Is This Thing On?

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, May 24, 2006)

“Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.” – Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University professor emeritus, in his essay ‘On Bullshit’

Every good reporter is supposed to have one – a first-class, grade-A bullshit detector. Mine seems to be broken. The batteries must be dead or the contacts corroded. You’d think a few days at the second Quest for Global Healing Conference in Ubud in May, and it would have registered at least one red-line alarm. Maybe the Bali damp has messed with the calibrations.

It should be as easy as falling off a log to poke fun at this meeting. One workshop promised to get people in touch with their animal spirits. People were asked several times to “sit and be with themselves for a moment” after especially inspiring speakers or performances. Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1976, made a reference the first day to the “ruling military junta in Washington” and was cheered. The audience chuckled at every report of a witty remark by that impish rascal, the Dalai Lama -- whom many people said they had met personally. Speakers talked of letting go and journeying together on voyages of sharing and discovery in transformative processes. And the five days closed with the burning of a Peace Altar to “consecrate the intentions, understandings and commitments birthed at the event.”

Nothing more than a gathering of “loony left” escapees from California is the tempting judgment. Friends usually more open to this sort of thing steered clear for fear of it being too “New Age-y.” A few had the impression that it was just a bunch of rich, ex-hippy Americans with nothing better to do with their organic money than attend a feel-good conference in Bali. But, for some reason, it did not all seem to be hooey. Maybe it was having Desmond Tutu as one of the headline speakers. Maybe it was the focus Day 4 on the practical business side of activism.

And also there’s this: As I sat in the audience for three mornings, listing things wrong and weird about the conference, one question kept coming back at me. What are you personally doing about any of this, chump? Because that’s the question that can always silence anyone sitting in the scorner’s seat. Do you have anything better? Do you have any suggestions? Can you do anything except sit there and snicker at the smirking remarks you’ll make later in the pub?

No matter how high my eyebrows raised at the odd mix of the New Age, “local” and “native” wisdoms, and the just plain made up stuff, there wasn’t any escaping the fact that many of the issues talked about at the conference – poverty, hunger, war, environmental degradation, abuse of the helpless – are among the things that sometime keep me awake at night. But I would never actually try to do anything to end them, you know. Or, if I hold the thought until morning that maybe someday I might get around to helping feed a few of the 40,000 or so kids that die each day from malnutrition, I usually get busy answering e-mails and getting on with my morning schedule. And the environment? I honestly don’t do enough to keep my own family’s ecological footprint from being larger than it should be; and I’m too worried about my personal finances to be anxious for long about half the world’s population living on less than US$2 a day.

Then there’s the factor of just being overwhelmed by the magnitude of things wrong with the world. Even if the folks at the conference can be dismissed as so many bearded prophets foretelling doom if repentant action isn’t taken promptly, it is not a great philosophical or symbolic insight that the world dies and is reborn every second. And in that light, isn’t it better to focus on the rebirthing and renewal rather than on the dying? No matter how one feels about animal spirits, moon burnings, and righteous, wrathful wood nymphs?

Too, the role of religious sentiment, traditional, loony, or otherwise, can’t be completely ignored when trying to inspire people to action. “One’s capacity to move into something bigger than what you might not have been able to do before, does require, I think, at least the recognition of something other than just your own humanity being at play,” said Marcia Jaffe, co-director of Quest for Global Healing in an interview. She’ll begin living in Bali part-time from July to form an institute aimed at getting non-profit organizations, businesses, and world leaders to cooperate together on changing the world. If that sounds grandiose, it can’t be any more damaging to the cosmos than other hobbies people take up after the kids leave home.

If nothing else, it’ll give me plenty of opportunity to test this darned BS meter of mine. Anybody got a Phillips?

(The second Quest for Global Healing conference was held at the ARMA Museum in Ubud May 3-8. Speakers included Nobel Peace Prize recipients Betty Williams and Desmond Tutu, as well as former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur. The third QGH conference will be in late 2007 or in 2008.)

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi

Excuse Me, Are You an Artist? What's Your Position?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, May 10, 2006)

“We almost had it there for a moment. We were this close.” – A friend’s foo-foo husband chagrined that the conversation of our beer-and-poker crowd had reverted to the topics of baseball and other manly sport after taking a short tease toward ballet and the classical arts

Most men, according to the funny papers and American sitcoms, don’t do well faced with the choice of taking the wife to some artsy thingamajig or watching the big match on TV. Fortunately, the invitation to the evening of modern dance came to my e-mail box and not to my wife’s. It only took a moment to note a scheduling conflict with the Chelsea vs. Manchester United match.

I binned the invitation and ended up cursing through the game as John Terry and crew dismantled MU. As football fans know, the worst thing about the game -- besides Chelsea winning -- was the injury to England’s Wayne Rooney ten minutes from time. At least now that Chelsea has won the English Premier League title, we can turn full attention to the World Cup.

Okay, not everyone. My friend’s husband from university days probably still holds the opinion that any conversation not concerning literature, art, drama, or dance is beneath his finely tuned, rarefied mind. That is, he probably still holds that opinion if some other beer-poker-and-peanuts crowd hasn’t torn him limb from limb and left his bones to bleach among the weeds and rusting cars out back. We threatened him with that shortly after he made his persnickety remark, and he was only too happy that we were all set to prove our barbaric nature. It would have been a real pleasure to watch that grin baking in the Oklahoma junkyard sun, but just then someone drew an ace and a potential full house. We had also run out of chit’lins.

Patrick, for that was his name, abhorred the idea that one artist can make a statement with a ball and football boots just as well as another can with brushes and paint or chisel and stone. But it’s true, you know. Most of us who pick up a musical instrument, paintbrush or pen are pikers, just no-name hacks fooling ourselves that we’ve got any talent, any skill. And while it’s maybe easy to admit that we aren’t a Picasso or a Steinbeck, it’s more difficult to accept that some beer-swilling, skirt-chasing, working-class lout from north London has more talent and artistry in one tiny little toe than we’ll ever have ever in our whole bodies, no matter what we do. So, we disparage the athlete’s art as something for the primitive man and feel better about ourselves.

Then again, the argument in its logical extreme ends with the meaningless concept that everyone is an artist and everything is art. After all, if we accept that athletes are artists, too, why not ordinary professionals -- taxi drivers, factory workers, shepherds, and such? Surely among the transport drivers of the world there is one drive-for-hire purist that knows the way to every destination and always gets you there on time. Or somewhere in the industrial wastelands there must be a drudge that never saw an extruder or stamper he couldn’t run faster and better than anyone else. Or somewhere in the world’s pastures one shepherd must have never lost a sheep.

And if we allow that ordinary people can be artists, can’t ordinary things be art? Empty pizza boxes, crumpled napkins, overflowing ashtrays, and half-full beer cans piled on a coffee table; a light bulb clicking on and off in an empty room; a white porcelain urinal. Some bachelor guy stacking pizza boxes and empties to the ceiling of his lonely apartment may be making a statement of sorts, but should we pay to see it? Is art a field of discipline or a way of viewing life? Do we have to pay millions and millions to hang it on our wall, a couple hundred to see it in a stadium, or even a few bucks to see it in a museum gallery? Can’t we all just walk around being art, being artists, watching everyone perform and create and make personal statements?

The first couple of weeks of May, according to an April 30 Financial Times article, Christie’s and Sotheby’s expect to sell close to US$1 billion of Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art, including one Picasso painting – Dora Maar with Cat – for US$50 million. There’s something wrong with that. There are much better uses for the money, supporting starving writers in Bali, say, or getting another top-notch striker for Liverpool, any striker other than Peter Crouch, really. We could probably spend hours arguing about it, but trust me, Crouch has got to go. Maybe we could wrestle for it. Come on, two out of three falls. Loser gets a noogie.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi