Didiontopia
neoliberlala intercessions
“In California, we did not believe that history could bloody the land or even touch it”
— Joan Didion, Where I Was From
I have been warned by loving friends and family for my whole adulthood that I would hate Los Angeles.
But, dear reader, I loved it.
Los Angeles is a mesmerizing city. Mostly because, as Joan Didion points out, it is in California, and California is a place in which its citizens are under the illusion that they are wildly independent, but, in fact, it is “an entirely dependent colony of the invisible empire [in which] corporate and political interests are joined.”
My first thought upon landing was that Los Angeles was spiritually a suburb, which is the status of most of Southern California, in Didion’s estimation. Huge tracts of land and ranches are divyed up and developed in the post-war baby boom. She describes most of Californian development as “an enthusiastic fall into a familiar California error, that of selling the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder.”
Land—and the past and future it contains, our wellbeing that’s bound up in it—is always subordinate to the profit to be made from it.
That’s tragic. Something about Los Angeles, like most suburbs, is sublimely, incandesantly, indisputably tragic. It’s not a tragic grandeur but something tawdry.
I think what makes it tragic is that the people who moved there mistook the advertising of confidence men for a mythology. A suburb isn’t freedom, it’s the indignity of dependency. A suburb isn’t stability, it’s a development that’s out of step and in no way in concert with the nature around it, and so therefore fundamentally transitory. A suburb doesn’t exist for its own benefit—it is not designed with the common good of its neighbors in mind. It is a mining project. It was built to extract wealth from land for the developers.
And Los Angeles could have been so many things, it is stunningly beautiful. It is shockingly polluted. And those two things together say it all, I think. The mountains fall into the sea by Malibu. It’s enough to break your heart.
These are the kinds of contradictions on which Californians have tended to founder when they try to think about the place they come from. — Joan Didion, Where I Was From
And the smog that hangs over the skyline in a perfectly delineated sub-atmosphere, obvious from any of the heights north of the city from which you can look down into the basin. The producers of the pollutants honk and grind on the five-lane highway, which, despite its girth, can’t hold all the traffic and cars joke the highway’s name comes from the functional speed limit “four-or-five miles an hour.”
When young people advocate for abolishing capitalism and creating some kind of new system, elderly folks of a certain persuasion often respond: “So you want this country to become Venezuela or Cuba!?!”
Seeing Los Angeles, I think of all the New Jerseyians and Staten Islanders who have protested congestion pricing in Manhattan. I think of the car lobbyists and the death of the American streetcar. I think of our love of individual freedom and suspicion of public transportation. Our relationship to our land being merely contractual and speculative rather than ecological and spiritual. And I look at Los Angeles. This is the reductio ad absurdum of all of our American sins.
And yet—it’s beautiful. I am terrified of snakes, but, behind the thick dirty wall of zoo glass, I could stare at them for hours. The lethal is doubly seductive.
“For what exactly and at what cost had one been redeemed? When you jettison others so as not to be caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains, do you deserve not to be caught? When you survive at the cost of Miss Gilmore and her brother, do you survive at all?”
— Joan Didion
Synod Update
This welcoming gaze of Jesus also invites us to be a welcoming Church, not one with closed doors. In such a complex time as ours, new cultural and pastoral challenges emerge that call for a warm and kindly inner attitude so that we can encounter each other without fear.
— Pope Francis, opening homily for the Synod in Rome
If you are distressed about the Synod on Synodality, I find it distressing that the Washington Post’s article on the opening day of the synod was all about conservative Catholic’s in the United States’ resistance to the Synod.
I don’t necessarily blame them for the story, since from the U.S. perspective resistance to the Synod is sadly the case. But I might push Michelle Boorstein’s reporting to find the more important nuance that the conservative resistance to the synod seems to (at least from her reporting and my own) to be based on ignorance about what the Synod is really about.
The cranks she interviews do not seem to have actually read any of the manifold documents provided by the synod office for the laity to read about the synod. It is unclear from Boorstein’s article if her sources have read anything about the Synod, except probably for the complaints in reactionary Catholic media media.
There is only one mention of the Second Vatican Council, and it is not in the context of explaining the sources of the Synod.
There is a complaint that Jesus’ name is overlooked in Synod documents (?) The preparatory document repeats the name of Jesus two dozen times. The Document for the Continental Stage names Jesus or Christ nearly 20 times. The Instrumentum Laboris invokes Jesus, Christ, or Christ Jesus 30 times. Pope Francis’ homily opening the synodal path in 2021 names Jesus a dozen times. The Pope’s homily opening the Synod in Rome last week calls upon our Lord and Savior in more than 16 instances.
There is a general inability or reluctance to focus on the goal of the synod—the goal of the synod of bishops since 325 and 1965—to learn how to walk together better. I have been confused from the beginning of the process about the insistence that the synod is about trojan horsing certain issues through a process. That really the synod is “about” gay marriage, women’s ordination, or somesuch other terrifying idea that is in no way related to the creed we profess each Sunday. The synod is about Christ. It is about being Christ’s mystical body together. For those complaining about lack of theological rigor or standing outside the process critiquing it, I wish that they had attended a listening session and brought these concerns to the very avenue of listening that the synod designed for them.
Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls
Sabeel Liberation Theology Centre issued a statement yesterday on the violence that erupted in and around Gaza this weekend.
At Sabeel, we envision a future where every life holds intrinsic value, and every individual enjoys freedom and safety, irrespective of their background or identity. Sabeel condemns and mourns the tragic loss of all life and human suffering. We categorically reject all forms of violence. And, we recognize that the only way forward for us is non-violence.
Please read the full statement here.
Covid Vaccine Update
“The lack of data about the vaccine and menstruation in the initial clinical trials was not some kind of shortcut but standard procedure. It was and is a reminder that in medicine, the default patient is usually male.”
— The Cut
Remember those heady days of COVID Vaccines and the ensuing controversies? Now there’s an unpleasant conversation you haven’t thought about in a long time! Let’s go back to those vintage 2021 trauma-stamped memories, shall we?
I have had COVID-19 four times—four, folks—despite getting as many vaccine shots. Were my vaccines actually Pfizer-branded placebos of sugar water? The jury is out.
A few things have happened since getting the COVID-19 vaccine, however, that I don’t think were supposed to happen. First of all being (I never get tired of saying it) that I got Covid—not twice, not thrice, but quadrice. The second being that my cycle (sorry, gentleman readers) became the most whacked out rollercoaster ride this side of the moon.
In the ensuing years, I’ve become cyst city. You get a cyst, you get a cyst, every other month is an Oprah-live-taping-sized festival of cysts inside my poor sweet ovaries.
I am not a scientist, but I am a human being with a brain, and so I deduce something has changed. Either turning 30 was a seismically disruptive event for my otherwise meticulously regular menstrual life or this wee viral shot caused a tsunami shock to the system.
Conventional capitalist wisdom through the megaphone of the beauty industry loudly informs us in no uncertain terms that turning 30 is an unparalleled catastrophe for a lady, so let’s not discount that.
But I have my eye on those vaccines, especially as more data is gathered on them.
My one takeaway from my COVID-19 saga is that science is responsible for plausible explanations regarding the topographical composition of the Mariana Trench; the origins of the universe; or the detection of life in galaxies lightyears away—and yet the female body is too much of a mystery to do any scientific studies on. Hormones, apparently, really have those scientists stumped.
It is cold comfort to be a female body—the one mystery left in the universe.
Did you make it to the La Brea Tar Pits?