Ask Dr. Ding

Hello Doctor I’m glad you’re some better. Diet 7-up is what I do too.

So I wondered if maybe you’d ponder on Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears and
post-modern zooming towards self-destruct. Are they the cultural dark anima
and shadow side of the lighter anima? I mean you’re right there close to
the Jung Center and all. Are they pointing out how our cultural beliefs
are so whacked? I’ve been reading Kunstler too much maybe again but
really…you’re in oil central and maybe you can wrap your brain around it
in such a way, I bet, that I’d like to hear your thoughts anyway…

I lived in Montrose some back in the 90′s and one year I actually taught
high school in Cy-Fair….talk about your Kunstlerian nightmare….

Anyway bye-bye and hope you feel better and have lots of fun in New
Orleans….

Lerel

DearLerel:

Thanks for the good wishes! And what a fun question to sink my sardonic lil fangs into.

I sincerely doubt that the Misses Winehouse and Spears are at all conscious of their role in the pomo lemming run to cultural oblivion. In Dr. Ding’s view, they are probably too busy chomping down on the fast-food byproducts of our strip-mall, drive-thru culture as envisioned by Kunstler, and slurping down diabetes-inducing, dental caries-promoting, brain-rotting crappucinos/heroin cocktails to notice.

Dr. Ding believes that in order to qualify as being representative of the shadow aspect of the anima, that the individual in question must be interesting, and acting with some kind of mild-to-moderate malice aforethought. Or some kind of outlaw pirate badass. And I just don’t find either one of them that interesting or, I don’t know, intentional. Maybe if I’d met them as individuals and we’d talked at length about tattoos, dance moves and our respective cosmologies, things would be different, but as it stands, junk food-addicted, media-addled codependents making superbad and incredibly predictable choices in habits, behavior, and personal hygiene just doesn’t cut the Jungian ice with me.

For real.

Dr. Ding feels empathy for Ms Spears and Ms Winehouse’s issues with mental illness and massive drug addiction respectively, to be sure. I worked with dually-diagnosed addicts for years, and these are serious, pernicious problems, quite literally life-and-death. Having an illness like Bipolar Affective Disorder or Opioid Dependence that likes to whisper continually “I don’t exist. Nothing’s wrong. It’s everyone else, not you.” is far more difficult to recover from than say, a straightforward Panic Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder, where you’re acutely and painfully aware that your shit is all kinds of jacked up.

But being fucked-up, mascara-smeared, and ensrhined inside an addictive, throwaway cultural lacuna just isn’t the same thing as being interesting. Which means, in dinglogique, that the Winehouse/Spears - Mall Culture Projection dialectic fails to obtain. It stalls out somewhere amid the fakey, highly derivative Motown vocal stylings of Winehouse, the plebian baring of generally more private body parts of Spears, and the stormy, shallow, rapidly shifting, self-hating, all-around personality-disordered romantic relationship dynamics of both.

Bo-ring.

Dr. Ding sees no dark archetypes here, no Kali Ma, no wailing Ban-Sidhe, no shit-kicking, reality-inverting Heyoka energy. It’s just sickness and psychopathology.

Listen to these young women sing, and you’ll get what I’m talking about. While Winehouse is a tremendously talented songwriter, her voice sounds inauthentic, gimmicky and put on, cod-soulful. Spears is a great performer, but the voice is tinny, hiccuppy, affected, little girlish. Neither sings through their hearts, from deep within their physical or spiritual being. The energy of their music doesn’t resonate deep within me. If I want soulful and strong I’ll take Etta James, KoKo Taylor, Aretha. If I want schmaltzy, over-the-top romantic I’ll take Edith Piaf and Patsy Cline. And if I feel the need to rain down death, gloom, and/or fury I’ll take Bjork or Pat Benatar or Beth Ditto or Chrissy Hynde or Siouxsie Sioux.

So, Lerel, I’m sorry to disappoint, but I think these gals are not so much emblematic of a “whacked” Kunsterlian cultural dystopia as they simply are a literal distraction from the war in Iraq, from a tippy, dilatory economy, and as of late, a highly entertaining distraction at that. And further, our collective fascination with their antics is nothing new; people have been rubbernecking at roadside accidents for centuries. It’s in our brain wiring to pay attention to negative events, because they are salient to our survival. If we’d paid more attention to pretty butterflies than to sabertooth tigers a few kajillion millenia ago, we’d really be up shit’s crick from an evolutionary standpoint, or perhaps we simply wouldn’t be, period.

Yes, society is circling the drain. Yes, we live in a culture rapidly depleting itself of meaning, heroes and heroines, a center, a purpose, a defining ethos. Yes, Kunstler is probably right bout lots of stuff. But I just don’t think that the Britneys and Amys of this planet are the horsepersons of the coming apocalypse. I picture more the Ring Wraith type.

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