Skeletons and Facial Cream

We live in a society that fears death above all other things. Yes, death is feared more than being ugly, overweight, unpopular, poor, impotent, or technologically ignorant.

It often amazes me how our capitalistic entrepreneurs play on this fear. Just watch the commercials that air on prime time television. So many offer the antidote to the cultural stigmas mentioned above. Their products promise to make you pretty, thin, cool, wealthy, vigorous, or illumined. The claim that if you have item x, then you'll be "in." If not, then you'll be "out." Whether we know it or not, this is the business of selling idols.

And marketers even do this with our greatest fear: death. Life is an idol; death is considered a form of hell. And the marketing specialists know this. How many commercials have we seen for "age defying" creams that promise to make wrinkles and blemishes and years of abuse "vanish?" How many hair care products are promoted for their ability to "take away the gray?" How many ads do we have to see where two old folks sit in bathtubs, holding hands, waiting on Jim's libido to kick in? The message here is that if you'll apply this cream or this dye or take this pill, then the affects of old age (which is the sacrament of death) will be gone. You'll be able to go on living without thinking about your own mortality, not forever of course, but at least for today. Carpe diem, as it is said.

But then, how do we channel this unresolved anxiety? What do we do with this subconscious whispering voice that before too long, there will no diem to carpe? In America, I believe that that is what we use Halloween for. Hooray for death! (but only for one day...). The history of this holiday is argued about. It has both pagan and Christian roots. But either way you look at it, the day was never used in the way we use it now. Even in its pagan background, the day symbolized a crossing-over of this world and the next. It affirmed an afterlife. Nowadays, it seems that we use it to lament the fact that this life is all there is.

Now, I am not anti-Halloween in the sense of kids dressing up and trick-or-treating. I am not the type to suggest that having a "holy huddle" in the church fellowship hall is any sort of corrective; bobbing for apples is not going to "win anybody to Jesus." But I do begin to question the increasingly elaborate displays in the typical front yard and on the typical front porch. Do we really need to greet our neighbors with a life-sized figurine of a decapitated man holding his own head in the right hand with a bloody clever in the left? Why the carnage? Don't we get enough on the news?

I think the answer lies in the fact that we fear death so much that we have to put it forth in such a way that we can fantasize it. We have to be able to laugh at it. In our culture, we no longer see and witness death in the way others cultures have and continue to do. It goes on in hospitals and nursing homes (out there), but it never touches us (in here). Add to that a growing sense of secularism and you have a recipe for necrophobia, a disease which infects our culture to the core.

The only medicine that we can agree upon (since 'religion' is no longer an option...) is to cover death with the thin patina of oxidizing creams and hair dyes and wait for Halloween to come. In the end, this course of action just makes Halloween happen everyday; I fail to see how facial creams and facial paints are really all that different.