Nothing's Shocking

Last night I had a nightmare in which my youngest daughter Yael was swept away by raging storm waters, much as tragically occurred in real life to a mother holding her two young sons during the recent Superstorm Sandy. Waking up to find my family still intact, I thought back to a passage in a work of non-fiction I was recently reading, in which a historical figure from the mid-19th century was the only one of eleven offspring in his family to make it out of childhood alive. While this may have been uncommon even by 19th century standards, it would not have been shocking to those who lived through it. Given the infant and child mortality rates of the time, it would have been more surprising if all eleven children had made it to the ripe old age of 21.

In the late 1980’s Jane’s Addiction released an album whose title, Nothing’s Shocking, more adequately describes the postmodern turn than all the learned tomes that have tried to capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive right now. As a creature born of the world described by Jane’s Addiction, the only event in my life that I ever found truly shocking was the death of my father. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War (that first hot American war of my lifetime), and the events of 9/11, to pick three turning points from my first 38 years, were each surprising. But none of them, and none of the surprises in my own little personal narrative, were shocking. The tumor in my father’s brain was the only fact that did not compute. And today, I would be less shocked by the arrival of extroverted extraterrestrial visitors or the lowering of the curtain of history according to the timelines established by the Mayan calendar, than I would by the death of my children. The difference between 1850 and 2012, between then and now, can be summed up thusly: everything was shocking then except death- nothing’s shocking now except death.

Perhaps (post) modern parenting, in which we give our children as much unconditional love as our neuroses will allow, is only possible under the terms of this now. Our love is unconditional, because there is nothing left that our children can do to shock us out of our love, e.g. I will be secretly disappointed if at least one of my daughters doesn’t turn out to be a happy, confident lesbian (how else will I know that my love was experienced as truly unconditional?). But the secret condition of this unconditional love (other than that at least some of our children end up in some category of “other” so that we can flaunt our unconditional love) is that our children outlive us. Violation of this condition is the only means left for children to shock their postmodern parents (children are still free to disappoint these parents, in the main by joining seemingly outmoded religious movements made relevant again as megaphones for the “up yours” that children will always need to signal to their parents, no matter how unconditionally loving they may be). Meaning that a postmodern parent will only ever disown a child they’ve already lost, only ever say “You’re dead to me,” when it is literally true.

In the past, when everything was shocking except death, any parent who could have waved a magic wand over their child to prevent them from being gay would have done so. This now sounds barbarian. It is only the vestiges of this past that prevent our current nothing’s-shocking-except-death conditions from giving way to the inevitable cloning of our children and a new barbarism. I know a woman in her sixties who explained that she had her tubes tied after her second child because she had always wanted two children, and the two that she had given birth to could never be replaced. In the (near) future, women will make the same choice for the opposite reason. Tubes will be tied and vas deferens clamped because the children we have will all be replaced on an as-needed basis, burying fear along with the irrelevant corpses.

Jane’s Addiction’s album title may actually be referring to this looming future, when nothing, not even the death of one’s child, is shocking. Nightmares like the one I had last night will then be anachronistic, and I will be able to devote myself full time to my recurring dream of showing up to school without any pants (or underpants) on. But the naked guy who attended all of his classes at Cal-Berkeley in the full Monty has already traipsed through reality, leaving me to come up with a new nocturnal transgression. Dostoyevsky’s old fear that "if there is no God, everything is permitted," has been replaced by the conditions on the ground: if there is no death, everything is permitted. The infamous death of God turned out to be the death of death. And it further turns out that the one thing you can’t clone is death, making unconditional love less a moral imperative and more of a defense mechanism: Enjoy your children! (It looks like they’ll be sticking around for a while.)