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Recent
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May
16, 2003
Website
of the Day
Iraq and Our
Energy Future
May
15, 2003
Ayesha
Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
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Hilden
Moussaoui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees:
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Kenneth
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Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell
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Bush's Little
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Website
of the Day
Strip-o-Rama
May
14, 2003
Cindy
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A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
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Jason
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David
Lindorff
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Giggling into Chaos
Jack
McCarthy
Twin Towers of Journalism: Racism
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Madsen
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The Longer View
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de Rooij
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James
Reiss
What? Me Worry?
Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
Website
of the Day
A Tribute to Ted Joans
May
13, 2003
Saul
Landau
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
Michael
Neumann
Has Islam Failed? Not by Western
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Uri
Avnery
My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
Jacob
Levich
Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas
William
Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory
The
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Stew Albert
Asylum
Hammond
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An Illogical Reign
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May
12, 2003
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Floyd
Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel, and Baghdad
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Lindorff
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Sharon and Sons, Inc.
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Bush's War Web Log 5/12
Book
of the Day
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Marty Peretz
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May
10 / 11, 2003
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Cockburn
Rosenthal Faces the Music in Key
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Mandel
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Gancarski
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Sherman
A Letter to My European Friends
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El-Bizri
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Bruce
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/10
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May
9, 2003
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Mahajan
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Madsen
When Lying Pays Off: Neo-Con Fabricators
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Bush's War Web Log 5/09
May
8, 2003
Julie
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Z.
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Spinoza
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Ben
Tripp
The Other "F" Word
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Pushovers
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Bush's War Web Log 5/08
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May
7, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Quoting Under the Influence: Breasts,
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Bill Kunstler's Last Big Speech
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/07
Website
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The Truth About Bush's Military Records
May
6, 2003
Paul
de Rooij
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Money to Burn: in Defense of Bill Bennett
John
Stanton
Bush's War on Jesus
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A Roadmap to Nowhere
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/06
May
5, 2003
Gary
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Mariscal
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Reed
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May
3, 2003
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Tears of Rage: Remembering May 1970
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May
2, 2003
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Butterly
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Gordon
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Question Those Writing History
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The Cuba Conundrum
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/02
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Moussaoui's
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May
1, 2003
Jeffrey
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Santorum: That's Latin for Asshole
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Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East
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Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition
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A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush:
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May
17, 2003
American Mourning
The
Ultimate Imperative of Denial
By RICHARD LICHTMAN
Given the frequency with which murder takes place
in the United States, the killing of Laci Peterson is not an
extraordinary event; except in the sense in which any murder
of a human being is an extraordinary event. But in the current
United States of America there has occurred a profound inversion
of values in which the sacred is trivialized and the trivial
is exalted. A country that can speak so casually of the infinite
value of life, of the dignity of the individual, of the majesty
of human existence, can quite literally destroy life without
consideration and reveal thereby the deep corrosion of its ideology,
by which I do not mean the "world view" shared by the
population, but the mystification that destroys the possibility
of understanding the actual nature of human life and purpose.
What is most extraordinary about the
Laci Peterson situation, though it is a common occurrence in
America, is the fact that it has become a national melodrama
and on the occasion of what would have been her 28th birthday
"drew mourners from across Northern California." (San
Francisco Chronicle, 5/5/03) Why are we not surprised to learn
that the ceremony included a "video tribute" while
the song "I Will Remember You" was played. So I do
not use the word "melodrama" lightly or disrespectfully.
It is a profound requirement of contemporary American life to
inhabit the realms of the melodramatic and the histrionic.
The Reverend Donna Arno, who presided
over the ceremony noted that the event was as much for the community
as for the family. "The family realized the effect this
has had on the town and even on the nation." Over 800 years
ago in Western Europe death was a "collective" affair
in which the dying person initiated the procedure of leaving
this world and departing for some relation with God in the next.
The site of death became a public place in which others came
and went at ease. It was not, however, so much the death of a
distinct individual, an irreplaceable person, as a member of
a species who was marked for death. But that event was the opposite
of melodramatic; it was, instead, ordinary and commonplace, what
Philip Aires has called "tamed death." For us, everything
has changed.
When Leona Ortiz Ramirez was asked by
her 11 year old daughter, Bianca, why she was going to make the
drive to the ceremony "for someone I don't even know,"
she explained that when she "first heard Laci Peterson described
on television, "she sounded like me." The American
way of mourning embraces vicariously, through the other, what
one cannot confront in one's self, the necessity of death and
the anguish thereof. And those who, "casually dressed in
jeans or shorts brought their families to say farewell to a woman
they only knew from stories they read or pictures they saw,"
were enacting what has been a prototypical American sublimation
of the grief of mourning. That other for whom one mourns is not
a person one has known through one's lived relationship, but
one who essentially "represents" the construction of
an artificial sentiment as constituted by the media elaboration
of needs deeply denied and vicariously manifested.
Three years earlier at the funeral of
her grandmother Laci spoke of her wish for her own funeral. As
her brother noted; "She said, 'I don't want people to be
sad. I don't want them to be missing me. I want them to be happy."
How does one learn to sacrifice the vital meaning of one's life
for the sake of a murderous creed of abstract anonymity? What
Laci lived through, what she deeply believed, we will of course
never know, despite the media pretense that we are transparent
and readily summarized. But what leads a human being to come
to believe in the great virtue of serving the masses in their
quest for happiness, of offering herself up in a ritual of common
hedonic service. Happiness is, of course, the great American
religion, and woe unto him or her who disturbs its majestic equilibrium,
its all-comforting assurance. Should the face of happiness be
rent, should the suffering that lies beneath its fiercely controlled
exterior be revealed, everything is threatened at once; the entire
mystification of American life hangs in the balance, the great
American Dream is revealed in its fragile betrayal, dangling
precariously from the fraying thread of blasted hope. Should
we be surprised that in the earlier pictures of Laci on her wedding
day or later when pregnant, her husband is not to be seen? Was
this the life that brought her happiness and the need to display
it?
In front of the stage on the day of the
ceremony, behind the huge choir dressed in white, was placed
a "photo portrait of Laci, featuring the broad smile that
people throughout the country had seen in the months since her
disappearance." "Bright sprays of flowers....along
with a small stuffed rhinoceros" graced the stage. "Laci
Peters was eulogized as someone who was bubbly, vivacious and
the life of every party." It is essential that we not identify
the lived meaning of Laci Peterson's life with the public construction
of that meaning. Her funeral was clearly for those who need to
draw comfort from it. But how ghastly that the vicarious mourners
should choose as the quintessence of her existence, that vivacious
presence as the "life of the party." And beyond the
obvious pathos of this death resonates the defining symbolism
of another life curtailed, the aborted promise of further human
fulfillment.
Who confronts happiness in America has
broken the ultimate imperative of denial. And what can more undeceive
us than death, wherein we are forced to confront the limitations,
failures and broken hopes that our social world has first raised
to the status of certain fulfillment, and then slowly brought
down in grief. This is not what we learn form the presentations
of mass media, which thrives on escape and mystification; but
it is the cry that resonates, as in the well known painting of
Ensor, within every meaningful work of literature and serious
reflection in the 20th century. In the world of manipulated,
voracious consuming images and those ghostly human phantoms who
pursue and ingest them, we learn the secret of it all. These
figures are not themselves merely happy; they are so far beyond
happiness that they reveal themselves in their mania and their
manic defense, against .......time, and change, metabolism, the
failure of satiation, and finally, aging and death.
Americans are simply forbidden to weep
powerfully, passionately, uncontrollably at the conclusion of
life, for it carries the burden of too much life unlived. "One
only has the right to cry if no one else can see or hear,"
Aires noted, or if the crying has been made into a public ceremony
with carefully planned protocols and rituals that honors "the
life of the party." As American sexuality is so often sublimated,
once again through media stereotypes, so mourning becomes shameful,
"like a sort of masturbation." as Geoffry Gorer noted.
It is not that death, as sexuality, has been denied access to
the world, but that both of them have been eviscerated and replaced
by malleable and secure substitutes.
So, it should come as no ultimate surprise
that America can splatter death around the world and not stop
to count the corpses. Those others we have killed are unrecognized
or soon forgotten. We claim for ourselves the melodrama of war,
the pretense of honoring life amidst our compulsion to destroy;
it is the pornography of unjustifiable murder and meaningless
death that we embrace for ourselves, while the other generally
goes unmarked. Yet, there have been occasions when even that
other has been invited into our histrionic embrace - that child
screaming in her terror on the railroad tracks in Nanking or
the girl consumed by napalm and flaming inward toward her unbearable
suffering on the road in Vietman, seeking salvation in her abandon.
(And why is it so often children we sentimentalize?) We install
death in the world with indifferent casualness and insinuate
calamity in self-righteous certitude, visiting oblivion on others
and ourselves, a sacramental sacrifice to the god of capital
accumulation, so seductive in its abstract certainty and dead
anonymity. Those who would peer under the surface of official
happiness to note the blighted lives, the love of death, the
sense of purpose and identity grown corpulent with greed, serving
no purpose so much as staving off anxiety, they will be marked
for stigma and despair.
So we mourn in our hollow ritual for
the woman, we are told, who wanted nothing so much as to be the
life of the party. Mourn for her and the party she will not attend.;
and for the party of sorts we will live more and more as this
insane nation rampages through blighted lands and conducts its
terror in the world. Do not be deceived by the practiced joy
of simulated war, the president dismounting from his trusty steed
in the age of mechanical reproduction. This is only an apparent
respite amidst the actual murders. Better to remember Auden's
poem:
Epitaph on a Tyrant
Perfection, of a kind, was
what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Richard Lichtman
is the author of "The
Production of Desire," "Essays
in Critical Social Theory," and most recently, "Dying
in America," which among other aspects, includes
a memoir of the death of his father. He can be reached at: rlichtman@earthlink.net
Yesterday's
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Ayesha
Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
Not to Help Amina Lawal: The Hidden Dangers of Letter
Writing Campaigns
Julie
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Kenneth
Rapoza
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