Happy Days?

Until the recent death of “Joannie” (Eran Morin) from the TV series “Happy Days“, I didn’t really make the connection between Scott Baio’s appearances as a Trump stalwart and the TV series he’s most associated with that depicted America in the 50s as a time of happy innocence.

Do people really associate the slogan “Make America Great Again” with “Happy Days“? That would be bizarre. That would definitely be surreal. The 50s were, in reality, nothing like the idyllic time portrayed in the TV show. It was probably more like what was depicted in the movie Revolutionary Road, judging from my reading of the history of that decade. If people get their ideas of actual history from a TV sitcom, isn’t that the meaning of “post-historic man”?

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“A Government of Death”

Globalisation. “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It was always a lie — a propagandistic slogan only — from the outset, for even its proponents described it in terms of “creative destruction”. There would be “winners” and “losers”. But in public, they overplayed the “creative” and downplayed the “destruction” bit, and they did so in the context of an “age of diminishing expectations” as Christopher Lasch called the period.

“Neo-liberal globalisation” isn’t, actually, the most accurate term for this process. “Globalised neo-liberalism” is the more accurate term. “Globalisation” is actually the creative aspect of this process. Neo-liberalism is the destructive aspect.  But these two processes — one creative and integrative, one destructive and nihilistic — have become conflated as the meaning of “globalism” itself.

Trapped in the Mirror

Trapped in the Mirror was the title of a book on narcissism by Elan Golomb. It’s a very good title. Unfortunately, as I recall it, the book never really fulfilled the potential suggested by its title, largely because of its limited clinical and psychological focus on the individual where it could have broadened into the historical, sociological, or cultural context. Christopher Lasch attempted to do this with The Culture of Narcissism. Even then, I think, Lasch, despite the excellence of his sociological insights, erred in thinking that this, too narrowly, was a problem peculiar to “American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations”, as the subtitle has it.

Narcissism is the state of being “trapped in the mirror” and is the human, all-too-human condition. It has been that since human beings became self-conscious. It was just what was formerly called “idolatry”, which is the same state of being “trapped in the mirror”. If it were not the human condition, the ancient myth of Narcissus and Echo would not have been composed, and an event like the “Axial Age” of the prophets would never have occurred. It is narcissism that lies behind the legendary “Fall of Man”, and the Fall of Man was to become trapped in the mirror. This is also referred to as “the Fall into Time”, or “The Kali Yuga“.