Rowan was a model citizen
One-eighth scale
Painstakingly posed
With animating make up
Almost lifelike
This short poem, “Model Citizen,” is a reflection on the life-like which should only be mistaken for life at one’s own peril — or, in this poem’s case, at one’s community’s own peril. The status quo and the powers that be provide a straightforward framework, including incentives and disincentives, to behave in a certain way. This is a large part of what we call culture. Busy-ness and business are dominant aspects of modern Western civilization. Unfortunately, being busy, or just seeming busy, isn’t necessarily linked with human betterment or progress. Like Gandhi said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Surely, the capitalist business and consumer culture feeds the need for speed, ever-increasing “industriousness” to grow the economy and standard of living. Perhaps the best example of why this path is perilous is the reality that a “successful” growth of worldwide standard of material living requires an increasingly unsustainable exploitation and consumption of natural resources, and concomitant waste. If such growth is not to be a fatal planetary cancer, there needs to be wholesale changes in the way we do business, and busy-ness, as relates to the urgency of the situation. We cannot settle for life-light or lifelike. Such citizen posers may be the death of us all.
This poem points to the role of good citizenship in creating, maintaining, and sustaining healthy communities and a healthy planet. In good citizenship, democracy is the process and the common good is the goal. Neither democracy nor the common good can reasonably be entrusted to elites, whether these elites are political, business, technocratic, or religious. It is precisely these elites which have an interest in selling us something other than the common good. The proprietary nature of modern existence, driven by the profit motive, has brought us to this place. The common good is anathema to profit as king. The unjust advantage held by elites is what keeps us on this perilous trajectory. Nominal democracy is a common tool used to fool average citizens into accepting something less than the common good. There is a great divide between elites, who are generally viewed as portraits of “success” — a mere fantasy for many — and the masses who would be greatly advantaged by securing the common good. Of course, in affluent societies, the “middle class” comprise most of the so-called “model citizens.” Their advantage in the larger scheme of things is sufficient to buy into the status quo, if not the powers that be. The amorphous common good of some possible life is bypassed for the reasonable access to the concrete benefits of living in a materially affluent society. Most simply put: if I’ve got mine, then risking that for something less certain seems like a bad bet. So we settle. In terms of democracy, made nominal, this appears as that oft-too-common choice of the lesser of two evils, choosing between two elites who have no real interest in the common good, other than to pacify the masses and maintain stability and predictability. Just note the language used with the utmost importance regarding financial interests and “markets” needing “certainty.” Predictability has many nice facets to it, but in this case, the greatest certainty is that the rich will grow richer and the poor will grow poorer. When this almost-cliche formula receives little complaint or resistance, it is a sure diagnostic that you are richer than poorer, or at least a committed wannabe richer. In the end, this poem is a call to the poorer masses to throw off the illusions brought by nominal democracy (in a plutocracy) and the modest temporary incentives to play it safe as a “model citizen” only one-eighth scale. Then, we can join together in a much truer democracy able to secure the common good for all — yes, even the richer.
