David Hughes

Part I: Several months ago, I attended a public screening of the Ralph Nader documentary An Unreasonable Man. It is a well-balanced depiction of a wholly respectable citizen, the only downside being that I was forced to watch this movie in Manhattan. (1) But something strange happened near the film's conclusion: Three rows behind me, an old bearded man in a wheelchair began to vomit. This seemed to be the product of some type of seizure. For a moment, I feared this person was dying. But then that moment became two moments, and then it became three moments, and then it became two minutes. And nobody, including me, did anything. There were at least a hundred people in this theater, all watching a nonfiction movie about a humanitarian idealist, and we all listened to an elderly stranger have a vomit-inducing seizure for two minutes. Eventually, some Asian kid from the back of the theater ran down the aisle, asked the old man if he was okay, and wheeled him into the lobby. This made everyone in the room much more comfortable, thereby allowing us to continue learning about the importance of activism.

I think about this episode a lot; this is partially because it makes me feel guilty, but mostly because the situation seemed so paradoxical and predictable at the same time. We were actively watching a movie about ethics, yet consciously ignoring every ethical impulse any normal person should have. Why would a theater full of people sympathetic toward (or at least interested in) Ralph Nader completely disregard a stranger who clearly needed help? There are two possible explanations for why this happened. The first is that modern Americans are inherently lazy, openly hypocritical automatons (which, I must concede, is not exactly a new theory). But here's the second, less obvious possibility: Perhaps the audience -- and I include myself here -- did not sense any meaningful relationship between the experience of watching An Unreasonable Man and the experience of being alive. It seems like those two things should be connected, and I'm sure the film's directors intended its spectators to see a relationship between Nader's moral integrity and the application of values in everyday life. But maybe that expectation is unrealistic. Maybe this rarely happens. In fact, maybe this never happens. And this prompts a larger, more abstract question: Is it unethical to be entertained by the sincerity of someone else's ethics?

Part II: Last summer, my girlfriend returned home early from work on a Wednesday afternoon. I was sitting on the couch, shirtless and unshaven, listening to the Grateful Dead's American Beauty, eating some colorless sludge, and reading a book about the CIA. She, perhaps predictably, asked what the fuck was happening.

"I'm a hippie now," I replied. "This is my new thing: From now on, I'm a hippie. I'm only going to do hippie stuff."

This was (truly) my intention. Twelve months ago, I woke up and arbitrarily decided that I would become a hippie. To be frank, it didn't seem that radical a transformation. But my girlfriend comes from the Pacific Northwest, where being a hippie is still a legitimate occupation.

"You can't do this," she said. "You can't just wake up and declare yourself a hippie."

"Don't point your plastic fingers at me," I said in response. "You just can't accept my gentle freedom. Why don't you go out and buy me the new issue of Relix?" (2)

"This is always your problem," she continued. "You do this sort of thing all the time. It is offensive to take someone's authentic idealism and ironically embrace its most stereotypical features simply to fabricate a clever way of explaining why you're too lazy to get an adult haircut." (3)

"I disagree," I said. "I don't see why I can't just declare myself a hippie for entertainment purposes. I don't understand why I need to embrace any specific hippie beliefs. It would seem like being a third-order simulacrum of a hippie should be totally acceptable at this point in history, and perhaps even preferable. I reserve the right to dictate my motives for adopting the contextual qualities of postmodern hippiedom. Moreover, I grow tired of this debate. How about we hitchhike to an animal shelter and feed all the puppies LSD?"

"You are a disgrace to all hippies," she said in disgust. Which is a pretty damning decree, all things considered; it's akin to calling someone a disgrace to all former Buffalo Bills running backs.

Part III: Are normal people still interested in the music of Trent Reznor? I can't tell. The latest Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, sold 187,000 copies during its opening week of release, but record sales are no longer an indicator of anything. However, I am keenly aware of Reznor's ongoing ability to fascinate rock writers and magazine editors, virtually all of whom see him as either a genius or a histrionic goth bag. It's hard to figure out how to feel about this dude. His two towering career achievements are 1) a collection of brilliant, engrossing soundscapes that sound (and feel) far more distinct than logic would dictate, and 2) several of the most idiotic lyrics any adult has ever written down, much less sung in public. I lost track of Reznor's whereabouts from 1998 to 2005, mostly because his records all started to sound like a schizophrenic trying to sexually seduce an Intellivision console by screaming at it during a Pink Floyd concert. Whenever he runs out of ideas, Reznor yells at God, which kind of makes him like a writer for Six Feet Under. Yet something about this new NIN record snared my interest, so me and 186,999 other people went out and immediately spent $17.99 on Year Zero.

It's pretty good. The best parts sound like the end of "Welcome to the Machine."

What specifically interested me, of course, was the fact that Year Zero had been widely described as Nine Inch Nails' "political" album, although I have no idea why the political insights of Reznor would possibly intrigue me. His beliefs have always seemed pretty straightforward; like all his other lyrical notions, they are superficially obvious and specifically unfathomable. (He seems to view George Bush as an Orwellian version of Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men.) I've read many (generally positive) reviews of this album, all of which reference the ideological premise behind the record before ignoring its details almost entirely. In other words, there appears to be an inordinate amount of curiosity surrounding the possibility of Trent Reznor having ideas about the world, despite the fact that nobody cares what those ideas are. The content of his principles is totally meaningless; all that matters is the possibility that he has any principles at all.

And this, I suspect, is dangerous.

It's dangerous because finding distractive pleasure in other people's ethics (regardless of what they are) creates the potential for ethics to become a commodity. Which wouldn't bother me at all, except for the fact that commodities always feel disconnected from the aforementioned "experience of being alive." It's a transformation that turns every thought, belief, and action into a form of anesthetizing entertainment. This is why the happiest people in the world are those who can't figure out why they don't care about anything at all.

Of course, it also explains why the kind of people who watch documentaries about Ralph Nader can still be the kind of people who ignore puking old men in wheelchairs.

Footnotes

1. For anyone living outside of New York, let me give you one critical tip if you ever plan on visiting: Do not attend any movie that contains even the vaguest of political messages. The audience will ruin the experience every time. Whenever people in New York watch movies about politics, they feel some childish, idiotic obligation to boo or moan whenever the film makes any passing reference to George W. Bush, and they always make sure to laugh (or -- worse -- sigh dramatically) whenever the onscreen narrative contradicts their reactionary, unoriginal political views. This is because moviegoers in New York usually think their personal opinions are more interesting than any movie ever made. [Back to Story]

2. This was part of what drew me to the hippie lifestyle: It's incredibly easy to win arguments. [Back to Story]

3. Or words to this general effect. At the time, I was kind of distracted by "Truckin'." [Back to Story]

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