politics and stories

"As an artist I work with lots of different media but mainly what it
comes down to is storytelling. I tell stories. And I love stories.
They're illusions. You can make them up. You can get a lot of
people to believe them. You can even get a lot of people to believe
a story about how they're in great danger and how there's an evil
despot with lots of hidden weapons who wants to kill you. I mean
you can actually start wars with stories. That's how magic they
really are. And if it's a really good story, you can tell it again.
Just add a few new details about mushroom clouds hanging over
U.S. cities and invasions of the homeland. Just change a few names
and places and you can tell the exact same story again and you
can start another war. Because everyone forgot that the first
story wasn't a true story. But of course the point was never that
it was a true story. The point was that it was a good story.
Scary, convincing, and beautiful.
So what do stories mean in a country where the government is
very media-savvy, very story-savvy? What does a true story
mean now?
What's a beautiful story?
Many of the big American stories now, the most-told stories, are
apocalyptic. They're stories about how the world is getting
hotter, more crowded, and dangerous. They're about arctic floods
and disappearing resources and entropy and the world winding down.
And nobody knowns whether all this is fiction or not. But like
many complicated stories about the future, there's no way to
predict which version is more likely. It's just sort of a matter
of preference. It comes down to which story do you like better?
This is another thing I love about stories — they are wild and
alive and always changing.

What are days for?
To wake us up.
To put between the endless nights."


LAURIE ANDERSON em "Homeland"