Its Reality Stupid!

It sometimes seems to me we typically in the U.S. live in a reality vacuum. Reading a story in the NY Times about the exit polls from the PA primary, you get the sense that when we "analyze" (I use this term very loosely) results of a contest what we are really doing is expanding on a fiction plot which has received its bare-bones outline from the interaction of pollsters making up questions to ask, and a few people answering them (40 precincts in the Edison/Mitofsky poll). The networks then look at this outline, and depending on their predilection for mystery (will Clinton make a comeback?), romance (she put up a good fight, but will lose in the end), or adventure (the ongoing drama will kill the Democratic chances), and finish the plot.
The interesting thing about these polls is that the "Reality" they point to is a reality created than a reality reflected. In some ways its really similar to Lucretius' (and a few others, like Marx) argument against religion, i.e. they are made by humans in order to deal with a reality that is too harsh for them. The reality in this case is that we have no clue as to why people vote the way they do, and as to what the outcome will be. We don't want it to be true that we cannot categorize human action, because then this would really make us question a whole host of other assumptions, like the economy (as if this is not really the biggest fiction of all), or energy, or "America," assumptions that we have, pious fictions as it were that allow us to go about our day.
Again, perhaps this is another instance of Calvin's insistence that we are a factory of idols.

Beautiful Idolatry

I just finished reading Charles Bock's debute novel Beautiful Children. It's about a whole lot of crazy stuff: runaway kids, strippers, pornographers, marriages falling apart, young boys finding their sexuality, drugs, and a rape. It's certainly difficult to read, in some sense because the subject matter - the Las Vegas that tourists don't see - is difficult. I'm not sure how accurate Las Vegas is in the novel (Bock grew up there), but the world is convincing enough.

I was most struck by one interesting line of imaginative thought. Cheri Blossom is a stripper who's boyfriend (named "Ponyboy") convinced her to get breast implants (she even ends up putting sparklers in her nipples because they are fake), and who also gets her to be in an amateur porn film (although she leaves before everything goes down with "Rod Erectile"). One of the ways she "gets through" the night as a stripper (and in other situations) is to pretend she's in a film. She plays a naughty Catholic School girl, and she has these dialogues with her nun teacher (and sometimes she strips even in the movie), and these conversations act as something like her moral compass (e.g., when she has mercy on Ponyboy in the recognition of his self-destructiveness). It is very interesting that she needs this, and there is something very true in this - how in order to deal with any situation, we as humans create images and narratives, place ourselves in these and attempt to construct some meaning to a horrible situation.

This seems to my mind very similar to Calvin's conception of idolatry: we almost have a compulsion for religion he thinks, and so we end up creating the idols we need to function with. I think there is an analogy here: Cheri's idol isn't a "god" in a sense that we normally understand it. Yet, it is something that has nothing to do with her current situation, a kind of narrative or image that she relies on.

This is a larger point, I suppose: that we are a factory of idols, that in some way we live on images to show us something that is not ourselves precisely so we can be ourselves.