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Volume CXXXII, Number 11 |
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The savage religion
GENEVIEVE CREEDON
COLUMNIST
My father says I am a rebel without a cause, because I believe in change. I am very cynical about change, but I believe in it.
At the program on Iraq before Thanksgiving, Professor Ghodsee suggested that change could begin if we stopped shopping. And people laughed. Is the idea so ridiculous?
Consuming is the great American pastime; it's even more than that-it's the American religion. And it feeds off of fear-fear that we don't have as much as the next person, fear that we don't look the way we're supposed to, fear that our appearance, our material goods, are an indication of our worth.
But we like shopping. We like consuming. We apparently like walking into stores so that we can feel completely inadequate viewing all the things we don't have and then wanting them. Shopping is about perpetuating fears and wants.
And we have been obsessed over the past year with fear, with the threatening world of which we are terrified. But we do it to ourselves every day. We are a culture of fear, obsessed with appearances, obsessed with expectations and what we are supposed to do.
This is a free country in which we scare each other out of the exercise of that freedom. And for what? So that we can perpetually be stressed about what we have or don't have, what we look like, what we're eating, what image we are perpetuating.
My father told me that I have no cause, because I want to change a mindset that people are quite happy with-one that is comfortable. And, I wonder, how comfortable is fear? How comfortable is it to judge and fear other people on the basis of superficial qualities like appearance and possessions?
Consumer culture is not just about our recreational shopping habits; it is about buying into ideas, consuming a mindset that may not even be our own. It's about intellectual and cultural hegemony-ceasing to recognize expectations and constructed roles as what they are, and believing instead that they are all there is.
I went home for Thanksgiving break with blue hair, and I was told that something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with me because I am not willing to buy into certain stereotypes and expectations. Something is wrong with m, because I will not allow myself to live a life based in fear. Something is wrong with me because I believe in change.
And I believe in change because the alternative is bleak. I believe in change because there is nothing else in which to believe, except fear. In his poem "A Sword In A Cloud of Light," Kenneth Rexroth writes: "It would do/ No good to say this and it/ May do no good to write it./ Believe in Orion. Believe/ In the night, the moon, the crowded/ Earth. Believe in Christmas and/ Birthdays and Easter rabbits./ Believe in all those fugitive/ Compounds of nature, all doomed/ To waste away and go out./ Always be true to these things./ They are all there is. Never/ Give up this savage religion/ For the blood-drenched civilized/ Abstractions of the rascals/ Who live by killing you and me."
It may do no good to write this either, but writing and language is how I believe in change, so I will write it. Change is about value and meaning. How can we not believe in it?
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