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June 07, 2004

Facts Are Stupid Things

Posted by nerdling | June 7, 2004 03:03 PM

Hey, did you hear that Ronald Reagan died? I'm sure it comes as a shock but I want to do my part to console a nation blind with remembrance. Thus I extend my condolences for his family, and my sympathies to those who haven't yet come to terms with the fact that death doesn't make you a better person, it makes you a corpse. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I'd rather be honest than a hypocrite. After all, it wasn't my life. I'm already headed for my own reckoning. {Via Out of Focus}

Schadenfreude is a word most Americans should be well used to. After all, we are a nation of voyeurs, loving nothing so much as watching others being gagged and tied, humiliated, violated, or otherwise exploited. I can substantiate this claim by falling back on the old capitalism dictum of supply and demand, but anyone who sits down with American media of any sort—TV, radio, film—is guaranteed the opportunity to bask in the discomfort of others.

We are a nation of sadists and libertines who pretend allegiance to morality, grasping at the wisps of salvation as they sparkle and fade, all the while hungering to see Christ hammered to the cross again and again and again, peevishly wishing that we could really feel redeemed through that suffering. We delight in witnessing pain of all sorts, reveling in the the knowledge we are safe and unharmed, escaping from the rest of our pains through the degradation of others. I'm not claiming that no other nation suffers from these same tendencies—these are human traits, not strictly American ones—but it is reaching a fever pitch.

These behaviors are now so universally internalized here that depiction has become the aim of such behaviors rather than a by-product, a shift which is turning out more horrors all the time.