English 67

I figured that rather than respond to Sean I’d open up a longer post on this reading.

I thought it was cool that “Happiness After September 11” included a lot of familiar concepts that you wouldn’t typically expect to see in a formal essay.  I read it over Thanksgiving Break and stopped several times to say, “yeah, desire IS a pagan concept” (a friend of mine who is wiccan recently showed me her harvest ritual), or “Mom, remember when Hannah had
Huntington’s on Everwood?” (that was one of our favorite shows), or “Eliot, remember The Land Before Time”? (those movies were quality), or to smirk at a reference to Shrek and also 3:10 to
Yuma, which I recently saw in theaters.  My family wondered how all of these references might combine into an essay on happiness after September 11^th, and to be honest, I still don’t quite see how many of them tie in, but I did appreciate four points that were made in the article.

First, though it is a little dubious to claim you know whether citizens of
Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s were happy, the three fundamental conditions make a lot of sense.  It is true that not only a lack of material needs but an excess of them can cause unhappiness.  Brief shortages of material things do make you appreciate them more.  I think the idea of having an “other” to blame and having another place to dream of and visit that is the perfect distance away is really cool.

Second, I suppose that some follow the Lacanian claim that people dream of what they don’t want, counting on fact that those things won’t happen. It is definitely true, to a certain extent, that knowledge makes us unhappy.  Many people truly do prefer ignorance. But I am not one of those people.  If I believe in anything it is knowing the truth, even if it will make me cry.  It is impossible for me to say what I would do if I ran the risk of
Huntingtons, but my guess is that I would want to know.  I wouldn’t be able to really live or commit if I had that question mark looming over me.

Third, the assertion that today’s postmodern liberal democrat would respond to the phone joke saying that the source of evil today is precisely those people who feel a direct line to God and denounce others as Hellish is definitely applicable when you consider terror and also our own country in its criticism of those with socially conservative religious ideals.  I am not religious myself, and I agree that the danger there is the absolutism of it. I don’t have a problem with religious people—only if they have a problem with me not being religious.

For those who do agree with the aforementioned democrat’s response to the joke in terms of how it relates to terror (i.e. think the 9/11 hijackers were dangerous because they believed so strongly in their religion and hated our mentality), consider a point made earlier in the piece: don’t assume you know someone else’s motivations or beliefs. Those men may have been suicidal to prove to themselves and others that they did truly, in fact, believe.