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.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Thursday, January 12, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
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.
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.
Monday, December 19, 2005
MARRY ME, WHOEVER YOU ARE
If there is one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on, it is that the media is biased towards the opposing view. Conservatives long ago made a cliché out of the “liberal media bias”, and any liberal worth her salt can tell you that the mainstream media is owned and operated by the same corporations for whom the Grand Old Party is transforming America into a client state. I am not interested in asking which side is right, because that is a trick question designed by both sides to ensnare those foolhardy enough to wander into the trap. Both sides of the aisle adopt the pose of media bias victim, but if they can not convince you of their victim-hood, they will settle for a debate. Because once you are affixed to the sticky-trap of the media bias debate, you are not going anywhere that either side can’t keep an eye on you. When you enter a debate that can never be won, you have already lost. And what you have lost is the ability to ask the first question that should always be asked of politicians and their parties: What’s in this for them? In this set of particulars, what do both parties have to gain by portraying themselves as victims of the media?
Avoiding such bottomless pits as the futile media bias debate is where the rubber hits the road for the body politic of a democratic America. Citizens leaping into the abyss of the media bias debate enable political entities, both right and left in orientation, to concentrate on their real ambition, the consolidation and expansion of political power. Americans wishing to hold politicians accountable to the citizenry they purport to represent must remember that a magician distracts you with his right hand so you won’t see the tricks he’s up to with his left. Conservative and liberal politicians have us all arguing about the media over here, while they are both over there dividing up what belongs to us like kid brothers and sisters measuring who gets the bigger glass of milk.
Both liberals and conservatives are entrenched in the role of media bias victim because of the political ammunition accessible from the victim role. Donning the cloak of victimization infuses a political entity with greater potency, which more than makes up for the slight cloud of weakness that lingers over the victim. The potency of the victim flows from the pall cast over the alleged oppressor from the other side of the political spectrum. Right and left are so quick to paint themselves as victims in order to smear the opposition as oppressors. The universal desire by both ends of the political spectrum to be identified as victim of the media reflects how important holding the moral high ground remains in the war without guns that is contemporary American politics (see the attempted character assassinations of Bush via dubious National Guard duty and of Kerry by way of swift boat veterans as the central acts of violence in the political war without guns; so far the conservatives have better snipers). Holding the moral high ground is the sine qua non for success in American politics, and has been ever since the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock with their own brand of moral fervor. Seizing it gave liberals desegregation and the end of the Vietnam War, just as it fueled the success of the recent conservative campaigns for war in Iraq and the Patriot Act (note that liberals most often attempt to seize the moral high ground on the coattails of social justice, while conservatives lean heavily on the American public’s belief in the sanctity of patriotism-ergo the aptly titled “Patriot Act”).
When conservatives and liberals play the media victim role they resemble nothing more than a fraudulent employee wearing a neck brace to work in order to get workman’s compensation. The employee is not really hurt, but he knows that by portraying himself as injured by his employer he will be able to manipulate the employer to his own ends. The false wound grants true power. Have you ever faked an illness just to miss a day of work? Imagine what politicians are willing to fake to get their hands on their drug of choice, power.
The breadth of the myth of political entities as passive media victims is matched only by the depth of its absurdity. Political spin doctors are the most capable and calculating manipulators of media breathing air (ad wizards give them a run for their money, but ultimately it is easier to convince someone to buy a Coke than it is to convince him that you are the right guy to run his life). The media bias debate is perfect cover for the real battle by both right and left to more effectively manipulate the media to their own respective ends, a battle now fought to the (political) death. The real question is not whether right or left are the true victim of media bias, but whether right or left is the reigning victor in media manipulation.
Of course, the two party system guarantees both right and left a perpetual bout on the championship card. In real boxing, one or two losses send a fighter into retirement or obscurity. In American politics there are no real defeats, because no matter how many times the right or the left lose, they are right back in the ring for the next championship fight. As vicious as the war between right and left is on one level, with both sides vying to play the Don, on another level the never-ending skirmish between institutionalized right and left is actually a dance. As long as the two keep up their never-ending political tango they have the dance floor all to themselves, making American politics nothing more than an infinite 1950’s dance-a-thon, where the last couple dancing wins the prize.
In order to believe in the reality of their democracy, Americans focus exclusively on the war between right and left for Big Enchalada status. The fact that almost every American, whether Conservative or Liberal, believes that their side is the victim of media bias originates from our need to believe that our democracy is real, that our participation in elections has real consequences, that the future really is at stake when we cast our ballot. To accept that right and left are ultimately collaborators taking turns as Head Honcho would be to deflate the drama of political theater into farce. The dominant cultural myth of America is the greatness of our democracy. For Americans to continue to believe in the greatness of their democracy it must be increasingly infused with the meaning of war. American democracy needs the weight of war to hold it down. Otherwise, having severed its legitimate connection to the populace by failing to offer real choices, it would float away, a farce whose plot is lighter than air.
Americans are now fighting a war to establish “democracy” on the other side of the world. The war in Iraq is something of a wedding ceremony for war and American democracy, in a courtship that is at least as old as the military industrial complex. The difference between the war-without-guns to keep democracy real at home, and the war to make American democracy real in Iraq, is that we can use real guns in Iraq. The symbolic violence enacted by American democratic theater at home is no longer vivid enough to keep the American audience in its seats. Now we must spill the real blood of brown skinned Muslims to keep the show of American democracy in production; As ever, the show must go on. This week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has begun spying on Americans at home is the first indication that the blood spilled in Iraq will not suffice, and that the marriage between war and democracy in the Homeland will no longer be symbolic. Americans sang “Over there, over there” during World War I, but will soon be singing “Over here, over here” in the War (without end) On Terror, a war whose drumbeat has become the beating heart of American democracy.
To divorce democracy from war, Americans must remarry their own democracy. But, like any successful second marriage, this reborn marriage must tell a new story the second time around. The false divide between American right and left, encoded in the myth of media bias, is the lie that undid the first marriage. Americans, no longer able to make real choices for their country through the levers of democracy, became legally separated from both the right and the left, who had in the meantime married one another. It was the ultimate marriage of convenience, like a seventeenth century marriage between rival European royal families that sewed up the map for both of the involved clans. Polygamy has now ensued, as in order to finalize their divorce with the American citizenry , the right and the left have together now married war.
For a second marriage between Americans and democracy to work, it will have to be a lot like the movie Somersby, in which the Richard Gere who returned from war to Jodie Foster became the mensch he had never before been. In fact he may not have even been the same person at all. But that’s okay, because Americans are looking to remarry a mensch this time, and don’t really care if our new democracy isn’t really our old one. Power will always be seductive for politicians, but for a second marriage to work the bond between Americans and democracy must be strong enough for fidelity to trump seduction. If we can craft such a relationship between Americans and democracy, Jodie Foster can look that new democracy in the eye and say “I never loved him the way that I love you.”
If there is one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on, it is that the media is biased towards the opposing view. Conservatives long ago made a cliché out of the “liberal media bias”, and any liberal worth her salt can tell you that the mainstream media is owned and operated by the same corporations for whom the Grand Old Party is transforming America into a client state. I am not interested in asking which side is right, because that is a trick question designed by both sides to ensnare those foolhardy enough to wander into the trap. Both sides of the aisle adopt the pose of media bias victim, but if they can not convince you of their victim-hood, they will settle for a debate. Because once you are affixed to the sticky-trap of the media bias debate, you are not going anywhere that either side can’t keep an eye on you. When you enter a debate that can never be won, you have already lost. And what you have lost is the ability to ask the first question that should always be asked of politicians and their parties: What’s in this for them? In this set of particulars, what do both parties have to gain by portraying themselves as victims of the media?
Avoiding such bottomless pits as the futile media bias debate is where the rubber hits the road for the body politic of a democratic America. Citizens leaping into the abyss of the media bias debate enable political entities, both right and left in orientation, to concentrate on their real ambition, the consolidation and expansion of political power. Americans wishing to hold politicians accountable to the citizenry they purport to represent must remember that a magician distracts you with his right hand so you won’t see the tricks he’s up to with his left. Conservative and liberal politicians have us all arguing about the media over here, while they are both over there dividing up what belongs to us like kid brothers and sisters measuring who gets the bigger glass of milk.
Both liberals and conservatives are entrenched in the role of media bias victim because of the political ammunition accessible from the victim role. Donning the cloak of victimization infuses a political entity with greater potency, which more than makes up for the slight cloud of weakness that lingers over the victim. The potency of the victim flows from the pall cast over the alleged oppressor from the other side of the political spectrum. Right and left are so quick to paint themselves as victims in order to smear the opposition as oppressors. The universal desire by both ends of the political spectrum to be identified as victim of the media reflects how important holding the moral high ground remains in the war without guns that is contemporary American politics (see the attempted character assassinations of Bush via dubious National Guard duty and of Kerry by way of swift boat veterans as the central acts of violence in the political war without guns; so far the conservatives have better snipers). Holding the moral high ground is the sine qua non for success in American politics, and has been ever since the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock with their own brand of moral fervor. Seizing it gave liberals desegregation and the end of the Vietnam War, just as it fueled the success of the recent conservative campaigns for war in Iraq and the Patriot Act (note that liberals most often attempt to seize the moral high ground on the coattails of social justice, while conservatives lean heavily on the American public’s belief in the sanctity of patriotism-ergo the aptly titled “Patriot Act”).
When conservatives and liberals play the media victim role they resemble nothing more than a fraudulent employee wearing a neck brace to work in order to get workman’s compensation. The employee is not really hurt, but he knows that by portraying himself as injured by his employer he will be able to manipulate the employer to his own ends. The false wound grants true power. Have you ever faked an illness just to miss a day of work? Imagine what politicians are willing to fake to get their hands on their drug of choice, power.
The breadth of the myth of political entities as passive media victims is matched only by the depth of its absurdity. Political spin doctors are the most capable and calculating manipulators of media breathing air (ad wizards give them a run for their money, but ultimately it is easier to convince someone to buy a Coke than it is to convince him that you are the right guy to run his life). The media bias debate is perfect cover for the real battle by both right and left to more effectively manipulate the media to their own respective ends, a battle now fought to the (political) death. The real question is not whether right or left are the true victim of media bias, but whether right or left is the reigning victor in media manipulation.
Of course, the two party system guarantees both right and left a perpetual bout on the championship card. In real boxing, one or two losses send a fighter into retirement or obscurity. In American politics there are no real defeats, because no matter how many times the right or the left lose, they are right back in the ring for the next championship fight. As vicious as the war between right and left is on one level, with both sides vying to play the Don, on another level the never-ending skirmish between institutionalized right and left is actually a dance. As long as the two keep up their never-ending political tango they have the dance floor all to themselves, making American politics nothing more than an infinite 1950’s dance-a-thon, where the last couple dancing wins the prize.
In order to believe in the reality of their democracy, Americans focus exclusively on the war between right and left for Big Enchalada status. The fact that almost every American, whether Conservative or Liberal, believes that their side is the victim of media bias originates from our need to believe that our democracy is real, that our participation in elections has real consequences, that the future really is at stake when we cast our ballot. To accept that right and left are ultimately collaborators taking turns as Head Honcho would be to deflate the drama of political theater into farce. The dominant cultural myth of America is the greatness of our democracy. For Americans to continue to believe in the greatness of their democracy it must be increasingly infused with the meaning of war. American democracy needs the weight of war to hold it down. Otherwise, having severed its legitimate connection to the populace by failing to offer real choices, it would float away, a farce whose plot is lighter than air.
Americans are now fighting a war to establish “democracy” on the other side of the world. The war in Iraq is something of a wedding ceremony for war and American democracy, in a courtship that is at least as old as the military industrial complex. The difference between the war-without-guns to keep democracy real at home, and the war to make American democracy real in Iraq, is that we can use real guns in Iraq. The symbolic violence enacted by American democratic theater at home is no longer vivid enough to keep the American audience in its seats. Now we must spill the real blood of brown skinned Muslims to keep the show of American democracy in production; As ever, the show must go on. This week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has begun spying on Americans at home is the first indication that the blood spilled in Iraq will not suffice, and that the marriage between war and democracy in the Homeland will no longer be symbolic. Americans sang “Over there, over there” during World War I, but will soon be singing “Over here, over here” in the War (without end) On Terror, a war whose drumbeat has become the beating heart of American democracy.
To divorce democracy from war, Americans must remarry their own democracy. But, like any successful second marriage, this reborn marriage must tell a new story the second time around. The false divide between American right and left, encoded in the myth of media bias, is the lie that undid the first marriage. Americans, no longer able to make real choices for their country through the levers of democracy, became legally separated from both the right and the left, who had in the meantime married one another. It was the ultimate marriage of convenience, like a seventeenth century marriage between rival European royal families that sewed up the map for both of the involved clans. Polygamy has now ensued, as in order to finalize their divorce with the American citizenry , the right and the left have together now married war.
For a second marriage between Americans and democracy to work, it will have to be a lot like the movie Somersby, in which the Richard Gere who returned from war to Jodie Foster became the mensch he had never before been. In fact he may not have even been the same person at all. But that’s okay, because Americans are looking to remarry a mensch this time, and don’t really care if our new democracy isn’t really our old one. Power will always be seductive for politicians, but for a second marriage to work the bond between Americans and democracy must be strong enough for fidelity to trump seduction. If we can craft such a relationship between Americans and democracy, Jodie Foster can look that new democracy in the eye and say “I never loved him the way that I love you.”
Monday, December 12, 2005
Front Row Seats
Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks franchise,
gets under my craw whenever I see him seated directly behind his team’s bench during games. Initially I was annoyed at Cuban for interfering with my viewing pleasure whenever I happen to tune in the Mavs. But now I am really steamed at Cuban, because when I really thought about his spotlight grabbing ways my thoughts careened off of their expected destination, which was a proper lambasting of Cuban’s WWF-Ringside-Manager courtside shtick, and landed me face-to-face with the realization that religion and I have failed one another. Mr. Cuban, I was quite happy hiding this from myself, thank you very much. But let me explain.
Unspoken etiquette dictates that professional sports franchise owners watch their team’s games from a dignified distance, in the Owner’s Box, shielded from prying eyes and difficult, at the very least, for cameras to capture. This etiquette has fallen out of fashion in recent years, with violators such as the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones (is it something about Dallas?) making his way onto the Cowboys’ sideline in the closing minutes of close games. Jones could easily be accused of using his Cowboys platform as a vehicle for his own media celebrity, and his penchant for national TV commercial spots squelch any doubts about the man’s appetite for attention. And to be fair, George Steinbrenner obliterated any standards of owner behavior twenty-five years ago upon his fourth or fifth firing and rehiring of Billy Martin. All that said, no owner has ever before had the audacity to plant his puss in our faces on game day by actually sitting with his team for the entire game. Cuban does this, and somehow no one bats an eye. Cuban takes the less out of shameless self promotion, because there is only ever more Mark Cuban.
One of the smartest ideas in professional sports was one of the first, affixing the home city’s name to a franchise. The idea is so central to professional team sports that it is unthinkable that a franchise in North American big league sports would not have its city, region, or state emblazoned on its chest. My own Baltimore Orioles are the only Major League Baseball team that does not have its home city’s name or initials located somewhere on any of its uniforms. But the Orioles reasons for omitting Charm City references from team garb dovetail with the importance of geographical identity; By omitting Baltimore the Orioles somehow believe they are more likely to attract fans from the entire state of Maryland, and beyond. The Cowboys may be America’s team, but the Orioles have a vision of themselves as DelMarVa’s Team (that’s short for Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland to all you Mid-Atlantic neophytes). Doesn’t have quite the same ring as America’s Team, but a decade of cellar dwelling puts the O’s desire to conquer mighty Delaware in perspective.
But back to Mark Cuban. The point being that the more he hogs the camera, the more he reminds us all that the Mavericks are his team, and not the great citizens of Dallas and the surrounding suburbs’ team. By now it is impossible to think of the Mavericks without also thinking of Cuban. The Yankees have a big enough mythology to contain even George Steinbrenner, but outside of the Lakers and Celtics, no NBA team could withstand Cuban’s media onslaught without being engulfed by sheer Cuban-ness. The blue road jerseys may still say Dallas, but squint and it almost looks like they say Cuban.
The more the Mavericks belong to Cuban, the less they belong to Dallas. Professional sports franchises continue to be named after places because doing so maximizes revenue streams. If it did not, and teams thought they could get away with it, you would see the Pepsi Mets, or the Sony Vikings. Teams are not shy about naming their arenas after corporations, so let’s not kid ourselves about the sanctity of team names. But pro franchises understand that an individual fan’s ability to identify with a given team, and to shell out mucho dollars in the process, hinges on the fan’s belief that the players on the field somehow represent that fan.
Baltimoreans have a collective inferiority complex. When the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2000 it was like Baltimore was Rome for a day. For a second Baltimoreans were on top of the Titanic shouting “I’m the king of the world.” Baltimore’s chosen representatives had taken on and vanquished the best of the best, and brought the NFL’s crown back to Baltimore. Our boys won the day, and we bask in their glow. At Cuban’s current pace if his Mavericks ever win a title he might be the only one who shows up at the victory parade, because it will be his boys who won the day, and the people of Dallas will be talking about their Cowboys (like Steinbrenner and the Yankees, the Cowboys are too big for even Jerry Jones to engulf).
That is the basic argument I wanted to pin on Cuban. But the more I thought about the critique, that Cuban interferes with fans’ ability to identify with their team, the more I realized that the foundational premise of that critique was flawed. Upon further review, fans do not identify with the players on the field as their chosen representatives. Barbara Mikulski represents me in the United States Senate, and I identify with how cool it is that a little, liberal lady from a working class neighborhood in Baltimore has gone toe-to-toe with Helms, Thurmond, and Lott for the past twenty years. But I don’t run half-naked through the city streets painted in her campaign colors on the night she wins re-election. Thousands of people did just that when the Ravens won the Super Bowl in January 2001. I saw them with my own eyes, as I weaved my car slowly between them on the way to a little post-Super Bowl lovin’ from the lovely Ravens fan I had met before the conference championship game (needless to say, I did not pass up the chance to marry this sexy football fan).
If you did not know the Ravens had just won the Super Bowl you would have thought that the whole city had just done some really good cocaine (having never done cocaine, the only explanation of its effects that has ever resonated with me was that it is like you just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl). Some might say that such a reaction to a football game is kind of sad or pathetic. I might agree with them if I believed that what fans do is identify with their team. But something much more powerful is taking place than mere identification. To understand it is to understand why running naked through the streets may have been the only appropriate response to the Ravens triumph (unless you were a Redskins fan on your way to get naked inside your favorite new Ravens fan’s Baltimore row-house).
Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about how rooting for sports teams is ultimately rooting for laundry. The players and coaches now seem to stick around for the proverbial cup of coffee. Ravens coach Brian Billick has been around for eight years, which gives him the third longest coaching tenure in a thirty-two team league. And Billick will be lucky to be back for his ninth. Over time the only thing a fan sees year in and year out is the team uniform, Seinfeld’s laundry. If fans were simply identifying with their teams, this constant turnover would stunt their capacity to do so. Identifying with the other rests largely on the process of propinquity, whereby the more time we spend with someone the more we come to like her, to identify with her. This process takes time, and time is exactly what vagabond professional athletes and coaches are not able to give any one city. My dirty laundry usually spends two or three months on the floor in my bedroom before I give in and wash it, but my laundry just doesn’t grow on me the way the moody diabetic administrative assistant did after a year at my old job. We never really loved our teams because the players were part of the fabric of our communities, the reigning myth in Baltimore about the beloved old Colts. If that’s why Baltimoreans loved the Colts, than they wouldn’t be filling 70,000 plastic purple seats every Sunday to watch a bunch of guys with mansions in Atlanta.
When people watch sports they do not want the team in white shirts to beat the team in blue shirts because the team in white somehow represents them. They want the team in white shirts to win because while they are watching the game they are the team in white shirts. The game is as real to the fully invested viewer as it is to the players on the field. By this I do not mean to suggest that fans have the same experience of the action on the field as do the players. Instead, I am suggesting that to be fully invested in viewing sports is to have an experience as intense, as emotionally involved, as dramatic, and as real as the players on the field. My experience as a fan is different, but no less profound than that of the player on the field.
The word spectator has a connotation of passivity, one stated overtly by Reebok’s old slogan that “Life is not a spectator sport”, and also lurking there in Nike’s now iconic slogan of “Just do it.” The company’s shared message is that consumer’s of sports entertainment are little more than couch potatoes (full disclosure: I received a stuffed animal couch potato from my grandmother around the 6th grade, by which time I was already an avid consumer of sports entertainment). Of course, both companies’ bottom lines are dependent on the very behavior they are smirking at in their ads; just check how much money each company pays celebrity athletes to wear in competition, just so their logos can be seen by the very TV sports viewer that the companies openly disparage. Apparently the message resonates with the American public. Nike would not have kept the “Just do it” ad campaign going for the past twenty years if their ad wizards could not show that it was continuing to touch a cultural nerve. Most Americans love watching sports on TV, but it appears that most Americans have also bought into the myth that watching sports on TV makes them lazy slobs, who thereby need to purchase the gear worn by the people really engaged in life, the athletes. Collectively, Nike and Reebok’s real slogan is “Get a life”, which is exactly what they are telling American sports fans to do. Do I need to add that if Americans collectively followed this advice then Nike and Reebok would soon be out of business, for if we are all out there kayaking and rock climbing we will have no time to watch Lebron James dunk in his Nikes, and will surely soon forget that we need Nikes to kayak or rock climb in the first place? Nike and Reebok really want us to just keep on passively watching ball games on TV, but they want us to feel anxious about what horrible couch potatoes we are while doing so. Because the best way to rid one’s self of that anxiety is to purchase the shoes that will jumpstart a new active lifestyle, or at least give one the image of someone with an active lifestyle. This was what Spike Lee really meant when, on Nike’s behalf, he told us all “It’s the shoes.”
It is time to redeem the American sports viewing couch potato, because there is nothing passive about what I do when I watch Tar Heel basketball on TV. To understand what really happens when a passionate fan watches a ballgame we must beat a dead horse, but one that may hopefully be resuscitated by a fresh take. The old nag in question is the dreaded “death of the author”, a onetime radical school of literary criticism that should have been called the birth of the reader, but death sells more copy than birth ever has. The death, or later, the decentering of the author sought to play down the centrality of authorial majesty in order to shed light on the important role of the reader’s imagination engaged with the text. Though attention grabbing, the whole death of the author imagery ultimately did a disservice to the movement, because the author never disappears, she just shifts from star of the show to co-star, collaborating with the reader rather than dictating to him. It was all too easy to dismiss a trendy theory that denied the author her props, because we all know that no authors equals no books. The academics who wished to kill the author in theory were probably frustrated authors themselves, expressing through their theory a repressed desire to kill real-life successful authors.
Which is a shame because the move to establish readers as full and equal partners with authors is similar to our continuing need to establish women as full and equal partners in society, in that it is both long overdue and rich in potential healing. Readers of books, audiences of drama, and, yes, spectators of sports are the forgotten half of the creative equation. This imbalance is symbolized by the shadow that falls across the audience as the spotlight shines on the stage, and the darkness that shrouds fans surrounding the blazing playing field. Our fervent celebration of authors, actors, and athletes has led to the belief that creative work is their singular accomplishment, leaving audiences cast as mere passive consumers. The secret truth of art, and sport, is that drama exists in the collaborative space between artist (or athlete) and audience. Just as no authors equals no books, no audience equals no art.
The point is not that if a tree falls it does not make a sound if there is no one to hear it. I am suggesting the more radical notion that artist and audience collaborate in the very creation of art. I will go so far as to identify the artist as the quarterback in the creative process. But in the history of football, no quarterback has ever completed a pass without a receiver, making the audience the wide receiver in the creative process. It is no coincidence that scholarly work being done along these lines is known as literary reception theory.
It is also no coincidence that this scholarly work is being done in the realm of literature. The active creative work of the audience is most apparent in the creative encounter between author and reader, though it is no less true for actors and audience, and for athletes and fans. Readers best exhibit the creative work of audience by transcribing the printed page into a living imaginative world. The reality of collaboration rests on the truth that there is not one work of art called “Moby Dick”, but that instead there are as many millions of “Moby Dicks” as there are millions of readers who have staged that drama in their imaginations. An artist can but create the potential for art. It is only when creative work is encountered and engaged by audience that it is born into art.
The spectator’s collaboration with the drama of competitive sport is the most visceral. Contrasting with the novel or the play, the ballgame’s outcome is never scripted. It is the scripted nature of professional wrestling that certifies its status as theatre and not sport. We are drawn to competitive sports by the symbolic connection between the unknown of victory and defeat, and the unknown of our mortality, of our life and death. It is often said of a passionate sports fan that he “lives and dies” with his chosen team. I live and die with the North Carolina Tar Heels. I of course do not mean that I literally biologically die when the Tar Heels lose a game. But life is full of many deaths, not limited to the biological. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe understands this: “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” I might add, to lose to Duke is to die a little.
The inability to comprehend the truth of life’s many little deaths, and to function on the concrete level of biological death to the exclusion of all other realities, is at the core of the spread of literalist religions throughout the world. At the same time, literalist religions trade in fundamental truths that leave no room for the collaboration of audience that is as central to the creation of sacred spiritual experience as it is to the creation of art. The establishment of audience as full and equal partner in the creative act is central to any hope of reclaiming the world’s religions from the grasp of literalism that does not just render them meaningless, but makes them dangerous.
Religion, when successful, draws the believer into communication and ultimately creative collaboration with the sacred. No branch of Christianity in America today is successful in shepherding this basic religious experience to its congregants (I draw on the Christian example out of familiarity, but suspect that the general pattern applies to other religions as well). The literalist evangelicals, whose churches are bursting at the seams, have no intention of empowering a collaborative religious experience. Quite the opposite, as their stock in trade is received truth. Their growth in membership is testament to the seductive nature of literalist belief, and to how great the temptation that here, at last, are all the answers. The mainline Protestants, who are struggling to hold on to their members, and who do so largely through cultural inertia, have lost their ability to connect contemporary Americans to the sacred. And contemporary Americans have, in turn, either succumbed to the temptations of literalism or drifted off into American secularism, which is really American consumerism. In either case, Americans have largely abandoned their once meaningful churches.
I am one of these Americans. I was raised Episcopalian by my father, an Episcopal clergyman, and by my mother, a PhD theologian and professor of religion. As an adult I have found myself unable to connect to the sacred through the traditions of the Episcopal church. My response to this failure in collaboration has been to abandon my church.
One statement captures the heartbreaking failure of our traditional mainstream churches and at the same time contains the seed of their revival: “I am a spiritual person, I’m just not into organized religion.” I have heard it so many times that I do not doubt that this statement lives in 90% of the people who no longer or never did attend church, and who have not succumbed to literalist religion. This statement leaves the door open for some form of spiritual life. If mainstream religion is to once more be relevant in the lives of the people of this planet, if it is to avoid being swallowed by the flames of literalism, it must find new ways to feed the spiritual hunger that its current practices have left starving in the bulk of us. I submit that the redemption of our real (ie non-literalist) religions is entwined with the redemption of the sports viewing couch potato. Both depend on recognizing, honoring, and uplifting the collaborative, creative power of audience, be they sports fans or worshipers.
No human experience is more powerful than the flash of connecting with the sacred. Real churches, synagogues, and mosques will be bursting at the seams if they reclaim their right and joyful role of facilitating this flash, and cultivating the flash into a steady light. I believe they can and will, if and when the imbalance of artist, athlete, or religious celebrant over audience is corrected. The audience is ready to gaze directly into the celebrant’s eyes, as soon as the scales are balanced.
I owe Mark Cuban an apology. I see now that he is a player on the stage, and he needs me. Now that I have taken ownership of my power as audience, I see that Cuban and I are going to do great things together.
Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks franchise,
gets under my craw whenever I see him seated directly behind his team’s bench during games. Initially I was annoyed at Cuban for interfering with my viewing pleasure whenever I happen to tune in the Mavs. But now I am really steamed at Cuban, because when I really thought about his spotlight grabbing ways my thoughts careened off of their expected destination, which was a proper lambasting of Cuban’s WWF-Ringside-Manager courtside shtick, and landed me face-to-face with the realization that religion and I have failed one another. Mr. Cuban, I was quite happy hiding this from myself, thank you very much. But let me explain.
Unspoken etiquette dictates that professional sports franchise owners watch their team’s games from a dignified distance, in the Owner’s Box, shielded from prying eyes and difficult, at the very least, for cameras to capture. This etiquette has fallen out of fashion in recent years, with violators such as the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones (is it something about Dallas?) making his way onto the Cowboys’ sideline in the closing minutes of close games. Jones could easily be accused of using his Cowboys platform as a vehicle for his own media celebrity, and his penchant for national TV commercial spots squelch any doubts about the man’s appetite for attention. And to be fair, George Steinbrenner obliterated any standards of owner behavior twenty-five years ago upon his fourth or fifth firing and rehiring of Billy Martin. All that said, no owner has ever before had the audacity to plant his puss in our faces on game day by actually sitting with his team for the entire game. Cuban does this, and somehow no one bats an eye. Cuban takes the less out of shameless self promotion, because there is only ever more Mark Cuban.
One of the smartest ideas in professional sports was one of the first, affixing the home city’s name to a franchise. The idea is so central to professional team sports that it is unthinkable that a franchise in North American big league sports would not have its city, region, or state emblazoned on its chest. My own Baltimore Orioles are the only Major League Baseball team that does not have its home city’s name or initials located somewhere on any of its uniforms. But the Orioles reasons for omitting Charm City references from team garb dovetail with the importance of geographical identity; By omitting Baltimore the Orioles somehow believe they are more likely to attract fans from the entire state of Maryland, and beyond. The Cowboys may be America’s team, but the Orioles have a vision of themselves as DelMarVa’s Team (that’s short for Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland to all you Mid-Atlantic neophytes). Doesn’t have quite the same ring as America’s Team, but a decade of cellar dwelling puts the O’s desire to conquer mighty Delaware in perspective.
But back to Mark Cuban. The point being that the more he hogs the camera, the more he reminds us all that the Mavericks are his team, and not the great citizens of Dallas and the surrounding suburbs’ team. By now it is impossible to think of the Mavericks without also thinking of Cuban. The Yankees have a big enough mythology to contain even George Steinbrenner, but outside of the Lakers and Celtics, no NBA team could withstand Cuban’s media onslaught without being engulfed by sheer Cuban-ness. The blue road jerseys may still say Dallas, but squint and it almost looks like they say Cuban.
The more the Mavericks belong to Cuban, the less they belong to Dallas. Professional sports franchises continue to be named after places because doing so maximizes revenue streams. If it did not, and teams thought they could get away with it, you would see the Pepsi Mets, or the Sony Vikings. Teams are not shy about naming their arenas after corporations, so let’s not kid ourselves about the sanctity of team names. But pro franchises understand that an individual fan’s ability to identify with a given team, and to shell out mucho dollars in the process, hinges on the fan’s belief that the players on the field somehow represent that fan.
Baltimoreans have a collective inferiority complex. When the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2000 it was like Baltimore was Rome for a day. For a second Baltimoreans were on top of the Titanic shouting “I’m the king of the world.” Baltimore’s chosen representatives had taken on and vanquished the best of the best, and brought the NFL’s crown back to Baltimore. Our boys won the day, and we bask in their glow. At Cuban’s current pace if his Mavericks ever win a title he might be the only one who shows up at the victory parade, because it will be his boys who won the day, and the people of Dallas will be talking about their Cowboys (like Steinbrenner and the Yankees, the Cowboys are too big for even Jerry Jones to engulf).
That is the basic argument I wanted to pin on Cuban. But the more I thought about the critique, that Cuban interferes with fans’ ability to identify with their team, the more I realized that the foundational premise of that critique was flawed. Upon further review, fans do not identify with the players on the field as their chosen representatives. Barbara Mikulski represents me in the United States Senate, and I identify with how cool it is that a little, liberal lady from a working class neighborhood in Baltimore has gone toe-to-toe with Helms, Thurmond, and Lott for the past twenty years. But I don’t run half-naked through the city streets painted in her campaign colors on the night she wins re-election. Thousands of people did just that when the Ravens won the Super Bowl in January 2001. I saw them with my own eyes, as I weaved my car slowly between them on the way to a little post-Super Bowl lovin’ from the lovely Ravens fan I had met before the conference championship game (needless to say, I did not pass up the chance to marry this sexy football fan).
If you did not know the Ravens had just won the Super Bowl you would have thought that the whole city had just done some really good cocaine (having never done cocaine, the only explanation of its effects that has ever resonated with me was that it is like you just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl). Some might say that such a reaction to a football game is kind of sad or pathetic. I might agree with them if I believed that what fans do is identify with their team. But something much more powerful is taking place than mere identification. To understand it is to understand why running naked through the streets may have been the only appropriate response to the Ravens triumph (unless you were a Redskins fan on your way to get naked inside your favorite new Ravens fan’s Baltimore row-house).
Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about how rooting for sports teams is ultimately rooting for laundry. The players and coaches now seem to stick around for the proverbial cup of coffee. Ravens coach Brian Billick has been around for eight years, which gives him the third longest coaching tenure in a thirty-two team league. And Billick will be lucky to be back for his ninth. Over time the only thing a fan sees year in and year out is the team uniform, Seinfeld’s laundry. If fans were simply identifying with their teams, this constant turnover would stunt their capacity to do so. Identifying with the other rests largely on the process of propinquity, whereby the more time we spend with someone the more we come to like her, to identify with her. This process takes time, and time is exactly what vagabond professional athletes and coaches are not able to give any one city. My dirty laundry usually spends two or three months on the floor in my bedroom before I give in and wash it, but my laundry just doesn’t grow on me the way the moody diabetic administrative assistant did after a year at my old job. We never really loved our teams because the players were part of the fabric of our communities, the reigning myth in Baltimore about the beloved old Colts. If that’s why Baltimoreans loved the Colts, than they wouldn’t be filling 70,000 plastic purple seats every Sunday to watch a bunch of guys with mansions in Atlanta.
When people watch sports they do not want the team in white shirts to beat the team in blue shirts because the team in white somehow represents them. They want the team in white shirts to win because while they are watching the game they are the team in white shirts. The game is as real to the fully invested viewer as it is to the players on the field. By this I do not mean to suggest that fans have the same experience of the action on the field as do the players. Instead, I am suggesting that to be fully invested in viewing sports is to have an experience as intense, as emotionally involved, as dramatic, and as real as the players on the field. My experience as a fan is different, but no less profound than that of the player on the field.
The word spectator has a connotation of passivity, one stated overtly by Reebok’s old slogan that “Life is not a spectator sport”, and also lurking there in Nike’s now iconic slogan of “Just do it.” The company’s shared message is that consumer’s of sports entertainment are little more than couch potatoes (full disclosure: I received a stuffed animal couch potato from my grandmother around the 6th grade, by which time I was already an avid consumer of sports entertainment). Of course, both companies’ bottom lines are dependent on the very behavior they are smirking at in their ads; just check how much money each company pays celebrity athletes to wear in competition, just so their logos can be seen by the very TV sports viewer that the companies openly disparage. Apparently the message resonates with the American public. Nike would not have kept the “Just do it” ad campaign going for the past twenty years if their ad wizards could not show that it was continuing to touch a cultural nerve. Most Americans love watching sports on TV, but it appears that most Americans have also bought into the myth that watching sports on TV makes them lazy slobs, who thereby need to purchase the gear worn by the people really engaged in life, the athletes. Collectively, Nike and Reebok’s real slogan is “Get a life”, which is exactly what they are telling American sports fans to do. Do I need to add that if Americans collectively followed this advice then Nike and Reebok would soon be out of business, for if we are all out there kayaking and rock climbing we will have no time to watch Lebron James dunk in his Nikes, and will surely soon forget that we need Nikes to kayak or rock climb in the first place? Nike and Reebok really want us to just keep on passively watching ball games on TV, but they want us to feel anxious about what horrible couch potatoes we are while doing so. Because the best way to rid one’s self of that anxiety is to purchase the shoes that will jumpstart a new active lifestyle, or at least give one the image of someone with an active lifestyle. This was what Spike Lee really meant when, on Nike’s behalf, he told us all “It’s the shoes.”
It is time to redeem the American sports viewing couch potato, because there is nothing passive about what I do when I watch Tar Heel basketball on TV. To understand what really happens when a passionate fan watches a ballgame we must beat a dead horse, but one that may hopefully be resuscitated by a fresh take. The old nag in question is the dreaded “death of the author”, a onetime radical school of literary criticism that should have been called the birth of the reader, but death sells more copy than birth ever has. The death, or later, the decentering of the author sought to play down the centrality of authorial majesty in order to shed light on the important role of the reader’s imagination engaged with the text. Though attention grabbing, the whole death of the author imagery ultimately did a disservice to the movement, because the author never disappears, she just shifts from star of the show to co-star, collaborating with the reader rather than dictating to him. It was all too easy to dismiss a trendy theory that denied the author her props, because we all know that no authors equals no books. The academics who wished to kill the author in theory were probably frustrated authors themselves, expressing through their theory a repressed desire to kill real-life successful authors.
Which is a shame because the move to establish readers as full and equal partners with authors is similar to our continuing need to establish women as full and equal partners in society, in that it is both long overdue and rich in potential healing. Readers of books, audiences of drama, and, yes, spectators of sports are the forgotten half of the creative equation. This imbalance is symbolized by the shadow that falls across the audience as the spotlight shines on the stage, and the darkness that shrouds fans surrounding the blazing playing field. Our fervent celebration of authors, actors, and athletes has led to the belief that creative work is their singular accomplishment, leaving audiences cast as mere passive consumers. The secret truth of art, and sport, is that drama exists in the collaborative space between artist (or athlete) and audience. Just as no authors equals no books, no audience equals no art.
The point is not that if a tree falls it does not make a sound if there is no one to hear it. I am suggesting the more radical notion that artist and audience collaborate in the very creation of art. I will go so far as to identify the artist as the quarterback in the creative process. But in the history of football, no quarterback has ever completed a pass without a receiver, making the audience the wide receiver in the creative process. It is no coincidence that scholarly work being done along these lines is known as literary reception theory.
It is also no coincidence that this scholarly work is being done in the realm of literature. The active creative work of the audience is most apparent in the creative encounter between author and reader, though it is no less true for actors and audience, and for athletes and fans. Readers best exhibit the creative work of audience by transcribing the printed page into a living imaginative world. The reality of collaboration rests on the truth that there is not one work of art called “Moby Dick”, but that instead there are as many millions of “Moby Dicks” as there are millions of readers who have staged that drama in their imaginations. An artist can but create the potential for art. It is only when creative work is encountered and engaged by audience that it is born into art.
The spectator’s collaboration with the drama of competitive sport is the most visceral. Contrasting with the novel or the play, the ballgame’s outcome is never scripted. It is the scripted nature of professional wrestling that certifies its status as theatre and not sport. We are drawn to competitive sports by the symbolic connection between the unknown of victory and defeat, and the unknown of our mortality, of our life and death. It is often said of a passionate sports fan that he “lives and dies” with his chosen team. I live and die with the North Carolina Tar Heels. I of course do not mean that I literally biologically die when the Tar Heels lose a game. But life is full of many deaths, not limited to the biological. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe understands this: “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” I might add, to lose to Duke is to die a little.
The inability to comprehend the truth of life’s many little deaths, and to function on the concrete level of biological death to the exclusion of all other realities, is at the core of the spread of literalist religions throughout the world. At the same time, literalist religions trade in fundamental truths that leave no room for the collaboration of audience that is as central to the creation of sacred spiritual experience as it is to the creation of art. The establishment of audience as full and equal partner in the creative act is central to any hope of reclaiming the world’s religions from the grasp of literalism that does not just render them meaningless, but makes them dangerous.
Religion, when successful, draws the believer into communication and ultimately creative collaboration with the sacred. No branch of Christianity in America today is successful in shepherding this basic religious experience to its congregants (I draw on the Christian example out of familiarity, but suspect that the general pattern applies to other religions as well). The literalist evangelicals, whose churches are bursting at the seams, have no intention of empowering a collaborative religious experience. Quite the opposite, as their stock in trade is received truth. Their growth in membership is testament to the seductive nature of literalist belief, and to how great the temptation that here, at last, are all the answers. The mainline Protestants, who are struggling to hold on to their members, and who do so largely through cultural inertia, have lost their ability to connect contemporary Americans to the sacred. And contemporary Americans have, in turn, either succumbed to the temptations of literalism or drifted off into American secularism, which is really American consumerism. In either case, Americans have largely abandoned their once meaningful churches.
I am one of these Americans. I was raised Episcopalian by my father, an Episcopal clergyman, and by my mother, a PhD theologian and professor of religion. As an adult I have found myself unable to connect to the sacred through the traditions of the Episcopal church. My response to this failure in collaboration has been to abandon my church.
One statement captures the heartbreaking failure of our traditional mainstream churches and at the same time contains the seed of their revival: “I am a spiritual person, I’m just not into organized religion.” I have heard it so many times that I do not doubt that this statement lives in 90% of the people who no longer or never did attend church, and who have not succumbed to literalist religion. This statement leaves the door open for some form of spiritual life. If mainstream religion is to once more be relevant in the lives of the people of this planet, if it is to avoid being swallowed by the flames of literalism, it must find new ways to feed the spiritual hunger that its current practices have left starving in the bulk of us. I submit that the redemption of our real (ie non-literalist) religions is entwined with the redemption of the sports viewing couch potato. Both depend on recognizing, honoring, and uplifting the collaborative, creative power of audience, be they sports fans or worshipers.
No human experience is more powerful than the flash of connecting with the sacred. Real churches, synagogues, and mosques will be bursting at the seams if they reclaim their right and joyful role of facilitating this flash, and cultivating the flash into a steady light. I believe they can and will, if and when the imbalance of artist, athlete, or religious celebrant over audience is corrected. The audience is ready to gaze directly into the celebrant’s eyes, as soon as the scales are balanced.
I owe Mark Cuban an apology. I see now that he is a player on the stage, and he needs me. Now that I have taken ownership of my power as audience, I see that Cuban and I are going to do great things together.
Friday, December 02, 2005
The Ghosts of Hollywood
I may be a little late getting into the game, but I would like to try to get my head around why it felt like the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston-Angelina Jolie love triangle was happening in my own family, and why most everyone else I talk to felt this way too. God forbid my sister ever divorce her eminently likable husband for an irresistibly hunky fellow grad student down at the local coffee shop, but if she did I would at least feel like I have an emotional map to follow thanks to the roller coaster of feelings I’ve been through with Brad, Jen, and Angelina.
So, why do we all care so much? They are all three pleasing to look at on-screen, Jen with a remarkable freshness, and Brad and Angelina with Hall-Of-Fame caliber bone structure, and that certainly does not hurt. But the most important trait they share, and what everything else I am about to say rests on, is that they are good but not great actors. They are good actors, but they are great stars, and that is exactly how Hollywood wants it.
When was the last time you saw a stunning Hollywood movie (for me, The Matrix in 1999 I believe it was), or watched a truly original network television show (whenever they ended Seinfeld). Exceptions pop up periodically to prove the rule, but we get a seemingly endless stream of film and television entertainment that runs the gamut from mediocre to pretty good. I submit that the two dominant media of popular art, mainstream film and television, have slumped into their current doldrums by an accident of history, and that it has been the best thing to happen to Hollywood’s hold on America since the talkie.
Our intimacy with Brad, Jen, and Angelina has its roots in the emergence of the multiplex cinema and cable television, but if you had to finger a precise moment of conception it came on the day that Al Gore invented the internet. Multiplexes and cable TV radically increased the amount of space that Hollywood (which should be read as shorthand for the entertainment industry) had to fill with creative product. But the birth of the internet was truly like the Big Bang of a new universe, with the creation of literally infinite space for entertainment content. Hollywood has just as many talented people as it ever had, if not more. It is just that before multiplexes, DVD’s, cable, and the internet, the amount of space that entertainment media was expected to fill matched up roughly with the amount of talent necessary to fill the limited media outlets with quality product.
I bet if I was a fly on the wall in a Hollywood executive’s office in the early 1990’s, when the first eruptions of the “Age of Information” were about to transform the industry, I would have seen not a few 3-Xanax panic attacks as the reality hit that all of this space would have to be filled with content. How could any producer be expected to fill that much space with content that people would actually be willing to pay for? Hollywood spreads, and there was no way to stop it from filling the virgin media. Kudos to any producer who managed not to jump off the pier in Santa Monica, for within a few short years one single concept would hook Americans into their media like crack cocaine hooked our cities in the 1980’s. That concept: reality.
The concept may have been born by MTV’s “Real World”, blossomed with CBS’ “Survivor”, and now dominates the prime-time landscape. But I am talking about much more than that phenomenon known as “reality TV”. All of mainstream film and television has become window dressing, just entertaining enough to grab our attention to facilitate the real show in Hollywood, which is the reality show of celebrities’ “real” lives. Hollywood will never be able to fill an infinite media space with compelling entertainment, but Hollywood has solved that problem by creating an assembly-line approach to the creative process; Each of our entertainments is at its core the same Model T, if you will. Hollywood does not want or need to produce original or creative dramas, because the play is no longer the thing. The play is now just a cheap come-on line, but Americans have turned out to be suckers for a cheap come-on line. Perhaps all we ever wanted was to be voyeurs. But like locking your car helps keep an honest man honest, quality mainstream entertainment helped keep the American conversation relatively interesting for decades.
In America there is only one conversation, and it is about Hollywood. This is not so because we are shallow, but because we are too heterogeneous in our makeup to talk to each other about much else. We need to talk to each other about Hollywood if we are to connect. Without it, three questions into any conversation (How was your weekend?, How’s the family?, and How ‘bout this weather?) and we’re done. I don’t want to hear about your religion, I really don’t want to hear about your politics, and don’t start with the wooden duck decoy collection.
So, we talk about Hollywood, and Brad, Angelina, and Jen in particular, because not to talk about them would leave us all collectively mute (if you don’t believe me try a little experiment: go to a workplace lunchroom, where people talk to each other who would not be hanging out together if they didn’t share an employer- I guarantee you that if they are not complaining about their bosses they will be talking about Hollywood). But, much like its predecessor God, Hollywood is dead, struck down by the information superhighway that paved into our lives these past fifteen years. The Hollywood we now consume, the celebrity reality show, is roadkill.
But if the image of Americans as vultures pecking at a squished jack rabbit on an empty road in the Mojave Dessert between LA and Vegas is too grim, there is a perhaps more comfortable imagery ready at hand. My fellow Americans, we care so much about Brad, Angelina, and Jen because they are ghosts, and as ghosts must, they haunt us. Brad, Angelina, and Jen are the ghosts of the dead American (pop) culture (they are also the ghosts of Jack, Jackie, and Marilyn). They, and their lesser cousins (does anyone else gag when they are spooked by Kenny Chesney and Renee Zelwegger?) will continue to haunt us, and we will be stuck talking to each other about them, until a new, living culture, whether recognizably American or not, rises up to re-animate this big ghost town called America.
Until I catch wind of it, though, I will continue hiding from reality in my chosen sub-category of Hollywood, sports entertainment (what could be more haunting than watching my beloved Washington Redskins miss the playoffs year after year-perhaps they are haunted by their own racist mascot?). At least that way I have something to talk to my countrymen about.
I may be a little late getting into the game, but I would like to try to get my head around why it felt like the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston-Angelina Jolie love triangle was happening in my own family, and why most everyone else I talk to felt this way too. God forbid my sister ever divorce her eminently likable husband for an irresistibly hunky fellow grad student down at the local coffee shop, but if she did I would at least feel like I have an emotional map to follow thanks to the roller coaster of feelings I’ve been through with Brad, Jen, and Angelina.
So, why do we all care so much? They are all three pleasing to look at on-screen, Jen with a remarkable freshness, and Brad and Angelina with Hall-Of-Fame caliber bone structure, and that certainly does not hurt. But the most important trait they share, and what everything else I am about to say rests on, is that they are good but not great actors. They are good actors, but they are great stars, and that is exactly how Hollywood wants it.
When was the last time you saw a stunning Hollywood movie (for me, The Matrix in 1999 I believe it was), or watched a truly original network television show (whenever they ended Seinfeld). Exceptions pop up periodically to prove the rule, but we get a seemingly endless stream of film and television entertainment that runs the gamut from mediocre to pretty good. I submit that the two dominant media of popular art, mainstream film and television, have slumped into their current doldrums by an accident of history, and that it has been the best thing to happen to Hollywood’s hold on America since the talkie.
Our intimacy with Brad, Jen, and Angelina has its roots in the emergence of the multiplex cinema and cable television, but if you had to finger a precise moment of conception it came on the day that Al Gore invented the internet. Multiplexes and cable TV radically increased the amount of space that Hollywood (which should be read as shorthand for the entertainment industry) had to fill with creative product. But the birth of the internet was truly like the Big Bang of a new universe, with the creation of literally infinite space for entertainment content. Hollywood has just as many talented people as it ever had, if not more. It is just that before multiplexes, DVD’s, cable, and the internet, the amount of space that entertainment media was expected to fill matched up roughly with the amount of talent necessary to fill the limited media outlets with quality product.
I bet if I was a fly on the wall in a Hollywood executive’s office in the early 1990’s, when the first eruptions of the “Age of Information” were about to transform the industry, I would have seen not a few 3-Xanax panic attacks as the reality hit that all of this space would have to be filled with content. How could any producer be expected to fill that much space with content that people would actually be willing to pay for? Hollywood spreads, and there was no way to stop it from filling the virgin media. Kudos to any producer who managed not to jump off the pier in Santa Monica, for within a few short years one single concept would hook Americans into their media like crack cocaine hooked our cities in the 1980’s. That concept: reality.
The concept may have been born by MTV’s “Real World”, blossomed with CBS’ “Survivor”, and now dominates the prime-time landscape. But I am talking about much more than that phenomenon known as “reality TV”. All of mainstream film and television has become window dressing, just entertaining enough to grab our attention to facilitate the real show in Hollywood, which is the reality show of celebrities’ “real” lives. Hollywood will never be able to fill an infinite media space with compelling entertainment, but Hollywood has solved that problem by creating an assembly-line approach to the creative process; Each of our entertainments is at its core the same Model T, if you will. Hollywood does not want or need to produce original or creative dramas, because the play is no longer the thing. The play is now just a cheap come-on line, but Americans have turned out to be suckers for a cheap come-on line. Perhaps all we ever wanted was to be voyeurs. But like locking your car helps keep an honest man honest, quality mainstream entertainment helped keep the American conversation relatively interesting for decades.
In America there is only one conversation, and it is about Hollywood. This is not so because we are shallow, but because we are too heterogeneous in our makeup to talk to each other about much else. We need to talk to each other about Hollywood if we are to connect. Without it, three questions into any conversation (How was your weekend?, How’s the family?, and How ‘bout this weather?) and we’re done. I don’t want to hear about your religion, I really don’t want to hear about your politics, and don’t start with the wooden duck decoy collection.
So, we talk about Hollywood, and Brad, Angelina, and Jen in particular, because not to talk about them would leave us all collectively mute (if you don’t believe me try a little experiment: go to a workplace lunchroom, where people talk to each other who would not be hanging out together if they didn’t share an employer- I guarantee you that if they are not complaining about their bosses they will be talking about Hollywood). But, much like its predecessor God, Hollywood is dead, struck down by the information superhighway that paved into our lives these past fifteen years. The Hollywood we now consume, the celebrity reality show, is roadkill.
But if the image of Americans as vultures pecking at a squished jack rabbit on an empty road in the Mojave Dessert between LA and Vegas is too grim, there is a perhaps more comfortable imagery ready at hand. My fellow Americans, we care so much about Brad, Angelina, and Jen because they are ghosts, and as ghosts must, they haunt us. Brad, Angelina, and Jen are the ghosts of the dead American (pop) culture (they are also the ghosts of Jack, Jackie, and Marilyn). They, and their lesser cousins (does anyone else gag when they are spooked by Kenny Chesney and Renee Zelwegger?) will continue to haunt us, and we will be stuck talking to each other about them, until a new, living culture, whether recognizably American or not, rises up to re-animate this big ghost town called America.
Until I catch wind of it, though, I will continue hiding from reality in my chosen sub-category of Hollywood, sports entertainment (what could be more haunting than watching my beloved Washington Redskins miss the playoffs year after year-perhaps they are haunted by their own racist mascot?). At least that way I have something to talk to my countrymen about.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
GONE TODAY, HAIR TOMORROW
I heard a fascinating interview on Diane Rehm’s chat show this week. Diane was interviewing Ray Kurzweil, who was publicizing his new book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Based on the interview alone (plus the dust jacket, which I read at Barnes &Noble today) I can say that Kurzweil is one of the great optimists I have ever encountered. Among other pending exploits, he expects modern science to cure cancer, arrest and reverse the aging process, and empower the elimination of poverty. Big deal, right? To some degree we all expect science to work some miracle cures in the future, just as it cured polio and landed us on the moon in the past. What makes Kurzweil’s optimism so breathtaking is that he says these changes will occur in the next 15 to 20 years.
All of these developments are part of what Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity”. If Kurzweil fails at everything else he can always sell that term, “the singularity”, to Hollywood; I can already see Keanu Reeves co-starring with Jodie Foster in shiny silver singlets in “Singularity: the Major Motion Picture”. But for now Kurzweil’s singularity is a non-fiction term, albeit a sexy one, in that branch of thought known loosely as futurism. While the term singularity evokes the mystical-alien/human-union-sex scene in the pool in Cocoon, if I am interpreting it correctly it is another word for cyborg, among whose ranks numbers the decidedly less sexy Robocop (although we are left to wonder if Robocop’s, ahem, masculinity is intact). Whatever term you choose, Kurzweil is talking about the merger of human and machine. And Kurzweil’s merger is not metaphor, he’s not talking about the ubiquitous strolling teenager with cell phone cupped to ear. In Kurzweil’s vision we will have the mystical-union-sex from Cocoon, but instead of having it with aliens we’ll be having it with our laptops. The singular in singularity means that my Toshiba and I will be one Singular entity.
Kurzweil’s optimism regarding humanity’s future relationship with machines is in stark contrast to the script adhered to strictly by Hollywood. Both the original Terminator and Matrix films portray human and machine’s future as adversarial, with humanity in a war for its very survival. Hollywood makes billions playing off of our fears and anxieties, and the Terminator and Matrix films are no exception in their respective riffs on our growing reliance upon and vulnerability to our machines. But Kurzweil’s task as a futurist is not to scare the pants off us, but to predict the future as accurately as possible. Kurzweil’s outrageous optimism is singularly American; Only an American could have written this book, and that fact is ultimately more reliable than anything Kurzweil has predicted for the future. Kurzweil’s vision of the future may or may not come to pass, but the fact that he has such a vision, and that his vision is broadcast unabashedly through our mainstream media, is exactly why Lance Armstrong is the most important American alive today.
Lance Armstrong is the past and he is the future, at least as we live them both in the present in America. Here is all you need to know about Lance Armstrong’s biography to know why he is such a potent figure on the American landscape: 1) He had testicular cancer, which almost claimed his life. 2) He recovered from that cancer to not only ride again professionally as a cyclist, but to become the greatest cyclist of all time, winning an unprecedented 7 consecutive Tour De France championships. 3) A cloud of suspicion hangs over his accomplishments, as seemingly the entire French media is out to prove that Lance Armstrong cheated, by way of performance enhancing doping, to win France’s beloved bike race over and over.
That he pissed off the French in winning all those races is an added bonus for Armstrong’s US popularity, but I maintain that the three elements listed above are what really account for Armstrong’s central place in the American psyche. For those three elements, conjoined in the body and triumph of Armstrong, inject Armstrong into the very space that Kurzweil clears with the ferocity of his optimism.
Armstrong’s well publicized battle with testicular cancer grounds him precisely in the past that Kurzweil sees for us. Per Kurzweil, cancer, along with myriad diseases and the aging process itself, will be erased by a stroke of technology’s delete key. The one certainty that grounds all of human existence, mortality, will be expunged from the human storyline. Armstrong’s victory over cancer, then, makes him a link to our pending human past. That he overcame testicular cancer, a disease which by attacking the reproductive organs strikes directly at humanity’s heretofore only concrete means of transcending mortality, makes Armstrong’s defeat of cancer weightier still. In American iconography, Armstrong faced down mortality’s henchman at high noon, and proved quicker on the draw.
To understand Armstrong’s connection with Kurzweil’s human future we must tread rockier, more controversial ground. I want to begin with the disclaimer that I do not pretend knowledge of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence regarding performance enhancing doping (my opinion, which of course is just that, an opinion, is that the controversy is too murky for me to have a strong opinion one way or another; Armstrong’s consistent dominant results after a bout of nearly fatal cancer do raise one’s eyebrows, but the overzealous pursuit of Armstrong by what feels like the majority of the French population, and their thus far piddling results, tip the scales slightly back in Armstrong’s favor-but then again, I too am an American). And like the ultimate validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, the truth about Armstrong’s doping innocence or guilt is beside the point I am making here. Whether the accusations against Armstrong are true or not, the cloud of suspicion that envelops Armstrong is real.
It is the vaporous nature of this cloud of suspicion that is the secret fuel for Armstrong’s overwhelming popularity in America. Remember, Armstrong plays a sport with a negligible following in America. For comparison’s sake, American Greg Lemond won three Tour De France crowns in the 1980’s, including an Armstrong-esque inspiring win after being accidentally shot in the back on a hunting trip by his brother-in-law (talk about living symbolism; NFL football games on Thanksgiving Day exist for the sole purpose of preventing in-law shootings, “accidental” or otherwise; retiring to game, couch, and six-pack has saved countless lives). And Greg Lemond’s name carries about as much cultural currency as Jan-Michael Vincent (he of “Airwolf” fame; oh how I love helicopters).
So there is more going on here than meets the eye with this Lance Armstrong & America lovefest thing. Armstrong overcame cancer and won a few bike races, but somehow he’s shagging Sheryl Crowe(can I still say shagging, or is that too Austin Powers?). Rockers date actors, not jocks. Just ask Michael Phelps, he won six gold medals, a number only one count less than Armstrong’s seven Tour wins, in a sport with at least some visibility in America, and who has he been seen snogging in public? Nobody you or I have ever heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cancer. Remember Jon Kruk, the fat first baseman/outfielder for the Phillies ’93 pennant team? He overcame testicular cancer and I don’t see Nora Jones all hugged up on him. Sheryl Crowe should be dating the new Bond guy, not Lance Armstrong. But somehow, there Armstrong was at half-time in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day, watching his significant other Ms. Crowe do the half-time performance for all of us half passed out on our couches avoiding our in-laws, right where the camera could catch him.
Americans are too tactful to ever publicly proclaim that we love Lance Armstrong so much precisely because of, and absolutely not in spite of, the cloud of suspicion that hangs over his Tour victories. In our heart of hearts Americans have absolutely no problem with improved performance via science, be it on the sporting field or in the bedroom (which brings up another looming sporting figure, one Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for performance improving steroids and appeared in advertisements for performance improving Viagra, but the task of unpacking all that is for another day). Clouds of suspicion are just fine by us, an ever more literal minded American public. Until we see some CSI-style, irrefutable DNA-based evidence, we are all more than happy to enjoy the show. For evidence of this one need look no further than the bloated home run sluggers of turn-of-the-millennium era baseball. The steroid abuse of that era was obvious to the naked eye. But that did not stop the ratings parade, and the ad nauseam lionization of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and company. America could not get enough, as long as it was just a cloud of suspicion hanging over baseball. Once the steroids testing program was implemented, and the courtroom-style evidence began to roll in, America was forced to turn off the show, like a husband re-stashing the porn when he hears his wife pull up in the driveway at the end of girls’ night out. We are a moral, upstanding people after all, and we in no way support cheating of any kind.
At least that’s what we have to say when called out on the carpet. But our actions prior to the public unveiling of the steroids scandal tell us more about what we actually think and feel about scientifically improving human performance. Lance Armstrong’s cloud of suspicion remains intact, at least until the day the French tag some uncontestable forensic data on him. Until then, America will continue to love Lance under the cover of his cloud of suspicion. Under that cover what we are really in love with is the idea of perfecting ourselves, an idea voiced under the guise of futurism by Kurzweil. Lance Armstrong, because we do not have certainty whether he used performance enhancing drugs or not, is the ideal container for America’s hopes for the future, for a time when we are liberated from our very mortality . Should it ever be proven that Armstrong was a doper, than his usefulness for the American psyche will have passed, and he will shrink from our consciousness as rapidly as Sammy Sosa’s power numbers in the era of steroids testing. If it is somehow conclusively shown that Armstrong never doped, his cultural importance will likewise fade, though not as drastically, as he will still be cast, only in the much smaller part of aging sports hero (cynically, I also believe that his ability to date A-List rockers rests on his current cultural cache-for his and Crowe’s sake I hope I am wrong about that).
Armstrong’s significance is time-limited nevertheless. For the game that America is currently playing, that of publicly decrying the use of performance enhancing drugs (a public cry voiced symbolically by the US Congress’ investigation into steroids in professional sports; There is still no better barometer of what we can get away with admitting in public as the American political system) while secretly pinning our hopes for immortality on the science that delivers those drugs, is one that can not last. Whether Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, pandora’s box is already open, and Americans will soon be able to pop a pill to hit a homerun in the ballpark with as much freedom as they now pop them to hit one in the bedroom. Our old ideas of cheating, along with the entire playbook of ethics that applied to a world bounded on all sides by human mortality, will soon be out of date, if they are not already. Mortality may never disappear, but whether it takes 20 years or 200, it will come to mean something altogether different and will need a new set of ethics to guide humanity as we navigate the changes. So at some point Lance Armstrong will probably get to go back to being a champion cyclist who overcame cancer, but maybe by then there won’t be any cancer. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I was born way back in 1974.
I will close with one final observation about the Lance Armstrong phenomenon. It struck me when I was trying to come up with something to say about the yellow “Live Strong” Armstrong armbands that were briefly all the rage. I remembered that the arm band fad that had preceded Armstrong’s was none other than the “WWJD” armband. The WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do, as most of us all know by now. One figure famous for his relationship to mortality and immortality segued into another, right on our wrists. Interesting, don’t you think?
I heard a fascinating interview on Diane Rehm’s chat show this week. Diane was interviewing Ray Kurzweil, who was publicizing his new book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”. Based on the interview alone (plus the dust jacket, which I read at Barnes &Noble today) I can say that Kurzweil is one of the great optimists I have ever encountered. Among other pending exploits, he expects modern science to cure cancer, arrest and reverse the aging process, and empower the elimination of poverty. Big deal, right? To some degree we all expect science to work some miracle cures in the future, just as it cured polio and landed us on the moon in the past. What makes Kurzweil’s optimism so breathtaking is that he says these changes will occur in the next 15 to 20 years.
All of these developments are part of what Kurzweil refers to as “the singularity”. If Kurzweil fails at everything else he can always sell that term, “the singularity”, to Hollywood; I can already see Keanu Reeves co-starring with Jodie Foster in shiny silver singlets in “Singularity: the Major Motion Picture”. But for now Kurzweil’s singularity is a non-fiction term, albeit a sexy one, in that branch of thought known loosely as futurism. While the term singularity evokes the mystical-alien/human-union-sex scene in the pool in Cocoon, if I am interpreting it correctly it is another word for cyborg, among whose ranks numbers the decidedly less sexy Robocop (although we are left to wonder if Robocop’s, ahem, masculinity is intact). Whatever term you choose, Kurzweil is talking about the merger of human and machine. And Kurzweil’s merger is not metaphor, he’s not talking about the ubiquitous strolling teenager with cell phone cupped to ear. In Kurzweil’s vision we will have the mystical-union-sex from Cocoon, but instead of having it with aliens we’ll be having it with our laptops. The singular in singularity means that my Toshiba and I will be one Singular entity.
Kurzweil’s optimism regarding humanity’s future relationship with machines is in stark contrast to the script adhered to strictly by Hollywood. Both the original Terminator and Matrix films portray human and machine’s future as adversarial, with humanity in a war for its very survival. Hollywood makes billions playing off of our fears and anxieties, and the Terminator and Matrix films are no exception in their respective riffs on our growing reliance upon and vulnerability to our machines. But Kurzweil’s task as a futurist is not to scare the pants off us, but to predict the future as accurately as possible. Kurzweil’s outrageous optimism is singularly American; Only an American could have written this book, and that fact is ultimately more reliable than anything Kurzweil has predicted for the future. Kurzweil’s vision of the future may or may not come to pass, but the fact that he has such a vision, and that his vision is broadcast unabashedly through our mainstream media, is exactly why Lance Armstrong is the most important American alive today.
Lance Armstrong is the past and he is the future, at least as we live them both in the present in America. Here is all you need to know about Lance Armstrong’s biography to know why he is such a potent figure on the American landscape: 1) He had testicular cancer, which almost claimed his life. 2) He recovered from that cancer to not only ride again professionally as a cyclist, but to become the greatest cyclist of all time, winning an unprecedented 7 consecutive Tour De France championships. 3) A cloud of suspicion hangs over his accomplishments, as seemingly the entire French media is out to prove that Lance Armstrong cheated, by way of performance enhancing doping, to win France’s beloved bike race over and over.
That he pissed off the French in winning all those races is an added bonus for Armstrong’s US popularity, but I maintain that the three elements listed above are what really account for Armstrong’s central place in the American psyche. For those three elements, conjoined in the body and triumph of Armstrong, inject Armstrong into the very space that Kurzweil clears with the ferocity of his optimism.
Armstrong’s well publicized battle with testicular cancer grounds him precisely in the past that Kurzweil sees for us. Per Kurzweil, cancer, along with myriad diseases and the aging process itself, will be erased by a stroke of technology’s delete key. The one certainty that grounds all of human existence, mortality, will be expunged from the human storyline. Armstrong’s victory over cancer, then, makes him a link to our pending human past. That he overcame testicular cancer, a disease which by attacking the reproductive organs strikes directly at humanity’s heretofore only concrete means of transcending mortality, makes Armstrong’s defeat of cancer weightier still. In American iconography, Armstrong faced down mortality’s henchman at high noon, and proved quicker on the draw.
To understand Armstrong’s connection with Kurzweil’s human future we must tread rockier, more controversial ground. I want to begin with the disclaimer that I do not pretend knowledge of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence regarding performance enhancing doping (my opinion, which of course is just that, an opinion, is that the controversy is too murky for me to have a strong opinion one way or another; Armstrong’s consistent dominant results after a bout of nearly fatal cancer do raise one’s eyebrows, but the overzealous pursuit of Armstrong by what feels like the majority of the French population, and their thus far piddling results, tip the scales slightly back in Armstrong’s favor-but then again, I too am an American). And like the ultimate validity of Kurzweil’s predictions, the truth about Armstrong’s doping innocence or guilt is beside the point I am making here. Whether the accusations against Armstrong are true or not, the cloud of suspicion that envelops Armstrong is real.
It is the vaporous nature of this cloud of suspicion that is the secret fuel for Armstrong’s overwhelming popularity in America. Remember, Armstrong plays a sport with a negligible following in America. For comparison’s sake, American Greg Lemond won three Tour De France crowns in the 1980’s, including an Armstrong-esque inspiring win after being accidentally shot in the back on a hunting trip by his brother-in-law (talk about living symbolism; NFL football games on Thanksgiving Day exist for the sole purpose of preventing in-law shootings, “accidental” or otherwise; retiring to game, couch, and six-pack has saved countless lives). And Greg Lemond’s name carries about as much cultural currency as Jan-Michael Vincent (he of “Airwolf” fame; oh how I love helicopters).
So there is more going on here than meets the eye with this Lance Armstrong & America lovefest thing. Armstrong overcame cancer and won a few bike races, but somehow he’s shagging Sheryl Crowe(can I still say shagging, or is that too Austin Powers?). Rockers date actors, not jocks. Just ask Michael Phelps, he won six gold medals, a number only one count less than Armstrong’s seven Tour wins, in a sport with at least some visibility in America, and who has he been seen snogging in public? Nobody you or I have ever heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because of the cancer. Remember Jon Kruk, the fat first baseman/outfielder for the Phillies ’93 pennant team? He overcame testicular cancer and I don’t see Nora Jones all hugged up on him. Sheryl Crowe should be dating the new Bond guy, not Lance Armstrong. But somehow, there Armstrong was at half-time in Dallas on Thanksgiving Day, watching his significant other Ms. Crowe do the half-time performance for all of us half passed out on our couches avoiding our in-laws, right where the camera could catch him.
Americans are too tactful to ever publicly proclaim that we love Lance Armstrong so much precisely because of, and absolutely not in spite of, the cloud of suspicion that hangs over his Tour victories. In our heart of hearts Americans have absolutely no problem with improved performance via science, be it on the sporting field or in the bedroom (which brings up another looming sporting figure, one Rafael Palmeiro, who tested positive for performance improving steroids and appeared in advertisements for performance improving Viagra, but the task of unpacking all that is for another day). Clouds of suspicion are just fine by us, an ever more literal minded American public. Until we see some CSI-style, irrefutable DNA-based evidence, we are all more than happy to enjoy the show. For evidence of this one need look no further than the bloated home run sluggers of turn-of-the-millennium era baseball. The steroid abuse of that era was obvious to the naked eye. But that did not stop the ratings parade, and the ad nauseam lionization of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and company. America could not get enough, as long as it was just a cloud of suspicion hanging over baseball. Once the steroids testing program was implemented, and the courtroom-style evidence began to roll in, America was forced to turn off the show, like a husband re-stashing the porn when he hears his wife pull up in the driveway at the end of girls’ night out. We are a moral, upstanding people after all, and we in no way support cheating of any kind.
At least that’s what we have to say when called out on the carpet. But our actions prior to the public unveiling of the steroids scandal tell us more about what we actually think and feel about scientifically improving human performance. Lance Armstrong’s cloud of suspicion remains intact, at least until the day the French tag some uncontestable forensic data on him. Until then, America will continue to love Lance under the cover of his cloud of suspicion. Under that cover what we are really in love with is the idea of perfecting ourselves, an idea voiced under the guise of futurism by Kurzweil. Lance Armstrong, because we do not have certainty whether he used performance enhancing drugs or not, is the ideal container for America’s hopes for the future, for a time when we are liberated from our very mortality . Should it ever be proven that Armstrong was a doper, than his usefulness for the American psyche will have passed, and he will shrink from our consciousness as rapidly as Sammy Sosa’s power numbers in the era of steroids testing. If it is somehow conclusively shown that Armstrong never doped, his cultural importance will likewise fade, though not as drastically, as he will still be cast, only in the much smaller part of aging sports hero (cynically, I also believe that his ability to date A-List rockers rests on his current cultural cache-for his and Crowe’s sake I hope I am wrong about that).
Armstrong’s significance is time-limited nevertheless. For the game that America is currently playing, that of publicly decrying the use of performance enhancing drugs (a public cry voiced symbolically by the US Congress’ investigation into steroids in professional sports; There is still no better barometer of what we can get away with admitting in public as the American political system) while secretly pinning our hopes for immortality on the science that delivers those drugs, is one that can not last. Whether Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, pandora’s box is already open, and Americans will soon be able to pop a pill to hit a homerun in the ballpark with as much freedom as they now pop them to hit one in the bedroom. Our old ideas of cheating, along with the entire playbook of ethics that applied to a world bounded on all sides by human mortality, will soon be out of date, if they are not already. Mortality may never disappear, but whether it takes 20 years or 200, it will come to mean something altogether different and will need a new set of ethics to guide humanity as we navigate the changes. So at some point Lance Armstrong will probably get to go back to being a champion cyclist who overcame cancer, but maybe by then there won’t be any cancer. Somehow, I have my doubts, but I was born way back in 1974.
I will close with one final observation about the Lance Armstrong phenomenon. It struck me when I was trying to come up with something to say about the yellow “Live Strong” Armstrong armbands that were briefly all the rage. I remembered that the arm band fad that had preceded Armstrong’s was none other than the “WWJD” armband. The WWJD stands for What Would Jesus Do, as most of us all know by now. One figure famous for his relationship to mortality and immortality segued into another, right on our wrists. Interesting, don’t you think?
Thursday, November 24, 2005
I managed to catch a broadcast of my favorite television program the other day, ESPN's "Pardon The Interruption" (PTI), a rare feat these days due to parental duties for my one year old, who has a strict No-TV policy diligently policed by the author of that legislation, my lovely wife Jennifer. During this episode of PTI, the charmingly argumentative hosts of the program, Kornheiser and Wilbon, took a break from yelling at each other about the latest happenings in the male soap opera of sports entertainment and showed a clip of our President in Beijing, China. Mr. Bush had just finished some sort of photo-op/brief press conference for the gathered media, and attempted to exit stage right. Unfortunately for Mr. Bush he attempted to exit via a large, rather ornate set of red and gold doors, a pair of doors fit for an entrance to a palace or grand ballroom. Mr. Bush reached for the first of these doors without hesitation, without a doubt in his mind that it would open for him and allow a graceful exit from the stage. But the door was locked, or perhaps as a decorative door it just doesn't open. Undaunted, without missing a beat, Mr. Bush reached for the second, conjoined door. This kind of thing happens to me all the time, I'll be entering the local 7-11 and the first glass door I try is inevitably the one locked. Mr. Bush must have reacted as we all do, we know we can get in the 7-11 if we just use the other glass door. So it was typically American of Mr. Bush to grab for that second door, only this time the second door wouldn't budge either. At this point I thought Mr. Bush handled the situation with aplomb, as he appeared to share a laugh at his plight with the on-looking media, diffusing the embarrassment of the moment and restoring some dignity as he at last found the real exit stage right, a discrete set of black curtains set a few feet to the back of the stage behind the decorative doors. Mr. Bush then got out of there post haste. Narrating the clip, Kornheiser and Wilbon had a few laughs at the president's expense, but were fairly generous in cutting him plenty of slack.
Of course, the temptation in observing this clip is to use it to make a mockery of Mr. Bush, which Wilbon gave us a taste of by comparing the moment to President Ford's memorable tendency to fall down the stairs when deplaning, a tendency exquisitely sent up by that great Saturday Night Live "Stumblebum" skit (which skit served as my primary introduction to Mr. Ford's tendency, as I was in diapers during Ford's presidency). Mr. Bush's embarrassing Beijing moment dovetails nicely with his famous/infamous deficiency in oratory. We always knew Bush was no Churchill, but we never suspected he was a Ford.
But rather than skewer Mr. Bush for his comical blunder, I'd rather do something more pretentious. I intend to view this incident symbolically, for I believe that what happened on the stage in Beijing can tell us much more than that our president is kind of dopey and gravitas-challenged. Viewed symbolically, this incident is a snapshot of the failure of Mr. Bush's most important foreign policy strategy, the war in Iraq. More importantly, it is a roadmap (to borrow a thus far empty phrase from another Middle Eastern thicket) for Bush, if he can summon the courage of leadership to emulate his wisdom on stage in Beijing.
The symbolism is not overly complex. In Beijing, Mr. Bush found himself on stage, just as his decision to pursue war in Iraq placed Mr. Bush at the center of the global stage. As I watched Mr. Bush pull futilely on those decorative doors, I could only think of the day he landed a jet fighter on an American aircraft carrier, to proclaim victory in Iraq. In the buildup to the Iraq war Mr. Bush and his administration had promised a swift victory that would both rid the world of the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and establish a model democracy in the heart of the Islamic world. Top Gun-style theatrics aside, Mr. Bush’s proclamation that day aboard the aircraft carrier was his finest hour: weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam was deposed, and for a brief moment an Iraqi democracy appeared a fait accompli, with but an inevitable series of elections to make it official.
The aircraft carrier stunt was the Bush team’s choreographed attempt to exit stage right through the doors of history with Mr. Bush off to attend a post-Oscar-style after party where he would be feted as a conquering hero. But, just like those doors in Beijing, the doors of history would not budge. And Mr. Bush, his political capital, and the US Military are stuck in Iraq to this day, where assuredly, things have not gone according to script.
If the symbolic view ended there it would be a possibly clever, but probably just cute way of criticizing Mr. Bush’s plan to triumph over terrorism via victory in Iraq. But the real value of interpreting events symbolically rests on an ability to carry the analysis into the future tense. Events have a way of unfolding that not only reflects what has already come to pass, but offers a guide for a safe, if trying, navigation of churning waters. I believe that events unfolded on stage in Beijing in precisely such a fashion, and that the value of viewing those events symbolically obtains only when we view the scene in its entirety. If Mr. Bush is to salvage his final three years in office he needs to discover a future tense in Iraq. Put bluntly, the man needs an exit strategy. On stage that day in Beijing, Mr. Bush’s own reactions will, if viewed symbolically, guide him towards a possible exit strategy, or at least an approach that would make one possible.
The key element in Mr. Bush’s reaction to his embarrassing situation in Beijing was his immediate awareness of the humor of the situation. Laughing at himself was the only way to preserve his dignity in a potentially humiliating circumstance.
Now I am not suggesting that Mr. Bush needs to find the humor in the morass of Iraq, because there is nothing funny in the daily tragedies befalling both Iraqis and American servicemen (and servicewomen). Instead I want to link Mr. Bush’s use of humor in the face of embarrassment with the quality of humility. Mr. Bush evidenced some capacity for humility when he laughed at his blunder on stage in Beijing. By laughing at himself he laughed with the onlooking media throng, instead of allowing them to laugh at him. Bush was then able to exit the stage, dignity largely intact, by way of an inconspicuous curtain at the back of the stage. Symbolically, this is the recipe for Mr. Bush to exit Iraq. He, and his administration, must exercise a capacity for humility that to this point appears to be beyond their ken. But it is only through a quantum leap in humility that Mr. Bush can summon the courage to craft an exit strategy from Iraq that will in no way resemble the glorious victory envisioned at the outset of hostilities. It is only through humility that Mr. Bush can accept that the goal of establishing a foothold for democracy in Iraq through the use of military power has failed, and that simply to avoid civil war in Iraq and get our men and women home will be all the victory we are going to get. And perhaps most importantly, it is only through a demonstration of humility that Mr. Bush can join with the American public and the world who watches us, just as he joined with the media on stage in Beijing. Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq has been one of the great acts of hubris in modern times, and it will take an even greater display of humility for Mr. Bush to balance the scales. I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Bush is up to the task, but I have no doubt that this was symbolized for us all to see on a stage in Beijing.
Of course, the temptation in observing this clip is to use it to make a mockery of Mr. Bush, which Wilbon gave us a taste of by comparing the moment to President Ford's memorable tendency to fall down the stairs when deplaning, a tendency exquisitely sent up by that great Saturday Night Live "Stumblebum" skit (which skit served as my primary introduction to Mr. Ford's tendency, as I was in diapers during Ford's presidency). Mr. Bush's embarrassing Beijing moment dovetails nicely with his famous/infamous deficiency in oratory. We always knew Bush was no Churchill, but we never suspected he was a Ford.
But rather than skewer Mr. Bush for his comical blunder, I'd rather do something more pretentious. I intend to view this incident symbolically, for I believe that what happened on the stage in Beijing can tell us much more than that our president is kind of dopey and gravitas-challenged. Viewed symbolically, this incident is a snapshot of the failure of Mr. Bush's most important foreign policy strategy, the war in Iraq. More importantly, it is a roadmap (to borrow a thus far empty phrase from another Middle Eastern thicket) for Bush, if he can summon the courage of leadership to emulate his wisdom on stage in Beijing.
The symbolism is not overly complex. In Beijing, Mr. Bush found himself on stage, just as his decision to pursue war in Iraq placed Mr. Bush at the center of the global stage. As I watched Mr. Bush pull futilely on those decorative doors, I could only think of the day he landed a jet fighter on an American aircraft carrier, to proclaim victory in Iraq. In the buildup to the Iraq war Mr. Bush and his administration had promised a swift victory that would both rid the world of the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and establish a model democracy in the heart of the Islamic world. Top Gun-style theatrics aside, Mr. Bush’s proclamation that day aboard the aircraft carrier was his finest hour: weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam was deposed, and for a brief moment an Iraqi democracy appeared a fait accompli, with but an inevitable series of elections to make it official.
The aircraft carrier stunt was the Bush team’s choreographed attempt to exit stage right through the doors of history with Mr. Bush off to attend a post-Oscar-style after party where he would be feted as a conquering hero. But, just like those doors in Beijing, the doors of history would not budge. And Mr. Bush, his political capital, and the US Military are stuck in Iraq to this day, where assuredly, things have not gone according to script.
If the symbolic view ended there it would be a possibly clever, but probably just cute way of criticizing Mr. Bush’s plan to triumph over terrorism via victory in Iraq. But the real value of interpreting events symbolically rests on an ability to carry the analysis into the future tense. Events have a way of unfolding that not only reflects what has already come to pass, but offers a guide for a safe, if trying, navigation of churning waters. I believe that events unfolded on stage in Beijing in precisely such a fashion, and that the value of viewing those events symbolically obtains only when we view the scene in its entirety. If Mr. Bush is to salvage his final three years in office he needs to discover a future tense in Iraq. Put bluntly, the man needs an exit strategy. On stage that day in Beijing, Mr. Bush’s own reactions will, if viewed symbolically, guide him towards a possible exit strategy, or at least an approach that would make one possible.
The key element in Mr. Bush’s reaction to his embarrassing situation in Beijing was his immediate awareness of the humor of the situation. Laughing at himself was the only way to preserve his dignity in a potentially humiliating circumstance.
Now I am not suggesting that Mr. Bush needs to find the humor in the morass of Iraq, because there is nothing funny in the daily tragedies befalling both Iraqis and American servicemen (and servicewomen). Instead I want to link Mr. Bush’s use of humor in the face of embarrassment with the quality of humility. Mr. Bush evidenced some capacity for humility when he laughed at his blunder on stage in Beijing. By laughing at himself he laughed with the onlooking media throng, instead of allowing them to laugh at him. Bush was then able to exit the stage, dignity largely intact, by way of an inconspicuous curtain at the back of the stage. Symbolically, this is the recipe for Mr. Bush to exit Iraq. He, and his administration, must exercise a capacity for humility that to this point appears to be beyond their ken. But it is only through a quantum leap in humility that Mr. Bush can summon the courage to craft an exit strategy from Iraq that will in no way resemble the glorious victory envisioned at the outset of hostilities. It is only through humility that Mr. Bush can accept that the goal of establishing a foothold for democracy in Iraq through the use of military power has failed, and that simply to avoid civil war in Iraq and get our men and women home will be all the victory we are going to get. And perhaps most importantly, it is only through a demonstration of humility that Mr. Bush can join with the American public and the world who watches us, just as he joined with the media on stage in Beijing. Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq has been one of the great acts of hubris in modern times, and it will take an even greater display of humility for Mr. Bush to balance the scales. I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Bush is up to the task, but I have no doubt that this was symbolized for us all to see on a stage in Beijing.
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