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COMFORT IN NUMBERS
We live in a world where the part you play becomes your life. If you make a living as a file clerk, you are a file clerk. If you make a living as a lawyer, you are a lawyer. Lately there's been much angry denial of this fact; people saying you are not your job, you are not your house, you are not your things. It is what it is: Denial.
We live in an age shaped by the cotton gin and interchangeable part. As hard as some groups fight for individuality and uniqueness, it's not something they really want - they're still buying the same products everyone else is buying.
There's an insidious comfort in numbers. We like knowing there are about a million other people in the world at any given time doing exactly what we're doing, using exactly the same thing we're using in the same way. Misery and mediocrity love company.
It is no different with less tangible commodities. Our personalities can now be broken down into disparate brands with the mass market mindset of the franchising revolution. Pick your flavor and stick to it.
We live in a world where, if you play a live fast die young rebel on the big screen, you become a live fast die young rebel in real life. Death pulls equal weight with the reputation earned in life. Not a new concept; this has precedence in everything from religious texts to epic poetry, but in America we've taken it to neurotic, self-aware extremes using the wonderful little toolbox of pop psychology.
There is an ultimate question which governs our lives, with far more power and subtlety than banalities like 'What's your stance on abortion', 'Do you believe in God', 'Are you Socialist / Capitalist / Green'.
The ultimate question is: Did you die in a manner consistent with the way everyone thought you lived?
If in the publice eye, or want to be, the answer had better be 'yes'. There's a country full of college freshmen gunning to be the next Jim Morrison, and they might have to pull themselves out of the bottle, off the ground, and unstick faces from coffee tables were they to discover he'd faked his death, lived to 70, and donated vast sums of money to charity with proceeds from The Doors royalty checks.
What a tragedy that'd be.
When our idols turn into liars the nation rocks in its cradle, and we squall like the infants we've become.
Give me a Rob Zombie who secretly loves Jesus, a Britney Spears who covertly graduated from Yale, a Rosie O'Donnell who's really a happy heterosexually-married mother of three.
Give me that and I'll show you some disillusionment that makes this generation's affectation of hip nihilistic ennui look like Little Debbie Oatmeal Cakes.
About the author
Torrey Meeks lives to write and writes to live. He also writes to pay the bills and to buy the gas for his motorbike.Read his American Newswire column
