The Real Architects of Change

I saw a bumper sticker the other day: “Siri for president.” I laughed out loud. Who wouldn’t want a truly smart person to lead us who could provide direction, information, and assistance on nearly anything, in a pleasant voice, even-tempered, polite, professional and unbiased?

I suppose it would, after all, take a skillfully programmed, artificial intelligence to do that. Which is sad, when you think about it. Why can’t humans be as intelligent and as nice?

Singer-songwriter, Julie Gold, who gave us the Bette Midler song, “From a Distance,” was interviewed a few years ago and was asked what she might have been if she had not been a musician. She said,

“I've never had any other loving heartfelt desire. From the minute I heard music I knew why I was born. To make music to play, to listen to music; and for some reason I have been lucky enough to live this beautiful life as a musician. I don't know. I don't know what else I would have done, because I love music too much. For anyone who has that calling and is trying also to make a living at it, it is really hard. Getting gigs and getting listened to. Getting respect, it's hard. It’s what bonds us all because we have been so rejected and dejected. Yet we know in our hearts why we are here.”

“We know in our hearts why we are here.” What a beautiful statement of self-confidence and yet humility. Since a child, she knew she was born to be a musician.

I truly wish we had a musician, or a novelist, or a poet, or a painter or sculptor, to be our president. They live out of their hearts. They understand human emotions. Most of them have had to work hard, grueling years, often through long periods when their gifts were never noticed, rejected and dejected, as Julie Gold said, with no financial rewards. They know how to survive. Many of them, even those who have highly succeeded, have no real interest in fame or big money. They produce art because they have lived it, and they love it, and it touches us where most of us live. Broken relationships. Lost love. The brutality and waste of war. The lethalness of hate. The wreckage of greed. Death. Loss. Grief. The thrill of intimacy. The glory of color. The magnificence of music. Songs that bring us to tears or lift us into heights of euphoria. Novels that leave us collapsed in frightening self-awareness and longing or help us enter a world of tenderness and utter compassion. Paintings that astonish, overcome us, and move us to reverence. Poems that reveal our deepest feelings and send us exhausted from their truth.

Could sculptors Frederic Remington (old west figures) or Gutzon Borglum (Mt. Rushmore) have led our country well? Could we have been in good stead under the presidency of Walt Whitman, Georgia O’Keefe or Ansel Adams? Would Etta James or Aretha Franklin or Toni Morrison or Mary Oliver been capable to run our nation properly? Yes. In every instance, yes.

Picasso once said, “We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.”

Give us leaders with that kind of passion and devotion to ideas and yearnings greater than themselves and we would have some kind of government.

Writer William Burroughs—iconoclastic, brutally honest, visionary—once said that artists are the real architects of change.

How right he was. They lend their brilliance to us in gifts of words, photographs, songs, paintings, sculptures, ideas, insights, vistas and images, lyrics and sounds that inspire us to acts of courage, to deeds of transformation, to insights into ourselves and our world that challenge us to love better and to live openly and alive.

I may very well write in Mark Twain this year. What a president he would have made.

If I had five minutes to evacuate--what would I take with me?

If I was told there was a bomb in my building and I had five minutes to evacuate my apartment I’d grab a grocery bag and quickly toss these items into it: 1. A photo of my grandparents, Mom and Pop and me, when I was 15 years old. I learned what love is made of from them. I learned what it is to be kissed on and hugged in arms so tender they felt like God’s arms. I discovered self worth from those two angels in human flesh. Of all the people in my life, they were the ones who made me feel I counted. Honestly, whatever capacity I have to love others came from them. 2. A sentimental, dog-eared, stars in the margin copy of Pat Conroy’s, “The Prince of Tides.” It is a book I have read three times and often return to for its wisdom. It is a harsh, profoundly tragic novel, the story of a family so broken and tortured by such flawed and wounded people that it is sometimes difficult to turn the next page. And yet it is the story of such Herculean courage and endurance that you want...

A Losing Strategy

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OPINION PAGE:

OPINION PAGE © 2024 Timothy Moody The apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump last Sunday afternoon at his Trump International Golf Club was foiled by the Secret Service. Details are still coming in about it, and it's not yet known why the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, apparently wanted to shoot Trump. The botched attempt was amateurish in every way, just as the one in July was by a kid 150 yards from Trump. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day. The former President is, of all things, blaming these attempts on his life with what he called the “violent rhetoric” of President Biden and VP Harris. Of course, that is absurd, especially coming from Trump, who has consistently been guilty of that very thing since he became president in 2016 and even before. His speeches, X posts, and comments on his Truth Social platform have been endlessly filled with threatening language and incitement to violence. He suggested those protest...

The Unclad Soul

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