The Real Choice in This Election

In a 1971 essay entitled “The Bible,” Ken Kesey wrote about what he felt was the most important of questions, the one he felt the Bible addresses: do we treat those around us as tools to be used or as people bound together with us and with God?

To make his point, he asked his reader to compare two artistic views of American forests. One view used to frequently grace the pages of magazines back in the ’60s and ’70s — ads by Weyerhaeuser, the wood products corporation, in which they touted their good stewardship of their forests. Their ad was accompanied with a picture of a nice forest scene, replete with nice forest animals — entirely nice, entirely serving their point, which was to make their products attractive in a time when there was much concern over damage caused by foresting practices then in vogue. It was all nice.

The other view was from the magnificent coffee-table sized collection of the photographs of Eliot Porter, then in his 80s, entitled In Wildness. Kesey wrote of Porter’s book:

His eerily profound pictures of rocks and flowers and trees convey a concentration so intense that my first time through the book I remember becoming nauseous when I found myself tripping on the pictures to such a degree that I thought I had been dosed.

Weyerhaeuser’s art was serving the purpose of selling the products of the forests it owned; Porter’s art was tracing the infinite depths of the art the Creator has put into His world. Paraphrasing how Kesey puts it, there’s all the difference in the world between that and the point of view of one who acts on the belief that if you can’t sell stuff to somebody, then it can’t be worth much. 

I’ve had my own pet comparison to illustrate the same point. I grew up with Winnie the Pooh with the original illustrations of E. H. Shepard. His drawings of Christopher Robin, Eeyore, and Winnie the Pooh were welcoming and delightful to a small child and their enchantment only increases with age.

Shepard does not draw the characters as treacly; there is no condescension whatsoever in them. Those traits may sell movies and merch, which is just fine, but they do not bring us into wonder. Shepard did that. He joined us in the wonder of the imagination which we discover as children and which we need all our lives. And that is a world that is both powerful and dangerous — Christopher Robin senses that his world is both beautiful and fragile — and we know that with some precision as adults that the lesson of such art is all the more necessary.

Compare that to the roly-poly saccharine Pooh of Disney’s cartoon, which has more in common with the bear touting the virtues of Charmin for his posterior than to Shepard’s Winnie. There is no wonder there — only its sellable simulacrum. 

Disney did not start out that way. The art of his early movies was no mere imitation. The image of the Wicked Queen standing before her mirror in Snow White haunts the mind as an archetype of evil.  The multiplying brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence from Fantasia imprints itself on the mind the way Frankenstein did in the 19th century, warning us that the work of our hands can turn very, very dangerous when we think that our power is all we need in the world. 

But Disney left that kind of depth behind. In recent years, its run onto the shoals. It has plunked for politicized art, which does not trust the viewer or the creator, but relies on its conformity with an intolerant culture to manipulate our assent. A ticket to its products serves as admission to the Uniculture’s approval. One must assent to the message and buy the product because of the pressure of the regnant ideology which requires obeisance in every area of life — and which sickens everything it touches.

Learning to distinguish between the invitation to depth and wonder on the one hand and manipulation on the other, Kesey was saying, is a lesson that applies to the art of life as well as art in the smaller sense.

Kesey pointed towards Martin Buber’s philosophy of relationship, that the prime reality in life is relationship, and we choose one of two kinds: I-It, in which the other is merely a cipher, an ‘it,’ whom we mean to use as long as it is useful to us; and I — Thou, meaning we relate to the other as having the same kind of innate value as we know in ourselves, and not reducible to mere usefulness.

This all follows from Genesis 1 — the human being is created in the image of God and is not reducible to anything. The Infinite One has invested us with infinite worth, and the test of our true humanity is how we live this understanding in every single choice we make. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Grant Power Only to the Accountable) 

This principle applies to politics as well. The vision of Shepard was not of airbrushed perfection, but of a genuine lovability. Pooh was silly, Pooh could be weak, as could all the other characters in that book — but they showed their soul, and we loved them not in spite of those flaws but because of them — we felt kinship precisely because we see Pooh as sharing the shortcomings we work to overcome every day.

Porter’s photos showed everything in the forest, the rot and the mud as well as the blazing autumn leaves and mighty tree trunks. The dizzying detail in which the whole range of what Aristotle called generation and corruption was all on display and it is the totality of the vision that makes it real, affective, memorable — and part of us, together in God’s creation.

Why Real Matters

Analyze our current political content by this same sure criterion. Is your candidate looking to sell you a partially real vision crafted to extract your vote, but which can establish no lasting bond of trust? Or is your candidate candidly flawed, but entirely real, and who throws himself with complete reliance on your recognizing his commitment, in faith that that act of trust will bring us all closer to national redemption? (READ MORE: We the People Can Break the Culture of Lies)

The campaign already had its signal moment, when bloodied and pushed to the ground Trump stood up, pumped his fist, and yelled “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

As Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said at the RNC podium (and think of that! a Teamsters president speaking to the Republican convention!):

I think we all can agree whether we like him or don’t like him — in the light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough SOB.

It isn’t hard to discern when you are looking. What is real touches us deeply. We sense the difference clearly between depth and shallowness. Check: is the candidate being sold by artifice and by careful management, trying to find the way to extract votes that trusts the voter very little and commits to the voter even less? Or is the candidate a whole and real person, warts and all, who trusts the voter enough to put forward all that he is, seeking to create a sustaining bond of ongoing trust?

There is the choice.

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