Putin's Bloody Little Playground

 

Putin’s Playground

Any Town, Ukraine

Simon Clark says,

"I miss the playground as it used to be,

Laughter, fun and frivolity,

Sliding down and spinning ‘round,

Chasing the breeze and winning the race."

My Friend Ray Mungo

Ray can be fully appreciated only by those of us who were young during the Vietnam War. He wrote for the anti-war underground as one of those intellectuals LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover wanted incarcerated—and many were, more than in today's Russia where Russians have been brainwashed to think Putin is their Savior sent to them by Jesus Christ. America’s counterculture generation was one of a kind never to be seen again. To quote Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” They were free thinking rebels who read books and watched movies from Europe. Philosophy classes were packed with students looking for answers since they concluded that the thinking of adults who could go along with LBJ’s war and accept police dogs being turned loose on black people was as primitive as that of the Puritans who hanged women for witchcraft.

Unlike today the young were free thinkers because religious and secular ideologies had not yet imprisoned their minds. It was an age that celebrated love unlike today when Hollywood has demoted love to sex. The Golden Age of Hollywood had come to an end but a few intellectual, aesthetic golden nuggets were produced. It was a time before Hollywood became America’s Pravda. The great movie stars and directors were departing leaving a void where once there was inspired creativity. When Ray was writing young people were reading, not comic books and graphic novels (as fascinating as they can be; I’ve read plenty) but weighty philosophical tombs by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and novels by Albert Camus,  Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy (who lived before Russia was lobotomized by Marx). That glorious time came to an end of course, and was replaced by mediocrity. (Simply consider America’s last two presidents.)

Free thinking existentialism succumbed to the hive-mind thinking of religious and secular ideologies or to the no-thinking of nihilistic anarchism. Today America lives in an age defined by social media communication via Facebook, Twitter, Tik Toc, etc. Very different from the age of the rebellious Transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. Or even Fenimore Cooper who had given up on the American enterprise and escape with Natty Bumppo into the world of the Noble Savage for whom freedom and spirituality was more important than the dollar. The 1920s were anything but boring, as were the 1930s that gave birth to America’s Greatest Generation, and 1940s when that generation fought the greatest evildoer history has known (though Putin might catch up with his nukes). Even the 1950s had hot rods and the most glorious music that celebrated—not sex—but teenage love. Then there were the sixties, the apex of American culture for young people. LBJ and the Cold Warriors tried to destroy their love of life but failed. Thousands were drafted from their lives to die over there. Over here they were imprisoned or shot dead on campus by National Guard (guarding whom?) for their rejection of LBJ’s evil war, a war America started unlike WWI, WWII, and Putin’s war. Refusing to surrender, America’s youth celebrated love and life and created music that was heartbreakingly sublime.

And Ray and I were there. I was there as an observing participant, he as an anti-war activist who fought against evil men and their evil war not with a tank but with a typewriter. That is who Ray Mungo was. 

My favorite books by Ray Mungo: 

  

The Limits of Postmodernism

Preface: The Journey that Became a Destination

Coleman College paid for me to take a train to University of Nebraska at Kearney to present a paper titled “Seeking the Postmodern Project.” The conference was “Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Problem of Reception: Nietzsche and the Consequences.” It was put on by the German language department. It became a special experience for me for reasons having nothing to do with the conference. Coleman College allowed me to take a train from Fullerton, California, to Hastings, Nebraska. The train would get me closer to Kearney than a plane would. The train let me off at about 3 AM. It was a wintery morning and the town was asleep. The car I reserved was all alone in the train station parking lot with the keys inside. During the drive to Kearney I saw migrating geese. I got out of the car to watch and listen to them as they passed over high above in the gray sky. During the conference I drove out to a prairie-grass reserve. There I stood and looked upon a remnant of the ancient prairie. A mystical experience? Perhaps.

Seeing the geese and prairie grass meant more to me than the talk about Nietzsche, though I didn’t say that to my boss Dr. Coleman Furr, though I think he would have understood because he had a desert home in Yuma, Arizona. My talk was on Nietzsche and Hemingway. But I rewrote it for its publication in the Platte Valley Review (winter 1995, volume 23, number 1). Nietzsche was still present, but having viewed the Great Plains from the train and in person I replaced Hemingway with the Pawnee Indians, the ancient dwellers of that ancient land. In the words of poet William Cullen Bryant, it was the place where, 

The red man came—

The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,

And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

The solitude of centuries untold

Has settled where they dwelt. (“The Prairies”) 

The title of my article became “The Limits of Postmodernism.” A question that came to mind was “Are our lives, more comfortable and less vulnerable to daily hazards, more meaningful than the early lives of the red and white settlers of the prairies?” 

The Limits of Postmodernism 

I want to reflect on the project of postmodernism and pay tribute to this place—the city of Kearney and the state of Nebraska. Also pay tribute to the peoples who have called this place home—Americans and the native peoples, most recently the Pawnee—and indirectly to Nietzsche, who valued perhaps most of all living simply and honestly, who understood life to be a drama of very basic forces, who believed Western culture had created a worldview so cluttered by false notions and meaningless distractions that it had lost sight of the simple yet dramatic realities of living.

Postmodernism is essentially a historical period, not a project. But once people like ourselves become aware of the postmodern condition and begin to explore it, define it, and respond to it, it evolves into a kind of project. Even if the postmodern means that all projects are finished, insofar as they no longer have final legitimacy, then learning to live meaningfully, truthfully, beneficially in such a world becomes our project.

Having a clearly defined project enables individuals and cultures to move confidently into the future by giving them a clear sense of direction. And though many postmodern thinkers suggest certain directions, certainly the postmodern condition is characterized by the lack of a universal project capable of giving definition to society or to the individual. Western society has been characterized by its universal religious and secular projects contained in grand mythic narratives. The postmodern world, on the other hand, offers no clear project that society or the individual can aspire to, no imperatives for living rooted in a general ontology.

The first task is to reconsider whether the worldview of postmodernism or modernism or the Western religious tradition can adequately serve as the basis for a new project. Western culture has taken a good deal of pride in replacing traditional cultures, even those of its own. But now in this post-modern period, when even the final projects of modernism have been called into question, it is time to consider whether or not the culture that evolved out of Western philosophy, religion, science, and technology is really truer, better, more meaningful than even those first cultures that existed before the great civilizations.

Take, for example, the Pawnee who lived in the region. Are our truths more profound and satisfying? Do they more accurately express the reality of the lifeworld? To think that these people whose relationship to the world was one of immediacy did not understand the world seems to me arrogant and misguided. Do we really understand life more clearly? I do not think we do. How can we, isolated as we are from the primordial world, that first and final world, by the clutter of our intellectual, artistic, and technological creations? I believe that we, the critics and philosophers of the postmodern, have created a complex symbolic universe that may provide us with a fascinating dwelling place but does not effectively serve the lives of most people. Do we really need all this? Do the people of this city Kearny—these farmers, merchants, parents, and children–need what we have to offer? Does our talk really get to some important truth that can lead them or anyone to a way of life that is truer and more noble than the one we see about us here on the great plains of Nebraska? Or is what we have to offer simply more of the intellectual clutter that has poured so profusely from the Western tradition?

Note the words of planting from one of the primordials, those people who dwelled in the first world, these the words of the Navaho: 

The sacred blue corn-seed I am planting

In one night it will grow and flourish

In one night the corn increases

In the garden of the House God 

The sacred white corn-seed I am planting,

In one day it will grow and ripen,

In one day the corn increases,

In its beauty it increases.[1] 

Does all of our knowledge enable us to live more truthfully, meaningfully, and appreciatively than this? What do we offer instead? This was once a world where all things and activities were sacred. This was a world where life and language were simple and profound.

Language creates, translates, and reveals reality for human beings, but I ask what greater thing our modern theoretical systems do than are accomplish by the simple expressions of the Navaho. Is our world truer? Is it more noble? Have we greater insight? Or have we created a universe of words that imprison us, that separate us from the world that is truly our flesh, our mother, our origin, and our end? Language can create the illusion of reality; it can become an artificial reality. Moderns are awash in language and yet have, it seems to me, very little experience or understanding of reality. And the postmoderns seem to have lost their way in this complex linguistic universe, and even seem to be cheerful at having become lost.

The Pawnee who once grew their corn and hunted buffalo here, the farmers who still take their living from the earth, they are not lost, and they have little need of what we offer. So what is it we as postmoderns offer? What are we about? If it is we who are the educators, then we must accept the responsibility of leadership, but the direction of that leadership remains unclear to me. Or if there is some direction but we cannot communicate it simply and clearly to ordinary people, to farmers, merchants, students, then what we do is really of little value and we have little to offer. For unlike doctors who help their patients with treatments and medicines, we have only our language to offer to those who seek some direction in the postmodern world. When I offer direction to my students, I do not send them to the texts of the postmoderns, which they cannot comprehend, but to those simple words of the believers, artists, or Native Americans, who I believe lived lives far more simple, truthful, honest, and beautiful than those of moderns or postmoderns. I fear that we have lost our way and are not really interested in finding a direction, which would, as a result, dislocate the self from the center of attention.

Is reality as complex as our philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, and even religious systems would have us believe? Yesterday I drove about the countryside, walked upon a dusty road, and even walked upon a remnant of ancient prairie. What I saw was wonderful yet to very simple. Certainly the individual forms of this vast expanse—the river, sky, land, and the animals and plants—are complex, and wonderful in their complexity, even mystery; but their purpose, their ultimate reason for being, seems to me to be manifest. They simply are. It is the appearance, not its cause, that is the final and important reality.

I marvel at the red-tailed hawk that sails overhead on giant wings, its ancient head gazing keenly at the world below. If I dissect this beast and master the mechanics of its organism, do I really understand its reality any better? I do not think so. It is what it appears to be, a creature of the world that seeks to continue its being, to stay out of harm’s way, to enjoy the simple pleasures that happen to be associated with its particular form. I believe we have overly complicated our lives, and postmodern theory has simply added to the muddle. As leaders, experts in the present condition of humanity, we must consider carefully what it is we should be conveying to others. Are we leading our students to some place where the vision of life is clear, fine, and satisfying, or are we continuing the long history of complicating life and obfuscating what is real?

The Western tradition began with the complex symbolic universe of ideas created out of ancient religious narratives and Greek philosophy. The tradition has spent 2000 years adding to, understanding, verifying, and more recently, attempting to simplify itself. Postmodernism seems to be the last stage—a realization that we have been investigating a world of our own creation more than the world itself, perhaps as a result never fully living in or understanding the real world. Historically, most people continued to live in the real world in spite of the fact that philosophers, theologians, and scientists told them that they were not living in the real world and that their worldly lives were really not so very real or important.

Priests and philosophers, cloistered from the activities of the earth world, studying scripture or inventing metaphysical systems, told them that reality was hidden and obscured, that it revealed itself only through their contemplative activities, mental inventions that expressed human reality as it truly is. The theologian told them that the true world lay elsewhere and that people’s lives were insignificant because they occurred in a subordinate realm of inferior reality. Native Americans, however, understood that there was nothing other than the act of living. For them the value and reality of every act of living was absolute and self-evident. This attitude is expressed in what Beverly Hungry Wolf says of the life of women among the Blackfeet: 

Let me just say that in the culture of my people the work of the woman was generally respected and honored, for the men knew very well that they could not live without them. The people of the past thought it a great honor that the women should bear and rear the children, ensuring that there would be people in the future. Equally honorable was the woman’s work of creating the lodges that made the homes, putting them up and taking down when camp moved, heating them, and providing the bedding and clothing for the household members. In the social life of my grandmothers, a household was judged not only by the bravery and generosity of the man, but also by the kindness and work habits of the woman. Even the wife of a poor man could find honor among the people by being a good housekeeper.[2] 

Do her words somehow miss the mark? Is there some hidden, essential dimension of reality if overlooked life cannot be fully lived? Is her view of the reality and significance of the lifeworld naive and unsophisticated? Again, I do not think so. Whatever we might add would be at best superfluous, at worst falsify reality. And perhaps the great tragedy of the postmodern condition is to have lost complete sight and experience of the fundamentals of life. What has the modern world invented that gives life greater meaning than the forms of being of the native peoples? In fact, if we look at the monstrous projects of modernism, we find that what continues to matter most to people are the simplest of things—love, work, pleasure, family, friends, community, the forms of nature, and a clear sense of purpose. The modern world remains in spite of its technological wonders a universe in which people still seek most those primordial elements of being human. If anything, modernism has transformed these elements into grotesque mutations. The tragedy of modern projects is that in the process of creating a world of greater comfort and security, sight of the fundamentals of being human has been lost.

Traditional Western man believed that nothing mattered so much as the presence of himself in the world, that he was the sovereign of the earth and its creatures and the object of universal, cosmic concern. On the other hand, modern man, rejecting all anthropomorphic metaphysics knows he means nothing to the universe, so he kills or captures its creatures so that his power at least makes him sovereign of the earth. If there is no God, then man will become God. To the Indian both attitudes would have seemed perverse. The Indian sought to be noticed by the great forces of the world, but did so not from a sense of self-importance but, to the contrary, from a profound sense of insignificance within the great scheme of things. The Indian knew that the universe—the “Wholly Other”[3] that was also home and mother—was the true object of wonder, not its human offspring. The Indian’s attitude was ultimately one of respect and adoration without the narcissistic egoism of the Jew or Christian. The Lakota prayer to the Great Mystery begins, 

Great Mystery, you existed from the first.

The sky, this earth you created;

Great mystery—look upon me, pity me,

that the Nation may live.[4] 

For 2000 years Westerners have suffered from delusion of grandeur and self-infatuation, which have, ironically, stripped the world of meaning for humans. Commencing with the Jewish and Greek worldviews and continued and refined by the Christian worldview, Western culture has embarked upon a process of establishing humanity as the supreme object and purpose of the cosmos. All the world leads to the human doorstep. (The religious traditions have often been critical of secular humanism, but both attitudes are egocentric and self-infatuated.) Yet, we rejected or destroyed the native cultures because their cultures and beliefs were considered nothing more than childish superstition. But it has been we who have been children, continuing to surrender ourselves to a Great Savior or wrap ourselves in ideological security blankets that negate and oppress rather than enhance life, afraid to accept our humble status in the world, misusing our technical prowess like a frustrated child angrily demanding the focus of every attention and the satisfaction of every wish. When we learn to accept the red-tailed hawk as our equal, then we will share in its nobility. But I am afraid that opportunity has already passed; the people who understood most clearly the ways of life and the place of humanity among nature’s other creatures have already existed.

Said Chief Luther Standing Bear f the Lakota, or Sioux, 

[The Lakota] loved the Earth and all things of the Earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil. They sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. 

Their tepees were built upon the Earth and their altars were made of Earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the Earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing. 

That is why the Indian still sits upon the Earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. 

Kinship with all creatures of the Earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.[5] 

The focus of life for Indians was worldly rather than otherworldly. They were a people at home in the real world, the primordial world of nature. They lived in the midst of its forms and knew them intimately. They were not lords of the earth but merely one form of being among millions of others. In their struggle to survive they knew they participated in that single principle of being—to endure and survive meaningfully. They understood also that all forms of life were of one family bound together in this struggle. It was a worldview that required courage and humility—a sense that the self mattered less than the whole and the greatest virtue was humility expressed through self-sacrifice.

The postmodern, with certain important exceptions such as ecofeminism, which in fact seeks a return to the abandoned organic lifeworld,[6] is not an advancement over the follies of the traditional Western and modern worldviews. At least the older Western worldviews required some sense of humility or before some great human project. But now, with the traditional and modern projects dismantled, we are left only with our self-centeredness. And the center is empty because the periphery of the world has disappeared.  Without the world we are nothing, and modern technological society sacrificed the world long ago.

In this place, Kearney, Nebraska, one can still see the world that was once there for everyone. It is the earth. It humbled us, fed us, gave us work to do, and sustained a sense of wonder for Being—as it still does for these people. Here we can see clearly the horizon of that primordial world that invented us and will one day reclaim each of us, our ideas, and our civilizations. It is the horizon of Being, and it is neither the creation of God or a god. It is simply our home, our mysterious home, mysterious only because of its presence, just as each one of us is mysterious by the very fact that we are. To seek more than that, to seek further justification of our being, to demand a final explanation or purpose, results not only in becoming lost—and I believe that no people have become more lost than we—but also in losing a sense of wonder and mystery for the very act of living—being here and having the opportunity of seeing (as an act of reverent appreciation) the world and its magnificent forms.

We may have no ultimate purpose beyond our being here, beyond wanting to endure and to see those whom we love endure for the length of their allotted time, but that does not lessen our value, because our being is the stuff of our purpose and our values. Our eyes enable us to see the beauty of the world; our ears allow us to hear its mystery; our hearts enable thus to love our own; our hearts and minds allow us to know, appreciate, and love all the forms being—living and non-living; our families friends, and neighbors enable us to commit ourselves to others and to endure the suffering that comes with sacrificing for others.

We can still be heroes and saints. Even without God, we can aspire to the divine life of Jesus—who loved all things of the world, whose life was heroic, noble and sacred because it was a life of concern and sacrifice. It was a life of power, but not the power of control, manipulation, and destruction, not the power of accumulation and domination; it was the power of love, the power of transforming oneself into a gift for others. Such a life is needed in a world with or without God.

But this is not the message of the postmodern world. If anything the postmodern world lives in in greater forgetfulness than the traditional or modern. It is a small, claustrophobic world of illuminated mirrors that reflect only one another. The music and dance of life has become a disco of artificiality, a TechNoir,[7] where the rock music and colored strobe-lights become a formless noise that has no connection with the world beyond. Where in the artificial capsule of the technological society is one going to find a place and time to sit upon the earth in order to experience its life-giving forces? Nowhere. Life in the postmodern is completely alienated from the first world, the primordial world.

Whether we rediscover the world before we destroy most of it remains to be seen. If we do not then we will finish our existence like Sartre’s hell—condemned to live alone with one another, in a world from which the beautiful and mysterious forms of Being were driven into extinction, with what is left being displayed in in cages or reserves so curious humans can view remnants of the world they have lost. We have created a prison and then happily became its prisoners, living not even in cages but cells that would be dark were it not for electric lights and television that glimmer like the illuminated shadows that dance upon the walls of Plato’s cave. In creating the modern world we destroyed or at least eclipsed not only an older world but a universe. Certainly, if the postmodern world seeks to create a new universe, it will have to begin by searching through the ruins of the old, for as of yet it has no materials of its own to build with. 

* * * 

This journal article was published in the Platte Valley Review, January 1994. It was based on my presentation “Seeking the Postmodern Project” that I gave at University of Nebraska at Kearney for a conference put on by the German language department: “Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Problem of Reception: Nietzsche and the Consequences” (April 15-17, 1993).

The author wrote Her Quest, a science fiction novel that describes a young teenage girl who embarks on a long, arduous journey to find the wisdom of the Native Americans. She lives in Usatopia, a technological society that is so artificial that birds are tiny robots. That is her world, the one that made her. She knows nothing of the world she seeks. Her quest was inspired by the words of her father, emperor of the Usatopia. Broodingly pacing back and forth and talking to himself unaware of his daughter’s presence, he says that his society lost the wisdom possessed by the ancient people who came before technology took control of the world, eventually destroying global civilization because it was misused by men. Her journey is a return to the old ways of an ancient people.

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[1] John Bierhorst, ed., The Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1987) 115. 

[2] Beverly Hungry Wolf, The Ways of My Grandmothers. See “Learning to Camp Like My Grandmothers” (New York: Quill, 1980) 120-129. 

[3] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London University Press, 1969) 25. 

[4] Quoted in Curtis’ Western Indians by Ralph W. Andrews (New York: Bonanza Books, 1962) 93. 

[5] Luther Standing Bear, Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, ed., T.C. McLuhan (New York: Promontory Press, 1971) 6. 

[6] The meaning of organic need not be limited to organisms. For the Native American all of nature was alive—rivers, streams, fire, shooting stars, the waxing and waning of the moon, the sun passing overhead, rain, snow, and clouds, wind, storms, and dust devils, the passing and arriving seasons, and so on. The earth has been an evolving organism since its birth, and it will grow old (if we don’t destroy it) and die. What the Native Americans knew that the Western tradition has forgotten with its religions, philosophies, sciences, and ideologies is that each entity of nature has a life of its own.

Who would have ever expected the beaver to be wiser than humans who killed them to near-extinction for hats and perfumes? They build their homes and care for their families. They are aggressive only toward threatening intruders; otherwise, their philosophy is live and let live. Tortoises also possess greater wisdom than humans. They too are not aggressive creatures by nature. They don’t go out looking for trouble as humans do. They are loners. Like the beaver they will protect their home territory. And like other loners they can moody. However, the greatest wisdom of the tortoise is that he/she doesn’t race though life, as we humans do. He/she seems to realize that goal of life isn’t about winning or reaching an invented destination.

The wisdom of these creatures is that the primordial raison d'être of life is simply being/existing in the world, better yet living life with the appreciative awareness possessed by Native Americans but forgotten by moderns and postmoderns who surrendered their minds and lives to invented fantasies, ideologies, and technologies.  Busily they hurry to this destination or that, often leaving trails of blood, oblivious to the world about them. It’s hardly a sign of wisdom that humans engage in war as ants and chimpanzee do. You would think we would know better. Apparently we’re no smarter than them just better armed. We even go so far as to invent religious and secular ideologies to justify our love of war, but that too is hardly an indication of wisdom but euphemized stupidity.

[7] The name of the discotheque in the film The Terminator.