Essay No writers needed By David Parmer	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
物書きのいらない世の中 20世紀末、もうすぐこの世は終わると予感し、崩壊後の社会に必要な人材を集めようと計画した人たちがいた。 そうした局面では、物書きや音楽家、画家といった「文化の担い手」は、「必要な人材」とはみなされなかった…。

At the end of the last century before the clock ticked over to a new millennium, many people were worried. Seriously worried. They feared the end of time, the Apocalypse, or a megaglitch in everything digital. As we now know, not much happened, life went on, TV got worse and the Rolling Stones got older.

But at the time, there were those who took extreme measures to protect themselves: stocking food and weapons, and buying generators to supply their own power. Many of them even planned post-Apocalyptic communities. I remember reading about their preparations. What most intrigued me was the type of people they were willing to take into their communities. They needed doctors, nurses, mechanics, farmers, carpenters, gunsmiths, martial arts teachers, heavy equipment operators and such. They had no openings for ad execs, bikini waxers, opinion pollsters, personal shoppers or writers.

Well, I guess, in one sense, they were right. In a survival situation you don't need writers, and you don't need musicians and you don't need painters. What you need is a woman who can deliver a baby and a guy who can handle an assault rifle, or vice versa. But the creative types, well, they are a luxury at a time like that.

But the "creatives"are the keepers of culture. By "culture,"I don't mean a lot of people dressing up and going to the opera. By "culture,"I mean that which makes us human, and the history of that which makes us human. Because when humans get one step beyond the fight for survival, their creativity emerges. When we have satisfied our needs for food and shelter, then creativity seems to spontaneously emerge.

O.K. Here is another way of looking at this. In English we say "to keep"a cat. And what that means is the human feeds and shelters the cat as a permanent guest. In return, the cat is supposed to catch mice, which they rarely do these days. The cat also amuses and delights its human. But really, the cat is a luxury. In the same way, creatives are society's cats: People feed and shelter them by buying their work, attending their concerts and paying them royalties. Now don't get me wrong, not all creatives are the carriers of high culture. Some writers, like myself, are the pizza-delivery persons of culture, and some musicians play at weddings, and some artists make the boxes for Big Macs. You might say we are culture's alley cats; the ones that kindly old eccentric feeds every morning in the park.

But society does feed and shelter the show cats, the high-level artists, and does so almost instinctively. We celebrate them in the same way we celebrate our Olympic athletes. On some level we know that they are working in an area of excellence that is beyond the ordinary. And we know their greatness is our shared potential greatness as a species. I say the world is a better place because of them. Let us pray to our gods that the darkness never does descend, and that we will always have our creatives and the luxury to support them.

Shukan ST: Aug. 17, 2007

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