2008 Woodie Awards
The Gage on Culture: Thoughts on a train ride
Taylor Gage
Issue date: 10/25/07 Section: Arts
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I sit here in the train station contemplating the state of our culture. It may seem like an odd place to begin such an intellectual discourse, but the state of the people around me have given me cause for concern.
No one talks, except to get "information." No one looks at anyone, except to snoop and ogle. Everyone seems focused on keeping their own world in order by shutting out those around them.
I wonder: how much more disconnected can our people become before they lose all sanity? How much more fragmented can society get before it simply falls to bits? The status quo is untenable.
Many of these people are obscenely obese. Many of them have no family, no connections of which to speak. Others chose not to make them to avoid the trouble or responsibility.
Too many of them focus their lives on satisfying their own desires.
They have become too infatuated with their own lives to notice something is terribly out of place in this circus of noise.
Leveling the very ties that bind us together, our democratic culture has reached the point where we cease to care about what the next person wears, says, thinks or does. This is dangerous.
Any idea of a cultural "good" has vanished, leaving this people with a disgusting monoculture created for them by America's corporations, which cater to the basest desires of 300 million people without regard to cultural mores or traditions.
A black man wearing a red coat asks for a couple dollars. No one responds.
It's not because they don't have a dollar; there are thousands in this room. It's because the man is not our responsibility; he's not anyone's responsbility. Well, except (maybe) the government.
This red-coated individual represents the masses of Chicago's "public" homeless. The city gives him food, but it can never really care for him.
The city has never really cared for anything. It only spends money on "things," "budget items," demanded by the impersonal "public." "Things" for the city to walk on, drive through, and crap in.
A city may build a road, but it can never build a path to a man's heart; only a human being can do that.
The red coat is only one symptom of our deadly disease: a dying culture. Until America stands up and cares for itself, cares for this man, and cares about a cultural "good," we are as good as dead.
No one talks, except to get "information." No one looks at anyone, except to snoop and ogle. Everyone seems focused on keeping their own world in order by shutting out those around them.
I wonder: how much more disconnected can our people become before they lose all sanity? How much more fragmented can society get before it simply falls to bits? The status quo is untenable.
Many of these people are obscenely obese. Many of them have no family, no connections of which to speak. Others chose not to make them to avoid the trouble or responsibility.
Too many of them focus their lives on satisfying their own desires.
They have become too infatuated with their own lives to notice something is terribly out of place in this circus of noise.
Leveling the very ties that bind us together, our democratic culture has reached the point where we cease to care about what the next person wears, says, thinks or does. This is dangerous.
Any idea of a cultural "good" has vanished, leaving this people with a disgusting monoculture created for them by America's corporations, which cater to the basest desires of 300 million people without regard to cultural mores or traditions.
A black man wearing a red coat asks for a couple dollars. No one responds.
It's not because they don't have a dollar; there are thousands in this room. It's because the man is not our responsibility; he's not anyone's responsbility. Well, except (maybe) the government.
This red-coated individual represents the masses of Chicago's "public" homeless. The city gives him food, but it can never really care for him.
The city has never really cared for anything. It only spends money on "things," "budget items," demanded by the impersonal "public." "Things" for the city to walk on, drive through, and crap in.
A city may build a road, but it can never build a path to a man's heart; only a human being can do that.
The red coat is only one symptom of our deadly disease: a dying culture. Until America stands up and cares for itself, cares for this man, and cares about a cultural "good," we are as good as dead.
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