 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Blackout MeditationNovember 09, 2007 Today's the 42nd anniversary of the "Great Northeast Blackout" of 1965. This is from the New York Times article published the day after:
"Falling dominoes" might have been a bleedthrough from the foreign desk or the Washington press corps: falling dominoes were much in the news in those days, generally in reference to the Bad Things That Would Happen in Southeast Asia if the U.S. didn't stalwartly (i.e., militarily) oppose everything with the C-word attached to it. But I love the image of the blackout hurtling eastward, maybe like a runaway freight train racing those dominoes for the Atlantic coast. The blackout must have hit my town, about 10 miles due west of Boston, at about 5:21. I don't remember the time. I do remember that I was at the barn, my horse was on the crossties, it was long since dark, and the first thing I did after the lights went out was step in a pile of manure. The second thing I did, once it became obvious that this wasn't just a flicker, was to go up to the Dicksons' house (they owned the barn) to find out what was happening and get a flashlight or two. Who else was at the barn? Can't remember, but I almost certainly wasn't alone: three or four of us were usually around after school, and the grownups by this time considered us old enough, at 13 or 14, not to need close supervision. Anyway, I got up to the Dicksons' and of course the lights were out there too. Mr. Dickson (think crusty/brusque old Yankee with a pipe in his mouth) told Mrs. Dickson to get me some candles. Mrs. Dickson (the practical one in the family) almost certainly rolled her eyes at this. Even I knew better than to even think about lighting a candle in that old wood-top-to-bottom barn with a loft full of hay: we teenagers regularly told the adults that they could not set foot in the barn unless they put their cigarettes out. I'm pretty sure I returned to the barn with at least one industrial-strength flashlight, and we (whoever "we" comprised) finished chores and were picked up by our various parents. If you lived in New England or elsewhere in the northeast at the time, where you were and what you were doing when the blackout hit became a staple of conversation, especially whenever the power failed wherever you were living in subsequent years. ("This is nothing! Remember the big blackout of '65?") It was like comparing notes about where you were when you learned that JFK had been shot, except that everyone in the country and even the wider world had a story about that whereas the Great Northeast Blackout was a regional thing. The Gulf Coasters had their hurricanes, Californians had their earthquakes -- we had our blackout. As the years went on, however, I knew more and more people who weren't old enough to remember the blackout, first because they were too young and then because they weren't born yet. Then I started knowing people whose parents hadn't been born when the blackout hit. It's only a matter of time before I meet a third-or-more-generation New Englander whose grandparents hadn't been born when the blackout hit. Now I've got Susan Werner's great song "Born a Little Late" running through my head. It begins:
It goes on to parody (with drop-dead accuracy) the boomers who assume that everyone shares their memories and experiences (and halcyon exaggerations of those experiences) and that anyone who doesn't was "born a little late" to ever be an authentic member of the tribe. What makes this more interesting is that there's a tribe of people (some of whom are almost certainly reading this blog) who can sing at least a few lines from "Born a Little Late" and who know Susan Werner's music more generally, and that though age is probably a factor in tribal membership, what's more important is familiarity with a certain kind of music, loosely described as folk, acoustic, roots, singer-songwriter, and/or indy. If you listen to the radio station that my boombox and truck radio are always set to -- WUMB-FM, out of UMass-Boston -- you have almost certainly heard of Susan Werner. If you've heard of Susan Werner, you've almost certainly heard of a whole slew of other singer-songwriters, and the chances are excellent that even if you and I are just meeting for the first time we can launch into an excited all-night conversation about music that will bore silly all non-tribal members in the vicinity. Because we belong to the same tribe, we share a common tradition, and that tradition includes events that we weren't around for. If you allude to how everyone went apeshit when Dylan plugged in at Newport, I'll know exactly what you're talking about, even though I sure wasn't there at the time; I was born, all right, but I was 12 years old and way big into horses and Middle Eastern history at the time. By the time I understood why Dylan's electric guitar nearly caused a riot and did cause feuds and animosities that went on for years, I'd long been listening to music that combined folk and blues with electric instruments and electronic techniques, like Simon & Garfunkel and the Grateful Dead. Electrification wasn't, as so many feared it was, the death knell for traditional music. It was the public beginning of a synthesis that's still going on, and wonderfully embodied in a two-CD set I've been listening to lots in the last few months: Bruce Springsteen's Seeger Sessions. I'm part of several traditions that sometimes brush up against each other and occasionally run through the same territory; some of them, however, have little connection with each other, which means that when I'm inspired to quote, say, Adrienne Rich to a bunch of horse people, I invariably stifle the impulse. I don't use dressage lingo in conversation with folkies, or expect someone who's never been to Martha's Vineyard to understand a joke about the Steamship Authority -- unless, of course, I'm willing to supply the necessary context. Yesterday I met for breakfast with my two writing buddies. We all have writing and Martha's Vineyard in common. Two of us have music. Yesterday morning the other two got going about a couple of TV shows about which I know nothing but were considerate enough to supply enough context that I had some idea what they were talking about. They were the native speakers slowing the flow so the novice could keep up. It comes down to who we can converse with fluently, who we can converse with if some of us are willing to make concessions to the others' lack of facility, and who we can't communicate with at all, maybe because we have no reference points in common but more likely because we're not willing to, or capable of, putting the effort in. The unwilling and incapable tend to be those with more clout. Those with less have to put the effort in. Our survival and well-being are at stake. Brazilian immigrants on the Vineyard have to pick up at least enough English to navigate the roads and the grocery stores. English-speaking residents and visitors can get by quite easily without learning a word of Portuguese. And so on. The United States of America consists of myriad tribes, some intersecting, some overlapping, and some mutually exclusive. So what holds us together? What holds us together other than a few lowest-common-denominator reference points? What happens when those with clout decide to exploit those LCD reference points in order to silence the tribes and maybe even deny their existence? A key element of fascism as I understand it is that people are united only through the leader, or through membership in a symbolic, LCD whole: that orchestrated unity replaces and discourages the organic unities based on our connections with each other. At the same time it seems that often the only thing holding a country together is a strong central authority, and when that strong central authority goes -- as in the USSR, or Yugoslavia, or Iraq -- things get ugly. I have no trouble understanding why so many are drawn into religious unities; as strong central authorities go, "God" is right up there. Still, I believe that diversity and creativity and possibly the survival of the planet depend on another kind of unity, one based on the intersections and confluences of all our myriad tribes. The people with clout (who include most of us, at least part of the time) want an easier, less threatening (to them/us) way out. Damned if I know what the answer is.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||