Webs of gibberish

Two months ago I read Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho which makes me feel like a geeky loser having read it at such a later time, like the past two months, given the reputation (notoriety) of this novel in contemporary literature. But even if I read it in college or even early on in high school, I wouldn’t have appreciated its depth and the themes which it criticizes. I guess I don’t need to bore you with how the novel seems to suck you in despite its plotlessness and how it titillates you and makes you feel like a perv for wanting to see more of Patrick Bateman’s all too-detailed gratuitous sexual violence in the pages. As they say, some things are meant to be read. Which is why so many, even critics alike were led astray by the novel’s bluntness lambasting it as trash and accusing Ellis of pornography that they actually lost track of the social critique it was meant for in the first place, like commodification and the increasing gap of social classes as a result, the rise of the urban bourgeois, the loss of identity in a seemingly economically flourishing era, etc. Psycho is set in New York and Bateman’s world is Wall St. heaven. The indestructibility and stability of Ellis’ stylishly concocted world will be comical if placed in the vulnerability of the current times. Recession and bailout, hell even sub-prime mortgage, would remotely surface in the superficial discussions of self-absorbed financial execs, Bateman et al. But even if such were discussed, as vague terms, in that particular economic pinnacle, the wide gap would have alienated the blue-collar layman from giving a flying fuck about how economic slowdown would actually allow them to live decently.

Last night, I watch the government’s economic panel sling back answers from supposed intelligible queries and stories out of these landed up on front pages of national broadsheets today. For the past few weeks, we too have been engrossed in the US economic situation attempting to make sense out of it, out of our lives as Filipino citizens (and at least for me not that successfully) but in the end, Juan dela Cruz won’t give a flying fuck (I purposely repeated those two words). John Cassidy in The New Yorker aptly puts it: “As an exercise in crisis management, it is potentially disastrous—and, to the rest of the world, dumbfounding”. But what am I really talking here anyway that none of the thinking people already know? I think it just goes to show that we are still bridging, and that’s why we don’t bridge the gap, it’s because it is always burned. In the world of American Psycho, the insignificant are further marginalized and the economically important continue to slobber with whatever there is to consume.