"Normal Life"

A normal existence -- what could be more irrational? It's fantastic the number of things you're forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, the truths that have to be evaded!

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

For the first time, tragedy had been brought near to [Harvey Rolfe], and he marvelled at the indifference with which men habitually live in a world where tragedy is every hour's occurrence....what he now saw and felt was the simple truth of things, obscured by everyday conditions of active life....But for the power of deceiving ourselves, we couldn't live at all.

George Gissing, The Whirlpool

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

That, he had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense of it goes out of his mind.

Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

I don't watch much television (apart from Turner Classic Movies, bless them), but lately, on the occasions when I have watched conventional broadcasts -- a golf tournament, say, or Sixty Minutes the other night to catch the Conan O'Brien interview -- I have been struck by the extent to which the commercials pretend that we are still living in the "normal world" -- of 1980! There's a mom, there's a dad, there are two young children, a boy and a girl, there's a dog, there's a nice suburban house with a mowed lawn, there are investments, there are vacations, there are two vehicles. Mom and dad both work (which is why I say 1980 rather than 1960), at good, secure jobs, moving steadily up the career ladder with no disruptions, no lay-offs, no nasty office politics, no thwarted ambitions. This is the world that the commercials imply. It is one sort of fantasy of normal life.

If you check out the covers of the remaining print magazines at your local news-stand or grocery store, you can sample other such fantasies, because most magazines peddle a particular fantasy, month in, month out. A very popular one, which gets more play in the publications than on television, is that you can have phenomenal sex on a daily basis if you follow the tips in the magazines' articles and if, crucially, you look like the models on the magazines' covers (which even they don't look like, really).

Sexual fantasies are, of course, persistently unrealizable; Freud long ago wrote about how this enables "the grandest cultural achievements, which are brought to birth by ever greater sublimation of the components of the sexual instinct. For what motive would induce man to put his sexual energy to other uses if by any disposal of it he could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? He would never let go of this pleasure and would make no further progress."

So it is unrealistic to expect specifically sexual fantasies to change much, although they are a little more public nowadays, glaring at you from the covers of Cosmopolitan and Maxim instead of hidden under brown wrappers. But the larger fantasy of normal middle-class life depicted in the TV commercials -- one might expect that to adjust to reality just a wee bit more, and it hasn't except in a few relatively minor ways (more depiction of racial diversity, for example). The fact is that Americans have long been drifting away from the middle class fantasy lifestyle, partly out of choice, partly out of necessity. The recent financial disasters are going a long way toward decimating the middle class, of course. But even before that, the most common sort of household being formed in the United States was the kind I live in -- a singleton in an apartment. The notion of a life without significant disruption ("Pre-approved with your good credit rating!") is going by the boards; I know scarcely anyone who made it through the last decade without being up-ended at least once. You get more of a glimpse of the actual state of affairs in the cheap world of local TV commercials, with their hawking of used cars and personal injury attorneys. But at the national level, advertisers pretend against all available evidence that everything is just fine.

A dominant fantasy is one that the majority of people need to buy into in order for things to run "smoothly." But when a dominant fantasy unmoors itself too noticeably from reality, will people still buy in? "Normal life" is a fiction that goes on only as long as most of us consent to it, and only if conditions permit. If conditions no longer permit, and enough of us stop consenting to the fiction, matters could get quite interesting. I think that is where we are at, even if the Don Drapers of today don't know it yet.