Choking on the past

How did we get here? Coming off the 1960s, that time of relentless and discombobulating avant-gardism, when everything looked and sounded perpetually new new new, cultural creators—designers, artists, impresarios—began looking backward for inspiration.

Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. It’s the rare “new” cultural artifact that doesn’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes.

Life Sucks Die

Not exactly "funny" ha ha

Don't flex your head

Postmortem for a dying nation

The dominant thinking on the left, I suppose, is some variety of a “false consciousness” argument, that the elite have pulled the wool over the eyes of the vast majority of the population, and once the latter realizes that they’ve been had, they’ll rebel, they’ll move the country in a populist or democratic socialist direction. The problem I have with this is the evident fact that most Americans want the American Dream, not a different way of life—a Mercedes-Benz, as Janis Joplin once put it. Endless material wealth based on individual striving is the American ideal, and the desire to change that paradigm is practically nonexistent. Even the poor buy into this, which is why John Steinbeck once remarked that they regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Hence I would argue that nations get the governments they deserve; that the wool is the eyes.

The mess that lies beneath

Disgust represents a fear of contamination. And a great many traditional social boundaries and taboos exist as a way of protecting against contamination. The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued that the desire for purity and cleanliness is all about organising offensive things into acceptable social spaces – a place for everything and everything in its place. But the problem with a moral instinct that's all about policing the social boundaries created by disgust is that the sources of disgust are often the very same things that make us human. Cardinal O'Brien, for instance, is filled with disgust at the thought of gay sex. Which is why he is so intent on maintaining the boundaries of traditional marriage. But what a great many of us see in the Catholic church's response to homosexuality is simply a refusal of love itself – more specifically, love in all its sticky, squelchy reality.

Suck on this