A Meditation on the State of the Union (1992)
By Jacki Apple
This short essay was written in 1992 in conjunction with the six part radio art series Redefining Democracy in America, conceived and produced by Jacki Apple. It was a personal response to the conditions, events, and rhetoric surrounding the L.A. "uprisings" of 1992, and an attempt to place such events in a broader historical context. It was also a response to the "madness" of the election campaigns, and the crisis of consciousness our country faced then, and sadly still faces three decades later in 2020.
Thirty years ago in 1962, James Baldwin wrote in the New York Times, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” A fine parallel to our own historical sentiments declaring not only the prerogative, but the imperative to bear arms against tyranny and injustice. But ideals and the events they precipitate are often subsumed by the enterprise. Our history is fraught with contradictions we have repressed and denied for too long. Thus the "dawn's early light" with its "bombs bursting in air" can have different readings two centuries later, depending on who is invoking that anthem, and whether you are looking down from the top, up from the bottom, or caught in the middle in the crossfire from both sides. What does "the rockets red glare" mean in the heart of the city, in a nation awakening from its delusions and denials into a cold grey twilight, morally bankrupt?
We are a predatory society in which economic priorities supplanted human needs and values very early on. Violence is endemic. Violence begets violence and insurrection and repression are history's bedfellows. Beirut could happen here. El Salvador could happen here. Tiananmen could happen here. Sarajevo could happen here. We could continue to turn each other into racially or ethnically defined objects and sacrifice each other on the altar of power. There are no winners in that scenario. Just as there are no longer any safety zones, no places to hide, no places to run to, no nation on the planet not infected and infested with this vampiric virus Greed, and the hatred it breeds.
We are a nation of looters. We’ve stopped imagining any other way to be. What is a TV set, or a pair of sneakers stolen from a store, in a nation robbed without conscience of billions by a handful of people who control its resources and its wealth? We should not be surprised when the disenfranchised emulate the shameless criminals who govern them. What can we expect in a society so corrupt that a person's worth is measured solely by what s/he owns? We are all addicted, seduced and manipulated into a state of desire that can never be satisfied no matter how much we consume. Making the poor rich and the rich poor will not solve the problem. It will merely change the faces, not the values. This century of betrayed revolutions on every continent, in which the overthrowers of oppression soon became the oppressors, is evidence of that political fact.
Poverty is a state of imbalance. Only a radical shift in our perceptions of what constitutes social and spiritual wellbeing can right the wrongs. Only when each of us truly knows and feels in our hearts and souls that the loss of each and every child to poverty, violence, ignorance, hopelessness, despair, and the degradation of racism and sexism, will diminish our own children's lives and the future they will inhabit, will meaningful rebalancing be achievable.
Racism is endemic and systemic. Racial hatred and fear between whatever combination of white, Black, brown, and Asian is fueled by a system that perpetuates the view that in order to have more someone else must have less, as if that were a law of nature. The result is fear of one's own loss, and resentment of another's gain. Only when we confront this lie, and each begin to understand and believe that when we commit to changing the paradigm we are not being forced to give something up, but are choosing to gain something far more valuable, will we be able to take the steps necessary to achieve social health, economic balance, and environmental harmony.
Education, jobs, racial justice and equal opportunity are all simply words without substance until they are connected to a different set of values that restore meaning to the words we have forgotten—integrity, ethics, respect, tolerance, dignity, grace, honesty, honor; until we seek cooperation over competition, imagination and creativity over profit for its own sake; until we embrace the idea that each of us is capable of achieving and practicing excellence in our daily lives from the smallest tasks to the largest, and that in doing so we each meaningfully contribute to the fabric of life that we are all a part of.
We must confront, recognize and acknowledge our history in order to make a different future, one in which we embrace a way of thinking and a set of values that coincides with the actions we take. Without this there will be no new dawn, only long nights of fire in which our dreams turn to ashes, and our nightmares inhabit the day.
Redefining Democracy in America can be listened to on the New American Radio website at http://www.somewhere.org
JACKI APPLE is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. (https://www.jackiapple.com/index.html) She is the author of the book Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018, and the online column Peripheral Visions (https://fabrikmagazine.com/peripheral-visions) A radio art innovator, she was the producer/host of Soundings KPFK-FM, Los Angeles, 1982-1996. She is Professor Emerita, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.