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Puritanism & Postmodernism · Mar 14, 10:51 PM

On our morning dog walks Carole & I talk about various things, but mostly we bring each other up to date on what’s going on at work. Carole works in a college art gallery & over the last few weeks, Carole’s boss has gotten several outraged communications about works of art. There were a couple regarding the publicity card for the David Rees show, which arrived enclosed in an envelope, though an unsealed one as is customary for such mailings. “My children had access to these images!” wrote one over-excited housefrau (or words to that effect). More recently, the alumni magazine ran an image of a make nude from the art collection on the back cover & received a complaint that such an image was not “appropriate for family viewing.” The image was of the figure’s back, but apparently the worried parent could discern a tiny bit of ball sack between the nude’s legs. So, just a couple of anecdotes. I’m not David Brooks so I won’t propose the existence of a cultural trend & then build a sociological thesis on a couple of observations.

Still. The country appears to have gone insane, if by insane one means consciousness focusing on insignificant details while ignoring the basic features of reality. What is it that makes Americans become hysterical about a four letter word or a depiction of a naked body—turning such bits & pieces into fetishes endowed with a super-charged cultural energy—while ignoring the actual horrors that surround them? he question answers itself, I suppose. It is much easier to stick a Support Our Troops ribbon on your ride than to actually entertain for a moment the texture of reality. Which would mean allowing oneself to imagine reality outside of a cliché. “Why doesn’t the media report the good things that are happening in Iraq?” The question has become part of the apparatus of denial & is passed like a magic talisman from one military family to another. It hurts to think. If you don’t conform to the cliché you are a traitor.

The effect of such a reality is to reduce every statement to a cliché, so many chips on the table to be won or lost.

Note: I should probably put “Postmodernism” above in scare quotes since I don’t want to be confused with someone who thinks such a thing actually exists.

* * *

  1. I don’t understand why people suddenly seem so upset by nude images. You can’t go into the Greek or Roman antiquities section of any major museum and swing a stick without hitting some statue in the ball sack. On another note, I can picture the founders of October standing side by side in their expanded field, shaking their fingers at you and stammering, “You, you, you, ... LATE MODERNIST, you!”
    — Michael Harold    03/15/2005 07:58 PM    #
  2. About 20 miles north of where I live, the mall parking lots are filled with trucks and SUVs that suffer a veritable pox of ribbons announcing that the owners of those vehicles support our troops—and they do so in the most acceptable form, too.

    Some of these people might even be relatives of troops … and so they may have to be actively engaged with that support, in terms of keeping the home fires going all by themselves …

    But what really got me lately is the number of other cars that now sport these ribbons closer to where I live, in an area so blue you would think it’s deprived of oxygen, and supposedly aware and willing to engage in debate and not just in stickering themselves into clichés. I am so tempted to ask these people here with the more expensive cars that are now plastered with these ribbons that take their place along the pink ribbons, and all the other ribboned cause celebre of de jour, if they are actually willing to pitch and go babysit or help clean house or fix something for the families of the troops they proclaim to support.

    Maybe I am naïve, but that kind of confrontation of each other’s reality, however spotty and brief, might help us look for a cure for the ribbon disease….

    I do agree with you on the spread of the insanity … and am at a loss to see how fast denial is ripping apart the fabric of a cultural tradition in which thinking and analysis and difference once made for rich patterns in which all sorts of experiences found a color or texture!
    — maria    03/15/2005 09:11 PM    #
  3. Notable, I think, is that most of those ribbons are magnets
    — Emily Lloyd    03/16/2005 01:38 PM    #
  4. ...ugh, the bulk of my comment didn’t post. There’s an amusing bumper sticker out there that says “I Support Our Troops More Than You Do.”

    The magnet comment was about the level of commitment…I support..but I don’t want to mess up my shiny bumper.
    — Emily Lloyd    03/16/2005 01:41 PM    #
  5. I tried commenting yesterday, but it wouldn’t post, so I made a lengthier comment on my blog at http://aholeinthehead.blogspot.com
    — Dan    03/16/2005 10:40 PM    #