"Grumblers and Fumblers"

As a nation, do we know who we are any more? We used to be a melting pot, an

amalgam of cultures, beliefs, habits, even jokes. We were varied, but we blended
into a unique American identity. Somewhere along the road to tomorrow, however, we
stopped melting. We cooled toward each other instead. We lost our shared identity.

Maybe we need more soul, more magic. One photographer has written, “One of the
many things that I learned as a child from my Choctaw grandmother in Mississippi
... is that the world we live in today is far too cold, logical, analytical,
scientific and ordered for my taste. Where did the mystery about life and death
go? Where's the bliss of aesthetic chaos to be found today? Honestly, where's the
magic?”

Photography is a good place to look for magic. At one time photographs were said
to capture a soul and freeze it into celluloid and salts. This belief originated
in folklore, with the feeling that mirrors were said to steal souls, so that
breaking a mirror breaks the soul. Some cultures, like the Mayan, believed that
mirrors lead one to another realm where Gods and ancestors can converse. Perhaps
this is why cameras are banned in many hispanic churches. In other cultures, when
someone dies all the mirrors are covered so that the soul can't be imprisoned in
them. (No joke: when my mother died at age 47 of a stroke, family members covered
all the mirrors in the house. I promptly uncovered them, but that's another
story.)

Playwright David Rabe takes a more cynical view of how we now mirror ourselves. In
“Goose and Tomtom”, he writes: “The ancients might have had some consolation from
a view of the heavens as inhabited by this thoughtful, you know, meditative, maybe
a trifle unpredictable and wrathful but nevertheless “UP THERE” - this divine
onlooker. We have bureaucrats. The air's bad, the ozone's fucked, the water's
poison, and into whose eyes do we find ourselves staring when we look for
providence? We have emptied out the heavens and put (ourselves) into the hands of
a bunch of aging insurance salesmen whose jobs are insecure.”

Those of you who know me recognize that I am not hawking religion or even
necessarily nationalism. But belief in ourselves, in our shared vision, may be
essential for us to survive. If our young experiment in democracy is to continue
it must identify itself, understand itself, see itself as a community of
interests. As Dr. Seuss said, “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There
is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Stephen Sondheim once described us as “tumblers, grumblers, fumblers and bumblers.

Goodness and badness. Man in his madness”. That may well be true, but we had best
redefine ourselves if we expect to have a tomorrow. We need to be united by more
than despair. As a reviewer wrote of Sondheim's "Assassins", "Sondheim has taken
on the American Dream, challenged its validity, exposed its falsehood....He has
taken on the promises, the lies and the deceit of politicians, the social
injustices, the anger of the losers and the deprived". Another reviewer pointed
out "A shadow America, a poisoned, have-not America...(Sondheim) will wave a gun
in a crowded theater, artistically speaking, if that's what is needed to hit the
target of American complacency".

I hope we are more than complacent, deprived, and depraved. I hope we can
eradicate the poison that has infected our philosophical and political landscape.
But we need to make a start, to be better than we have been recently. As the Tao
Te Ching teaches us, “A journey of a thousand miles begins at the spot under one's
feet.” Can the United States lift up its feet? For all our sakes I certainly hope
so.
c. Corinne Whitaker 2009 www.giraffe.com/gr_fumblers.html