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GOOD RIDDANCE
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” my brothers and I would say back in the Fifities, amplifying the sentiment with the extra words instead of swears, which had yet to come into fashion. Ordinarily I’m pretty blasé about the turning of the calendar page, but 2008 has been different. After sweating out whether The Decider would decide to start a war with Iran to distract people from their economic woes, and fearing this might be the year when computer hi jinks turned the seemingly fair elections into fascist exhibitions, and worrying whether the American people would once again be lulled by bold promises and bald-faced lies, I’m so glad to see this year turn into the Past.
“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade….”
So wrote W.H. Auden in “First September 1939,” the day when Germany invaded Poland, after which England and France declared war on Germany, and the planet began shrugging 70 million people, more or less, off its crusty surface. I can easily imagine myself in Auden’s place, as I sit here at my very remote computer terminal, wondering what this blog should be now that the tempestuous electoral season has become merely pestiferous.
But, there is hope at last, even if the corniness of that word seems as high as an elephant’s eye. There’s work to be done, good work.
One pledge I’ll make to you, as the year turns, is to make this blog more of a companion to the one that covers Southern Vermont’s art scene. Specifically, since it’s so much easier to find space for pictures online than in print, I plan to post a lot more pictures of exhibitions and galleries, so that even people who can’t travel to see creative work can get some idea what is going on.
I’ll start doing so right away, with a piece on the Frog Hollow State Crafts Center. But not in this piece of shoveling out.
Bad as it looked in 1939, and as close as we came to losing that war (a lot closer than most people realize), we came through World War Two—those of us who did come through. If we keep at it, we’ll get the better of this challenge, too. As somebody or other said, a crisis is too good an opportunity to waste.
Or as Auden wrote, at the end of “First September 1939,”
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
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