***************excerpts from article***************
Dreyfuss' zeal and conviction were palpable as he discussed the importance of teaching civics in a nation bound together only by ideas, rather than ancestry, religion or ethnicity. "The American system requires the involvement of intelligent people in citizenship and governance," Dreyfuss said Monday at the University of Virginia. "Everyone in the world knows that America is a miracle – except Americans, because we don't teach it anymore."
"America is the greatest answer to a question that has been asked for 13,000 years: 'How can people live together with some sense of mobility and freedom and intellectual freedom and opportunity?' So far, we are the best answer by leagues."
"Just as people require extensive training to be a driver, pilot, doctor, or lawyer," Dreyfuss said, "they require education in citizenship to develop the basic pre-partisan tools of politics in order to be responsible sovereigns of a government of the people, by the people, for the people."
At times during his talk, Dreyfuss was evocative of a prophet frustrated with the heedlessness of his people, most notably when he stressed the urgency of this crisis of uninformed citizenry. He suggested that America's decline, like Rome's, would be a gradual process of rot from within rather than a turning-point event, but could happen within the lifetimes of our grandchildren.
He lamented the corporate takeover of American media, which compromises the independence of journalists. TV news, in particular, "makes big things small, and small things big," he said.
"But there is one root cause of all these factors contributing to a decline in citizenship," Dreyfuss said, once again sounding prophetic: "The real villain here, about all of this, is you and me. We have lost our ability to sustain outrage."
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The thing that struck me, beyond the topics he was covering, was Richard's mental/emotional state, which was notably despondent. His points were provocative (and indisputable, to the best of my knowledge) but he presented such a doomsday picture of things, free-associating about the ills of our country, essentially communicating, "THIS is fucked up and THAT is fucked up, and THIS is fucked up, and THAT is fucked up." I didn't disagree with ANY of his points, but man! I wanted to jump up and shout the famous Harvey Milk quote: "You gotta give 'em HOPE, Richard!"
Poor Richard didn't seem like he had much hope to give. He pretty much just took the lid off The Big Pot of Icky, scraped up all the encrusted junk from the bottom, stirred it around, shoved our noses down in it and said, "You see that?? You smell that?? You're ingesting that stuff every day! And you might not realize it now, but that stuff is TOXIC--and it's gonna kill you! It's gonna kill ALL of us. It IS killing all of us." His entire presentation was driven by that sentiment, and he never offered any tangible steps to rectify the situation, other than to reinstate Civics in our middle schools.
I really didn't know what to make of his morose state, and I'm quite sure that other people were confused by it as well. At one point, he did say, "I was much more lively during the morning presentation." (There'd been a morning session from 11 to 12.) "But over the last few hours, I've just gotten sadder and sadder." While he was unmistakably passionate about the points he was making, he simultaneously seemed like a little kid who was angry because his parents had forced him to come downstairs and join in the family's Thanksgiving dinner celebration when all he really wanted to do was to stay in his room and play with his toys. "I'm in a BAD MOOD. And I'm gonna STAY in a bad mood! And I'm gonna make you all sit and WATCH me, cuz I want you to SEE just HOW BAD of a mood I'm in!" (stomp, stomp!) Depressed and passionate at the same time.
The moderator for this session was one of those new millennium, not-retarded-for-real-but-acts-retarded-anyway college girls who was doing that mumbly, insecure 3rd grader, garbled baby-talk thing that college girls have increasingly been doing over the last 10 years. I was embarrassed for Charlottesville and for UVA (and for the entire audience) that this girl had been chosen to run the Richard Dreyfuss event.
The afternoon session had been billed specifically as a Q&A and was scheduled to run for 90 minutes--from 3:00-4:30 pm. After only THREE people had gotten their questions answered, the moderator-girl suddenly said to us (out of nowhere--in her retarded baby-talk voice): "Okay, everybody. Please join me in thanking Mr. Dreyfuss for coming here today," and cut the session short by a half-hour. We all just sat there, confused, clapping half-heartedly, looking like we'd just been hit in the face with a flounder.
While people swarmed around Richard in the adjacent foyer, I went back into the auditorium to check the time. The not-retarded-so-why-do-you-and-your-fellow-not-retarded-college-girlfriends-talk-that way moderator-girl was still milling around, straightening up the room. It was only 4:05, and I asked her why we hadn't gone the entire 90 minutes. She said that Richard's peeps had informed her that he needed to be somewhere at 4:30, and that she'd have to cut it short. I told her that it would have been really great if she'd have shared that detail with us before we got started. She just looked at me blankly, the way college girls look at you nowadays when you raise a point that pertains to the ILLOGIC of their actions, like, "Excuse me, but YOU JUST STEPPED RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY CAR WITHOUT LOOKING, and if I hadn't slammed on my brakes, you'd be on a stretcher right now, getting your ass hauled off to UVA Hospital." Blank stare. No acknowledgement of the reality of the sitution. No apology. No anger. Nothing. Blank stare. Generation Meh. How ironic. This lack of response completely illustrates the core theme of Richard's presentation:
NOBODY CARES ANYMORE. NOBODY QUESTIONS ANYMORE. NOBODY DEBATES ANYMORE. AND NOBODY'S OUTRAGED AT ALL THIS OUTRAGEOUS SHIT.
THIS IS FUCKED UP.
I shifted gears from my own baby-grumpiness towards this girl and did some interfacing with her, signing her on as my confidante. "You know, I really loved the points he made, and he was so passionate about them. But didn't he seem rather out of sorts?" And she said, "Well, he's probably tired from all the traveling." And I said, "Of course. But wasn't he way perkier at the morning lecture?" And she agreed that he seemed a bit strange. She'd attended the morning session, and concurred that he'd been super-energized and super-animated, and had presented all kinds of helpful suggestions to the audience as to how they could make a difference. I said, "Wow. When you tell me that, I can't help but wonder if he's bipolar. I mean, what could've happened between 12 noon and 3:00 pm to make him sink down SO low?" (This was a weird thing for me to say; I can't even remember the last time, if ever, that I played armchair psychiatrist and suggested that someone might be suffering with bipolar disorder.)
Richard remained in the foyer well past 4:30, conducting a Q & A session with the group of people who stood around him while the auditorium sat empty a few feet away from us. When I finally did speak with him, I felt like we genuinely connected; I shook hands with him warmly and thanked him, and he said, "At first, I wasn't sure if you were with me or against me, but then I could see that you were with me." And I said, "Oh, I was just doing whatever I could do to keep from bursting into tears--that's all." We looked directly into each other's eyes.
I shared a couple of my own ideas with him about the decline of America and of the consciousness of the general population. I explained that I keep my head out of politics for the most part and that I don't watch, listen to, or read the news because it all seems so rigged to me, but that I DO keep myself informed in other ways--specifically by way of observing what goes on in pop culture and in my immediate world. I cited a few examples--like a strange incident that I'd experienced at my health club a couple years ago that seemed to mirror a corrupt M.O. modeled by the Bush administration. The folks in charge were supposed to be serving us, but instead, we, the people, (the paying customers) were being treated like employees who were in trouble with the boss (or in danger of getting in trouble with the boss). The folks in charge were letting us know, in NO uncertain terms, that if we were to raise a complaint, or otherwise exercise our rights (as Americans and as health club members) to free speech, we would surely be accused of attempting to overthrow the government, and would stand to be punished--(or at the very least, ostracized). He told me that he's planning to discuss this very topic in his upcoming talks--that he'll be inviting audience members to look in their papers and select any random story about some screwy news event, and see how it traces back to "The System" and/or follows the model of "The Powers That Be."
I also made a point about the current trend in entertainment--how empty it is, how scary American Idol is, for example, and that it, too, correlates with the trend of decline that he'd addressed in his talk. I said, "When we were growing up, we had the Ed Sullivan show, we had Dylan, we had the Beatles..." And he chimed in and named some other great artists and commentators that were on TV in those days, and he said, "We had television that meant something." And then he turned to another audience member who was standing at his right side, and started speaking with her. Just like that. I leaned towards him, touched his shoulder and quietly said, "cheers," and left the building.
I headed next door to Alderman Library to get on a computer, and one of the college kids who'd attended the lecture walked by me, and I stopped him, and we had the BEST talk. His name was Colin--he was from Lynchburg, and had been a big fan of Civics in his middle school days. (He's a history major now.) I asked him what grade he was in, and he said, "15th," and we laughed. We had the most enlivening, enriching, connected, heart-driven talk ran right along the lines of the same topics that Richard had discussed, but our talk felt completely different. We were awake and buzzing and excited to be sharing these ideas with each other! And even as we touched on some of the more counter-intuitive elements of our culture and of modern life, (like the "travesty" of American Idol, which, I'm happy to report, were HIS words--hallelujah!) our spontaneous little pow-wow still had an overall tone of HOPEFULNESS.
Over the next few hours, I shared my experience of the lecture with a few other friends--relaying how the talk had affected me--and specifically, how I was struck with Richard's mental state.
The following morning, I went to the gym, and before I even got out of my car, I sat in the parking lot, thinking about all of this. I recalled "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and how Richard played a wacked-out, messenger-like father who'd had a life-altering experience and a vision of something important that he couldn't share with the people around him. Just thinking about that made me cry.
So later that night, I went to Blockbuster and rented "Close Encounters," and it was exactly as I'd remembered it: he was crazed and tortured and isolated with his vision, obsessed with the "mountain" shape that he couldn't stop drawing, compelled to replicate it with shaving cream, with piles of dirt, with mashed potatoes on his plate at the dinner table, weeping and muttering like a frightened and confused prophet: "This means something. This is important." I'd shaken hands with that same man just one day before. The actor and the character were conjoined, and I'd heard the exact same message from him as he stood on that stage at UVA: "This means something. This is important."
The experience of seeing Richard has stayed with me in an unexpecetedly inspiring way, and yet, as brilliant and noble as I felt his efforts to be, the disturbing aspect of my close encounter with him remains equally prominent as I play the whole thing back in my mind.
Final note...in closing...
Right before I started this blog entry, I looked up Richard Dreyfuss on Wikipedia. In classic encyclopedic style, there was a string of facts listed with no emotional content or judgement attached to any part of it whatsoever: "Early Life," "Career," "Other Work/Political Activity," "Academic Life," "Books," and then: "Personal Life," with one-sentence, bulleted factoids such as: "Married so-and-so, had three children named such-and such, mother died in October 2000 due to complications from a stroke, etc." No commentary--only the facts.
And then, the next bullet:
Just like that.
"In 2006, he appeared in Stephen Fry's documentary, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, in which Fry (who also has the disorder) interviewed him about his life."
Such a strange feeling came over me--some weird kind of exhilaration accompanied by a touch of guilt, which, I suppose was appropriate, given the fact that this isn't exactly the kind of thing you wanna get too excited about, as if you're the winning contestant on Jeopardy!
"Thank you, Alex. Standard DSM-IV Disorders for $800, please."
"Perky at noon, despondent at 3."
"What is...BIPOLAR??
Ding-ding!
I wished there was someone I could call. I just needed to say, "I can't believe what I just read! This is freaking me out!," but who was I gonna call--and who would have understood? It would have taken me 15 minutes just to explain the backstory.
Darn--where's that not-retarded-so-why-do-you-talk-that-way-baby-talkin' college girl NOW when I really need her??
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Link to entire article in UVA Today:
