From: Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 11:33:46 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Kitsch!
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- From the "Unberable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera.
Part Six, "The Grand March"

Section 6

  Sabina's initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather
than ethical in character.  What repelled her was not nearly so much
the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into
cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear - in other words,
Communist kitsch.  The model of Communist kitsch is the ceremony
called May Day.
  She had seen May Day parades during the time when people were still
enthusiastic or still did their best to feign enthusiasnm.  The women
all wore red, white, adn blue blouses, and the public, looking on from
balconies and windows, could make out various five-pointed stars,
hearts, and letters when the marchers went into formation.  Small
brass bands accompanied the individual groups, keeping everyone in
step.  As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blase
faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were
properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement.  Nor were
they merely expressing political agreement with Communism; no, theirs
was an agreement with being as such.  The May Day ceremony drew its
inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with
being.  The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not "Long live
Communism!" but "Long live life!"  The power and cunning of Communist
politics lay in the fact that it appropriated this slogan.  For it was
this idiotic tautology ("Long live life!") which attracted people
indifferent to the theses of Communism to the Communist parade.

Section 7

  Ten years later (by which time she was living in America), a friend
of some friends, an American senator, took Sabina for a drive in his
gigantic car, his four children bouncing up and down in the back.  The
senator stopped the car in front of a stadium with an artificial
skating rink, and the children jumped out and started running along
the large expanse of grass surrounding it.  Sitting behind the wheel
and gazing dreamily after the four little bounding figures, he said to
Sabina, "Just look at them."  And describing a circle with his arm, a
circle that was meant to take in stadium, grass, and children, he
added, "Now, that's what I call happiness."
  Behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and
grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee
from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass
grew and no children ran.
  At that moment an image of the senator standing on a reviewing stand
in a Prague square flashed through Sabina's mind.  The smile on his
face was the smile Communist statesmen beamed from the height of their
reviewing stand to the identically smiling citizens in the parade
below.

Section 8

  How did the senator know that children meant happiness?  Could he
see into their souls?  What if, the moment they were out of sight,
three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
  The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling.  When
the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.  In the realm
of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
  The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can
share.  Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it
must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their
memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children
running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.
  Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession.  The first tear
says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
  The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all
mankind, by children running on the grass!
  It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
  The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of
kitsch.

Section 9

  And no one knows this better than politicians.  Whenever a camera is
in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in
the air, kiss it on the cheek.  Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all
politicians and all political parties and movements.
  Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies
exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one
another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the
individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create
unusual works.  But whenever a single political movement corners
power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
  When I say "totalitarian," what I mean is that everything that
infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of
individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in
the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who
starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony
(because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite
seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who
prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree
"Be fruitful and multiply."
  In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by
totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.

Section 10

  The decade immediately following the Second World War was a time of
the most horrible Stalinist terror.  It was the time when Tereza's
father was arrested on some piddling charge and ten-year-old Tereza
was thrown out of their flat.  It was also the time when
twenty-year-old Sabina was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts.
There, her professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of
socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic
conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and
better.  So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could
exist only "on the other side" (in America, for instance), and only
from there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for
instance), could it penetrate the world of "good and better."
  And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all
Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with
incredible innocence and chastity.  The greatest conflict that could
occur between two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he thought
she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her.  But in
the final scene they would fall into each other's arms, tears of
happiness trickling down their cheeks.
  The current conventional interpretation of these films is this: that
they showed the Communist ideal, whereas Communist reality was worse.
  Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation.  Whenever she
imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a
shiver run down her back.  She would unhesitatingly prefer life in a
real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues.  Life
in the real Communist world was still livable.  In the world of the
Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would
have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week.
  The feeling Soviet kitsch evoked in Sabina strikes me as very much
like the horror Tereza experienced in her dream of being marched
around a swimming pool with a group of naked women and forced to sing
cheerful songs with them while corpses floated just below the surface
of the pool.  Tereza could not address a single question, a single
word, to any of the women; the only response she would have got was
the next stanza of the current song.  She could not even give any of
them a secret wink; they would immediately have pointed her out to the
man standing in the basket above the pool, and he would have shot her
dead.
  Tereza's dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a
folding screen set up to curtain off death.

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