What
distinguishes identity from alienation in gender, age, class, ethnicity, among
other relational contexts, will be explored this Sunday by David Fredette, Eva-Maria
Palevich, Bob Sanders, Cora Santaguida and numerous other PoemAlley members
contributing to PA’s annual summer service at the Unitarian Universalist
Congregation in Stamford (formerly the Unitarian Universalist Society).
“The
Face of the Other”, organized by Dr. Frances Sink of the UUCIS, Ralph Nazareth
and Rolf Maurer, deals with a theme that has become increasingly an ominous
fixture of the social and political landscape since 2001, not just in terms of
the labeling of individuals or groups outside our own circle of self-identification,
but those whose Otherness is little more than a projection of our own insecurities,
or a repressed facet of ourselves.
Though
the unprecedented recent domestic enthusiasm for soccer (what the rest of the
world calls football) was almost as exciting to observe as the World Cup games,
themselves, the intersection of professional sports and nationalism in regard to the Other was easily caught through a casual stroll down Bedford Street
during the games, where unbelievably impassioned reactions to the
televised sporting events in open-air bars and restaurants ranged from screams
of demanding anguish to the primal chanting of “USA! USA!”—the latter hurled
with equal exceptionalist hubris just a few days later by Texans against
busloads of "disease-carrying" child refugees from South and Central America.
As
to the former response, most of the Western media for the last few weeks has
been painting Israeli bombardment of Palestinians trapped in Gaza as acts of a struggling
victim with a similar emotionalism and lack of proportionality that trumps any
real opportunity for constructive engagement (as of July 20, hundreds of Gazans
have been killed by the IDF using advanced weaponry largely supplied by the US,
whereas only two Israelis have been killed by homemade Palestinian rockets).
Be it the fatalistic insistence that the conflict is unresolvable, the deplorable, objectifying excesses of Israelis and their supporters finding recreational routine in watching the
bombardment of Gaza from a Sderot hillside, or the online posting of the
cooking of “Rachel Corrie pancakes” while staying at “Heritage House”, a
residence for foreign IDF recruits in occupied Jerusalem, the unlikely forced
association of Nazis awaiting trial in 1945 with former resistance members and
victims of the German war machine under a different roof in a Nuremberg suburb demonstrates the promise on a
person-to-person basis for dialogue, if not rapprochement with, the Other. Notes Jessa Crispin
in her review of Christiane Kohl’s The Witness House (Other [sic] Press, 2010)—a post-war counterpart to Weisenthal’s The Sunflower (Schoken, expanded 1998)--"... at the end of war, we still have to eat at the same table. Finding a way to
do so is perhaps the key to healing.”
If fear of a repeat of past oppression underlying the origins of the Mideast conflict
(and those interests exploiting it with horrifying and historically ironic results)
cannot be discounted, neither can fear's role be ignored in the shaping of industrial
society’s collective Other.
Peak
Oil researcher and Appalachian-based North American Archdruid John Michael
Greer (Not the Future We Ordered, The Long Descent) attributes the origins
of racism, patriarchy, imperialism and other associated Manichean ideologies to
the separation of humanity from Nature, first venerated with the supplanting of
religion by rationalism during the Enlightenment. From the degrading
classification of under-industrialized, native societies—such as some of the nations
of the previously mentioned refugees --as “Third World”, to
the peculiarly American discomfort with public breastfeeding, Otherness is
imposed upon any lifeway or individual who unavoidably reminds us of our fundamental
connection with the timeless processes that challenge the primacy of a mass merchandised existence whose fragility we are too scared to face.
Again, honest, unfettered talking and listening, both on an interpersonal and national scale, is the prescription of
Greer, Carolyn Baker and other writers who have been concentrating on the end
of industrial civilization and the technocratic psychology that keeps
policymakers and the public focused, at best, on riding out transitory crises,
when productive adaption to permanent change following unavoidable catastrophe
is what’s needed.
In demonstrating the tragic Sisyphian results of a weak, or insincere communication, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (Weinstein Company, 2012) works on two levels, as well. The dichotomous relationship between the late
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic Lancaster Dodd and Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, an impulsive, carnal
World War II veteran, mirrors the structure of post-war
society where the shallowness of the nascent 1950s
consumer paradise provides a public façade for the Other of a foreign policy of
Cold War paranoia, coups and puppet wars, whose ultimate outcome is, to
paraphrase Douglas MacArthur over the battleship PA in the
opening scenes of the film when Japan surrenders, up to “God’s will” rather
than any human agency.
Quell, as the personal Other unacknowledged
by a younger Dodd (played by W. Earl Brown) in the scene below literally tries
to shine a light on his awareness, advising Dodd “You need to shut up!” to get
the attention of the loquacious charlatan, who later builds a career teaching
people to shun their animal nature:
Instead,
despite their later unaccountable affinity for one another, Dodd stubbornly wastes
time trying to “reform” a wayward Quell. Also tapping into the then-contemporary appeal
of Freudian psychology, Fred Wilcox’s lavish, if less subtle Forbidden Planet (MGM, 1956) at least has
its version of a definitive egocentric, Morbius (played by Walter Pigeon), overtly denying his responsibility in a loose super-science riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, after accidentally manifesting
his Id as an independent force through the use of brain-altering alien technology:
But
the mistake for them—and us--is not only in refusing to confront the Other (be
it Id, Jungian Shadow or external opponent), but in failing to muster the insight or
courage to see the transformative potential in accepting it as part of
ourselves.
Talk
may be cheap, but, in the end, like Crispin’s dinner table, it’s all we’ve got,
whether it's within ourselves, or with one another.
Where:
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Stamford
20 Forest Street
(at the corner of Bedford, across from the Avon Theatre)
When:
Sunday
July 27, 2014
10 am
Contact:
203-348-0708; 203-327-6464
maurer_rolf@yahoo.com
The Barnes & Noble Open Mic poetry program meets the second
Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore
(located in the Stamford Town Center), now beginning at 7:15 p.m.
