A Perfect Enmity to the Good

I’ve been thinking a whole lot lately about the old adage “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The historian of religion Karen Armstrong would say that this saying is an indication of the tension between mythos and logos—the eternal ideal vs. the practical real.

And while I’m sure that’s the way it was intended, it also reveals the relative limitations of our ability to imagine the ideal to begin with: our notions of the perfect tend to simply be the opposite of what worries us from day to day. So if you’re a slave in a sweatshop, your concept of heaven will be freedom and wealth. If you’re an overworked accountant, your picture of the afterlife will overflow with leisure.

The problem, of course, is that if we actually had our perfect worlds, it wouldn’t be very long before we’d all be perfectly bored.

Twain and Shaw both wrote much better about this issue than I’d ever be able to, but the problem says a lot about the human psyche: that psyche is bounded by its environment, penned in by its laundry folding and dish sudsing and Master Card payments and dead Diehards in the Mercury Montego.

Confronted with constant anxiety-producing crap, the imagination, in its boundlessness, heads in the opposite direction. La-La Lands have no zits and no creditors and no dropped cell phone calls.

Which is all fine and good as far as it goes. Pretty soon, however, we start to actually believe in it, especially when our lives get really frustrating or genuinely bad: bankruptcy, joblessness, Hurricane Katrina. Millennialist cults all seem to derive from distressed personal and political situations, from the eschatology of Jesus growing from the dissolution of Jewish culture under Greece and Rome, to the cargo cults of the South Pacific reacting to the dissolution of their cultures by the modern world, to the Ghost Shirt Dance of the Native Americans appearing from the dissolution of their cultures and bodies by the white man’s bullets and broken treaties.

We look to our ideals, our myths, for deliverance from our practical circumstances which frequently suck.

Even though it has been our own corporate class that has sold us out instead of a foreign invader, America is currently in a state of decline. In the 1950s and 1960s, even a relatively poorly educated factory worker could make a decent, middle-class living. This lead to a decades-long period of religious and cultural moderation, if not downright liberality. Women began to expand their social rights and minorities to gain their civil rights, and just at its apogee, the government started to genuinely (if inefficiently) act to relieve the plight of the poor.

But as corporate America realized the incredible profits to be made in cutting wages and offshoring work, and as conservatives gained power under Reagan/Bush and during the Republican Revolution of the ’90s, the assumptions that had once undergirded social advancement in America began to seem less and less realistic. Middle class wages stagnated during this period, where they continue to languish, and working class wages actually declined. With the laws favoring the corporate and investor classes and with little other recourse against the vagaries of layoffs and outsourcing, Americans began to cling to their ideals as all they had left.

Traditional American ideals—even those of immigrants and minorities—tend to exclude immigrants and minorities. Our ideals, steeped in conservative Christianity, militate against homosexuals, heathens and the poor. Just as they were screwing us the most, we clung the strongest to the conservatives, who continue to hold sway in our day-to-day lives, no matter a change in Congress. The mid-term elections of ’06 might indicate that we are finally waking up to how self-deluded we have been, but it remains to be seen whether or not those we actually elected will be willing to get down to the business of making this nation better for the real people who live here. So far, the Democratic Congress has provided little cause for optimism; they’re still fighting the last battle with the Republicans and actually think that they got elected because of values. Nothing could be further from the truth: America is still fettered by its conservative ideals. We’re simply now more willing to collectively compromise because those ideals are getting in the way of putting food on the table.

Striving for the perfect in an unperfect world, whether or not that striving comes from a fundamentalist reading of the Bible or the Koran or even the U.S. Constitution, tends to kill people, who are themselves imperfect and therefore obstacles to the ultimate goal. There are no single mothers or infidels or atheists or adulterers or secular humanists in anybody’s view of heaven, so those who bomb them off the face of the Earth with a fighter plane or the belt of C-4 strapped to their chests feel comfortable in knowing that they won’t meet the angry souls of those they’ve killed when they make that journey to the Other Shore themselves.

And that’s the real problem: peace, for as much as the warmongers would argue otherwise, is a very practical sort of thing. Disagreement and struggle, suffering and strife are inevitable parts of being alive, of course, but war is the purposeful and (usually) planned disruption of the otherwise normative human suffering taking place on the basis of individual and community. Peace is actually good for business in the long term. It’s good for study and farming and making love. It’s good for pondering over one’s pipe and tumbler of brandy. Peace is conducive to fixing one’s Volvo. There is no such thing, at least in this world, as a perfect peace. We wouldn’t want that anyway, and we waste our time and cause trouble when we strive for one. But the sort of practical peace that we can achieve accepts that this world and the people in it, its owls and moose old-growth pines, are imperfect–and that such is the point of the good.

Independence Day Freedom in Review

Now that the would-be bombers in Great Britain have all been tracked with closed-circuit television, the FBI is going to want a CCTV network for the U.S., and We, The People are likely to agree. There are all kinds of reasons this is a bad idea, and I don’t need to echo the sadness most civil libertarians feel at the willingness of Americans to part with their rights. Among the rights we frequently forget is the one forbidding unlawful search and seizure, which, if we had the kind of CCTV coverage England has, would certainly be violated 24/7. But then, Britain does not have a Bill of Rights, so they can get away with it. We should not let our law-enforcement agencies get away with that here.

But what’s as frustrating as our willingness to part with our rights as Americans in order to “fight” terrorism is that we wouldn’t feel the need to had the U.S. and Western Europe engaged in a more enlightened foreign policy over the last few centuries. Our unbridled hubris and basic lack of consideration for the consequences of our own actions have pissed off the very people we now fear as terrorist threats, but that same hubris does not allow us to come to terms with our own complicity in our problems.

Even the fact of a substantial population of pissed off Muslims in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the U.S. is the result of colonial powers having wrecked the crap out of much of the world or the U.S. having overthrown popular governments and replaced them with evil dictators during the Cold War. Dangerous émigrés would never have emerged had their home countries been more livable, or had their cultures not been co-opted by those of their oppressors.

I am not saying that all of this is our fault, of course: terrorism is reprehensible and uncalled for by any account. But I am saying it all could have been relatively easily avoided had we in the West put even half the thought into diplomacy that we put into invasive schemes of law enforcement or Machiavellian schemes of invasion in other nations the world over.

I Can’t Paint with Fat Paintbrushes

Helgi Tomasson, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet, was quoted in Dance Magazine saying this many years ago. The external pressure exerted on dancers to look a certain way and the resultant frailty of a dancer’s relationship to her body has been well documented by scientists (the female athlete triad of ammenorhea, anorexia, high-energy exercise). It has also been told countless times in stories and folklore passed on in the aural tradition, how all dance ephemera continue in the dance consciousness.

In an American company dancers would hide rolls of quarters in their buns for the weekly weigh-in. This way they could continue to starve themselves while staying above minimum weight. In another German company dancers put cotton in their jello, helping their stomachs feel full while depriving their bodies of nutritive value.

One famous ballerina limited herself to one apple only a day while unable to dance from injury, maintaining her weight of 90 lbs. She was also so weak, she was forced to alter choreography–no longer having the stamina to perform the famous 32 fouettes in the Don Quixote pas, she instead did a series of pique turns.

The scientific facts along with this tiny fragment of the folklore being passed down is alarming and horrific. But dancers continue to feel the pressure to be thin to the point of being too weak to move. Just a few years ago an etoile of the Paris Opera Ballet was fired because she was considered too heavy. She was 110 lbs.

This weekend I was approached by my artistic director. He told me to lose weight, or he would not create a pas de deux on me and also not send me on tour to New York. I felt deeply ashamed of my body, its imperfections, its quirks and changes. I felt incompetant and unworthy. Then I remembered myself. I went back to him the following day. I said no.