Today, Memorial Day, I woke at 3AM.  Couldn’t sleep.  For a diabetic, high blood sugar sometimes has that effect.  I decided to make use of the circumstance by getting dressed in order to read more in Simulacra and Simulation bv Jean Baudrillard.  Baudrillard’s thought is revolutionary, reminding me of the effort required to learn a new language.  The effect is similar as well, as the world is revealed in new and surprising ways.  Not that this is pleasant.  An unpleasant truth is more valuable than the old customary untruths, or to name them properly, comfortable lies. 

So I progress through the book a few pages at a time.  Baudrillard’s thesis is simply truth has become an orphan in our place and time.  The traditional binaries between what is morally commendable, and what is evil is obscured, rendered unserviceable by the common place of multiple interpretations of reality.  The interpretations are more real, and are prior to the facts that generations gone before would have expected in the narrative.  Do you remember the old Westerns that you watched as a kid on TV?  Gunsmoke comes to mind.  The characters and their dialogue followed the time hallowed arc, personalities, their inner characters, as well as the language was linked to “reality.”  Such was the assumption of that bygone era.

Today we live as if in a fun-house of mirrors, the multiple interpretations of events which rise to the attention of “the media.”  There are multiple versions of the real.  Just sample the social media outlets, many making no attempt to conceal their ideological angle of attack.  There are moral interpretations aplenty for any issue, and morality is put to effective use to resuscitate systems that are dying, and otherwise would be dead.  Every day examples of such non-linear, circular thinking abound in the news feed of my iphone.

I understand this how far fetched this sounds.  The best example that comes to mind is the answer that President Bill Clinton gave when interrogated about the Lewinsky affair. 

The question: “Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was ‘no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton,’ was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?”

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” Clinton responded.

The disingenuous reply is even more disorienting when viewed/listened to in video form.

Call me crazy,  but does the sea-change in our social zeitgeist foreshadow an end of great story telling of the great rock-ballads, lyric and harmony depicting the ebb and flow  human experience?  Without that palpable, organic link to the grit of reality, where are the stories to come from, stories of any kind?  Believing that “reality” is a simulation, that the interpretations are the sole reality….  There is no reality beneath or behind, —  referred to.  All of the reality variants are considered equally “real.”

What of a single arc of a story, like what Homer wrote of Odysseus searching for his home in Ithaca after years of warfare before the walls of Troy?  Can a great story be recognized, have life, in a society such as ours?  Perhaps you have thoughts about this?  I would be interested to hear your point of view.

To conclude I offer this great Rock tune by REO Speedwagon.   They sold 10 million copies of their Hi-infidelity album. This song made the album the best seller in 1981.  You will note the arc of the story is well defined by the narrators interpretation of events.  The moral dimension is an end in itself, and is not a prop for something else.  Take It On the Run by REO Speedwagon.