Appealing Ideas #3 - possibly
This is only a possibility, appealing though it is, because I'm not sure if it's an Idea or a Corporate Marketing Strategy for California(TM). This is how it goes.
Somewhere far across the Western Ocean, Beyond the Setting Sun as the bards used to say, lie (variously) Avalon, the Blessed Isles, Lyonnesse, The Isles of the Young, Valinor for my hobbit friends, or, to cut a long saga short, some form of Heaven-on-Earth often involving scantily-clad maidens (some of whom would eat you). I personally think that the persistence of this Idea of lands beyond the sunset is due to the folk memory of the rare, long interspersed but definite pre-Columbian visits to the Americas. We know the Vikings went there, the Polynesisans, the Pheonicians almost certainly, the Irish in the Dark Ages; as civilisations rose and fell (along with levels of technical development) here in Europe and Africa, so these expeditions of trade or colonisation were mounted.
There are enough "unexplained" human remains (peoples or races which shouldn't have been there at that specific time but inexplicably are, to the annoyance of antroplogists and the glee of Erich von Daniken supporters) to make it a fair working hypothesis (for me, at any rate); the problems would have been, I suppose, that it's is such a very very long way to the Americas, and once you got there, in your reed-boat with your Pheonician equivalent of metal key-rings of the Eiffel Tower and I-went-to-Athens-and-saw the-Acropolis T-Shirts, there wasn't anyone on a similar civilisational or technological level to trade with. The journey was too long and dangerous to make settlement a real possibility, until technology combined with population pressure and land-hunger here in Europe made it economical. So people came, had a look, thought "Nice people, nice country, but what can you get here you can't get cheaper in Massilia?" and forgot about the Americas again. But not quite; the memory of the Lands beyond the Setting Sun, the Blessed Realms, persisted in folk tales and folk memory.
So we're psychologically and culturally set up to believe in some kind of Paradise over the Western Ocean. This is why, I reckon, against all sense of reason and logic, we actually accept and even watch shows like "The O.C." I'm not singling this show out for any particular ingnominity, it's just a bloody good example of the genre and provides a handy title for this imaginary land - The Orange County. County, because this is obviously a small and exclusive Land, reserved for the Blessed; what kind of Paradise would it be if the hoi polloi were allowed to trample around throwing gum-wrappers and wearing Wal-Mart shoes? Orange because oranges need warm, lush, fertile land to ripen and grow, and that's what days are like in Paradise; lush and warm, with only the gentlest, softest sprinkling of summer rain (rainbow included) at convenient moments. And in this Blessed Land, The Orange County, live beautiful people, transcendent versions of ourselves, transfigured; yes, they have their moments of pain and confusion, but there's generally nothing that can't be worked out by "honesty" and "communication". We watch these beautiful avatars of ourselves grope through some moral dilemma or other, often hampered by their own touching naievety and inner shyness, until at last, in a blaze of glorious enlightenment the likes of which we can only dream of in our miserable lives, the simple Truth hangs limpid and transparent for all to see. There's always a moral, there has to be, for this is The Orange County, and even through suffering we gain access to our inner selves and our true emotions. There are "bad" people (although they're still beautiful, or at least very rich), but ultimately they only exist to point out the truth of the Moral and to set up the Dilemma in the first place.
I like this Idea because it gives me some kind of esoteric rationale for why so many people watch this kind of crap. I know why I do; I lost the remote for my bedroom TV, and if I'm Zenning mellowly on a Sunday morning I tend to just glide through those shows on autopilot until something I like comes on. Ultimately, I watch them because I'm too lazy to get out of bed and change channels manually, which says a lot about how sad my life has become of late. But the idea that millions (yes, that's millions) of otherwise normal intelligent people actually watch this godawful deadhead rubbish every week, that's quite scary. I just watched a brief snippet this morning of some show or other, and there was a woman at work wearing a bikini!! Please, introduce me to any woman on the face of this planet with the confidence to spend a day walking, sitting, standing, eating and going to the bathroom, in front of her colleagues, dressed in less fabric than it takes to make a decent napkin! If she exists, I want to meet her so that I can gawk. Who can she be, this Goddess who can sit on an office-chair without unattractively flattened thighs? Has she so throrougly waxed and depilated and coiffed that she's not worried about one single bodily or cranial hair? Is she, in short, made of plastic?
I've never been to California, which seems to be packaging itself as the New Improved Blessed Land, but I'm sure it's much like any other part of the Western world with, okay, better weather. Not everyone who lives in The Orange County is beautiful and inexplicably rich and has perfect teeth. What we're being granted is a brief glimpse into the supposed lifestyles of the planet's richest and most fortunate beings, the Princes of America, with the gentle subtext that they too suffer the slings and arrows etc., only with better haircuts. Here am I, lying in my bed with a joint and a coffee, having the only real downtime I get all week as a single mum; Sunday morning, when it's an understood convention for my daughter and I that Mama is going to be lazy and go back to bed after breakfast. Daughter watches a DVD in the living room of our tiny flat, I watch Friends and Hollyoaks on Channel 4 in the bedroom; we don't have a lot of money, my daughter and I, but already the electricity, the implied running water, the computer and the DVD put us in the top billion of this planets 6 billion inhabitants. I'm actually pretty grateful to be who I am, when I am and where I am, which is good, because otherwise when Friends morphed into Tales of The Orange County in whichever format it was being transmitted in (ugly strange oddbals are allowed in New York and Boston, but not in any of The Blessed Land incarnations I've seen yet), I'd probably get very depressed about not having a swimming pool or a therapist or (gods help me) and orthodontis.
I liked the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Californication" a lot; that's an Appealing Idea all in itself and Californication is a concept-encapsulating word I'd really like to have come up with myself. Oh well, we can't all be Oscar Wilde all the time. Still, it describes so well the brand image of the New Improved Blessed Land which is being packaged so successfully to us other citizens of the planet. It's pretty insidious really, when you put it together with the current Bush administration's Mission to democratise people back into the Stone Age. It would be so lovely, wouldn't it, to live in a house that outshone a Sultan's palace, drive a sleek car which only needed gas when you had a scene in a gas station, to be so beautiful and self-confident that even clothes are just gilding the lily. And we too could have that; The Orange County gives us something to aspire to, as all good Paradises should. I hate to think of how many women (and men) across the world are starving themselves and mutilating their faces and bodies in a doomed attempt to enter The Orange County; how many people are selling their souls and their bodies every hour of every day to live in that impossible, unsustainable Land. We all know, deep down, that it's a fantasy that has as much chance of actual existence as Fairyland, that in any case we'll never be rich enough or beautiful enough; a lot of us spend our lives (and lose them) trying, though. We even go to war for it.
I think the problem with The Orange County as a Paradise is simply this: money. It's a Capitalist Paradise; you can't get in just by being good or having faith or resculpting your face and your body, you have to be rich too. Obviously being white helps, if you don't want to spend your time in Paradise as the Butler, but even that isn't as important as being rich and having a swimming pool. A decent Paradise, the one which most religions get by on in one form or another, is open to all, providing you follow a certain ethical code - many of which, interestingly enough, actively encourage poverty in some form or other. Most of the really popular Paradises have no such thing as money, and are essentially pretty solipsistic; you, your soul, go to Paradise (who really believes they're going to the Other Place, after all?), and then good things happen to you according to your particular belief-system for all eternity. What you don't have to do, ever again, is wonder where your daily bread is coming from. In The Orange County, unfortunately, money (the lack of it and the love of it) is often both the plot and the moral; even when you've reached Transcendence, the ultimate expression of Incarnate Man, some shyster will still be trying to take it all away from you.
And then there's the above mentioned Other Place. Where do all the other 6.999 billion souls who never even make it to Central Casting go? It's the unfortunate flipside of having a Paradise; it has to be exclusive, if everyone went there anyway whatever they did, what would be the point of sticking to the rules? What would a Captialist Hell be like, I wonder? An eternity of working at Starbucks, paying off the interest on the interest of a loan you took out 6 years ago on a car that got stolen two weeks later because you left the keys in the ignition. So quite a bit like life then, but without the rare and precious good bits; except on Sunday mornings, maybe, when we could all watch The O.C.
Somewhere far across the Western Ocean, Beyond the Setting Sun as the bards used to say, lie (variously) Avalon, the Blessed Isles, Lyonnesse, The Isles of the Young, Valinor for my hobbit friends, or, to cut a long saga short, some form of Heaven-on-Earth often involving scantily-clad maidens (some of whom would eat you). I personally think that the persistence of this Idea of lands beyond the sunset is due to the folk memory of the rare, long interspersed but definite pre-Columbian visits to the Americas. We know the Vikings went there, the Polynesisans, the Pheonicians almost certainly, the Irish in the Dark Ages; as civilisations rose and fell (along with levels of technical development) here in Europe and Africa, so these expeditions of trade or colonisation were mounted.
There are enough "unexplained" human remains (peoples or races which shouldn't have been there at that specific time but inexplicably are, to the annoyance of antroplogists and the glee of Erich von Daniken supporters) to make it a fair working hypothesis (for me, at any rate); the problems would have been, I suppose, that it's is such a very very long way to the Americas, and once you got there, in your reed-boat with your Pheonician equivalent of metal key-rings of the Eiffel Tower and I-went-to-Athens-and-saw the-Acropolis T-Shirts, there wasn't anyone on a similar civilisational or technological level to trade with. The journey was too long and dangerous to make settlement a real possibility, until technology combined with population pressure and land-hunger here in Europe made it economical. So people came, had a look, thought "Nice people, nice country, but what can you get here you can't get cheaper in Massilia?" and forgot about the Americas again. But not quite; the memory of the Lands beyond the Setting Sun, the Blessed Realms, persisted in folk tales and folk memory.
So we're psychologically and culturally set up to believe in some kind of Paradise over the Western Ocean. This is why, I reckon, against all sense of reason and logic, we actually accept and even watch shows like "The O.C." I'm not singling this show out for any particular ingnominity, it's just a bloody good example of the genre and provides a handy title for this imaginary land - The Orange County. County, because this is obviously a small and exclusive Land, reserved for the Blessed; what kind of Paradise would it be if the hoi polloi were allowed to trample around throwing gum-wrappers and wearing Wal-Mart shoes? Orange because oranges need warm, lush, fertile land to ripen and grow, and that's what days are like in Paradise; lush and warm, with only the gentlest, softest sprinkling of summer rain (rainbow included) at convenient moments. And in this Blessed Land, The Orange County, live beautiful people, transcendent versions of ourselves, transfigured; yes, they have their moments of pain and confusion, but there's generally nothing that can't be worked out by "honesty" and "communication". We watch these beautiful avatars of ourselves grope through some moral dilemma or other, often hampered by their own touching naievety and inner shyness, until at last, in a blaze of glorious enlightenment the likes of which we can only dream of in our miserable lives, the simple Truth hangs limpid and transparent for all to see. There's always a moral, there has to be, for this is The Orange County, and even through suffering we gain access to our inner selves and our true emotions. There are "bad" people (although they're still beautiful, or at least very rich), but ultimately they only exist to point out the truth of the Moral and to set up the Dilemma in the first place.
I like this Idea because it gives me some kind of esoteric rationale for why so many people watch this kind of crap. I know why I do; I lost the remote for my bedroom TV, and if I'm Zenning mellowly on a Sunday morning I tend to just glide through those shows on autopilot until something I like comes on. Ultimately, I watch them because I'm too lazy to get out of bed and change channels manually, which says a lot about how sad my life has become of late. But the idea that millions (yes, that's millions) of otherwise normal intelligent people actually watch this godawful deadhead rubbish every week, that's quite scary. I just watched a brief snippet this morning of some show or other, and there was a woman at work wearing a bikini!! Please, introduce me to any woman on the face of this planet with the confidence to spend a day walking, sitting, standing, eating and going to the bathroom, in front of her colleagues, dressed in less fabric than it takes to make a decent napkin! If she exists, I want to meet her so that I can gawk. Who can she be, this Goddess who can sit on an office-chair without unattractively flattened thighs? Has she so throrougly waxed and depilated and coiffed that she's not worried about one single bodily or cranial hair? Is she, in short, made of plastic?
I've never been to California, which seems to be packaging itself as the New Improved Blessed Land, but I'm sure it's much like any other part of the Western world with, okay, better weather. Not everyone who lives in The Orange County is beautiful and inexplicably rich and has perfect teeth. What we're being granted is a brief glimpse into the supposed lifestyles of the planet's richest and most fortunate beings, the Princes of America, with the gentle subtext that they too suffer the slings and arrows etc., only with better haircuts. Here am I, lying in my bed with a joint and a coffee, having the only real downtime I get all week as a single mum; Sunday morning, when it's an understood convention for my daughter and I that Mama is going to be lazy and go back to bed after breakfast. Daughter watches a DVD in the living room of our tiny flat, I watch Friends and Hollyoaks on Channel 4 in the bedroom; we don't have a lot of money, my daughter and I, but already the electricity, the implied running water, the computer and the DVD put us in the top billion of this planets 6 billion inhabitants. I'm actually pretty grateful to be who I am, when I am and where I am, which is good, because otherwise when Friends morphed into Tales of The Orange County in whichever format it was being transmitted in (ugly strange oddbals are allowed in New York and Boston, but not in any of The Blessed Land incarnations I've seen yet), I'd probably get very depressed about not having a swimming pool or a therapist or (gods help me) and orthodontis.
I liked the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Californication" a lot; that's an Appealing Idea all in itself and Californication is a concept-encapsulating word I'd really like to have come up with myself. Oh well, we can't all be Oscar Wilde all the time. Still, it describes so well the brand image of the New Improved Blessed Land which is being packaged so successfully to us other citizens of the planet. It's pretty insidious really, when you put it together with the current Bush administration's Mission to democratise people back into the Stone Age. It would be so lovely, wouldn't it, to live in a house that outshone a Sultan's palace, drive a sleek car which only needed gas when you had a scene in a gas station, to be so beautiful and self-confident that even clothes are just gilding the lily. And we too could have that; The Orange County gives us something to aspire to, as all good Paradises should. I hate to think of how many women (and men) across the world are starving themselves and mutilating their faces and bodies in a doomed attempt to enter The Orange County; how many people are selling their souls and their bodies every hour of every day to live in that impossible, unsustainable Land. We all know, deep down, that it's a fantasy that has as much chance of actual existence as Fairyland, that in any case we'll never be rich enough or beautiful enough; a lot of us spend our lives (and lose them) trying, though. We even go to war for it.
I think the problem with The Orange County as a Paradise is simply this: money. It's a Capitalist Paradise; you can't get in just by being good or having faith or resculpting your face and your body, you have to be rich too. Obviously being white helps, if you don't want to spend your time in Paradise as the Butler, but even that isn't as important as being rich and having a swimming pool. A decent Paradise, the one which most religions get by on in one form or another, is open to all, providing you follow a certain ethical code - many of which, interestingly enough, actively encourage poverty in some form or other. Most of the really popular Paradises have no such thing as money, and are essentially pretty solipsistic; you, your soul, go to Paradise (who really believes they're going to the Other Place, after all?), and then good things happen to you according to your particular belief-system for all eternity. What you don't have to do, ever again, is wonder where your daily bread is coming from. In The Orange County, unfortunately, money (the lack of it and the love of it) is often both the plot and the moral; even when you've reached Transcendence, the ultimate expression of Incarnate Man, some shyster will still be trying to take it all away from you.
And then there's the above mentioned Other Place. Where do all the other 6.999 billion souls who never even make it to Central Casting go? It's the unfortunate flipside of having a Paradise; it has to be exclusive, if everyone went there anyway whatever they did, what would be the point of sticking to the rules? What would a Captialist Hell be like, I wonder? An eternity of working at Starbucks, paying off the interest on the interest of a loan you took out 6 years ago on a car that got stolen two weeks later because you left the keys in the ignition. So quite a bit like life then, but without the rare and precious good bits; except on Sunday mornings, maybe, when we could all watch The O.C.
posted by holojojo at 1:14 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home