Imagine A World Where Simple Goodness Matters Afresh

Guest blogger extraordinaire, Michael Lee (OU Musicologist) shares the following:

This morning, I woke early to deal with my dog's sense of time and entitlement. Then I made a grave mistake. I turned on the news. Within 20 minutes, the pending collapse of democracy in America revealed itself with brazen precision. What a scary time. Which is worse: the envigoration of massive racial injustice, a deadly pandemic confronted by no plan, the president promising the end of democracy, or a climate crisis threatening life on earth?

Maybe all four could be fused into a single story about capitalism as a really big mistake. As we discussed, the Soviets and particularly Stalin did the worst disservice to the human race by discrediting an alternative to capitalism so thoroughly as to make all future alternatives far less viable. Maybe we're living through the moment when Donald Trump will so thoroughly discredit capitalism as to make the search for an alterntive vital again. Whatever is going on, it doesn't look like a happy ending is pending unless our side changes tactics. 

A hopeful friend, Jake Johnson, led me in a subsequent discussion of the above to a conclusion worth sharing. As we now find ourselves as human beings half emptied by the current circumstances, we may need to abandon any effort to address capitalism's remaining guardians (the venal, the timid, and the ignorant) with the reason and facts we so cherish. They have abandoned truth, and reason is entirely relative to them. As tools of persuasion, the facts have passed their expiration date with tens of millions of our friends, neighbors, and family members.  

Armed with this knowledge, we may need to reply with fantasies larger and more compelling than those Trump and the greedy monsters who make him possible are presenting. Here the arts and the artists may be at an advantage. The time to dream a better world is now more than ever. Lie more compellingly, artists who love truth. What is a lie but another name for a dream in this fact-free world? Please, artists, present a world where simple goodness matters afresh, and mean braggarts are pitied rather than followed.

We need a wildly attractive and wholly fabricated evangel of the beauty of everything Trump, his angry mob, and the cravens who enable him hate. Trump is piloting the Republic one of two places: oblivion or change. Let's rouse ourselves from our bad-news-induced torpor and use our imaginations to tilt the scale toward change using the tool our times value: fantasy.

--Mike