Thursday, September 27, 2001

Dope

For those of you worried that I am neglecting my promised, straggly essay on the Earthquake in Lisbon and its effects on the Enlightenment - a hot button issue, right? Hollywood fodder -- well, I'm not. My plan, on this site, is to experiment with free form essays - ex cathedra riffs that are visibly assembled out of the lumber in my head. So if that lumber doesn't feel like getting up and making itself into an essay, I'm not going to make it. But I do remember my promises, and will try to get around to my original intentions.

-- The Randalls Grocery store I go to has a large red white and blue ribbon stuck to the stuccoed pillar in front of the entrance; the Goodwill store on 5th and Lamar has tacked up a goodly sized flag, maybe two and a half feet by five, on the side of their building; the GSD and M advertising agency on 6th has a huge flag on a pole and a banner stretched out on their front lawn area which contains some pithy patriotic apothegm; ny neighbor has a small flag on a shishkabab sized stick waving outside her door. I am living, right now, in a flurry of patriotic colors. It stirs memories of 1980, the hostage crisis, the frustratingly ineffectual Jimmy Carter, the songs of hillbilly defiance on the radio. I lived in Shreveport then, and Shreveport's white population responded to the occupation of the "nest of spies" in Teheran by demanding, and receiving, round the clock playing of Kenny Rodger's "Coward of the County." I was a redneck, but I wasn't stupid -- I turned to black fm and listened to Grand Master Flash invent hip-hop.

And so it goes, and so it goes.

Readers, I've been reading Robert Lacey's gossipy account of the Saud royal family, published in the backwash of the hostage crisis (1981), and I've been surprised by the assumptions in that book -- surprised, that is, by the way perception was so totally shaped by the Cold War. Surprised, for instance, that the US sponsored King Faisal's pan-Islamic ideas to counter Nasser's russophile socialism. Surprised by the immediacy of the oil price shock in those days. Surprised, mostly, by how much of this I have forgotten. Yes, the importance of forgetting in history is always underrated: historians have a natural fondness for memory, for archeology and continuing structures and civilization. But it is forgetting that melts the structures of hegemony, and that operates so openly, ingenuously, and ruthlessly in the minds of men. All that is solid melts into air, somebody once said. And what melts it?

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