“2001: A Space Odyssey” is one of my favorite
films. From start to finish, it’s
brilliant. Most fans of the movie like
to talk about Hal, the demonic computer, or the bizarre scene at the end leading
up to the Space Baby. But for me, what
is most notable about Kubrick’s classic is the juxtaposition between the “Dawn
of Man” segment at the film’s outset and the next scene, showing a journey to
the Moon.
“The Dawn of Man” revealed our roots in ape society
and the value of tools (specifically, the weapon known as a club) in advancing evolution. Once an ape recognized how valuable a club
could be in killing his rivals, he became the ancestor of human beings. Immediately after making that point, Kubrick
whisks us far away in space and time to the future of man as an animal that is
no longer earth bound. Our hero is not
an ape with a club but rather a PhD with a cover story. Dr.
Heywood Floyd exemplifies the intelligent, urbane and influential role model
that contemporary man aspires to be. He
is tasked, however, with the unenviable job of informing an audience of
scientists that what is actually transpiring on the Moon must be kept hidden
from the public back on Earth, and that these scientists are expected to
support a fictitious story about an epidemic.
In other words, Dr. Floyd, who is serving in the role as a teacher of
the best and brightest, is simply peddling bullshit. But boy does he look good and sound good when
he does it. Then, in the next scene, Dr.
Floyd’s sophistication is matched by that of Hal, the supercomputer, only this
time, we see the product of 21st century intelligence not merely lie
but kill – and do so without an ounce of remorse.
Yesterday’s March for Our Lives in Washington DC
wasn’t really about guns any more than Kubrick’s film was really about
technology. First and foremost, “2001: A
Space Odyssey” was an essay about the human condition and how little human
beings have truly evolved over the millennia.
Our technology has improved in leaps and bounds, Kubrick tells us, but as
for our goals and our characters? We
have merely replaced unmasked aggression with sophisticated ways to lie and to
destroy. First and foremost, the March for Our Lives
was about political bullshit. It was
about the consequences of living in a society run by politicians who have Hal’s
conscience when it comes to death and destruction and Dr. Floyd’s skills when it
comes to enunciating cover stories. The
gun laws these politicians defend are not the problem; they are but one of many
symptoms. The Generation Zers who put on
yesterday’s program made this point crystal clear to anyone in attendance who
cared to listen.
To those who weren’t in attendance, let me set the
scene. The event wasn’t so much a “March”
as a “Stand.” We stood for hours,
800,000 strong, on America’s main street, Pennsylvania Ave. We all faced the Capitol Building – in fact,
we could see nothing ahead of us but masses of people, a “March for Our Lives” sign
and the behemoth Capitol. To our left
was a TV screen, but for the hours leading up to the speeches, we didn’t watch
that screen; we simply listened to the sound system, which was high quality to
say the least. In fact, people were
having a great time even before the speeches because the Generation Zers who
put on this show figured out the importance of pumping great music over a great
sound system. I wondered why all the Boomers and Xers who’ve
put on marches before couldn’t have come up with that idea.
At 12:08 pm, the March officially started. The organizers gave us plenty of
variety. We saw songs performed on
stage, heard plenty of speeches, and watched a number of pre-produced informational
videos. Pretty much everything was excellent. No glitches.
I thought for a second we had witnessed a glitch when one of the Marjory
Stoneman Douglas students got sick on stage, but even she turned it into a
triumph, saying “I just threw up on international television and it feels great”
before continuing with her poem without missing a beat.
In terms of the speeches, when we weren’t listening
to the MSD students, we heard from African-American or Latino children who come
from impoverished communities. They were
pointing out that gun violence has underlying causes, not the least of which is
poverty. Poverty begets gun violence,
they taught us, but then again, gun violence also begets poverty. If we want to stop this cycle, we need to
devote resources to our poor communities, which is a point I have rarely heard
made by the politicians who have come on TV to confront the MSD massacre.
As for the MSD students, they spoke as adults. They asked to be taken seriously based on the
logic of what they had to say and the emotions that they bring to bear on the
gun issue, and not because they possessed some special status by virtue of
their personal accomplishments in bringing the movement this far. Nobody on
that stage – not the MSD students, nor the kids from Chicago or South-Central
LA – wore their gender, race, sexual orientation, or youth as a badge. We
heard their personal stories but in a way that felt inclusive. If anything was put at the forefront here, it
wasn’t race or gender but rather socio-economic class and personal
circumstance. When I compare the way these kids communicated
to, say, the Boomers or Xers on MSNBC, I felt that the former were being
infinitely more respectful and substantive and infinitely less obnoxious. They truly took a throng of 800,000 people
and turned it into loving family.
So with that as background, let me address the
target of the March: politics as usual.
These kids called for a political revolution and, indeed, used that word
explicitly. “Enough,” they said, with
politicians who take money from special interests, like the NRA, and then ignore
the will of the majority and the dictates of common sense to advance the agenda
of those special interests. (Opposing
bans on assault weapons would fall into that category.) “Enough” with politicians who offer us their “thoughts
and prayers” after a tragedy but don’t do anything to change the system that
created the tragedy. And “enough” with politicians who resort to
doublespeak in order to dodge the fundamental issues that plague our society,
whether they involve something specific like assault weapons or something more
general like poverty. It is not a coincidence that there were more
allusions yesterday to Marco Rubio than any other politician, including Donald
Trump. Rubio epitomizes the kind of
slick, smile-at-my-constituents but vote-with-my-donors politician that this
group of Generation Zers was targeting yesterday.
The MSD crew, the “Survivors” as they are known,
have a deep, deep bench. But they also
have a rock star. Her name is Emma
Gonzalez. Even as she walked to the
stage, I could hear some of the girls behind me screaming like it was 1964 and
they were about to see Paul and Ringo. Gonzales
proceeded to hit one out of the park by repeating the names of the MSD victims
and various things that they would never do again, before standing silent and
resolute for 6 minutes and 20 seconds – the same length of time it took the
gunman with an AR-15 to shoot so many members of her community. I knew immediately after she stopped
talking that she would be leaving us to our own thoughts for 6 1/3
minutes. And I made the most of it. I simply stared at the image above her head,
the image of the United States Capitol Building. A place that has come to be associated above
all else with obfuscation, hypocrisy (such as expressions of “thoughts and
prayers” without a commitment to action), cynicism, unprincipled ambition, servile
self-seeking, cowardice, phoniness, arrogance ....
Emma Gonzalez originally became famous for using the
refrain, “We call BS,” in a speech delivered back in February. Here’s an excerpt:
“The people in the government who
were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who
notice and our parents to call BS.... Politicians who sit in their gilded House and
Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to
prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun
violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.
We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as
cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of
senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know
what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government
works. We call BS.”
If you really think such “BS” only applies to the
way politicians deal with the gun issue, you’ve missed Emma’s point. She knows damned well that she’s only
addressing a symptom, but she also appreciates that in order to start a
movement, you must begin by successfully acting at the symptom level. Banning
assault weapons and requiring universal background checks are clearly needed
reforms. Only a bought-and-sold
politician, or a true gun fanatic, could possibly oppose these measures. Yet even when Obama had 60 Democratic
Senators and a Democratic majority in the House we still couldn’t pass gun
reforms. So, as these kids pointed out
many times, this isn’t just a “Red” versus “Blue” problem... the truth is that it’s
a cancer in our political environment that’s metastasized. Call it the cancer of Bullshit. More specifically, we have become a society
controlled by politicians who care most of all about getting elected, know that
the path to electoral success is by appealing to special interests at the
expense of their constituents, and don’t mind bullshitting whenever their
actions are challenged.
The truth is that Donald Trump was elected precisely
because enough Americans who are older than the MSD kids became so alienated by
politics as usual that they voted for a reality TV star who talks like the guy
at the end of the bar. Americans of all
ages realize that our system is broken.
The questions are: (1) Can we fix it?
and (2) If so, how?
I don’t have all the answers. But I’ll tell you this. We had better listen to those kids from
Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Because they
are smart, they are charismatic, they are organized, they properly appreciate
the cancer, and thankfully, they haven’t been infected with it. Right now, they and those with whom they
associate are my oncologists of choice. To
be sure, when it comes to this fledgling “We Call B.S.” movement, we older
folks need a voice, but for now, let’s use our ears more and our mouths less.
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