Thanksgiving Day 2015

Cultures demands mythology, as this week we are about to celebrate one, the joining of the European Christian culture with that of the indigenous people of this new continent who were known in my childhood as Indians.  Just as the name was based on a sizable geological error of location, the end result of the destruction of a native civilization is subordinated to the myth of comity between the two cultures, rather than a slow cultural if not complete actual genocide.

Mythology, from earliest tribal images to modern national historiography, provides something vital for any culture, something that we may not be able to appreciate until it starts to collapse.  Exploring this subject presents the, "Fish don't know they are living in water" problem, that we have no way of grasping or discussing something so universal that there are no handles, words or concepts to deal with it.  If fish are removed from water, there is no problem to be resolved or corrections to be made -- they are dead.  So too, our American-Western-Enlightement culture is so vital for our civilization that when there are processes that are like the loss of water environment for aquatic creatures there are no evolutionary adaptations for combating this occurrence.  A shark may slap his fins, bare his teeth, blood would rush to his organs of flight or fight, but to no avail, as the change is so beyond any even ancient forebears faced that there is nothing, even in incipient form, available.

I'm writing this essay based on this premise: first that civilization is to humanity as water is to aquatic animals, and further, that civilization, in the aggregate meaning all of the systems and norms of a given time; or viewed over all of human existence require a common frame of reference that is beyond scientific verification, but rather in the realm of common belief.  Myth, or Mythos and the word Ethos is the best approximation for this discussion.   

I'm writing this essay at a time of personal loss, meaningless for the world but profound for me.  My interpersonal connections are tenuous at best, really for almost a decade being on a single liberal website, Dailykos, with a million members and a few who know me from my handle Arodb.  And then there is a group who play tennis every morning at a public court,  where after the informal doubles sets some of us, maybe a few, sometimes a dozen go to our coffee shop to shoot the breeze.  These conversations, my joining right after Obama's election, can be mundane (finding the best tire shop) to the most personal and profound.  It's the diversity that makes it work when it does.  As I write this I have come to the conclusion that even if I were to continue with both of these settings, the magic that made them so important to me over so long a time are not sustainable under the stresses of this particular moment in history.

"Ethos" happens young, to this child before I had anything to compare Union Station crowded with soldiers who enjoyed a connection with a cute kid.  I reached my fifth year in the protected environs of the white side of the street of Washington D.C. feeling the sadness when Roosevelt died and the joy when we had won the war.  In the Washington Post when I was just starting to read, I remember this heading, "American is great because American is good, if American ever ceases to be good she will cease to be great."  At the time, almost seventy years ago, there was no reference I can remember to the author of this aphorism, Alexis de Tocqueville so I pondered it in my very naive brain, and felt it just seemed too simplistic, even though everything that was printed must, of course, be true!

At that tender age, the "idea" of a nation being "good" made me think, but with no possibility of clarifying the point.  I knew enough not to raise the issue with my dad, who happily ending his formal education at thirteen, and with this,  his own exploration of such conundrums.  As far as the United States being good, always having been and in the future being so, was not really in doubt. We were the "good guys," with movies showing heroes who killed Indians and Japs and benevolently dominating "gals" and "colored people" with any moral qualms not being raised as even existing.

There was a slight problem, which was that we were Jews, a group not that common in that neighborhood of D.C at that time.  The American ethos was intertwined with Christianity, as we followed our teacher's instructions to sing hymns to the one "born as the king of Israel."  I knew that the new nation did not have a king, and if it did it would not be Jesus Christ, since my Rabbi would have told us.  But, years later, when he was pressed during my daily classes leading to my Bar Mitzvah, he unleashed an explosion of ridicule of that "crazy person" that my teacher, classmates and country so revered.  He forgot to add as I walked away somewhat stunned, "Lot's of luck dealing with this, kid" 

Before I give anyone the idea that what I say here is meant to be the sum total of my formation, I have no such illusion.  Millions of Jewish kids of my era faced these conflicts, and managed to deal with them and thrive in this country.  I'm writing this because my experiences forced me to grapple on a personal level challenges similar to what this country, probably the world is facing on this Thanksgiving day.  One of the most quoted lines of  the Poem by W.B. Yeats "The Second Coming" is "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;"  I had felt the power of these words, yet never till now
understood his dire warning.  He wrote those words in 1919, when a horrible war was ending not in real resolution, but a time-out when the conflicts of the previous conflagration were to fester and metamorphose into genocidal monstrosities.  Yeats could only sense the consequences of this loss of the center, the common values, too deep and amorphous to be codified into law, but which allowed human beings to connect on this vital indefinable level.

I will miss my after-tennis group, yet how can I expect a more profound conversation than that which takes place among the political leaders of our country.  All that's left is taking sides, choosing the most vivid expression of vilification of the opposition to endorse.  There is no appreciation that we are reliving the words of Yeats' poem.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

The "Centre" that could not hold in 1919, is now being overwhelmed by an even more cacophonous machine of a media made more graphic and intrusive.  Only those blessed with a simplicity of thought have the hubris to stand up and shout- with each outburst -- if looking up would see:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;