Tears again

It kills me. It kills me. In Don Delillo’s Underworld, he has Lenny Bruce giving a performance during the Cuban Missile crisis about JFK’s speech on TV, and he says:

"Kennedy makes an appearance in public and you hear people say, I saw his hair! Or, I saw his teeth! The spectacle's so dazzling they can't take it all in. I saw his hair! They're venerating the sacred relics while the guy's still alive."

And he punctuates his monologue with a “line he’s come to love: we’re all gonna die!”

That was back when superman first came to the supermarket. The monster was just being born back then, and it didn’t seem at all like a monster, it seemed like art: those Esquire writers, like Norman Mailer, going beyond the surface scrim of politics to contact with knowing fingers the Siamese twin tie between the larger than life personality and the larger life at large, the semiotic encoded in the statesman’s gestures, his suits, his dislike of hats… And so this new way of writing about politicos, writing about them as though they were characters in a novel, was born. Born just as the novel was dying out as a dominant aesthetic form – cut out the middleman, make your own in living breathing flesh and blood characters, hire consultants to do it, and then raise up a brood of commentors whose perceptions are as predictably shallow as their upbringing, a background in which was omitted all history, languages, nights of the soul, empathy, imagination, knowledge, and loose this whole dire bestiary on tv and in the papers as a permanent chorus, giving us ever thinner narratives, novels in which Superman gradually lost the irony and became an action movie figure, President Mission Accomplished, and in which now the emphasis was all on the hair, the cleavage, the tears – because this brood weaves novels that will never reflect the sad state of our prosperous days. These are the days when democracy is giving birth to feudalism, to syndromes ong thought to be long extinct – mercenary armies, torture, an executive claiming more divine rights than Charles I ever dreamed of. Accompanying it is the slugs orgy of outrage 24/7, the cretinorama by which all the information by which one could make an informed choice about anything – drugs, cars, toothpaste, politicians – is utterly waylaid in a maze. As our lords and masters intended it to be – make the world hazy and issue credit cards, that’s the plan.

The continuing ‘controversy’ about Hillary Clinton’s tears hurts so bad it is going to make my balls drop off. Nobody gives a flying fuck, except in TV toyland. Oh, it isn’t that sentimentality and mushiness should be off the radar as far as politics is concerned. I propose we do talk about it. I say, let’s talk about the worst, the bloodiest, the most malign sentimentality of them all, which is called toughness. It is the silence the boy substitutes for calling for his mommy. And soon it hardens delightfully over the tyke. Oh how they love toughness, the media Heathers, oh how it makes them cum cum cum all over their peashooters. Of course, the funny thing is that the toughness they sentimentalize about is projected on such amazing, bilious old physical wrecks like Fred Thompson or John McCain. On the other hand, the Ur-gesture of toughness – going into a convenience store and blow the head off the cashier, for instance – is all too yucky. Oh, that scares them so much that they desire even tougher men to lock those tough boys up. So it is tough and tougher, a simp’s progress down the road to the pit. And all that fucked up toughness is unmoored. It is part and parcel of the whole unmoored emotional landscape that has to float above the wasteland created by the corporation and the state, it’s a clip joint sentimentality designed to get men and women down down down on the totem pole to look up and admire, as their heroes, the men and women who systematically plunder them, who contrive their vulnerability, who pride themselves on gambling with the lives of the feebs’ and rubes’ children. They are tough, those who build, cell by carcinogenic cell, the environment of disaster into which we are collectively drifting.