As Walt Whitman
gazed down the democratic vistas of culture,
he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness,
importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbish
to make any discrimination of value, except the most generous one.

All facts, even the mean ones are incandescent in Whitman’s America.
p. 27

Much of modern art
is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible.
By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear,
because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing,
art changes morals
–that body of psychic custom and public sanctions
that draws a boundary between
what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable
and what is not.
The gradual suppression of queasiness
does bring us closer to a rather formal truth
–that of the arbitrariness of the taboos constructed by art and morals.
p.40

The freakish
is no longer a private zone, difficult of access.
People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace
emotionally vacant are seen daily on newsstands,
on TV, in the subways.
Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible,
with glitter in his hair. P. 45

–excerpt On Photography; America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly
by Susan Sontag, pub. Picador 1977

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Elon Musk said he would reverse Twitter’s ban of Trump.

–New York Times, The Morning, May 11, 2022

What song is apt to express our condition, the place and time of our present habitation?  This one by Neil Young still speaks.  It’s the 21st century, and we keep dreaming.   “There’s a band playing in my head…”

After The Goldrush

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming,
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and drummers drumming,
And the archer split the tree.

There was a fanfare blowing to the sun
That was floating on the breeze.

Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst through the sky.

There was a band playing in my head,
And I felt like getting high.

I was thinking about what a friend had said.
I was hoping it was a lie.
Thinking about what a friend had said.
I was hoping it was a lie.

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver space ships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun.
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones.

All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun.

Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun.
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home.

Lyrics composed by Neil Young