Death is all the future holds is death

What does it do to one’s sense of the world, of its potential and possibility, if the full content of the category of “the news” is death? I wandered over to KTVU, one of the local horrible TV channels owned by some horrible branch of the mouse, and an interesting thing about every single story there–every single event which they take to represent That Which is New and Novel in the World–is that the substance of those stories, their upshot and significance, is death. Everything ends in death or tends towards death. Death is what is; what there is, in life, is death.

With the exception of yesterday’s earthquake and tsunami–memento mori stories if ever I’ve heard one–we have: a shooting of some dead kids in Oroville, a fatal car crash that killed people dead, a dead teenager found on a beach, dead, the trial of the alleged killer of Bob Lee (dead), an escaped killer of a dead person, someone in LA caught shipping death-making weapons to North Korea, a dead person’s body found, the case of some jailworkers who watched a dead person die in jail, and a lady who was attacked and tied up but didn’t die.

Exceptions prove the rule, which is that everything is about and ends in death. A “woman tied to tree at gunpoint” is described as “an atypical case” and it is clear, without needing to be said, that what makes it atypical is that she wasn’t killed; the ending of this story, which perversely doesn’t come, is death. And when it comes to the earthquake and tsunami–for which the story is what didn’t happen–we are reminded that the world is a gun, pointed at us: “There is no other way to say it,” the story opens, “California’s North Coast dodged one of nature’s biggest bullets,” which is a way to remind you that nature wants to kill you until you are dead.

Because there certainly seems to be no other way to say it, or anything else, except death! “If it bleeds it leads” is enough of a cliché that we don’t tend to think about what it does to us for the only story we can tell, or be told, to be death. Clichés normalize into a background given what, if we saw with even slightly defamiliarizing eyes, would suddenly appear as wildly perverse and strange: imagine an alien, a visitor from another country, or a Joseph Campbell from the future perusing the mythologies of our culture, our tales and social truths; imagine such a person determining what the one story we tell, over and over again, is death. Imagine such an alien future tourist looking at our social world and saying “damn, these people sure do tell themselves stories in order to die.”

What an odd way to live, to be always telling stories about death! I sometimes go on bike rides, and one of my favorite rides is down to Jack London Square and then along the estuary, to the east, and as you bike along the San Francisco Bay Trail, you pass a great building that looks like this, and I’ve always noted it, and seen it, as I bike past it, and thought to myself, I wonder what that place is, and now I know: that place is a temple of death, a portal into a virtual universe where nothing but death occurs, where the endpoint and purpose of all live, all novelty, all human experience and truth is death: