Paul Elisha – Twice born

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To echo the March 28^th front page of the New York Times, “Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation— and one of the best known American intellectuals— has died,— at the age of 82.”   Author of  two dozen volumes of superb and searing poetry, plus a half-dozen more of prose, all totaling close to a million copies in sales, she was for me and countless other committed readers, a revered teacher and prophet.  As our nation approaches an historic crisis of conscience, a most appropriate tribute to this towering literary Titan is found in her own clairvoyant words, written in 1983 but amazingly relevant to the present:  “To recover history or her-story, means resisting two powerful pressures in American culture—and, I suspect, in the culture being created globally by the multinational high-technology empires— very similar pressures, yet not the same.  One is the imperative to assimilate;  the other, the idea that one can be socially ‘twice-born’.”  “—–Every wave of immigrants who were not already Anglo Saxon has been haunted by the pressure to assimilate.

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Paul Elisha – On the Merits of Slaughter

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Looking back across many eventful years, this commentator can attest that life is an apt vehicle for learning but not without exemplary teachers.  In this respect, no one could have been luckier than I.  The eventful year was 1986 and my nonpareil mentor was an indomitable New York State Assembly-person.  Louise Slaughter was elected several years earlier, as a democrat in a habitually conservative suburb of Rochester.  She’d espoused an interest in the arts and legislative leaders decided the Arts Committee was just the spot to keep her involved in diversionary limbo, away from the attraction of more potentially combustible issues.  They were unaware that previous family hardships, in unsafe Kentucky coal mines and a hard-scrabble farm life had impelled her to become a Graduate Micro-biologist and Public Health advocate.

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Paul Elisha – The Decaying Landscape

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In 1964, an obscure but already highly controversial professor Marshall McLuhan, of St. Michaels College at the University of Toronto, published a small book titled- “UNDERSTANDING MEDIA.”  In it, he wrote the following:  “The American stake in literacy as a technology— applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by electric technology.  The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external.  Electric Technology is within the gates and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with Gutenberg technology, on which the American way of life was formed.  (This) threat hasn’t even yet been acknowledged…  Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they’re used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”  While McLuhan’s theories (especially his aphoristic maxim: “The medium is the message,”)   were widely discussed for several decades, they are now rarely cited.  Still, among today’s most brilliant minds, it’s generally conceded his theory— that today’s mass media are decentralizing how we live, turning the globe into a village and forcing us back to a tribal lifestyle…  were pointedly prophetic. read more

Paul Elisha – The National Pattern

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Witnessing the spate of disturbing and dubious events reported on varied news media outlets over the past week, along with subsequently contrived efforts at ambiguous evasion, one was hard put not to believe that this nation’s once vaunted proclivity for creative invention has degenerated into a craven bent for shoddy distortion.  It’s downright depressing to learn that the art of artificial invention has become the modus operandi for American marketers and others, whose official and political pursuits make use of their talents and services.  Even more deplorable is the sad fact that institutions looked on by many as repositories of reverential trust have joined in the unholy custom.

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Paul Elisha – On Hanging, Together or Otherwise

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Listening to the insinuations, insults, banalities and flat-out falsehoods being traded by hubristic hunters, hungry for public office and their miscreant media manipulators, one is impelled to ask just how much verbal abuse this experiment in aggregate self-government is able to absorb, before losing any resemblance to its intrinsic model?  One might also add:  “Does anyone care?”  If so, when will they assert sufficient verbal leverage to convince the most flagrant offenders of the real and imminent danger they court?

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Paul Elisha – Changing the Odds

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From its creation, America has been a nation of mottoes and slogans.  From “Let freedom ring,” to “Don’t tread on me,” we’ve sought to define ourselves in catch-phraseology.  We’ve also used it to document our history.  We’ve gone from the ‘Great Depression,’ to the ‘Great Recession,’ and now, it appears we’ve embarked on ‘The Great Regression.’  All readable signs point to a massive slide toward our most intolerant and intolerable past.  Those who sought the independence of distance, here, knew of the distress that theocratic dogma imposed and were determined to disassociate from it.  They knew and mistrusted the tyranny that fundamentalist fusion with despotic autocracy meant for whole populations.  But distance was insufficient defense against determined agents of dogma.  From Roger Williams to Cotton Mather, the minions of misery sought to subvert stalwart defenders of long-term latitude and live-and-let-live tolerance.

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