Literacy and its discontents

I turned the radio on yesterday and caught a snippet of someone speaking on Democracy Now. I'm not a fan of this program since it generally seems utterly paranoid, but this caught my attention and I was able to find out from their site today that the speaker was Buckminster Fuller. He said, "When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to universe. We’re at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do. It’s a matter now of humanity getting to the point where it’s now qualifying to make some of its own decisions in relation to its own information. That’s why we’ve come to a new moment of integrity." This awareness of the importance of literacy clicks with the issues I've been struggling regarding Episcopalians' approach to Scripture and authority, as well as the current presidential campaigns. What do we really want in a leader? I have probably noted before that St. Jonah's is conflicted to the marrow about this. We desperately want it both ways. We really want a leader who supports and affirms what we already think and feel, and maybe pushes us just a teensy bit further in that direction (and pushes those who aren't there a whole lot further in that direction). Which is why I think more and more that the very idea of a congregation choosing its own pastor is ill-founded and we should return to the idea of the hierarchy appointing people (I hear even the Methodists do this). But why, I ask myself, am I so ready to believe a hierarchy, a magisterium, is going to be more capable than we are? Aren't I just longing for pre-literacy days when us folks just had to listen to authority with humility and obedience? Isn't it natural that those two virtues would fade away now that we are all empowered to read and learn? And yet, and yet, this is no longer really the era of literacy that Fuller heralded. It is the post-literate era. No, that doesn't mean that fewer people can process letters and words in a textual form, and it doesn't just mean that fewer people choose to do so, particularly outside of the internet. It means that we now realize that each and every one of us derives a different meaning from those letters and words, and even one person derives a different meaning at different times. Yes, big revelation: that's the message of Derrida et al. and has been subsumed into the general postmodernist view, and all I'm really doing here is calling it the postliterate reality, because I think that is a more accurate term (and calling anything an accurate term in this context is, I suppose, an exercise in futility). Yet, it sheds a ray of light that reveals things are not really so different after all from the pre-literate era. Maybe now, more than ever, we need a magisterium.

The beach, life, death, etc.

The local news has been all about Ted Kennedy since his seizures and diagnosis of a brain tumor. I take great interest in hearing the medical details and seeing how well he is doing, happy he gets to go home and be with his dogs, his boats. I realize that even though I don't always agree with his positions, he is such a familiar figure and face here in Massachusetts. He's a fixture. It is getting on a year since my father's diagnosis of his cancer having metastasized to his brain, so I feel that connection too. Also strange, because when I think back to my earliest childhood memory of this Senator's brother being assassinated, I understand that this first intimation of the mortality of fathers has marked me in a deep way, so that I feel connected to Ted, the lesser brother, the one who screwed up bad at Chappy. On Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Crackles suggested we go to the Cape for the day and just check it out, so we wake up early, see the Teddy news and hear about the Fugawi boat race that he will not be racing in. First we go to Harwich, because that is where Mr. Crackles's family always went. It is nice: the parking is free till June, we walk on the beach, then head into town and find a restaurant and have a nice lunch. Then we decide to drive on to Hyannis, where there's more of a town, walk around have coffee and a snack at the twelve tribes coffee shop. Traffic is starting to get a bit more crowded, and the beautiful day is getting on. When we drive to another beach, where they are charging to park, the girls say "why don't you come back in 15 minutes when it won't cost you 15 dollars?" so we drive on and find a place where we seem to be able to park on the road and there's just a little spot of beach we bring our chairs to and sit down. Mr. Crackles is looking at the boat that has pulled up to the pier and saying it looks like Teddy's boat. How can you tell, I ask. Sailboats kind of look alike to me. It's got two wooden masts, like his, he says. And then we notice, there are about a dozen people gathered on the beach besides the pier and sure enough, that's him and his family, walking off the boat down the pier. And the two dogs! (One runs back towards the boat then follows along.) Apparently, he did go for a sail, though he was sitting out the race. He seemed jovial, walking in that strange way of his along the dock. Mr. Crackles is amazed. I actually feel like this is normal in some way. Like I said, I've felt this connection and this awareness of Ted as a familiar and local figure so it seems just kind of right that we should end up there, seeing him disembark.

Today he had brain surgery.