“Our culture is singular for its ignorance of death. The great art and celebrations of many other cultures—ancient Egyptian and Etruscan, the Greek of Eleusis, Tibetan [we can add Mayans]—honor the underworld. We have no ancestor cult, although we are pathetically nostalgic. We keep no relics, though collect antiques. We rarely see dead human beings, though watch a hundred imitations each week on the television tube. The animals we eat are put out of sight. We have no myths of the -nekiya- [calling up ghosts or a visit to the underworld], yet our popular heroes in films and music are shady underworld characters."
I have this sense that I can't quite manifest or articulate (so bear with me) that our world is so unbalanced and crazy for this very reason: we push aside the very idea of death. I see our country's willingness to bomb Other People Far Away as a way of (attempting to) "outsource" our own death. We can find Other People to most everything for us that we don't want to do - why not the dying, too? And then we can continue the dream - for that's what it is.
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