That might release a flood of celebrity photographs like the many displayed in the new enormous, glossy, and expensive Santa Fe Magazine where we (I’m included in an interview full of errors and an airbrushed portrait) are used to promote that ghastly term, “Lifestyle,” composed of advertisements for overpriced “luxury items” and the means to buy and display them.
So why did I agree to be interviewed?
I really don’t know.
Maybe I was asked on one of those low days we all experience, especially in the horror of these relentless wars; I discipline myself to avoid exposure to endless realms of news and the horrifying, obscene photographs of dead and dying soldiers in the ruins of their towns and their lives. Where are you now, Ernie Pyle, when we need you? I may be mistaken, but as I remember his World War II photos in books like Brave Men, Pyle didn’t thrust his camera into the faces of dead and dying soldiers. It’s obscene, our fascination with suffering we don’t share.
Also obscene to be flattered into becoming a part of the parade of vanity that is the Santa Fe magazine, summing up for me all that has gone wrong with this place in the 41 years I’ve lived here. I should be ashamed, and I am: to be more vain at nearly 87 than I was at 21!
I haven’t gotten rid of my vanity, but as a town, we have started to make a comeback; yesterday’s municipal election allowed us to vote for the three percent “mansion tax” to be applied to the many new houses being built here that cost more than 1.5 million; the funds will go to finance our desperately needed housing fund, leading, we hope, to building the kind of apartments costing less than two thousand dollars a month—the median here now—that will allow the people who work here to live here.
However there is an ongoing threat, even to this initiative: silently, secretly, massive apartments have been going up here to house the three thousand out-of-state workers, hired by the bomb factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, forty miles away. If you are making plutonium pits, the triggers for nuclear weapons, what a relief NOT to live in that dismal town but in the once beautiful, once small town “down the hill” —Santa Fe.
There are two small, poor not-for-profits here that have labored for years to try to educate us about what is going on up that hill; their influence seems to be slight in a place where luxurious living is on most people’s minds (if they can afford it). But such voices are always crying in the wilderness, since we humans, male and female alike, seem to thrive on our obliviousness.
I remind myself that “talking about money” is what a dear friend accuses me of doing all the time, and also remind myself that when I first saw my airbrushed portrait, I wondered—briefly!—if I could find some kind of make-up that would make me look like that, and also—briefly!—why it was placed at the end of the hefty magazine, while Ali McGraw was put on the cover.
As my grandmother used to say, quoting Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” a truth that would be of little comfort to a dying soldier.
[*There was a book published by this title in 1987, but it doesn’t seem to have been what the title suggests.]
James Ozyvort Maland says
One of the standard, and admittedly sexist, songs that I sang with the Harvard Glee Club was ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ by Ralph Vaughn Williams. (That was before the merger of Radcliffe and the immergence of Drew Faust and Claudine Gay.)
Even more censorious than the title of Williams’ song was ‘Men of Harleck.’ The entry for the latter song in Wikipedia has a slew of different lyrics, but none of those has the phrase in the version we sang, namely “Death is glory now.”
I don’t mind thinking death might be glory, but I prefer thinking of it as rejoining the half-happy universal consciousness. Everything by halves, sometimes called the middle way—my last name means “Middle Land” in Norwegian. Susan Sontag said the middle between the male and female sexes is the ideal—the epicene.
Draza says
Beautiful.