Zeitgeist And The Oscularium: Kissing and Telling

When the Japanese surrendered to the Americans in 1945, nurse Edith Shain kissed a sailor in Times Square, Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped a picture, and that picture told the tale.  The innocent nurse, all in white, and the dark, bloody, but still boyishly-innocent warrior joined at the hip and at the lips.  America's self-imagined soul in one snapshot, our nurturing goodness and our righteous aggression, passionately joined.

Eisenstaedt captured in that picture the innocence and optimism of the national mood, blissfully unaware of the coming complexities that were slouching towards New York.  Victory led to the kiss of a jubilant prosperity; prosperity led to purposelessness, most famously addressed by Kennedy's challenge to get to the moon; boredom led to the corruption of Vietnam and Watergate; Corruption led to cynicism and a spiritual chaos that is still resolving itself.

And now we stand again at a crossroads, and a second kiss catches my eye: the kiss of Alexandra Thomas and Scott Jones.Rich Lam / Getty. Move along, people. Nothing to see here. Well... actually, yes, there is.

Alexandra Thomas was slightly injured in a riot in Vancouver that broke out when the Canucks missed a chance to bring The Stanley Cup home.  Scott Jones bent down to comfort her with a kiss.  "He has always lived in his own world, he's special like that. He doesn't always connect with what's going on around him," his mother says.  "I'd have to have my house flooded to get on the news, but he just has to kiss a beautiful girl."

Good work, if you can get it.

In the digital global village, this picture could be anywhere: Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Morocco, Moscow, or Gstaad.  

And all around the world, those who are "disconnected with what's going on around them" are now (or still) the most interesting people.  They're the ones who don't swell the mindless current that drives us all along, but who swim in the current, choosing who they will be and what they will do.

Like kissing in the middle of a riot. 

The rage in the streets of Vancouver was, like the rage everywhere else these days (or so it sometimes seems) outrage that our entertainment isn't up to our standards.  Sure, now and then there's a riot you can get behind and help to swell.  The world is smaller, now, and the emotional gravity of our relationships is confused and difficult to sort out, but we move in herds that seek the greener grass as we trot down asphalt streets and shatter shop windows.

Strange moments lead us into the streets, anything from a hockey game to complaints about globalization.  Maybe "justice" has become a sort of flash-mob of the conscience, an indignant status update, and our humanity feels strangely connected to our billions of electromagnetic tethers that hold us in our orbits around one another.

But even in a moment where the greatest injustice sends us all to the barricades, when black-masked Authority pats its palm with a bludgeon; or when nature plunges us all into the nightmare of our animal selves, maybe we should remember Scott Jones, a somewhat disconnected stand-up comic from Australia, who points us to the greatest justice of all: there's a human creature here, and look how beautiful a human creature is.

Let the world shriek in its shrill tones: there's time enough in the timeless human heart to feel, and The Stanley Cup was never so beautiful or shining as Alexandra Thomas, or me, or you.  Certainly not so shining as Scott Jones.