 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
When Feeling Bad Makes You Feel GoodSeptember 04, 2005 Just pulled my copy of Joanna Russ's The Female Man off the shelf and flipped pages till I found what I was looking for: "A Simultaneous Round of 'Ain't It Awful.'" Protagonist Joanna, from the 1970s U.S., and protagonist Janet, from Whileaway, have just arrived at a party, "the right and left hands of a bomb," as Joanna puts it. Among the conversations they listen in on is this one:
I went looking for "Ain't It Awful" because some carryings-on about the devastation of New Orleans brought it to mind. The devastation of New Orleans isn't all that much like the unwillingness of one's husband to appreciate the cleanliness of one's floor. What's similar is the wallowing, the self-perpetuating pity party aspect of it all. Lamentissa and Wailissa don't consider leaving their spousal clods; the pity-partiers don't consider that if the TV coverage is making them so angry, perhaps they should pull the plug? Any minute, smoke was going to start emanating from my nose and ears. It occurred to me, first, that these same people had carried on in a similar vein for days after the last U.S. presidential election, and, second, that by fuming about their foolishness I was playing the same game. I stopped reading anything posted by Lamentissa, Wailissa, and any of their close kin. I grabbed hold of the emotional wires that were jerking my knees and lighting my hot buttons and traced them back to their source. They turned out to be rooted, not surprisingly, in my simmering grief and anger at the slow-motion economic devastation of Martha's Vineyard. Unlike hurricanes, wars, tsunamis, and even presidential elections, slow-motion economic devastation doesn't lend itself to TV coverage. If it were televised live, it would be about as dramatic as watching grass grow or paint dry. The opening of a mall makes a big splash; the slow sucking of life from a small town's downtown doesn't get covered until the boarded-up storefronts catch someone's attention, and by then it's way too late. With slow-motion economic devastation, it's also much harder get a rant going at a big bad enemy. We were the ones who got suckered by those low prices, not George W. Bush. We built and sold and landscaped and cleaned the trophy houses that pushed up property values and property taxes and made it impossible for so many of us to live here. That's a significant payoff for playing "Ain't It Awful" with distant events: we can let ourselves, our nearest and dearest, and "people like us" off the hook and happily blame it all on people we never liked anyway. We can pat ourselves on the back for our elevated ethical and political sensitivities, while looking down our noses at whoever doesn't share them. We can even look down our noses at people who seem to be having a good day while the other people are dead, dying, and homeless in New Orleans. Clear away the specifics, and this outlook looks less progressive than Protestant, and a particularly dour, censorious, gloom-and-doom kind of Protestant at that. Anyone who sings, dances, or skips down the street doesn't grasp the seriousness of the situation, or the trickiness of the devil. The hardships of the storm-struck Gulf Coast, repeated third-, fourth-, and fifth-hand by avid TV-watchers, suggest the horrors of hell as evoked by fire-and-brimstone preachers. I can't believe that New Orleans, an emphatically non-Protestant city famed for its music and style and street celebrations, wants the rest of us to don hair shirts on its behalf. For decades "preparedness" has been a rallying cry for those who favor a big defense budget so we'll be "semper paratus" to fight commies, rioters, terrorists, and whoever threatens our supply of cheap oil. At the moment it's the liberals and lefties who are deploring the deterioration of the levees and the inadequate evacuation plans of New Orleans. The point isn't to defend the planning: by most rational accounts, it was pretty lousy. The point is that we have a hard time acknowledging that shit happens, and that sometimes it happens on a Brobdingnagian scale that makes even the best attempts at preparedness look, well, Lilliputian. Railing against the most obvious culprits can be satisfying, but the chances are that there's plenty of blame to go around.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||