Whew!
I'll need to run through this one again.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/8/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Corpses of Souls
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Walker Percy in his 1971 dystopian novel “Love in the Ruins” paints a
picture of a morally degenerate America consumed by hedonism, wallowing in
ignorance, led by kleptocrats and fools, fragmented into warring and often
violent cultural extremes and on the cusp of a nuclear war. It is a country
cursed by its failure to address or atone for its original sins of genocide
and slavery. The ethos of ceaseless capitalist expansion, white supremacy
and American exceptionalism, perpetuated overseas in the country’s imperial
wars, eventually consumes the nation itself. The accomplices, who once
benefited from this evil, become its victims. How, Percy asks, does one
live
a life of meaning in such a predatory society? Is it even possible? And can
a culture ever regain its equilibrium when it sinks into such depravity?
The novel’s main character, a doctor named Tom More, is a suicidal
alcoholic
and a womanizer. He has invented the “Ontological Lapsometer” to measure
human souls. He notes that “the dread chasm that has rent the soul of
Western man” has worsened “ever since the famous philosopher Descartes
ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that
haunts its own house.”
Percy, echoing the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, argues that
the capitalist, rationalist ethic that crushed empathy and understanding
and
replaced it with the primacy of personal gain, cruelty and profit doomed
Western civilization. The basest lusts are celebrated by capitalism.
Success
is defined by material advancement, power and the attainment of celebrity.
Those, like Donald Trump, who amass enormous wealth, often by cheating,
abusing and defrauding their employees and associates, are treated like
pagan idols.
Percy, who like the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was a medical school
graduate, was steeped in the classics, theology, philosophy, literature and
history. He knew the common denominators of decaying societies. The
elevation of the morally degenerate in the last days was never accidental.
These corrupt elites embodied the warped values of a dying culture. They
reflected back to the society, as does Trump, its spiritual emptiness. The
feckless Romanovs in Russia, the megalomaniacal Kaiser Wilhelm II in
Germany
and the doddering head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph I, in
the last days of the European monarchies exhibited the same stupidity,
self-delusion and self-destructiveness seen in the late American Empire.
The
moment of terminal decline is always marked by an inability to acknowledge
reality and by monstrous, ill-fated schemes, often expressed in wars, to
restore a supposed golden age.
Advertisement
“In every civilization its most impressive period seems to precede death by
only a moment,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote. “Like the woods of
autumn, life defies death in a glorious pageantry of color. But the riot of
this color has been distilled by an alchemy in which life has already been
touched by death. Thus man claims immortality for his spiritual
achievements
just when their mortal fate becomes apparent; and death and mortality are
strangely mixed into, and potent in, the very pretention of immortality.”
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of
their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements
of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively
empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state
mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and
pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the
single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to
use
force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property
classes.
This abject surrender of the state to the rich is expressed at this moment
in the United States in the new tax code and the dismantling of
environmental regulations. This degradation of basic democratic
ideals—evidenced when the Supreme Court refuses to curb wholesale
government
surveillance of the public or defines pouring unlimited dark money into
political campaigns as a form of free speech and the right to petition the
government—means the society defines itself by virtues that are dead. The
longer this illusion is perpetuated, the more an enraged public turns to
demagogues who promise a new utopia and then, once in power, accelerate the
assault.
All of our institutions are corrupted by a neoliberal ideology. It has
contaminated the press, the academy, the arts, the courts and religious
institutions. Christian theology has ingested the toxic brew of American
exceptionalism, the myth of American virtues and the conflation of freedom
with unfettered capitalism. The liberal church, like the bankrupt liberal
class, holds up multiculturalism and identity politics as an ethical
imperative and ignores the primacy of economic justice. It tolerates the
intolerant, giving credibility to those who peddle the heretical creed of
the “prosperity gospel,” a creed that says God showers divine favors in the
form of wealth and power on the Christian elect. This idea makes Trump one
of God’s favorites. It is also an idea that is a complete inversion of the
core message of the Christian Gospels.
In Percy’s novel, the Roman Catholic Church has rebranded itself as the
American Catholic Church, based in Cicero, Ill. It celebrates Property
Rights Sunday. The priest raises the Eucharistic host in the Mass,
conducted
in Latin, to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sermons focus on how
the rich in the Bible—Joseph of Arimathea and Lazarus—were specially
blessed
by God. Evangelical Christians stage ever more elaborate spectacles and
entertainment, including nighttime golf—the Moonlight Tour of the
Champs—advertised with the slogan “Jesus Christ, the Greatest Pro of Them
All.”
Today’s secularists have their own forms of hedonism, self-worship and
idolatry. Spirituality is framed by puerile questions: How is it with me?
Am
I in touch with myself? Have I achieved happiness and inner peace? Have I,
along with my life coach, ensured that I have reached my full career
potential? Am I still young-looking? What does my therapist say? It is a
culture based on self-absorption, a vain quest for eternal youth, and
narcissism. Any form of suffering, which is always part of self-sacrifice,
is to be avoided. The plight of our neighbor is irrelevant. Sexual
degeneracy—narcissists are incapable of love—abounds in a society entranced
by casual hook-ups and pornography. In the Percy novel’s “Love Clinic,”
“volunteers perform sexual acts singly, in couples, and in groups, behind
viewing mirrors in order that man might learn more about the human sexual
response.”
“I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and
science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all,”
More says. “Generally I do as I please.”
The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with wealth
and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing. Few
achieve the imagined pinnacle of success, and those who do are often
psychopaths. Building a society around these goals is masochistic. It shuts
down any desire for self-knowledge because the truth of our lives is
unpleasant. We fill the spiritual vacuum with endless activities,
entertainment and nonstop electronic hallucinations. We flee from silence
and contemplation. We are determined to avoid facing what we have become.
Renegades in the novel have formed armed guerrilla bands in the swamps.
These “castoffs” and “disaffected” rebels include “dropouts from Tulane and
Vanderbilt, M.I.T. and Loyola; draft dodgers, deserters from the Swedish
army, psychopaths and pederasts from Memphis and New Orleans whose
practices
were not even to be tolerated in New Orleans; antipapal Catholics,
malcontented Methodists, ESPers, UFOers, Aquarians, ex-Ayn Randers, Choctaw
Zionists who have returned to their ancestral hunting grounds, and even a
few old graybeard Kerouac beats. …”
The United States in Percy’s book has been fighting a war in Ecuador for 15
years. The old and infirm, like the poor and disabled, are abandoned by the
society. The elderly are shipped off to a euthanasia facility called Happy
Isles Separation Center where they are finished off with the “Euphoric
Switch.” All those pushed aside by the corporate state live in misery and
poverty and are treated as a criminal caste.
More—whose ancestor was St. Thomas More, the writer of “Utopia”— and his
three paramours escape to the abandoned ruins of the local Howard
Johnson’s.
The faded Rotary banner still adorns the banquet room. It reads: “Is it the
truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better
friendships?” More and one of his lovers, Moira, sit on a moldering bed and
read “above the Gideon Bible” scrawled on the wall the words “For a free
suck call room 208.”
“I am surrounded by the corpses of souls,” says Father Rinaldo Smith, the
pastor of the tiny remnant of Catholics who refuse to join the American
Catholic Church. “We live in a city of the dead.”
“There are Left states and Knothead states,” Percy writes—Knothead being
the
new name of the Republican Party—“Left towns and Knothead towns but no
center towns. … Left networks and Knothead networks, Left movies and
Knothead movies. The most popular Left films are dirty movies from Sweden
[one depicted fellatio being performed in mid-air by two skydivers in free
fall on an outdoor two-hundred-foot screen.] All-time Knothead favorites,
on
the other hand, include The Sound of Music, Flubber, and Ice Capades 1981,
clean movies all.”
The Democratic Party is now the Left Party. The political agenda is
captured
in the acronym LEFTPAPASANE, which stands for “Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now,
Euthanasia.”
The elites, who live in well-protected gated communities, all get along
with
each other whether they are members of the Left Party or the Knothead
Party.
They are, like the Clintons and the Trumps, members of the same exclusive
club.
“The scientists, who are mostly liberals and unbelievers, and the
businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side
in
Paradise Estates,” he writes of the gated community in the novel. “Though
the two make much of their differences—one speaking of ‘outworn dogmas and
creeds,’ the other of ‘atheism and immorality,’ etcetera—to tell the truth,
I do not notice a great deal of difference between the two.”
“Paradise Estates, where I live, is a paradise indeed, an oasis of concord
in a troubled land,” More says. “For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad
way.
Americans have turned against each other; race against race; right against
left, believer against heathen, San Francisco against Los Angeles, Chicago
against Cicero. Vines sprout in sections of New York where not even Negros
will live. Wolves have been seen in downtown Cleveland, like Rome during
the
Black Plague. Some southern states have established diplomatic ties with
Rhodesia. Minnesota and Oregon have their own consulates in Sweden (where
so
many deserters from these states dwell).”
“People look and talk and smile and are nice and the abyss yawns,” he
writes. “The niceness is terrifying.”
In the novel’s raging culture wars, the political triumphs of the left
include removing the words “In God We Trust” from pennies. The Knotheads
enacted a law that required “compulsory prayers in the black public schools
and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama.”
An
exclusive private school, Valley Forge Academy—like the privatized
education
being implemented by Trump appointee Betsy DeVos—is “founded on religious
and patriotic principles and to keep Negroes out.”
Students in the universities, radical multiculturalists and moral purists
“are a shaky dogmatic lot,” Percy writes. “And the ‘freer’ they are, the
more dogmatic. At heart they’re totalitarians: they want either total
dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes
them unhappy is something in between.”
Percy is describing what Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death”—the
numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical death.
“Even now, late as it is, nobody can really believe that it didn’t work
after all,” Percy writes.
“
The old U.S.A. didn’t work! Is it even possible that from the beginning it
never did work? That the thing always had a flaw in it, a place where it
would shear, and that all this time we were not really different from
Ecuador and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just richer. Moon Mullins blames it on the
niggers. Hm. Was it the nigger business from the beginning? What a bad
joke:
God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the
apple of my eye; because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce
Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish
Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it
from strangers. But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you
Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and
finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had
to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you
because you already had passed the big one. One little test: here’s a
helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That’s all.
One little test: you flunk!
God, was it always the nigger business, now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683,
and hasn’t it always been that ever since the first tough God-believing
Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set
foot here with the first black man, the one willing to risk everything,
take
all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he
was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first
would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he
lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly
Visigoth-Western-Gentile-Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall
out,
turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.
