America the Horror Show
Finally the
USA has an act that perfectly expresses its true spirit as the horror
show nation among nations: the random mass slaughter of little children
by a maniac. Is it not so that the failure to protect little children
from harm is the most shameful weakness an adult human can present?
Next, of course, comes the empty ritual of pretending that we must make sure something like this never happens again.
How? By some forensic inquiry into the psychology of the shooter, Mr.
Lanza... his comings, goings, email musings, Netflix rentals, chemical
composition of his fingernail clippings? We flatter ourselves with the
technocratic conceit that if we can measure something enough, we can
control it. Ban assault weapons or tighten up the background checks? The
horse is out of the barn on that one. There are enough weapons loose in
the USA to conduct a full-scale Civil War right now. And probably
enough ill feeling. Just pick the flavor of the conflict you want:
ideological? Religious? Racial? Regional?
For what it's
worth, the Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in
America, and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children
into men. The tragic monster that Mr. Lanza grew up into lived with Mom
and ended up parking four bullets in her brain. Imagine the tensions in
that monster. It's not an accident that the commercial fantasies
represented in movies and television aimed at boys are populated by
legions of super-heroes. This sort of grandiosity -- the wish to project
supernatural powers -- is exactly what you get in boys who have not
developed competence in any reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor
-- and I wouldn't necessarily include school, such as it is in our time,
as a reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor, since it is mostly a
brutally boring accreditation process. Notice, Mr. Lanza's chief
instrument of death was the "Bushmaster." His weapon made him a
"master" of something, at least, even if it was just the systematic
slaughter of six-year-old kids and the women in charge of them.
History has its own arcs and particular moments in history have
their own spirits of the time. This moment for us is the sum of the
unintended consequences of countless bad choices we've made for many
decades against the backdrop of enormous material riches. I've inveighed
against these manifold fiascos enough for this audience. The net result
is a nation that has turned men either into weaklings, fakes, or
monsters. I think the greater tragedy is that we are past being able to
teach ourselves how to act and now it is up to nature and history to
provide the only kind of instruction we can understand.
I
used to crack a joke when showing a particular slide in my visiting
college lectures that "we're a wicked people who deserve to be
punished."
It's
not so funny anymore. Look around at the squalid mess that America has
made of its own terrain: the endless wastelands of free parking and
slumping strip malls, the wilderness of tract housing subdivisions, the
cities left cored, rotting, and stinking in the fall drizzle, the
countless redundant roadways -- and while you're at it, take a good hard
look at the depressing and disgraceful industrial boxes that school is
conducted in, these euphemistically-named "facilities." We live in
physical surroundings that are the perfect growth medium for serial
killers, mass murderers, psychopaths with no feeling, and
sado-masochists preoccupied only with the ritual orchestration of their
own shame and guilt in the service of inflicting pain.
Let me remind you that there is a range of thought and feeling evinced
in human culture that no longer exists in America. These things were
called virtues. They are qualities in thought and action related to
goodness and excellence, and they are in very short supply these days in
the USA, though we are well-supplied with fakes and approximations of
virtue -- such as the moments of sham heroism witnessed yesterday
afternoon and evening by men watching televised football. What matters
now is that an epochal undertow of events is dragging this enormous
nation into an economic convulsion that will inevitably turn political. I
don't think that our society can be redeemed in its current form. It
has to pass through a tribulation that demands the reemergence of adult
male humans who know how to be men in more than one dimension. And you
who make it through to the other side will barely comprehend the
monsters left behind, or how they made themselves that way.
