Circular Cruises/Persistent Mythology

Persistent Mythology

29 May 1997

Sat at lunch today with a co-worker whom I haven't really spoken to at length before.

She was raised here in the New England area, and she told a story about living elsewhere and meeting people who thought she took tea every afternoon.

"No, no," she said, "I said I came from New England."

I find this story a little comforting. I was beginning to think that only the South had this persistent mythology problem.

That's when you no longer do things the old way, and haven't for a long time, but people elsewhere still think you do.

It may be that Boston was very English to begin with ... but I have only met two people with the broad "a," and they were both over the age of sixty. There is a coffeehouse on every block in Cambridge, but only one tearoom, and the best cream scones in town are at an Icelandic bakery.

And French is hardly spoken in Louisiana anymore, and no one knows how to carve a pirogue in a single piece from a cypress log except the demonstrators at the cultural museum.

You will only find the ghost of jazz in the French Quarter. Jazz tends to migrate.

- - -

I don't have much else to say on the matter. Only that I'm tired. I'm tired of telling people that things are the way they are, only to have them insist that they're really the way they think they should be.

I'm tired of people giving more attention to the bigots of the past, like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond - men who will ultimately be defeated by their own datedness - while ignoring or cheering the bigots of the present like Pat Buchanan, who get away with more because they have learned the tricks of newspeak that the old dogs will never master.

I'm tired of people arguing the same points of morality that were being argued in the Edwardian era while missing the big stuff: pollution and poverty and the fact that the corporations rule the earth and they're out for your ass.

- - -

Does it sound to you like I'm escalating unreasonably? From Bostonians and high tea to the decline of the planet in forty lines?

I suppose that's my point.

Collapse always starts somewhere. Go lose your myths.

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