Kitsch Helps Us Come to Terms With Horror

Spoiler Alert!!!: Scottsboro Boys, Bleach (Anime)

Kitsch is difficult to define, but I like to put it this way:  It's something that tries to exaggerate meaning when it's not there, like a gilded cardholder or pink flamingo garden ornaments.

Sometimes when the world pushes inhumanity to the extreme, and a serious objective narration of the account may not suffice because any attempt to recreate its essence will in some way demean it.

I recently watched the Scottsboro Boys at the Ahmanson Theater.  It's about the wrongful persecution of a group of nine African-American teenagers in Alabama during the Great Depression.  Two Caucasian Alabama women accused the boys of gang raping them.

It was doubly kitschy because it was a circus act within a broadway musical.  The audience knew that obvious inconsistencies, like African American boys playing the part of southern Alabama women, but the musical progresses and gradually stings the audience of the pain of the inmates.

My favorite song was "Southern Days."  Before the verdict was read to the boys, all of them were imagining how they would spend the moment leaving jail.  When all expound their hopes, the interlocutor enters the scene and attempts to convince the boys to remain in the South.  With forced faces they all begin to sing a folk song about the South.

These lines completely shifts the tone of the number:

HOW THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
COME BACK TO ME!
LIKE MY DADDY HANGIN’ FROM A TREE.

It completely shatters the song's attachment towards Southern nostalgia.

Nostalgia is the greatest threat to history.  At least censorship or forgetting history allows room for one to wonder if pain occurred, but nostalgia erases history AND seduces one to accept a comfortable narrative.

The danger of nostalgia also reminds me of Japanese anime.

(source)

When Ben Lewis interviews Takashi Murakami, Murakami talks about how after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after 30 years Japan creates children's television shows that depicts cartoons of this image.

I didn't realize this until I wrote this blog, but the reverberation of this incident is STILL in modern day anime.

SPOILER ALERT FOR BLEACH!!!

This video is the climax of the Bleach series.  Fast forward to 25:00:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFTwjj7lO0

I'm skipping vital details, but the flowy hair guy has to kill the evil butterfly looking thing.  The entire Bleach series hinges on this moment, but if you have no idea what's going on, this final explosion of raw power from the protagonist is eerily similar to an atomic blast.

Victims of the atomic bomb blinded and deafened by the explosion explain how they saw something as bright as the sun, and couldn't hear anything because their eardrums would rupture from the shockwave.

When we look back into a traumatic history, we cannot recreate the event to convey the feeling.  Ironically kitsch allows us to look without altering the feelings of history.

 

 

My Ethnicity

"Where did your family come from?"

This is a heavily charged question that plucks a delicate nerve.  Depending on context, I'm mostly happy to answer.

My ancestral family lived 300 to 400 miles NE of Hong Kong.  The city is swampland, on Hanjiang river delta.



The place is famous for scholars sent to exile.  Han Yu wrote a memorial dissuading the emperor from allowing the Buddhism to enter Tang China.   "Offerings to the Alligators" was a political satire about him using the will of the emperor to banish alligators.

Why do we have an innate curiosity of this question?  Why does do people frame the identity of another person within this context?

I'm personally not offended when people ask me about my family history, but I'm frustrated that the answer to this question doesn't go beyond the stereotypes and closed off world-views.

For instance, my parent's generations constantly complains about how my generation is "forgetting the past," and that something is irrevocably lost with modernization.  Yet they too have been altered by modern times.

Cultural history is important in that it provides a chronological outline of the chain of events that produce the people of the present.  From an anthropological view, modernity thrusted us far away from out ancestral norms.

I initially believed out heartless modern world was lacking some moral high-ground of the past.  My study of China in  college helped me weave the rich narrative that connects the ancient past to the present.  I felt certain that my understanding of history and culture would show where to find this moral high-ground.

There's only one person on earth I trust when she describes my family history.  She lived through some of the most traumatic events of modern Chinese history with my own family (They were neighbors).  After one month of  graduating with a Chinese major, I had the mindset of a Chinese scholar, ready to enlighten me on the darkest parts of my family history.

I asked her if I could record her biography and preserve history for the next generation, she said,

"No.  I don't want to relive the painful moments of my life and have it exposed to everyone.  People shouldn't use me to cling onto past.  It's good to not repeat the mistakes of history, but one also has to be aware the present can change and count the blessings of the present.  Longing for an ideal to exist again blinds you from the happiness in front of you."

Our attachment to the nostalgia of family history is like an old favorite pen without ink.  It was able to communicate our thoughts from the past.  We still cling onto it, even though it no longer serves a purpose.

The past people we admire the most weren't historians or soothsayers, but the ones who defied circumstance and upbringing to do good at that moment.  History tells us that we should value the present pursuit of happiness.