On The World Stage, the US is a Bit Player

Writing as I am from the heartland, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and having had some time on my hands as my son attended his last session of Hebrew School, I perused the news of the day. I have these past few days been thankfully removed and distracted from the daily cacaphonic chaos of economic and political nonsense I am usually wired into, intently focused as I am on my son's future as a person and a musician.

I was privileged to see him perform twice as the solo percussionist in the pit orchestra of the Nicolet High School Theatre production of "Thoroughly Modern Millie", an adaptation of a comedy film from 1967 directed by George Roy Hill and starring Julie Andrews, James Fox, Mary Tyler Moore, John Gavin, Carol Channing, Beatrice Lillie, Pat Morita and Jack Soo and which ran on Broadway in the early 2000s. (H/T to Wikipedia)

Though ostensibly a comedy set in 1922 Manhattan about aspiring yet naive young waifs from all parts of the country who come to Manhattan to seek and find fortunes and husbands, the women in the play find themselves in the evil clutches of Mrs. Meers, who is herself on the lam from the police for operating a white slave trade out of the Hotel Priscilla, where she takes on a Chinese persona and takes in orphaned women without money, ties or connections, kidnaps and sends them off to China never to be heard from again. We hear, over and over, the refrain from Mrs. Meers, in her finest phony Chinese accent, that "it's so sad to be all alone in the world". Indeed it is. Ultimately, "green glass love" prevails over priceless emeralds and true love and honesty win the day and all go home happy, with the notable exception of "Mrs. Meers", whose devious plot is uncovered, she in receipt of Broadway justice.

Though 2008 is a world away from 1922, the connection between the themes of "Millie" and conditions in the United States today are too eerily striking to avoid making. New York is tougher and more expensive now than perhaps even the Vanderbilts, Mellons or Carnegies ever anticipated - or perhaps not. I began to think of my son's future as a person of the world as a Jazz artist -- someone who himself intends to go to New York and seek the fulfillment of his dream to become a professional straight-ahead Jazz drummer. As Woody Allen suggests, 80% of success is just showing up. The question is whether this country, in its present state, is a place that still holds the promise that it once did for aspirants not only in music and the arts in general but in any field in which drive, determination, discipline and passion are the key elements to success, in addition of course to just showing up and of course being in the right place at the right time with the right people.

It very much saddens me to have come to the conclusion that his future is not in the United States though thanks, I suppose, to providence and inertia inherent in the Jazz tradition, the training he has had and will receive here in Milwaukee and later in New York is still second to none, at least for what he wants to do. New York is still the Jazz Capital of the world. But this country is in a nose dive to irrelevance. While of course the slave trade still exists in too many parts of the world, this country has become an economic slave not only to China but to too many other parts of the world that we are only bit players in. These United States are presently paying the price for what George Herbert Walker Bush called Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics" which he celebrated as the cure-all potion for the economic malaise left behind by the reign of Jimmy Carter during the Republican primaries for the 1980 elections. Voodoo indeed. We are now absorbing so many pins and needles that the life-blood of this country has about drained out, our pride and futures having been mortgaged 50 times over, saddling generations of future Americans with the debt that the voodoo doll has absorbed. It is hard to see how, from any perspective, we will ever dig out of the hole that we have happilly, blindly and willfully dug ourselves into for the past 25 years.

This country is literally owned by China, city-states like Dubai and Singapore and the rest, to whom we have given over our futures. When Wal-Mart, Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics and Halliburton (among notables) set the economic agenda for the country and not the people whom we elect every two, four or six years, the voodoo becomes more and more painful with each prick of the needle, our elections nothing but a charade of the democratic principles that were laid down over 225 years ago by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Hamilton and the rest of their ilk who apparently could not foresee the rise of the rest of the earth and Americans' capacity for the abuse of the grand experiment called republican (small r) Democracy that is ostensibly a part of the kettle of the grand experimental stew.

We have forgotten what it means to work together. We have forgotten what it means to demand accountability from our elected leaders. We have invested ourselves not in the future but in hanging on to past glories and the quest, the lust, for a higher share price of the stock of the multinational corporations that have bought and paid for this sham of a government that takes our money just to continue in status quo, helping the rich get richer and damning the rest of America to fight over trivialities and engage in pettifoggery while being robbed blind by the same people who claim to represent "American Values".

One does not have to be sagacious to figure out that how the rest of the world looks at us is simply a reflection of who we are as a polity and as a people. Bloated, arrogant, thrashing about for relevance as if our victories at Normandy and Guadalcanal 65 years ago are still of import in today's world. While they were indeed important for many years, they are sadly irrelevant in 2008 because America decided to recline pining for the better days of yesteryear simultaneously beating its chest as if those events were going to determine the course of world events for the unforeseeable future. When I hear presidential candidates talk about a "deterrent shield" over the Mideast (Hillary Clinton) I laugh. When I hear Mrs. Clinton claim that she would "obliterate" Iran, I shudder, as though Dr. Strangelove has come to life in female form and the perversity of that film our perverse reality. As if the US has any power do anything any more to intimidate or deter anyone from anything. We are on life support in a national coma and the doctors who are in the operating theater are Chinese, Indians, Singaporeans, Dubaians and of course the sheiks of Arabia who wield such enormous influence in this country because of that black dope that lies underneath the otherwise useless sands of those countries and from which, sadly, too many Jihadists emanate in their misguided interpretation -- some would argue not--of the Qu'uran as though it was still the year 1000, and caliphates were still acceptable forms of rule over civilized people, the large majority of whom simply want to just live in peace and get along with one another. Regime change in Iraq has only wrought confirmation to the Jihadists that the Christian Crusader/NeoCon exceptionalist mindset that the American obligation to export democracy is a threat to them and their tribal way of life. This is not to deny the threat that they pose to America simply because we are Americans. There are always those who will seek power by any means available for reasons both public and, as importantly, private.

So my advice to my musician artist son who only seeks to follow his dream and make it pay, to reveal his true self to the world, is this: while your training is here, leave this country and its provincial and self-destructive ways and go to Europe where they have, albeit imperfectly since WWII, learned in some measure to live with one another and who still can appreciate the loud silence of Yeats, Joyce, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Alan Ginsberg or Amiri Baracka and the rhythmic, metered and yet improvisational beauty of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Mingus, Coltrane, Monk and the rest. This country has forgotten how to improvise for the common good, to reject and denounce, in today's political parlance, a life of cynicism and pettiness. People laugh, if they care at all, at the only candidate for president who is talking common sense and not lapel pins and the impact of one's Pastor, as if those things matter at this precipice in American history. The future for our young does not lie here, though at this point it makes for a launching pad for those who seek to follow their dreams but whose fulfillment, sadly, lies in large part elsewhere. We are apparently bereft of a true and promising future for our young who sense the loss of hope and dreams available once to those who could, on sheer wit, make it in New York or anywhere.

What matters is something that I have to admit I owe in part to Ross Perot who some time ago in connection with the NAFTA warned of the giant sucking sound coming from the south, afraid as he was that all of the previously high paying manufacturing jobs would eventually end up in Mexico. The sound I hear these days is not a sucking sound, but rather the one I remember from my days as a 12 year old when Edith Bunker would ask in her Queensian accent "I wonder where Archie is?" and as if on cue, Norman Lear would push the button announcing the loud flushing of a toilet. "Oh, there he is!" And there we are. But instead of sitting on the commode, we are like the water in it sadly swirling around and down. How long until we wake up and fix the plumbing?

Lest you think that I am somehow something or someone less than a patriot, I will tell you that I had family members who saw combat in WWI and WWII -- people who put their lives on the line for this country and what it once stood for. People who killed for the ideals expressed in our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, for meaningful and useful freedom to do good in the world but of course who always warned against "excessive foriegn entanglements" and the useful idea of being rid of a state religion - whether they be Czars, Popes, Kings, Queens, Fuehrers or Emporors supposedly descended from Heaven from which the founders found to be such an evil influence and from which they fled the old country. I had relatives who were friends of Presidents whose positions mattered - were relevant -- when the United States meant something to the world: its beacon of hope and prosperity. It's true of course that people are still dying, literally, to get into this country. No walls can stop the influx of people who feel even less hope and no promise in their native lands than this one.

Which in some measure should tell us something, everything, about the condition of the rest of the third world of which we are fast becoming a part, the middle class having basically ceased to exist as our presidential candidates talk about tax benefits for those two percent who earn over $250,000. Or was that $200,000? And tax breaks for the wealthy, the war on the middle class. Whatever. Conversation irrelevant. Period. Stop.

I am reminded of the rise, fall and decline of the British empire and the fact that people from the UK now inhabit every corner of the world and the reality that it is individuals and not countries and artifices that truly matter. In the end, it is individuals working together wherever they can find hope and promise, financial, spiritual and otherwise, who will save not only this country but the world, from itself. Of what relevance are countries like ours any more? We are at the same time a cog and a hamster on a rolling steel wheel, running as fast as we can, going nowhere and signifying not yet nothing, but at the present moment, very little bit players enslaved to the chase for money and elusive and ultimatley meaningless power and therefore the obscurity of the bit player, tap-dancing to others' tunes -- the pretender that we as a country are.

Yes, Millie may be modern, but slavery of the soul of our country is today every bit as bad as the economic slavery to which we are seemingly perpetually and permanently chained and from which I am quite afraid there is no escape from, institutionalized as it is, inviting the question of where government ends and business begins and where business ends and government begins. Time will tell whether this situation will change. In the mean time, I suppose, the fact that there are people who dare to ask questions and challenge the country to do better is the penultimate indicator, a presupposition, of faith in the basic decency and goodness of Americans to do better for ourselves and for our children. That we have faith tells me that perhaps there is still hope for this grand experiment, but the life force that once awoke a sleeping giant one Sunday morning in Hawaii in December of 1941 to defend the freedoms fought and died for by the revolutionaries of the 1770s seems to be slowly, ineluctably, ebbing away, away. Off, my son, to New York. The airports still function, I think. And planes do land there as well as they do take off.