How Coarse Can The Fabric Get?

I watched, like anyone else who regularly views news coverage on television these days, the photographs and footage of the last moments of Col. al-Qaddafi's life. How inured to graphic scenes of inhuman behavior have we become that many of us don't seem to recoil from such violent images? Sure, we've been viewing guys in those black hats, if we're baby boomers or older, being dispatched by the white hatted guys for more than sixty years on t.v., and in the movies for nearly a century, if we're nonagenarians and even older still. As a society we have lived through or learned of two world wars and countless others, read of these or similarly described sanguinary tales as well as the non-fictional ones in newspapers, periodicals, etc. and have seen or heard of protests, crimes, car accidents, plane crashes and all kinds of natural and unnatural disasters. This is simply life. Fact is though, we've soaked in enough images of brutality into our collective spongy gray matter to theoretically shatter the inner St. Francis of nearly all of us. Of course, we compartmentalize, intellectualize, rationalize and therefore are usually not traumatized by these indirect encounters with the deeply spiritually ugly, particularly with t.v. images of yore and their consistently sanitized depictions, and with atrocities journalistically presented in a similarly non-explicit manner until about the mid 1960s. Lucky thing that. Yet now (since, let's say, a convenient-to-designate-as-watershed film such as "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967) we seem to have become, with increasing regularity, unaffected by such scenes of unspeakable carnage. I believe this kind of numbness may be worse than having one's psyche reduced to a kind of quivering jelly by one's first experience of a shocking event after being societally sheltered in a gentler time.

I recall, it must have been about 1974, that while visiting the apartment of a friend from my then relatively recent high school days, his younger brother, perhaps in his early teens or even younger, entered the room we were in, energetically moving about the premises while clutching what appeared to be a small flesh colored rubber doll. He was a bit manic in his mannerisms and speech, but the gist of his pronouncements was this: "I'm holding a human fetus. Someone I know who works in a nearby hospital obtained it for me and I'm going to keep it!" To this day I don't I know if he was speaking the truth or not. I had never before (or since) seen such an alleged object. Was it just an imitation of the real thing, in fact made of rubber, or was it the actual remains of a person (or just a potential person, as some imprudently assert) that had been preserved in formaldehyde? Guess I'll never know. Whether this little snot nose was a con-man-in-training or not, the point of his exhibition was equally profoundly crude and disturbing wherever the truth lay. The zeitgeist of that period was (and I'm afraid, is) for me, encapsulated in that display that proclaimed "I can do or say or behave in any way that pleases me and I shall view anything or anyone I wish and rip any curtain aside because my will is the only thing I consider 'sacred.' Otherwise, that word is meaningless to me!"

Please do not misunderstand. The Qaddafis, the Saddam Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, the Mussolinis, etc., etc., all got (or failed to get in Stalin's and Pol Pot's cases) their just deserts. And I'm no foe of the death penalty nor do I subscribe to the old pacifist caution that violence only begets more violence. What I am saying is this: when there is no perceived horror in the world, how can there be any beauty and goodness in it? The avoidance of the mere squeamishness experienced by still a few of us, by not showing these images, is not what I am urging. There is no moral component necessarily in sparing one of this or in the physiological reaction itself, that it primarily is. After all, Himmler was reportedly often seen with his eyelids violently twitching along with other facial tics as he viewed the slaughter of Jews and others in the concentration camps.

I read daily a newspaper to my mother whose vision is quite limited. She's very fond of the gossip columns and with each passing month I've noticed the uptick (perhaps I should keep a log of the instances) in blasphemies and Anglo-Saxon words referencing sex acts and intimate body parts that are printed in these pathetic examples of reportage descended from the yellow journalism mindset of an earlier time. With the scantest amount of self-censorship, as in "f--k" and the like, they pollute further, what for decades now has been a world of print devoid of real reflection and serious human thought. Except for some incisive and insightful columns about the national and geopolitical scenes, there is precious little to recommend American journalism in the 21st century. With these particular words it seems increasingly merely a superannuated and endangered formality to delete a few letters of such when printing them, not dissimilar to "deleting" as it were, through the non-total nudity of pasties and g-string on a stripper at an establishment that, legally or not, authorizes its female performers/employees to nightly dispense at some dramatic moment with these vestigial articles of minimalist modesty. One expects "mainstream" newspapers like the one I read to very soon graduate to their version of final "denuding" via the end of deletions and other instances of journalistic forbearance.

How about the prospect of literature (and assumedly instruction) distributed to grade school children in N.Y.C. public schools that expounds on various aspects of sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual practices and their acts with specific, explicit and detailed explanations of the same? Is this not a coarsening of our social fabric also? I'd say it's the secular version of the early Christian hair shirt in terms of discomfort though it's light years from the concept of self-mortification. A garment of steel wool and fiberglass with an overcoat of top quality sandpaper (coarsest grade, naturally) is what the well dressed nihilist is wearing this season.

There are so many other examples, too numerous to recount all of them here, in hundreds of other spheres of our fragile social structure that reinforce the conclusion I am forced to draw about these repulsive but ineluctable facts. Western civilization is on the decline. Big time. Our Judeo-Christian world and the Hellenic traditions of Reason and democratic principles that were strengthened immeasurably by Anglo-American philosophies of self-government, have been under siege for a long time and is now worse than "on the ropes." Whether it's elements of a corrupt police organization defending ticket fixing, officers on duty making lewd gestures during an ethnic festival, gun and drug smuggling by some of these same professionals sworn to enforce and uphold the law, pension fraudsters, Wall Street double dealers ("Greed Is Good"), Occupiers singing the old tune of the fabled grasshopper: "The World Owes Me A Living", clergymen "Gone Wild", school teachers corrupting their students with sexual liaisons or even political diatribes masquerading as detached, objective presentations of facts, or an unending parade of politicians guzzling with abandon at the public trough together with public sector unions aided and abetted by a quasi-socialist administration in Washington, the truth is this: the guys in the black hats have returned from their graves and seem now impervious to our bullets of righteous indignation.

What to do? Keep our powder dry anew and for a while longer. Watch and wait and seek good counsel. There are men and women of good will still among us. The selfishness needs to end however. We needn't devolve into "useful idiots" as Marxism 101 teaches or to become an actual card carrying Commie bastard to arrive at a less unjust world. No, we need to re-learn the old verities and treat one's neighbor the same way that we wish to be treated. Our individuality and our privacy both need preserving also and we can defeat our sworn enemies, and more importantly, direct our wrath against their transgressions without forgetting that greatest love: agape. Even a Qaddafi was once "somebody's darling, some mother's son." Once we can cease to allow ourselves to exult over the license we gift ourselves with: that of dehumanizing our adversaries or "cockroachizing" them to unleash the vermin within ourselves, then we may start to become more human again and eventually fully so (no demonizing at all, grimly or exuberantly) with continued great effort, contemplation and prayer.