The greatest deceit against intellectual honesty is the significance of our appearance. That inner beauty is of greater virtue is a pernicious lie told with frightening vigor.
Beauty is something not talked about because concern for one’s presentation is cause for secrecy, shame, and ridicule – unless you’re a celebrity whose sale is in derision. What secret are we keeping exactly? And why should my efforts at looking great require such clandestine secrecy?
Germany under Hitler and China under Mao had youth squads who would turn in their parents and neighbors if someone spoke ill of the regime. Violators were publicly humiliated and often executed.
The fervid “Gotcha!” attacks against celebrities spotted with puffy upper lips get more media attention than the mass graves from genocidal atrocities of aggrandizing dict-o-crats. As though primping, pricking, and preening is more scandalous, more personally offensive, than slaughtering citizens of your own country.
Women are more emboldened about abortions and bankruptcies than they are about their desire for plastic surgery. And yet more righteous about having the bong water look of limp hair and sallow skin called sexy when it’s clearly not. Beauty is skin deep down to the bone.
The Orwellian campaign to convince us that our ugliest disheveled state is somehow more sublime than a tended to façade would be comical – if the campaigner weren’t so violent. Ruining one’s reputation out of sheer jealousy is murder, just short of snuffing out one’s soul.
Slashing clothes off fur-wearing backs, splashing fast-food diners with bloodied water, hurtling food at faces with malevolent force, setting McMansions on fire to punish the landowner is somehow a tolerable if not celebrated assault in our society. No animals were harmed in the making of this movie, yes. But humans are ritually sacrificed on the altar of righteous indignation.
The jackbooted SS of old is the suede footed Birkenstock of now insisting that they had to destroy the village in order to save it. What’s to save? And my God, what’s been lost?
Thought provoking. Loved it.
ReplyDelete