what's the story?

Yesterday: Listening to Camille Paglia, she of the AK-47 verbal delivery, speaking on world religions and their symbols. As an atheist, she bemoans the loss of religious narratives and, consequently, the inability to understand the great art of the Western canon. [One example: she described how, in a class she was teaching, she had to explain -- this is to college students -- who Moses was.] She did not turn this into a “kids today” argument, which I greatly appreciated. I find it a never-ending source of amazement when adults complain about kids -- teenagers and young adults -- and how this up-and-coming generation will walk us right over a cliff. There are two ideas embedded in here which need to be tweezed out. The first is: who taught this up-and-coming generation? If they don’t know the foundational stories, whose fault is that? If they don’t know Hamlet from omelet or Moses from Moby, it is not because they intentionally wiped these stories from their memory. It’s because they never heard them in the first place. Who didn’t tell them? A mirror would come in handy here. The second idea: somewhere -- I can’t pinpoint it on a timeline, but I suspect it’s much further back than one would think -- another story came along which was much more powerful. For lack of a better name, let’s call it the American dream. The happy marriage of convenience between capitalism and consumerism. Slowly, but with glacial certainty, this has been becoming the foundational story of American culture and, by extension, most of the developed world. Like it or not, it will remain the foundational story until a more powerful idea comes along to replace it. [A general collapse in the global economy would birth another idea.] But for the time being, all those stories about “I was happy playing with a speck of lint and a matchbook cover when I was a kid” are simply nonsense. You were also watching “The Ten Commandments.”