July 24th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

–J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945.

Lately I’ve been tortured by the seeming putridity of American culture. Why is it that we’ve become so selfish? So egotistical? So self-absorbed? So hateful? Whether speaking of politics, business, religion or the common interactions of everyday life, we exist in a society increasingly devoid of courtesy, decency and humility. Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the sub-prime mess, every case representing the sacred belief that it’s every man for himself. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, reality TV. We are obsessed with instant fame, with self-worship. Fuck what you have to say, read my comments, look at my pictures. Me, me, me. Forty years ago things were hardly perfect, women lacked rights, segregation reigned, but most people knew their neighbors. All service was full service. The customer was always right. Now we have self-checkout lanes at the supermarket and gated communities to keep the rabble out. The streets are drowning in tension and violence. Makeshift mass murderers slaughter entire schoolhouses, office buildings, churches and community centers. Our political leaders auction off their integrity to the highest bidder in a frenzy never before seen while our religious leaders rage for the blood of gays, Muslims and Jews. We all seem to suffer from the symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. Anxiety runs high. Small gestures seem absent. People practically bowl eachother over when walking down the street. A billion hands clawing at the walls and all there is to do is climb the bodies higher and higher pushing down anyone brazen enough to get in the way.

But why? What is the cause of this malady? Why do things seem to be getting worse?

America has always been a whore. We’re cheap. Walking billboards with price tags sown in. Since the founding of this great nation we have committed unspeakable acts of genocide and destruction. We took a land of vibrant beauty and paved a wall-to-wall strip mall in its place. We’ve commodified everything from our most sacred belief systems to the air we breathe. Whereas once we built great public works and exported idealism now we stand an indebted shill, arms broker to the world, an empire on the brink of collapse. Our turn in fortune is of our own making, a natural and expected result of our greed. As the ship sinks we scramble for the life rafts, women and children be damned. And yet it’s not as simple as all that. Our social morality began to collapse long before our dominance on the world stage.

In the 1950’s the generation that would elect Kennedy and usher in an era of social upheaval came into adulthood. Writers like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Mailer, comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, musicians like Miles Davis all rose out of the fires of global destruction to deconstruct a social order they saw as rigid and false. Academics like Alfred Kinsey and Marshall McLuhan challenged basic perceptions of human relationships and our trajectory as a species. Feminism, civil rights, revolutionary politics, concepts of decency, social order and basic rights. In film, music, literature, journalism and art. On every front everything was reexamined. Everything was taken apart. The world as it was didn’t make sense anymore. The old order had to be usurped. In every case these luminaries, these revolutionaries, were reacting to one and the same thing: an America brimming with unlimited prosperity while standing on the precipice of complete annihilation.

The generation that gave us the Beats and modern Jazz was the first to come into maturity under the shadow of the nuclear bomb. Cities melting into the ground, billions torn from flesh and bone, the eradication of civilization, the apocalypse alive in stark reality, one act of madness away from fruition. And so every generation since has come into the world with a gun cocked and pointed to the head. Aware, whether consciously or not, that the end of all things is omnipresent and inevitable. The social transformation of the 1950’s and 60’s was necessary, vital. The lessons learned over those decades invaluable, but unfortunately incomplete.

Today there are some 20,000 active nuclear weapons in the world, of which about 7,000 are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched within fifteen minutes of an order to do so. The largest of these weapons have a yield of some 50 megatons (which equates to a single warhead having the destructive power of 50 million tons of TNT). The system is called deterrence. The idea is that under the threat of complete global destruction no country would ever risk unleashing their nuclear arsenal. Yet conventional wisdom states that if you build a thing you must use it. And so we live with a knife at the throat, waiting, ready, expectantly for the final blow. This insane system, peace at the barrel of a gun, is, as it has been for fifty years, defended as the only way to avoid large scale conflict. When this stark raving mad concept in global diplomacy is understood and compounded further by the looming specter of climate change, the stifling problems of overpopulation and imperial collapse, is it really that hard to see where our society is headed?

A reality of our own making. The battle of Armageddon that a growing segment of our population would welcome with utter glee. An America in which we stand, as James Thurber once wrote, “not on the brink of war, but on the brink of was,” where basic human decency, civic duty and compassion are sacrificed on the alter of instant gratification and decadence. The me society. America has always been a whore, capitalist ideology run wild, greed as divine right, but now more than ever growing over fifty years strong there is the presumption that even if our actions have consequences we won’t be around long enough to face them. Live for today no matter the cost because tomorrow will never come.

In this same sense it’s easy to understand why so many have pinned such unrealistic hopes on Barack Obama, as they so desperately, hungrily crave, need a savior to lead them out of the dark. Ironically, despite our certainties of destruction we cling to hope. Despite our momentary lack of empathy and compassion we remain good people, or at the very least we hope to be good again. We just can’t make sense of the world right now. The end is coming soon. In our despair we become inhuman. Murderers, rapists, thieves, megalomaniacs. We embrace what is easy. We consume and allow ourselves to be consumed as our only means to cope.

June 21st, 2009 by Hoopleton

“Walk away, asshole,” said the grinning blonde as she exhaled her cigarette.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“I said,” she said, “walk the fuck away asshole.”

I had approached her initially to try and resolve what seemed to have been a huge misunderstanding between myself and her boyfriend earlier in the night. Apparently, in some cultures it is considered a grave insult to ask someone to remove their elbow from one’s back.

What struck me was not the words she used, but the fact that she grinned at me as she said them.

As I got home later that morning I was left to wonder why it was that people were so awful to one another. How come it seems more and more that the members of our society are so very bloody-minded.

I’m not one to believe in the myth of a nostalgic past, but I can’t escape the feeling that things in our society are increasingly changing for the worse. I can’t recall a time in history when people would walk into office buildings, churches or schools and murder one another en masse. When insulting someone in the most vile way possible passed for acceptable behavior.

I’m reminded of the 1993 action crime drama, Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. In it, Douglas plays a laid-off defense engineer named William Foster who over the course of one hot Los Angeles day transforms from a generally decent human being into a maniac on a killing spree. What’s interesting is that although on the surface it appears to be little more than a popcorn blockbuster, the film actually offers an interesting commentary on the moral decline of our society.

Douglas’ character, Foster, is the archetype for the displaced American man. When we first meet him he looks like a 1950s stereotype. Rimmed glasses. Short-sleeve button down shirt and tie. Briefcase. Once a breadwinner, the king of the castle, he has fallen on hard times. His wife has divorced him. He’s lost his job. His car has broken down. There are holes in his shoes. He sits in his dead American-built auto, stuck in a traffic jam, as the people around him scream insults and honk their horns. It is at this moment that something in him changes. It’s at this moment that he realizes, perhaps for the first time, how ugly the world is and how powerless he is within it.

And so Foster gets out of his car, abandoning it in the street, and embarks on an odyssey through a world that would no longer give him the respect that he once deserved, hoping to reach his ex-wife’s house on the other side of the city in time for their daughter’s birthday.

In the film Foster encounters a series of seemingly trivial situations which drive him into a increasingly homicidal rage. What’s fascinating, as Rogert Ebert commented in his review of the film, is that there’s never a release. He never enjoys what he does. He’s scared and confused. He’s angry and disconnected. And in each encounter we are reminded, through Foster’s commentary, of the way things once were.

In a convenience store, after the owner refuses to give him any change for a phone call, Foster destroys many of the goods on display, remarking on the cost and screaming, “I’m rolling back prices to 1965. What do you think of that?” Then after a couple incidents with gang members he meets a homeless man asking for change and promptly picks his hard luck story apart. One of the most telling scenes takes place in a fast food restaurant, where, after he’s told that he’s 3 minutes too late for breakfast, Foster draws a gun (which he picked up from the gang members) and laments on the lack of genuine costumer service and the inconsistency between the appearance of the flat hamburger in his hand and the image of the big, juicy hamburger in the photographs on display.

Foster isn’t playing out a fantasy, he’s following a set of instructions programmed into him by television news and film. As he’s been devalued in society, he is transformed by that same society into what it does value, a maniac. He struggles against it, but ultimately is powerless to resist.

The two most vital scenes of the film take place toward the end. In the first, Foster meets a homophobic neo-Nazi who has been following the day’s events on a police scanner and considers himself a kindred spirit. To Foster the idea is revolting and he stabs the man (though it should be noted he does so in self-defense). In the second, Foster wanders onto a vast estate and meets a caretaker family whom he tells about his having been laid off by his defense-contractor employer when the Cold War ended. He also tells them of his feelings of being discarded as obsolete after so many years of study and work. When the husband offers himself as a hostage in exchange for his family’s freedom, Foster gets angry and leaves.

In these two episodes we see Foster recoil at being classified as the maniac that society has molded him into. He is a decent man, but in this new world that he inhabits he must either embrace his new role or be destroyed.

Ironically, the man who finally destroys Foster, Robert Duval’s character Sergeant Martin Prendergast, is but another example of the displaced, bygone American man.

Prendergast is on the verge of retirement. He’s another decent man, who doesn’t swear, is respectful and accommodating, and for these reasons is constantly mocked by his domineering wife and vile co-workers. At one point, his own supervisor effectively tells him that he’s not manly enough. Men swear, he informs him.

Throughout the film Prendergast is constantly just one step behind Foster, insisting on investigating the case despite the dismay of everyone around him. As we get to know Prendergast we realize that he too has just as many reasons as Foster to succumb to violence.

By the end Foster’s transformation is complete. The artifacts of his former persona (his briefcase, shirt and tie, etc.) have been replaced by a bag filled with guns and black BDUs. In the film’s climax Prendergast finally catches upto Foster and confronts him at the end of a pier (an obvious metaphor for the end of the world). There, after Foster is again rejected by his former wife, he and Prendergast discuss their mutual feelings of displacement. The cop mentions how the world has changed, how the water is no longer clean enough to swim in, how his daughter died and how powerless he is. Foster for his part finally realizes that he’s the villain in the story, and asks, “How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.”

In the final minutes Foster draws a toy gun, forcing Prendergast to shoot him. Although on the surface it seems that Prendergast is able to survive because he possesses more empathy than Foster, in reality Prendergast transforms as well. In the end he too becomes a killer, the decency in him drained away. Whereas at the start he was a kind man who could not even bring himself to use foul language, by the end that kindness is dead as he says to his supervisor, before a crowd of reporters, “Fuck you.” To this his supervisor grins sheepishly, as though to say, “Welcome to the club.”

Falling Down teaches us that in the modern world there’s no place for decency. In this new America one must either embrace madness or die. To revolt against the paradigm is to become an outcast. It is to become that which one abhors.

Ultimately, the film never explains why society is this way. Why people, like that woman from last night, would find so much joy in displaying their utter lack of civility. What it is that leads decent people to the breaking point. To the choice between inhumanity and destruction. Why, as William Foster might ask, have we all been lied to?

I imagine that more than anything else it has to do with overcrowding. Not that long ago it was still possible to escape. To find refuge from the noise and havoc of modernity. But as the population pushes past the 7 billion mark, as every square meter of the Earth is developed and populated, we find ourselves increasingly at the breaking point. We are constantly confronted by one another and in the resulting tension we fall back on our most violent inclinations. It is why seemingly normal people become mass murderers. Why students shoot up classrooms. Why devout worshipers become hatemongers. Why bankers and CEOs defraud investors. Why a person you don’t know can stare you in the eye, grinning, and say as naturally as could be, “fuck you, asshole.”

The world as we’ve constructed it is a crowded, stressful, impersonal place, drowning in the constant blaring static of our consumption and greed. In the resulting chaos few of us seem to possess the strength to remain upright.