The Transition House, Inc. Collage Contest Entry Received an Honorable Mentioned!
Along with the Ribbon and Recognition, Hideaway Pizza presented a $100 check that the clients have donated to a special client fund at Transition House, Inc.
After hours of discussion, debate, and lots of cutting and pasting, this
wonderful collage is the final product that the client's submitted in the
Hideaway Pizza Collage Contest 2006. The theme of this year's
competition is Oklahoma Politics: Donkeys, Elephants, and Everything in
Between! Below are a some photos of just a few of the many steps that
went into creating the final product. A very special thanks and
recognition goes to the clients who worked for hours on end on this special
project - with special thanks to Elizabeth, Recovery Coordinator at Transition
House, inc., who worked lots of late nights and extra hours to make this project
a huge success.
Along with the collage, an essay was submitted. The following is an essay written by Chuck that goes along with the Collage:
OKLAHOMA POLITICS
The Donkey and the Elephant and Everything in Between
Transition House Inc., Norman Oklahoma
Essay by Chuck Miller
Symbolism is a very useful communication tool in a society as complex and busy as ours. A wealth of assumptions, ideas and history can be suggested instantly with the display of some iconic image that we are conditioned to respond to. Flash a swastika, for example, and the response will be immediate and predictable. Unless you are some sort of deluded radical, the response will be negative in the extreme. Impressions of tyranny, oppression, rigid control, war, murder and genocide will flit through your mind and an enormous amount of data will be conveyed immediately, without a single word being spoken.
Very convenient, you'll agree. A direct line to the history of our culture, the landscape of human ideas, even the Jungian collective unconscious. We are a people obsessed with icons and archetypes, from the Christian cross to the grinning face of Mickey Mouse. There is a kind of beauty in this, but as with anything so powerful and all-pervasive, it should be approached with extreme caution. The potential for misuse is great, and has been realized time and again throughout human history. It is almost a form of telepathy, or perhaps hypnotism would be a better analogy. We almost worship them. They are totemic objects.
To go with all that, we seem to have a crying need as a people to divide ourselves up along imaginary lines, vague or specific generalizations from within whose walls we may launch attacks at the members of other artificial convocations of people. We must belong to something and we must hate something else. This may be an expression of natural selection, the competitive urge in its most primal, bloody-minded form, which may not be as vestigal as we might want to believe.
At some point, the symbols become meaningless. It is simply us against them, with no definition of terms. The donkey and the elephant have been bled dry of meaning. "Liberal" and "conservative" can be so broadly defined, and usually are, that generalizations and assuumptions take the place of actual signal. Really, it is intellectually sloppy. More than that, it is incredibly inimical, as we have seen time after time in the world. It discourages critical thinking, examination of evidence, logic itself.
We have so few natural enemies, we have had to start making them ourselves. And since we see ourselves as the pinnacle of God's creation, superior to every living thing on the earth, the only way to make it a really sporting proposition is to recruit from our own ranks. As Pogo Possum once said in Walt kelley's wonderful comic strip, "We have met the enemy and he is us." We create our own subspecies based on arbitrary distinctions and we go to war.
The more night-and-day, black-and-white the distinctions are, the better. Republicans are shifty, greedy, cold, plutoratic. Democrats are freewheeling, irresponsible, tolerant of sin and crime. So, our perceived strengths and weaknesses become moral and ideological rather than physical. All of which is absurd, of course. John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, came from a family that had managed to put back a few dollars, or so I have heard. He was an inveterate adulteror and was probably complicit in a few felonies. But he espoused programs that would aid the poor and generally improve the landscape of society as a whole. And he was involved in attempts to remove the more-or-less duly elected leader of a sovereign nation by secret and treacherous means. This theme, in fact, runs through the tapestry of American history, Democratic and Republican alike. And that is what has led us to the state we find ourselves in today. It isn't really Bush's fault. It isn't Clinton's fault. It is the logical outcome of a reckless foreign policy of empire-building and empire-toppling that stretches back from Iraq through Iran, through Vietnam, through the Phillipines, through Haiti, back to the Spanish-American War and beyond. September 11 was an egg laid by a particularly nasty chicken that came home to roost. Nor is the united States unique in this respect. The former Soviet Union made a career out of it, and look what happened to them.
The truth is, Democrats and Republicans are like matter and energy-- essentially the same thing, and completely interchangeable.
Our system of government is deeply flawed, as are most human institutions. Look for a moment at the human race as it is today, and do it as objectively as possible, suspending emotional reflexes as best you can. Our technology is awesome and our resources plentiful. Ignore for now the arguments of the right and the left, the religious and the secular. This planet could be a paradise. This is not hypothetical. We could do it right now, today. There is no need for starvation or homelessness, and the effects of disease could be radically reduced with the proper application of things that we currently have at our disposal. We have it. We could do it. We refuse to. Why? There are so few inherent obstructions in the physical world, they are almost not worth mentioning. Everything that bars the door to this utopia is imaginary, artificial divisions conceived in the very worst areas to be found in the minds of men. That is our only impediment. Our own fractured and pertverted nature.
We were never cast out of Eden. In fact, we never even left. We simply transformed Paradise into a wretched hive of scum and villainy. And one of our chief means to this end has been the application of absolutist labels to anything and everything within our sphere.
So what, then, do we find between the elephant and the donkey? Just about what you would expect, the found thing you see when you view the actual animals in a zoo. Piles and piles of it, everywhere. Most of us find ourselves ankle-deep in it, or up a creek of it without a paddle and without a clue. Most of us regard political institutions as forces of nature, things we cannot control and at whose mercy we always are. We seem to have lost track of the notion that a government should exist only to benefit all people equally. It's not "American Idol," not a contest, not a show. Or it shouldn't be. But it is all of that, and worse. If you're smart enough and ruthless enough, it is a mechanism by which you can work your will and yours alone. The constituents are not a factor. Government exist to serve and sustain not the people, but itself. Greed, lies and treachery keep it afloat. The few are enriched and the many, the great unwashed, get whatever the current power-holders feel like giving them. Prosperity today, crushing poverty tomorrow. The system itself is sick and it may flatline any day now. If you bother to think much about it, it will scare you. That's why most people try not to. They place a trust that is partly a response to subtle coersion in their leaders, whom they know to be corrupt, but what's a person to do? We get angry, we feel helpless, paranoia rears its head. We are hemmed in by forces we do not even understand, and cannot control. We are the in-betwennies, people just trying to get along, honest and decent for the most part, but horribly weak-willed and intimidated. The donkey and the elephant both dump in our front yard, just as they please, and we do not stop them because we have forgotten that we can. Strange new neuroses emerge.
"The Scream" by Edvard Munch is another totem that has resonated through the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. As a symbol it is less direct, appealing more to instinct and emotion than intellect. The concept of the global village has been realized, and it has brought with it not enlightenment, but a peculiarly modern mutation of one of mankind's oldest companions. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the dark. Fear of ourselves. When we lived in caves, it was the unseen predators we heard howing in the night. Modern civilization is a bit different. Its literary incarnation can be found in the works of Gogol and of course Franz Kafka. Early rumblings can be found in the work of Dostoyevsky and others. If they were a festering, a slow leak, Kafka was the hemmhorage. Kafka certainly did not create this dreadfully confused state in which man fears nothing so much as that which does not exist. Kafka did not invent this sinister anti-god, nor was he even the first to discover it. But he gave it the first clear voice it ever enjoyed. He became the spokesman for a relatively new cosmology in which danger comes not from without, but from the very institutions we have created to sustain ourselves. The puppet-masters are never visible. There might not even be any. The system itself, brought to life as an expression of our will, is the master. These are the monsters we cannot see, but we hear them in a thousand ways.
In the end, the donkey and the elephant will prove to have been one and the same creature. One day, we may look back and say that Kafka was an optimist, and "The Scream" will seem as winsomely innocent and nostalgiac as that painting of dogs playing poker. Like Victor Frankenstein, we created a monster, and it is choking us to death.