ot

. HOW DID the world get
Stalled?

That’s my question as we stum-
ble into the last half of the last
decade of the millennium.

It wasn’t all that long ago that
revolutions seemed to be breaking
out everywhere. Radical ideas were
being loosed at every turn.
Demands were being made on
every front for change. I’m speak-
ing really, reaily generally.

But sometimes there is a gencral
truth that is hard to get a handle on
simply because it is like the air we
breathe or the water we swim in:
everywhere. .

The truth of our time is that his-
tory, if not quite over, is bogged
down in a swamp of some kind.

It is more than just a matter of
these being conservative, reac-
tionary times. We are, for the
moment, intellectually exhausted, .
spiritually drained, and politically
numbed.

Nowhere is this feeling more
oppressive than when I prowl
through a bookstore. looking for
something new, fresh, stimulating,
something that pushes the enve-
lope...

Well, there’s no shortage of
material that would have been con-
sidered pretty wild back in the
’60s, and prior ‘o that would have
- -been completely underground.

. Nowadays, you can pick up a
book about anything you want.
Sexually outrageous stuff is so
commonplace, it is to yawn.
Graphics that make your. hair stand
on end? No problem.

There are, of course, more
books available than ever before.
The question is, do they. matter?

:,As an exercise, try to think of a
young literary hero for our time. I
don’t know about you, but nobody
comes to mind for me.

All the mavericks and rogues
are either dead, senile or well past
their prime. —

Where is the Generation X
equivalent of the Angry Young Men
or the Beats?

Where have all the hip poets
gone? Where are the wounded
wordsmiths with the giant egos
whose exploits spilled over into the
mass media? .

Where, indeed, did the Counter
Culture and the “underground” go?
What happened to the Movement,
and why didn't anything emerge in

- its place?

In Canada, we have Margaret
Atwood, Mordecai Richler and we
did have Robertson Davies — but
then, if these are our current stars, I
rest my case. ;

Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat
may still sell, but they don’t exactly
set literary trends on fire.

- Nobody does.

There might be fabulous stylists
here and there, like Graeme
Gibson, but nobody has a good old-
fashioned Ayn Rand-style vision:
nothing is really sweeping and epic
anymore. :

Bob

strict
personal

Literature has followed the pat-
tern of fragmentation into market
niches that has transformed the
world of music.

Just as there are more books
than ever, there is more music. But
can you hum a few bars of any of
it?

Can you remember any contem-

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fled by smal

porary lyrics? Do any new super-
stars stand out from the mob of
superstars crowding the stage?

{t is almost as though everyone
got shipped to the same superstar
school, where they learned the
same formulas for success.

In politics, it’s tempting to say
that we haven't bogged down so
much as turned around and gone
backwards.

In Russia, for God's sake, we
have the spectacle of Communists
getting elected as the poor
baboushkas desperately try to
retreat into the past to escape the
grip of gangsters.

Speaking of Reds, the real mea-
sure of just how stagnant our histo-
ty has become is probably to be
found in the fact that the remaining
Communist countries — China,
Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea —
survive as intact dictatorships,
despite everything.

As for the rest of the world,
deficit-reduction, downsizing,

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streamlining and balancing budgets
seem to be the great themes of our
era.
This is about as inspiring as
scraping old paint off the wall.

It wasn’t that long ago that the
environmental movement seemed
to be the vehicie of revolutionary
change.

Today? We see the Republicans
tearing apart the fragile shield of
legislation that was built up over
the past three decades to protect the
natural world.

At home, we see the federal
Liberals performing a similar func-
tion, quietly dismantling Canada’s
environmental protection jaws
behind closed doors, chasing
aggressively after eco-freaks
instead of polluters, and making the
same old stupid misiakes when it
comes to preserving wildlife that

they have been making all along.

it is difficult to see any signs of
fresh political insight, literary or
artistic vision, or any serious new
philosophies on the horizon.

For years, the hope was, among
other things, that we would learn
the Three Rs. Weil, we have. But
not quite the way some of us
expected.

What we have are recycled
ideas, reused policies, and reduced
everything.

Even those who dv proclaim a
great vision of the future, like the
separatists in Quebec, are simply
talking about a smaller, weaker,
more constrained, less grandiose
national goal, which makes them,
in an odd way, typical of our poor
era.

The worst part is, I suspect, that
if any kind of literary, political or
artist giant were to come along, he
or she would be nibbled to death by
the downsizers.

The real bottom line? We live in
small-minded times.

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