Yeah ... the Trump parade has been trampling over me and my sanity too.
I agree that the natural temptation is just to "check out" because that feels easier in the moment, but a bad situation (or in our case a nightmare situation) can always be made worse by forfeiting our voice. None of us asked to be in this situation (well, that's not true, I guess he didn't get put back in office by accident), but we owe it to ourselves to remain active agents here.
I also really think you're doing something special in choosing to use media and art to explore the culture that feeds these attitudes. Even in a world where people have just forgotten how to read, society is better when we have people who are thinking about art, and enabling others to do the same. I definitely don't want to downplay the necessity for direct action, the kind that entails more than just typing words on a keyboard, but I've also learned not to underestimate the deliberate, slow-burn change that this instills in a system, and so I'm happy when I see thoughtful pieces like this persisting in defiance of a thoughtless world.
Thanks, as always, for reading, and thanks also for these kind words.
I'm certainly a believer in direct action (for some reason, when I write that I hear Al Pacino in "The Devil's Advocate" screaming: "I'm a fan of man!") but I also agree that there's a real and deep value in thought itself, especially in moments like these. Perhaps my most naive belief (out of what are, surprisingly perhaps, many of them) is that if you expose enough people to the thoughts of other people - and by way of corollary, to art - we would not be in the state we're in. Really engaging with other people's thoughts (and isn't that what art and film are, at base?) is perhaps the most human thing we can do; it is humanizing and humane, and perhaps by doing that we can make a small dent in this maddening idiotic tide.
I think this is a really hard question to answer. My suspicion is that people don't change all that much, but that the culture around them does, radically. I suspect that your parents - Depression-era folks - did indeed have a much different relationship with money, or, to be more exact, wealth, than do we. One of my favorite ways to think about this is to note how differently wealthy people were and are portrayed on screen: in films all the way through the 1950s, the very wealthy were often portrayed as so out of touch as to be comedic figures; now they are often portrayed as the people we should all aspire to be. I don't think this can be indicative of the two times having no difference at all in their view of money...
Yeah ... the Trump parade has been trampling over me and my sanity too.
I agree that the natural temptation is just to "check out" because that feels easier in the moment, but a bad situation (or in our case a nightmare situation) can always be made worse by forfeiting our voice. None of us asked to be in this situation (well, that's not true, I guess he didn't get put back in office by accident), but we owe it to ourselves to remain active agents here.
I also really think you're doing something special in choosing to use media and art to explore the culture that feeds these attitudes. Even in a world where people have just forgotten how to read, society is better when we have people who are thinking about art, and enabling others to do the same. I definitely don't want to downplay the necessity for direct action, the kind that entails more than just typing words on a keyboard, but I've also learned not to underestimate the deliberate, slow-burn change that this instills in a system, and so I'm happy when I see thoughtful pieces like this persisting in defiance of a thoughtless world.
Thanks, as always, for reading, and thanks also for these kind words.
I'm certainly a believer in direct action (for some reason, when I write that I hear Al Pacino in "The Devil's Advocate" screaming: "I'm a fan of man!") but I also agree that there's a real and deep value in thought itself, especially in moments like these. Perhaps my most naive belief (out of what are, surprisingly perhaps, many of them) is that if you expose enough people to the thoughts of other people - and by way of corollary, to art - we would not be in the state we're in. Really engaging with other people's thoughts (and isn't that what art and film are, at base?) is perhaps the most human thing we can do; it is humanizing and humane, and perhaps by doing that we can make a small dent in this maddening idiotic tide.
So many aspects of our current lives seem to be about money. Are we any different from past peoples and cultures?
I think this is a really hard question to answer. My suspicion is that people don't change all that much, but that the culture around them does, radically. I suspect that your parents - Depression-era folks - did indeed have a much different relationship with money, or, to be more exact, wealth, than do we. One of my favorite ways to think about this is to note how differently wealthy people were and are portrayed on screen: in films all the way through the 1950s, the very wealthy were often portrayed as so out of touch as to be comedic figures; now they are often portrayed as the people we should all aspire to be. I don't think this can be indicative of the two times having no difference at all in their view of money...