After the Future

Thoughts on "Lost" and "The Divine Comedy"

[Ed. Note: for more recent thoughts on this theme after the series finale, see "More on Lost and Dante's Island Down Under".]

During seasons 1 and 2 of Carlton Cuse's and Damon Lindelof's Lost, I would put up the random post when a particular episode grabbed me, but it became clear after a while that the writers were operating at a level of complexity that made it futile, for me anyway, to try to grasp what they were trying to do. So I decided to go along for the ride and see where they wanted to take us. Well, we're in the final season, and there are six more hours to go, and because a clearer picture, more or less, is emerging, I'll be posting again about Lost as the series draws to a close.

The narrative has become extraordinarily convoluted, but I think in a good and interesting way. Nevertheless, it's hard to believe that in the six remaining hours all shall be made clear. We'll see. I'm more interested in the overarching narrative pattern than trying to parse out the show's many subthemes, and I think the pattern of that basic story is finally taking shape.  And in future posts I might talk more about some of the subthemes that interest me, but today I just want to talk about what I think, at this juncture anyway, that basic narrative pattern is.  I also want to think out loud a bit about what the possible significance of the series might be as a cultural event: I'd argue it's the most important and ambitious of several pop-cultural attempts to help us establish an imaginative beachhead in a postmodern, post-Einsteinian world. I'll get to that, but first let me ramble a bit by reflecting on some interesting connections I see between post-Newtonian Lost and Dante's Ptolemaic Divine Comedy:

Quote of the Day: Ed Rendell

"I don't think we have a battle for our soul -- I think we have lost our soul," he said. "We have been cowed into [sic] stop talking about the things that made us Democrats in the first place; that we believe the government can and should make a difference in people's lives; that we can protect the most vulnerable in our society; that we can, in fact, give opportunities to people who haven't had it. And that government can be an important catalyst -- they can't do it by itself -- but they can be a catalyst for growth."

That's what we believe in. But [Republicans] have us cowering behind the shower curtains," he concluded.

The Huffington Post approached Rendell after the affair and asked him to elaborate on what, exactly, he meant by saying the Democratic Party is soulless.

"We have been out-spun and we are scared," he said. "And when you are scared, you can do one of two things: you can circle the wagons and hide inside or under the wagon, or you can get out and fight for what you believe in. I think we are starting -- President Obama started when he went to the Republican caucus -- to fight back and for what we believe in. If we do that, I think our losses will be much less [in 2010] than what anybody suspects." (Source)

If the Dems lose in the next couple of cycles, it won't be because of what they stand for but because they don't have the spine to stand and fight for it.  They will be perceived as the party of inept, bumbling, corporate sycophants.

Charisma Wasted; Opportunities Lost

If you were Barack Obama and were pursuing the policies that he ended up pursuing, would you want Dawn Johnsen in charge of the office which determines the scope of your legal authority as President?   Greenwald

Things going on in my real life have kept me from posting the last two weeks.  There's just not the time--and when it comes to issues in the political sphere I'm just not that interested. It's all depressingly predictable. It was only interesting when there was a chance that something significant and new might be introduced.

And it's clear that with Obama we're back to the same old, same old. Not terrible, not good, but also not really very interesting, if by interesting we mean something creative, imaginative, bold. Democrats simply don't know what those words mean, and it's really hard to care about the business-as-usual politics of calculation with which they are so well versed and comfortable. It's predictable and pedestrian, something only the most wonkish political junkies or the most conventional worshipers of governmental power can focus on with sustained interest and enthusiasm. 

I know.  This is how things work, and to have expected Obama to have been anything more than he has turned out to be was unrealistic. But as the title of this blog indicates, I'm not interested in the way things are so much as I'm interested in that toward which they are moving. If we are in a holding pattern while Dems are in power, the future lies elsewhere. So I will leave it to those who are more interested in the way things work within the framework of existing realistic expectations to focus on Obama's remaining years. I'll be paying attention, but it won't be for me a primary area of concern.

Things will only get interesting again when the holding pattern breaks, and that will happen if the Republicans take over. Our pattern of dramatic regression will resume.  If, on the other hand, Obama and the Dems manage somehow to stay in power for the next eight years, we'll remain in this neither here nor there holding pattern similar to the Clinton years. We might see some incremental improvements--maybe this feeble attempt at HCR will be improved a little, maybe not. Maybe we'll get some modest environmental improvements, but after this week, that's looking dubious. And maybe we'll get some control over the financial system, but probably not.

In other words, if Dems are in power there won't be any action commensurate with the problems, and our future is like a balloon with with pinhole slowly shriveling. But if the GOP is in power, we're more likely to see the balloon pop, and in a perverse way that's more interesting, and maybe it would be better for us in a heightening-of-the-contradictions sort of way.

But one thing is clear to me, and the Dawn Johnsen affair adds more evidence to support it, that the elite in either party are ok with executive abuses of power, and so our future therefore will be largely determined by the whim of whichever elite faction holds the reins of power. One way or another, slow leak style or explosively, a significan level of power abuse is in our future.

Whatever Obama's successes, modest or significant, his one great failure will have been to endorse the Bush Cheney doctrines of executive power. In the long run this choice by Obama and his Justice Dept. will have impacts that will dwarf anything else this administration does.  

Politics follows culture, and sets the conditions for the possibility for anything significant in the political sphere. We're in a holding pattern there as well, but sooner or later something has got to give. So I'm going to focus my attention more on cultural sphere themes, particularly regarding ideas relating to "retrieval." I've been reading off and on Dante's Divine Comedy as a kind of exercise in retrieval, and perhaps some ideas about that will form in such a way that I can share them here.  I'm likely to return to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, and along a parallel line I'm also interested in issues related to the retrieval of shamanic or animistic consciousness, and the possible ways, a la McLuhan, in which that might be effected by technology's reconfiguring the brain/sense system.

I'm not sure if there's anything there, but my hunch is that's where the "new" for us humans lies--not in the technologies themselves, but in the ways in which they will change the fundamental experience of being human for good or ill, and that in turn will affect our politics. So for these reasons posts here are likely to be less frequent because they won't be reactive to events, but will be more related to things I'm reading or observing in the cultural sphere which interest me more for their latent rather than manifest qualities.