MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION

MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION

My very oldest friend and I have had this long running debate about the prudence of telling the stories of gunslingers in film as entertainments. He feels that to do so trivializes their crimes and memorializes their misdeeds. This somehow leads the audience down some primrose path of deception that reconfigures history into some glorified and rosy tale that replaces veniality for cleverness, skullduggery for slyness and slickness, and thuggery for stealth and sleight of hand.

So we continue to have debates over the greatness of “Butch Cassidy”, “The Wild Bunch”, “Tombstone” and “The Sting” which glorify the escapades and cleverness of ne’er-do-wells and crooked law men.

And where this may be somewhat of a rarefied esoteric artistic/moral debate when it comes to “liberal” notions of what constitutes great art, it is not all that uncommon in day to day skirmishes of the political/art periodical or newsroom hostilities. Recall, for example, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibits, or Cavallaro’s chocolate “My Sweet Jesus”, or any number of even more disturbing images that have graced our art galleries in order to make artistic or political statements and the ensuing press and religious reactions, that exemplifies this point.

The reason I mention this dichotomy is to illustrate that in any debate there are at least two sides, and in this one there is the side which could describe itself as coming from the point of view of “taste” and the other from the point of view of “authenticity”. Authenticity argues that art should serve the idea, and ideas often are transmitted by powerful symbols. Symbols can be subjected to artistic hyperbole, as in the above examples, in search of a means of expressing the true meaning of the symbol. “Taste” argues that authenticity oversteps the bounds of propriety when using symbols that happen to also have strong simultaneous religious ,political and moral values resulting in the request that these not be shown or displayed, or even that they be removed and taken down when these symbols are claimed to be “art” (completely disregarding our dearly held beliefs and rights of free speech and expression).

But the Supreme Court has held that one can get overly enthusiastic with the notion of “artistic” to the point where it can be called pornographic if deemed to have no “socially redeeming value”; but of course this often then becomes subjected to the Justice Stewart Potter test for pornography of “I know it when I see it” interpretation, which then throws it back into the “court of public opinion”; and by that measure, how “tasteful” (read pornographic) one sees art, must surely change with the tides of the times.

And all this is a circuitous introduction to a discussion of why I do not tell the long involved stories of the men and women in the rooms. These stories are often graphic, gutsy, dark, and hard to hear. They are frightfully similar in scope and arch. They all start similarly and all end the same way. The story in the middle, how much of what addicting substance, when, how and where is the only difference and the particular depth , the particular hole and the particular hell and the particular salvation are the only differences. And the rise to their successes pretty much tell the same story.

I was born, I drank, I got drunk, I blacked out, I almost lost my life, I found AA, I found my higher power and now I am sober, one day at a time by the grace of God. Sounds pretty simple. But like my friend who objects to the glorifying of the debauching tales of crooks, I have elected not to tell the debauching tales of drunks, so colorful in their individuality, so broad in their scope of the human condition yet so similar as to make it the very touchstone that allows AA to survive. If our stories were not all the same more or less, then we would see no identity in each other’s tales, we would find no empathy in our fellow AA’s and the program would fail. They are the very symbols of our recovery and aural/graphical means by which we gain membership in the AA fellowship.

These stories are the histories that Joseph Campbell calls “The Power of Myth”. They are the glue that keep societies together, the common ancestry, the handed down wisdom, the tales of ancestors and founders, the rise of the nations and the spread of the culture. These stories are the way we find our way into the rooms. We diagnose ourselves by means of our stories. In fact, if we come into the rooms and after having been there a very brief time and we haven’t heard our story being told, I am sure that we could say in clear conscience that we are neither addicts nor alcoholics.

The story makes the diagnosis. And it is crystal clear that the degree of our “perversion” ill fits how much of an addict we are. We are or we aren’t one in a sense. Our ability to recover often has little to do with how much of an addict we were. In fact initially our recovery may have more to do with fear than anything else. The fear of death, the fear of life, the fear of social ostracism or familial castigation.

And recovery often has little to do with the degree of support and support system we have. Those who have the most in material wealth often fail repeatedly while those who have fallen the most and have the least can be the most shining successes. The story does not tell us anything more than that we can recover and how we recover and why we recover. It cannot tell us to recover. Because to recover we must want to recover and only we can want to recover.

We can want to recover when and only when it no longer is a debate in the head between a bad and a good. Whether it is a moral bad or a moral good; a political bad or political good; or a debate as to whether it is something that one can do or one cannot do. It is all irrelevant to the task. And that task is that the debate is over. One has then determined that you can do it successfully.

Recovery is neutral in and of itself. Recovery is only good for the drunk in that it saves the life of that drunk and with that life gives that soul a chance to pass on that gift to others. The soul then saved can work in the spirit of a greater good or power greater than himself for the betterment of human kind.

Otherwise, the story does not mean much of anything.

© res 4/15/2011