Wednesday: Picture this

Okay, so Wednesdays are supposed to be devoted a picture that creates a meditation. However, today's main news story was about not releasing pictures, so the whole project seems a bit misguided. Let's talk about the pictures. It's probably best to start where this blog left off a couple of days ago, with general unease about the jubilant reaction to the death of a fellow human being, giant caveats aside, and whether that was okay. Well, now we sort of took the debate a step further, asking it it was necessary to see pictures of that fellow human being dead in order to satiate our thirst for firsthand knowledge.

As an aside isn't it crazy to think that there existed a time in our country when people sort of trusted their government? Starting somewhere after WW 2, elucidated a bit below, we started to question everything and think in conspiracies. Ie, did we know if Iraq had WMD's or not? Anyhow, this sort of distrust is now part and parcel with engaged citizenship. I mean, after Watergate, Iraq, etc. you'd have to be naive to take at face value what the government sells you. That's why the death of Bin Laden is so odd. It seems calculated to raise the maximum amount of suspicion in the skeptical populous. No grave, no pictures, all wrapped up nicely.

Conversely, the arguments laid forth by our President seem to be pretty legitimate. By all rights presenting photos of the body or the body itself could certainly insight even more violence than has already been anticipated. And it is this inherent cynicism that leads a free-thinking citizen to question even the timing of the whole affair in regards to reelection campaigns rather than just taking to the streets and cheering. Caveats aside.

This is all really secondary to what I wanted to think about, death. A water cooler topic, I know. I wonder what we/I would have gained by looking at a picture of a dead Bin Laden. Would it have just seemed like one more picture on the screen? Eight out of the ten most popular television shows on cable currently feature corpses on a regular basis. What does this do to our psyche as a nation? Has it made us more comfortable with death? I'd argue no, on one hand, but I think death as televisual abstraction is a definite yes. Thus, other than for clearing it up for skeptics, I fear Bin Laden would have been one more dead body to look at. This, when we live in a culture that is extremely uncomfortable with death in reality. I'm including myself in this wholeheartedly. From the singularity crowd to pill popping elders and middle aged folks who keep getting younger we are sort of terrified of aging, of death.

Note: I think this is all more true for people in the civilian population. I think that military folks who face this sort of thing not as abstraction, but as reality, probably have a whole different perspective and generally carry around a bunch of internal shi- after having seen things that most civilian types are not just happy to avoid, but would avoid if a draft was ever reinstated. And this discomfort with death is it odds with the casual way that it is often presented to us in the abstract, referring to television of news clips as abstract here is probably fishy wording, I've not figured out our exact relationship to tragedy as viewed through television or pictures on a blog yet. I suppose this really started in WW 2 when people got pictures of the concentration camps, and we really had to begin to learn to empathize with people who were not our family, or friends, or neighbors, or friends of friends, or members of the same clan, state, region, country, religion, but just other human beings. This is terrifically complex, in my mind, and I mean to explore it more in relation to the earthquake in Japan and my own, sort of appalling and indifferent initial reaction to it. I think it has something to do with narrative.

Anyhow, in this case I guess I'm happy that the cynics, myself sort of included, did not win out. I don't think that seeing another human being's dead body splayed out on the ground for my own sense of pleasure, pleasure is being used here more as pleasure in "really" knowing something rather than just knowing something, though the word isn't chosen entirely by accident as I think it's more complex than simple knowledge, and knowing even if the image would seem recycled from endless versions of NCIS or Law and Order. (I feel it's important to reiterate that I'm not opposed even to these shows I'm just sort of curious what the preponderance of bodies at rest is doing to our perception of real death as portrayed through the same medium. I can say that in my, admittedly limited, experience it isn't doing much for our actual relationship with death, here meaning family, friends, et al). Being aware of all the above listed cynicism it's probably and housing much of it within my own heart I hesitate to say this, but I'd rather we all looked at pictures of kids smiling rather than a bullet ridden body. I think the former might do more good for our collective psyches than the latter. Note: It reminds me of that old argument about putting good food in your body instead of bad so that you get good results. A saying which I roughly translated during college as, "Put crap in, you get crap out." A quote, which my best friend pointed out was less insightful than supererogatory and that an adjustment was probably needed to make it strike home.

Civics from TPK



There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have a profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. I’m talking mostly about economics and business because that’s my area.”

Q; What do we do to stop the decline?

“I have no idea what to do. As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, bit if we the government take away citizen’s freedom to cede their autonomy we’re now taking away their autonomy. It’s a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them. Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.”

“I can see taxpayers not wanting to part with money. It’s a natural human thing. I didn’t like getting audited either. But shit, you’ve got basic facts to counterbalance that—we voted these guys in, we choose to live here, we want good roads and a good army to protect us. So you ante up.”

“That’s a little simplistic.”

“It seems like, suppose you’re in a lifeboat with other people and there’s only so much food, and you have to share it. You’ve only got so much and it’s going to go around, and everybody’s really hungry. Of course you want all the food; you’re starving. But so is everybody else. If you ate all the food you couldn’t live with yourself afterward.”

“The others’d kill you, too.”

“But the point is psychological. Of course you want it all, of course you want to keep every dime you make. But you don’t, you ante up, because it’s how things have to be for the whole lifeboat. You sort of have a duty to others in the boat. A duty to yourself not to be the sort of person who waits till everybody is asleep and then eats all the food.”

“You’re talking like a civics class.”

“Which you never had, I’m betting. What are you, twenty eight? Did your school have civics when you were a boy? Do you even know what civics is?”

“It was a cold war thing they started in the schools. The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance, the importance of voting.”

“Civics is the branch of political science that quote concerns itself with citizenship and the rights and duties of US citizens.”

“Duty’s kind of a harsh word. I’m not saying it’s their duty to pay their taxes. I’m just saying it doesn’t make any sense not to. Plus we catch you.”

I don’t think this will be the conversation you want to have, but if you really want my opinion I’ll tell you.”

“Fire away.”

“I think it’s no accident that civics is taught anymore or that a young man like yourself bridles at the word duty.”

“We’ve gotten soft, you’re saying.”

I’m saying that the sixties—which God love them did a lot for raising people’s consciousness in a whole lot of other areas, such as race and feminism…”

“Not to mention Vietnam.”

“No. mention it, because here was a whole generation where most of them now for the first time questioned authority and said that their individual moral beliefs about war outweighed their duty to go fight if their duly elected representatives told them to.”

“In other words that their highest actual duty was to themselves.”

“Well, but to themselves as what?”

“This all seems pretty simplistic, you guys. It’s not like everybody that was protesting was doing it out of duty. It became fashionable to protest the war.”

“Neither the ultimate duty is to self element nor the fashionable element is irrelevant.”

“You’re saying that protesting Vietnam led to tax cheating?”

“No, he’s saying that it led to the sort of selfishness that has all of us trying to eat all the boat’s food.”

“No, but I think whatever led to it becoming fashionable to protest a war opened the door to what’s going to bring us down as a country. The end of the democratic experiment.”
“Did I tell you he was a conservative?”

“But that’s just a put-down. There are all kinds of conservatives depending on what it is they want to conserve.”

“The sixties were America’s starting to decline into decadence and selfish individualism—the ME generation.”

“There was more decadence in the twenties than there was in the sixties, though.”