[Leica] The Horror, The Horror

[abridge at dcn.org (Adam Bridge)]

On Saturday, May 29, 2004 Teresa299@aol.com thoughtfully wrote:

>
>Yes.  We have.  Under the name of fear.  Under the claim of patriotism.  
>With 
>the desire to protect the "homeland."   Just listen to the chatter on the 
>airwaves.  I don't think it's just the "reserves" who are pushing the 
>envelope.  
>It probably went up higher.  
>

No, Kim, these are NOT the reasons. In fact they aren't coupled to the 
reasons
for America's decline in sensitivity into a kind of depraved indifference.

However much you want to put the blame on these blunderings of the current
administration they are merely exploitable symptoms of the American culture.

You don't have to look far to see it: the profound sense of entitlement, 
casual
rudeness, thoughtless behavior and the inability to have any sympathy with
another's plight.

And you don't need some special lens to catch it. You need a quick eye and a
well chosen location so you can catch any number of these small, but 
indicative,
events. Or fly and watch a patron in first class come unglued because after
they've had their fifth drink the flight attendant refuses to serve them. 
It's
not even HARD to record these things.

We're bombarded with messages about actions without consequences - real
consequences, broken hearts and spirits, severe injury, death.

In fact Arnold made a pretty good movie about this when he made "Last Action
Hero" in which a villain and hero from the movies are injected into the real
world where you can't smash a car window with your fist without being hurt,
where you can die from a single shot to the gut. It didn't do very well, but 
it
was, in its way, quite insightful.

We've lost the concept of honor. I listened to a Talk of the Nation a week 
or so
ago that had a NY Times reporter, a young man from the sound of him, who 
tries
to "cover" issues of honor and ethics. And he didn't get it. He was totally 
at
sea trying to apply the concept of honor in the tide of cultural relativism. 
I
felt badly for him because without a guiding moral, and an underlying ethic,
there is no honor, no proper sense of right behavior at all.

Of course this doesn't mean that the underlying ethic is the ONLY possible 
one,
because in the real world there are many conditions and there will be many
ethics which can be in conflict with each other - probably a good thing since
without a test or trial no value system can be truly understood.

I submit that you can explore the human condition with your current glass. 
Just
as someone can explore the textures of the world. They are both fine
explorations for an artist. 

It only takes observation and empathy.

Adam Bridge