It’s Sunday evening and I just want to ramble a bit.
One of the more difficult social tensions (dialectics) to solve is between involvement and distance.
In order for republican and democratic forms of government not to devolve into tyranny it is necessary, it seems, that people — citizens — be involved, have something at stake, have voices and make them heard. This is the ideal of the agora, the market of ideas and the public space, a government for and by the people. We extend the free exchange of goods to a free exchange of ideas, and it is perhaps therefore that only in this optimistic form of society that we speak of “progress.” For in this instance progress is emergence and growth, it is the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, it is looking forward.
Yet a seeming precondition for the type of economic growth often associated with free markets (or at least a type of supposedly free-market capitalism) is insurance and limited liability, spreading cost across a statistically significant group. This is rational. It can encourage people to invest, to take a limited risk with their assets. We want things not to be at stake. More reward than risk, more profit than loss — otherwise why invest? why take part? What’s in it for me?
We currently live in a nothing-at-stake, limited liability, sheltered society. Few of us have anything personal or personally invested in bombing Iraq, in war, in killing. We only get involved when it becomes a matter of our drinking water or air, our schools closing, Not-In-My-Backyard.
What we claim to like in our politics in personal responsibility; what we want in our economics is not to be responsible. If our politics and economics didn’t overlap this might not be a problem.
But I’m rambling.
I’m most of the way through R.E.M. — just started Murmur and finished Monster. Most of the other, early-alphabet R.E.M. albums that I know (Eponymous, Green, Document …) are now long past, but New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Reconstruction of the Fables, and Up are yet to come, as is Out of Time, which I do know. I became an R.E.M. fan my first year in college, when I got a handful of albums of Jacob that I copied to cassette. The result was that I didn’t get their earliest stuff, and once I left Pomona I stopped getting their stuff. I know a snap-shot of their music, and that snap-shot is, to me, what R.E.M. “is.”
The Reverend Horton Heat is next, but I still have over 4 hours of R.E.M. (out of 10-plus) to go. Last night I watched Lifeforce (1985, with Patrick Stewart … space vampires!) and read the first (Peter David and Jae Lee) Dark Tower comic from Marvel, based on Stephen King’s novels, characters, and world. The art is gorgeous (Jae Lee is talented) and the dialog is distinctive (Peter David does a good King imitation), but the first issue was mostly setup, though it was self-contained enough and made sense. It was combined with a large prose section at the end covering another “episode” in the hero’s life and providing more background information.
Today I read The Loners No. 1, which is a spinn-off limited series, dealing with characters who used to star in other titles but who were most recently seen at the beginning of Runaways, Vol. 2 — the former Excelsior, made up of former child/teen super-heroes who work as a 12-step group trying to get such super-heroes to retire. The title was changed for the series because Stan Lee, formerly of Marvel and no longer on such great terms with his old company, holds the Trademark on Excelsior … something like that.
