I am so embedded, personally, and as a society Americans are so embedded generally, in this construct of mind, that it is almost impossible to think about it directly. So my excuse–such as it is–in writing so obliquely is that I do not have a better approach.
As usual, I started my internet day with a survey of news and political blogs. The item attracting blog attention was President Bush’s rejection of (his father’s) Iraq Study Group with his own assertion that instead of drawing down the commitment he will instead add 50,000 troops.
Why is one unsurprised?
Most of us can see that this is a military disaster, but there are two things that are harder to see. First, that this is a perfect embodiment of the American spirit, as taught in countless aphorisms, self-help books, and Hollywood movies. If Bush’s pronouncements are really just prolefeed for the rubes, that is what he is appealing to. Being delusional, it is possible he believes it himself.
Second, these fantasies and delusions attract because the reality we have laid for ourselves is really, really hard. Whether our desire for Iraq is democracy, an end to sectarian war, or simply to grab all that oil, there is no strategy whatever that can offer ANY of these things, let alone all of them.
Who is willing to face that?
And those are just the failed goals. What about the malign consequences that are now fated to ensue?
The Democrats are already in full denial mode, and it looks like they will again do anything Bush asks. Even here in left blogistan we continue to pretend that there is something constructive that might be done. We share in the delusion.
This is familiar. The US continued fighting the Vietnam war, with accelerating brutality, for more than a half-dozen years after it was plainly lost, all because, years after the rest of the world could see the obvious, we would not admit it to ourselves. Nixon had a phrase: “Peace with honor.” But the honor was a illusion that no one else shared.
Others could see through us like glass. What they saw was neither flattering nor heartening. But we could not see ourselves at all.
So far I am only writing about the attractions of delusion. So let’s take another step.
On one of his early albums Bob Dylan recorded a song (from memory):
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town.
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin broken down.He looked for work and money and he walked a ragged mile.
He looked for work and money and he walked a ragged mile.
Your children are so hungry that they don’t know how to smile.Your grass is turning black and there’s no water in your well.
Your grass is turning black and there’s no water in your well.
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells.There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around the cabin door.
There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around the cabin door.
Seven shots ring out like the ocean’s poundin’ roar.There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm.
There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm.
Somewhere in the distance, there’s seven new people born.
In proper folk-song form, the predicament and its conclusion are laid out very concisely, with shared understanding of what it is and what will happen.
Indeed, what MUST happen. The last line line
Somewhere in the distance, there’s seven new people born.
is both conclusion and reversal, undoing what has gone before–making it all right, and natural. The sense of completion has already been hinted at a stanza earlier by the number seven (this is a point of mythology that I don’t go into here); The final line tells us that the completion is right and proper–just.
We are not supposed to ask why.
Before I DO ask why, I want to take up a few aspects of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. I should say at the outset that I did not follow the news story at the time: I did not think the media would say much of substance. One virtue of that is that the movie was able to take me by surprise.
Moore starts out with the atmosphere of paranoid fear that pervades Littleton Colorado. Through the metal cage of a front door he interviews a local suburbanite about his ready-to-fire gun collection. This is a treat for a big bad city-dweller like myself. Even in the ghetto nobody has front-doors like that!
He moves on to the local economy. Set on a desolate stretch of prairie, Littleton exists to build nuclear missiles, whose plain purpose is to commit mass murder, and if used would likely end human civilization and many larger lifeforms. He asks, but does not answer: What kind of people can devote their lives to this?
Plainly, these people never think about what they are doing, ever. Robots have deeper souls.
Finally he gets to the school itself. It is bizarre. All of the kids, including the killers, are inundated with material wealth. They seem hard-put to even make proper use of all their toys. But the loneliness and the aimlessness are palpable. These last are familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Midwest. But one thing I did not expect was the utter cluelessness of the adults. Worse than anything I remember. Times change.
When I was in school, bullying (when it was finally noticed) was supressed. At Columbine scapegoating and bullying among the students is encouraged and utilized by the staff as a form of child-management.
By this point, you have to know what is coming, even if you never read the news or heard about the movie.
Needless to say, I had not seen the footage of the killings themselves. That they HAD been filmed was the big surprise–but only for me. Everyone else, Moore included, was not concerned about the cameras. But for me, this was the turn–like in Dylan’s song: Oh, this is the way it is SUPPOSED to happen! Everything is JUST FINE.
Before I explain, let me note that the killings certainly appeared to be traumatic. The kids were upset. Their parents were upset. Only–and this was curious–even as new “security” measures were being devised, nobody wanted to know why the murders had occurred. No matter how horrible people thought it was, everybody tacitly accepted that it had to be this way. They might add new fences or more cameras. But they would never, ever do anything that might prevent violence from happening.
Why were the cameras the turn?
Although it appears that our entire civilization (and not just the US) is either rooted in, or turning to embrace murder/suicide, there is something about the Midwest that brings it closer to the surface. The country is open in a way that might suggest freedom but equally suggests desolation and exposure. The social mood is constrained and claustrophobic in the extreme: Everyone is into everyone’s business, but not in a nice way–the tone is hostile and invidious.
The Midwest has a history, different from other regions. The Texas Tower killer is probably the most famous. It is a pattern.
The cameras, like the telescreens in George Orwell’s 1984, are there not because the children are loved (they are not) but so that they can be spied upon secretly and hostilely, and more effectively, and so that they can EXPERIENCE being spied upon hostilely. The cameras are there to enhance control. The prison atmosphere is not an accident.
(These children grow up in Solzhenitzen’s First Circle. Only, no one tells them that.)
The immediate effect on the subject is to induce a false personality to show to the (ever-present) camera. This is a psychological distortion, and carries a risk: Some children will not be able to separate their false personality from their real one, and in the process they will lose track of what is real and what is not. The result is a gradual depersonalization. Depending on how much stress is laid upon them, they will drift into unreality but remain functional, or they may eventually crack up. Separating personalities carries a different risk: It very much matters which personality is which, and the talent of keeping track is yet another layer. If everything goes well, by separating your personalities you can cope with the hostile environment.
Littleton is a town which chooses this distress for its children.
From there the movie devolves into worrying about the sales of bullets at K-mart. Very heart-warming, in a fuzzy, liberal way, and completely meaningless. While I do agree that it is better not to leave dangerous tools and weapons lying around, that is really so not the point. The kids had moved on from impulse and opportunity to the thinking through of plans. It is a “whole nother level.”
As a total aside, let me commend his portrait of the towers of Detroit. Nothing so says fascism since the German movies of the Modernist period.
Let me return to Hollis Brown. So his grass is burnt black this year? It’s South Dakota: These things happen. But we understand that he is on his own: The starving kids are his problem alone–not ours–or at least we expect him to think that. And if he had gotten REALLY ANGRY, and taken out a few of his neighbors, as well as his wife and kids, well, we expect that too. All of it is better than making the changes that would keep it from happening.
It is about time to ask: Murder/suicide is an acceptable price for WHAT? What is it buying us? And who is the “us” to whom these benefits accrue?
At this point, I have written myself into a box: I can see where this is going, but not how it gets there. The essential point is this: Our civilization has learned how to make slaves responsible for their own slavery. This was perfected toward the end of the nineteenth century. The downside is that they do tend to crack up. The upside is that it is very, very efficient.
How is it accomplished? Bait and switch, of course. We start with individualism and freedom. It sounds good to those who have been brutally subjected to another’s will. That the world actually works through a network of mutual constraints and interactions may pass unnoticed. After all, the children in Littleton are actually growing up in an artificial, enclosed environment of hostile control. Suppose, at the same time, we can teach them an ideology of individualism and freedom? The switch comes when the freedom never materializes. Meanwhile the individualism means they take it on themselves.
Life does not get much more enclosed than that.
Suicide begins to seem like a choice.
From suicide to murder is very easy. But this is only half the picture. For the mania that is endemic to the bottom of our society seems to have possessed the top. Indeed, it radiates from the top. The techniques of depersonalization that are practiced on the children of Littleton were not created by sane people, and cannot be implemented by them–that is a salient feature of all these techniques. So where did they come from?
Derrick Jensen writes about this. It may be time to give him a closer look.
