I took a quick trip in the car an hour ago and flipped on the radio. I went through Fox News, two CNN channels, two NPR channels, and CNBC, and each one talked up the Jackson “situation” (that’s the best word I can think of). Yesterday, a local AM news outlet reported that Al Sharpton has called for a postage stamp of MJ. The LAPD expects some serious challenges with crowd control at the funeral, but Staples will garner $65-75 million dollars in advertising exposure during the ceremonies. One woman lucky enough to procure a ticket spoke on the air of watching “history” being made.
I have no opinion about Michael Jackson or about his music, and the neutrality makes the hoopla and broadcasted emotion a mystery. Why all the publicity? Why are people so eager to step to the news microphones to amplify the personal, the deeply personal, meaning of it all?
Listen and observe for a while, and withdrawal isn’t enough. You need an antidote, some cultural voices to provide grounding and perspective and wisdom.
There is Harold Bloom, who writes books with titles such as “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?” and op-eds headed “Dumbing Down American Readers”. Bloom will announce that Stephen King and J. K. Rowling are dreadful novelists and stylists, and he’ll endorse a general for president (Wesley Clark in 2004) in the Wall Street Journal after citing Gibbon.
And there’s George Steiner, whose New Yorker writings have recently come out (see here). Steiner is one of the last of the thinker/critics that believes interpreting a line of Wordsworth and Goethe correctly is a momentous endeavor. He has said, “The age of the book is almost gone,” and also:
“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”
“The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.”
“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”
And Lionel Trilling, who believed in (but did not coin the phrase) “the moral obligation to be intelligent.”
And Irving Howe, whose entire essay “This Age of Conformity,” is a tonic at this time and place.
And . . .
Or maybe just a poem for solitude and quiet, such as the one that used to be one of the most famous and popular in the English language, but has now fell into oblivion. It begins:
“The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
