Grand notions...

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost." – Flaubert

In this Saturday morning's mailbox there were two rather synchronous calendar events:

Today marks the 103rd anniversary of the founding of the Grand Canyon as a National Park. President Woodrow Wilson signed the landmark preservation bill in 1919. "The Grand Canyon fills me with awe...You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see." – Theodore Roosevelt, after viewing it for his first time in 1903.

Today is also the 52nd anniversary of NPR's official incorporation (1970), among the first manifestations of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, signed into law by then President Lyndon Johnson as a truly independent voice free of congressional, and therefore political, interference. The endeavor was to be funded by a tax on receiver sets not unlike the BBC. That aim was shot down by the next President, Nixon, effectively placing content within reach of politicians devoted to capitalist ideologies.

I find it interesting that these two events underscore what I see as the principle force behind the great American cultural divide. It took 30 odd years of vociferous opposition from ranchers, miners, and would-be entrepreneurs before the Grand Canyon Park became reality. Nixon's nixing of the fundamental underpinning of public broadcasting was, I would argue, based on the same mind-set. There were, and continue to be, a large segment of our culture, possibly dominant only by our passive acceptance, who see no value in the beauty of a “hole in the ground,” and those who continue to advance attempts to gut public broadcasting, public schools, and almost anything public including the protected status of the Grand Canyon, unless it can be converted into dollar$.

My sense of all this is that this divide can be recognized in the Watercourse metaphor of the forces of Yang and Yin. Yang, left to its own isolated and therefore ignorant masculine devices, would convert everything into value added commodity and do so with the loudest of voices on Fox. Yin, having no devices, is increasingly discovering the feminine value of participating in the public arena in the instinctual mothering motives of the preservation of the democracy itself – of life, liberty, truth and beauty.

John Keats, whose death anniversary we recently noted in these pages, penned the famous lines “...beauty is truth, truth beauty, and in this life that is all you will ever know, and all you need to know.”

Keats vision, the Grand Canyon, and NPR are manifestations of the underpinning foundation of our democracy which remains under attack by political machination. They will succeed to the extent we fail to show up at the polls and “throw the bums out.”

We've had enough stupidity.