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Last week, it seems, we were willing to admit
that our highest social values could be expressed in price codes (
the "mark of the Beast" as the cranks say, the "prophets of doom").
This week, we feel shame. In a Times interview a fashion
designer expressed doubt that her work had any significance and
wondered if she could go on with it. The fashion industry is also
ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed; even the news media expressed some
fleeting longing for decorum & dignity & decency.
Are
we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our
mean-spiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred
of the body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry &
"information", our degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art
& lit, & so on & so on? -- or should we defend all this
as "freedom" and "our way of life"?
Our leaders are telling
us to return to normal routines (after a decent period of mourning)
in the assurance that they will assign significance to the event,
they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will
mediate for us with the forces of "evil". But what exactly is this
normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this
shame?
Schoolchildren (again according to the Times)
ask their teachers what it means that the terrorists were willing to
die, to kill themselves; and their teachers evade the question,
saying that "we don't understand." And the ad execs, they don't
understand either -- they're bewildered. Awake but confused by a
crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed in
terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of
meaning?
A hyperfashionable Italian clothing company uses
death to sell its products. Photographs -- even huge billboards
--showing people dying of AIDS or waiting to be executed -- designed
to sell woolly jumpers. Is this life as normal? Should we return to
it?
For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No
thumping bass speakers rattled the air, no chants of hate for women
& queers, no "Madison Avenue Choirs" hymning the celestial
delites of commodities or vacations in the midst of other peoples'
misery.
For a few hours or days there appeared no official
spin on the event, no slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation,
no meaning. We watched the cloud drift around the city, first to the
East over Brooklyn, then up the west side of Manhattan, finally over
the east side as well. With the smell and the poisonous haze around
the moon came a nightmare about the occult significance of the
cloud: -- angry bewildered ghosts in a vast white cloud. And we
breathed that cloud into us. We'll never get it out of our lungs.
What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a
meaning.
But next day the spin was in, the media had
found or been given its answer -- "Attack on America", on our
freedom our values, our way of life, carried out by "cowards" who
were nevertheless not "physical cowards" (as some official explained
to the Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He didn't
say.
Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but
received no coherent answer. Do "they" hate "us" because we use up
75% of the world's resources even though we only constitute 20% of
its population? because we bomb Baghdad & Belgrade without
risking even one American life? because we refuse to discuss
pollution or racism? because we demand the destruction of the
Alaskan wilderness to fuel our SUVs for thirty more days? because we
export a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world, video
games about death, movies about death, TV shows about death,
commodities that are dead, music that kills the spirit? because
we've made advertizing our highest artform? because we define
"freedom" as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money?
The politicians have told us that "they" envy us and our way
of life and therefore wish to destroy it. Envy -- yes, why not? The
whole system of global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No
envy, no desire. No desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend,
implosion of global capital, q.e.d. But then why should the
ad execs & fashion designers & sports teams &
entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame?
Any why
should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they
envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and
spend, and waste? What does it mean?
After the Holocaust (or
Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers said that there could
be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently. We have
poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before. It may
not mean anything. But we have it. And who could have dreamed at the
gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have -- Nike
ads or sitcoms about lawyers?
Is any meaning going to emerge
from the 9/11 event? Without meaning tragedy ends not in catharsis
but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our leaders "seek closure" --
perhaps by killing many Afghan children -- perhaps by a new Crusade
against the Saracens -- and of course by a return to normal. We'll
show "them" -- by refusing meaning. We will sleep because it is our
right not to awake to confusion & shame.
Our sleep will
be troubled. We'll have to "sacrifice a few freedoms" to protect
Freedom. We'll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or
months we will have buried even the fear & hate, or rather we
will have transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye
of the media, our externalized unconscious. We'll have sitcoms again
and gangsta rap and arguments about our right to download it all for
free into our home computers. We'll get those airplanes flying, once
again polluting "our" skies with noise & carcinogens. We'll
overcome our shame. And that will constitute our revenge. That will
be our meaning. Our morality. |
