Sunday, April 24, 2011

"America is Sick: The Gentle Death of American Culture, and What It Says About Us" by Ben Pettaway

On the first morning of September 1970, the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky sat before his diary with a heavy heart. His nation was dying.

Not of war, or famine, or disease, but of internal, spiritual rot. His countrymen's hearts had grown callous to the plights of others, blinded by materialism and greed and indifference. He found evidence of this in his country's bookstores, and in its theatres, and at the box office. He found evidence every time a news anchor could read of atrocities from his teleprompter without reaction. "Entertainments" filled the cinemas. Novels sought to help people escape from their daily lives, not to convince them to make their lives better. These "arts" were not art, at all. They were distractions.

True art seeks not to entertain its audience, but to change it forever at the deepest level of human understanding -- the spiritual level.

I'm afraid that Tarkovsky's 1970 U.S.S.R. and 2011 America aren't all that different. Equal air-time is given nightly to Kate Plus Eight's weight-gain, as it is to the horrors and genocide occurring daily around the globe. Our multiplexes are filled with empty-headed rubbish and supernatural romance novels written with a tenth-grader's writing ability are lauded as masterpieces.

If one believes that art is the soul of a nation, a belief that I hold, then this trend is deeply troubling.

Why has our nation's art become less intelligent? Dumber?

The troubling answer to this question is that we, America, are dumber.

The United States' test scores are abysmal when compared to those of other world powers, and that's only when focusing on math, science, and reading comprehension*. What of the arts? What of our literature and history? What of our nation's heritage, its culture, its very identity?

A 2010 Marist University polling of 1,004 U.S. residents concluded that 26% of American citizens do not know which country the United States separated from in 1776**. That's more than 1 in 4... Startling, isn't it? Surely, with the knowledge that our country's citizens are not educated about their own culture, our government would strive to enrich its citizens by focusing more on arts and history.

This, however, has not been the case.

For the past decade, the US government has cut funding to art and music programs nationwide, and at the same time, have strong-armed teachers into altering their teaching methods to teach to standardized testing. This idiotic focusing of efforts, an effort meant solely to boost our scores at the expense of everything else, forces teachers to fly through each work of literature, and robs them of presenting the material in a manner where students could actually dwell on what the work was teaching them, instead of mindlessly memorizing facts and the theories of scholars deemed smarter than they.

This way of teaching literature is beyond useless. It goes against everything that art stands for. Two people are NEVER going to experience the same work of art in exactly the same manner. Each person brings his own history, his fears, his biases, his dreams, his faith... No two people are alike inside, so no two interpretations of an artwork should be identical. Each should have his own personal reaction; we don't need others to tell us what something means... The only way that man can truly grow is if he genuinely seeks and desires truth, and discovers it for himself.

In January 2008, There Will Be Blood, one of the finest movies of the past decade, lost its opening weekend at the box office to Meet the Spartans, an abomination against cinema and art if there ever was one...

America is sick. Our art is suffering. It's time for a change.

An excerpt from the diaries of Andrei Tarkovsky:

Sept 1st, 1970

"...Going through old papers I came across the transcript of a university debate on Rublev. God, what a level. Abysmal, pathetic. But there is one remarkable contribution by a maths professor called Manin, Lenin Prize winner, who can hardly be more than thirty. I share his views. Not that one should say that about oneself. But it's exactly what I felt when I was making Andrei. And I'm grateful to Manin for that.

'Almost every speaker has asked why they have to be made to suffer through the three hours of the film. I'll try to reply to that question.

It is because the twentieth century has seen the rise of a kind of emotional inflation. When we read in a newspaper that two million people have been butchered in Indonesia, it makes as much impression on us as an account of our hockey team winning a match. The same degree of impression! We fail to notice the monstrous discrepancy between these two events. The channels of our perception have been smoothed out to the point where we are no longer aware. However, I don't want to preach about this. It may be that without it life would be impossible. Only the point is that there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful for them.'

It was worth sitting through two hours of rubbish for the sake of that last sentence. This isn't the moment for complaints and indignation in the corridors. It's too late for that -- complaints seem pointless and undignified. We have to think very seriously about how we can carry on living: any rash move could have disastrous consequences.

It is not a question of safequarding particular advantages, what is at stake is the very life of our intelligentsia, our nation, our art. If the decline of art is obvious -- which it is -- and if art is the soul of the nation, then our nation, our country, is suffering from a grave psychic disease..." -- Andrei Tarkovsky


FOOTNOTES

*http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html

**http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/misc/usapolls/US100617/July%204th_summer%20vacation/Country_From_Which_US_Declared_Independence.htm

1 comment:

  1. I'm proud to have been your teacher, Ben, though I can hardly take credit for how intelligent and focused you are. You make some great points here and I was glad to read it. Keep it up and good luck.

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