Celebration

Discovering how "unreasonable" I'm becoming…*

Engulfed, vine charcoal on paper, 34” x 52”

Another post that had to sit a bit before I could complete it.

Written the first week of December.

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This evening, early as it comes this time of year, we had to turn up the music to drown out the fireworks our town now trots out at every excuse. Today? The echoing retorts as explosions fill the sky in early December 2023…. What could they be celebrating?

The lighting of a tree recently killed and stuck in the ground covered with lights and baubles of plastic…. The beginning of that Holy Season….

Oh, you might start to feel a little queasy…. I was. They’ve really upped their game. These had deep, ground shaking “low end.”

But then, you’d be totally missing the point of celebrations in the US at this point in history.

The Holy Season they celebrate was born on Madison Avenue, cross-pollinated by the recently, at that point in 1946 no longer employed theorists, strategists, and staffers of The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

The only connection with what could not possibly be called that anymore, the Holy Land, would be that it has been all wrapped up in this new religion. This religion worships death and venerates destruction. Filled with converts and lapsed members of all the previous religions. Most importantly it celebrates Whiteness, a condition of holiness that one must be born into…. I almost forgot, this religion does allow for certain “buy-ins.” If enough money changes hands Whiteness can be bought…, for a while at least. Look at Britain’s Tory Government, or the ranks of Post-Trump hopefuls and lackeys of the current GOP….

This religion is the Church of Consumption.

Writing those words, the feeling that having a post at the end of 2023 wagging a finger at “consumption?” might be a bit weak tea faded and was replaced by the certainty that this is the right way into what’s been consuming me lately.

Consumption. What a difference a century makes in what we might mean by it. In 1923 it still conjured a deadly, incurable disease. By 1946 it grew to mean Progress!™ and Growth!™. By 1989 that meaning was getting a harder edge. The End of History!™ and Morning in America!™…. In this century it became an almost trite rebuke against The Consumer Culture. It may soon, once again be used to refer to that same, once again becoming incurable, deadly disease….

In the present moment, it does feel like we’re passing through another turn of the old and well-worn meaning of Consumption.

What does consumption look like in The Celebration Season of 2023?

The moment I heard tonight’s fireworks it became clear. Consumption now means; not to its critics, but to its devotees; the destruction of anything that might have once seemed sacred; the unapologetic, the vigorously unapologetic, consumption of the self in a self-immolation of hatred and fear. An earlier time would have called it the consumption of one’s soul. By the devil, or Hell’s Fire…. To us, maybe…, one’s humanity?

You know who doesn’t celebrate fireworks? Besides most of those who have actually been under fire. And those of us who can’t stand the hollow, empty stare that is the hulk of what remains of awe. The husk of a sentiment that for most of existence was brought on by simply looking up at a truly dark, night sky. It is every other sentient being that still manages to stay alive despite all our best efforts.

We didn’t just turn up the music to protect our sensibilities. We did it to help calm our dog. Our resident descendant of the Iberian Wolf. Stand-in and intermediary between us and the rest of the living world, both for those in the past and those still alive in this lingering present. She hasn’t lost all sense. She understands that anything that makes that much noise must be dangerous. Who were we to argue?

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Sporadic dawn shotgun blasts, singly or in volleys up to the “legal” maximum…, five? greet us on our first walk of the day from October through December. Hunting, something that has taken place since there were organisms that learned to engulf nutrients concentrated within the bodies of other organisms, something at the core of life, now reduced to an expensive experience to be consumed; along with the tens of thousands of dollars worth of boat, motors, and gear; so that these celebrants might spray the marsh with lead pellets as they try to kill some of the ragtag fragments, no more than a dozen or maybe two “waterfowl” their government and our beloved institutions deem hunt-able for a fee.

Note: Just last week I saw one of these rigs parked at the local Stop & Shop. Sixty feet long, a camouflaged mini PT-Boat on a trailer behind a giant black pickup truck. A camouflaged 200 HP outboard behind and a nest of carbon fiber shooting punts arranged on deck. The entire aesthetic unabashedly paramilitary to the point of mercenary worship. The message, “This is just practice. What we really want to do is hunt you….”

A further note… This parking lot was bulldozed, carved from the back of what had been the Narragansett’s great summer village on the edge of this once great Salt Pond, salt marsh. Our own version of the way settlers don’t just “replace” those they conquer, but insist on erasing any vestige of their memory from sight.

Tonight’s celebration, the contractually obligated full thirty minute barrage, with Finale, celebrates this wonderful “Right” to kill. The ducks and geese. The tree blazoned in plastic. Funny how when it’s finally time to clear out the old decorations there’s just not that much to throw away. It just disappears….

It celebrates the violence that got us here. It celebrates the violence ongoing, perpetrated in our names. It celebrates the entire orgy of destructive consumption, now more vigorously, more enthusiastically deployed than ever. The fact that it is death, destruction, wholesale violence and murder, and that this can no longer be “innocently” denied; is at the heart of these celebrations. And this December, its Advent tallied in the mounting thousands of deaths carried out for the unapologetic soothing of the consuming fears of the guilty and powerful that always end up being turned against the guiltless and poor.

In so many ways this is an old story. What makes it so different in 2023?

There is nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide one’s culpability, “Hell, it’s like Whiteness is a crime?” These complaints openly made. The incredulity looming behind the dropping facades. The growing realization that it doesn’t have to be a Swastika…. Any runic geometric form with past holy precedents will do. Any field of stars and stripes….

These are times of revelation. The certainty that this is so, coming only lately and as a big surprise to someone never confirmed and never celebrating the religion that has stood on the call for such a time. They had other reasons. Their sickest and most perverted followers today in their millions have their reasons too…. It just seemed the term was fully debased.

I should have taken that itself as a sign…. At the heart of my lifelong inquiries has been the necessity to carve back meaning for an entire debased and toxified language. The depths a term has fallen to is a symptom of how badly we need to look at what it might possibly mean when seen from outside the current Edifice of Thought….

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*Meanwhile the “reasonable” ones are continuing to find excuses for genocide. Some with bombs and some with Progress!™. Actually, they are the same people and the celebrate two sides of the same Will to Destroy….

I’m discovering, in this time of revelations, just how unreasonable I’ve become. I can no longer not see the way the “little things” we take for granted: lawns, asphalt, nick-knacks, the entire hunger for “normalcy;” embody the foundations of this Will to Destroy.

What is this Normality!™ everyone seeks to reestablish?

How far back does the error go?

How deeply ingrained are these toxicities embedded in the roles and identities we insist on maintaining?

What does one do when the realization that what passes for a culture, all our “traditions,” the habits we rely on; constitute a Death Cult?

The alleged sanctity that powered the American Century!™ is proving itself to have been sanctimonious bullshit. All of it.

Histories of the Twentieth Century claimed it as a time when the righteous lined up against evil and prevailed. Then they celebrated. Who wouldn’t?

What started as gut-feelings that something was not quite right. After all, we grow up immersed in the stories surrounding us. It takes a lot to get us to even consider questioning them. Unless we are in some way precarious, either subject to dangers within the personal sphere and, or, outside the hegemony; because no one maintains that we have any entitlement to join in the charade…. What is now impossible to ignore – and not because of any rhetoric, not because of any propaganda or marketing message, but because the veils are dropping, the violence more and more unapologetic, the celebrations of it no longer hidden – This culture, as it exists within the lives and the works of those who still pay it allegiance, is totally corrupt and totally destructive. Every action, activity, attitude it celebrates and encourages is a celebration of destruction. One wants to say of death, but as we find daily in the lexicon of the enablers, the abstracting away of murder and willful killing with passive terms twisted almost beyond recognition have become the latest and most egregious mangling of language, “

Tonight, New Year’s Eve, I fully expect to have to go through this ll again….

What a time to celebrate….