NOTHING IS THE NEW EVERYTHING

Americans do not believe that there can be too much of a good thing. We are, despite this belief, still subject to Newton’s third law. For the time being, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But our best scientists are busy liberating our actions from the chains of their equal and opposite reactions. Progress to this end is proceeding apace, as evidenced by the emergence of three meticulously engineered products on the market in recent years. Low-carb beer, hybrid SUV’s and Viagra are here to empower the American consumer to get drunk, burn rubber, get laid and still wake up with rock hard abs, a clean conscious, and a rock hard (if not clean) cock. Americans are through paying the piper. But as the story goes, the spurned Pied Piper of Hamelin reacted to the people’s failure to pay for his rat-removal services by subsequently escorting the children of Hamelin to an early demise. Americans would do well to note this cautionary tale before chugging too much of the Budweiser Select. I have a feeling Sir Isaac has a thing or two on the brewmaster down at Anheuser-Busch.

Isaac Newton may have founded modern physics, but the wisdom expressed in his third law, that everything comes with a price, is, to quote the immortal John Denver, “older than the trees”. America’s beef with the wisdom contained in Newton’s third law is really a rejection of something much older than physics, namely the concept of sin.

America, for better or worse, has been soaked in religion since the day the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. By and large, we are still a church-going people, and most of us still voice a belief in God. But the bridle of religion has never rested easily on this prodigal folk, and almost 400 years post-Pilgrim we finally have secretly spit out the bit, gambling that our master at the reigns won’t notice. We still believe in God, and are interested in remaining in His good graces. What we have lost interest in are all the tedious rules handed down from on high. Ever practical, and always ingenious, Americans have solved the problem by remaking their relationship to the Almighty in the image of Diet Coke; all of God’s love and forgiveness but none of his rules. Just as Diet Coke replaced sugar with Nutrasweet, America has replaced sin with low-carb beer, hybrid SUV’s, and Viagra. Each of these three products flushes one of the seven deadly sins down the toilet. Surely, four more products shall emerge that will complete the purging. For now it will suffice to review the extant elimination, keeping in mind that everything, even and especially the end of sin, comes at a price.

Low-carb beer, first introduced to the public in the form of Michelob Ultra and now joined in the Anheuser-Busch stable of beers by Budweiser Select, is the ultimate expression of the low-carb diet. Low-carb beer stands at the pinnacle of the low-carb lifestyle as the only available low-carb intoxicant, at least until someone cooks up some low-carb pot brownies. Low-carb beer not only gives you a buzz, it enhances that buzz with the frisson of getting away with it scot-free. Perhaps, liberated from its homely partner the beer belly, the beer belch could even prove seductive. With low-carb beer, the possibilities beckon, in a way that even the comeliest plate of low-carb fare can never approach. There is too much history to a plate of filet mignon and caviar, it is too wrapped up in the human drama of power and prestige to ever serve as a capable instrument in the American war on sin. Certainly, a plate of salisbury steak, scrambled eggs and Velveeta isn’t up to the task.

No, it is the newly crowned King of Low-Carb Beers, Budweiser Select, that must lead the charge to topple the signature American deadly sin, gluttony. The size of people shopping at Super-Walmart grows out of our super-sized fries and Super-Big Gulps. We are a land of Super-Gluttons. Budweiser Select, as champion of all that is low-carb, is here to tell America one thing: you do not need to change. Continue consuming mass quantities. Despite all the Michelob Ultra ads featuring sculpted twentysomethings slavishly pursuing physical fitness, raising a glass of low-carb beer is to reject the very discipline these ads so deceitfully glamorize. A finely tuned athlete may occasionally indulge in the odd pint of lager, but it is an indulgence precisely because beer is the opposite of physical fitness. Linking beer to physical fitness is like linking marijuana to studying for your final exam (there is a theory that if you study for an exam on a drug you will do better if you also use the drug during the exam- this may apply to caffeine, but until someone volunteers to take their organic chemistry final stoned I stand by my argument).

And yet, Anheuser-Busch profits surged the year they introduced Michelob Ultra. Kudos to Anheuser-Busch for tapping into America’s rejection of gluttony as sin by tapping a keg of Michelob Ultra. Through its portrayal of low-carb beer drinkers as quasi ancient Olympians, Anheuser-Busch has enabled a turning point in the war on gluttony as sin. For the sin of gluttony, the introduction of Michelob Ultra was like Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. The die is now cast. The sin of gluttony will continue to fight the good fight as it always has, offering the lesson for those who listen that overindulgence has its price. But Appomatox, the time when sin must surrender its old ally gluttony, looms. Like the southern warrior turning in his guns at Lee’s request, gluttony’s footsoldiers, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, must soon lay down their arms in the face of Budweiser Select’s overwhelming force.

Tucked in a pocket just below the expanding American waistline rests the expanding American wallet. Our gluttony is matched by its kindred spirit among the seven deadly sins, greed. You pay a stiff price for telling the truth in America, and in 1986 Ivan Boesky told the truth of America’s relationship to greed in an infamous speech at the commencement ceremony of the University of California, Berkeley (of all places!): “Greed is all right by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Later that year Boesky paid a 100 million dollar fine to the SEC, purportedly for the misdeed of insider trading. Boesky was really paying for his speech. The second Boesky made the speech, he had to pay, and the insider trading stuff was just the mechanism facilitating a public flogging of Boesky for blowing America’s cover.

But Boesky’s ultimate penalty came in the 1987 Hollywood film Wall Street. Hollywood, whose mythmakers exist to provide cover for America (the greatest example is 1986’s Top Gun, in which Tom Cruise, with lockstep cooperation from the United States Navy, glamorized America’s cold war campaign so brilliantly that Navy recruitment numbers immediately spiked. Six years later Hollywood, with uncanny foresight, cast Cruise in A Few Good Men, in which Cruise establishes that the military court system is more than capable of meting out justice should any instances of abuse arise in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Clearly more is at stake when Cruise wears a uniform than just ticket sales; when cruise plays soldier, or cop, as he did in 2002’s Minority Report, prepare to read the tea leaves. Minority Report, in which psychics predict crime so that it can be stopped before it happens, endorses the twin post-9/11 American tactics of profiling and pre-emptive war to stop terrorism before it happens.) cast Michael Douglas to play the Boesky role in Wall Street as a villain. We were so eager to embrace the idea of Boesky as villain that we thanked Douglas with an Oscar for so skillfully enabling us to do so. I don’t know Ivan Boesky, and he may be a greedy bastard, but all he did when he gave his speech was tell it like it is in America. In fact, until he slipped up by giving that speech, Ivan Boesky was a real American hero precisely because he was a greedy bastard.

So, as Douglas put it in his version of the speech in Wall Street, greed is good. Which brings us to the SUV. By now the SUV needs no introduction. We have even had an SUV backlash, but it has had only marginal impact on sales of the ubiquitous thirsty behemoths. The SUV’s bulletproof popularity is firmly rooted in its role as proud, if coded symbol of American greed. The code reads that Americans are rugged individuals who like big, rugged trucks for our big, rugged lives. The secret decoder comes in the form of a popular bumper sticker which depicts a Calvin-from-Calvin&Hobbes look-alike wearing a Ford logo and pissing on a Chevy logo (or vice versa). This bumper sticker sells partly because of its adolescent vulgarity, but largely because it understands that to be on top in America is to piss on those beneath you. SUV’s are just the translation of this bumper sticker into Detroit (and Asian, and European) iron. When the Worldwatch Institute website reports the fact that “the United States, with less than 5% of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources-burning up nearly 25% of the coal, 26% of the oil, and 27% of the world’s natural gas,” it is just as much a fact that to drive an SUV is to piss on the rest of the world. SUV sales remain solid in the face of rising prices at the pump precisely because spending 100 bucks to fill up your tank only to get 12 miles to the gallon is like stomping your boot into the chest of the guy you’re pissing on, i.e. it feels really, really good.

The problem with all of this, like Boesky’s speech, is that it threatens to blow our cover. Greed is good in America, as long as it is covered in a veneer of, if not generosity, at least innovative entrepreneurship. SUV’s are too obvious; America has been caught urinating in public when we are usually content to flush our waste into the river and let the currents carry it downstream, safely past our borders (see the American export of acid rain to Canada). Enter the hybrid SUV. Hybrids are a new class of vehicle that combine a traditional gas-burning engine with an electric engine, with the effect of cleaner emissions and improved fuel efficiency. Hybrids have been available on the US market in car form since 1999, expanding the significant, if niche segment of the car market devoted to extreme fuel efficiency (automakers, while obviously not devoted to extreme fuel efficiency as a rule, do recognize the potential profits of catering to a real niche market). But the kind of person who would buy a hybrid car would never buy a hybrid SUV, because SUV’s, regardless of the engine underneath the hood, stand for everything that a hybrid car buyer loathes. It would be like a vegan wearing a leather jacket because the leather was tanned with natural products that had never been tested on animals. Vegans and leather do not mix, and neither do tree huggers and SUV’s.

Hybrid SUV’s, then, are on about something other than clean air and sustainable growth. To understand their purpose one need look no further than the advertising for the three hybrid SUV’s currently on the market, the Ford Escape Hybrid, the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and the Toyota-built Lexus RX 400 Hybrid. Ford’s website boasts of “the no compromise Escape Hybrid.” Lexus television ads intone “you can drive two cars, or one without compromise,” the RX 400 Hybrid, natch. Compromise, apparently, is an indignity the American consumer must no longer bear (the Budweiser Select slogan is “Expect Everything”). Compromise is born of a world where you can not have your cake and eat it too. Hybrid SUV’s have performed gene therapy on the world’s DNA, evidenced by the Toyota Highlander website which announces that “now you can have your SUV and MPG too.”

Toyota’s ad wizards are really saying you can be greedy and virtuous at the same time. Which is exactly what Ivan Boesky said. Boesky had the misfortune of being ahead of his time, a prophet of 21st Century America, a time and place when “you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Boesky symbolically met the fate of most prophets, although in America to forfeit $100 million is a fate worse than death.

The sin of greed can be understood as an overdose of yes, for which the antidote is a healthy diet of no. Human morality as it relates to greed exists on the continuum between yes and no. Too much yes swerves off towards greed, and too much no veers towards asceticism. As the Buddha discovered, extreme greed and extreme asceticism are equal in folly, leading him down his Middle Path. The Buddha’s wisdom obtains as long as the human dimension is bounded by both yes and no. Hybrid SUV’s present a world that says yes and yes.

Our relationship to greed and gluttony is rather simple and is captured by an SUV at a fast-food drive-thru, where we simultaneously consume food and oil as fast as we can. Our relationship to the third deadly sin in question, lust, is more complex. This complexity is evident in our commingling of sexual repression and lust. On the surface, the two conditions seem contradictory. At first glance it feels odd to maintain that a people who spend anywhere from three to ten billion dollars annually on porn (porn revenues are notoriously fuzzy) can still be called sexually repressed. It is tempting to accept that Jon Holmes long since pounded the sexual repression out of America. Odd as it may seem, however, our addiction to porn is but a symptom of our ongoing sexual repression.

This is all rooted in very basic Freudian stuff, and begins with the fundamental importance of the human sex drive, which, along with aggression, comprises much of that primal force, the Id. The Id must be tamed by civilizing factors, internalized as the Superego, for the individual to join human society. This is all covered in the first week of Freud 101, which is to say that it does not take ten years of psychoanalytical training to grasp that there is something amiss in our culture’s version of this process. The American sex drive is like a horse only half broken to the saddle. Americans mount their sex drives (pardon the pun) only to get bucked off unceremoniously. Unable to ride their sex drives into the sunset, Americans retire to porn, which, at best, is like riding the animatronic bull in a country-western bar, and is more often akin to shoveling out the horse’s stall.

Americans are as close to being comfortable with our sexuality as porn is to being a celebration of human sexuality. Porn is what is left of American sexuality after it bursts forth from the American unconscious like steam from a cracked pressure cooker. Being American I do not know what the cultural landscape of a people with a well integrated sexuality would look like. But I know that the pinnacle of their sexuality would not resemble the sexual act that stands as ours, as documented by porn. This act’s status is authenticated by its title, the “money shot”, as our almighty sexual act is linked to the almighty dollar. Although porn sex scenes do not vary greatly in content, in America every hetero porn scene must end with a “money shot”, because a facial cumshot, which when its aim is true is a shot of jiz in the eye, is the only sexual act that captures the twisted dynamics undergirding all straight American sex. The facial cumshot closes every hetero porn scene with a warning: Attend to your repressed sexuality, or it will assuredly blind you.

Like this figurative blindness, literal impotence is a byproduct of American sexual repression. When repressed sexuality erupts as lust, Nature has its mechanisms to stem the flow. As body and mind are one, the dysfunctional psychology of American sexuality is matched by 30 million dysfunctional American genitals (according to Wrongdiagnosis.com). One out of every nine Americans struggles with impotence. Porn is the open wound of sexual repression, and impotent loins are the scars. Lust, like gluttony, is written across the body. While obesity, gluttony’s pound of flesh, sits out in the open, impotence has long been lust’s dirty little secret. At least it was until the pharmaceutical industry realized the gold mine idling in America’s pants.

Viagra, and its siblings Levitra and Cialis, are strip mining American impotency to the tune of $2 billion annually. Viagra comes to the party dressed as the redeemer of American sexuality. The consummate wolf in sheep’s clothing, Viagra profits are in fact dependent on the very sexual repression Viagra purports to overcome. The day when Americans heal the wounds of sexual repression is the day the American cock will rise again. The day of this resurrection is also the day that Viagra goes out of business. For now, Viagra is doing everything it can to maintain the sexual status quo. This is most evident in the porn industry, the engine room of American sexual repression. Theage.com reports that porn industry “insiders say up to 90% of new actors now use (Viagra) to perform.” Viagra inflates the loins of the porn industry to gird up its own loins for the job of Prison Warden. Viagra is now the Warden who keeps American sexuality repressed under lock and key, and porn is its prison guard.

Viagra’s black magic is its ability to mine already scarred land. Encrypted in this black magic is the code of a new logic. This new logic, in the form of Viagra, declares that one can be concurrently impotent and virile. Much like Viagra, low-carb beer mines the scars of obesity, casting a spell that conjoins gluttony and health. And hybrid SUV’s mine our scarred land: Presto-Change-O, you are now greedy and green.

Americans consume this black magic because it promises the quick fix. But, like the viewer of porn, the more we consume the more we grow blind to the consequences. Which brings us back to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It may have been momentarily convenient for the adults of Hamelin to stiff the Piper on his rat-removal bill. But the eventual toll, the lives of Hamelin’s children, was a grim reminder of the logic found in Newton’s third law: Everything has a price. As America increasingly buys into its new logic in the hopes of stiffing the Piper, we are, ironically, running up an inestimable tab with said Piper.

The surge of this new logic delivers the collapse of meaning. I am not interested in sin in a fire-and brimstone, you-will-burn-in-hell kind of way. Instead, I am interested in sin as the guarantor of meaning. Sin draws boundaries around human experience. Encountering these boundaries, as gluttons do through obesity, as the greedy do in their loneliness and isolation, and as the lascivious do when their equipment no longer works, can be quite painful. It is this pain that Americans wish to cancel, but it is also this pain that steers us, like the Buddha, to the Middle Path. Sin, when attended to, delivers us to that place where health is occasionally spiced by indulgence, where wealth is equaled by generosity, and where sex is matched by love. Ignored, sin startles you with obesity, loneliness, and impotence. These are sin’s gifts, and their price.

No longer willing to pay this price, America has raised the stakes. Sin will not just be ignored, it will be erased. We attempt to erase sin with every sip of Budweiser Select, every mile driven behind the wheel of a Ford Escape Hybrid, and every swallow of Viagra. But with every sip, mile, and swallow we expand our existential vacuum. It means something, perhaps everything, to be healthy but occasionally indulgent, to receive but to know how to give, to touch and to care. And, while unpleasant, it means something to be fat, greedy, and limp. It means absolutely nothing to be simultaneously gluttonous and healthy, greedy and gracious, impotent and virile. To attempt to be both at once is to succeed at being neither. Americans want everything, thus we get nothing. In fact, we get nothing-plus. We pay all of sin’s price, and get none of its gifts. The depth of our self-delusion is bottomless; we really believe that Budweiser Select will vanquish obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. But sin’s muscle is here to stay. All of our machinations have estranged us from only one of sin’s muscles, its heart. But if prodigal America comes back home from its far-flung madness, sin will throw open the doors to the Middle Path’s banquet hall and have a celebration on the spot.

Know Thyself…Whilst Thou is Still Thee

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s website, “identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.” Were this nuts and bolts definition your only guide you might imagine the impact of identity theft on the victim as falling in the extremely-disruptive-annoyance range of potential life tragedies, on par with an auto accident in which no one was hurt but your car is totaled. Yet according to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s website “the emotional impact on victims is likened to that felt by victims of more violent crimes, including rape, violent assault, and repeated battering.” Despite the best of intentions, the FTC lacks insight into the ferocity of this crime. Imagine the outcry if the following definition appeared on a federal government sponsored website: sexual assault occurs when someone uses your vagina without your permission to commit rape or other crimes.

The only clue to the gravity of the crime in the FTC’s description is the use of the term identity theft. Identity theft is not a sexed-up misnomer for personal information theft. In the 21st century, “when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes” they have not just spoiled your credit or crippled your finances, they have well and truly robbed you of your very identity. Identity theft is as descriptively named and as potent as that other quintessentially 21st century crime, suicide bombing. To witness the shocking potency of identity theft is to encounter the vulnerability of our unavoidable new identities. Identity theft is actually a misnomer, because it is not theft but murder, the murder of our digital selves.

Identity theft can be as crippling as rape or battering because of a fundamental shift in identity. The American Heritage Dictionary defines identity as “the collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known,” recognizing that identity resides not in the individual’s self concept but in other’s perceptions. One’s identity in the world is nothing more than how one is known and recognized by the world. Increasingly, the world knows us as an accumulation of little bits of data. We are akin to George Seurat’s pointillist paintings, but instead of an accumulation of tiny colored dots coalescing to form the human image on canvas, we are the accumulation of tiny dots of data (credit rating, tax bracket, debts, liquidity, 401K, e-mail account, HDTV, cell phone network, health insurance) coalescing to form identity.

The world now knows us primarily by the series of letters and numbers that surge through the digital network when our name and social security number are entered. In a world of genetic determinism, this data is the DNA of identity. If you cling to the notion that your identity flows from the wellspring of your moral reputation, just speak with an upstanding victim of identity theft whose digital data went haywire after the crime. Victims of identity theft suffer like victims of violent assault because once the world recognizes you as an accumulation of deficient data it will begin battering you as such.

The split between identity and reputation is now complete. To be sure, identity trumps reputation. It was not long ago that men fought to the death to defend the honor of their reputations. A lifetime of humble good deeds, formerly underwritten by goodwill in the community that guaranteed security in an uncertain world, now won’t even get you a cup of coffee if you have the wrong set of data attached to your name. This is the horrific specter of identity theft, that a lifetime devoted to doing the right thing and respectful of the need to have the right set of data can be undone in an instant by some guy in New Jersey using your “personal information” to finance his personal mission to download every available internet image of anal sex (of which there are surely millions). You may be the world’s most devoted soccer mom, but if the computer screen reports $60,000 in debt from a bad porn habit than that is how the loan officer will see you (not that soccer moms and porn are mutually exclusive, I guess, but most of the pro-porn feminists I have had the privilege of encountering don’t fit that demographic).

Identity theft opens up a world that most of its victims have only seen on TV or the movies or read about in the paper. This is the world that is supposed to apply to Jerry Springer-style white trash, immigrants, and “inner city” blacks. It is the world that makes us happy to stay in our suburbs and good schools. It is the world that Republicans want to ignore and Democrats want to save by making it like their selves. It is, at heart, a world that does not open doors. If identity theft had a logo it would be a closed, padlocked door. Life in America from the middle class up is about being welcome inside. Identity theft makes you Lucky the Leprechaun when all the signs say No Dogs or Irish Allowed Inside.

The outside created by the American inside is a shadowland. The aforementioned Jerry Springer is a modern-day Barnum, staging the American shadowland as circus and beaming it into our homes every weekday. The bearded lady has been replaced by the man who wants to have a sex change so he can have a lesbian affair with his step-daughter, but as ever, we are meant to ogle. And to gloat that we are inside, if somehow a bit underwhelmed by our predictable sex lives, which are after all a small price to pay to be on this side of the door. (Full disclosure: when I was younger and more ridden with angst I occasionally tuned in Cops to tune out the angst; Cops always told my angst “this is the world’s smallest violin, and it is playing just for you”. Thank you Cops.)

Identity theft is a backstage pass to the American shadowland, where the first fact of life is that it is nothing like The Jerry Springer Show. Instead of threesomes with your landlord, try having your electricity turned off. You might have been up for a fling with a little person, but you can’t pick him up because your car just got repossessed. And it might be fun spending the next two weeks trying to seduce the lesbian vegan who lives next door into eating meat and your sausage, but how about going on your own diet of ramen noodles and Ho-Hos because you can only get to the corner store and that’s all you can afford. Want to tell your black wife you’ve been sleeping with your Aryan supremacist gay boss? That will be hard if you can’t even get a job because you are living out of your ’83 Datsun and haven’t bathed in a week and a half.

The crime of The Jerry Springer Show is that it portrays those who live outside of America while living within its borders as enthusiastic sexual deviants while ignoring the reality that their lives are often shitstorms, where if sex plays a role it is frequently in the form of abuse or unwanted children. The horror of identity theft is that it boots you outside where making ends meet could mean being the kind of stripper who strips not to get rich or pay for college, but to pay the rent. The tragedy of America is that we who live inside are willing to treat those on the outside looking desperately in as if they were prostitutes in the windows of Amsterdam’s Red Light District ready to turn a trick for our delight. Really kinky sex is clearly still beyond the pale inside America. Beyond the pale lies the shadowland, whose residents must carry the weight of American sexual denial, in addition to the crushing drudgery of survival.

The FTC warns that “one bit of personal information is all someone needs to steal your identity.” In a few years the FTC may have a similar warning that one bit of DNA is all someone needs to clone you, making ownership of our bodies as tenuous as our current struggle to keep identity under lock and key, lest it slip away in the night like an overprotected hormonal teenager who you just know is coming home pregnant. Just as parents ward off evil by lying awake in bed until teenage child walks through the door at 3 AM, Americans have their own ritual to protect every last bit of personal information. Every time you shred your credit card statement you are symbolically sacrificing your digital self in order to placate the identity gods. The shredding of your digital self is the sacramental statement that it is better to be torn asunder than to have one’s identity stripped. When you shred you affirm that it is better not to exist at all than to exist outside, in the American shadowland.

The pious shredder exhibits an absolute faith in the state of grace that is insider status. This common American faith is as fundamentalist a religion as exists anywhere in the world. It is practiced just as fervently, and heaven and hell are as real as your own retirement plan and your wife’s grandmother’s inability to afford dentures. In the American faith identity theft has substituted the fear of hell for the fear of God, and left us all scrambling to cement our place in the heaven of insider status. But the lives we build as insider cathedrals are as sturdy as a house of cards; Remove one card, have “one bit of personal information” stolen, and the entire edifice crumbles. I reserve judgment on spiritual devices such as rosary beads or prayer wheels designed to ease passage of the soul into the afterlife or to smooth reincarnation. But no amount of shredding can ward off the shadows outside every American insider’s window. You might as well wear a garlic necklace while you are feeding the shredder.

Identity theft is, at the last, the mirror image of the American Dream. Behind the looking glass it is always riches-to-rags. Though I am tempted, I have not yet purchased a shredder. But my faith is strong. I tear my credit card statement to pieces with my bare hands.

OH DARLING, I’VE INVITED MR. & MRS. DEATH FOR CHRISTMAS

There comes a point in every smoker’s career where the only reasonable approach is to say to one’s self “I am a smoker”, accept all that this entails, and get on with one’s life. These individuals either can not or will not quit, it does not matter which, just that they are smokers to the end. My life is at just such a defining moment. I do not floss. I have tried and failed to floss throughout my adult life with nothing more to show for it than the toothbrush-like flossing device that hit the market last year now sitting on my sink as a reminder of yet another failed stab at acquiring the habit. The face that stares back at me in the mirror above the sink is that of a non-flosser, and always will be.

Non-flossing is the new smoking. How this came to pass is the story of how death died in America. Except, of course, unlike God or the author you can’t kill death because it is already, need we say it, dead. Death has just decamped from our lungs and set up shop between our teeth. Which crevices provide an ideal milieu for death, as demonstrated by the inordinate number of dentist suicides.

But before illuminating the great American lost cause of killing death, and death’s subsequent journey up the esophagus, I need to clarify my non-flosser credentials. Just as smoker’s vary from the two-pack-a-dayer to the I-only-smoke-when-I’m drunk, non-flosser’s come in many stripes. As a non-flosser who religiously brushes three times a day on weekdays, and twice a day on weekends, I am the cousin of the most curious of all smokers, the health-conscious vegetarian or, these days, vegan smoker. We have all met them, and been preached to about the hot dog meat rotting in the folds of our colons, and they keep mentioning something about free radicals (a confusing term that should reference black-clad anarchists but is instead intended to scare me away from my delicious processed cheese; I enjoy all cheeses but my relationship to American cheese, like a healthy marriage, is only deepening as the years pass). Because they are more often than not puffing on cancer sticks while preaching, it is tempting to bite them. Instead, I settle for biting my cheek until it bleeds. This allows the smoking vegan to get on with the process of killing themselves while simultaneously trying to live to one hundred and ten.

The smoking vegan may at first seem to madden the onlooker with her hypocrisy. But the tension induced by witnessing the preaching smoking vegan’s irrational praxis is rooted much deeper than annoyance at hypocrisy. The vast bulk of us are hypocrites 90% of the time, but the fact that I speak highly of tolerance and equality while residing in a de facto racially and class-bound neighborhood does not annoy people anywhere near as much as the guy swilling wheat grass between puffs on his American Spirit hand-roll. Most of us wear the mask of hypocrisy to pass as decent, good-hearted folks as long as it does not interfere with getting on with the business of our perceived self-interest. Vegan smokers are unpopular, then, not for your garden variety hypocrisy, but because they bring to a conscious stage the single most important and almost always unconscious psychic conflict, a conflict upon which rests the fate of our very souls. Which explains the near biting.

The capstone to Freud’s towering career was his recognition of this psychic conflict, the conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct. Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex is generally regarded as the centerpiece of his understanding of the human psyche. But it is his later work on the death instinct, and its tension with the life instinct, that stands as his greatest contribution to the understanding of human psychology. Much more than a successful resolution of the Oedipus complex, the quality of an individual’s internal relationship between life and death instincts is the foundation upon which the individual’s benign or malignant psychic life rests. The vegan smoker is a living allegory of the malignant relationship between life and death instinct that dominates the American psychic landscape. This relationship is almost always tucked away in the unconscious, but the vegan smoker rubs your face in it with the breath of her noxious preaching mixed with dissonant carcinogenic fumes.

The vegan smoker provides a pictogram of life and death instinct in conflict, allowing us to witness firsthand the tension that Freud uncovered in this dynamic interplay. Freud’s probing of the psyche revealed a human instinct to "re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life" ("Ego and the Id" 709), which he termed the death instinct. What was disturbed by the emergence of life was the peaceful slumber of death, an eternal, unbroken quiet darkness. From the cacophony of the womb (which I learned during my wife’s pregnancy is louder than a vacuum cleaner, and is why turning on the vacuum cleaner was the only thing that would put my daughter to sleep for her first three months) to the instant, reassuring wails of the newborn in the shiny delivery room, life is from the first a barrage of noise and, soon thereafter, light. But amidst the swirl of noise and light, there is more to life than life. It is this surplus to life that Freud termed the death instinct. This instinct to return to nothingness, which Americans regard as the negation of life, is, in truth, the very stuff of life.

It is the belief in death as negation, bound up with the denial of death as surplus, which fuels America’s mass repression of the death instinct. Americans insist on life to the exclusion of death. Whether this insistence informs the extremist style of capitalism we practice, or if it flows out of that extremism, is a chicken-and-egg question we can not answer. But the connection is symbiotic and spiraling upwards. The marketplace of American capitalism is the noise of our overdeveloped life instinct. To make money in America is to make noise. We continue to make a great deal of money, and we have never been louder. Silence, reflection, solitude, these are the enemies of the marketplace, and the marketplace is gaining ground in banishing them with each passing day. Perhaps the marketplace’s fiercest weapon in this battle is the cell phone and its increasingly adept progeny . To carry a cell phone is to never be alone (my wife and I just gave each other matching cell phones for Christmas/Hanukah, and in order to make up for this I may have to spend a lot more time secluded in the basement).

As it attempts to banish solitude, the marketplace, of course, does not work alone. It supplies the noise of the life instinct, but science provides the light. Science, autistic in its inability to relate to matters that do not respond to the Scientific Method, aims its high beams in all directions at once in a single-minded pursuit of knowledge, leaving no space for shadows, let alone the darkness of night that is safe cover for the healthy expression of the death instinct. With the death instinct so well repressed, science has its sites set on biological death itself. The most optimistic of scientific futurists (i.e. Raymond Kurzweil; see Gone Today, Hair Tomorrow below for more on Kurzweil’s future for America) foresee the death of biological death within the next generation.

As the death instinct has been buried ever deeper in the American unconscious, the life instinct has been given free rein, resulting in a near unanimous effort by Americans, hand in glove with science and the marketplace, to live forever but to never be alone. Yet even if science negates the (supposed) negation of biological death, and even if no one ever spends a moment alone ever again, the death instinct will live on as life’s surplus. But the repression of life’s surplus, our potentially healthy death instinct, boomerangs back to take our heads off with the return of the repressed. When the death instinct returns it does so in distorted form, as must all material returning from repression. The violence now endemic to America is the mutant return of the repressed death instinct. From the jaw-dropping sum of homicides to the drug trade’s low-grade war in urban America, from the violence dripping from our pop songs, TV, movies, and video games to the war in Iraq, violence permeates the American landscape. Addressing each symptom is futile, like the carnival game played by Venus Williams in a recent TV ad where she hammers down one plastic groundhog after another, only to see another one pop up in its place. Only in America today the groundhogs pack sawed-off shotguns and nine-millimeters.

There are many forms of violence, including slow suicide. The vegan’s cigarette, a slo-mo AK-47, is the twisted death instinct returned from and pointed at the head it was buried in. The smoking vegan has one of the most severely repressed death instincts of all. Not only does the smoking vegan want to live forever, she wants all the animals to join her in earthly eternity. Unsatisfied by the negation of her own mortality, the smoking vegan wishes to strip her four-legged friends of their right to die as well. The smoking vegan is afraid that if she lives forever she might be all by herself, which actually might not be that bad if only she can bring her pet dog with her. The smoking vegan’s genuine feelings towards animals are revealed when she smacks a mosquito into the beyond, as she certainly does not want her and Fido’s eternal earthly bliss disturbed by those little bastards. Only it is hard to make it to eternity with a two-pack-a-day habit. In a world where you can never be too thin, at least the smoking vegan’s diet of field greens and bark plus the always thinning smoking gives her a good shot at a runway model’s physique until she croaks. But God help the fat smoking vegan.

Nevertheless, the smoking vegan has a leg up on my crowd, the non-flossers. There is a certain sexy neurotic flavor to the vegan smoker, at least until they start preaching. I am all for brooding vegan smoking. Anyone who would put that much effort into a holistic, sacred approach to eating while sucking on carbon monoxide is, at the very least, interesting. Vegan smokers are a holdover from a time when the death instinct was not quite so repressed. Death’s return from the repressed could still take an overt form. Say what you will about vegan smokers, but they are unabashedly out in the open. Today, the death instinct has been repressed so far, stuffed ever deeper by the ballooning expansion of science and market, that the arena for its distorted return from the repressed is limited to the negative space of passivity. In the future, and the future is already now, death will erupt and take root wherever we don’t do something. I may brush my teeth two to three times a day so that my teeth will last forever, but death is so far repressed in me that I can’t even actively smoke to yellow those brushed pearly whites. Instead, I passively non-floss my way to destroying the teeth my parents paid a small fortune to straighten.

The non-flosser is not alone, just better camouflaged than their passive self-destructing brethren. It is hard to miss the three hundred-plus pounders who don’t watch their calories as science and the market demand. I may have just taken a shot at fat vegan smokers, but as active gives way to passive, fat will become the new skinny. To all the brooding-skinny-smoking-vegans out there, prepare to give way to sulking-fat-non-flossers. Death is about to put the Rueben sandwich back into Rubenesque.

But there is a way out of this American mess. The way out resides in the central story of human existence that Freud uncovered with the death instinct. Boiled down, there is one script that all human lives follow. The script comes in two versions, each with unique plots and contrasting endings. Despite these differences, the two versions are telling the same story, that of the marriage of life and death instincts. The first version, the romance, has three acts: Life, Death, and Rebirth. The second version, the tragedy, also in three acts: Life, Repression of Death, Return of the Repressed. Central narratives from both western and eastern religions point to this basic structure of human existence. The Christian story of Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and resurrection is a template for the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that humans repeatedly cycle through between the moments of biological birth and death. The eastern tradition of reincarnation is another writ large version of the story of birth, death, and rebirth that humans live day-by-day. Both eastern and western religions have animated the everyday cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through stories and traditions that stretch beyond the barriers of biological birth and death. But the utility of these religious stories, and their truth, is found in their relationship to birth, death, and rebirth as it occurs within the boundaries of a human lifetime.

Religion’s raison d’etre, then, is to serve as the fulcrum point on which the delicate balance between life and death instincts rests. The death instinct is life’s surplus, because without the addition of death, human life can not obtain the liberating, spiritual form of rebirth. Science and market, which have outstretched their real but limited usefulness by replacing religion in America, are ignorant of the sacred role of death as life’s surplus. Science and market regard death as life’s negation, dooming death instinct to repression, and guaranteeing the return of the repressed death instinct in the form of violence and passive self destruction.

The imbalance of what is left of religion in America, and its perversion at the hands of science and market, is on full display every December. It is no coincidence that Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth, has taken on such outsized proportions in America. The ballooning of Christmas symbolizes the American obsession with birth and life. The hijacking of Christmas by consumerism, witnessed in the battle royale of shopping that ensues early in the AM on the day after Thanksgiving, reveals the link between the holiday that celebrates life with the consumer culture that recognizes only life. And as Christmas has waxed, Easter (remember Easter?), the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, has waned to the point where it ranks a notch or two below Ground Hog’s Day. Ironically, Christmas Day itself has become something of a symbol of death, as it is the only day of the year where capitalism, barring the odd Chinese food joint, rests.

Functional religion mediates its flock’s relationship to death through meaningful spiritual practices. The most important spiritual practices for developing openness to death involve silence, which clears an inner open space for the encounter between life and death. This open space slowly emerges in those who cultivate silence, lapping like gentle waves at the tumult until a sufficient calm settles. Only in this sturdy, quiet inner space can life and death merge and in their union beget a rebirth that pours outward to all those fortunate enough to encounter the shining yet weathered new-old soul. “Born again” is a term misapplied to religious initiates; the new life of a spiritual rebirth, the only genuine meaning of eternal life, is the result of a humble lifetime’s (or many lifetimes) devotion to silence.

I have not yet cleared much inner space for death. My mind and spirit clatter with the noise of life, and this is perhaps appropriate to my age and station in life. But I am not quite comfortable with this rationalization. Death happens all of the time, not just when we are old and wizened. I have certainly repressed death with life, and flossing is hardly the only thing I can not do as a result. My maternal grandmother died sometime within the past five to seven years. That is as specific as I can get. Her death literally did not register, as a few years ago I found myself unable to recall whether my grandmother had actually died or whether she was still slowly dying in Ithaca, New York. I could try to blame it on the fact that I did not attend the funeral, and thus was denied “closure”. But my failure to attend her funeral, and my prior failure to attend my grandfather’s funeral, are symptoms and not the cause of my alienation from dying and death. By repressing death, I have lost the ability to grieve. I must ask myself, if life can not be grieved, what value life?

I can tell you that my father died in the weeks after September 11, 2001. I was present for much of his rapid decline from a malignant brain tumor. I offered and received comfort from my family and friends throughout the four months from diagnosis to death. I attended the funeral. I wept. I supported my mother as best I could through her overwhelming grief. I prayed. Looking back, I can think of no way I could have been more present for the death of my father. And yet, my father never died. He got sick, but he never died. I see him periodically in my dreams, and he is invariably sick. I can conceive of illness, but I am not yet whole enough to contain death. Until I am able to grieve, until death becomes real, my father will never die for me. But I have not kept my father alive by failing to grieve. All I have done is made my image of him into a ghost.

I used to love the opening credits of the X-Files. The spooky music and the UFO-sighting clips were spot-on, but what I really loved was the closing sequence of the credits when the words “The truth is out there” briefly graced the bottom of the screen before fading to commercial. Nothing thrills me more than the belief that there is truth and that it is obtainable. The Bible has the exact same line just with different words: “ask and it shall be granted unto you, seek and you shall find.” Translate this into 2006 American (there is such a language) and you get “There must be more to life than this.” The truth is out there, and it is that we are individually and collectively out of touch with this more to life. Life’s more, life’s surplus is death. It will most assuredly be granted unto us. The question for the twenty-first century is whether we shall seek to find death, or whether death will continue to haunt us.