In such a world, simple human beings live like royalty or gods, but without either responsibility or reflection -- and they have even traded the infinite pathos of their lives for a bunch of froth and the illusion of relative omnipotence...
Well said. It seems to take cataclysmic events (e.g. 9/11) for people to feel any pathos, and this they try to "recover" from as quickly as possible. As if pathos were illness, abnormal, certainly inconvenient in day-to-day life.
Skeleton Keys (88 part two)salimondoSeptember 1 2005, 13:49:10 UTC
[continued]
To put it crassly, when the Episcopalians outgrew their religion back in the heady 20th century, the farmers were thrilled to wear the castoffs. Today's big media southern revivalism is a paper dragon compared to the kind of small town hellfire they could dish out a few decades ago. It's just threadbare Anglicanism for the mass market: vague feel-good loyalties, moral platitudes, a sense of self-satisfied election. And the horror of death. That's what the blue state types are fighting: their own shadow.
If I were a blue state strategist, I'd challenge the WASPs to pick up a little of the stark old-time religion that the red states have abandoned, the Wisconsin Death Trip. Ichabod Crane. Witches of Eastwick. Sharp-boned yankee gloom. The old southern gothic -- the American Gothic. The greats still understand this, and I think this is why Alan Ball and Tony Kushner still do such achingly good work on the tide of bulimic explusa, and in the old days why Norman O. Brown and the boys had such ecstatic power. It's about death
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Well said. It seems to take cataclysmic events (e.g. 9/11) for people to feel any pathos, and this they try to "recover" from as quickly as possible. As if pathos were illness, abnormal, certainly inconvenient in day-to-day life.
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To put it crassly, when the Episcopalians outgrew their religion back in the heady 20th century, the farmers were thrilled to wear the castoffs. Today's big media southern revivalism is a paper dragon compared to the kind of small town hellfire they could dish out a few decades ago. It's just threadbare Anglicanism for the mass market: vague feel-good loyalties, moral platitudes, a sense of self-satisfied election. And the horror of death. That's what the blue state types are fighting: their own shadow.
If I were a blue state strategist, I'd challenge the WASPs to pick up a little of the stark old-time religion that the red states have abandoned, the Wisconsin Death Trip. Ichabod Crane. Witches of Eastwick. Sharp-boned yankee gloom. The old southern gothic -- the American Gothic. The greats still understand this, and I think this is why Alan Ball and Tony Kushner still do such achingly good work on the tide of bulimic explusa, and in the old days why Norman O. Brown and the boys had such ecstatic power. It's about death
Reply
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