The Horrible Secret of Adulthood
Mar. 17th, 2003 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backup"The bullies, cheaters, tattletales, and sniveling toadies who tormented you in high school are now trying to sell you insurance, explaining why a pay raise for you is currently impossible, informing you your tax return is being audited, and telling you why your country has just declared war."
-- Matt Groening, Life in Hell, 1987
This is why the sense of existential crisis I have had for the past few years isn't getting any better. Sixty-six percent of the American public supports this war of aggression launched by a bunch of fundamentalist lunatics who say, very openly and plainly, that it is intended as a first step on the road to complete world domination. I guess that on some level part of the trick of being a historian is convincing yourself that education will help things, that people can learn not to make mistakes again. But after 60 years of being the preeminent world power, there should not be an American alive unable to distinguish between a rational threat to our well-being and a crackpot manipulation of public hysteria. And yet you have that 66 per cent. So what possible good can be accomplished by being a historian. I feel completely adrift.
Or, to quote a recent interview with Kury Vonnegut about artists facing the same issue: "When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high."
A reversion to long quotations -- shades of my adolescence, and the adolescent sense of impotent rage that comes with it. And in that vein, we are back from Pittsburgh, and perhaps within a few days, once I am less obsessed and enraged, I will have something meaningful to say about the trip.
-- Matt Groening, Life in Hell, 1987
This is why the sense of existential crisis I have had for the past few years isn't getting any better. Sixty-six percent of the American public supports this war of aggression launched by a bunch of fundamentalist lunatics who say, very openly and plainly, that it is intended as a first step on the road to complete world domination. I guess that on some level part of the trick of being a historian is convincing yourself that education will help things, that people can learn not to make mistakes again. But after 60 years of being the preeminent world power, there should not be an American alive unable to distinguish between a rational threat to our well-being and a crackpot manipulation of public hysteria. And yet you have that 66 per cent. So what possible good can be accomplished by being a historian. I feel completely adrift.
Or, to quote a recent interview with Kury Vonnegut about artists facing the same issue: "When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high."
A reversion to long quotations -- shades of my adolescence, and the adolescent sense of impotent rage that comes with it. And in that vein, we are back from Pittsburgh, and perhaps within a few days, once I am less obsessed and enraged, I will have something meaningful to say about the trip.
