Perspective

In seventh-grade art class (yeah, we used to have to take art classes, whether we wanted to or not), we once did an exercise on “perspective.” I no longer remember exactly how it worked; seems like we made a point in more or less the center of the page, then drew lines from the corners and sides to that point, then drew buildings, cars, whatever, between those lines. Point of the exercise was to show how perspective worked (I think; I was not the teacher, obviously, and have never been an artist).

But, stand in the median of a long flat stretch of freeway, and you’ll see how it works. The eastbound lanes to your right (if you’re facing east, that is), run parallel to the westbound lanes on your left; drive your eyes down those roads, though, and eventually the parallel lines converge--they don’t stay parallel, at least not as you see it, and obviously they never diverge, start going in directions opposed to each other--unless you have a serious vision problem, some ophthalmologic disease that makes you see things opposite of how they are, or maybe how they “should” be.

What started me thinking about that was a visit from my father today.

Dad is a big-time conservative, although not so loony as, say, Sarah Palin or that clown from Texas or the pizza guy or the dog abuser or, well, I lose track of them all. His main focus is the Second Amendment, actually, and he will admit to such, although he is also not a huge fan of capital gains taxes and so forth. He is a farmer, has almost always been a farmer (while working day jobs simultaneously to keep food on the table; farming is not always the most profitable of occupations), comes from a long line of farmers. Interestingly, he is in favor of legalizing most illegal drugs, and also in favor of a woman’s right to choose, that is, abortion. He also hates liberals with a passion, has been known to talk disparagingly about Catholics (something I’ve never figured out, given that he gets along well with Catholics and doesn’t seem particularly prejudiced in his dealings with them), and would never slam the door on, say, a black person whose car has broken down and come knocking to use the telephone (now, THAT shows my age--EVERYbody has a cell phone, these days). In some ways, he is what Churchill said about Russia: “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

In short, he is an American, or at least one variety thereof. And there are a lot of varieties.

I do disagree with him on a lot of things. For instance, when I was a kid, I identified myself as a “Republican.” That was in the 1970s, and I was in my pre-teen and teen years. First time I voted in a presidential election was 1980, by which time I considered myself a libertarian. Over the three decades since then, working my way through all but a couple of months of them in a variety of mostly “pink-collar” jobs, I’ve begun to swing more towards the liberal point of view, if there is one.

Anyway, he came over this afternoon to pick up something stored in my shed, and we of course talked for a while. Talk turned to politics and economics, and somehow I wound up trying to explain Occupy Wall Street to him. “The occupiers are not bums or lazy or people who want handouts,” I said. “They are people who are working or have worked and want to work again, and are asking only for fairness.”

I told him that none (or mostly none) of the occupiers have any problem with capitalism or the fact that some people make more than others. The problem, I said, lay in perspective. You’ve got two lines, one the 99%, one the 1%. As the lines go forward on a graph, they should remain more or less parallel; look at them with “forward perspective,” they should ultimately converge. Instead, you’ve got the line of the 1% going up, the line of the 99% going down. Instead of converging, or at least remaining parallel, the lines diverge. And that is unnatural, the opposite of how things SHOULD work.  What was it Flannery O'Connor said?  "Everything that rises must converge"?  Yeah, it's like that.

Well, Dad isn’t a photographer, and he has probably never taken an art class, so what I was saying probably struck him as utter nonsense. To his credit, though, he DID listen.

So maybe there is hope for the Occupy movement.  "Real" people are starting to hear, and maybe even to listen.