A Message from the Mayor

A friend contacted me, a friend who I just discovered is mayor of his town, and told me that he has run into difficulty posting comments to this page. Fortunately he saved his last comment, which you will find below, before Google Blogger sucked it into its ether:

There's a lot of brow-furrowing going on among the press regarding what on earth is causing so many people to kill themselves, either deliberately or through over-doing various means of escape. I keep thinking, maybe it's that life for huge numbers of people is simply not worth living any more. Why is that possibility never considered? I agree with you about the fractured horizon. There's no horizon left because we have trained ourselves to see only money, money and its absence, in a sweeping plain that has no focal points left. Every last thing has either been reified or obliterated. Public spaces, where convivial but random social encounters might occur, have been made unpleasant or have become overcome by the pleasures of virtual space via cell phones. We are taught in every imaginable way, subtle and direct, that money and its lack really is everything, and the degree to which you don't have it is the degree to which you must register shame. What you said in another post about the futility of re-creating rock and roll is part of this: that music was of a time when there was hope and opportunity to be found in rejecting the status quo, and that hope and opportunity transcended gender and race in the countries where rock and roll thrived. What is there now? Recreating Rock is like trying to recreate epic poetry. It's not that the audience is gone, it's that the entire set of preconditions, the whole environment, has been obliterated. You can't grow tigers and rainforests on Baffin Island. But we too have been ripped from that environment and thrust into a new one, this one, and frankly it sucks, and it doesn't surprise me at all that so many people choose to leave it.