"Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."
We will all be turned into kitsch, shit turned into gold. We accumulate. We consume. We discard. We do these things habitually; life means churning out a lot of shit. Productivity is correlated to consumption, supply and demand, the good capitalist preaches. And then a time comes when our capacity for accumulation is exhausted, we are discarded, leaving a malleable object: an archetype, a stereotype, an idyllic remembrance. The desperate need for the fallen soldier is kitsch; the memorial immortalizes resentment, entrenches the impossible dreams of purity and perpetual peace - rows and rows of headstones stretching to as far as the eye can see - and alchemizes revanche with the spirit of a people, "lest we forget...let us kill in their honor and join their blessed ranks." Headstones - rows and rows of kitsch, sweet images of immortality for those who have passed into the void.
But don't get me wrong, kitsch is not absolutely malformed or "evil" nor should it be demonized. It is how it is employed, manipulating the most abysmal human emotions - blind faith in hope - for power ambition, that makes it the enemy of life. Kitsch often is an imperfect expression of an inarticulate human voice reaching out for affirmation. But the one enamoured with kitsch does not wait for response from life or from above, he seeks to construct meaning through saccharine remembrance. Recollection searches a shrapnel-filled, fragmented, and fractured world for objects of kitsch: the possibly tragic, yet invariably sweet, face of an orphaned child mourning his father's death; the son shall carry on the work of the father. Humanity longs for inspiration, for hope, however detached from reality. Without the possibility of kitsch, man would only see the blood and gore, fragments and fissures, and stare aimlessly at the dark expanse. The possibility of kitsch keeps him from offing himself and ending the meaningless suffering. But it isn't kitsch that keeps humanity from plunging off the ledge into an abyss. We are therefore we live. I rebel therefore we are, Camus once wrote. Kitsch is the ass-god providing fleeting comfort; resentment invariably returns to animate revanche.
Taut, proud, and erect, the proud solider stand frozen for all time. He is peddled to believers by dishonest brokers of power. Freedom is irrelevant for he who worships illusion.
