There is a law of diminishing returns that states that a benefit will require an ever increasing input of energy to maintain a fixed result. In the United States, in early 2017, we witnessed a casual amount of bullshitting by our nominally-elected president. The outrage and shock by the citizenry was high. But today, after a daily onslaught of lies, outrage, insults to humanity, insults to intelligence, and insults to any sense of ethics or morality, our president has to work ever harder to continue to keep the country in a boil. One wonders how a person of his seniority has the stamina for this, but he clearly does. Anger, pettiness, vindictiveness, spite, narcissism, and sheer meanness are, apparently, their own reward – with a bottomless well of energy gained in ego-stimulation.
I have spent two months in Europe this summer. During that time, I met only one Trump supporter: an older white man, curiously, from Canada. That’s not surprising that I encountered none; statistics show that the vast majority of Trump supporters don’t own a passport, much less have a desire to leave the country and explore different perspectives. Back home, I often hear people tell me that San Franciscans live in a bubble, completely out of touch with what it means to be an American today. Well, if that’s true, then all of Europe is in the same bubble. At some point the bubble is not a bubble but the reality that the name-callers refuse to recognize.
Simply put, if there’s one thing that this summer has taught me, it’s that if you’re not outraged by what’s going on, you’re not awake.Why, you might ask, would a musician, who blogs about performing, bother to care about this political quagmire we, as Americans, are in? Simple! Like religion and politics being inextricably linked (it’s where we get our moral code of ethics), politics and art are also inextricably linked.
It’s more than the fact that the best art has always come from periods of peace and prosperity. For at least 1000 years, artists have traveled extensively. Their expression of art has always gained from the exposure to outside ideas. I, too, fall into that lineage of traveling artists. There’s absolutely no question about the benefit, to my musical expression, of extensive travel. Always, my hosts and friends abroad are respectful of the differences and customs of each country and region. But never before, until now, have I been embarrassed to be an American. Never before has our country been a laughing stock as it is now. In a mere 32 months, Trump has done irrevocable damage to our reputation, how we function in the world at large, and by extension, how I function in the world at large.
A week ago I was in Denmark for two concerts. My visit there happened to coincide with Trump’s offer to buy Greenland (a protectorate of Denmark). The shock, the amusement, the disbelief of all the Danes I spoke with, could fill an entire chapter of a book. But the amusement and eye-rolling quickly turned to outrage and anger at being manipulated when Trump canceled his scheduled trip to Denmark. The cost of hosting an American president is not inconsequential, not to mention the many lives that are required to organize this. To dismiss a nation’s hospitality as being something one isn’t interested in, because they refused to grant your ridiculous request, is a high crime in my “book.”
Yes, people are able to distinguish between citizenship and governments. But they also ask me, repeatedly: “Don’t most Americans agree with him?” And I have to admit that, while I don’t think so, I don’t actually know.
There are many angry Americans who are so angry that they are willing to punish the world for being left behind. It doesn’t take an astute student of history to know that even though history can repeat itself, it never goes backwards. We are entering a major sociological shift from the industrial age to the technological age. That shift has a catalyst of unfathomable power, namely social media. At the same time, the end result of our industrial revolution was unfathomable ecological destruction. You put those two phenomena together (sociological shift and a very imminent mass migration caused by climate change) and you’ve got a recipe for fear and hysteria.
Let’s call this for what it is: global suicide. And let’s look for a solution in the same place we counsel those who call suicide prevention hotlines: Find community. What does that mean for the globe? It means we need to end seeing ourselves as separate from each other. I believe that countries will need only to maintain their cultural specificity. The other option, nationalism, builds walls where bridges are needed.
And yes, music holds one of the possible keys to that bridge. The Resonance Project, that I have founded, looks at how music effects our brain so that we can find common ground where there has been difference. It’s a start!