The search for meaning, political and otherwise.

Via “Children of Our Age,” by Wislawa Szymborska, and the (oft-quoted) “The Culture of Narcissism” (again!) by Christopher Lasch.

“Children of Our Age,” by Wislawa Szymborska

We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
and though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

Does the political provide us with meaning? Or are we are the ones tasked with bestowing politics, and thus, politicians (or any idea or person, for that matter) its value?

Watch any party convention—Republican and Democrat alike—and it might prove the former true, with its pure spectacle and bedazzled pageantry, its nauseating optics, its cultish sense of belonging. Politics give us meaning, a value system, an identity.

Less than a week ago, a bullet perforated Donald Trump’s right ear. If said bullet had traveled only an inch or so left, it could have pierced through the side of his skull and tore into his brain matter with devastating consequence. A terrifying and historic moment, indeed. According to video from the scene, the first bullet clipped the outer contours of his ear and his hand reflexively went up to investigate, found blood. As he registered more bullets were flying—a surreal experience that could only rely on instinct, as the brain would need time to catch up with reality—he collapsed to the ground for safety, as Secret Service bodies swiftly formed a circle around him. The entire event lasted mere minutes before the shooter was taken out and the bullets ceased.

But what came next is most intriguing. As officers continued to form a human barrier around him, in attempt to shield him from any residual danger, they began to lift him to his feet, to whisk him off stage, when Trump defiantly looked out into the crowd and raised his fist. It was an unbelievable act of consciousness as fresh blood trickled from ear to cheek. The cameras flashed, the crowd cheered.

What we didn’t know at the time was that, in the background, a civilian proved not so auspicious, struck by errant bullet—the man’s death was supposedly instant, hopefully painless.

***

It’s hard to believe that any politician under such existential duress would be so trained in abject self-consciousness, so one with the abstraction of his own image, that his second or third impulse after being shot, after the initial, more uninhibited reaction to the tangible reality of being shot, would be to consider the image of being shot. I suspect he’s not the only one of us who would hold such a proclivity. Perhaps the shiny global panopticon we built to keep ourselves in check has officially overridden any necessary or evolutionary biological system of self-preservation. Stay alive is swiftly followed by don’t look stupid while doing so. Failing at the latter might prove more damaging to the self. Because there are cameras!

In Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, he described an increasingly theatrical and illusory political sphere devoid of meaning, a “politics as spectacle.” The root, he argued, was traced back to advertising, which became, in the early 20^th century, the most useful iteration of propaganda. In a larger “society as spectacle,” the worker became most economically useful as a prime and valued consumer. Lasch wrote:

In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life.

Worse, this spectacle of loneliness, of isolation, this construction of need meant to drive consumption not only worked to strip society of deeper meaning, but stole away the individual autonomy to reject such a society. In a self-closing loop, it “…upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion.” Even uprising is rendered moot. “When the images of power overshadow the reality,” Lasch argues, “those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.” In a system where one is incapable of producing real change, left with no clear channel for autonomy or opportunity to better one’s societal conditions, even protest risks becoming a theatrical display without meaningful end.

This is made most clear on social media, where internet activism tends toward a theatric without solution. If nothing else, this spectacle of activism has rendered even our most sincere attempts to raise consciousness—mine included— to be viewed as disingenuous, ineffective. And in the end, any sincere concern, bookended by targeted ads.

The replacement of deeper meaning with its representational image has seeped into every aspect of society but is most notable in politics. Lasch perceived politicians as early as Kennedy and solidifying with Nixon as reliant upon the ensuing distraction and confusion that spectacle brings, by using language as a medium not to convey truth or authority, but to sound true and authoritative. A superficial image of leadership usurped any actual success or failure of leadership. Lasch explained,

Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality.

The year was only 1979, and Lasch proved to be a prescient social critic. He foretold our contemporary reality, predicted the flattening of all experience and feeling into commodity, which was only quickened by the proliferation of social media and its hollow promise to liberate, to give voice. The internet as a whole carpentered as just another market for corporation and consumption, constructed as the crudest offshoot of raw capitalism. With our behavior now easily aggregated into data points, we are more readily manipulated, especially by politicians.

***

Last Saturday evening, while enjoying an early dinner with friends, the phones kept pinging. Someone had to check. “Sorry… I have to interrupt, because apparently…someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump?”

More shocking than the statement itself was how little we were moved, not because we didn’t hold empathy or wished death or harm upon him, but because we were so deeply accustomed to news of violence and spectacle. Anyway, he survived, so dinner resumed, unfazed.

***

When I ask colleagues or friends who they are voting for in the upcoming election, and most importantly, why, their logic and motivation remain notably unintelligible. They can rarely relay a policy they find moving or important, and if they do, it’s usually an abstracted version, a vague idea.

People prefer to define themselves politically by opposition, in relation to the other side. Those on the Left persistently warn of a “fascism” of the right, of an inherent threat to democracy. Meanwhile, Liberals have actively suppressed student protesters in support of Palestine, seeking to limit their speech online and otherwise. The Right persistently warns of a “socialist” and “communist” left that wants nothing more than to take inherent freedoms away (“freedom,” of course, remaining vague and undefined), conflating two varying ideologies as one and falsely labeling social democratic principles as, you guessed it, fascist. It would seem, then, that political language has been increasingly voided of fact and divested of meaning. If the other side is always fascist, communist, and/or socialist, without any real account of what those words and ideologies actually mean (and whether or not any leader is actually acting under these ideologies), how are we ever to truly hold anyone accountable for tangible policy? How might any of us determine what we desire, what we believe?

***

I immediately assumed that the assassination attempt was void of political meaning. Still, in the aftermath of the event, mass condemnations against political violence rang from every corner of Congress. Present Biden was adamant that “political violence” in America was, verbatim, “unheard of.” A few days earlier his administration resumed shipment of 500-pound bombs to Israel, who continuously enacts mass carnage upon Palestinian civilians, the death toll purported to be somewhere close to 52,000. A most staggering act of political violence.

Trump’s shooter, unsurprisingly, was reported to be a loner, intelligent and odd, an outcast relentlessly bullied. Whichever candidate and their subsequent politics he would aim his derision didn’t seem to matter; he had most recently registered to vote as Republican. Trump’s rally and its relative proximity was only, seemingly, a matter of convenience. It wasn’t political violence he was seeking, but spectacle, through which he hoped to secure meaning. He was aiming for eminence in the collective conscience, his name listed in the annals of history. The shooter knew he would likely die in the act, but his hope was that it would be a death in infamy.

The shooter’s attempts at wider recognition turned out only half-baked. The assassination did perhaps prove to be a minor factor in the election, having a sobering (likely, temporary) effect on political language, used as another tool of propaganda by both sides for different means. Attendees at the Republican National Convention were seen wearing faux bandages over their ears in solidarity; one can already buy a t-shirt emblazoned with Trump’s bloodied face, his defiant fist raised.

Though any personal significance he might have gained was short lived—as was his life. The shooter died, of course, but barely made a historical footnote. I had to look up his name to remember it. It was Thomas.

***

I’ve long pondered whether the internet truly changed human behavior as drastically as we think it has, or if it just extracted our most terrible traits—the very worst of our inclinations—and built them up like muscle, positioned them at the forefront to be more ruinous. The Culture of Narcissism might support such an argument, as it was written long before the proliferation of the internet and yet is easily applied to contemporary behavior.

What I think social media has done is further blunted deep thinking, severed our innate capacity for connection, urged us to continuously reflect a world right back onto ourselves. Brainwashing, isolation, and narcissism are nothing new, as Lasch described them well in 1979. The common thread is meaning, and it seems we already begun to lose it pre-internet.

Still, I’d argue we had more shreds of it remaining before 4chan and Facebook came around. The children are lonelier, and it’s probably the internet. Our culture is more violent, and it’s also probably the internet. We are consuming things and ourselves into oblivion, and it’s definitely the internet.

***

The question remains: is there a politics worth dying for? Historically, people died for all sorts of noble political causes, particularly the rights of others. But what if politics relinquished deeper meaning and now only serves to represent us in image? What if our beliefs are most likely to be used to present an idea of ourselves to a wider world, as opposed to tangibly shaping a better reality through policy?

The shooter who attempted assassination held no apparent deep-seated belief. He sought no greater meaning or purpose except personal renown. Still, the world has begun to place more meaning upon this act than it deserves. An innocent man named Corey Comperatore died that day, and I find his political leanings moot. He died attending a Trump rally, yes, but he died most meaningfully in an apparent selfless act: allegedly using his body as a shield to protect his family from harm. In the upcoming months and years it is they who will be left with the tangible remnants of this act, an unbearable grief. The loss of their father will burn holes in the contours of their memory; Trump cleaned his wound, and the world moved forth.

I watched Palestinian children die in vain for months without a political end in sight; their deaths deemed necessary, by the media and our government. This is unfathomable violence under the auspices of abstract “political” purpose: namely, to ensure another’s perception of “safety,” more accurately, to confiscate land, to erase. A Palestinian life, like any other, holds greater meaning than any political one. Currently, there are too many dead Palestinian children to name, but I imagine in the future we will construct a memorial, etch their names into a physical matter as a shrine, to make meaning of what will become a part of our horrific history. We will erect it in lame attempt to atone for what we actually caused, what we watched occur from afar, by image alone. We will give it meaning when it’s too late.

It could be said that violence, political or otherwise, maintains no inherent value, no true meaning until we imbue it with one. Its ultimate consequence of death rarely serving as an impetus for change—a life lost is a finite, corporeal end that risks being forgotten in time. In that regard, it feels obvious but must be stated: who and what we are willing to die for should be deeply considered.

Szymborksa reminds us,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.