America into one big Disneyland. And this is only one way we have stripped the very face of America of any content, any reality, concentrating only on its power as image. We also elect images, groom ourselves as images, make an image of our home, our car, and now, with aerobics, of our very bodies. For in the aerobics craze the flesh becomes a garment, susceptible to fashion. So it becomes less our flesh, though the exercise may make it more serviceable. It becomes “my” body, like “my” car, “my” house. What, within us, is saying “ my” ?What is transforming body into image? We shy away from asking. In this sense it can be said that after the age of about twenty-five we no longer have bodies anymore—we have possessions that are either more or less young, which we are constantly trying to transform and through which we try to breathe. that is a real cliff, except it’s not the cliff we say it is, so that the meaning of both cliffs—not to mention of our act of climbing—is reduced. As I look out onto a glowing city that is more than 400 years old but was built only during the last forty years, as I watch it shine in blinking neon in a desert that has seen the flash of atom' bombs, it becomes more and more plain to me that America is at war with meaning. America is form opposed to content. Not just form instead of content. Form opposed. Often violently. There are few things resented so much among us as the suggestion that what we do means. It means something to watch so much TV. It means something to be obsessed with sports. It means something to vacation by indulging in images. It means something, and therefore it has consequences. Other Iv l edia is the history that forgives,” my friend Dave Johnson told me on a drive through that same desert a few months later. We love to take a weekend every now and again and just drive. Maybe it started with reading On the Road when we were kids, or watching a great old TV show called Route 66 about two guys who drove from town to town working at odd jobs and having adventures with intense women who, when asked who they were, might say (as one did), “Suppose I said I was the Queen of Spain?” Or maybe it was all those rock ’n’ roll songs about “the road”—the road, where we can blast our tape-decks as loud as we want, and watch the world go by without having to touch it, a trip through the greatest hologram there desert I thought of what Dave had said. “Media is the history that forgives.” A lovely way to put it, and quite un-Western. We Westerners tend to think in sets of opposites: good/bad, right/wrong, me/you, past/present. These sets are often either antagonistic (East/West, commie/capitalist, Christian/heathen) or they set up a duality that instantly calls out to be bridged (man/woman). But Dave’s comment sidesteps the dualities and suggests something more complex: a lyrical impulse is alive somewhere in all this media obfuscation. It is the impulse to redeem the past—in his word, to forgive history—by presenting it as we would have most liked it to be. It is one thing to accuse the media of lying. They are, and they know it, and they know we know, and It’s not that all this transformation of realities into un- or non- or supra-realities is “bad,” but that it’s unconscious, compulsive, reductive. We rarely make things more than they were; we simplify them into less. Though surely the process could— at least theoretically—go both ways. Or so India’s meditators and Zen’s monks say. But that would be to increase meaning, and we seem bent on the elimination of meaning. We’re Reagan’s Rangers, climbing a cliff cultures have argued over their meanings. We tend to deny that there is any such thing, insisting instead that what you see is what you get and that’s it. All we’re doing is having a good time, all we’re doing is making a buck, all we’re doing is enjoying the spectacle, we insist. So that when we export American culture what we are really exporting is an attitude toward content. Media is the American war on content with all the stops out, with meaning in utter rout, frightened nuances dropping their weapons as they run. is, feeling like neither boys nor men but both and something more, embodiments of some ageless, restless principle of movement rooted deep in our prehistory. All of which is to say that we’re just as stuck with the compulsion to enter the image as anybody, and that we love the luxuries of fossil fuel just as much as any other red-blooded, thickheaded Americans. Those drives are our favorite time to talk, and, again, America is our oldest flame. We never tire of speaking of her, nor of our other old girlfriends. For miles and miles of we know they know that we know, and nothing changes. It Is another to recognize the rampant lying shallowness of our media as a massive united longing for...innocence? For a sheltered childlike state in which we need not know about our world or our past. We are so desperate for this that we are willing to accept ignorance as a substitute for innocence. For there can be no doubt anymore that this society knowingly accepts its ignorance as innocence—we have seen so much in the last twenty years that continued on page 23 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989 7
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