Miley Cyrus Is Not The Issue Here
“The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire: we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions: news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas.”- Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
If the last century was one of noise, the 21st finds itself plagued by incessant and seemingly infinite racket. Social networking websites masquerade as ways to bring humans closer together, but generally result in making us jealous, loud mouthed, and narcissistic imbeciles. Our news feeds stream constant reminders of things, people, emotions, etc. that, perhaps, we’d like to have, but at the current moment have no means of obtaining. For me, this means that I feel longing and envy when photos of women for whom I have sexual and/or emotional attachment appear on my feed. For others it might be a friend’s new car, or an ex getting married, or an enemy from high school achieving great success before you do. Whatever it may be, we are in constant need of “emotional enemas.” Social networking sites, as has been stated by many before me, also allow for a whole slew of idiotic and asinine banter that causes real life emotional distress. We only “like” things we agree with, are only “friends” with those who share our ideology, and are not afraid to shun and bully those who may disagree with us. And really, for all this “connection,” the reasons we keep coming back to these sites are a deep fear of loneliness and an endless need for approval. These are problems that enslave us to advertisements, fill us with useless desires, and leave us suspended in a constant state of dissatisfaction.
Of course there are many other factors contributing to this incurable distress. We all have cell phones; most of us have smartphones. The smartphone means that people never have to (or, in some cases, get to) stop engaging in those surrogate interactions. Indeed, no one who owns a smartphone is fully present in any situation. I can hardly have a conversation with someone without being interrupted by him or her insisting I watch another flash-in-the-pan, cool this week, lame the next, time wasting YouTube video of a cat or some other nonsense. I’m not pretending I am innocent here--I can be just as bad as anyone else. I’m addicted to Facebook, I love Twitter, I’ve watched hours and hours (more like years and years!) of porn, I try to get people to subscribe to my YouTube channel, I buy a ton of shit from Amazon, and I occasionally try to get people to read what I write on this here [blog]. In contrast to that, though, I’ve lived without internet in my home for the past 6 months in a rural area, my cell phone is a flip-phone that doesn’t get service half the time, I’ve only watched porn occasionally in the last 6 months (and I masturbate 3 times daily, if possible and necessary), and I spend almost all of my money at local businesses (full disclosure: I mean bars). That being said, I am narcissistic, I struggle with my emotions, I am too quick to judge other people, I am an alcoholic, I am an insomniac (when I don’t have the proper amount of weed), and I find myself damn near tortured by a desire for people to regard me as worthy of awe. In the words of Steve Earle, “I a’int ever satisfied.”
Huxley wrote The Perennial Philosophy in 1945. He worried about the radio, something we now see as archaic. I’d like to imagine that Huxley would be shocked if he had a chance to see the year 2013. Unfortunately, I’ve read Brave New World.
I titled this post “Miley Cyrus is Not the Issue Here” for two reasons: one) to get your attention and maybe get you to read at least this far; two) because I overheard a few friends discussing her (not so) recent Rolling Stone cover. She’s topless, sticking out a pool, and licking her shoulder. It’s goofy and not terribly sexy. That should about sum it up. My friends disagree, and--in order to prove it--went on to spend the better part of an hour discussing their disgust and shock. It’s not every day that I quote Jesus Christ but all I could think was: “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Celebrity gossip is one of the most appalling of modern distractions, it seems to me. My question is this: what do we expect from these people? Who of us does not get off on the thought that there are people in the world that want to fuck us, want to be us? I certainly understand letting out a passing laugh when confronted with the cover. It is ridiculous and therefore deserves to be the subject of ridicule. What irks me is the mob mentality that tends to surround these things. This phenomenon seemingly stems from the very same unquenchable thirst for approval that addicts us to social networking sites, smart phones, etc. Here is our chance to join the masses in disapproval! What better way to hide from admitting our own vices? I can’t think of one.
Here’s the thing about Miley: we created her. We’re the mindless robots that endlessly consume Disney products, take our children to her concerts, and spend our free time discussing exactly what type of person she should be. I have found that most people being told who to be tend to rebel against that idea. Along those lines, though I am no psychologist, I’d like to offer that anyone who inherits the pressure to be a role model at age fourteen is going to, at some point, rage against that label. Moreover, it is that person’s right to rebel. These things happen all the time. You think Miley’s twerking is too sexual? I had girls grinding their asses into my groin in such a way that I achieved many erections in seventh grade. Back then, of course, I’m sure it was Britney Spears’s fault, or some other perky-breasted pop star. You never hear anyone shouting: “It’s all the fault of puberty and the fact that sex is fun!” Instead we get, “The kids are out of control and that hot bitch is to blame!” Here’s the cold, hard truth: people were fucking doggystyle, sucking dick, eating pussy, engaging in anal sex, giving rimjobs, being homosexual, ejaculating on each others faces--you name it!--well before the invention of the television. Before the radio, too, for that matter. The problem with technology is not that it allows strumpets to teach children to want to fulfill their innate animalistic urges; it is that is gives us far too many people to cast blame upon for our problems (real and imaginary), not one of them being ourselves. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
(A side note that might help this whole, “we like to judge people, we don’t really give a fuck” argument: Miley released a series of videos that she called “The Backyard Sessions” on YouTube in 2012. In them, she covers “Jolene,” “Look What They’ve Done To My Song,” and “Lilac Wine.” In my opinion, it’s the best music of Miley’s career. The sparse arrangements showcase a beautiful voice treating these songs with the emotional richness they deserve. Not to mention that I fully support covering old tunes so that a new generation might be exposed to them. I was shocked when I saw them. But where was the media? Why was no one covering this child star’s rise to glory, this fulfillment of potential? I offer that the answer may be the lack of controversy surrounding such a story. “Child Star Makes Good” the headlines would read and the people would think “Good for her!” and move on. No, that won’t do. People have been waiting for this girl to fall for quite some time. It would be too much for society to handle if someone could be beautiful, talented, rich, and respectable! So she chose to become the whore we so desperately wanted her to become.)
I was born and raised in the city of Chicago, Illinois and now I live in Sister Bay, Wisconsin. I recall one evening a few years ago, when myself and a few of my friends went to watch the sunset at the Ellison Bay bluff. As the sun descended under the horizon, all the colors of the rainbow appeared over the water, where the sun used to shine. The colors stacked on top of each other across the whole of the horizon, starting orange on top of red, yellow on top of orange, thin movements of green and violet, and--as I followed the colors up, up, up, through darkening shades of blue; I turned around to find the sky a deep black. In this blackness hung a round, white, radiant moon. Day and night lay spread out all around me and I was in the center, caught in the slow transition. A seagull glided over the water; a fish jumped in the distance.
After a while my friends decided to hike down a trail for a different view. I stayed back. (Full disclosure: I was too high to navigate the steep trail.) I sat on a bench and continued gazing at the beautiful scene; the trailing sound of my friends’ voices becoming less audible as they covered more ground, until the last “ha ha!” echoed off into the night sky and I was wrapped in silence. Silence. Silence like I had never known. It held me down with its weight. I could feel it pushing against my chest. I started to hyperventilate. I could not move. In fact, nothing moved. No breeze blew by. Silence. My brain struggled against the absence of sound, of distraction. My brain tried to make the moment sentimental; it tried to rekindle memories of past loves, but the silence snuffed them out before they could set fire. Then my brain tried to fashion a religious moment. I tried to have some sort of revelation. Nothing. Nothing but oppressive, utter silence and incidental beauty, the world as it is: quiet, lonely, beautiful, insignificant, indifferent. I cried.
The epigraph to this blog post is a quote from a chapter in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy entitled “Silence.” It is my belief that silence is the remedy to the plague of sarcastic indifference that menaces our present society. It is only through silence that I have found myself capable of realizing the flaws in my own personality and become aware of some of the glaring selfishness in some of the actions in my past. They say that the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, and silence has allowed me (perhaps even forced me) to make such admissions.
An example: not too long ago I was alone in my old apartment (the one without internet or cable that I mention in the opening paragraph) feeling sorry for myself. Put simply: a girl whom I wanted around me was no longer around me. Anyhow, I took a sizeable dose of marijuana and lay down in my bed. I began to become aware of how quiet it was in that big apartment all by myself. I recalled the wild nights spent there just weeks before. Beautiful memories of singing and dancing and drinking and smiling and all that nice stuff presented themselves. The memories were proof that there was life in that place, once. There had been life in the very bed I was lying on; but it was gone now. There would be no waking up to the face of a darling young woman. There would be no debauched after bar party the next night. I was lonely now.
I reacted to this naturally enough. I wondered “Why? Why am I lonely? I don’t deserve to be lonely, I am awesome!” It soon dawned on me, though, that if I felt this way in moments like this, well, why wouldn’t everyone else? Perhaps we fear silence because, in it, we become aware of how cosmically insignificant we are. And if I am afraid of my own insignificance, it stands to reason that other people share this fear. It was with that in mind that I began to recall another past relationship, one that I had always blamed the destruction of on the woman I was engaged in said relationship with. Story: I met this girl at work, courted her, slept with her, began to treasure my time with her (but didn’t mention it), said good-bye to her when it was time for her to head back to college, began to miss her (but didn’t mention it), visited her at college once, all went well, visited again, and that was the end of that. I’d say I was dumped but we never made anything official, so I suppose it would best to say she no longer wanted to sleep with me.
I wasn’t broken hearted, I was disappointed and perturbed. What had I done? What had changed? I thought we had a good thing going. I thought about it a few times throughout the year, always with someone around me to readily agree that I had done nothing wrong and she must just be crazy. How convenient! Now, though, I was stoned to the gills, painfully aware of the silence that surrounded me, laying on my bed, and confronted with memories of my time with her. Empathy! Empathy, that was the problem. I had failed, all this time, to attempt to view myself through her eyes. In this light I saw myself as an alcoholic, narcissistic, promiscuous man that spent his time preaching the gospel of I don’t give a fuck. Indeed, these are qualities that may have attracted her to me in the first place. But people need more than that. We need love, not just in the sense of physical affection, but those words that help us feel as though we matter to someone. On numerous occasions thoughts like “You make my world brighter” and “Thanks for being here” crossed my mind, but I never voiced them. I got drunk and had sex with her and assumed that she could read my mind, as though she could see in my bloodshot eyes that somewhere in there is someone who rejoices in her happiness. I had treated someone I cared about as though she was worthless.
I don’t know if this is in step with her line of thinking, but that’s not what matters. Ever since that night I have made conscious efforts to consider how the way I talk and act might make other people feel. There’s no doubt that other relationships have fallen apart because of my inability to express that I am at once a savage and a sentimentalist, a whore and a prude, a fighter and a lover. What this all boils down to is that, somehow, in a world that claims it is connected, we’ve lost the ability to adequately communicate. There’s nothing hip about admitting your fears. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can love each other without sharing in those fears. Immerse yourself in your fear; embrace your insignificance! Then, perhaps, one might find the empathy necessary to make someone else feel as though, in this insignificant life, there is someone that believes in his or her worth.
We all have a need for approval, it’s human nature. It becomes a problem, though, when this need dictates our every action. This is the issue with rampant use and unlimited access to social media. The “daily or even hourly emotional enemas” that Huxley speaks of become minute to minute emotional enemas. Sometimes I am astounded at the power a tiny thumbs-up symbol has over society. People crave “likes” like addicts crave drugs. It makes us feel good when people approve. Stuff that feels good has the greatest potential to become addicting. Evolution can’t be stopped and the world will continue in it’s technological advances, this I cannot argue or oppose. My suggestion is that we all try to complement the noise with silence. Take some time to examine yourself. Walk through the woods, lie in the grass, prance in a field. Hell, sit on your couch! But shut your phone off and confront whatever thoughts and emotions come up while you’re drenched in silence head on. Don’t be afraid of yourself. After an hour or so, go ahead and dive back into the network, hopefully with a better sense of the fear and insignificance that we all share. Of course I respect your right to tell me to go fuck myself with my hippy nonsense. Still, I hope you’ll give it a try. I find myself moved to close by quoting Matthew Arnold’s, “Dover Beach:”
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
