Cultural Shift?

[Paul Mackin]

Yes P portrays so beautifully these nonWestern views of the forces at work
in many human lives and how strong is the desire (surely the correct
word) to hold to them. Does the juxtaposed Kate Julian quote
hint at least that the days of the sublimation of desire in the service
of efficiency and rationalization may be on the wane. I was raised in
a sort of the-dead-and-the-invisible-are-not-there school myself but can't
help taking notice of the fact that the Washington Zoo's deceased giant
panda is to be stuffed and displayed perpetually in the Museum of Natural
History--and have to approve.

			P.

On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Steve Maas wrote:

> GR (153 Viking): "There are peoples--these Hereros for example--who carry on 
> business every day with their ancestors.  The dead area as real as the 
> living."
> GR (317): "Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression." 
> (I like P.'s Terry Gillianesque description here: "wait, wait a minute 
> there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth 
> together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap 
> Labor and Overseas Markets. . . .")
> Plus probably hundreds of other references in P.'s work to the U.S./northern 
> European way of looking at life and death (or death and life).
> 
> Kate Julian, writing in the December-January _Civilization_, sees the 
> ongoing proliferation in the U.S. of impromptu roadside shrines to victims 
> of cars or other violence as potentially of great import.  She writes: "We 
> may be seeing nothing less than a major shift in America's deeply ingrained 
> and fundamentally Protestant approach to death.  The United States and 
> northern Europe have long emphasized privacy, individual loss, and solemnity 
> in grieving; but sidewalk altars and parking lot shrines invite 
> participation by all, allow displays of emotion, and implicitly recognize a 
> continuing relationship with the dead."  Of course, the Opposition is not 
> inactive.  Julian goes on to write: "[H]ighway departments. . .have 
> restricted or outlawed [roadside shrines].  The hostility of the opposition 
> can be jarring.  A Nevada highway spokesman characterized the offerings as 
> ‘debris,' for instance, and a Houston legislator condemned them as ‘visual 
> pollution.'"
> 
>      Steve Maas
> 
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