out a pack of unemployed artists, in this case photographers, to look at America. Magic happened. Some of the best and most powerful images ever taken of America and its people blinked to existence. They are a national treasure and kept in the Smithsonian.
You have seen many of the black and white photos from this effort, by now famous photographers like Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Dorthea Lang. Recently the Denver Post Photo Blogs published some of the color capture of this time and place. Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943. http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/... Have a look.
Are these the people who made the greatest accidental empire the world has ever seen? Shsss, don’t tell anybody - all empires are accidental. “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” “Empire to empire in . . .” Look at the faces, the land, the technology. It is gone and distant and strange today. The context these people lived in and the thoughts they had and the way they explained life and their place in it, are only left in these colorful shadows of the once was.
The scribes and thought shapers and those who want to take credit will tell you that: “America is not imperial.” “America is not an empire.” “America is different and special in history.” Yes, they are absolutely correct. You only have to look at these photographs and others like them to know that. People driving horses and wagons, dripping oil on steam engine wheels, and sitting in the dirt eating white bread off paper plates are not imperial storm troopers. They were not the foundations of empire. What a stupid idea. Nobody will buy THAT book. Except that they did, and a million books have been written, read, written again, and then again.
There are many times many answers and opinions and myths about how America got from there, in these photographs, to here in 2012. Stories about the strange and magnificent “founding fathers” who were not really human at all, but angles sent to light our way and give use “The Constitution” to guide us in our struggle against the darkness. Sound like some of the things you have heard on CSPAN or at a Sarah speech? Then there are the stories about our virtue and morality and hard work and innovation and freedoms and capitalism handed down generation to generation to carry on the great experiment in Democracy. Not to worry, no more examples! The difficulty is squaring all the opinions with the photographs. Doesn’t work with that “Greatest Generation” pap either. Look at the pictures again.
The people and the world and the beliefs of the people in these photographs are gone forever. So it the world of 1776 and the world of 1968 and the world of 1997. These photographs are so powerful and regarded as a national treasure because they show a painfully clear snapshot of people and meaning from the middle of “The American Century.” When people drove horses to town and had outhouses. Just 70 years ago. You can see it and imagine it and go back to it.
It might be time to send unknown artists out again to see what America and Americans look like now. Really look like. Are they people who will try build the road to empire or the meek followers of the road to yesterday’s history. Same road, same amount of work. Has to be paved by every generation new. Only they own it. Put down the struggle and it changes in the blink of a thought, and is undone like it never was.
It is all about what you believe together, and how hard you work - and how the dice fall. Without the dice the other two do not get you there. Catch 22.
Back in the last century, about half way through, and just before the great war that laid the foundation of the American Empire, there were bad times. All over. Everyone everywhere was lost and in search of security and order - and empire. In the middle of that a little government agency, called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created. It was part of the government response to the Great Depression and tried to catch the falling collapse of agriculture, America’s biggest economy at the time. One of the things it did was to send out a pack of unemployed artists, in this case photographers, to look at America. Magic happened. Some of the best and most powerful images ever taken of America and its people blinked to existence. They are a national treasure and kept in the Smithsonian.
You have seen many of the black and white photos from this effort, by now famous photographers like Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Dorthea Lang. Recently the Denver Post Photo Blogs published some of the color capture of this time and place. Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943. http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/... Have a look.
Are these the people who made the greatest accidental empire the world has ever seen? Shsss, don’t tell anybody - all empires are accidental. “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” “Empire to empire in . . .” Look at the faces, the land, the technology. It is gone and distant and strange today. The context these people lived in and the thoughts they had and the way they explained life and their place in it, are only left in these colorful shadows of the once was.
The scribes and thought shapers and those who want to take credit will tell you that: “America is not imperial.” “America is not an empire.” “America is different and special in history.” Yes, they are absolutely correct. You only have to look at these photographs and others like them to know that. People driving horses and wagons, dripping oil on steam engine wheels, and sitting in the dirt eating white bread off paper plates are not imperial storm troopers. They were not the foundations of empire. What a stupid idea. Nobody will buy THAT book. Except that they did, and a million books have been written, read, written again, and then again.
There are many times many answers and opinions and myths about how America got from there, in these photographs, to here in 2012. Stories about the strange and magnificent “founding fathers” who were not really human at all, but angles sent to light our way and give use “The Constitution” to guide us in our struggle against the darkness. Sound like some of the things you have heard on CSPAN or at a Sarah speech? Then there are the stories about our virtue and morality and hard work and innovation and freedoms and capitalism handed down generation to generation to carry on the great experiment in Democracy. Not to worry, no more examples! The difficulty is squaring all the opinions with the photographs. Doesn’t work with that “Greatest Generation” pap either. Look at the pictures again.
The people and the world and the beliefs of the people in these photographs are gone forever. So it the world of 1776 and the world of 1968 and the world of 1997. These photographs are so powerful and regarded as a national treasure because they show a painfully clear snapshot of people and meaning from the middle of “The American Century.” When people drove horses to town and had outhouses. Just 70 years ago. You can see it and imagine it and go back to it.
It might be time to send unknown artists out again to see what America and Americans look like now. Really look like. Are they people who will try build the road to empire or the meek followers of the road to yesterday’s history. Same road, same amount of work. Has to be paved by every generation new. Only they own it. Put down the struggle and it changes in the blink of a thought, and is undone like it never was.
It is all about what you believe together, and how hard you work - and how the dice fall. Without the dice the other two do not get you there. Catch 22.
Nothing Is What It Seems
and everything is something it isn’t.
This is a favorite E. B. White quote from his essay The Door. It is old and not well known, certainly not like Charlotte’s Web. The essay, the one about the door, is about life.
The musing is collected in an interesting gray cloth book residing on the shelf of my library labeled: Time Machine. Present Tense, Vol. III, Portrait of a World, edited by Sharon Brown of Brown University was published for college students by Harcourt, Brice & Company in 1941.
The book has wonderful chapters like, The American Heritage, Men at Work, Whither Science, Strains and Stresses, Headliners, Patterns In Politics, and War and the Future. The Door is filed under Strains and Stresses. Even in 1941 there were strains and stresses about the present world and what comes next it seems.
The little gray book also has American Landscape by Thomas Wolfe, Two For A Penny by John Steinbeck, and The Modernization of China and Japan by Hu Shih. It contains 63 essays, columns, poems, and plays from when they taught college students those things, back in the middle of the American Century.
I do wonder who Sharon Brown was and what became of her books. What did all those essays and stories and poems mean to her and the people who published them - and all those students who read them in that time of infamy? What were they thinking? And why were all those particular things filed under, “Portrait of a World?”
How do we find Sharon Brown today? You can find the book on Amazon in the UK. Seems Sharon Brown gets mixed up with Sharon Osborne. But, pick the one who was born in 1891. Then the Amazon search engine breaks down and reverts to Sharon Osborne. Well this is now, and that was then. Celebrities were different then.
What about now? These times are the real times, the ones that matter. There are wars raging. Economies are crashing. America is unsure of what its now and its future will be while the money leaks away and new, dark powers rise. The jobs and cities that were thriving 10 years ago are shaky, unsettled, and wide-eyed. Old national faiths built on old successes and triumphs tremble. They glow dully and seem thinner and staler, too naive. “For it is inevitable that they will keep changing the doors on you, he said, because that is what they are for; and the thing is to get used to it and not to let it unsettle the mind,” says Mr. White in his essay, the one in the gray textbook from 1941. The one about life.
Youth unemployment in America is about as high as it has ever been. It is tough to get a decent job coming out of college right now, and the loans are deep and endless. College students network, blog, text, meet, and have the great ideas that young people with new minds always have. There are many young people in Silicon Valley and New York and Los Angeles who are trying to make the next Facebook, or writing code for the iPhone, or trying to get a conference up with TechCrunch to make the rent for another month. They are smart and connected and working hard. A career? Sure, but have to land the next gig and maybe I will have to go work steady at Google or Yahoo or Oracle or Hp one of these days if my startup does not work out. Now, if I could get on at Apple.
Having a startup and even getting a couple of bucks from an angel investor so you can pitch it to a VC, once you get it running, is not Facebook. But, Facebook isn't quite Facebook anymore. The IPO never took off as it should have. Something changed.
The past is temporary. Wait awhile and It will be something it isn’t. All of it will be invented over again come the next generation and the one after that.
You can also use a door and a bit of string to pull out a loose tooth, so I am told.
This is a favorite E. B. White quote from his essay The Door. It is old and not well known, certainly not like Charlotte’s Web. The essay, the one about the door, is about life.
The musing is collected in an interesting gray cloth book residing on the shelf of my library labeled: Time Machine. Present Tense, Vol. III, Portrait of a World, edited by Sharon Brown of Brown University was published for college students by Harcourt, Brice & Company in 1941.
The book has wonderful chapters like, The American Heritage, Men at Work, Whither Science, Strains and Stresses, Headliners, Patterns In Politics, and War and the Future. The Door is filed under Strains and Stresses. Even in 1941 there were strains and stresses about the present world and what comes next it seems.
The little gray book also has American Landscape by Thomas Wolfe, Two For A Penny by John Steinbeck, and The Modernization of China and Japan by Hu Shih. It contains 63 essays, columns, poems, and plays from when they taught college students those things, back in the middle of the American Century.
I do wonder who Sharon Brown was and what became of her books. What did all those essays and stories and poems mean to her and the people who published them - and all those students who read them in that time of infamy? What were they thinking? And why were all those particular things filed under, “Portrait of a World?”
How do we find Sharon Brown today? You can find the book on Amazon in the UK. Seems Sharon Brown gets mixed up with Sharon Osborne. But, pick the one who was born in 1891. Then the Amazon search engine breaks down and reverts to Sharon Osborne. Well this is now, and that was then. Celebrities were different then.
What about now? These times are the real times, the ones that matter. There are wars raging. Economies are crashing. America is unsure of what its now and its future will be while the money leaks away and new, dark powers rise. The jobs and cities that were thriving 10 years ago are shaky, unsettled, and wide-eyed. Old national faiths built on old successes and triumphs tremble. They glow dully and seem thinner and staler, too naive. “For it is inevitable that they will keep changing the doors on you, he said, because that is what they are for; and the thing is to get used to it and not to let it unsettle the mind,” says Mr. White in his essay, the one in the gray textbook from 1941. The one about life.
Youth unemployment in America is about as high as it has ever been. It is tough to get a decent job coming out of college right now, and the loans are deep and endless. College students network, blog, text, meet, and have the great ideas that young people with new minds always have. There are many young people in Silicon Valley and New York and Los Angeles who are trying to make the next Facebook, or writing code for the iPhone, or trying to get a conference up with TechCrunch to make the rent for another month. They are smart and connected and working hard. A career? Sure, but have to land the next gig and maybe I will have to go work steady at Google or Yahoo or Oracle or Hp one of these days if my startup does not work out. Now, if I could get on at Apple.
Having a startup and even getting a couple of bucks from an angel investor so you can pitch it to a VC, once you get it running, is not Facebook. But, Facebook isn't quite Facebook anymore. The IPO never took off as it should have. Something changed.
The past is temporary. Wait awhile and It will be something it isn’t. All of it will be invented over again come the next generation and the one after that.
You can also use a door and a bit of string to pull out a loose tooth, so I am told.
