Twisted Knots

"A well-known celebrity once approached me, offering to give me her 'last interview'. She told me she had tried to kill herself several times. We ended up talking for three days. I told her I would conduct her last interview, but that it would not be for a very long time.

She was not the first celebrity to ask me to do this. I have given them the same answer every time: Spring doesn’t come to us from afar, but, even now, it is coming from beneath our feet. We were born without a reason, and we should keep on living without a reason."

Kim Dae-o, a South Korean journalist specializing in the entertainment industry

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Dear Kate,

Here's another paragraph from the same piece:

"South Korea’s entertainment industry itself has to bear a lot of the responsibility. It treats celebrities as commodities from whom a few powerful agencies can squeeze as much income in as short a time as possible. Many celebrities are spotted as children and are not taught valuable life skills, only how to sing and dance. The situation is worse for female celebrities, with the public more interested in every salacious detail of their lives."

I have yet to watch "Parasite," but I know it's about the desperation of late capitalism.  It has made history at the Oscars (again, a popularity contest) and justly celebrated as a piece of cinematic art.

I am sure no one is celebrating the desperation it portrays.  I hope.

Actually I am not too sure.  In real life, I am not too sure.

As a father of two teenagers, I can rewrite the paragraph above this way:

Parents themselves have to bear a lot of the responsibility. They treat children as consumers from whom a few powerful establishments can squeeze as much money and time and loyalty and youth and sex--really, life--in as short a time, and for as long a time, as possible. Many children are not taught valuable life skills, only how to crave and use and spend and discard and repeat.  The goal is to make yourself to the other side, to be the powerful in the powerful establishments, to teach and preach and sell.  And if the children get anxious and depressed and even suicidal about it all, we would tell them it's normal, part of being human, no stigma to it, and all they need is a prescription of some sort, a pill, a kind word, a sermon, a cause to fight for and distract ourselves with, for them to keep on keeping on. "We were born without a reason, and we should keep on living without a reason."

Rowan Williams wrote with characteristic wisdom and authority:

"If we are able to demythologise the goodness of choice as the affirmation of the consumer's will, we may have learnt something of value in understanding the relation of child and adult. Protecting the human young from some of the pressures of adult choice implies a recognition that such choice is weighty, potentially tragic, bound up with unseen futures for the agent and other agents. To learn about this, I have argued, requires a space for fantasy, a licence for imagination, where gradually the consequences, the self-defining knots, of adult choices can be figured, fingered, experimented with. To look at the child as economic and sexual consumer is to flatten the landscape of our own adulthood, to make universal a model of choice that is at best partial and trivial; and also to treat the child as a market rival, confirming that ambivalent strain of rivalry that both energises and skews culture."

Not too long ago at a family dinner, I saw two female elders scanning a young female progeny of theirs from top to bottom and back and concluded in unison, "You look good. You should be a waitress."  One of them is a long time Christian.

Yours, Alex