Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes: Redemption Songs in the Culture of Second Chances?

What to do with a dying democracy? What to do with a declining stagnation of chronic social outcomes?

Answer: Redeem the social values that have made us a great nation in word and re-make those that have made America a despot in practice and praxis. Become the walk that we talk, the people of a land of freedom, understanding, liberty, dignity, justice and compassion for all.

Tiger Woods is returning to golf to play the 2010 Master’s Tournament! This is a historic moment for the world of golf. This moment is set within another larger moment in American culture. Not only is it historic for the world of golf, but also for the world as a whole. The culture that has come to evolve in the contemporary moment is what I call, a culture of ‘second chances.’ It is part of a culture-wide existential moment in which those who deserve a second ‘go at it' will get their chance at redemption.

On the level of the nation state, this juncture is where America, Americans, and all that we really stand for will be put to the test. We will be acquitted or convicted, acknowledged or denied, standing at the entrance into the impending era of our evolutionary success or failure in the great democratic experiment.

In the culture as a whole there is a sort of revival afoot. Cultural elements and products are collectively re-circulating. Cultural elements of style, investments on the ideological and social level, and the characteristic circulation of local and global symbols are pulling forward into the future the vast collection of all such past events in the cycle of the retro-cultural unfolding of contemporary reality.

As just one example of a manifestation of re-circulating culture of second chances, ‘classic rock’ bands like Motley Crue, and Poison are back on the road. We are at the beginning of what looks like another renaissance in American music. The music industry, the economy of music production and sale, the importance of music ‘up from the ground,’ and the impositions and dispositions of the socio-economic-politico cultural atmosphere have all evolved in ways that are echoing the late 1980’s, a cultural milieu that spawned the ‘underground’ music scene of that era.

Many artists who never achieved the level of success they know they deserved, for example the heavy metal group Anvil, are back in the game, bigger than ever, recording and touring. People who have been around the course many times with or without recognition are emerging, and re-emerging, having another go at what they feel is rightfully theirs.

Tiger's return from personal moral crisis to play professional Golf’s “Master’s Tournament” (the first Major Championship of four for the year) is just such another moment in the culture of second chances. “Being John Daly” is a program being presented by The Golf Channel that is documenting this winner of several major tournaments’ return to playing at the top level in recovering from his own personal issues which caused him to fall from a ‘top tier’ golf career.

All of these, and many other stories like them are emerging as a culture-phenomenal reaction to the failing of the American culture. It is a cultural failing that is evidently unfolding as a lack of confidence in the American future, brought on by a series of moral, social, and economic upsets to the equilibrium of the current civilization. The subconscious super-structure of the cultural imagination, the collective unconscious as genius of practical survival technology, in the rush and panic of managing the declining imperial structure and its re-constitution, re-invents itself according to what it knows of its own past and according to what it hopes for its future. The totality of all previously constituted cultural symbols and elementals spring into action to make ready the way for the next necessary evolutionary step on the road to forestalling inevitable extinction, on the road calling forth our inevitable demise.

The ghost of culture, though it knows not its very self, intuitively knows its role in the hive and puts into action competing adaptive and mal-adaptive cultural attenuations that must then ‘fight it out’ between themselves on a slippery path between the depths of brutality and the heights of compassion.

We brutally murder our saviors when they fall, only to have them re-emerge from the obscure depths of moral depravity, to be finally redeemed in our name, in our place, for our pleasure, for our pain, thus are we too, subjectively collectively redeemed, as well. On some collective level the human being as an ideal existence is going through the macro-scale experience that each of us is individually and vicariously experiencing as the micro-analytic subject.

There are many stories of redemption in the face of despair that are unfolding in the strangest of ways right before our eyes, when not in the well-worn patterns we all immediately recognize. This is the challenge that the ghost of culture is responding to, manifestations of which are materializing as the redemption of all the symbols, symbolic structures, discourses, narratives, ideological social cultural investments, and flows of competing expressions. From all directions competing cultural flows re-invent, re-align, re-signify and square-off, ultimately vying against all others for cultural dominance on the road to redemption, on the road back to Rome...

Reedemshun sonnz!