ATHENS AND LOS ANGELES
There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been
interested in learning about the Greeks. “I perceive,” she says, “that
there are superstitions in the arts, just as in religion.”
“Exactly,” says Ogi; “and they serve the same purpose. They begin as
honest ignorance, and are then taken up and used as a source of income
and a shield to privilege.”
Says Mrs. Ogi, “It strikes me the Greeks lived in a country very much
like Southern California.”
“Quite so. The climate is the same; and the rocky hills and fertile
valleys, and people living the outdoor life, and giving their time to
sports. The one-piece bathing-suits that have come into fashion in our
‘beauty parades’ are about the same thing as the Greek maidens running
naked in the games. And if you want to parallel the darker side of Greek
sensuousness--”
“There is Hollywood,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“There is all smart society, as much luxury and wantonness as your
thesis requires.”
“But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are
going to say--our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements.
But joking aside, why?”
“Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a
country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on
piñon nuts. All the settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and
raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if
anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get
together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time
on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was
ripe.”
“What are we going to do?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave
empire.”
Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the
entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye--the ancestral habit
of expecting some hostile intruder. After a while she remarks, “I
notice you didn’t say anything about slavery in Greece.”
“It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where
its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which
destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their ‘world war,’
and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel
between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh--or
weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the
Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an
aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war
lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn’t developed the
technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and
psychic factors of our ‘war for democracy’--‘defeatists’ and
‘bitter-enders,’ poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising
utopias after victory, spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees
crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines,
rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the
general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way;
Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became
subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks.”
“Thus endeth the first lesson,” says Mrs. Ogi. “And now for the Romans.”
“Well, the Romans didn’t bleed themselves to death; they were practical
fellows, with a business man’s point of view. They turned their deadly
short swords against other races; and when they had conquered somebody,
they put him to work for the glory of the Grand Old Party. They were
‘hard-boiled,’ as we say; our big business men of the rougher type--old
P. D. Armour, and Pullman, and ‘Jesse James’ Hill, and Harriman, and the
elder Morgan, and Judge Gary. This banker in Chicago that the Republican
party has just put over on us as vice-president, General ‘Helen Maria’
Dawes--he commanded an army against the Germans, and having conquered
them, he goes back to put them under bond, to set them at work for long
hours, and drain the milk out of the mothers’ breasts, and feed it to
the international bankers, instead of to the German infants. That was a
perfect Roman job, and General Helen Maria would have been the boy
after the Romans’ own heart; they would have made him a prefect over the
whole of Asia Minor, or Northern Africa, or Spain, and he would have
come home a millionaire--but never so rich as the head of one of the
Morgan banks in Chicago!”
“I shouldn’t think you’d get much art out of people like that,” says
Mrs. Ogi. “But go ahead and tell us the story.”