When I visited San Francisco seven or eight years ago, I got a taste of how pornographic (or like the internet) the world had become. On a block of The Mission I visited a store that sold only American-made goat’s cheese. Next to that was a spot selling only dark chocolate, a whole crew of oddly dedicated kids in Oompa Loompa outfits making it for you on the spot. Next to this was,“The Spoonery” (or some such) which curated handmade wooden spoons. While the snark in me wanted a hardware store that sold only screws—“Oh no, sir. For nails go across the street. Just step over all those homeless people and you can buy all the bespoke nails you need”—going from one such specific to the next felt all too much like looking through someone’s search history.
Actually, I approve of this arrangement over the Walmart model. That is, as easy as it is to make fun of tech money digging ever deeper into niche so as to satisfy itself, the actual “real-space” future will be better served by streets of individuated craftspeople than of homogenizing corporations. I’d happily pass by nine cobblers to get to the one I like (as I do with coffee places) not because I care all that much about getting just the right shoes (slightly less true with coffee) but because people need things to do and making shoes (or coffee) is a lot more satisfying than stocking shelves at a big box store. Unfortunately, my model of a world of middle-class folks enjoying life making things does not produce the obscene wealth that comes with, say, owning Nike or Starbucks.
But anyway this is all a long roundabout to my actual subject, which is to follow up on Karl’s comment of a few days ago, when I wrote about the shooting in Nashville. His comment I recommend to you not only for his quoting Susan Sontag but for what he says himself. “Society as spectacle” (Sontag) and our theater of “mass bloodletting to excise societal demons” in which “commando cops respond by performing the divine retribution of a sanctimonious God by proxy” (Karl) pulls together much of what I was trying to say about gun culture and religion.
About its pornographic element, though, and thinking of Karl, I here add a point informed by my San Fransisco experience.
What is pornographic about the now is not just or even primarily how lurid our culture is. (“If it bleeds it leads,” as Rich wrote to me). Violence and stupidity and depravity will seek out their prurient zenith and may have come closer to doing so today than ever before. But what’s worse, or makes these extremes so possible, is how we can all dial up the extreme of what we want all the time. Ameican-made goat cheese? Sure. An endless gang-bang? Just gotta Google it. My fantasy of carnage? Look, there it is.
One thing I keep coming back to in these discussions is the lack of commentator (Sontage among intellectuals, say, Cronkite amongst the rest of us) whose voice could sway one to a civilized act rather than a primal one. (And what is more primal and anti-civilized than I must get now what I want?)
Another is that dialing up exactly what you want all the time leads to a scar in the vein of satisfaction. More, more, more. Always the next fix of info-enter-training transmission. Again, though, this is a different kind of “more” than came with television. Look again at the end of the Sontag Karl quotes:
. . . it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."
True enough for its time. But with the internet, those who could not patronize reality via television (though perhaps they were escaping it) now have the luxury of dialing up how they want that reality to look and sound. Everyone with a phone can manage their own little church of exclusion, whack off at their own podium of righteousness, and transmit their info-enter-tainment.
There is a lot to say, in other words, about what makes a culture more or less healthy, and we—or I—can play the Sontag game in this space, though less well obviously, of essaying what it all “means.” Yet let us (or me) not be too clever either. Every crassness, stupidity, and technology available in America is fully available in Japan too. And Japan has one gun death per capita for every thousand in America. One for every thousand.
No analysis is more important than the unshakeable truth that America loves guns and is sick with guns. Everything after or to the side of that is intellectual exercise or, perhaps, its own kind of smut.
A few days ago, when I started thinking about responding to Karl, Nashville still mattered. It no longer does. In the life of a news cycle that needs something far more spectacle-like to last, merely a few killed won’t do, even if it is a trans person at the trigger, a church school that gets shot up. Besides, Mr. Trump’s indictment would have pushed even a greater catastrophe from the spotlight. Mr. Porn himself now assumes his rightful spot in the culture. The assent of the primal he embodies is the orgasmic equivalent of the lowest common denominator, as impossible to purge from who we are now as the blood at Uvalde and Sandy Hook. To our collective and ongoing shame, we cannot get rid of the guns or get him off our god-damned screens.
Excruciating.