On Muteness & Mutation
Yeah, I know. It's been a drag here of late.
I've had little to say, and my attempts at posting have been exercises in futility. My blog queue is full of drafts. Creatively, I never really caught a second wind after Shiner's death, but that only interrupted my momentum. Silence would've found me anyway.
Sick of politics.
Sick of media.
Sick of the Party Faithful.
Sick of the fucking treadmill.
Sick of the plague of denial permeating every nanometer of American culture.
Only the intensity changes. None of it goes away.
I'll remember 2007 as the year I finally parted, once and for all, with the last remnants of the most stubborn and pernicious of myths: that the American political system, despite its flaws, possesses enough redemptive qualities to render it worthy of every citizen's allegiance. This is The Big Lie. The titanium thread perpetually weaving the infinite fabric of lies called American culture, upon which the sacred and profane are pulverized into an amorphous blob of meaningless commodity.
Ignorance truly is bliss. And bliss is the worst kind of hallucination; the kind which distorts truth beyond all recognition. An almost impenetrable screen of delusion. The strange thing is how counterintuitive the dynamic is. You don't pursue bliss in American society. It pursues you. Relentlessly. Fraudulent, toxic and all-consuming, it is the imaginary fuel of a very real power structure. The adhesive which keeps the social order predictably static. The political establishment, equipped with sprawling media tentacles and religious devotion to state-sanctioned brutality, spawns an endless stream of intricate, seductive illusions. It is the projectionist, the projector, the screen and the image. It's even its own audience, sitting in the seat over, pleasantly eating popcorn and swilling soda like the rest of us.
Reject the bliss at your own risk. There is nothing pleasurable, much less easy, about subjecting yourself to the visceral, tormenting, soul-crunching erosion of faith in humankind that comes from dissecting the barrage of holography constituting the American norm. Not that it matters. The congenital inquisitor is not driven by satisfying answers (there aren't any), but by the opiate of revelation, even when each one accompanies the destruction of a cherished notion or previously indispensable belief.
Once the macro lie is understood, the black box can be seen for what it is: the ultimate self-sustaining, self-perfecting propaganda machine. The penalties for disobeying its commands are too many to list here, but, for me, its demystification comes with one briefly comforting realization: I'm not crazy. Subsequently, recognizing the micro-lies becomes an effortless task, one as natural as drawing a breath or taking a piss. Their transparency, quantity and effectiveness are initially shocking. The shock fades, but the sheer magnitude of the micro-lies - their pervasiveness; the ease with which they are propagated and accepted without question; their necessity to the existing social order - eventually tempers the first realization with a qualifier: Perhaps my grip on sanity is more tenuous than I thought. Departures from consensus reality are like that.
When the last of the national myths - all parented by American exceptionalism - finally dissolves, what will fill the vacuum? Social conventions, once merely suspect, become absurdist role play. The shiny material articles signifying success and enlightenment and culture begin to dim. What's left is our personal relationships. Because of my introverted nature, and because most people are content on the conveyor belt of life, I'm not especially thrilled with that particular nugget of truth. I should be living in a cave somewhere in Calistoga County.
I am fortunate to have a loving wife to drag along on this expedition, although deviating from the narrow conceptual framework of the American experience is an inconceivable proposition for her. And not without reason. The post-modern rat race of contemporary American life is largely a hollow, unsatisfying charade. Nonetheless, the psychological process of leaving it behind has delivered me to a place that is, in many ways, even more barren and desolate than the desert I've been wandering for the last forty-five years. Because I still live here and expatriation doesn't seem likely for some time, I still have to keep a toe in the water, smiling pleasantly while interacting with mall zombies.
Expecting others to understand the nature of my discontent, much less care, is extremely unrealistic; yet, despite the futility, attempting to do exactly that feels necessary in a way it never has previously. It is against this backdrop that I received an exquisitely formed idea for another writing project. The thing which doomed me to failure in past projects was the absence of a message. Now I have one. It'll be interesting to see if I can pull it together in 2008.
I've had little to say, and my attempts at posting have been exercises in futility. My blog queue is full of drafts. Creatively, I never really caught a second wind after Shiner's death, but that only interrupted my momentum. Silence would've found me anyway.
Sick of politics.
Sick of media.
Sick of the Party Faithful.
Sick of the fucking treadmill.
Sick of the plague of denial permeating every nanometer of American culture.
Only the intensity changes. None of it goes away.
I'll remember 2007 as the year I finally parted, once and for all, with the last remnants of the most stubborn and pernicious of myths: that the American political system, despite its flaws, possesses enough redemptive qualities to render it worthy of every citizen's allegiance. This is The Big Lie. The titanium thread perpetually weaving the infinite fabric of lies called American culture, upon which the sacred and profane are pulverized into an amorphous blob of meaningless commodity.
Ignorance truly is bliss. And bliss is the worst kind of hallucination; the kind which distorts truth beyond all recognition. An almost impenetrable screen of delusion. The strange thing is how counterintuitive the dynamic is. You don't pursue bliss in American society. It pursues you. Relentlessly. Fraudulent, toxic and all-consuming, it is the imaginary fuel of a very real power structure. The adhesive which keeps the social order predictably static. The political establishment, equipped with sprawling media tentacles and religious devotion to state-sanctioned brutality, spawns an endless stream of intricate, seductive illusions. It is the projectionist, the projector, the screen and the image. It's even its own audience, sitting in the seat over, pleasantly eating popcorn and swilling soda like the rest of us.
Reject the bliss at your own risk. There is nothing pleasurable, much less easy, about subjecting yourself to the visceral, tormenting, soul-crunching erosion of faith in humankind that comes from dissecting the barrage of holography constituting the American norm. Not that it matters. The congenital inquisitor is not driven by satisfying answers (there aren't any), but by the opiate of revelation, even when each one accompanies the destruction of a cherished notion or previously indispensable belief.
Once the macro lie is understood, the black box can be seen for what it is: the ultimate self-sustaining, self-perfecting propaganda machine. The penalties for disobeying its commands are too many to list here, but, for me, its demystification comes with one briefly comforting realization: I'm not crazy. Subsequently, recognizing the micro-lies becomes an effortless task, one as natural as drawing a breath or taking a piss. Their transparency, quantity and effectiveness are initially shocking. The shock fades, but the sheer magnitude of the micro-lies - their pervasiveness; the ease with which they are propagated and accepted without question; their necessity to the existing social order - eventually tempers the first realization with a qualifier: Perhaps my grip on sanity is more tenuous than I thought. Departures from consensus reality are like that.
When the last of the national myths - all parented by American exceptionalism - finally dissolves, what will fill the vacuum? Social conventions, once merely suspect, become absurdist role play. The shiny material articles signifying success and enlightenment and culture begin to dim. What's left is our personal relationships. Because of my introverted nature, and because most people are content on the conveyor belt of life, I'm not especially thrilled with that particular nugget of truth. I should be living in a cave somewhere in Calistoga County.
I am fortunate to have a loving wife to drag along on this expedition, although deviating from the narrow conceptual framework of the American experience is an inconceivable proposition for her. And not without reason. The post-modern rat race of contemporary American life is largely a hollow, unsatisfying charade. Nonetheless, the psychological process of leaving it behind has delivered me to a place that is, in many ways, even more barren and desolate than the desert I've been wandering for the last forty-five years. Because I still live here and expatriation doesn't seem likely for some time, I still have to keep a toe in the water, smiling pleasantly while interacting with mall zombies.
Expecting others to understand the nature of my discontent, much less care, is extremely unrealistic; yet, despite the futility, attempting to do exactly that feels necessary in a way it never has previously. It is against this backdrop that I received an exquisitely formed idea for another writing project. The thing which doomed me to failure in past projects was the absence of a message. Now I have one. It'll be interesting to see if I can pull it together in 2008.
posted by Arvin Hill at 12/06/2007 01:05:00 PM
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