Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 14

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to be consumed. This is a purely aesthetical approach
to life that leaves us prisoners of the moment. By
contrast, reality in all other types of society is
experienced as tragic: life involves suffering only
occasionally punctuated by periods of happiness, and
eventually leads to death. The question all previous
societies have faced, beyond that of survival, is the
transcendent meaning of suffering and death, as the
basis for the meaning of life.^^
In his novel Mao II, Don DeLillo critiques in fictional form the
"purely aesthetical approach to life" taken by the contemporary
American media. One of the novel's characters is a photographer
who confesses, "No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality,
misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the
end."^^
This sort of amoral reductionism as inspired by the mass
media trivializes the meaning of human dignity and its ties to
tragedy in other ways. Every TV watcher of the nineties is exposed on
a regular basis to the silliness of the heartbreak of psoriasis, the
public hunruliation of septic system backup, the horror of gritty fiber
laxative, and the embarrassment of male pattern baldness, not to
mention the torments of jock itch, static cling, ring around the collar,
bitter beer face, doggy bad breath, and detergent haze on the kitchen
floor.
It's tempting to imagine obiter dicta the ways in which
Madison Avenue might incorporate the works of Sophocles,
Shakespeare, and other tragic writers as part of its sales strategies.
Oedipus, in the throes of a Maalox moment, raises his hands to the
sky and asks to be delivered, not from the net which Zeus has been
weaving for him, but from That Queasy Bloated Feeling caused by
eating too many spanakopitas; Hamlet curses his birth, not because
the time is out of joint, but because the roving salad cart in his
favorite restaurant has run out of Pepperidge Farms Croutons;
Tolstoy's functionary Ivan llych feels forsaken by Providence because
his living room curtains from Sears Safari Collection—the very ones
he was hanging when he fell off the ladder and injured himself—
have come waterstained from the factory.