We were screwing in a mirror when we realized our mistake. Since the handyman was unavailable, we had to do it ourselves. Certainly it was very pleasurable to know that we could, but we screwed-up.
Lurid sexual news is common these days; it grabs people’s attention. It titillates the public’s imagination like nothing else, even murders and celebrity scandals. Forget wars and genocide and a world teetering on the edge of nuclear annihilation when there is sexual news to keep you focused.
The bombs smoke the air with the smell of death rising everywhere. It’s the air we breathe.
But back to the screwing. Maybe I have reeled you in and you want more details. Okay, let me tell you.
As we were screwing in the mirror, we realized we had placed the drywall anchor too low, so it was behind the mirror and not slightly above. A simple measuring mistake. So relax. Perhaps you were getting too excited.
Let’s get to the smoke. No, we had not been smoking an intoxicant, we were just a bit incompetent.
Smoke comes from many directions; it’s usually meant to shroud our ability to see the truth of our situation, as in the phrase “smoke and mirrors” – the magician’s trick. Who are the magician’s running our show?
Sometimes it’s innocent smoke that turns day to night, such as the smoke that’s drifted down from Canada that has just forced me to turn lights on at midday.
Sexual titillation is not innocent smoke. That it is everywhere is obvious; it has been so for decades now. The German-American sociologist Herbert Marcuse posited this in 1964 in his book, One-Dimensional Man, in which he argued that a new totalitarianism was developing in the U.S. A. and Western Europe that “manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.”
This was happening both culturally and politically. This unification of seeming opposites – “democratic unfreedom” that prevents qualitative change – was facilitated by what he called “repressive modes of desublimation.” One important aspect of this method of social control was the offer of increased satisfaction of the sexual variety that would draw off instinctual energy from significant social change in societies where technological rationality was the underlying fact. Localized sexuality and the sexualization and titillation of everyday life would reduce genuine erotic living. This faux-sexuality would seem to many people like liberation from the then fading traditional religiously-based forms of sublimation, which were also repressive. But rather than freedom, Marcuse argued, it was the commodification of sex as another commercial product to keep people gratified and happy with their condition in a society of growing inequality and technical control.
This “Happy Consciousness” has prevailed, and today we find ourselves incapable of imagining significant political change as the latest American president, Donald Trump, “of grab them by the pussy” fame, presides over multiple wars and growing internal repression.
Once many people smoked one or more packs of cigarettes a day. Doctors recommended them as good for your health. One of my sisters used to smoke in the shower and our family doctor smoked as he examined us kids. He was the team doctor for a major university’s basketball team. In times past, many a man went out for Lucky Strikes or Camels and never came back.
Do they still go out? For what? Do they ever come back?
In my little town of Great Barrington in western Massachusetts there are ten or so pot shops, which is approximately one shop for every 700 people. I wonder if they have read Baudelaire’s “Be Drunk”? “You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.”
Simon and Garfunkel once asked:
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,
wo wo woWhat’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson
‘Joltin Joe’ has left and gone away,
hey hey hey
Joe, the mythical man, is long dead. Yet dreams of mythical men perdure and they will be dredged up with the next elections. Sexual scandals will follow. What’s new pussycat?
We think we have come to our senses, that the smoke does not get in our eyes. But that’s an extreme form of mental myopia. The neo-fascist vulgar Trump is our present nightmare, but his presence has a past and a future, which Chris Hedges correctly notes in “Requiem for America on the Fourth of July”:
Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con. [my emphasis]
This is Marcuse’s point about the unification of ostensible opposites. But most people still don’t get it, for one-dimensional thinking is the norm. And in a digital world the tyranny of the moment dominates peoples’ attention, even as the moment itself is immediately superseded by the next. As the Red Queen said to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
So we rush on, getting nowhere fast, forgetting that we are all getting screwed in a looking-glass world.
Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist….writer – beyond a cage of categories. His latest book is AT THE LOST AND FOUND: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press) edwarcurtin.com
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