Skeleton Keys (88)salimondoSeptember 1 2005, 13:48:36 UTC
Thanks. It's a hard thing to diagnose because there are so many forces involved, but invoking the cataclysm is a step in the right direction.
But first, we have to step sideways for a look at how these "simple human beings" are dealing with smaller-scale visits from death these days. From what I can see, death is the absolute horror of the frothy people. The information castes (froth makers) simply refuse to deal with mortality in any concrete or personal way -- as you say, it's an abnormal inconvenience, a glitch, something that happens to other people and especially never something to talk about in front of your own darling children except as a euphemism or other abstraction. If god forbid a relative should pass into the big wide somewhere, you buy a book and it helps you construct your response, like a parent cutting up an entree into little digestible cubes because little hands are unwieldy on the knife.
And the people who still buy and sell stuff and services, they see this and the class-conscious types follow suit. But among the rest, the pure consumers of froth, death is still something of a rural tabu, a big spooky, an allergy, and the more deeply they're insulated from it on an everyday level, the harder it gets to meet death head on to shake the feeling. I think this is a factor in a lot of the emotional formations of the white American mass, from the abortion hysteria (not just a death industry, but death for BABIES) to born-again triumphalism (because true believers never die, they just get taken up) to anti-rock music tracts (I remember that the grand tabu of the song "Hotel California," for example, was the line "you can check out any time you like," an apparently morbidly positive reference to suicide) down to the way we deal with meat. The froth workers were never on a first-name basis with death, but the froth eaters aren't even able to chatter about it in the abstract.
As a civilization we are literally medicating ourselves to death. Healthcare has made vast strides toward the cure for death and the eradication of its good friend pain, and every program in the quadrillion-dollar pipeline pushes the grave back a little farther in some small direction. Life expectancy is up, we can keep even terminal cases alive for ages, cosmetic technologies can make prettiness universal, keep the tragic at bay every day. And the supreme effort is bankrupting us.
And the miracle, naturally, is that when death is walled out so carefully, death keeps finding new ways in, and when it succeeds, the effects on unprepared people are cataclysmic.
Now it's funny that among the froth-making or "daimonic" castes the rallying cry is "life against death!" and all that organic feel-good stuff. It's funny because this campaign to abstract the pathos out of life has succeeded too well for them, and now the "simple human beings" -- the mass voter -- have seized on the message and are using it to take power from the froth making middle elites. It used to be that the religion of the poor was about death because the poor were closest to death. By insulating the poor from death, the bourgeois civilization succeeds in insulating them from their natural source of power -- but also fails in giving the poor complete access to their own natural source of power, the power of turning the vast things in the world into words and images. Death has been apparently conquered, which means the middle class have won by eradicating one of the primary stings of poverty, which means the poor have won, which means the middle classes have lost. And the joke of course is that death isn't actually dead.
Skeleton Keys (88 part two)salimondoSeptember 1 2005, 13:49:10 UTC
[continued]
To put it crassly, when the Episcopalians outgrew their religion back in the heady 20th century, the farmers were thrilled to wear the castoffs. Today's big media southern revivalism is a paper dragon compared to the kind of small town hellfire they could dish out a few decades ago. It's just threadbare Anglicanism for the mass market: vague feel-good loyalties, moral platitudes, a sense of self-satisfied election. And the horror of death. That's what the blue state types are fighting: their own shadow.
If I were a blue state strategist, I'd challenge the WASPs to pick up a little of the stark old-time religion that the red states have abandoned, the Wisconsin Death Trip. Ichabod Crane. Witches of Eastwick. Sharp-boned yankee gloom. The old southern gothic -- the American Gothic. The greats still understand this, and I think this is why Alan Ball and Tony Kushner still do such achingly good work on the tide of bulimic explusa, and in the old days why Norman O. Brown and the boys had such ecstatic power. It's about death also.
But first, we have to step sideways for a look at how these "simple human beings" are dealing with smaller-scale visits from death these days. From what I can see, death is the absolute horror of the frothy people. The information castes (froth makers) simply refuse to deal with mortality in any concrete or personal way -- as you say, it's an abnormal inconvenience, a glitch, something that happens to other people and especially never something to talk about in front of your own darling children except as a euphemism or other abstraction. If god forbid a relative should pass into the big wide somewhere, you buy a book and it helps you construct your response, like a parent cutting up an entree into little digestible cubes because little hands are unwieldy on the knife.
And the people who still buy and sell stuff and services, they see this and the class-conscious types follow suit. But among the rest, the pure consumers of froth, death is still something of a rural tabu, a big spooky, an allergy, and the more deeply they're insulated from it on an everyday level, the harder it gets to meet death head on to shake the feeling. I think this is a factor in a lot of the emotional formations of the white American mass, from the abortion hysteria (not just a death industry, but death for BABIES) to born-again triumphalism (because true believers never die, they just get taken up) to anti-rock music tracts (I remember that the grand tabu of the song "Hotel California," for example, was the line "you can check out any time you like," an apparently morbidly positive reference to suicide) down to the way we deal with meat. The froth workers were never on a first-name basis with death, but the froth eaters aren't even able to chatter about it in the abstract.
As a civilization we are literally medicating ourselves to death. Healthcare has made vast strides toward the cure for death and the eradication of its good friend pain, and every program in the quadrillion-dollar pipeline pushes the grave back a little farther in some small direction. Life expectancy is up, we can keep even terminal cases alive for ages, cosmetic technologies can make prettiness universal, keep the tragic at bay every day. And the supreme effort is bankrupting us.
And the miracle, naturally, is that when death is walled out so carefully, death keeps finding new ways in, and when it succeeds, the effects on unprepared people are cataclysmic.
Now it's funny that among the froth-making or "daimonic" castes the rallying cry is "life against death!" and all that organic feel-good stuff. It's funny because this campaign to abstract the pathos out of life has succeeded too well for them, and now the "simple human beings" -- the mass voter -- have seized on the message and are using it to take power from the froth making middle elites. It used to be that the religion of the poor was about death because the poor were closest to death. By insulating the poor from death, the bourgeois civilization succeeds in insulating them from their natural source of power -- but also fails in giving the poor complete access to their own natural source of power, the power of turning the vast things in the world into words and images. Death has been apparently conquered, which means the middle class have won by eradicating one of the primary stings of poverty, which means the poor have won, which means the middle classes have lost. And the joke of course is that death isn't actually dead.
[continued!]
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To put it crassly, when the Episcopalians outgrew their religion back in the heady 20th century, the farmers were thrilled to wear the castoffs. Today's big media southern revivalism is a paper dragon compared to the kind of small town hellfire they could dish out a few decades ago. It's just threadbare Anglicanism for the mass market: vague feel-good loyalties, moral platitudes, a sense of self-satisfied election. And the horror of death. That's what the blue state types are fighting: their own shadow.
If I were a blue state strategist, I'd challenge the WASPs to pick up a little of the stark old-time religion that the red states have abandoned, the Wisconsin Death Trip. Ichabod Crane. Witches of Eastwick. Sharp-boned yankee gloom. The old southern gothic -- the American Gothic. The greats still understand this, and I think this is why Alan Ball and Tony Kushner still do such achingly good work on the tide of bulimic explusa, and in the old days why Norman O. Brown and the boys had such ecstatic power. It's about death also.
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