Is a historical perspective even possible without irony
these days? ..or ever?
I spend a lot of my time in the studio with the radio turned
on to the National Public station. Of late,
the powers that be on our local NPR have decided to dedicate the entire
afternoon, starting at 1pm, to different news programs instead of dedicating
half the afternoon to classical music. Now, national news organizations, especially
those funded from the same source, tend to focus on the same stories with about
the same editorializing, which makes for a repetitive afternoon. As I am in
the studio and only half listening anyway, I don’t mind absorbing news in such
fashion.
This past week, the 70th anniversary of D-day, for which I was
not alive, happened to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the
massacre at Tiananmen Square, for which I was. The coverage of these stories
played themselves out in my studio, all week, before everyone moves on to covering the World Cup, in
the basket case of Brazil, on this upcoming one; and as
I mucked about making prints with Duchamp in mind, I half listened to it. I heard stories of old
veterans talk about their experiences during WWII interspersed by interviews with too
young to remember Chinese people on the meaning of Tiananmen to them. The coverage of D-day made me decide to go
visit Normandy next year; and the interviews with young successful Chinese people
made me wonder about history and revolutions.
While I work in my studio, the stories I hear on the radio
usually remain in the background. Occasionally some stories pop into the foreground; and this week, a small part of one interview
in particular did so for a few minutes. It was an interview with a young woman who
might or not be a reporter; I wasn't paying attention at that point. What struck me, and moved the story to the
foreground of my consciousness, was her answer to the interviewer asking what Tiananmen
meant to her, and how she viewed herself as compared to the young people that
rose in protest that day. Her answer is what made me pay attention. Tiananmen meant very little to her; and she went onto say that the kids in the square that
day were more idealistic than the Chinese youth today. Today, she said, the youth are more materialistic and more
interested in personal economic well-being.
The things that the kids were fighting for on
that far away day twenty five years ago at Tiananmen: a more democratic and
open system of leadership, did not seem to matter at all to any of the Chinese youth
that I listened to on the radio this past week.
In sum, they are more interested in personal capital accumulation than
democracy, which, lest my memory fails me, was not one of the goals of Mao’s Cultural
Revolution.
…1.5 million killed, god knows
how many imprisoned, complete appropriation of private property by the state;
and all the Chinese want now seems to be capitalism without the messiness of democracy….
This was when I said “wow” and went back to
thinking of Duchamp.
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