Spoken Word Piece

Tuesday night

I was in England, and was standing on a large, open lawn, watching an avant garde piece performed by boys and girls from an academy of elite students. They wore matching dark blue blazers, and were gathered together as if they were a choir. Their teacher, an older man with white hair, stood behind them; he was wearing a brown suit. As the performance began, various students called out words and phrases, seemingly in no apparent order. No one spoke over anyone else, and the play was not ad-libbed; it was scripted. Everyone knew their part in advance. And so it continued, for several minutes, with the teacher contributing at one point, and finally ending with someone on the front left letting out a scream. When the performance was over, all of us walked to the road which would take us back to the school, off to the right. I overheard someone saying that the teacher lived nearby. I caught up to the teacher and said, "I enjoyed the performance, but what did it mean?" He said, "What do you think it means?" I said, "Well, we're devolving, particularly in America. We were progressing toward enlightenment, but now we're headed in the other direction." He replied, "That's right."

*****

In my few trips to Europe I have gotten the feeling that they are light years ahead of the United States, which is stuck in the Dark Ages in many ways (still fighting over evolution, etc.). Sometimes I allow myself to hope that a President Obama might lift the veil and head us back in the direction of intelligence and progress. Yet, living in Tennessee, I have my doubts that America will elect a black man, particularly one with a "foreign-sounding" name. Yesterday an older coworker said to me, "This is gonna' sound bad, but I'm just not ready for a 'President Obama.' I said, "How is that any stranger than a 'President Eisenhower?'"