CONTRARY to optimistic claims that the collapse of the so-called United States is imminent, an event that would certainly throw up all kinds of fascinating permutations, it remains a fact that globalisation is still being disseminated beneath the rabid auspices of Americanisation and thus despite what often rears its ugly head in a domestic context the disease itself continues to flourish worldwide.
It is interesting to compare what is going on under the present health dictatorship – with its nonsensical restrictions on human relations – to some of the more pertinent comments made by Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) in his 1986 work, Amérique:
“This is a culture which sets up specialized institutes so that people’s bodies can come together and touch, and, at the same time, invents pans in which the water does not touch the bottom of the pan, which is made of a substance so homogeneous, dry, and artificial that not a single drop sticks to it, just like those bodies intertwined in ‘feeling’ and therapeutic love, which do not touch – not even for a moment. This is called interface or interaction. It has replaced face-to-face contact and action. It is also called communication, because these things really do communicate: the miracle is that the pan bottom communicates its heat to the water without touching it, in a sort of remote boiling process, in the same way as one body communicates its fluid, its erotic potential, to another without that other ever being seduced or even disturbed, by a sort of molecular capillary action. The code of separation has worked so well that they have even managed to separate the water from the pan and to make the pan transmit its heat as a message, or to make one body transmit its desire to the other as a message, as a fluid to be decoded. This is called information and it has wormed its way into everything, like a phobic, maniacal leitmotiv, which affects sexual relations as well as kitchen implements.”
Baudrillard describes this phenomenon as ‘asepsis,’ which in medicine is defined as the state of being free from disease-causing micro-organisms, and one may observe this condition as it appears in a more paranoiac context in the average cleaning product advertisement, the obsessive housewife who rails at her children for daring to arrive for tea with muddied knees or the disposable nappy that may as well be concealing radioactive waste.
Ultimately, this sanitising tendency is a classic manifestation of Americanisation and the country’s long-time obsession with obliterating everything and anything which fails to live up to its squeaky-clean image. Meanwhile, few things are worse than the plastic smile that settles across the features of the Empire’s ultra-perfected citizen like a maniacal sneer:
“It is a bit like the Cheshire Cat’s grin: it continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared. A smile available at any moment, but half-scared to exist, to give itself away. No ulterior motive lurks behind it, but it keeps you at a distance. It is part of the general cryogenization of emotions. It is, indeed, the smile the dead man will wear in his funeral home, as he clings to a hope of maintaining contact even in the next world. The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’. […] An autoprophetic smile, like all signs in advertising. Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile. Give your emptiness and indifference to others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile . . . Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
Unsurprisingly, this forced grimace – particularly when combined with the obligatory mantra ‘Have a nice day!’ – actually reinforces the kind of fabricated social distancing that we witnessed during the Covid period. The human consequence of any alienating civilisation is a retreat into the self, yet here it is armed with the cultural paraphernalia upon which that very civilisation is so dependent:
“The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his word-processor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction.”
Bear in mind that Baudrillard wrote these words some thirty-five years ago, long before the rise of social media, but next time you think about the reasoning behind the extreme measures that are being enforced in contemporary society you may like to remind yourself that what you are seeing and experiencing continues to adopt a profoundly ‘westernised’ configuration, by which those elements which do not accord with the disinfected American Dream must be scraped off the imperial sole like unwanted faeces.
