From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Tue Oct 04 2005 - 14:21:52 BST
Case stated to Platt September 25th:
I actually remember the kind of system I am comfortable with. I remember a
time when I had hope for the future of our people. You are going to love
this one Platt.
It was the 1960's. It was a difficult time to be sure. There was the Cold
War, Vietnam and the assassinations or our leaders by terrorists. But there
were other things as well. The Civil Rights movement showed that we were
finally coming to terms with the power of the beliefs we had set as the
foundation of our nation. We were willing to deal at last with the blight of
racism. A blight we had enshrined in our constitution. These are exactly the
points I have been trying to make here. During that period we as a people
were willing to reexamine the way we had been treating our fellow citizens
for a 100 years. The same people we had enslaved for 150 years before that.
We began to see the consequences or our failure to Value a significant
portion of our population.
Under a Dynamic leader we had set our sites on the stars and actively
promoted scholarship and science in the pursuit of an impossible dream. I
can't watch Apollo 13 without breaking into tears over the majesty of the
vision, the intensity of our commitment to the men and mission and the
tragedy of having thrown it all away. In a recent anniversary screening of
the movie, Frank Lovell was interviewed. His comments on the spirit of
commitment at NASA during that time and his distress over the political
failure to push that vision forward through the 70's (read: Nixon era) was
heart breaking.
We saw that by working together we could do the impossible and in the
process make discoveries that would have lasting benefits for everyone on
this planet. It was a time when money was not the only thing that people
valued. But ultimately it is our baser instincts that seem to have won the
day. Those baser instincts like greed and lust for power that you seem to
Value so highly. It was a very dynamic time on many fronts and apparently a
lot of static latches got tripped. Much of the evil in the present results
from backlash against those days.
Your failure to recognize that there is a higher good than money or that
people other than U.S. citizens have any right to self determination and
your failures understand our system of finance and politics would be
shocking if:
a. I believed you were serious
b. You weren't parroting views trumpeted in our media by supposedly serious
people.
Ant McWatt comments:
Case,
I enjoyed the above piece of writing. It reminded me of Paul McCartney’s
observation in the mid-1990s that the Sixties still seemed like the future
to him. Again, I think it was because of the number of “static latches
[that] got tripped” then in the arts and in the political arena which still
haven’t been followed through or developed yet.
I have to agree with you that it has been a great pity the ways things have
generally turned out in the West since the Sixties. I know there was a
certain hedonist degeneracy with the hippie era but since then, the US and
UK and moved towards a far worse type of conservative degeneracy as seen in
Watergate (Platt is always very quiet about that certain right-wing
episode), military actions (as seen in Iraq) and a materialist, selfish
ethos of fear (as seen in the governments of Thatcher, Raygun, Bush etc).
I do hope therefore that Pirsig’s work will eventually provide more balanced
individuals their own foundation of moral values that can be used to fill
the vacuum left by Hippie hedonism and, at the same time, challenge the
present right-wing hegemony. As Liberal politicians need to realise, moral
values don’t necessarily have to mean the political agenda of neo-con
Fundamentalist Christianity. As such, and as a small step in the correct
direction, maybe people should consider sending their local Liberal
candidate a copy of ZMM or LILA!
Best wishes,
Anthony.
www.robertpirsig.org
.
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