Star Tribune illustrator L.K. Hanson has been doing these one-panels on the op-ed page for a number of years now. He takes a quote from a philosopher, historian, or other intellectual and illustrates it.
I was starting to think he'd used up the best quotes... until today. In case it's hard to read the text in the graphic, here's the quote from George Santayana:
American life is a powerful solvent... It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it into the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.What a strange combination of nouns -- good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism. But those four disparate states of being resonate with me as a way of describing the prevailing American world view, if I can make that kind of generalization.
While Hanson's illustration implies that television is the manifestation of this solvent, Santayana clearly didn't intend that, since he wrote these words in 1920, before commercial radio was even common.
Santayana was talking about something more essential than our media, something that the media are a symptom of, rather than a cause. I have just been thinking lately how my accident of birth as part of this country -- with its plentiful natural resources, wide open spaces, and ostensible meritocracy -- allows me (and everyone else) to be coopted by comfort, selling out our fellow citizens of the world in exchange for a shopping spree at the mall.
It's a solvent that works by soothing, by buying us off. I don't know what it will take to change it. Maybe if our many comforts (cheap gas and cheap food, to name a couple) become less common, our complacency and thoughtlessness will transform into a pair of companions more worthy of our good will and optimism.
1 comment:
I have savored L.K.Hanson's quotation panels for years. He resurrects treasured bits of wisdom and delivers them to us like pearls enshrined with his drawings. I thank him and the Trib for providing this treasure.
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