Charnel-house Of Images
I have no plans to join millions around the world viewing the inauguration. I’d rather dedicate my awareness to other things. I imagine Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Chew – appointed members of the royal court. They will occupy prime seating close to the man forwarded to the oval office by a system that long since voids the individual by gerrymandered districts, by a media fire hose of lies, slander, innuendo… This is called democracy. The individual who is to swear an oath, his hand resting on sacred scripture, to defend the Constitution is – a seditionist, a serial rapist, a convicted felon.
Am I inordinately good, morally superior to my fellows who will virtually join the spectacle? I am not. The distinction (if there is one): I know a funeral procession when I see one.
I’d just rather nurse my sadness elsewhere. I read that Michelle Obama will not attend either.
…the human race
is beginning to produce itself
as waste-product,
to carry out this work
of waste disposal
on itself.
What is worst
is not that we are submerged
by the waste-products of industrial and urban concentration,
but that we ourselves are transformed into residues.
…a way of transforming our environment
into an archaic residue,
to be tipped into the
dustbins of natural history
[that is] present events,
immediately voided of their meaning by news,
transformed into crusher residues,
a charnel-house of images.
News is
of the event as waste;
It is the current dustbin of history.
The Illusion of the End, by Jean Baudrillard, trans. by Chris Turner, chapt. Maleficent Ecology, page 78
4 thoughts on “Charnel-house Of Images”
For the past 8 years, and I suspect for the next four and perhaps beyond, the words that pepper much of my verbiage are:
Dystopian
Existential
Xenophobic
Misogynistic
These are not words I want to be using nor are they descriptors I used much before the era of Trump. I hate that they have become so prevalent in my writing and in my various discussions. I wonder if I will live to see a time when they will have once again been relegated to the closet of my vocabulary. It’s all very sad!
Our times are without doubt troubled. It is not our business to save the world. We are obligated to speak and to write our truth as difficult as that proves to be. I find myself to be a tragic optimist. Long term I have no idea if or how things will work out. I realize odds are conditions for most of us will become worse. Living one day at a time, if necessary one hour at a time, we must improvise responding to circumstance according to our resources and inner strength.
The lesson from this brief interchange (at least for me) is that we have entered an era of survival. I don’t mean that either of us (or for that matter anyone who might be reading your blog comments section) are starving or will be torn apart by wolves. In this case survival is mental. That the world has turned upside down and that each of us must choose a path that allows us to continue living for however many years we have left. In one case it might be to focus on the positive, to embrace whatever good we can find in our own backyard. For others it might be to turn off the news and turn a blind eye to the environmental destruction that is bound to happen. For me, it is trying to keep my head above the tsunami of melancholia that is swirling about in my head. This may entails dark thoughts and dystopian (there’s that word) waking nightmares. We all choose what we hope will allow us some peace of mind.
There are others, hundreds if not thousands, who will not be able to cope with the intolerance of our new version of the American Dream and opt to end their days, their future too bleak to consider life under an autocratic regime. This will be especially true for those who were already marginalized by their lot in life, be it LGBTQ, minority, autistic, idealist, or ardent environmentalist. I cannot ask them to stay the course, telling them that “things” will get better since I don’t really know if that’s true. People attempt to comfort my own bleak musings by telling me that everything is cyclical, that the pendulum will swing back towards inclusiveness, kindness, and tolerance. In my own myopic haze I just can’t (or don’t want to) see it.
So as has been noted in this blog many times, we can’t see the future. Whatever any of us believe, we believe because it suits us best. I would like to be cautiously optimistic, as was said above, but it is just not in my wheelhouse at this point in time. I wish everyone the best of luck. May the optimists be correct in that we will return to the light down the road.
Well said.
If time is parabolic rather than linear, I assume that the period of the return is a matter of many generations. That is, not proximate enough to make a difference to any living individual.