Red Skies and Gnawing Questions

Was it just me, or did anyone else notice that the tongue-in-cheek references to ‘Armageddon’ and ‘The End of the World’ in Sydney on 23rd of September didn’t quite have their tongues completely in their cheeks?

As the dust storm swept through our city, a bunch of my friends, and a bunch of stuff I read and heard that day through the press, jokingly referred to Christian ideas of a final judgment, and then less jokingly remarked that climate change is rather serious, and we need to do better for our country and our children.

To my ears, this sounded like a secularization of the Christian idea of judgment. People are aware that their actions can have terrible consequences, people are aware that indulgent, selfish and reckless living can have terrible consequences on our world and our future, and people seem to believe that there may be a day when this becomes overwhelmingly obvious and perhaps even terrible – the sky will turn red, the seas will rise.

I’m not trying to make any kind of remark on climate change or environmental issues, but just pointing out how hard it is for people to really shake off the idea that there will be a day when their actions will have consequences and when they will be asked to give an account for what they did. Even a primarily secular community like the City of Sydney still has, from time to time, a moment when this thought in allowed to creep in.

Even if we ‘throw off’ ideas about a God and universal ethics, about a quaint Jew who supposedly rose from the dead and spoke a message of warning, it seems to be hard to avoid the gnawing question – ‘Will things one day fall apart for us because of the kind of lives we led?’, ‘Will it one day turn out that we were the cause of the centre not holding?‘

On Money and Privacy

We are fascinated with privacy. Gossip magazines, stories about dual identities and secret affairs, and TV shows like Lie to Me and Big Brother disclose this fascination of ours pretty obviously. There is something alluring about the possibility of a secret identity, a secret relationship, secret passions, a secret past. At the same time there is something comforting, warm and even liberating about a secret place, a secret hobby, a secret dream, a secret song, a secret ability –  a secret thought-life which is not open for others to critique, question, probe or trample all over.

But is this a good thing? I realise this is a pretty broad question to throw up – is privacy in all instances and at all times an excellent or a harmful thing? – but it’s an important question. What reactions do you immediately have to it?

A friend has recently introduced me to the prose of Joan Didion. She is a brilliant writer, penning some real insights about human nature and American life. Writing in the 1960s, she has this to say about America’s fascination with millionaire Howard Hughes:

Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the west, trailing a legend of desperation and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favourite people and our favourite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted…That we have made a hero out of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake, but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Of course we do not admit that…There has always been divergence between our officials and our unofficial heroes. Hughes is the last private man, the hero we no longer admit.

-          Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967), p. 71-72

In this excerpt Didion suggests that the reason Americans made a hero out of Hughes was because he was a symbol of complete freedom. Legends circulated that he would buy up entire hotels for just him to use, that he would buy movie stars to only work in his movies, that he would pay a barber large amounts of money to be standing-by 24/7 in case he ever wanted a haircut. His money and his power were the means to mobility and privacy. This is both an interesting suggestion about why money and power (often thought to be materialistic ends in themselves) are so valued, and also a dark suggestion about what desires may actually drive human beings.  A suggestion that there is something destructive embedded within the American dream.

There is a delicious irony to Didion’s suggestion. America secretly admired a man who has complete privacy, because it would not be publicly polite to admit that you actually value and desire privacy above all things. America secretly admired the man who had the means to live completely secretly.

Perhaps contemporary fascination with promiscuous NRL players, outspoken radio personalities, adulterous politicians, and idle hedonists like Paris Hilton, is generated from that same place as America’s fascination with Hughes.

Christianity has bad news for those who would chase all their life after ‘personal freedom, mobility, privacy’ as the greatest good in life. And it has a word of warning to those of us who love our privacy a little too much:

The sins of some men are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later.  (1 Timothy 5.24)

…Either way, they appear. Privacy is in fact, a myth. Don’t romanticize it, let alone secretly chase after more and more of it.

Radiohead on Hiding From Your Choices

When I’m at the pearly gates
This’ll be on my videotape
My videotape
My videotape

Mephistopheles is just beneath
And he’s reaching up to grab me

This is one for the good days
And I have it all here in
Red, blue, green
Red, blue, green

You are my centre when I spin away
Out of control on videotape
On videotape
On videotape
On videotape

This is my way of saying goodbye
Because I can’t do it fact to face
So I’m talking to you before
No matter what happens now
I won’t be afraid
Because I know
Today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen

– Radiohead, ‘Videotape’ from In Rainbows

I am a Radiohead fan.

But this lyric really bothers me. At once Thom Yorke is convinced that the choices he makes in his life have important consequences – and he seems convinced that particular choices are going to have bad consequences. But he hides from these choices by telling himself that ‘today has been the most perfect day’. However things work out in the end, he’ll always have this one perfect day to hold onto and justify his choices. He’s sure that one day ‘Mephistopheles’ is going to require something quite serious of him, but stops himself from being bothered by this right now by remembering how ‘perfect’ the moment in question was.

I usually admire Thom Yorke’s lyrics for the way he can latch onto the absurdity of pride, the pain of isolation and the desire for something permanent and good; but in this song I think he cops out and glorifies a simple ‘live for the moment’-type mantra, and the tinge of melancholy and curiosity which accompany this song seem token – more a result of habit then genuine reflection.

What say you?