Wintering in Florida with Thoughts of Coleridge

Our good friend and dynamic observer of human race, Terry Field, Englishman and summer sojourner in his villa in Normandy, France, has removed himself and lovely wife to central Florida for the winter.  He has time to reflect on the contrasts between Europe and North American, and with many literary allusions, once again shares with us his view of the time and space which we occupy in the early 21st Century.

His words are read best perhaps in small doses, a paragraph or two at a time, and then to ponder a bit. He has given us titles for various subject matters and one might best rest the brain a bit between word bites. A master's degree in history and literature is recommended. - Glenn N. Holliman  

Something has got to Give

In Xanadu there Kublai Khan a stately Pleasure-Dome did build. With that good-old-boy Kublai must have hung around the New World recently as well!

I very much enjoy my sojourns in the United States. In part because I like new experiences, new civilisations, new geography, new minds. In part because it is a relief from the boredom of – now - the experience of seven decades of a common European civilisation. 

Left, a portion of Terry's American 'Pleasure Dome'.

In Eurotica the same compressed ‘tribal’ concerns, the same outlook on life, the world and time; the same sense of the dolorous reality of the loss of all after the collapses following on 1945. Such is  replete with sniffy but compensatory dissociated superiority, the (probably justified) sense of cultural entitlement, an abandoned and evacuated beauty everywhere largely replaced with ugly modern functionality, and hope for the best of the best to somehow arrive again, whilst expecting only less tomorrow than today.

By contrast It is fun in America. The place is still virginal and being enthusiastically torn to pieces for human advantage. Here in America, a merry disconnection from the constraints all other peoples on earth labour under still informs the wonderfully flabby and comfortable cheerfulness. 

Happily I have no difficulty in jettisoning the wearying dog-in-the-manger jealousy-couched-as-superiority exhibited by the great majority of Europeans. In America I drive a fine Lincoln motor car propelled by a capacious V8, drink V8 for breakfast to engender North American levels of vitality and Eat Red Meat. 

When here I enjoy the golf-course view from my winter home along the Gulf Coast of Florida. 

 Above a portion of the unisex golf course adjacent to Mr. Field's reality home where he is a member of the Lawn Mowing Society.

The unisex octogenarians seen ‘teeing off’ provide a jolly hope for me that my still stout frame may yet achieve a happy mindlessness which my wife so looks forward to. where the fate of a little white ball may replace all else I presently consider significant.

 The Multi-Cultural Lawn-Mowing Society

When the remote thought of hunger suggests itself, I like and enjoy the wonderful fish, glorious meats, tropical fruits, vegetables and such, all helpfully gathered by the labouring classes from the nether-regions of Central and south America. When some of their number rest, exhausted, their faces covered against the sun and heat outside my home after striving to cut the grass and trim the burgeoning  jungle hereabouts, I greet them with a cheery phrase in Spanish (Hola Hombre!!!) and an encouraging wave of my patrician hand.

That they growl at me and look for all the world as though I am the reincarnation of Cortez worries me not at all, for I am now associated with the Conqueror of the Word  - the nation that is the inheritor of Messrs Oppenheimer Fermi and Einstein’s fertile minds, the explosive results of which makes all war other than satisfying skirmishes in  comfortably remote foreign parts  a terminal foolishness so far mercifully avoided. Thus, here, war has been replaced with pleasure, and God as Modified by Amazon reinforces the pleasure. No longer does the Holy Spirit pour upon me, rather the pouring occurs when the doorbell rings and the Amazon Van pours out its Holy Contents as ordered.

All seems well in this Empire of Joyful Irresponsibility. As entertainment consumes lives, vocabulary, thought-capacity and comprehension to the point where, in a recent review of literacy and comprehension, only 13% of American school-children could distinguish between fact and opinion, and in this soup of happy almost-universal confusion I thrill to the theatre of the absurd that is The Democratic Party and The Republican Party.

Of course they are not what they pretend to be, nor are they what the inmates of this wondrous sandbar -dreamfest social construction imagine them to be. In truth, they are simply centres of cathartic unhappiness.

Such a valuable resource of frustrating and constructed-frustrated misery is extremely precious in a world where all unhappiness is turned into ‘process’, to be flushed down the thought-toilet as soon as is possible.

‘Process’ defines in stages the totality of human emotional life here, as though we are all machines subject to simple servicing and ‘tuning up’(she is ‘going through the grieving ‘process’ after poor Joel ‘passed’).  Here all experience is defined as being capable of ‘satisfying’ the urge for ‘completion’, with nothing remaining to disturb the pond of calm future selfishness. 

Personal calm and contented happiness is ‘lived’ here (Terry resides in a gated community), and for this contentment to persist throughout their long lives, all psychological perturbations require to end with ‘closure’. One coupled are searching for ‘closure’ after their dog Rex was unintentionally eaten by that pesky alligator at the lake by the seventh tee when Nancy and Rock let him loose to concentrate on the ball.  So they are ‘in therapy’ with a New Age Shamen from Jersey who connected with his Inuit ancestors after an uplifting and inspirational visit to Alaska care of MSC cruises and the All-Inclusive Bar Experience).

SO there you have it; they are not ‘political parties’ at all, since such does not exist; and have not existed since around the time that Jaqueline Bouvier and Jack decided that it was too tiresome to carry on sustaining the tedious acknowledgment of the reality of violent difference. They manufactured The Great Society with the help of Lyndon and Ladybird.

Now nearly all work is done by computers, automated factories, the Chinese abroad and The Great Undocumented stateside, so pleasure is the only game in town now. In a sea-to-shining sea world where the bomb has removed the healthy rapid and final deconstruction of dead political ideas within society known as nations, tribes federations and confederations and their all-but instantaneous replacement and  reformation into new relevant vitalities, the ossified, ‘pickled-in-aspic’ social organisations that survived the final re-organisations of 1945 and Bretton Woods grind on and on, seemingly eternal, with the inhabitants shorn of any sense of reality. 

Thus manufactured non-problems are ruthlessly identified by the computer-programs that are the Two Main Parties. Thence brutal disagreements as to how to solve these non-problems consumes the mini-minds of the Post-Kahn generations after they are manufactured by the ‘political-class’.

Mutually Assured Reduction

Herman Kahn, that wonder of the Hudson Institute, so clear in insight and clarity, well saw our present condition, when he described a future society shorn of education, capacity to think and formulate ideas, shorn of comprehension and with the administrators of nations performing the functions not for wealth but for the otherwise unavailable privilege of knowing ‘the truth’ He was correct, save for the bit about ‘the truth’ Even that is not on offer at the highest levels of government. Now only fantasy satisfies.

The Men with Turbans are Scary!!!

I read that Americans are ‘more fearful’ as a result of the recent assassination of an Iranian General whose business seemed to have been to range across the Middle East, and further beyond, as well as within Iran, controlling the futures of peoples with violent coercion and no sort of responsive ‘accountability’.

Yet the country I enjoy periodically is itself of such predominant power, wealth, military reach and technological prowess that it can still order all but the entire planet as it wishes. Why then should its stupefyingly comfortable, fortunate, grotesquely rich and wealth-modified humanish life-form inhabitants NOT feel a little discomfort as a tiny price for their previously unimaginable advantage?

Butter-Kegg and  the Wine Bottle

Once  upon a time a presidential candidate went to a winery raising funds to fight against the Man with Small Hands; he thought he could do this by drinking a bottle of wine that cost 900 dollars.

This dreadful behavior was ‘called out’ by an Indian woman who was identified as a squaw by the Man with the Small Hands so other citizens would know that her forked-tongue would not catch them all unawares. She said that Butter-Keg was less pure and good than she is, and that he was a very naughty man for drinking the 900 dollar wine and said he should stick to  supermarket merlot for the sake of his soul and to Purify All Democrats.  

He said she could afford more 900 dollar bottles than he could. That made her Unhappy, so after dark she danced around her teepee, ‘whooping a hollerin’ to vent her frustration and Nobody Saw Her do that.

Then the New York Times said this conversation between candidates was an uplifting sign of Robust Democracy at work.

Watching the Antipodean Barbecue.

Outside the local funfest I have been transfixed by the horror that is the Australian New Condition. From another life I have a very strong affection for The Lucky Country, the land of Gough, of ‘My Brilliant Career’, of Breaker Morant, of wonders and light and matey friendliness.

Yet I know that this is coming to a dread finish. I know, since I have made it my business to know, that the drought will now never end there; that heat will consume the country, grain production will cease entirely, cattle and sheep will be slaughtered without mercy until none remain, and the Murray and Darling will dry to streams and then nothing at all.

And all this is not known to the majority of the inhabitants, led by a gross absurdity of a marketing man who Knows Nothing save for Coal.

I could weep. Indeed I do weep. For my friends there, for folk there I have loved, for the happy inflection in their pronunciation to be forgotten in not too many decades, for the girls and boys who will have to leave as refugees to go to God-Knows-Where. And we have done it all to ourselves.

As the incomparably wonderful Judith Durham so heartrendingly sang, ‘I am, you are, we are Australians’. I know I am.