pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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SUBURBANIZATION OF THE SOUL

217.

There is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanization of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all.�J.G. Ballard, interview in The Guardian, 6.22.04

I saw a bumper sticker on the way into work today that read �We ARE the rogue state.� Was pondering the Ballard quote when I saw it and concluded, sadly, that far more Americans can name the characters on the Simpsons or identify the newest Hollywood break-up than can define a rogue state. Statistics indicate that few voters even care to know more than what�s on their television screens, prefer a jingoistic message that makes them feel good about themselves to the pesky, messy, difficult reality that's going on all around them. Global warming? Talk to the hand coz I gotta buy some more bling and you're boring me....

I found this scribbled quote from AdBusters in my journal:

DON�T LOOK NOW
Listen: don�t you get it? This is the greatest place on earth. Nobody cares about the declining dollar, or the dwindling oil reserves, or the massive trade deficit. These are just words you hear on the news every once in a while. They don�t mean anything to anybody.

Look around you! We�re number one and that�s not going to change. It�s no accident we�re all fascinated with Paris Hilton. We�re her, she�s us. She�s beautiful, rich and fabulous�she has it all, everyone wants to be her. And that�s exactly what this country is like.

Yes, we�re in debt�what country isn�t? How much do you think Paris owes on her Visa right now? We get the Chinese to keep buying US treasury bonds and we�re golden. The important thing is: we have to keep our eyes on the prize. We can�t let the eggheads and nay-sayers get us down. These people aren�t in touch with reality.

Look: this is a beautiful place�we�ve made it that way. We can�t turn back now. We can�t give an inch. We can�t let it slip from our grasp.

We�ve just got to believe.

Groan. Just like any number of sermons or King George the II speeches, eh? If AdBusters included a credit, I couldn�t find it, but it sure sounds like a cross between the smiling, bobbleheaded Gipper and that ee cummings poem about the silver-tongued politician who spoke, then drank a glass of water rapidly. .

�

Matthew Alper wrote, in The God Part of The Brain (due out in 2006), that Gawd is a coping mechanism. And we humans are hard-wired (to our detriment) to believe in a deity, he says.

Gotta ponder that a bit, but this could be true. Maybe we are hardwired to accept easy answers that allow us to turn back to something that makes our heads hurt less. Or perhaps we�re just too frantically busy trying to make ends meet or get the kids off to soccer practice on time and too poorly educated to understand specious reasoning and hollow persuasive speech that contradicts itself�irony�when we encounter it.

Then there are the Machiavellis and (fucking) Napoleons (to use ani�s phrase) of the world. Perhaps they recognize our common fears and insecurities and our need for pat answers and so create a contemporary Gawd to provide those answers and a means by which they can employ this deity for social control (or, in the case of the Catholic Church, for extravagant riches).

A review of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) that I read a while ago contains this wonderful observation:

Art is the only god you can prove exists. Everything else is mortal.

Now this is a spin on something Pottergrrl said, that I loved:

Creativity is my religion. It has saved me more than once.

Yes.

The reviewer said that people who �get� Warhol understand that he was fascinated by the shallowness of personality, by its transparency. He recognized that Americans respect the infinitely reproducible better than any one-off creation, so he gave us what we wanted: 8,000 identical silkscreen prints of canned tomato soup. (What is today�s equivalent? How about 8,000 identical Humvees popping wheelies over the previous beauty of Alaskan wilderness?)

Warhol once said

What�s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Interesting observation and, you know, if I come across Cokes in those tiny glass bottles, then I just gotta have one too. But let's remind ourselves that we live in a consumer culture in which the richest few keep inheriting the businesses that pay advertising agencies big bucks to convince us all to spend our money on those Cokes (or shall I say on bottled, colored caffeine and sugar, which is oh so incredibly addictive) and other useless bling ... and on, say, satellite TVs, which allow us to view even more advertisements that convince us to buy even bigger and better bling, and to do this by maxxing out our interest-generating credit cards.

�

In Videodrome, Professor Brian O�Blivion appears only on TV, and says �

The television is the retina of the mind�s eye. Therefore, the television is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch. Therefore, television is reality and reality is less than television.

Hmm.

And since I somehow slid sideways into a rant about TV and celebrity and money, I�ll end with this factoid: Warren Buffett, an American whose personal holdings have outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average for over forty years now, has a luxury yacht named �The Middle Finger.�

Rogue state. Yeah.

And, finally, an observation by Slavoj Zizek:

The planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: we can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of twentieth-century art�s �passion for the Real��the "terrorists" themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage but for the spectacular effect of it.

And so we line up for spectacle every day, flip our channels to Fox because we dig that sensationalism, those graphic images of the burning plane or exploding Iraqis or mangled car wreck and find anything less so yawningly gawd-awful boring.

10:15 a.m. - 2005-08-03

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