memorial day

MORPHEUS: You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Do you believe in fate, Neo?

NEO: No, because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.

MORPHEUS: You’ve felt it all your life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it's there. The truth.

NEO: What truth?

MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch -- a prison for your mind.

In “On the Genealogy of Morals” (1880), Nietzsche writes, “It seems to me that…modern man…resists a really vivid comprehension of the degree to which cruelty constituted the great festival pleasure of primitive men and was indeed an ingredient of almost every one of their pleasures….To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all too human principle to which the apes might subscribe; for it is said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were, his prelude” (462, Princeton).

How far we had come by 2001. It wasn’t sufficient that our craving for tragedy be met by the spoken word, we had to see it televised: the plane endlessly circling the vast Atlantic, providing the comforting illusion that we knew the spot where our prince of Camelot, JFK Jr., and his beautiful princess, met their demise in a watery grave. And even while we pondered Gary Condit’s role in the disappearance of his comely young intern, we vicariously gawked at the cruel mouth of the Parisian tunnel that swallowed up yet another perfect princess. But media pandering is an insatiable beast. We need more, always more.

So we rent “Faces of Death VII” for the third time and settle back to watch parachutes fail and gruesome car wrecks, then switch to cable and succumb to staged pseudo-realities, like failed cosmetic surgeries and rescued ugly ducklings. But we need more. Our Jackassian pursuit of the absurd is temporarily satisfied by Tom Green pretending a situation where a child seat is thrown from a car top. He positions us as insiders to a cruel joke. We watch the shock in the unsuspecting faces of the terrified onlookers, and then smugly record their horrified reactions to the joke before them. Our eyes are glued to these telegenic pawns, the bit players who feed our need to ride above a mayhem that could never happen here.

“Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’….There is no ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring—the strength of character—to throw off its shackles.” Nietzsche? Raskolnikov? No, this is from a taped conversation between the serial killer, Ted Bundy, and a court psychiatrist, in which Bundy attempts to justify his murders. For Bundy, all moral values are subjective. Horrifying? Yes. Does Bundy intrigue us? Yes. But why? Is it a coincidence that “Silence of the Lambs” was such big box office when the receipts were tallied at the local metroplex?

And then came 9/11, a televised reality so gruesome that it trumped all that that had come before. In the grimmest of ironies, the only available analogy for the believable happening before our eyes was the unbelievable. Since 9/11 was unprecedented in terms of what had been televised before, we could only compare it to a movie. And even this fell short, in that no comparison would suffice. We turned to fiction to describe the factual. It was a life-event so real that art could never imitate it. And yet we turned to art to explain it. It was like a movie.

9/11 revealed the immediate past as an American fantasy—a time when we were racing headlong toward a precipice we couldn’t see, or perhaps better, didn’t want to recognize. This unpredictable event loosed a violent wheel of fire that has given us Afghanistan, Iraq, and who knows what to come. Should we fail to engage with the ominous significance of where we’re headed, the next abyss we approach may swallow us all.

May Peace be with us on this sad Memorial Day -- RT