Because You Never Asked

 

 

(5/09, Spain)

 

     (This is the third in a series of four including “Gonzalo Torrente Ballester”, “GTB and PCM”, and “Who’s Smarter Than GTB?”).

 

     The first quotes from GTB are taken from an essay called “The Scandalous Truth”. It is a response to a number of letters to the editor accusing him of being “scandalous” in criticizing the Catholic hierarchy and other hypocrisies of so called “Christians”. In his response, he almost seems proud of the accusation. “Christ himself was scandalous. And how could he not be if he was the Truth? All through history, the truth --- be it human or divine --- was scandalous”. And then, to further punctuate his assertions, he avails himself of one of history’s most militant atheist geniuses, Frederick Nietzsche. He explains how Nietzsche “measured the moral capacity of people by the amount of truth they could endure. The truth, for both individuals and whole societies, is unbearable when their souls are sick, that is, when they sacrifice the content for the forms, those forms that must be kept so that nobody is scandalized”.

 

     PCM speaks frequently about the devaluation of truth in American culture, most specifically in the essays “The Demoralized Zone (The DMZ)” and later in “Industrial Size Lying”, amongst others. In the latter, this idea of not being able to break with the forms is highlighted.

 

     GTB, in an essay about Barry Goldwater, cross examines the fact that many of Goldwater’s partisans consider him the “defender of Christian civilization”. Not being a fan of Barry Goldwater, he describes the one time Republican candidate for the presidency as a defender of racial segregation, of inequality, of a narrow form of capitalism, none of which adjusts too closely to GTB’s idea of Christianity. He then goes on to say, “that what we now refer to as ’Christian civilization’ would be better thought of as ’techno-civilization’ or ’capitalist civilization’, each of which would respond to reality far better than ’Christian’, which, judging from what we see, hear, and know, has very little relevance to contemporary ’civilization’”.

 

     One score and hundreds of essays ago, PCM began this series with an essay called “Christians”. It was that proverbial “first step” made famous by Mao Tse Tung, a prototypical bad guy in the theater of American “information”. What we refer to as information in Occidente is something both GTB and PCM expound upon fully in their respective works, but that will come later.

    

     In the aforementioned essay “Christians“, PCM finishes with the idea that Christianity’s “most cherished principle is a cheap and secure supply of oil”. Can it not be seen, dear reader, the close kinship of GTB’s remarks about “techno-civilization” and “capitalist civilization” and the “cheap and secure supply of oil” concept? I hope so.

 

     And the kinship finds even closer bloodlines. In the essay “It Is Still Not Time”, GTB talks about the almost unavoidable sociological tension created by the neo-liberal economic concept and the Christian religion it shares so much space with. “The autonomy needed by one’s economic life juxtaposed to one’s religious life is such, that many good faith believers must divide their consciences and behavior in two parts and loosen the ties between them to such extremes, that they all but disappear”. He finishes with this thought: “Our civilization does not live detached from God, but opposed to Him”.

 

     PCM, in such essays as “In God We Trust”, “Michael Chang or Christians Revisited”, “More On Religion”, “Christmas” and others, explores this spiritual-material conflict inherent in trying to live within the demands of both the capitalist system and the Christian religion. For both GTB and PCM it becomes a juggling act beyond the emotional possibilities of almost all people, one that dooms us to both hypocrisy and guilt.

 

     GTB, much like PCM, spends a good deal of time trying to unravel the mystery of the electronic media’s message, especially that 2,000 pound gorilla in the room, television. He understands what a powerful emotional tool it is and how it was a revolutionary change in the lives of human beings, just as PCM referred to it as the greatest propaganda tool ever known to man. GTB, in his essay “James Bond”, says, “naturally, I went to see a James Bond movie. There are phenomena one should take the time to understand, no matter how foolish they might be. Above all, when they mesmerize the masses, when, for good or bad, they have great influence”. How similar these remarks are to PCM’s in such essays as the series beginning with “Pornography”, where the “Pandit”, an Oxford educated Indian with a disdain for western culture, explains how he felt it necessary to understand “the enemy” as his reason to go to Oxford. Likewise, in the essay “Jerry Springer or Pro Wrestling Revisited”, the importance of this in depth perusal of our culture’s popular classes is emphasized.

 

     GTB goes on to talk about the amount of information or news this new electronic technology has made privy to all mankind. He contrasted this to the almost inexistent information available for mass consumption before these inventions and wonders why we are still so ignorant and naïve. In his essay, “The River Is Still Muddy”, he explains it thusly: “We have at our fingertips mountains of news that we either can’t interpret or lack interpretation of. Why? Because a good part of what we learn is meant not to reveal the truth, but to hide it”. PCM, in a whole host of essays --- in fact, so much so that he has devoted a voluminous category of his work to propaganda and such --- talks about media and its role in either dumbing down or leading the molten mass wherever the “powers to be” want them to go. In writing this essay, PCM was reminded of something Pablo Neruda, the legendary Chilean poet, once said. He felt people would be better off illiterate than reading the things printed in Chile’s most famous newspaper, “El Mercurio”.

 

     GTB spent a number of years in the late 60’s as a guest lecturer at the University of Albany, which is now referred to as SUNY (State University of New York) at Albany. I would guess his fragile relationship with the Franco regime made such a career move plausible. In any event, his impressions of the American Dream are a mixed bag that might best be described as uncertainty. In the end, he seems unconvinced, as if there is something not quite right here, in spite of the superficial, visible reality that seems so attractive. He talks about food that is ready to eat or pre-cooked; just boil it or put it in the oven, why slave away preparing things? Great idea --- but to his more educated tongue, everything taste the same. He goes on to ponder the American devotion to labor saving machines. “Here they use machines for everything. Why waste time? While the machine is working away, you can do better things, like, for instance, watch television. This is another machine, one that can be used to entertain oneself while awaiting death, one used to disguise a kind of collective boredom”.

 

     This idea of boredom being an American’s most dreaded enemy is a frequent visitor to PCM’s discourse.

 

     In an essay called “Anniversary of Cervantes”, GTB goes on to ask one of the most licit, perplexing questions of the post industrial or “information age”: “Why is it, with such wonderful means of communication, instead of elevating the people, they idiotize them”?

 

     And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the pith of the marrow, the quid of it all, the fulcrum over which the game will be won or lost --- isn’t it? It is the same as asking, how do we improve the human condition?

 

     For PCM there is an obvious response to GTB’s question and the fact that he knows it and GTB is somewhat confused is purely circumstantial. GTB was born in the early 20^th century in a country far from the vanguard of technological invention. TV was never a well anchored part of his reality although he did become familiar with it. PCM, being a charter member of America’s post war “baby boomer” generation, lived a far different reality. He grew up in the world’s first generation of TV-acclimated people, of people who took for granted the omnipotent existence of this amazing apparatus. After a whole lifetime of audio-visual immersion, the answer to GTB’s question is now “elementary, my dear Gonzalo”.

 

     What has defeated any enlightening abilities such wonderful inventions might possess, is the purely commercial nature of how they were set into American and eventually all of Occidental society. The obligation of private enterprise to make money, has subjugated enlightenment to what sells, and adolescent titillation is a far more vendible product --- with rare exceptions --- than most things that could lift the human spirit. What is even more tragic is the fact that the “molten mass” may be ignorant, but it is not stupid. If given the opportunity to be uplifted, it has as much physiological ability as any other strata of human life to do just that. But the exclusive commercial incentive of private media has gelded such a possibility.    

 

     But there is more. Such “idiotization” is an excellent propaganda tool for those at the top of the economic pyramid. It maintains a status quo built over a foundation of idiocy. How else can one explain such things as the war in Iraq? How else can one explain the health care situation in the United States? How else can one explain --- take your pick.

 

     But GTB is no fool. In spite of not having been formed in the television age, he eventually came to understand the game to perfection. Indeed, in his essay “Just the Necessary”, his brotherhood with the thinking of PCM becomes almost DNA perfect. In discussing the neo-liberal capitalism of contemporary times, he explains how humans “are beings that produce and consume, but a great part of the game is now seen manipulated by commercial propaganda, which orients our necessities to the demands of production”. This is a brilliant analysis that is really the direct opposite --- that is, production being oriented to our necessities --- of how most of us think things really work. He goes on to say a bit further on that “it’s logical then, in a society that is steadily evolving into no more than a simple game of production and consumption, that its educational systems might leave the individual defenseless before the means of communication”. He continues with a remark that pounds the bulls eye when one considers the rhetoric of post 9/11 America, or, even more, with that of the 2008 financial meltdown. “It is not far fetched to imagine a society in the not too distant future, where the idea of not consuming, or not buying, could be considered a sin or crime”.

 

     But the “coup de grace” lands on PCM like a splash of cold water on a groggy boxer. GTB, while explaining how we usually consider more complex societies, with the necessities they’ve created, as the more “civilized” ones, states: “At times, to reject is as significant as wanting. It is an indication of spiritual vigor and moral fortitude. We have arrived to an historical moment where we might have to decide if it is better to continue multiplying these necessities or to disregard some of them.”

 

     Dear reader, if you happen to not be one of the approximately 6 billion people (maybe 7 by now) who are unfamiliar with this dubious mass of philosophical patter, it should be obvious this just quoted statement of GTB is PCM in its purest form. It is Bogie and Bacall, Ruth and Gehrig, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. It is an intellectual meeting of the minds that mesh together like the inner workings of a fine Swiss timepiece. (Does anyone really need a fine Swiss timepiece?)

 

     I finish this series of essays with one called “Who’s Smarter Than GTB?”