“Camera’s got them images/Camera’s got them all/Nothing’s Shocking”-Perry Farrell
(This continues my unfortunate recent fixation on the World of Man-vexatious, a chemical irritant-but I hope to return soon to the World of God-to nature and her attendant mysteries, to cathedrals of music, to light and sound.)
Our President plans to hold his first news conference more than two months after he took office, an extraordinary delay. No one cares. He is carefully shielded by his team from unscripted interaction, due to his obvious cognitive decline. No one cares.
The artists’ responsible for WAP perform at the Grammys. Black female sexual empowerment! cry some. The remnants of the Right clutch their pearls and moan about the death of morality. No one mentions how boring the performance is, how utterly banal; devoid of joy, spontaneity, or rhythmic texture. The performance has dancers, stripper poles, massive props, simulated cash shooting through the air, and a giant bed; there are no musicians to be seen, no instruments, dancers and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, struggling to hit their marks. A smattering of polite applause. Finishing what Madonna started in 1984, another variant of the high school auditorium talent show striptease. Also, a product of collapsing the Hi/Lo art distinction. When urinals get displayed on gallery walls, Shakespeare and Superman end up equals, and we are all the worse for it.
Our current music. Robotic. Hollow. Music without musicians; pelvic thrusting, mechanical animals. “Certified freak/seven days a week” Music whose significance is the narrative attached to it, not the sounds themselves. Critics tell us what it means, why we should valorize, as the music and the performers themselves offer no arguments. Melody, beauty, eroticism—they make their own case, but WAP is unsexy, joyless, a pastiche of recycled sounds and cliches.
Compare for a moment with this clip, incandescent with the energy of howling youth; live sound clawing through space, forging new sounds steeped in the past; Aerosmith seen through punk.
This is what we get. Up is down. Down is up. Take something and celebrate it as its opposite. Trash is treasure; babble is poetry. Stripping is female strength.
“Spit in my mouth, look in my eyes/This pussy is wet, come take a dive.”
Everything is ridiculous.
Our current world is impossible to escape; it leeches into your skin, wends its way through your nostrils to your gut, acidic and tremulous. TransGod ascendant; new and ever more bizarre idols to be worshipped. The destruction of the private sphere; all behavior is public. Sexuality is public; your opinions, public. Resistance is futile. America sits under Uniparty control; private corporations police speech on behalf of the government. Democracy is no longer sacrosanct; to the Radicals, democracy is responsible for Donald Trump, so it must be fixed. (The real radicals are twenty-somethings who marry, reproduce and practice monogamy. Maybe the Mormons can save us, or a patchwork network of insular religious communities that enforce moral standards, farm and raise livestock, and homeschool their children—you know, pastoral bullshit, ruddy-cheeked youth made strong from throwing hay, sturdy, beautiful women with a baby on their hip, It’s positively (gasp) Aryan.) Compared to the industrial monolith of Progressive thought ricocheting through all our major institutions-government, education, the S&P 500-conservatives are, as the kids say, pussies. They mostly want to be left alone. Privacy lovers don’t form movements, they don’t march, sign petitions, conduct MMORPG Zoom calls to organize and conduct strategy; conservatives close the blinds, draw inwards, seek ever more recondite corners of the internet where they pace around and mutter about hypocrisy. They do not, as we have been led to believe, metastasize from MAGA hats to shaved heads, from America first to Atomwaffen.
So what to do? What is the appropriate attitude to adopt towards the obvious decline of the American experiment?
Cheery nihilism seems the only possible response. By this I mean the “internet is undefeated”/meme-based approach to all events which treats everything as a joke, as an opportunity to chuckle at the grim failures of modern life, to do it for the funnies.
The World of Man isn’t my business. I have no children and no desire to have children, so I have in a very real way opted out of the future; I have no skin in the game. I always distrust most of my thoughts, so consider my approach a working hypothesis for now.
Cheery nihilism is unthreatening. Walter Sobchak was correct—there’s nothing to be afraid of, dude. You can adopt this approach and still love your friends and family, forge new and meaningful relationships with other humans and animals, set goals, plan vacations, dream idly or dream magnificently. Cheery nihilism and loving your neighbor can be bedmates; there is no fundamental disagreement between embracing meaninglessness and kindness. Its essentially a religious perspective; Comet as Eschaton; or maybe SARS-CoV-3-like our current virus, but say triple the transmissibility and lethality. It’s asceticism without suffering, a polite cynicism. Believe what you want, but do not clamor greatly about the World of Men. For God’s sake, don’t join a movement. Turn inward; set sail toward the mysteries of consciousness. Nothing matters, but you don’t get to be a dick to about it. You should still hold doors open for old ladies, treat service workers with respect, send birthday messages and buy your wife flowers. It’s a big tent, and y’all are all invited; just remember to say thank you to the usher who leads you to your seats.