Proteus - And Late Night German TV

In Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, Proteus is a changeling, a god who is captured by the stranded King Menelaus, and changes into animals and trees to frighten his captor. Eventually, through holding on tight, Menelaus is able to find out how to get home. In our culture, we are stuck staring at Proteus, awed by the ever changing, the ever new. Branding, advertising demands this of us. It demands that we be focused on change, on freshness, on innovation. It demands new trends. It creates the illusion of a need where there is none. We live in what Gore Vidal calls the "United States of Amnesia." We are Lotus eaters with no sense of direction home. While in Germany over break I chanced upon an old film The Robe, a 50s epic about the Roman soldier who won Jesus' robe, an older movie in the tradition of Ben Hur, etc. Now the movie didn't just look old, it felt old. One of the reasons is apparent on the movie's imdb page - the average length of a shot in this film is 15 seconds. The average shot in contemporary film and television? 2-4 seconds. it's this reduction that indicates what has happened in ADHD land. We're obsessed with change, with a new image piled upon new image, with no time to contemplate what we're being presented with. The media is a fast-talking carpet bagger from the North. Taking a week to unplug, from internet, no cell phone service, taking an hour for breakfast under fir trees, birds chirping overhead. This is the contemporary equivalent of a vow of silence, taking time, slowing down, allowing an internal space to open up. This is the antithesis of life in Los Angeles, even for us non-scenester proles who work, go home, eat, grade papers, and go to sleep. It's this amnesia that conributes to much of the contemporary malaise. Without a sense of history, what we've been through as people, as families, as nations, that we lose a sense of gratitude, thankfulness for what we've achieved, how far we've come, what opportunities are there. This is replaced by a sense of entitlement, but ultimately a sense of fragmentation and boredom. Traditionally, people have come West to escape, whether persecution, or lack of opportunity, or the confines and social strictures of Old Europe. There is no place much further West than Los Angeles, a protean, shifting city with no memory. It creates, packages, and sells the ever new. If it's not awards season, it's Summer blockbuster season in which we tally the numbers and note that they are down 3% from last year, and we write articles and listen to industry insiders and pundits debate why not enough people went to see Spider Man 3. Then we finally find out who is the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby. We are obsessed with the trivial. How could we possibly miss a new episode of Desperate Housewives? That's how we get through the week. We justify it because our overworked bodies and brains need a rest, and our disconnected loneliness needs some facsimile of community, which we find vicariously onscreen. Late night, state-funded television in Germany (long after Germany's Next Top Model) took a close look at Mexican child laborers trying to come across the American border and turning to homosexual prostitution in Tijuana to stay alive. Some of them make it across for brief periods only to be deported and turn back to their street urchin lives in Mexico. It showed the in-depth lives of child prostitutes in Manila, and followed up on their lives now, some wasting away from drug use, some trying to find their way out, some dying from STDs, but none with any real hope. One lingering shot showed two 17 year olds who sleep in a wooden cart on the street holding each other, both of their minds severely damaged from daily huffing to numb their existence. They have been told they both have syphilis and to come back the next day to the Unicef shelter for some kind of aid, but in the morning, they've forgotten already, living as they do, literally one day at a time. The third and perhaps most heartbreaking of the late-night documentaries was from Northern Uganda, where villages are attacked by rebels, some are slaughtered, others are captured, some children, some adults, and forced to invade, rape and murder other villages by the rebels. The documentary showed mothers who had heard their children had been killed. It showed young mothers who had been kidnapped as concubines, gotten pregnant and tossed aside, now also not accepted by their old villages, thought to be rebel whores. It showed their tears and their desperation. It showed a church celebration, welcoming one of the kidnapped men, who by now had committed rape and murder, back into the village, in gesterues of grace and forgiveness and contrition. It showed Westerners, a lone English doctor with far too many patients. A Corsican who built a prosthetic workshop, where those missing limbs could build prosthetics for themselves and others who fall prey to mines. It showed the village coming together to dance and sweat in honor of the coming politician who makes a speech but has done nothing to help stop the violence. In America one feels the constancy of what TS Eliot called being "distracted from distraction by distraction." One hears vague things about Darfur, "problems in Africa," one hears about Beaners hopping the border. One hears about the fat Westerners on sex tourist trips to Asia, but one sees no detail, no image, creates no concept of the severity and depth of the problem. Why? Why so insulated and blind? I'm here a week and the fog of forgetting and current preoccupations have clouded my mind already. Maybe escape is the only way to clear-headedness. Maybe leaving the country is the only way to get past Proteus.