The Graduate and Gestalt

In a tumultuous moment at the end of the 1960s movie, "The Graduate," Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross run onto a bus, go to its back end, and sit down. Then, very oddly, instead of kissing and being excited to be with one another, they look off in somewhat different directions while the soundtrack plays Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence." My reaction to this scene was, What? What the hell is going on? What's the matter with these people? Well, and now I have my answer. I am sitting here, very belatedly reading about Gestalt psychology, which I had heard of but never really did much with, and here's this reference to "The Gestalt Prayer," which begins with, "I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine." I am reading, that is, about the existentialist roots of Gestalt psychology, about the extremely individualistic orientation of that whole worldview, and particularly about the existentialist focus on the present moment and, you know, it makes sense. When they ran out of the church and climbed onto the bus, the present moment had moved on. The church thing was great, yeah, but it was over, and now they were on a bus, each continuing to live exclusively in his/her own world, with the interface to the other being a project rather than something taken for granted. Reading this stuff reminds me of how weird people were, sometimes, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Maybe earlier than that, and definitely later than that too (in e.g., the punk movement), but certainly there was a sense, among a lot of people, that it was OK, or possibly even normal, to be strange or different. I have long been aware that there was a freedom then that we don't have now -- that, even though a guy was much more likely to be harassed for having long hair, there was also an accessible mindset in which it was understood that there would be people hassling you for being yourself, and that this was just normal. You didn't have to be within today's broad lines of normalcy to be normal; you just had to be yourself to be normal, and maybe you didn't even have to be yourself.

The Ultimate Intellectual Piracy

The United States may soon cease to be the world’s greatest threat to global peace.

That statement may come as news to those who were not aware that the U.S. ever was a great threat to global peace. And surely, by many measures, it is not. How many countries have a Peace Corps? How many provide real estate for a United Nations?

Let us not quibble about the U.S.’s standing as the world’s leading seller of weaponry. Let us not debate the invasion of Iraq, or the devastation and brutality of the Vietnam War (or, indeed, the murder rates in our own cities).

In fact, let us withdraw that statement about the United States altogether. Because soon, it may not matter anyway.

The U.S. has had its Ugly Americans abroad, as well as its piggish Yuppies cluelessly asking themselves, “Why do they hate us?” in the wake of 9/11. But at least some such Yuppies did ask, and some actually seemed to want to hear an answer. That, however, may not be the way of the future.

Surely there will always be a liberal, educated fringe of Chinese individuals who have not only visited the West but who have also come to appreciate the good things that the West’s liberal, educated fringe try to achieve. Such individuals will undoubtedly be grossly outnumbered, though, by those Chinese people who, in good middle-class American style, neither know nor care, very much, what the rest of the world may think or believe.

Most Chinese may be like most Americans – concerned, that is, with what’s on the barbecue or in the fridge, and not so concerned with what someone with a cause, somewhere else in the world, seems to be complaining about.

China has a reputation, these days, of copying what other people invent. There is no law of nature that limits such copying to the good things. Those who plunder goods from others’ homes may inadvertently haul away some dust and cockroaches as well.

In particular, China may be copying some flaws from America of the 1960s. Chinese responses to Tibet certainly make it seem that way.

On Tibet, as in Vietnam, the world speaks out, in the name of fairness and humanity. The Dalai Lama, like a latter-day Ho Chi Minh, actually talks as if he believed that the leaders of the superpower were reasonable people. But those leaders have their eyes on domestic opinion, and domestic opinion is clear enough.

It took a long, long time for Americans to make up their minds, take action, and ultimately end the Vietnam War. Even in a fairly open democracy, with many fictions exposed by a relatively free press, it took years on end for society to get sick of its own anti-communist rhetoric.

Americans of that era knew what they believed. They knew it because it was what someone had told them, and it was also what their friends seemed to believe. We cannot expect anything different from the Chinese, and we are not getting anything different. The effort to talk sense to Chinese people – even educated, westernized ones – about Tibet, these days, seems much like the effort to talk sense to Americans in 1968 (or, actually, in 2003).

Tibet is not the point. Tibet is merely the illustration. If the Chinese people are presently able to support internal or localized nationalist hype á la the Alamo or Cuba, in the future they may also be able to support nationalist hype focused abroad, á la Saigon or Baghdad.

Things are changing very quickly, these days, in the U.S.-China balance. It is easy to notice the shifts in the balances of finance, military power, and influence. But other things are shifting as well.

Sooner than we expect, people of the whole world may begin to encounter the Ugly Chinese. If such a thing happens, it will not be because Chinese individuals are interpersonally ugly. Much to the contrary, they hail from a culture that seems to foster deference and agreeableness. It will happen, not because of who the Chinese people are, but despite that.

Power tends to corrupt, and the Chinese people are gaining power. There are things they want and, as shown in Tibet, there are things they will take – not because they are right, educated, or caring, but simply because they will be increasingly able to follow their beliefs and feed their desires.

It will be too bad if China copies us so diligently in that mistake. But the writing does appear to be on the wall. Chinese public opinion is harshly set against a fair deal for the people of Tibet. Leaders in China, like leaders in the United States, do not generally tell their constituents to set their nationalism aside in favor of respect or decency to others.

Ultimately, the problem is with the accumulation of power itself. When a nation becomes as big as China or the U.S., it tends to expect its leaders to achieve outsized things at the expense of other peoples. There had never before been a superpower like the United States. And in its own, different but conceivably far worse way – as we may soon begin to see – there may also never be a superpower like China.

Getting Old

It's odd to see these occasional photos, online, of famous people from the 1970s and 1980s, and how they look now. Not that they all look bad. I saw one, today, featuring Goldie Hawn. She still looks like Goldie Hawn. But she's the exception. We are getting older, and we look it. That's OK, for the most part. We are human, we should expect this to happen. If anything, we should be proud of it. We have learned some things; we have been around the block a time or two. My generation, the Baby Boomers, distrusted older people in our youth, back in our 1964-1974 heyday. That was appropriate at the time. But it was also too bad for us. Now we are older people, and we don't have the confidence befitting the office. We are lame-duck old people, occupying the position by virtue of seniority; but eventually we will be shuffled offstage by new, younger old people, who hopefully will have spent their lives learning and believing that experience and wisdom are priceless. None of this helps the fact that everybody is starting to look so damned old. But, as I say, it's really OK. Being with all these old folks helps me to see differently. When I was a kid, I would dismiss or avoid people with wrinkles or grey hair. It just didn't seem that they understood my world. Now that I'm one of them, I think my world is opening up. Imagine feeling that you are not so terribly removed, after all, from your 87-year-old mother. It is a bit of an epiphany. This year, I will turn 53. It sounds like a lot. I don't feel very old, but in a kid's eyes I know I look it. I'm grizzled; my cheeks sag a bit; I'm grey. Christ, I probably even smell funny. Those kids, they have noses like a bloodhound, when they get around someone my age. Alice Cooper thought he had problems when he sang, back in 1972, "I'm in the middle / The middle of life / I'm a boy and I'm a man / I'm eighteen." What should I sing? "I've got an / Old man's face and a / Baby's heart / I'm 52 and I / May be an old fart ..." Ah, but see, I still have my sense of humor. I think it may have been the comedian Rodney Dangerfield who described a conversation with some guy: "So, Rodney," the guy said, "you lived your whole life in New York?" "Not yet!" Rodney replied with mock fright. That's how I feel. I'm in the middle of my adult life, if you start from 17 or so and run, like my folks, up into the high 80s. Who knew I'd be spending so many years as an old guy? It seems like a strange plan. But I don't write the music; I just dance to it.