Monday, August 23, 2010
Revolutions
Excerpts from Guy Davenport, "What Are Revolutions?" in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington: Counterpoint, 1996), pp. 235-248:
William Gropper, Divided House
This post is dedicated to a friend who wrote in a letter:
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Our revolution was fought because of a penny tax on paper and a two-penny one on butter. We are now taxed for every movement we make, every exchange of a nickel from citizen to citizen. That tyrant against whom we rebelled would not have dared to tax his subjects' incomes and was innocent of the diabolical idea that one can collect taxes on income not yet earned, which all of us now pay.
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The strangest revolution of our century is this perverse and invisible evolution of the human body into the automobile.
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When we wake up from our myths we will discover that we Americans do not live in Jefferson's republic but in a technological tyranny the likes of which has yet to be described by political scientists, who have slept through it all.
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My grandmother, like Alexander Graham Bell, would not have a telephone in her house—she said it was a vulgar invention. (Bell, its inventor, did not have one because it was a damned nuisance.) I like better the objection of Edgar Degas, who did not have a phone because there was a great likelihood that the party calling might be someone to whom you had not been introduced.
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Anybody can see that the automobile owns us, not we it. We are its slaves. It takes sharper eyes to see the more insidious process: the car is swallowing up our soul in its metal-and-glass body. But it has happened and it is so.
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What scares me is that for the past fifty years we have been moving backward while we have dreamed, or fooled ourselves, that we were moving forward. Every one of our cities became more dangerous to live in; we all became little more than consumers and taxpayers so far as our government was concerned. Rascality in government has become the norm rather than the exception. Wars have gotten longer, more demoralizing, more devastating and irrational.
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Because I have no rational revolution to offer you, I suggest, for the fun of it, that you try the Erewhonian. Take back your body from its possession by the automobile; take back your imagination from the TV set; take back your wealth from Congress's bottomless pit and maniac spending; take back your skills as homemakers from the manufacturers; take back your minds from the arguments from necessity and the merchants of fear and prejudice. Take back peace from perpetual war. Take back your lives; they are yours.
This post is dedicated to a friend who wrote in a letter:
More cheeringly, some crucial organ in our television blew up very loudly this afternoon causing me ill-concealed glee and a renewed faith in the efficacy of petitionary prayer. The LS (lumen stultorum) is a perennial source of friction, and its life has been spared up till now only because my 'nay' has always been outnumbered 5 to 1. Now in a brave act of self-snuffing it has done the ethical thing. Beyond repair, I hope, and may no replacement cross the threshold.
Labels: Luddism
