|
Piece of Work
I've lately felt a growing sense that we are underestimating ourselves.
The many preposterous things said about Michael Jackson during his life and since have helped circulation
and ratings numbers for corporate news organizations at the expense of the truth.
Nobody "wacko" could have achieved what he did. Artists generally but pop stars especially are endlessly belittled by the media,
and by us to the extent we believe the media.
"I'm just a singer in a Rock and Roll band." (Lyrics by John Lodge, 1972.)
I was nearly moved to tears by Lili Estefan and Raul de Molina on the Latino show, El Gordo y La Flaca. On the show that
covered Jackson's rites, the two hosts wore black.
They thoughtfully showed taste. They showed character.
I've lately experienced a deepening awareness of our lack of awareness of what a superlative species we are.
It seems as though the world is run by anti-humanists who do not want us to know that we all come from the
same source as the Bengal tiger and the blue whale, Mt. Kilimanjaro and the Amazon.
Watching the Melissa Thodos dance, "Vessels," I was reminded of the Polynesians as the dancers simulated
rowing canoes to music that had a Polynesian sound.
In the early days of European sailing, ships stayed within sight of land to avoid the real and almost inevitably
deadly chance of getting lost at sea.
Polynesian headmen would put their loved ones and all of their possessions in outrigger canoes and row into the
endless expanse of the Pacific.
The navigator could lie on his back in the canoe and read the sky and know the direction of land.
The dancers moved to music that evoked the spirit of those Polynesian explorers, the greatest navigators of all time
-- their serenity, their joy, their easy fearlessness.
Their genes are over 90% the same as ours. We are the same species.
Abraham Lincoln was the same species as Frederick Douglass. One a former slave, the other a white Southern male.
Lincoln called Douglass, "The most meritorious man I have ever met."
It took one to know one.
We are the same species as Galileo Galilei and Leonardo da Vinci, as Cleopatra and Elizabeth Regina, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
In World War II, we burned Hiroshima and Dresden as well as nearly wiping out European Jewry.
In the same 20th century, we also eradicated small pox and circumnavigated the moon.
Can we be all bad?
Think of Madonna and her fellow dancers, moving like laser beams -- quick, precise, weightless.
Think of Einstein writing an equation for energy converting into matter and matter converting into energy
-- the equation for the universe. Think of Shakespeare's take on humanity. " . . . how noble in reason,
. . . in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!"
Richard W. Fox is a university lecturer in astronomy and physics at Governors State University near Chicago.
His fiction has appeared in Aim Quarterly, Dana Literary Society Online Journal, and elsewhere.
Essays have appeared in a variety of venues, including The Taj Mahal Review, Mercury (publication
of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific), and Ascent Aspirations. He is also co-author of several
published astronomical research papers.
Email: Richard W. Fox
Return to Table of Contents
|
