This photo, like so many of those in Michael Eastman’s beautiful, moving, beguiling, maddening collection, transmutes history into timelessness. The house stands alone outside of time. It is a token of the past detached from its actual and ongoing social history.
The deep-seated cause of this feeling of hostility does not spring from the actions of Americans who go to Latin-America but from the treatment accorded to Latin-Americans who come to the United States. In truth, the whole question is involved in our own national and local Negro problem.
The delight and danger of swaying others
Appropriation art has not only outraged artists over the unauthorized and lucrative exploitation of their artwork but has been the subject of high-stakes lawsuits for decades. Appropriation artists defiantly operate under the flag of “fair use,” which some have described as a copyright lawyer’s full-employment act.
As the father of a ten-year-old, I find myself talking constantly with teachers and therapists, joining autism groups, attending school board meetings, speaking out against the censorship of school library books. I taught Vance to hold a fork; he taught me how to stay connected with the rest of humanity.
How did our bland city become a hot spot for national ad campaigns? Overhead was low, flights were easy in any direction, and smart, creative talent was abundant. Between the two world wars, Winston Churchill himself, speaking at an international advertising conference, pronounced the St. Louis Ad Club “far ahead of other cities.” By midcentury, the Midwest was the obvious place to study middle America.
Who is winning the old nature-versus-nature debate? Which of these influencers has the upper hand? Are we mostly preprogrammed, acting out what has been inside us since Day One, or do we go in the direction life blows us?
Might this be a way of coming to terms with feeling so unmoored from my birth country: journeying on a cultural tugboat up the largely English comedy river in search of the TV shows and comedians that had once influenced and shaped me? If I dipped my toe in the dimly remembered comedies of my childhood and youth, would I discover who I once had been?
The Classical Athenians told stories of Persuasion connecting brute desires and communal concerns, for both good and ill, because they experienced persuasion as an extraordinary power that could fortify or undermine their democracy.
The marketing around these technologies will continue to insist that they are miraculous little machines, helpful tools that allow us to accomplish more of what we want to do. Flawed-but-perfectible calculators for language. As they work their way into more of our speech, we will struggle to say the things we want to say. Then, we will struggle to think of things we want to say. And, then, we will not really be sure who is doing the saying.