{"id":108444,"date":"2018-04-02T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T11:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=108444"},"modified":"2018-03-30T16:18:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T15:18:55","slug":"disembodied-americans-and-the-crucifixion-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/disembodied-americans-and-the-crucifixion-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Disembodied Americans and the Crucifixion of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u201cThe existent, the body, disappears.\u00a0 We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks\u2026.Nobodies and no Necessity \u2013 for Necessity is the condition of the existent.\u00a0 It is what makes reality real.\u201d <\/em>
\n— John Berger, \u201cSteps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real body.\u00a0 To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten.\u00a0 The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread.\u00a0 To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Norman O. Brown, Love\u2019s Body<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>\u201cIf Marx were functioning today he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.\u201d <\/em>
\n— John Ralston Saul, Voltaire\u2019s Bastards<\/em><\/p>\n

***************************************<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Contemplation on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, 30 Mar 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why are so many Americans indifferent to the savage slaughter of millions of people around the world carried out by their own government under a long string of presidents? \u00a0\u00a0Why were they stone-cold silent during eight years of Obama\u2019s many wars and drone killings of which he boasted?\u00a0 Why are they silent in the face of the Trump administration\u2019s continuation and expansion of those wars and its push for a nuclear war with Russia?\u00a0 Why this incestuous turning in and away from the bloody havoc their government keeps afflicting on the world?<\/p>\n

And why all this denial while focusing on the pornographic media spectacles of Stormy Daniels (the porn queen turned \u201cAdult Film Actress\u201d), Monica Lewinsky, and a host of others paraded before the cameras to distract and entertain a population of spectators?<\/p>\n

I, like many people, wonder why.\u00a0 What follows is an attempt at an answer, with the focus of my thinking being primarily on middle to upper class Americans, for the poor and working classes have a hard enough time making ends meet and keeping alive themselves, since they are the victims of a domestic war waged by the same heartless ruling class that kills so many overseas.<\/p>\n

For when people lose touch with the physicality of life and embrace spectral images, mediated reality, and abstractions as real, they have stepped into a totally nihilistic world.\u00a0 A disembodied world. \u00a0When this is joined to a narcissistic self-preoccupation with one\u2019s own well-being and comfort, indifference to the suffering of others becomes the norm.\u00a0 This is the world of unreality populated today by so many Americans, who have grown progressively indifferent to the slaughter by their own government of people throughout the world \u2013 heaps of millions of dead bodies, blood, and body-parts everywhere.<\/p>\n

In \u201cSong in the Blood\u201d the French poet Jacques Pre\u0341vert says:<\/p>\n

There are great puddles of blood on the world
\nwhere\u2019s it going all this spilled blood\u2026.
\nmurder\u2019s blood\u2026war\u2019s blood
\nmisery\u2019s blood\u2026
\nand the blood of men tortured in prison\u2026.
\nWhere\u2019s it going all this spilled blood
\nthe earth that turns and turns and turns
\nwith its great streams of blood. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To the bodiless bloodless insouciant ones, however, the blood of \u201cothers\u201d is invisible. It is our<\/strong> lives that matter. \u00a0What is being done to these \u201cothers\u201d is of little consequence because it is experienced as an abstraction \u2013 unreal \u2013 as if it weren\u2019t happening, even as it is.\u00a0 And in a twist of fate straight from Greek tragedy, those who embrace this delusion are in denial of the very real possibility that they too will be \u201cdisappeared\u201d by a nuclear war being provoked in their names.\u00a0 Having turned their backs on nature and the corporeal reality of all living beings, having denied the passion play that is life on earth for all people, having denied that there are limits to American hubris and the West\u2019s clearly insane and nihilistic push for nuclear war with Russia, they will pleasure themselves \u201cuntil the atom too bursts into flames,\u201d as Albert Camus warned, \u201cand history ends in the triumph of reason and the death agony of the species.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an incisive article, \u201cIt is Us<\/a>,\u201d John Steppling recently asked a series of Tolstoyan questions about the ruling class (and by extension most Americans): \u201cWhat does the ruling class want?\u201d he asked.\u00a0 How much money do these people need?\u00a0\u00a0 Is it power they are after with their mad quest to gobble up the world and slaughter as they go?\u00a0 Power for what?\u00a0 For more money?\u00a0 Why are they provoking a nuclear war with Russia?\u00a0 Are they simply crazy?\u00a0 Don\u2019t they know they too will die?\u00a0 And what about all those affluent liberals and conservatives, the narcissistic bourgeoisie, the average person, are they all suicidal?<\/p>\n

I believe they think in their delusional way that the coachman will pass them by. They are living in the unreality that has overtaken so much of the Western world. \u00a0They believe they will pass.\u00a0 No failure for them.\u00a0 They won\u2019t die.\u00a0 They will \u201cpass on.\u201d\u00a0 They are different, special, they live in a fantasy of bodiless abstractions, even as they work on their bodies to go on and on, exercise and diet, pill after pill, supplements, dreams of running marathons at 98, body parts replaced as they do yoga poses to dreamy ethereal music in the safe surround of a warless environment where bombs and missiles are for the others in bloody bodies over there far away.\u00a0 The pornography of war out of sight and thought; the screening of pornographic titillation in everyone\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

It is generally assumed that the United States is a materialist society where the voluptuous life of bodily existence is affirmed and celebrated.\u00a0 Big breasts and bigger butts, skinny jeans and streaming sex scandals to the contrary, I think this is not true.\u00a0 American society has joined its Puritan tradition to instrumental reasoning and its go-go-get-it-done practicality to create a culture where the human body has become, like everything and everyone else, a thing to be manipulated \u2013 an instrument to be masturbated, a thing to be pampered, paraded, and presented in a society of looking-glass selves. Selfies in flight from others and human encounters where care and communion of consciousness lead one to love the world as one\u2019s body and to feel compassion for others far away in other lands who are being slaughtered by our guns and bombs. \u00a0And to say No, not in my name, not over my dead body.<\/p>\n

To burst the bubble of the self.\u00a0 W. H. Auden put it this way:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever view we hold, it must be shown<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Why every lover has a wish to make<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some other kind of otherness his own:<\/em>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet Americans pursue loneliness as if their mirror images were the world.\u00a0 Or the things they so avidly buy reflect who they are: interior decorating for the soul.\u00a0 Souls divorced from their instrumental bodies.\u00a0 With packaged and commodified consciousnesses, so many \u201cinteract with products\u201d these days, as they pursue constantly retreating phantoms; the social narcissism of images falling in love with their own images and reaching out to embrace their shadows.<\/p>\n

This is as far from eroticism as one can get, if one grasps the true meaning of Eros, the god of love, life, joy, and becoming, whose growth was stunted until his mother Aphrodite was oracularly told that \u201cLove cannot grow without Passion.\u201d\u00a0 And passion is a reaching out for others, not for oneself, or one\u2019s phantom image.\u00a0 The brilliant psychologist Rollo May summed up our situation by saying that when \u201ceros has lost passion,\u201d it has become \u201cinsipid, childish, and banal.\u201d\u00a0 And when the cult of technique and technology becomes a social addiction, feeling, passion, and individual identity is blotted out and, \u201cmirabile dictu<\/em>, we discover that the myth [of Eros] proclaims exactly what we have seen happening in our own day, eros, then, even loses interest in sex<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 Except on screens.<\/p>\n

Once the human body becomes an object of narcissistic preoccupation \u2013 its maintenance, presentation, coddling, etc. \u2013 it has become an instrument to be used, as do other people.\u00a0 The body remains but the human disappears, and the remaining \u201cinstrumental\u201d body is \u201cdisembodied.\u201d\u00a0 Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse in its multiple meanings is accepted as a \u201cmediated reality\u201d through so-called smart devices, we know that the era of humanoids has arrived, as Howard Beale so famously announced in the film Network<\/em> over forty years ago.\u00a0 Smart phones for dumb people; always in touch but never touching.<\/p>\n

To be human is to be embodied, incarnated, to love and suffer passionately, body and soul.\u00a0 Sexual passion and tenderness in the service of life, not death.\u00a0 Eros, not Thanatos. Passion for a suffering world and victims everywhere. \u00a0I think one important reason why so many Americans have turned their backs as their government crucifies the rest of the world is because they have lost their bodies not their minds, and in exchanging shadows on the wall for flesh and blood they have abandoned the world and embraced the unreality of things that a capitalist, consumer society proffers in lieu of life.\u00a0 And as so many great thinkers (Coleridge, Swift, Brown, et al) have pointed out, to try to rise above the body is ironically to equate the body with excrement.\u00a0 Norman O. Brown writes, \u201cThus the morbid attempt to get away from the body can only result in a morbid fascination in the death of the body.\u201d\u00a0 From this flows the narcissistic focus on self-preservation and the spending of one\u2019s life energies on the acquiring of dead things rather than the carefree letting go of one\u2019s love and care into the whole world that is crying out for redemption from an orgy of violence.<\/p>\n

Of course, the paradox of the disappearance of the living body into spectral images and things is the departure of the soul as well, the embodied soul.\u00a0 And a soulless country is a place where reality no longer exists and one can, for example, view Michelangelo\u2019s Piet\u00e0 <\/em>and think, \u201cWhat an amazing sculpture, how did he do it?\u201d but fail to feel heartache and rage that so many mothers across this planet are now weeping and cradling the crushed and crucified bodies of their children, victims of American weapons of war.\u00a0 Our weapons.\u00a0 Our wars.<\/p>\n

When will we dead awaken?<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.\u00a0 He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. <\/em>A former college basketball player, he teaches the sociology of sports, and writes on a wide range of topics.\u00a0 His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contemplation on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, 30 Mar 2018<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}