October 28, 2006
It’s on the faces of two of the most gifted intellects of 20th Century North America: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada and the author Joan Didion. “It” is the empty hell of the postmodern soul.
Having lived my last twelve years in Canada, five of them as a “permanent resident,” the ghost of Pierre Trudeau is all over my “dream states,” as it is embedded in the souls of Canadians themselves.
Canada! Hmmmm … another great postmodern artist, Joni Mitchell and her song A CASE OF YOU …
On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada.
Oh, Canada!
Ms. Mitchell has the same drawn and haunted look on her face as Joan Didion - it is hard to avoid these days.
The faces of both Pierre Trudeau, in the last five years of his life, and Joan Didion, now, on the fly leaf of her latest book, THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, they are hardly the masks of bliss.
“Oh,” say the postmodernists irately, “How dare you start accusing postmodernism for what was obviously the grief of loss in their lives! Prime Minster Trudeau lost a son to early death! Joan Didion lost her husband?! Have you no shame, Moriarty?!”
Well, I’d have to agree if I hadn’t read Ms. Didion’s book.
In THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, she writes about her husband’s death and the torturous illness of her daughter, but – unwittingly or not – she writes about it from the paradigm of a postmodern mind, reserved and aloof, almost clinical. The breaches in the iron walls of her detachment are few and far between. Those holes in her postmodern defences against traditional emotions, I believe, are what she refers to as ‘magical thinking’, when, indeed, they have been the human norm for millenniums.
As an obvious ‘Progressive,’ she might think her painfully rigid point of view is an intellectual ‘improvement,’. I just see it as pathetic, and not as an inspiration to the reader for true pathos. Probably she doesn’t want ‘pathos.’ But did she really want ‘pathetic?’
It is the very postmodern sanctuary of comfort to which Ms. Didion ran that explains not only the Third Millennium tenacity of her prose but also the abandoned house we see in her eyes.
In the old days, the pre-passé millenniums of Judeo-Christianity, there were mournings, wakes and unrestraint, cathartic expressions of grief which were as traditional as the phallic worship during the Festivals of Dionysus in ancient Greece.
Both were cleansings incredibly physical, emotional, psychological, athletic, sexual, communal … yes, orgies grief and passion.
What does postmodern really mean?
“Post” is a prefix, meaning “after”. Out of context it hangs expectantly waiting for an adjective or noun.
And “Modern”? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “modern” relates to the present, to the Now.
Anything that is living, breathing, standing before us – this instant, this nano-second – is NOW. From our first to our last moment we live in the Now. Only in the Now we live.
The Now is rough, unpredictable, uncontrollable, real, alive. Postmodernism is for people who try to sneak from the past into the future, avoiding life. It is for people who are too afraid to live in the present – too afraid to live at all. The postmoderns are the Walking Dead.
All of human history is written by living humans.
Time as seen through the eyes of eternity – something a postmodernist can’t believe in – is a perspective that can channel-surf human history and play musical chairs with any soul, placing it anywhere in the time frame.
If you are going postmodern, you are dying before our eyes, and, in the most Catholic of terms, heading to the court of eternity to be judged guilty ... guilty of despairing not only of eternity, but of life itself.
The postmodern readers of this, if there are any by now, know very well that I know that postmodern really means “Post-Marx”. It’s the ultimate, revolutionary commitment to a new calendar. Should things continue as they are for another hundred years or so, human history will be divided not by Christ’s birth but that of Karl Marx, or the publication date of DAS KAPITAL.
Karl Marx’s tendency towards death is all over his works and in all his followers. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong Il, they all shared and share in death’s narcissism. “After me, there will be nothing! Nothing left on earth at all!!”
Marx’s loathing for all of Judeo-Christianity or all of life as he had found it before him – he was so depressed, so obsessed with a non-existent God - might have driven him to a kind of Vincent Van Gogh suicide. But he had a PLAN!
Like his equally psychotic contemporary, Sir Francis Galton – the man who invented eugenics – Marx was determined to cure the chaotic nonsense of life with systematic death.
Obviously the Communist tyrants didn’t succeed in their ultimate dream, life still went on after their deaths, but we sure can’t say they didn’t try.
Mao Zedong’s brilliant biographers, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, make it clear that the price for Mao’s Super Power build-up was about thirty million Chinese sacrificed to starvation, while the very Post-Modern New York Times critic, in his review of MAO ZEDONG: THE UNTOLD STORY, encourages us to remember all the good things Mao did for China, the ‘improvements’.
And we foolish Americans interpreted Mao’s psychosis as the inherent and possibly genetic disposition of the Orient, particularly the Chinese, for an utter indifference to human life.
Ironically, Mao Zedong exported his indifference to human life more successfully to the intellectual supremacists of Western civilization than infecting his own people.
There is something so ghost-like about the faces of Trudeau in his last years and that of Joan Didion now. Why the gaunt, haunted, agonized look in Mr. Trudeau’s face?
That look began following Canada’s Black October in 1970.
Five terrorists, members of the Quebec Liberation Front had been granted their request for safe passage to Cuba, after they had murdered the Vice-Premier of Quebec and kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner. After approval by Fidel Castro the terrorists had been flown to Cuba by a Canadian Forces aircraft. One of the terrorists had also attempted kidnapping the Israeli consul.
(The British Trade Commissioner had been held by his captors tied to a chair, facing a television set for 2 months. How’s that for torture.)
The terrorist Jacques Lanctôt left Cuba and lived in Paris for a while, before he returned to Canada in 1979. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in jail. After that he started a publishing house.
What a wake-up call to humanity from the children, les enfants, of the vaunted French Fraternité! There is something so sycophantically, manipulatively, smarmily sophomoric about North American Communist leadership.
The famous photo of Pierre Trudeau dancing mischievously behind the back of Queen Elizabeth … you can almost see the French Guillotine in his eyes!
All that mischief abandoned him in his last years.
What had caught up to him?
We see in his face the workings of his own ferocious, Jesuit-trained intellect.
“I’ve fucked up,” seem to be the words in his face. “I’ve led Canada to hell with Communism. I took Lester B. Pearson’s Red Flag of Canada and closed those two red curtains upon the Canadian Maple Leaf!! And what repayment have I gotten for all that loyalty to Marx from my friend in Cuba?! The death of a friend, a family man, someone who wouldn’t have lifted a violent finger against his political enemies, let alone ever come to think of murder as an acceptable instrument of political protest.”
What do we see in the face of Joan Didion?
The sublimation of simple, human grief and mourning into a postmodern archaeology lesson, agony on a lecture podium dealing with its own feelings in the same way an embalmer might clothespin his nose to head the formaldehyde fumes off at the pass.
