Voices of Hope and Grief
by Art Kleiner

The rest of us, who are past adolescence, also return to the culture of death as we do to the culture of sex. We return because we identify with the pain. That’s why white Americans respond more to the grief of Littleton schoolchildren than to the grief of Kosovars, and more to the grief of Kosovars than to the grief of Tutsis; we respond according to the amount we feel, in our irrrational hearts, that we ourselves could be among the survivors.

At the conference called "Hope" — or, more precisely, "Images and Voices of Hope" -- the most eye-catching, and probably most pertinent item I saw was a column reprinted for attendees, headlined: "The Culture of Death." This column first appeared in the Wall Street Journal in April, a month or so before. It was written by essayist Peggy Noonan, who when speechwriting for George Bush coined the phrase "a thousand points of light." She is a gifted essayist with a strong conservative bent. Last April she wrote, as so many pundits did, about the massacre at Columbine High School, and more specifically about the question of who was to blame. She assailed the "wan, half-hearted fingerpointing," the accusations that guns, movies, cliques, video games, or poor parenting caused those children to use those weapons. Then she wrote something I completely agreed with.

"The kids who did this are responsible," she wrote. "They did it. They killed. But they came from a place and a time, and were yielded forth by a culture." She quoted the Pope: "It’s the culture of death," she continued, and she presented a prose-poem of snippets from the evening news: about Kevorkian and breast implants, about abortion and movies about cruel sex games, about serial murders, artificial insemination and rape (including the alleged rape of a woman by the U.S. president). She was partisan enough to leave out snippets about war, about pesticides, about Pinochet and Kosovo. But it didn’t matter; her particular choice of snippets was unimportant. In her greater point, Peggy Noonan was correct. We do live amidst a culture of death. Swimming in that culture, unaware of its full horror, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold sought, for a moment at least, to put themselves at the center of its attention span. That’s why this conference existed. The sheer giddy fear of living at the center of a lifeless media hurricane with an attention span of its own had brought a group of hopeful people, media and organization development and activist and religious people together. They had gathered at the Fashion Institute of Technology, of all places, to talk about changing the media so that it might focus, not on fashion, but on the eternal verities.

I was there because I knew some of the people involved, and was curious about others. Judy Rodgers, a film-maker and communications consultant who works with the Society for Organizational Learning, had spent a lot of time plotting over the telephone with me, in recent months, to figure out the best way to publicize our mutual interests: SoL and the new book The Dance of Change. She had invited me , more or less, to see what a writer like me might think about the ideas presented at the conference. My notes of the event open with a quote from Judy, who spoke first from the stage: "America is the biggest creator of images and messages in the world," she said. "A good case can be made that this role is more important than our role as a military superpower. If media is amplifying the turmoil and breakdown in the world, then what could happen if this powerful system of media could imagine a better world?"

Like anyone else who had lived, on and off, in New York since the 1960s, the artist Peter Max had been a significant figure on the fringes of my culture, and he was one of the coorganizers of the event; so I was glad for a chance to see him in person. (He came across, not as the ethereal beatnik I’d always imagined him to be, but as a down-to-earth, worldly, and savvy New York media guy — the sort of person whom you’d cast as the creative director at an advertising agency. He was a short-haired, compact man, with a broad but sharply defined grin that split his jaw under a dark moustache. The grin, in fact, was his most prominent feature; it reminded me of Pac-Man. Later, when I saw him threading his way out of the cafeteria, with a young woman walking behind talking briskly into a cellphone, he seemed much less animated, because the grin was gone and it no longer defined his face.)

The session leader was David Cooperrider, a young organization scholar at Case Western Reserve University, who had pioneered a kind of intervention called "appreciative inquiry," which seemed to be based upon teaching people to ask other people the kinds of questions that would draw forth their hopes and aspirations. Cooperrider came across as engaging, sincere, youthful, and idealistic — not a typical academic. The value of appreciative inquiry, I gathered, was not so much in the answers but in the act of asking questions; if Serbians and Albanians could ask each other the right questions, in the right way, that might make it impossible for them to play the roles of victor and victim.

The conference, which was organized around breakout groups and meditation sessions, seemed to draw out a chain of ideas that the group stumbled a long, a chain I had heard described many times since the 1970s. No doubt it had a lineage back to the Victorian era. The culture is polluted, it began. The media controls the culture. Therefore, the media must be made, somehow, to embrace and embody unpolluted images.

At our little breakout table, however, I didn’t play along. I found myself arguing against the prevailing logic, to the polite embarrassment of the other people there. I couldn’t help myself, in part, because of a movie I had seen recently; a film I had rented, found too unbearable to watch, then found myself unable to refrain from thinking about — so I had watched it in stops and starts, and finally when I had made my way to the end, I was able to go back and watch the whole thing, start to finish. This had all taken place a few days before the conference. The movie was The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan, based on a Russell Banks novel. It is about a small town struggling to recover from the worst disaster imaginable; the loss of most of the townspeoples’ children in a school bus accident. The bus skidded off a road into a frozen lake. Only the school bus driver, a woman devoted to the children she carried, and one of the older school girls, survived.

Amidst the grief, a lawyer (played by Ian Holm) comes to town to interview the grieving parents of the dead children, and to line them up in a class-action suit against whoever is responsible: The manufacturer of the school bus. Or the schools. Or the bus’ mechanic. He isn’t quite sure, but knows someone must be at fault. By pitting the townspeople against each other, around the question of whether such a lawsuit is right or wrong, the movie gradually burrows into the deeper truth of a calamity like this. In one of the most pivotal scenes, one bereaved parent says to another, "We’re getting on with our lives. Why can’t you?" But there is no getting on with one’s life. You are already halfway into another world, a world of sweet hereafters, a death-embracing world that represents the peace that overtakes us when we leave this vale of imperfection behind.

That is the culture of death, and it is hardly unique to our time. It was by far the predominant culture of the Middle Ages, and we swim amidst the echoes of that culture in a far deeper way than we swim amongst the images of Lara Croft or Marilyn Manson. Listen to this passage from historian Jeffrey Richards, talking about the 14^th and 15^th centuries (times not just of the Black Death of the bubonic plague, but many other plagues, including one which claimed so many young men it was known as the Boy’s Death, and also the time of the famines of the little ice age; so many people died during this time that the population of Europe shrank by 50-75 per cent):

The Black Death intensified the medieval preoccupation with ‘the four last things’, death, judgment, heaven and hell. It had a marked effect on art and literature, which became saturated in images of pain and death. Mystery plays with religious themes became common and usually told of human decay and the torments of hell. Funerals became great events, marked by lavish ceremonial. Revealingly, where the pictorial calendars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had emphasized spring and summer, inn the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they highlighted autumn and winter.

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