The Lunch Break Blog

The Calliope Crashed To The Ground 03/24/2009

Let’s play a word association game. If I said the word calliope, what would you think of? When someone mentioned it at lunch today, the first words to pop in to my mind were lyrics from the Springsteen classic “Blinded by the Light.” While this song may seem like a lot of rhyming nonsensical words strung together, I think it actually has a relevant meaning for America today. In his first single release, Bruce reminisces about his younger days saying “With a boulder on my shoulder feelin’ kinda older I tripped the merry-go-round / With this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing the calliope crashed to the ground”. The Springsteen song is about a cocky young man lured in by the carnival glitz and glamor of the music business. But his calliope, a Greek muse or an organ-like musical instrument powered by steam whistles, gets tripped up by the young man’s naivete about the way the world works. Likewise if America continues to buy into its own arrogant invincibility, our regenerative muse will desert us as well.
In a sense, Americans today are being “blinded by the light” of our own myth. We hear a lot of negative news about the economy, foreign affairs, and political scandals and yet we hear just as much about how the American spirit will carry us through these hardships and we will emerge even stronger. Now, I acknowledge that an optimistic and determined outlook is one of the best things for Americans to have in troubled times, but it’s not going to be our sole means of recovery. Probably following their government’s lead, average Americans, though concerned about the world, have made little changes in their lifestyles proportionate to the constant warnings about the severity of our state of affairs. Compared to description of life in this country during other tough times, we are living it up like there’s no tomorrow. During the Depression or World War II, our land was not a land of plenty. It was a place where people willingly sacrificed instead of running up credit. Back then Americans cut back on luxuries and saved money, not because they wanted to or because they liked deprivation, but because they had a common sense understanding that sacrifice was the best economic remedy. Because it was a matter of survival. To someone who lived during the 1930s and 40s, today’s America must resemble a land of hedonism; a place where wars are fought but few feel the consequences, and where money is easily borrowed and spent with little thought to how it will be repaid.
Not only does too much impudent pleasure-seeking threaten our survival, it is an invitation of blissful ignorance. Weary of all the bad news, we choose to ignore it with petty distractions. We decline to ask questions or raise meaningful protests of the decision makers in America, preferring our own bubbles of security to unpleasant thoughts of what not to buy and what companies to let fail. So we leave it to the politicians, most of which have no more training in economics than the average citizen and a lot less common sense. And when we find out that the law that we didn’t read and didn’t debate allowed more egregious abuses of taxpayer money, we feign outrage for awhile and then go out to eat, buy clothes at the mall, and watch $100 dollar/month cable TV. All the while, more things slip by our willful ignorance. The Congress wants to pass legislation that will destroy the meaning of a contract ( what? hand me that menu). The President wants to regulate the executive bonuses, not only of banks receiving bail out money, but all financial institutions and publicly traded companies (did you get those jeans on sale?). The federal deficit for this year is projected  to exceed 13% of our overall economy and force us to borrow 9.3 trillion dollars in the next ten years (wait, what’s going on in California? no, not taxes. why aren’t there any good movies out?). Where will this come from if China does not want to loan us any more money? (change the channel, this show sucks).

Instead of hedonism, we must return to the stoicism of our grandparents’ generations if we want any semblance of the America of the last fifty years to survive for our children. The knowledge-draining bliss from Ipods and flatscreen TVs can only last so long, before we find ourselves in real trouble. Do we really need these things to be happy for another two weeks or two minutes? The ancient Roman stoics would say that only “virtue is sufficient for happiness.” Of course, Rome eventually fell under its own decadence too, so maybe the coming collapse is just an inevitable part of the human experience. I guess it’s like the song says “Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun. Oh but mama that’s where the fun is.”