Monday, August 11, 2003

As much as the NYT Review of Books always has novels and nonfiction accounts of the holocaust and present day genocides, and the most egregious and cataclysmic examples of moral failings, I wonder constantly at what moral fortitude I have that those participants lacked. And I wonder whether or not I have the moral fortitude to resist those evils today. I think that's why I find Harvey Pekar so appealing right now, the idea of making heroics out of the everyday, to remind ourselves that morality, living, the big life, isn't contained in the grandiose but the daily struggles to overcome the mediocre, make the mundane meaningful in a magnified, fast-forwarded, overly seasoned world. What makes these times particularly frightening for me, especially hearing more and more stories from Elizabeth about her employees and customers, much more representative of the real world than my own experiences, is that our mass mediated society has succeeded not only in  making people numb to any substantive reality, replaced instead by desire for the most basic needful suckling of external stimulation by a world of things, but in making people feel a sense of entitlement - as if existing in this world and knowing that Ben Affleck can afford luxuries such as Bentleys makes one deserving of such splendid wealth, and angry that the prospects at a $25,000 job in retail don't give you access to such a world. Which is, of course, the fault of your lousy employer, but mostly the fault of welfare mothers and immigrants and Jews and gays. Encoding this sense of entitlement, rather than challenging it, are suburban mega-churches, suggesting that material wealth is not just an entitlement, but a reward from God for doing His will. That somehow, driving a Humvee and living a McMansion consumer lifestyle is not only not contrary to the teachings of Christ, but a sign of grace. We are ripe for fascism, ripe for another century or two of genocide, if not of actual people of cultures, which we are doing right now, both by will and apathy, at least the destruction of culture and ideas - the culture and ideas that more than any others are at the core of our ability to survive beyond those centuries. 9:00:49 AM