Bead Art
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Who's Afraid of the Virginia Reel?
By Leah Porter
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In case you were wondering, it is now illegal to dance at any national memorial site. Five dancers, who were also peace activists, were arrested somewhat harshly and thrown to the ground in a very untango-like manner. You can watch the video.
A new federal court ruling bars dancing at any memorial site nationwide. With all the back up and controversy in our court system, we have spent time deliberating on this issue? Yes, dancers are a tremendous hazard to national security, and I suppose the court feels that dancing around sites dedicated to Thomas Jefferson or all the dead from our ongoing wars is disrespectful or something. Actually, I find the latest talk going out over the air waves about the war in Afghanistan being “not worth fighting” the worst possible instance of disrespect to all those killed and maimed since this longest war started. But no one is passing laws about verbal dancing on the graves of the dead.
Anyway, this is dumbness yet again. This country is rife with dumbness. It is also a country that isn’t much fun. As our fun disappears, our dumbness increases. Our sense of humor is being drowned in moral proselytizing that inhibits everything from creativity to innovation, not to mention quality of life. Dancing at a memorial is just the latest in a series of peaceful efforts to wake us up to the ongoing drain of our rights and freedom, and five people were arrested for trying to do it with a sense of fun and a little humor. Boy, there is a bunch of people out there who are afraid of laughter and silliness. Get those miscreants thrown jail by golly before they rumba us to death.
I plowed through Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” a bunch of years ago. This novel was one heavy paperback, full of Eco’s tendency to wander into mental philosophical musings, and tough for me to read at that time, but the murder mystery plot in a medieval monastery was fabulous. Monks were getting murdered right and left over some mysterious item which, if you kept reading, turned out to be a book hidden in the center of a deadly labyrinth of a library. This book was so dangerous that the library was booby-trapped to keep those who weren’t in the know away from ever possibly checking it out. Eco was really setting the reader up for the big kill. I’ll never forget being absolutely crushed and disgusted when I got to the end and found out that this ‘evil thing’ was a book about the importance of laughter against the power of the oppressor. Huh? Oh well.
However, that book has never left me. I remember it often and now know that Eco was absolutely right. I’m sure Jon Stewart has read it. Or George Carlin. The Smothers Brothers. Or that Danish artist and writer condemned to death for cartooning against Islam.
Those in power, because of their insecurities of keeping that coveted power, detest any of the little people who dare to laugh in the face of their human follies. It makes them look foolish and oh my, that can’t happen. Dancing in the name of peace? That smacks of a love of life. Arrest those people before they infect others with their love of peace and fun.
Here’s the thing. The powerful in any venue believe that their efforts are more serious, that their engagement on the big world stage constitutes their right to proclaim what is appropriate behavior and what is not. It doesn’t of course. They are human just like all of us, but they have lost their sense of humanity, their sense of humor, and their belief in doing anything just for the fun of it.
The greatest indictment of our political system right now is its inability to laugh at itself. When you take yourself too seriously, it is inevitable that you are heading for a great fall. Maybe the next federal court ruling will be against laughing at any national memorial site.
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What I Read
Last Night...
“The Mountain Lion” by Jean Stafford
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This is another in my trilogy of NYRB and the last for a while. (I have to read “Wolf Hall” for my book club.) Again, the writing is better than almost any novel I have read that was written in the last five years. Except for Shirley Hazzard or Ian McEwan or William Trevor.
Written in 1947, with an autobiographical slant, this is the story of a brother and a sister, both neglected by their widowed and moneyed mother. Ralph and Molly are smart, but unattractive, unlike their two older, beautiful, and shallow sisters. Being unattractive is a major part of this narrative. Ralph and Molly are oddball siblings who do not fit in anywhere, but find their Uncle Claude’s ranch in the west to be a slightly better fit, at least for Ralph. Molly continues to antagonize any and all humans whom she finds to be “fat” and stupid. Molly is self-destructive, shall we say.
They age in jumpy chapters that are loosely connected but I didn’t seem to mind. It doesn’t really have plot, isn’t very tight as novels go, and has a strangely creepy feel over all. Stafford’s life might be worth researching in order to gain a grasp of these two strange ducks. I really liked the book and it would be a good book club selection, with a good afterword by Kathryn Davis.
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