As usual, it’s the convergence of insanity that I find so arresting that I can’t look away. Modern life is a daily glorious train wreck, the slow motion bashing of the Titanic into that poor iceberg. You want to look away, you know you should, but you just can’t.
So here are the two things–this review about everything that’s wrong with the new Anne Debacle, and this breathlessly delighted report about Self Marriage. Read them both, I beg you, and then come back here to be shouted at. Just kidding, I’m not shouting. I am very very calm. Deeply calm. I’m not waving my hands At All.
Well, maybe just a little. These two articles, taken together, I think illuminate the one catastrophic problem with where we are as a culture. Let’s consider the Anne piece first, and we’ll wrap it up with the clever invention of self marriage, if by clever I’m allowed to mean the most benighted and mistaken enterprise in the course of human history ever.
The pervasive problem illuminated by the Anne piece, setting aside, of course, the more pressing sins of idolatry, is the mushrooming cloud of the Buffoonification of Sex. For whatever reason, over the last century, Americans became very worried that You, whoever you are, wouldn’t Get It. As Disney overtook the cosmos, and over-explaining conquered the world, the very idea of subtlety became one of those wonders of the ancient world, like the hanging gardens of Babylon. You dimly imagined in your mind’s eye what they must have been like, you sketched the image, but you resigned yourself to never seeing them IRL. Your eye would never behold that fantastical delight. In anxious worry that you, driving around in your car, wandering around the wasteland of your office or grocery store or McMansion, the posture of American culture became one of Explicitly Explaining Everything.
And truly, some things need to be explained more, like math. But sex and gender and the relationships between men and women aren’t one of them. The trouble with men and women is that they are, or used to be, human–both the man and the woman. And as such, there was a great undersea iceberg of Stuff that couldn’t immediately be known and understood. Human language would take you some distance, but then you had to dive into the depths of intuition, of observation, of guesses, of glances, of knowledge too deep for words. When both parties were human, interesting novels and stories and yea, even movies could be written that would show the onlooker some glimpse of the complexity and wonder of humanity.
But in the anxious drive to make sure that Everyone Perfectly Understands, the strange subtlety of human relationships was destroyed. Truly, the people that ruined and destroyed the beauty of Anne of Green Gables deserve only to marry themselves.
Because that’s what you’re left with. When the other is a caricature–a flattened disposable child’s tattoo–no relationship is possible. None. It’s pointless even to try.
And consider the loneliness, the darkness, the farce of men and women wandering farther and farther from each other, the fixing of each identity to the only Sure thing that can be known, the self–it’s one grand dumpster fire of the vanities, the be-clowning of humanity, the flattening of the human person into an ill considered and badly drawn Disney sketch.
Which is why you shouldn’t jump over the idolatry like it’s no big deal. God is surely the most subtle and complex Being that ever came to earth to be known. And we did a perfect job making a mockery of him. Of course eventually we would have to drink the dregs of that cup, down to the very last bitter drop. Or, we could, every one of us, stop looking in the mirror, trying relentlessly to trace out the barely visible lines, to explain them over and over and over and over. Instead of that we could open that ancient and subtle book and discover something that takes more than thirty seconds to understand. If you feel like marrying yourself, get off the Internet, return the ring, and go to church. Please. I beg you, with my arms waving in the air.
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