Go Tell it on the Mountain

On the radio today was the case of a woman who, unhappy with her body after having three children, went to Turkey for a Brazilian surgery--removing fat from the waist and injecting it into the butt, getting that Kardashian look that is all the rage. She died after the fat was injected into a vein. But her surgery cost 3,000 pounds instead of 10,000.

I find stories such as this emblematic of the mental illness of our time. I feel the same way about a wide range of stories involving stupid uses of fossil fuels (cigarette boats, NASCAR racing, Air Force acrobatics) and mindless consumerism. Our planet is dying and we can’t run fast enough away from this tragedy and toward the bright distraction of 1,000 stupid entertainments. Maybe it’s unfair to consider reshaping your body an entertainment, but it certainly isn’t a necessity.

Colm Toibin’s book included many excerpts by the brilliant James Baldwin. Baldwin focussed on Americans' unwillingness to address systemic racism, however his writings reach beyond the issue of race to existential questions that dog America. Here’s Toibin:
"Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel in America because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, a poison that began in the individual spirit and only made its way then into politics. His political writing remains as raw and vivid as his fiction because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but through a reimagining of the private realm.”

And here’s Baldwin:
“The loneliness of the cities described in Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before, and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved. And those panaceas and formulas which have so spectacularly failed Dos Passos have also failed this country, and the world. The trouble is deeper than we wish to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation -- we will never establish human communities -- until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.”

I remember seeing a video once about the Pachamama Alliance in Peru, an effort by indigenous people to turn us away from our lonely lives as acquisitive consumers and toward a life built around community and spirituality--obviating the need for ever more stuff. Baldwin’s observations are similar, but are singed by his insights on racism:
"No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves."
And:
"What has been done to me is irrelevant because there is nothing more you can do to me. But, in doing it, you’ve done something to yourself. In evading my humanity, you have done something to your own humanity."
Finally:
"I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grip of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilised the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs, and an intolerable violation of myself.”

His writings in the 1950s and 1960s may not have direct bearing on Kardashian worship in this century. But to me it is of a piece. His observations on our mass dissociation from the real human, hurting world we live in explain why we have lost our way so completely that we are now part of a death cult, pedal to the metal as we head for the cliff.
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