Cultural Shift?

[Steve Maas]

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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