On a rainy Weekend day, I shrug about, staring at the sky with my shifty umbrella in hand. I head toward the public library, where I sit at a computer, and shift through the “Electric Library” database, looking up esoteric subjects.
Topic at hand: the major news stories of the 1990s. Or the major American news stories according to me, in a peculiarly paranoid frame of mind. The goal is to assure myself that things seemed to be falling apart in the world just as surely as things seem to be falling apart right this minute.
From the magazine American Demographics, I find an article about “Millennial Fever”, and how “marketers can take advantage of them by striking while the iron is hot”. Was the Y2K scare a Conspiracy dreamed up by the World Elite to sell us on bottled water and mass quantities of emergency supplies? Millennial Fever is driving consumer behavior in all sorts of interesting ways, which means it offers marketing opportunities. But it won’t last forever. If you want to strike while the iron is hot, you need to understand the symptoms of the fever and how you can turn them to your advantage. Hm. Well. Anyway. Buy Duct tape, everybody!
The Cultural Logic of Heaven’s Gate Tragic as it was, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide was a completely predictable bit of cultural logic. It is Millennial Fever in its most virulent incarnation. Techno/apocalyptic episodes are an inevitable symptom of this century’s end. With the fierce economy of the truly crazed, Heaven’s Gate encapsulates four critical themes of Millennial Fever, and drives them to their logical (or illogical) conclusion: technology as disembodiment; mortification and malleability of the body; apocalyptic agents; death and rebirth. Technology as Disembodiment. Marshall McLuhan points out that every new technology involves a sort of “amputation”: The automobile “amputates” the legs, or the television “amputates” conversation. The Internet “amputates” the body, so to speak, as well as personal identity. These cultural realities will dictate the quality of post-millennial civilization.
Everyone knows the famous cartoon: a dog at a computer commenting, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” It’s not such a slippery slope to the world of Heaven’s Gate: Web site designers who obliterated their personal identities and had amputations performed upon their bodies. Mortification and Malleability of the Body. The cultists referred to their bodies as “containers,” an image very close to the cyberdelic idea of “meat cages.” Denunciation of the body, followed by its mortification, is an end-time theme that pops up predictably in decades that precede the turn of a century. It was in the 1490s, for example, when Savonarola and his friends threw Florence into an orgy of self-flagellation.
Malleability of the body is a related theme, visible in our current fascination with body art, transvestitism, and the cyberdelic fantasy of computers implanted in the body. No surprise, then, that 8 of the 18 male Heaven’s Gate cultists had been surgically castrated. It’s an extreme version of a popular culture phenomenon, in this case body-piercing. Apocalyptic Agents. Our culture’s heavens flutter with angels and UFOs. They represent the same longing for apocalyptic intervention and delivery. And they highlight the fact that in our fin de sicle, religiosity substitutes for religion. Religion forces us to deal with gods. Religiosity is a cheaper thrill, and angels and UFOs are less disquieting forces. (Carl Jung, a long time ago, referred to UFOs as “technological angels.”)
The cultists killed themselves in order to hitch a ride on a UFO hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. In a tragicomic bit of American scientism linking up with a lunatic consumerism, the cultists bought a high-tech telescope, and then returned it to the store for a refund when it failed to reveal the comet’s flying-saucer companion.
Or hitch a ride on a UFO? The 1990s were full of stories of the people who dropped out of society in come manner or other. Oddly enough, I’d have to say the Heaven’s Gate Cult was the least tragic of the batch of stories I have in mind, in the sense that the Heaven’s Gate Cult kept mostly to themselves, and didn’t kill their kids. I can’t say the same thing about Waco or the Unabomber. I hope they latched onto that spacecraft that was trailing the comet!
In 1984, for example, Applewhite’s followers were entranced by the film Cocoon, in which a boatload of Florida pensioners is lifted into a giant spaceship. According to an ex-member, the group’s leaders decided that the film was telling them how they were going to be picked up and taken to the Kingdom level. So some members moved to Galveston, Texas, to prepare a houseboat for lift-off. But then they changed their minds; presumably another movie had come along.
Heaven’s Gate cheerfully acknowledged its debt to the small screen. In a final Internet posting, it referred obliquely to Star Trek: “To help you understand who we are, we have taken the liberty to express a synopsis in the vernacular of a popular science-fiction entertainment series. It is interesting to see how the context of fiction can often open the mind to advanced possibilities which are, in reality, quite close to fact.”
INCLUDING suicide, it seems. Science fiction undoubtedly helped Applewhite’s followers block out the conventional understanding of death. Life at Rancho Santa Fe, says one of the suicide tapes, “is like training on a holodeck. It’s time for us to put into practice what we’ve learnt.”
But what had they learnt? It is true that the immediate trigger for the Heaven’s Gate suicides was provided by reports, circulated by a late-night radio talk show, that a monstrous alien craft was trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Yet it was not the only reason Applewhite’s people killed themselves. Many influences were at work, such as the disorientating regime at Rancho Santa Fe, where near-starvation alternated with pigging out on Ben and Jerry’s, and where members rose in the middle of the night to gaze at their new home in the stars.
And one other factor should not be overlooked, although millions of Americans might prefer to do so. Put bluntly, a revived paranoia is sweeping across the United States, and perhaps Europe too. Conventional wisdom blames this on the unpoliceable Internet, which is why no one was surprised when Applewhite’s followers turned out to be website designers. Yet they weren’t really Internet buffs: they were entertainment junkies who mainlined on the conspiracy-obsessed films and television programmes of the Nineties. Cult entertainment, you might say, though it was more than that. This was how Heaven’s Gate “learnt” things.
We would hear about the destructive power of the Internet, and the dark corners in which the socially dejected can enter into, a couple years later with the Columbine Shootings. (I paraphrase Bill Clinton there, who was bumping around to the safest “Soccer Mom” ground he could find in his efforts to justify his presidency.) I note that we can easily transpose the sentence “A revived paranoia is sweeping across the United States, and perhaps Europe too.” to the current decade, and swiftly run ahead from there. (Care for some “Bird Flu?”)
Also keep in mind that the whole world is having trouble right now coming to grips with American Evangelical and its effect on politics and culture. Who are these “Left Behinders”, and why are people believing in the trans-death conversations held through the medium of John Edward (“Crossing Over”)… Has America Gone Mad? We all come full circle, and some things they never change.
(That batch of excerpting comes from “The Brainwashing of America: Analysis of Heaven’s Gate Suicides Has Missed one Vital Point Argues Damian Thompson: The Influence of Film and Television, Daily Telegraph, 8 – 9 -97.)
Against this backdrop, we have the Bill Clinton presidency, and The Nation assembling a panel of commentators to ponder its meaning.:
The presidency is a Jerry Springer show. The public is variously entertained, appalled and titillated by the smallness and coarseness of it all. Americans’ daily working lives have been transformed by the flows of global capital, by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve and by the wonders of the Internet. But in the evenings, when the work is done, we’re transfixed by the perils of Bill Clinton. News has become an Entertainment Division, a diversion from the daily grind. No matter that Asian economies are imploding, the world’s poor are expanding, more than a fifth of our own children are impoverished, American schools are falling apart, a record 41 million of us lack health insurance and the nation is experiencing the widest divergence of income, wealth and opportunity in five decades. It is more fun to ponder semen stains.
Though the consensus view is that he was Grover Cleveland reincarnated:
What can we demand of good leaders in bad times? Clinton concludes that we should not judge Presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland harshly. According to U.S. News & World Report, Clinton tells associates that they have been “under-appreciated as progressive reformers who tried to limit the power of big business and undercut the nativism and class hatreds of their age–stances he obviously considers parallel to his own.” Like him, they offered no bold initiatives, but, he suggests, they did all they could. If a President had a Depression spurring change, as FDR did, he could do more, but now… AND If he’s lucky, Bill Clinton will go down in history as the ablest President elected to office in the last third of the twentieth century. That would put him roughly on a par with the ablest President elected to office in the last third of the nineteenth century– the Gilded Age Democrat Grover Cleveland. […] The mixture of promise and disappointment continued into Clinton’s second term. A brilliant political counterpuncher, devastating in the clinches, he managed to get re-elected and, in his 1998 State of the Union address, to propose reasonably activist “third way” plans for strengthening Social Security, aiding education, raising the minimum wage and more. It all far exceeded Grover Cleveland’s policies (and was much friendlier to labor than Cleveland, the breaker of the Pullman strike, ever was). But as Clinton spoke, the Monica Lewinsky scandal was filling the headlines. …
Regretably, there could be no “Millennium Fever” in the 1890s for which I could parallel Cleveland with Clinton and finish the loop. “Centurian Fever” perhaps?… I will have to content myself in comparing Clinton with Bush and shrug away.
