Gloom and doom from Gioia

Dana Gioia op-ed on why literature matters . Do the math: declining participation in the arts, fewer young people reading literature, deficient reading skills among workers, mass ignorance of history, etc. Is it any wonder ... [insert anything Bush has gotten away with in the last 4 years here] .... I mentioned this to my old friend Mort Allman, and he says he's a contrarian about this issue: "no wringing of hands from this clown. I'll be bathing in warm showers of schadenfreude, as a post-future of economic dysfunction, knuckleheadedness, and educational meltdown descends upon a nation of bankrupt, pitiless, illiterate Walmart standbyes. As the world gets stupider, the smart people [those who aren't scapegoated and flayed] will see a big rise in their intellectual stock price. It's a supply/demand thing," he said. "We've utterly failed to make democratic education work the way it's supposed to. It should be creating an ethic of service and citizenship while at the same time encouraging the development of freethinking tolerant individuals. Instead we get the muck of 'No child left behind', which really means no child allowed to think for herself. Everybody gets to stand in line at the meatgrinder. It's like Pink Floyd's the Wall, man. Or like the videogame Lemmings; we move en masse towards the cliff edge. And that's when the revolution gets its legs... saving society from itself." That's when I told Mort it's not as bad as all that, that you have to understand that people have always been more stupid than smart, more foolish than wise. Life is short, art long. We may be receding slowly and steadily, the fadeout of a great civilization in decline, but there'll always be somebody who manages to keep the light going. You see flickers all around you, if you look. A classroom here, a lunch counter there. Somebody climbs a tree and thinks of a rhyme. Another carries a baby in her arms and imagines something better for her child. Somewhere a kid tosses a rock at a brick wall, and from his anomie springs a curiosity: what's in that book peeking from the recycle bin? Maybe there's something I need in there. Something to take me away from THIS.