ideas: from people
If all you have are big ideas…
And in this fledgling blog dedicated to big (and small) ideas, the very antithesis to why they are important.
Angels in America, a Broadway play-turned-Hollywood television mini-series (stunning opening credits below), has had more effect on me than anything else I’ve seen on a screen of any size. Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script, declared one of the most important works of contemporary literature, is teeming with ideas. On everything: sex, religion, politics, justice and the so-called American Dream.
Louis, the self-hating Jewish anti-hero of Kushner’s epic, loves debating them all. But black AIDS nurse and friend Belize tires of the rants. Of all the stirring monologues delivered, this may just be the best:
Up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his big ideas. Big ideas are all you love. America is what Louis loves. Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.
It’s a terrific characterisation of America, a righteous, supposedly united people striving for and enforcing a set of supposedly moral ideals it can’t hope to ever achieve itself, let alone hold other nations to them. Is America really just an impossible, and impossibly big, idea?
And it begs the question: what is the point of big ideas if all we do is talk about them, judge on them, but inevitably fail to achieve them? Or is holding them in our hearts, and the perpetual struggle for them, enough?
Tags: Discussion
3 comments for “If all you have are big ideas…”
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is the failure always inevitable though?
I think the whole notion of a big idea is connected to a hopefulness for the future…without that life may seem very bleak indeed
so perhaps the big ideas are necessary even if all we actually achieve are the little ideas
(for some reason “from little things big things grow” just popped into my head)
great blog!
I tend to agree, Wendy. Striving for the big idea is the best motivator. If we actually achieved global freedom, what would strive for then? Best that nobody hits the note.
And thanks for your generous feedback. Anyone who quotes Paul Kelly is a friend of mine.
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