Tranquilized by The Trivial

A life can be spent in avoiding confrontation with itself.  That phrase echoes in the very marrow of our bones.

Faces along the bar cling to the average day. The lights must never go out. The music must always play. (September 1, 1939. W.H. Auden)

Daily lives, culture, society--all is arranged for distraction, else people discover that they and the world are not as they want.  No deep reflection, no serious reasoning--avoid them at all costs, and that is easy as the purchasing power of a wealthy economy allows whatever it takes to keep the music playing, the action coming, the thoughts at bay.

Distraction serves the national agenda, both politically and economically, as it stokes material ambition and acquisition. Climb the corporate ladder, buy a fancier car, a bigger house, a faster boat. Is everybody happy?
Why, of course. We are prosperous, free, and the one buys the other. A bigger house, a newer car, are the hallmarks of liberty. It must be so, for its implications are everywhere.

And the lie of Authority 
Whose buildings grope the sky. (September 1, 1939)

The national agenda does not know what to do with inner experience. It is richer and more complex than The Simpsons' lives.

I once spoke with a woman from Denmark who told me that she found much talk of God, church, and country in the United States but could not find any real spirituality. She went to church on Sunday and found empty rhetoric and gestures. She observed hand-shaking, embraces, warm, lively chatter, but noted it was on the surface. The hymns, the social gatherings--all was lively and friendly enough, but something was lacking. Later, through newspapers and television she came to understand that the talk was self-perpetuating. It was what people did, an unexamined manner of speaking much better than silence.

Americana. Noun. 1) Things American. Curios, artifacts, themes. 2) That which has the characteristic personality of America. Traits and qualities which identify national character.

Don de Lillo's novel Americana is a masterpiece of the superficial. Despite that, death is everywhere. Fear pervades it.  Anxiety drives it. The main character, Dave Bell, narrates a story that slowly, inevitably, reveals his strategies of evasion even as he tries to film the heart of American reality. As he searches for America he deconstructs himself. Out to film the superficiality of American life, he reveals that he is also cosmetic, which Bell hides behind to ignore the terrible void in his life.

In Victor Frankl's  memoirs of a concentration camp, he remembered no delight. Inmates needed meaning to sustain themselves, and those who did were most capable of surviving until war's end. (Man's Search For Meaning)

If somehow a movie were made of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, it might play in Poughkeepskie, so long as it could be watched on DVD with a glass of chardonnay and from a hot tub.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
(September 1, 1939. W.H. Auden)

As the little child must be put to sleep by a lullaby, so
these men need the tranquilizing hum of society before they are able
to eat, drink, sleep, pray, fall in love, etc. (The Sickness Unto Death. Sören Kierkegaard)