Beyond Rivalry

Video at The Onion News Network's "Today Now!" morning show.

Too funny (because it's true) not to post. I actually do care about the 2008 elections and will vote (as always), but I have no interest in talking about it with anyone, ever.

Watch for the text boxes "About the Candidates."

Ben Jervey (at GOOD magazine) details his travel on Amtrak from New York to San Francisco in "Train in Vain.' I've taken this trip (and the similar one through the south, on both the Southwest Chief  to the Coast Starlight and on The Crescent to the Sunset Limited to the Coast Starlight) 7 or 8 times and can certainly affirm his reporting of the delays and about the rumours, anxious speculation, chatter, and blame-fixing about why there's a delay and how long it will last that hum in the background every moment the train is stopped -- and sometimes start before the delay even occurs, as word of the upcoming halt filters from the staff to the passengers. I think he didn't comment enough about the abiding and oft inbreaking sense of grandeur, beauty, time and space dislocation, relinquishment of control, and the temporary community-forming (for good and ill) that Amtrak travel affords.

I hadn't seen the energy comparisons to air travel and highway travel before.

I recommend the article if you are thinking of making a long-distance Amtrak trip.

I was on a train from Boston to San Francisco (either January 2005 or Nov. 2005) that was stuck for many hours over two days in snowstorms out west, and which looked like it would be at least 6 or 8 hours late into San Francisco (actually Oakland; there is no train station per se in SF); somehow, miraculously it still seems to me, we made up the time through the mountains and arrived almost exactly on time. Another trip, same route in reverse (Jan. 2005), we weren't so lucky; because of some problem with the tracks ahead of Denver (something on them? a freight train stuck on them? can't recall right now ...), we were stopped in Denver and shuttled to hotels for the night, finally continuing in the morning. For at least one person on the train, this delay may have been fatal: she was scheduled at the Mayo Clinic for an appointment concerning her brain tumour, which is why she couldn't fly or drive herself. She had had to make the appointment months in advance and didn't think she could get another one before it was too late for her. We sat at the Wynkoop Brewing Company restaurant bar and she (and her young son, who was travelling with her) cried and tried to figure out what to do. She didn't re-board the shuttle or the train with the rest of us, so maybe she came up with a viable plan.

There's a certain haunting quality about the "relationships" one makes when travelling, when spending 12 or 24 or 48 hours or more sitting beside someone, sleeping beside them (if you have a coach and not a sleeper ticket), sometimes  exchanging salient bits of life history in hours of conversation, sometimes not speaking at all (except 'excuse me' from time to time when crawling across legs or bumping each other) but perhaps reading over their shoulder, watching them do word puzzles, listening to their side of the cell phone conversation, and they you. They aren't relationships in the long-term, but there is an alchemy, a separation and a joining together, that inhabits these transitional, transient, in-transit meetings.

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eighth post on this topic; the first is here.

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 2 - ART

    Literature                                                                                                                                                        

The history of art is filled with challenges to the status quo.

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814):  The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, and the poor and unschooled are not necessarily bad.

"Almost every great novel of the 19th and 20th centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines."

Examples: Balzac - Le Père Goriot (1834), Hardy - Jude the Obscure (1895), G. Eliot - Middlemarch (1872), Fielding - Joseph Andrews (1742), Thackeray - Vanity Fair (1848), Dickens - Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins  - The Woman in White (1860), A. Trollope - The Way We Live Now (1875), Zadie Smith - White Teeth (2000).

    Painting                                                                                                                                                        

(You have to see the book for this, as he reproduces "paintings of the commonplace" -- which elevate the status of the ordinary -- and discusses them) 

    Tragedy                                                                                                                                                       

 "Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as 'losers' - a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing."

Tragedy helps to re-inject empathy into the equation by showing how like everyone else the tragic figure is.  G 

Examples: Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Tess, et al.

Tragedy doesn't absolve its subjects of responsibility but does offer and elicit a level of sympathy. 

At the center of tragedy is an ordinary human being with a tragic flaw who makes an error in judgment from which flows a terrible reversal of fortune. Tragic flaws are defects common to humans, such as excessive pride, anger, impulsiveness, etc.  Errors in judgment occur not from evil motives but from lapses in judgment, slips.

Tragedy reflects:

(1) how apparently small missteps can result in grave consequences

(2) the blindness we suffer with regard to the effects of our actions

(3) a fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny

(4) the sped and finality with which all that we cherish can be lost

(5) the mysterious forces against which our powers are pitted

Tragedy apportions blame without denying sympathy. We're appalled yet compassionate as we see the universality of the situation. This form of art seeks to plumb the origins of failure.

    Comedy                                                                                                                                                     

More specifically, satire.

"Jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense."

"History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty." [q.v. George Carlin]

Comedy also can be used to make sense of and mitigate status anxiety: "Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves.