The American Scream: Going Hoarse Without Speaking

[babylonsister]

The American Scream: Going Hoarse Without Speaking

Posted on Jul 24, 2011

By Christopher Ketcham


It is clear that nowhere in American commercial life, save perhaps the graveyard, is there a space not polluted by electronic voices. Every bar and restaurant, every airport lounge, bus depot, train station, every doctor’s or real estate agent’s office, every schoolchild’s welcome in the cafeteria, perforce, is larded over with the tin drum and tap and pan-banging and squeaking-squalling-keening of idols, the caviling of news-clowns, the gibberishing of marketeers. Everywhere is the grin-voice of the announcer, salesman, pitchman, sentimentalist, guffawer, crooner, rabble-rouser, tit-wagger, offering always information that leaves one dumber upon hearing. The world as presented in this mosh of nonsense is endless goof and boof, pratfall, infantilizations, the tin cans of the latest news gonged. It is the great horror of the modern, and to resist it is the duty of civilized men.

Silence is anathema, perhaps dangerous, as it might invite boredom, or, worse, introspection, and by God the public must not be bored or suffer self. The cellphone and iPhone and BlackBerry and whichever other electro-leeches at hand are key in this mess. Like little tyrants they screech and demand a hearing; like infants they wail at all hours and must be assuaged. We plug them in our own faces like pacifiers.

It seems we must have noise to recognize we are civilized. Or, perhaps, noise allows us to hide our uncivilized ways. We shall not hear farts, shifts in the seat, the growling of stomachs, the mediocrity of murmurs, the crinkle of shoes that stink, the perverse imp habit of talking to ourselves—it’s got to be cacophonied out—or the mass murder of citizens overseas, or the wars that send our young to mental and physical death-in-life, or the subjugation of entire classes of the poor to the control of the rich.

Let that lone voice speak in the darkness of the unknown crowd and get no answer back—the terror of comedians and actors, the multiplied terror—and damn him who stands there with his dick in his hand. Let the man speak alone and find the crowd against him—the ultimate terror. Let it never happen that the man speaks alone. Drown him in noise.


more...

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_american_scream_20110724/

[mwb970]

1. This reminds me of THX1138. /nt

[canoeist52]

2. great rant with a hopeful ending...

"I want to think our current darkness, lit ever more with the chirpy gewgaw light from the tyrant machine, is only the stumbling of the blind man who will see again, and hear again."

[snagglepuss]

3. K & R . What a fantastic rant. I love how he writes. Thanks for posting. nt

[raouldukelives]

4. K&R

[bemildred]

5. "information that leaves one dumber upon hearing"

TV makes you stupid, indeed.

[TygrBright]

6. Reminds me of C.S. Lewis' description in Screwtape Letters of the soundtracks of Hell and Heaven:

"It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer
made of Heaven; "the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is
not music is silence"
Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever
since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light
years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal
time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been
occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that
is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly
qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole
universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this
direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be
shouted down in the end."

One of his better passages.

thoughtfully,
Bright