As an amateur ontologist, my good friend David Schoffman has spent a lifetime thinking about thought.
Unlike myself, he is anything but a roustabout bohemian and as such his daily contacts are with what we call in France les gens raisonnables - the ordinary folk of the professional middle class .
He's often puzzled about why simple acts of inspiration are so inaccessible to his friends and neighbors on the west side of Los Angeles. What is it about creativity that is so elusive to the hybrid-driving, chia seed chewing smart set of southern California?
He's often puzzled about why simple acts of inspiration are so inaccessible to his friends and neighbors on the west side of Los Angeles. What is it about creativity that is so elusive to the hybrid-driving, chia seed chewing smart set of southern California?
Suddenly, this past summer, he had an inspiration.
Maybe it is precisely privilege, education and ambition that are the impediments to poetic thinking. Maybe with professional accomplishment and wealth come psychic atrophy and whimsical constipation. Maybe an overactive ego results in an underactive imagination.
Maybe, maybe, maybe ...
All this led to some serious field study into the bowels of Trump's and de Tocqueville's America. He decided to treat the midwest like Levi-Strauss treated the Amazon. And so my good friend David hardened his R's and loosened his belt and armed with a scythe and a pocketed flak vest went native into Fox Country to see how the other half lived.
These serious surrealists have ordained their president an imam and have free-associated their way toward believing in their ineluctable right to get fat and die angry.
At last Schoffman found the true American artistic vernacular! Invention lay in the heartland and not in the man-bunned barrios of Brooklyn or the food allergenic bungalows of Santa Monica and Malibu!
