Ball of Confusion? Bring It On

“You all should leave here feeling confused,” said one of my son’s professors during their semester in South Africa. Not what you would expect a representative of higher learning to say to students on a life-changing journey, but given what they had been absorbing at every turn about one side of an issue being just as compelling as another, they all understood what he meant. Listen to an advocate for wildlife preservation and then listen to a farmer struggling to keep his cattle, and you might feel stymied: cheetahs must be protected, yes, but the needs of local people can’t be sacrificed to the cause of tourism and the almighty dollar.

Driving home from the airport, I actually felt relieved: maybe the fact that a steady dose of confusion was seeping into my daily life, through just about all pores, wasn’t so awful after all. Maybe it was time to move past the lyrics of the 1970 Temptations song that had been spinning around in my head: “Ball of confusion/ Oh yeah, that’s what the world is today.” Maybe confusion could even be downright enlightening.

I’m not even talking here, although I certainly could, about the boxes still needing to be unpacked in our basement and our attic, or all the stuff yearning to be put in its proper place in the rest of the house. No, I’m talking about the steady infusion of contrasting elements that we get just by being aware of what’s going on in our immediate vicinity as well as in the broader world. Sometimes it feels like things are coming at us in impossible pairs, or that we are listening to a record on the turntable that always has a flip side.

Take the two anniversaries we just commemorated this past week, for example. Far be it from me to tread on any hallowed ground here, but I’d like to venture a point about both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, if I may be so bold. The Gettysburg Address is astounding in both its power and brevity – no real contrast there.  Read it a number of times, though, and this whole idea of life springing from death just knocks you out. He looked out over that battlefield which had become a massive graveyard, faced what was in some ways his tragedy, and called it “…a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live.” Our ideals of freedom, equality, justice rang out over that unimaginably bleak landscape. With Lincoln, there’s always much more mystery than there is confusion, but the clash of emotions here is almost too much to fathom.

The retrospective about Kennedy’s life and death that we got on our television screens through the whole past couple of weeks left many of us, I suspect, feeling confused. Was he in fact a truly great President or was he more of a harbinger of thrilling new possibilities, an almost mythical figure with tremendous gifts? How are we to add up the failures as well as the achievements? How much does it matter whether there was one killer acting alone or a conspiracy?  Why, as one commentator said, do “people keep looking for more meaning in that awful event?” We circle around it, trying to draw out new elements, not ever able to put it to rest.  In a way, to borrow from a hit movie from 20 years ago, we’re still Dazed and Confused.

A current celebrity who would never admit to being confused but does some awfully confusing things would be rapper Kanye West. If you haven’t already heard, a couple of weeks ago word broke that he was wearing clothes emblazoned with the Confederate flag on his “Yeesuz” tour. You can read about it here. Taking a symbol of racism and embracing it…how could someone with a hit song called “New Slaves” do such a thing? Here’s his explanation, in part:  “So I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag.Now what you gonna do?” Reactions within the black community have been all over the place, with some people giving him credit for being a game-changer yet again and others saying he’s gone too far this time. To me, insofar as using the symbol for a different purpose entirely constitutes re-appropriation, it seems possibly OK; on the other hand, the move has such an in-your-face quality to it that it also seems haughty and out of line. I mean, does he seriously want to encourage white college kids around the country to put up this chilling thing in their dorm rooms?

Given this current climate of confusion, I really wasn’t surprised when my younger son told me about the final exam he’d just had in a history class. Half of them were assigned to argue “Why Napoleon Bonaparte was a Hero” and the other half took on “Why Napoleon Bonaparte was a Tyrant.” Even though I share a birthday with this particular megalomaniac, I hadn’t planned on cutting him any slack. Maybe it’s high time for a thorough re-assessment of the guy.

More likely, though, it’s time to head back down to the basement, where confusion has at least some kind of clarity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You all should leave here feeling confused,” said one of my son’s professors during their semester in South Africa.  Not what you would expect a representative of higher learning to say to students on a life-changing journey, but given what they had been absorbing at every turn about one side of an issue being just as compelling as another, they all understood what he meant.  Listen to an advocate for wildlife preservation and then listen to a farmer struggling to keep his cattle, and you might feel stymied: cheetahs must be protected, yes, but the needs of local people can’t be sacrificed to the cause of tourism and the almighty dollar.

 

Driving home from the airport, I actually felt relieved: maybe the fact that a steady dose of confusion was seeping into my daily life, through just about all pores, wasn’t so awful after all.  Maybe it was time to move past the lyrics of the 1970 Temptations song that had been spinning around in my head:  “Ball of confusion/ Oh yeah, that’s what the world is today.” Maybe confusion could even be downright enlightening.

 

I’m not even talking here, although I certainly could, about the boxes still needing to be unpacked in our basement and our attic, or all the stuff yearning to be put in its proper place in the rest of the house.  No, I’m talking about the steady infusion of contrasting elements that we get just by being aware of what’s going on in our immediate vicinity as well as in the broader world.  Sometimes it feels like things are coming at us in impossible pairs, or that we are listening to a record on the turntable that always has a flip side.

 

Take the two anniversaries we just commemorated this past week, for example.

Far be it from me to tread on any hallowed ground here, but I’d like to venture a point about both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, if I may be so bold.  The Gettysburg Address is astounding in both its power and brevity – no real contrast there.  Read it a number of times, though, and this whole idea of life springing from death just knocks you out.  He looked out over that battlefield which had become a massive graveyard, faced what was in some ways his tragedy, and called it “…a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live.”  Our ideals of freedom, equality, justice rang out over that unimaginably bleak landscape.  With Lincoln, there’s always much more mystery than there is confusion, but the clash of emotions here is almost too much to fathom.

 

The retrospective about Kennedy’s life and death that we got on our television screens through the whole past couple of weeks left many of us, I suspect, feeling confused.  Was he in fact a truly great President or was he more of a harbinger of thrilling new possibilities, an almost mythical figure with tremendous gifts?  How are we to add up the failures as well as the achievements? How much does it matter whether there was one killer acting alone or a conspiracy?  Why, as one commentator said, do “people keep looking for more meaning in that awful event?” We circle around it, trying to draw out new elements, not ever able to put it to rest.  In a way, to borrow from a hit movie from 20 years ago, we’re still Dazed and Confused.

 

A current celebrity who would never admit to being confused but does some awfully confusing things would be rapper Kanye West.  If you haven’t already heard, a couple of weeks ago word broke that he was wearing clothes emblazoned with the Confederate flag on his “Yeesuz” tour.  Taking a symbol of racism and embracing it…how could someone with a hit song called “New Slaves” do such a thing?  Here’s his explanation, in part:  “So I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag.  Now what you gonna do?”  Reactions within the black community have been all over the place, with some people giving him credit for being a game-changer yet again and others saying he’s gone too far this time. To me, insofar as using the symbol for a different purpose entirely constitutes re-appropriation, it seems possibly OK; on the other hand, the move has such an in-your-face quality to it that it also seems haughty and out of line.  I mean, does he seriously want to encourage white college kids around the country to put up this chilling thing in their dorm rooms?

 

Given this current climate of confusion, I really wasn’t surprised when my younger son told me about the final exam he’d just had in a history class.  Half of them were assigned to argue “Why Napoleon Bonaparte was a Hero” and the other half took on “Why Napoleon Bonaparte was a Tyrant.”  Even though I share a birthday with this particular megalomaniac, I hadn’t planned on cutting him any slack.  Maybe it’s high time for a thorough re-assessment of the guy.

 

More likely, though, it’s time to head back down to the basement, where confusion has at least some kind of clarity.