Banality epidemic | a nationwide memory loss

Poster (©2017) Roy R. Behrens

Studs Terkel in Touch and Go: A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 2007, p.232 and 236—

“Banality” is the operative word…

Britney Spears, a pop singer, shaves her head and goes into rehab. Most Americans know her name. She is a celebrity. None of the contestants in a recent episode of Jeopardy, a popular TV quiz show, knew who Strom Thurmond was. For most of the twentieth century, on the floor of the Senate, he was the drum major of segregation. Not even his fathering a black child was within the ken of the Jeopardy participants. Nor did they know the name of Kofi Annan (the newly former United Nations secretary general).…

What happens to all Alzheimer’s sufferers is tragic. What I’m talking about is what I call a national Alzheimer’s—a whole country has lost its memory. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be.

We’re sinking under our national Alzheimer’s disease. With Alzheimer’s you forget what you did yesterday. With Alzheimer’s finally, you forget not only what you did, but also who you are. In many respects, we [in the US] have forgotten who we are.

We’re now in a war [in Iraq] based on an outrageous lie [about “weapons of mass destruction”], and we are held up to the ridicule and contempt of the world. What has happened? Have we had a lobotomy performed on us? Or it it something else? I’m saying it is the daily evil of banality.

life is an ever-shifting network of categories

Poster (© 2019) Roy R. Behrens

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior and the Arts. New York: Chilton Books, 1965—

Our lives are bathed in a continuous flow of signs which we interpret to catch the world in an ever-shifting network of categories. The condition of human life is continuous categorical metamorphosis. We are forever engaged in constructing around us an architecture of categories as fluid and yielding to our interests as the air. There is nothing man has not sacrificed, including millions of his fellow human beings, in the vain effort to fix that architecture, to stabilize his categories. But all knowledge, all science, all learning, all history, all thought are unstable, cannot be made static, even by the majesty of the law armed with the power of brute force.

Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos

Grosz Injustice

Above Photograph of George Grosz (1930). Photographer unknown. 

...

Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 145—

One day [artist Kurt] Schwitters decided he wanted to meet George Grosz. George Grosz was decidedly surly; the hatred in his pictures often overflowed into his private life. But Schwitters was not one to be put off. He wanted to meet Grosz, so [Walter] Mehring took him up to Grosz’s flat. Schwitters rang the bell and Grosz opened the door. 

“Good morning, Herr Grosz. My name is Schwitters.” “I am not Grosz,” answered the other and slammed the door. There was nothing to be done. 

Half way down the stairs, Schwitters stopped suddenly and said, “Just a moment.” 

Up the stairs he went, and once more rang Grosz’s bell. Grosz, enraged by this continual jangling, opened the door, but before he could say a word, Schwitters said “I am not Schwitters either.” And went downstairs again. Finis. They never met again.

Grosz Italian Topping

From George Grosz, George Grosz: An Autobiography. Nora Hodges, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 79—

He [a fellow art student named Kittelson] was teasing me one day at lunch about my "dandyism" and kept on undoing my brand new bow tie. I let him have fun for quite a while, kept my temper, and patiently retied the bow. Finally it was too much—my pride was wounded, the more so especially as other art students at a nearby table also started to make fun of me. With a devil-may-care smile, I asked him to stop, but encouraged by the laughing approval of the others, he continued. I was seized with a veritable Old Testament fury. I took my plate of Italian salad and emptied the entire contents on his head. Hands shaking with rage, I gave his head a powerful massage. It was a real Fratellini clown scene, and now the laughter and approval was on my side. My roguish friend, quite disconcerted by this unexpected shampoo, stepped lively to the men's room.