Discuss: Artifice v. Pastoral

I edited Jay’s article and informed her about this thread. Here’s what she asked that I post this response:

“I am fully aware of the controversy surrounding Chief Seattle’s speech, but I refer to it as an axiom, not as a historical document.  There is a
difference of register between a literal quote and a reference to a
well-known idea which, by cultural shorthand, is associated with Chief
Seattle.  It is in the latter register that I was writing and I’m sorry if it seems I did not make that distinction clear enough.”

The Chief Seattle “myth” for the gullible was written by Ted Perry, a screen writer for the 1972 ecology movie Home.

It is a shame how people eat up things and don’t check sources

Surely we’ve all had our say by now, anbd should leave the poor writer alone!

Seems folks can’t get past the artifice (or fiction of the statement) to see the pastoral of the piece itself.  I hope everyone on this thread can get a full copy of the essay in order to really dig into what is being brought out.  The author brings to light vivid examples of our current cultural landscape and ties it to our deep and twisted western roots of “civil"ization and industrialization while she gives examples of how mesmerized and numbed we have become with artifice. 

I found it to mirror my own state of mind at this particular moment in time and even before I read it, I’ve been having many conversations with people regarding the state of our own culture and lack of authenticity.

Chief Seattle speech is not ficticious. It happenned. That’s a fact.
What is ficticious is the canonical rendering of it, written by a Hollywood producer.
Since there is no direct -or lengthy- quote from that ficticious document, I decided to accept the author’s use of Chief Seattle concept as valid poetic licence.
Saludos from Mexico,
Francisco

Well said Jen -thank you! The fascination with artifice is everywhere, even here after reading this thought-provoking piece.
I was particularly struck myself by Griffith’s description of people responding to a tragic suicide as if it was a computer game. It is often my experience that people I interact with in the street, in a store, or as a driver, are behaving as if I was merely an obstacle to be overcome in their own private video game. There is no personal interaction, no graciousness, or even plain civility. I’ve also often been amazed at how people in the audiences of live performances behave as if it was TV, with no sense that the artist needs to have some response from them, or that fellow audience members will not appreciate their loud talking-over-the-TV type conversations.
I fear that our cultural gorging on artifice is at the cost of our social fabric.

Well there, you see? Exactly my point. In our culture (dominant or not) we’re all trained to accept these kinds of alternative versions of reality.  That the Native population has also learned it can’t be a shock to anyone, can it? I mean, they veg in front of the tube just as much as any of us do.

So, in the case of the Chief Seattle speech (and yes Francisco, I’m sure that he gave MANY speeches…not the point though)we have a case of art not just imitating life but CREATING it. This creation is so durable that the man who actually did the creating, the aforementioned screenwriter, campaigned for years to convince people that he made the whole thing up out of whole cloth…until he gave up the effort out of frustration.

Or, as the Japanese woman sitting next to me on the plane said as we were flying out of SEATAC, over Mt. Rainier: “It’s just like virtual reality.”  I wanted to hand her a pithy Chief Seattle quote in response, but I just smiled instead and replied, “Yes it is.”