cultural despair loss, grievance anxiety when feel dislocated
If you want to read a disturbing take on the world today, the writing of Fiona Hill is the writer for you.
You remember Ms. Hill.
She is the American lady with the brit accent who testified in one of the many hearings about important matters that mattered to important people back in the day when everyone was trying to get someone to say something that might get someone else in trouble.
Ms. Hill was an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2006 to 2009. She was appointed, in the first quarter of 2017, by President Donald Trump as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on his National Security Council staff. (Wikipedia)
Ms. Hill has a command of language and prose and wit that produces wonderful, easy to read and grasp, important books that we all should read but no one will.
In her latest book, commenting on the United States at the beginning of the century, the millennium era, Ms. Hill wrote this.
Cultural despair is the sense of loss, grievance, and anxiety that occurs when people feel dislocated from their communities and broader society as everything and everyone shifts around them.
Especially when the sense of identity that develops from working in a particular job or industry, also recedes or is abruptly removed, people lose their grasp of the familiar.
They can then easily fall prey to those who promise to put things – including jobs, people, or even entire countries – back in “their rightful place.“
If what it takes is a sense of loss, grievance as everything and everyone shifts around them, it is safe to say the United States is in a state of cultural despair.
The goofy thing about the THEY in the line that starts, They can then easily fall prey … is that it can apply to either side of our great debates.
Take money.
Rich people are in despair due to a sense of loss, grievance as everything and everyone shifts around them and they fall prey to anyone who says they will return and keep the I in RICH. Back in their rightful place.
Poor people are in despair due to a sense of loss, grievance as everything and everyone shifts around them and they fall prey to anyone who says they will replace the rich people with the poor people. In their rightful place.
The right places are not the same places.
And if someone is right, why would they want to consider another point of view that has to be wrong?
Something for everyone and at the same time nothing for anyone.
Did I leave out the title of Ms. Hill’s latest book?
can you start the day without knowing where you are more important, why?
Adapted from the passage:
“How can you start the day without knowing where you are? Or, perhaps more important, why? The answer to which is bound to be lengthy, imprecise, blurred by the urge to think that where you are is bound to be the right place on your short and brutish passage.“
From the novella, Westward Ho, by Jim Harrison.
Westward Ho is the 3rd part of the Brown Dog series which if you haven’t read you probably won’t but what can a body do about that.
Jim Harrison died 6 years ago back in 2016.
Probably about 35 years before that I saw a Jim Harrison interview on TV.
He was being interviewed at his home that at that time was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Mr. Harrison told how he could handle working in Hollywood.
With air travel available, Mr. Harrison said that while he was in a meeting on the west coast, he knew he could be home in Michigan in a few hours.
That, Harrison said, was the only way he could handle being in LA.
This is someone I should read I thought.
At that time I was working in a bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I was talking with a customer about recent books and she mentioned that her favorite was Jim Harrison.
“We just got his latest,” I said and grabbing a copy off of a stack of “Woman Lit by Fireflies” that I had set out that morning.
The lady looked over and took the entire stack and said, “I just finished my Christmas Shopping.”
I was left with that one copy in my hands that I had picked up.
It seemed to be a message so I took it home.
I still have that copy along with copies of most of Mr. Harrison’s other books.
It is odd that I still have that first book as I have given away so many copies of his books.
Yes yes and yes, his writing is profane, vulgar, rough, poetic and alive.
In another of the Brown Dog stories, Mr. Harrison writes that listening to an oldies rock station is like hearing all of your used-up emotions..
That is the feeling I get reading these books.
Yesterday, out of sense to prove there was such a thing, my wife and I drove to Savannah with the expressed purposed of finding the one and only mall in the low country.
To be fair, it is my wife’s birthday and I learned a long time ago it is better to let her pick out something then to try and guess what that wonderful woman will want to wear.
We found the mall and it was every mall anyone had ever been in anywhere.
The first job I ever had was in a mall.
It was in the bookstore, but still in a mall.
Malls and me, well, talk about a time warp.
The bookstore chain also had outlets in Ann Arbor so my summer job traveled with me back and forth from school.
I was paid, at least in part, to know stuff about books and to talk about books in such a way that customers would want to buy books.
I L O V E D T H A T J O B.
It wasn’t a job, it was a mission.
Yesterday, I was to happy to find that the mall in Savannah had a bookstore.
A Barnes and Noble but good enough.
And it was an older Barnes and Noble so that while it had the coffer bar, the games and toys section and the book-lover knicknacks, for the most part it was filled with books the old fashioned way.
I went into it’s huge history section.
It had 4 or 5 big bays of history books.
Military history beyond belief.
The proximity of the mall to Hunter Army Airfield and Fort Stewart may have had something to do with that.
I looked over the books and I was excited and sad at the same time.
Excited by the number of titles.
But sad at how few I recognized.
To make myself feel a little better I went to fiction to see how many Jim Harrison books they might have in stock.
I keep waiting for an anthology of some kind.
There weren’t any in fiction.
There weren’t any in classics which I checked for a chance.
If there is a period in history that attracts my attention it is 1939, that time when the British Government under Neville Chamberlain tried to keep Adolf Hitler under control through a policy that came to be known as appeasement.
You know, the plan that you keep giving in to Hitler’s demands in hopes that he will get tired and go away.
Mr. Chamberlain has come out on the short end of the history stick on this topic and in Britain few charges can damage a political career more than a charge of ‘Appeasement”.
But at the time it was popular and widely supported.
Down through history, the story of one man, Winston Churchill, holding the line against appeasement and preaching Nazi wickedness is one of the great stories.
It should be remembered though, that on one of the votes on the Government policy that Churchill called for [and in the House of Commons, Members of Parliament vote by leaving the House through the Yes or No door and then gather in the lobby outside ] Churchill found himself going through the YES door with but two other members.
I love this time and I love reading the accounts of how this all came down.
I have been reading the recently re-released diaries of Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon.
I have more to say about these diaries another time, but Sir Henry was “an upstart Chicagoan who’d unaccountably managed to marry the daughter of an exceedingly rich Anglo-Irish Earl, moved in vertiginously high circles.”
Sir Henry got into British politics and supported Prime Minister Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement.
And he kept a diary.
As the Munich Agreement came apart and Germany and Mr. Hitler moved to take over Czechoslovakia, Sir Henry recorded that on March, 14th, 1939, that Ruthenia was proclaimed independent.
Ruthenian lion, which was used as a representative Coat of arms of Ruthenia during the Council of Constance in the 15th century
Ruthenia?
Never heard of it.
Thank goodness for The Google.
I had to learn the who, where and what was Ruthenia.
I had a feeling it was made up but it wasn’t.
According to Wikipedia, Carpathian Ruthenia became part of the newly founded Hungarian Kingdom in 1000. In May 1919, it was incorporated with nominal autonomy into the provisional Czechoslovak state as Subcarpathian ‘Rus.
Pump the breaks for a minute.
I mean, lean on those breaks and stop right here.
Look at those two sentences.
… Hungarian Kingdom in 1000. In May 1919 …
Was a millennium of world history ever so easily dismissed?
If I write: Columbus came to the New World in 1492. Joseph R. Biden was elected President of the USA in 2020, the sentences would encompass some 500 years.
Hungarian Kingdom in 1000. In May 1919, covers 919 years.
And for the first time in my life I hear about Ruthenia?
THERE IS A LESSON HERE.
The wikipedia article on Ruthenia starts with the line:
Ruthenia is an exonym, originally used in Medieval Latin as one of several designations for East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox regions, and most commonly as a designation for the lands of Rus’.
That didn’t help me much.
Luckily the term exonym was linked for further examination.
According to wikipedia:
Exonyms are a type of Ethnonyms.
An exonym (from Greek: éxō, ‘outer’; also known as xenonym) is a common, external name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, or a language/dialect, that is used only outside that particular place, group, or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons, but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words.
Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms (whose name of the ethnic group has been created by another group of people) and autonyms, or endonyms.
An ethnonym (from the Greek: ἔθνος éthnos ‘nation’ and ὄνομα ónoma ‘name’) is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms (whose name of the ethnic group has been created by another group of people) and autonyms, or endonyms (whose name is created and used by the ethnic group itself).
As an example, the ethnically dominant group in Germany is the Germans. The ethnonym Germans is a Latin-derived exonym used in the English language. Conversely, the Germans call themselves the Deutsche, an endonym. The German people are identified by a variety of exonyms across Europe, such as Allemands (French), tedeschi (Italian), tyskar (Swedish) and Niemcy (Polish).
As a sub-field of anthroponymy, the study of ethnonyms is called ethnonymy or ethnonymics.
Ethnonyms should not be confused with demonyms, distinctive terms that designate all people related to a specific territory, regardless of any ethnic, religious, linguistic or some other distinctions that may exist within the population of that territory.
My head is spinning and I think I have to get back to bed.
The line, “Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons, but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words.” did catch my eye though.
I am reminded of the story of D Day and the paratroopers that were dropped over Normandy in the dark.
Those paratroopers had a special password and countersign to identify friend of foe in the dark.
The paratroopers were to call out, “Lightning?”
The proper response was “Thunder!”
Why?
Those continental Germanic peoples on the other side had problems pronouncing difficult foreign words, especially words with TH.
Them Germanic folks would have responded, TUNDER.
As for Ruthenia?
According to Wikipedia, “On 15 March 1939, the Ukrainophile president of Carpatho-Ruthenia, Avhustyn Voloshyn, declared its independence as Carpatho-Ukraine. On the same day, regular troops of the Royal Hungarian Army occupied and annexed the region. In 1944 the Soviet Army occupied the territory, and in 1945 it was annexed to the Ukrainian SSR. Rusyns were not an officially recognized ethnic group in the USSR, as the Soviet government considered them to be Ukrainian.”
As Frank Lloyd Wright might have said, “There you are.”
go to the window watch wait and know the coming of a little love
But leave me a little love.
A voice to speak to me in the day end.
Based on the closing lines of the poem, At the Window, by Carl Sandburg.
Give me hunger, O you gods that sit and give The world its orders. Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love, A voice to speak to me in the day end, A hand to touch me in the dark room Breaking the long loneliness. In the dusk of day-shapes Blurring the sunset, One little wandering, western star Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. Let me go to the window, Watch there the day-shapes of dusk And wait and know the coming Of a little love.
versions and values here’s an oldie but goodie deserve to be here
Has the last year, the last two years been stuck?
I would say have been stuck in neutral but neutral isn’t a word that comes to mind right now.
Everyone has an opinion.
Everyone is on one side or the other.
And, like the weather, everyone talks about it, but no one DOES anything about it.
If someone presents and argument and that argument is dismissed then the original argument is presented all over again but maybe with a different cast of characters or facts or whatever argument is based on nowadays.
Thinking this way, a scene from the old TV show MASH came to mind.
Neither the time nor place to rehash the show or get into a discussion about the merits of the show, the high points of the show, the low points of the show or if the show has stood the test of time.
Suffice it to say, I used to LOVE that show.
Today …. not so much.
But there was a time when me and my brothers would engage in endless discussions on show trivia and complete conversations that were made up of nothing but lines from the show.
One of my favorite questions was to list in order, both ways, of what Captain Pierce had to do to get a new pair of boots and how it all came undone.
But what came to mind was Corporal Klinger and his ongoing shtick of getting out of the army.
Klinger’s interaction’s with Colonel Henry Blake during the MASH early years were both funny AND witty.
I leave unsaid my feelings on the nonsense slap happy days of Colonel Potter and Klinger.
But thinking of arguments and facts and the last two years, it was this scene that came to mind.
Klinger marches in Col. Blake’s office and offers Blake a letter that Klinger just recieved bearing the news that his Father was dying and requests an emergency discharge.
Blake looks at Klinger and ask, “The Father dying, right?”
Klinger says, “Yes Sir!”
Blake leans over, opens a desk drawer and removes a file folder of letters.
Blake opens the folder and one at a time, removes each letter and delivers a short synopses of the letter.
Father dying last year.
Mother dying last year.
Mother AND father dying.
Mother, father, and older sister dying.
Mother dying and older sister pregnant.
Older sister dying and mother pregnant.
Younger sister pregnant and older sister dying.
Here’s an oldie but a goodie: Half of the family dying, other half pregnant.
Finishing the stack of letters, Blake looks at Klinger and says, “Klinger, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Klinger, without shame or embarrassment says, “Yes, sir. I don’t DESERVE to be in the Army.“
Not sure what this has to do with anything to tell you the truth.
Except that for all the conflict and words and arguments we have all had, the last year …
BOY HOWDY!
do we deserve to be here!
for the record and without the google …
Pierce needed boots from Supply Sgt,
Supply Sgt needed to see the Dentist
Dentist need a pass to Tokyo
Blake needed Houlihan off his case
Houlihan needed a party with cake for Burns
Radar needed a date with a nurse for the Cake
Nurse needed Klinger’s hair dryer
Klinger needed his crazy papers signed.
Pierce tries to get Burns, who has tears in his eye over his party to sign Klinger’s papers
Instead Burns rips up the papers
Klingler yells MY CRAZY PAPERS and goes and takes back his hair dryer
Radar shows up with flowers but the nurse, now without a hair dryer calls off the date
Radar returns to the party and slams his flowers onto the cake and takes the cake away just as Burns is set to blow out the candles
This causes Houlihan to scream at Blake that all this will be in her report to the General
At that moment the Dentist walks up to Blake to thank him for the three day pass which Blake grabs and rips up
Then the supply Sgt says to the Dentist, SEE YOU TOMORROW and the Dentist tells him to drop dead
And the supply Sgt refuses to delivers the boots to Pierce.
