“Mr. President, I’d like to pick up this Armageddon theme,” said Marvin Kalb. Ronald Reagan shifted his weight, eyes narrowed in concentration. It was 1984, his second debate with Walter Mondale, and the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium was done up like interstellar space. Everyone — the audience, the panelists and the candidates — floated against a curtain of black.

“You’ve been quoted as saying that you do believe, deep down, that we are heading for some kind of biblical Armageddon,” continued Kalb, the chief diplomatic correspondent for NBC News. “Your Pentagon and your Secretary of Defense have plans for the United States to fight and prevail in a nuclear war. Do you feel that we are now heading perhaps, for some kind of nuclear Armageddon?”

Reagan was indignant. And confused. “Mr. Kalb,” he said, “I think what has been hailed as something I’m supposedly, as President, discussing as principle is the recall of just some philosophical discussions, with people who are interested in the same things; and that is the prophecies down through the years, the biblical prophecies of what would portend the coming of Armageddon, and so forth, and the fact that a number of theologians for the last decade or more have believed that this was true, that the prophecies are coming together that portend that. But no one knows whether Armageddon, those prophecies mean that Armageddon is a thousand years away or day after tomorrow.”

He paused, then, pivoted to the Star Wars program. The answer doesn’t make any more sense now than it did in 1984. He crushed Mondale in a landslide.

Reagan’s oblique reference to growing Armageddon speculation over the “last decade,” is perfectly in line with the expansion of a kind of Christian theology known as “dispensational premillenialism” during the 1970s. While this tradition has deep roots in “fundamentalist” culture, it exploded into the national mainstream through Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s paperback The Late, Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970. In it, the authors argued that world events such as the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and the development of the atom bomb served to fulfill promises made in the Bible. Reading the news, they said, proved the end was nigh.

The Late, Great Planet Earth was past its thirty-sixth printing by the time Reagan answered Kalb. It sold more than any other non-fiction book of the 1970s. Prior to its pop-cultural and political success, however, dispensational premillenialism boiled on the fringes. Before Lindsey and Reagan, there was Salem Kirban — and a book that promised to tell its readers “HOW THE WORLD WILL END.”

“When this happens,” said its cover, and “if you still remain… READ THIS BOOK.” It would be, Kirban promised, your Guide to Survival.

Guide to Survival by Salem Kirban

The practice of looking for the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in current events is an old one. Dispensational premillenialism however, is relatively young. The approach solidified in the early nineteenth century through the ministry of a frustrated ex-priest from the Church of Ireland named John Nelson Darby. Darby, through a series of lectures and writings, transformed his readings of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation into a nuanced model of history. Time, he said, was divided into a series of stages, called “dispensations,” governed by God’s behavior toward mankind. For him, the present dispensation was the Church Age — a largely meaningless pause preceding the coming “Kingdom Age,” wherein Christ would return and the final victory of good over evil would be enacted. This age would begin, said Darby, with the mass disappearance of the faithful, as revealed by First Thessalonians 4:16-18:

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.”

He called it the Rapture. Following it, he said, would be a time of troubles, primarily discussed in Revelation. Boils. Locusts. Moons of sackcloth. Seas of blood. “Dogs and cats — living together — mass hysteria!” to quote another landmark speech from 1984.

Darby’s theology came to be known as “dispensational premillennialism” because, for him, the thousand-year period of Christ’s dominion promised in Revelation would occur without the intervention of human beings. This set him apart from the postmillennialists. For them Christ’s kingdom was the culmination of his follower’s work in the world — their salvation arrived after the millennium began. Darby imagined to inverse — salvation by Rapture, before the millennium.

By the time of Darby’s death in 1882, dispensational premillennialism was an influential theology in Europe. Across the Atlantic, and over the course of the twentieth century, it became an integral part of many Christian organizations, including the Southern Baptist Convention and various charismatic and Pentecostal churches. It appears in the rhetoric of such American religious luminaries as the Billys Sunday and Graham, Pat Robertson and, of course, Ronald Reagan — hence Kalb’s unease.

It also inspired a robust popular literature. After the Second World War and prior to 1970, premillenialist literature was a staple of specialty Christian publishers and booksellers. This is why Salem Kirban’s Guide To Survival, first published in 1968, could boast “over 1/4 million sold” on its exquisitely designed cover. The achievement has won him little enduring fame.

Today, Guide to Survival is almost forgotten, even in premillennialist circles. Its format is a kind of prophetic collage, containing Kirban’s analysis of current events and his predictions for the future, copiously illustrated in a variety of styles. His predictions, rooted as they are in the late Sixties, seem less than credible today. Few now look at the 1968 Democratic Convention as a sign of the end-times, for example. Political rearrangements have alienated Kirban from the American “fundamentalist” audience as well. His warning against the proliferation of guns in American life, for instance, seems dangerously progressive for 2014. That said, there are richer rewards in Kirban than either accuracy or political expedience.

Salem Kirban’s interest in dispensational premillenialism began around 1938, when he was a child. The author first encountered it, according to Guide to Survival, in “a little missionary Church in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.” There, overhearing talk of Revelation served as the “first spark that kindled [his] flaming desire … to understand God’s prophetic promises.” It would prove a lifelong practice. Beginning in the late 1960s and ending with his death in 2010, Kirban wrote over fifty books, many on premillenialist topics. By 1970, he was the head of his own independent ministry and religious publishing imprint. It was then that Lindsey and Carlson, and their competing efforts, made it big.

The success of Late, Great Planet Earth was won in large part by its “slang-filled colloquial style” and “mass-culture allusions,” argues the historian Paul Boyer. Kirban, by contrast, writes in a style that might best be described as breathlessly circuitous. An ecological passage from Guide to Survival, for example, begins by asking, “can it be that America is reaping a harvest of destruction brought about by sowing the seeds of corruption?” “The heritage that they will rapidly leave to the world is fast bringing us to Destiny Death,” he concludes — “Destiny Death” being the name of the chapter in which these words appear. This trick of concluding with titles comes up again and again in Guide to Survival. As a result, it reads something like a two hundred page movie poster. According to contemporary reviews from such outlets as NPR and the SF Weekly, Kirban’s prose is “so bad it’s good.” I don’t think so. It’s weird, certainly; a work of strange rhythm. Disentangling it, though, works to disorient the reader in a way entirely appropriate for a book about the end of time. Lindsey’s embarrassing counter-culture patois, which renders the apocalypse as “the ultimate trip,” comes off tame in comparison.

Kirban’s constant repetition of chapter titles for emphasis is part of a larger rhetorical strategy employed throughout Guide to Survival. At all points within the text, Kirban carefully reminds his readers of their position — signposting the concepts which have preceded any given section and stating, plainly what is coming next. This structure is assisted by the book’s standout feature: charts, illustrations and photographs. Take this graphic depicting the timeline of the Rapture and its succeeding tribulation:

From Guide to Survival by Salem Kirban

Not only is it clear and attractive, its sense of design works to impart Kirban’s theology with a minimum of words: the Rapture portion, for example, draws the eye upward from “the grave” to a full, round space containing a relevant snippet of Thessalonians. Visually, it mimics the action it describes while privileging the biblical verse upon which Kirban’s beliefs are founded. The author’s use of red spot-coloring, too, suggests an admixture of blood and ink. Kirban employs the technique throughout Guide to Survival.

Dispensational premillenialism, since its inception, focused on orienting its adherents within history — a history that, Darby believed, had both a definitive ending and a definitive end. Thus, Rapture charts and timelines have long been a feature of premillenialist material culture. Kirban, working more than a century into the tradition, clearly means to make his contribution along accepted genre lines. Guide to Survival’s aesthetic, however, is highly idiosyncratic. In sections of the book dealing with present social ills, for instance, Kirban relies on artfully selected black and white photographs to accompany the text. Some were even taken by the author, including a haunting image of coffins piled for use on an American military base in Vietnam. Kirban pulls no punches — when Guide discusses the horrors of technological war, he fills the page with actual napalm injuries — including those inflicted on children.

From “Guide to Survival” by Salem Kirban

As Kirban moves into the Rapture and the tribulation, his Guide relies increasingly on cartoons. Visually, it grows both more approachable and more abstract, even as the text grows darker. When describing the divine wrath of the last days, for instance, Kirban tells us that, “with the judgment of the First Vial, there comes a great running festering sore upon the body of every man who gave allegiance to the Antichrist and the False Prophet.” It’s a spare sentence, but the imagery is appropriately grotesque. The actual image accompanying the passage, however, gives the Cliffs’ Notes of the situation: “BOILS,” it says. “Malignant sores affect those with the mark of Antichrist.” Helpfully, a cartoon of a man with a 666 tattoo and a chest full of red spots appears beside this summary. In an aesthetic touch that is perfectly Kirban, he’s smiling. No other Rapture writer could be as comforting — and as unsettling.

From Guide to Survival by Salem Kirban

Guide to Survival is an evangelical text in the broadest sense of the word. At its conclusion, Kirban implores his readers to “give [a] simple prayer of faith to the lord,” noting that it need be neither “beautiful” nor “oratorical.” He even offers a form, in half-page box, which the faithless are encouraged to sign and date. “If you have signed the above,” he says, “I would like to rejoice with you in your newfound faith… you are saved, and are a saint of God.” In this passage, Kirban’s odd aesthetic reveals its arc.

For Darby, the Rapture was a necessary innovation. By positing that the “Saints” would rise before the time of tribulation, the first dispensational premillenialist removed the sting from the horrors produced by a literal reading of Revelation. The tribulation, for premillenialists, may be a time of unspeakable and unknowable horror but it is also a time that can be easily escaped. This is why Kirban confronts his readers with the ugly reality of the world circa 1968, as captured on film. And this is why he illustrates the tribulation with bold, informational charts and spare caricatures. With nothing but design, he’s arguing for escape and, by the end of the book, offering it directly. As a work of visual and written art, the Guide to Survival stands out.

Since 1968, dispensational premillenialism has waxed and waned as a strand of thought in American Christianity. In charting its course, it’s tempting to focus on the premillennial presence in politics and publishing. Figures like Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey and George W. Bush have brought the teleology of tribulation and Rapture onto our television sets and drugstore paperback stands. Neither place is where it started however. Within the massive body of dispensational premillenialists since Darby, there have been many writers, ministers and interpreters — each with some unique contribution to the field. To ignore those achievements is short sighted. Kirban, whose idiosyncratic Guide was published just before premillenialism’s latest mainstream explosion, is one premillennialist worth retrieving. To me, he seems like a great American eccentric —and, as usual with great eccentrics, a great artist too. When Ronald Reagan spoke circuitously and opaquely about the Rapture we elected him president. It’s too late to do that for Kirban — but we could at least keep his books in print.

Guide to Survival is, as I said, a collage of styles and approaches. In one of its stranger chapters, Kirban renders the moment of the Rapture through first person narrative. “It is sometimes difficult for one to imagine what will happen when the actual Rapture occurs,” he writes. “Therefor I have written the next chapter in novel form … [perhaps] it can more graphically describe to you the vivid realities of these events.”

What follows in this chapter, which Kirban titles “I Saw The Saints Rise,” is a strange admixture of science fiction, domestic drama and prophetic interpretation. It ends with a pair of pitches.

First: “While there is still time … you have one choice to make,” Kirban says. “DEATH by rejecting Christ,” or “LIFE by accepting Christ as your personal Saviour [sic]… I pray that you choose LIFE!”

Second: “I SAW THE SAINTS RISE is the first chapter of a novel entitled 666. You may secure this novel … by sending 2.95 to SALEM KIRBAN, Inc. Kent Valley Road, Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania 19006.”

I must confess that, despite my respect for Kirban, I haven’t taken him up on the former. The latter, however, worked like a charm.

Next Month:

Next month in “The Last Twentieth Century Book Club”…

***

“The Last Twentieth Century Book Club” is a monthly column about religious ephemera. Prior columns can be read here:

Monster in My Pocket

The Power of Source 

Carman, Part 2

Carman

Speak Out!

Fear of Death Removed

Good Ol’ Job

***

Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. 

The post Guide to Survival appeared first on The Revealer.

Nancy Cruzan’s Gravestone

By Ann Neumann

And he said, I may not return with thee, nor go in with thee: neither will I eat bread nor drink water with thee in this place. 1 Kings 13:16 KJV

“How do you want to die?” has got to be the least anticipated question I’ve ever been asked at a job interview–and admittedly, I have an uncommonly large sample set. I was trying to land a marketing manager position at a media company based in Boston when my interviewer lobbed it at me. My future death was not something I had considered before. Certainly, there was no wrong answer and I did ultimately get the job, but I probably should have taken a beat or two to consider the implications of my answer. “A long fall,” I said, imagining the slip, the recognition in free-fall that this is it, the instant death, painless. Not a bad way to go, I thought at the time.

Years later, while deep into research for a book about dying, I came across a story about geriatrician Dr. Joanne Lynn that goes something like this: Dr. Lynn often opens her talks by asking the assembled audience how they would like to die.1 Raise your hand if you want to die of cancer, she says. No hands. If you want to die of heart failure. A hand or two. Alright, she says, that means that the rest of you want to die of old age, a long, slow and agonizing slide into increasing discomfort, mental and physical frailty, disability, dementia.

This anecdote about Dr. Lynn and my subsequent research made me revise my choice of death by “long fall.” Think about it: No chance to say goodbye to loved ones, to right certain wrongs you’ve let fester, to mend broken relationships, to cross something really important off your bucket list. Dr. Lynn takes all the romance out of dying in old age, the rocking chair on the porch dusted with a sunset glow. Of course, many of us will never get a chance to decide how we die. But increasingly, “How do I want to die?” is a question that Americans are asking and demanding to answer for themselves.

There are a number of well-documented reasons for this. Americans are living longer but we’re also dying longer. Between 2000 and 2050, the number of Americans over 65 is expected to increase by 135%. The number of those over 85 will increase by 350%.2 Our greater number of twilight years means a pronounced chance of living with a debilitating disease–which means more invasive medical treatment for those with fewer and fewer years to live, a long and steady loss of quality of life (however individually defined), more disability, more care-taking needs, more personal and social expense.

When we think of the scariest diseases awaiting us after the age of 65, other than Dr. Lynn’s big three, we tend to think of the ones that affect our mental abilities, including Alzheimer’s and dementia. One out of nine Americans over 65 has Alzheimer’s.3 That number rises to one in three for those over 85. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the number of people who died from Alzheimer’s increased by 68%.4 It’s no surprise then that so many Baby Boomers accustomed to control are asking: How can I get out quick? How can I make my own medical decisions and say “goodbye” to my loved ones before I lose my mind?

Since the 1970s, medical ethics and the courts have well established the right of patients to informed consent, a concept that was enshrined by the case of Nancy Cruzan. Cruzan was in a persistent vegetative state when her family won the ability to remove her feeding tube. They were able to prove that Nancy would have wanted it removed. Informed consent is the autonomous right of a person to be told what all of their medical options are and their ability to decide procedures they do or don’t want–even if that decision means certain death.

Autonomy, then, is necessarily contingent on competence or on legal methods that anticipate incompetence and outline medical decisions based on a range of scenarios. Most often, advanced directives, living wills, and medical proxies are completed with the hope of not continuing treatment, of ending one’s physical existence after one’s mental existence has fled.

Sometimes, however, desperate patients have no medical treatments, like Cruzan’s feeding tube, to remove. Getting out of those painful last, lost years is a dire concern for Alzheimer’s patients and their families. Write Paul T. Menzel and M. Colette Chandler-Cramer in the latest issue of The Hastings Center Report (May-June 2014):

For people who have dementia and are no longer competent… control over the end of life is much less extensive. They may have written a clear advance directive for refusing life-saving care in specified circumstances yet subsequently find themselves living for years in severe dementia with no need for life-saving care that could be refused.

All these factors are leading to an increased interest in VSED, Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking. While VSED can be uncomfortable-to-painful for patients if they are not supervised by medical staff, it can be an easy way to end one’s life. Usually after 5 to 20 days, patients die of dehydration. If you know you’re at the tail-end of your mental competence, if you know that soon Alzheimer’s will take away what you consider you, if you have no more interest in sticking around while your family wipes your chin, while they become strangers to you, perhaps, patients are beginning to say, VSED isn’t a bad way to go.

In 2010 lawyers Thaddeus Mason Pope and Lindsey E. Anderson wrote in “Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: A Legal Treatment Option at the End of Life,” that VSED is legal but untested in the courts. They suggest that VSED should be commonly considered as an “exit option” for a patient who has outlived what he or she considers to be a meaningful quality of life. They write that “the legality of VSED remains uncertain in the United States. Consequently, it remains an underutilized and almost underground treatment mechanism. Moreover, the dearth of legal direction includes not only primary but also secondary authority.” What they mean is that VSED hasn’t yet been adequately addressed by the courts or by other secondary authorities, like the healthcare industry.

Pope and Anderson aren’t the only ones having this discussion. In 2011 Compassion & Choices, the nation’s largest aid in dying advocacy group, issued a booklet that outlines VSED, listing it as one of several ways that patients can hasten their deaths. And the current issue of The Hastings Center Report is chock full with articles that examine VSED and dementia.

This increased attention on VSED has, of course, caught the attention of “pro-life” groups who also advocate for an end to abortion and aid in dying. Their commentary highlights a number of issues that are prominent in the discussion of VSED.

The Patients Rights Council, which opposes a host of legal and accepted end of life rights for patients, including aid in dying and VSED, published a paper last year that targets VSED by categorizing it as suicide, blaming the media for aggrandizing death by VSED, by proclaiming it as a painful way to die, and by expressing concern that broader public discussion about VSED will lead to elder abuse and coercion.

In January, conservative (and anti-aid in dying) columnist Wesley J. Smith asked another question: “I understand that doctors and nurses may not be able to force feed in such a case, or put in a feeding tube against the patient’s desires. But should they help make it easier? Doesn’t this make them complicit?” Smith implies that VSED is not like any other medical decision a patient is entitled to make–and an attending doctor is entitled to comply with while keeping the patient comfortable. Complicit in what? would be my retort.

VSED’s challenges to doctors are evident in commentary by Timothy W. Kirk that follows a case study, “A Fading Decision.” The article, written by Kirk and two others, Ross Fewing and Alan Meisel, appears in the new Hastings Center Report and concerns a woman, Mrs. F, who decides to stop eating and drinking but then enters a new phase of dementia that makes her forget that wish. Her family and caregivers struggle to know what to do when she asks for water and food. Kirk writes, “Voluntary oral feeding is not medical treatment that requires the informed consent of a patient with formal decision-making capacity.”

Kirk’s is a point worth considering in Mrs. F’s case and one that echoes contentions other groups have legally grappled with since the 1970s. While the courts have consistently considered intubation, feeding and hydrating with an inserted tube (whether in the nose or surgically, through the stomach), to be a medical procedure subject to informed consent principles, the Catholic Church and its allies refuse to consider nutrition and hydration anything other than “comfort care,” medical or non-medical care that must ethically be provided to all in order to relieve pain and keep a patient comfortable.

Conflating intubation with VSED methods is almost like calling an apple an orange, I acknowledge. And of course every end of life situation requires a unique decision-making process. Yet, as the case of Mrs. F shows, provision or denial/removal of food and water is again and again an area of care that is hard to generalize.

The power of food in our culture–from the farm table midday meals of my ancestors to the bee-keeping, fish co-op members of my adopted Brooklyn–is undeniable. What we eat at mealtime, where it comes from, and whom we share it with determines who we are and what social and cultural groups we identify with. What we eat defines us; it makes us human. “Feed a cold,” we say, indicating that eating well is the best way to stay healthy. “Break bread,” we say, to denote kinship, cooperation, reconciliation. “Manga,” we say, like mothers all across the globe who show they love us by feeding us. Eating is both an interaction with food (culture, production, connoisseurship) and our communities; a natural and necessary activity imbued with ritual, sacred meaning, social status, identity. “He won’t eat,” dozens of family members have told me as they hovered over their dying loved ones, as if the patient has given up, with the recognition that their loved one is slipping away from life when they don’t eat. To give up eating is to many a denial of the self rather than the assertion of the self that proponents of VSED claim it to be.

I’ve written often about the right of hunger striking prisoners to not be force-fed5; like Alzheimer’s patients, such prisoners aren’t terminal (meaning six months or less to live) or suicidal (in this context, meaning mentally incompetent to make rational decisions). But they have decided that their pain and poor quality of life make life no longer worth living. Hunger strikers claim that stopping eating is an exercise of their first amendment rights–their only remaining means of protest. Those who choose VSED have determined that their pain, their days, their bodies are their own. What right–and I don’t mean this rhetorically–do we have as a society to tell people how they must die? If at all possible, I think I’d like to make that very decision for myself. If you could, wouldn’t you?

The long fall is no longer an appealing way to die to me. Let’s just say, when death is immanent, there are a few people I would like to see one last time, a few hands I want to touch. Maybe even, like my Dad who died of cancer in 2005, I’d like a last chance to eat ham loaf made from my grandmother’s recipe. I’d like to look my nieces in the eye and tell them how amazing they are. I wouldn’t mind one last good laugh with my beloved sister. But I also know that few of us get to choose our death. To be able to do so would be a rare privilege–perhaps one that few of us could say “no” to.

***

1. Paula Span at The New York Times’ Old Age Blog retells this story here: http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/how-many-of-you-expect-to-die/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

2. From the International Journal of Epidemiology, 2002: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/4/776.full

3. “Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia.‘Dementia’ is an umbrella term describing a variety of diseases and conditions that develop when nerve cells in the brain (called neurons) die or no longer function normally. The death or malfunction of neurons causes changes in one’s memory, behavior and ability to think clearly. In Alzheimer’s disease, these brain changes eventually impair an individual’s ability to carry out such basic bodily functions as walking and swallowing. Alzheimer’s disease is ultimately fatal.” For this and subsequent information on Alzheimer’s, see “2013 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures” at http://www.alz.org/downloads/facts_figures_2013.pdf

4. Liz Seegert summarizes the “2014 Alzheimer’s disease facts and figures” at the Association of Health Care Journalists Covering Health blog: /

5.http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-longest-hunger-strike/ and http://www.nylslawreview.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NYLS_Law_Review.Volume-58_Issue-2_Neumann-article.pdf

***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann‘s book about a good death, SITTING VIGIL, will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.

The post The End of Eating appeared first on The Revealer.

Woman channeling her grandmother.
© Shannon Taggart

By Don Jolly

It was a clear day, warm enough to eat outside. Sixth avenue was buzzing: cars in the street, students on the sidewalks, planes in the sky. Alex Rodriguez, from the Yankees, was holding court at the next restaurant over, regal in gold-tinted shades. I was sitting with the photographer Shannon Taggart, talking about one of her recent subjects: an ectoplasmic medium named Gordon Garforth.

Garforth is a spiritualist. His religion, a product of the American nineteenth-century, holds that death is not the end of consciousness. For him, there is an eternal world of “spirit,” and certain gifted individuals, mediums, are capable of conveying messages and energy from the other side. Some can even manifest various physical substances and effects, broadly identified as “ectoplasm.” When he enters a trance, Garforth told Taggart, “You’ll see masks spilled over my face. You’ll see my hands change.” It was just how the spirits worked for him.

Taggart was skeptical. “I’m thinking, ‘Okay.  Well that could mean many things,’” she said. “I didn’t go into his séance expecting anything.  I got to sit in the front row, about six feet away from him.” She kept a camera on her lap.

“He was seated in front of a low red light,” she said. The room was dark, otherwise. After twenty minutes, the medium’s wife announced that spirits were going to begin working with his hands. Taggart remembered the next moment very clearly: “He just brought out his hand. What I saw, with my eyes, was this regular hand just very gently and instantly —skip gigantic.”

“I screamed out loud,” she continued. “Which is very impolite in a séance situation.”

Physical medium Gordon Garforth with enlarged hand.
© Shannon Taggart

Taggart’s photographs have appeared in outlets such as Readers Digest, Discover Magazine and the New York Times. She’s captured dance auditions and artists’ portraits. Her approach is often unusual, and frequently relies on long exposure times, producing hallucinatory doublings, strange auras and smears of motion as her subjects move.  When she photographed Garforth, the long exposure was mostly done to compensate for a lack of light. The resulting images are jittery and blurred — Garforth moved around. They also show the medium holding up a single, grotesquely inflated hand.

“I had that experience of seeing that hand get large,” she explained. “I don’t know how it happened. Whether it’s a hand actually getting large in front of my face and I was creating a photograph that documented it, or whether it’s that I was tricked somehow or I had a hypnotic experience and then my camera, through its dysfunction, mimicked that experience…  I mean, all of those are interesting perspectives.  I love that they’re all there.” She’s been catching similarly ambiguous situations for over a decade.

Taggart grew up in Buffalo, New York. From an early age she was attracted to the nearby town of Lily Dale — a spiritualist community which has, since 1916, played host to many of the movement’s most prominent thinkers and mediums. “I was raised Catholic,” she continued.  “A lot of Catholics actually go to Lily Dale for readings, because Catholic belief doesn’t dismiss what is happening in spiritualism, necessarily.”

Taggart’s cousin once attended a “message service” in Lily Dale, a public assembly where mediums provide scattered communications to a curious crowd. “You don’t know even which medium is going to be there that day,” Taggart said. “Whoever it is stands in front and they pick people out with their finger. Then they give a short message from someone who’s died.” Taggart’s cousin was picked out. The medium told her a secret, something nobody outside the family could have possibly known. At this point in the story she wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know if I want to put all the details about this in the article – if you don’t mind,” she said.  “You could say it’s a secret.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

Driven by this strange incident, Taggart had a formal meeting with Lily Dale’s Board of Directors in 2001, asking to make the town the subject of a long photographic project. “I don’t know why, but they just welcomed me with open arms,” she said. Her work in Lily Dale is still ongoing, and many of her images of the place are available on her website. From there she branched out into similar projects covering Vodou rituals in Brooklyn and working with mediums like Garforth. She’s even taken a paranormal investigation course at  Arthur Findlay College in England,  “the world’s foremost college for the advancement of spiritualism and psychic services” — at least according to its website. Still, Taggart doesn’t consider herself a “believer” — or an “unbeliever,” for that matter. When it comes to spirits and blurry photographs, the discourse often revolved around proof. Both spiritualists and skeptics want for documentary photographers.

Physical medium Kai Muegge with ectoplasm.
© Shannon Taggart

Taggart, however, refuses such classification. “Purely as an artist, going through all the development courses with the spiritualists opened me up immensely,” she said. “I could not wrap my brain around how you could be a sane person and talk to dead people.” At the same time, however, she didn’t enter this new world with an intent to debunk. “I didn’t not believe,” she said. Whether her images are of ghosts or frauds or camera errors doesn’t matter much to Taggart — what counts isn’t the exterior world they capture, but the interior world they provoke.

“When I first got interested in photography, it was through the work of Diane Arbus,” Taggart said, referencing the famous photographer of twins, giants, dwarfs, and other unusual subjects. “The first time I saw a Diane Arbus image, I was 16 years old and seeing her work, I was like, ‘Oh, I get – you can put your thoughts into a picture.’ I felt like I was seeing into her mind in some way, through her images.”

It’s this occult perspective she tries to capture in her images of spirit visitation. “It’s impossible to photograph this stuff conventionally because the interior element is so huge,” she said. “It’s unphotographable.” Nonetheless, lengthening exposures and allowing other products of “accident and error,” into the work allowed Taggart to photograph it.  “I’m not really looking for proof,” she said. “I’m looking to go deep into the experience.” Think of Garforth and the big hand — whatever explanation you prefer, Taggart’s images capture her experience precisely. I found them deeply unnerving.

This artistic approach makes Taggart an enigma to skeptics and spiritualists alike. According to her, trusting photography to either prove or disprove the existence of spirits — or anything else, for that matter —is wrongheaded. “Photography is much too complicated of a medium,” she said. “It’s a trickster medium.  It can be two things at once.  That’s what I love about it.” For her, deliberate distortions “give your mind, or the photographic mechanism, something to play with.” They invite interpretation.

At the beginning of her work in Lily Dale, Taggart photographed a woman named Dorothy. “A lovely lady, working in the museum,” she recalled. “She was so helpful to me and showed me all around the museum. She was the first person who told me about spirit photography,” the tradition of spirit photographs dating to the earliest days of the medium. “So,” Taggart continued. “I took some pictures of her.  One inside the museum and one when she was outside.”

“There was a huge purple orb right on her right shoulder, in both pictures,” she said. “Just for kicks I brought the picture back to Dorothy. She held it in her hand and said, ‘Oh, that’s Bob.’”

“Bob?” I asked.

“Bob was her deceased husband,” Taggart explained. “A week later, I was walking around the town and she drove by me and I heard her telling people, ‘that’s the girl who photographed Bob in the museum.’” Taggart smiled. “I love seeing that as the point where my camera started showing me things – handing me a language to refer to the material.” For Taggart, the images were flawed and forgettable. For Dorothy, however, they had become thick with meaning. A purple splotch had soaked up all her memory and faith and knowledge of the world to come. Who am I, Taggart thought, to get in the way of that?

Dorothy with Bob’s orb, Lily Dale Museum.
© Shannon Taggart

Shortly afterward, she recalled photographing another medium who, like Garforth, operates under a dim red light, necessitating a long exposure. In the séance, “everyone was saying, ‘Oh, I see a woman who looks just like you right next to you, I think it’s your grandmother.’  And then other people were saying, ‘She looks like you, but it’s not you,’” and so on. Taggart didn’t see anything.

Later, developing images from the session, a perfect duplicate of the medium’s face appeared, connected by a thin, night-highway line of red to the original. Taggart recalls her excitement at the find. “Isn’t that funny?  Isn’t that weird?  Isn’t that coincidental?” she asked. It was a distortion produced by motion and the long exposure, sure — but it was something else, too. Since then, Shannon has maintained her photographs’ two faces in parallel. Artistically speaking, it’s paid dividends. Some of her most arresting images will see print this month in the first Morbid Anatomy Anthology. Her lectures on the topic are in high demand.

“It must be hard to find other interesting subjects,” I observed. “After all that. What could be as ambiguous as life, death and haunting?”

Taggart thought for a moment. “Well,” she said, “I’ve been working on a book about Michael Jackson.”

***

Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. He writes a monthly column for The Revealer called “The Last Twentieth Century Book Club” which you can read here. 

The post A Conversation with Shannon Taggart: Photographer of Séances, Spirits and Ectoplasm appeared first on The Revealer.

Kabir from http://www.artnindia.com/

Kabir was a 15th/16th century devotional poet and social critic from northern India.  The songs of Kabir are known (and passionately performed) far and wide in India today.  Beloved for his rough rhetoric and irony, his bold, blunt language, and fearless attitude, Kabir criticized both Hindus and Muslims, promoting a religion of the heart in which priestly mediations, ritual practices, doctrinal commitments had no significant place.  Whether through paradox, playful wit, or cutting satire, Kabir sought to expose the hypocrisy and pretension of so much “organized religion” while emphasizing the preciousness of life, the power of selfless devotion, and the presence of Ram (his favorite name for the inconceivable Divine) within.

The poems below were each written in the style and spirit of Kabir.  Some address themes and topics that Kabir himself engaged, while others take on aspects of our modern world and experience from an intentionally “Kabirian” perspective.  All of these poems were written by students in Professor Patton Burchett’s “Religions of India” course at New York University.

For some of Kabir’s own poetry, click here.

For a fantastic documentary on modern-day performance of Kabir’s songs and modern-day understandings and appropriations of his message and memory, click here.

***

Red and blue, divided house
Speak loudly and say nothing on the floor
You close your ears and open your mouths,
Influence the pundits and the media
While representing the wealthy who fund your campaigns.
Push personal agendas while keeping bills from passing
When they don’t agree with party lines;
Compromise only as a last resort
After wasting months of time –
And those who suffer in the end? The people,
The voters, the ones you leave behind.
–RYAN J. MILLER

So…
You say you are seeking god, my friend, you say you long to be beloved
Well love!
Love with abandon, love with joy, love with great devotion
But there is one rule.
There is no point endlessly searching for something outside of you when the beloved you want and need is within
Take salvation in that and not some empty ritual, a soulless house of worship.
You may love, you may have joy, you may be devoted but it must be within
Take salvation in the within.
–BRINDA J. DIXIT

An elephant and donkey play chess,
Turn by turn they pit their pawns against each other,
The same pawns that protect and support them,
Now sacrifice their individuality for the game

The pawns wish to end the conflict,
So they follow orders in hopes of victory,
But both players prolong the game
to keep their seats at the board

An eternal stalemate continues
There is no progress
There are no winners
The game is out of our hands
–RAJIV BHAGAT

What is this “immediate liberation,” Varanasi?
What does “instant entry” mean?
Heaven is not California Screamin –
God gives out no FastPasses.

–HANNAH BAEK

If you practice yoga to fashionably burn calories
or ogle the butts of cute girls,
You’ve a better chance at moksha
drinking a ten dollar kale smoothie.
–HANNAH BAEK

People cannot talk anymore
since technology controls our lives.
As much as we try,
there is no way back.

Why worry about who looks best,
or what new phone to buy?
There is violence—
rape, murder
in India, in the rest of the world
that must be extinguished!

These days
we text more than we speak,
and “like” more than we share our opinions.
What of human connection?
It has ceased to exist—
for me, for many,
eventually, for everyone.
–NIRUPIKA SHARMA

I said to myself:
Why do you feel lonely?
You are in the greatest company
when you are alone.

Do you believe the stories of your life should be recited aloud,
so as to gain momentum and tangibility?

The softest stories are the ones that will grow within you;
they darken your joints and stretch your skin,
until you are taller and wiser.

Your shadows are your only friends!
They will count to ten and dance;
with or without you!
You will never be as present as they are absent,
until you see you are made up of the brightest cosmos.
–TWINKLE BHARWANEY

You are blessed with life
Lucky to explore the earth
Why fill your life with sorrow and worry?
You are just wasting the time
Between now and your death
–KASHVI KUMAR

Those who have everything
are no better off
than those who have nothing.

Look into yourself,
fill your mind with Ram,
then you will know
what it is to be rich.
———–

May the murtis stay near to your heart,
keep the diyas close to you
for when Death comes,
of course you shall
take it all with you

Or you can rid yourself
Of your need of things
Empty your mind
See what peace
Thinking only of Ram brings
————

Finding it hard to believe in the idea of God
We instead turned to science—
Why yield to the unseen, untouchable,
When Higgs boson is in front of our eyes
–MANSI PARIKH

On commutes and in class,
At home and in relationships,
Eyes straight ahead and mouths open
We feign disinterest
Until the time comes when
What we pretended becomes genuine.
–PATRICK NEWELL

The post Poems in the Style and Spirit of Kabir appeared first on The Revealer.

Journalists take cover in a shootout between police and drug traffickers in Brazil. (AP/Silvia Izquierdo) via Committee to Protect Journalists.

By Natasja Sheriff

This is the first in a series of posts on issues at the intersection of press freedom, religion, digital media and politics by Revealer contributing editor Natasja Sheriff. 

On May 3, 2013, a group of journalists, press freedom advocates and members of the public, gathered to mark World Press Freedom Day at NYU’s journalism school, shared a poignant moment. As a panel discussion on global trends in press freedom got under way, Kassahun Yilma, an Ethiopian journalist living in exile in the U.S., paused as he began his presentation. “Before I start telling my story about Ethiopia,” he said quietly, “I would like a minute of silence.” As we stood and the room fell silent, he asked that we pray for Ethiopia, for journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega, and journalists around the world.

Just a day before, the Ethiopian Supreme Court upheld a sentence condemning Eskinder Nega to 18 years in jail on vague charges of terrorism. Nega is just one of more than 100 journalists worldwide who, at the close of 2012, were imprisoned on anti-state charges of terrorism, treason and subversion, often related to ideological and religious persecution. This alarming statistic emerged during one of the deadliest years for journalists on record, prompting Amnesty International, in collaboration with the NYU Center for Religion and Media, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, the Overseas Press Club, UNESCO and the Global and Joint Studies Program at NYU Journalism to convene a symposium to mark the 20^th Anniversary of World Press Freedom Day.

Lonnie Isabel, Nina Ognianova, Marcela Turati, and Roozbeh Mirebrahimi share a moment of silence, led by Kassahun Yilma, for journalists imprisoned and at risk around the world. May 3, 2013. Photo by Steve Latimer.

World Press Freedom Day, held annually on May 3, was first observed in 1993 following the U.N. endorsement of the Windhoek Declaration (a statement on the principles of press freedom) and has become a global event.  Since its inception, the day has acted as “a reminder to governments of the need to respect their commitment to press freedom and is also reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics,” according to UNESCO, the organization that first championed a day for press freedom.

“We’ve seen real progress in 20 years, increasing numbers of countries have put in place freedom of information laws, constitutions,” said UNESCO’s Suzanne Bilello (video), introducing the May 3 event, but “far too many countries continue to criminalize expression and journalists continue to be penalized with prison terms for libel.”

“I hope one day, this day of freedom of press, will really be a celebration and happy for every part of the world,” said Iranian journalist Roozbeh Mirebrahimi during a panel discussion on global trends in press freedom (video). “But right now for large numbers of countries in the world, like Iran, or other places, it’s just a reminder of what we don’t have, what we lost, who we lost.”

From Turkey to Iran, Mexico to Ethiopia and the United States, the issues raised by the day’s speakers—issues that most threatened journalists and a free press—were remarkably similar: the use of anti-terrorism and national security laws to silence journalists; the tyranny of blasphemy laws and the suppression of religious freedom; arbitrary “red-lines” that journalists might unwittingly cross; and the “opportunities and vulnerabilities” brought about by access to the internet and digital media. The Revealer has reported on Russia, Pakistan and Ethiopia as these issues played out in the case of Pussy Riot, in the use of blasphemy laws to oppress the Ahmadi community and in the application of anti-terrorism laws, like those used to jail Nega, in Ethiopia.

These same themes echoed throughout the day as journalists Ann Cooper and George Packer (video) drew attention to the intersection of religion and press freedom as they discussed the insidious impact that charges of blasphemy can have on freedom of speech, and press freedom.

Ann Cooper and George Packer in conversation at ‘Information on Trial,’ at NYU’s Journalism Institute. May 3, 2013. Photo by Steve Latimer.

“I guess this is a subject that maybe doesn’t strike Americans very much, because we have no history of blasphemy laws in this country,” said Packer, but “I’d say [there is] a really worrying tendency towards self censorship among writers, journalists; people that have a public voice when it comes to religion; and when it comes to the intersection of religion and politics, which is especially crucial.”

In 2013, as the symposium took place, deadly attacks on journalists in Syria, Iraq and Egypt dominated the headlines and Turkey won the unenviable title of the world’s number one jailer of journalists; repressive laws silenced and imprisoned journalists and activists from Ethiopia to Russia; digital freedom and domestic surveillance, in the guise of national security measures and anti-terrorism laws, touched the lives of every citizen.

Is there cause for optimism in 2014? Are we any closer to celebrating press freedom, as Mirebrahimi hoped? To what extent are press freedom and larger issues of freedom of expression related? As Angela Zito, co-director of NYU Center for Religion and Media, asked during the symposium’s morning session, where are the points of intersection between religion, politics, digital media and human rights? These are just some of the questions The Revealer will be asking in a series of posts as we revisit press freedom and the May 2013 symposium, one year on. We hope you’ll have a look back at some of the previous articles mentioned here and that you’ll join us as we explore this topic further in the next post.

***

Natasja Sheriff is an freelance journalist based in New York. From 2012-2014 she was the Luce Foundation Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media and served as The Revealer’s international editor. Natasja co-organized the Information on Trial event with members of Amnesty International Local Group AI280.  

The post Religion and Press Freedom in the Digital Age – Part One: Information on Trial appeared first on The Revealer.

Still image from the Google commercial “Google Search: Reunion”

By Shruti Devgan

A recent Google advertisement called “Google Search: Reunion,” starts with an Indian grandfather waxing nostalgic about the days before India and Pakistan were separate countries. His granddaughter addresses him by the Hindi word for grandfather, “daadu,” a sign that they formally belong to the Hindu faith. The grandfather reminisces about his childhood days with his Muslim friend, Yusuf, now a citizen of Pakistan. The advertisement then shows the granddaughter doing several Google searches including search phrases like “park with ancient gate in Lahore,” “oldest shop near Mochi gate, Lahore” all in an effort to locate “Yusuf uncle.” She manages to trace uncle Yusuf to his grandson’s sweet shop.  His grandson arranges a visa for him, and the two grandchildren work together to fly Yusuf to India so that the two childhood friends, Indian and Pakistani, are shown meeting each other in a tearful reunion. A soothing soundtrack about a return to carefree childhood days provides a backdrop to this beautiful and problematic three and a half minute long video.

The Indian subcontinent’s freedom from British colonial rule in 1947 was accompanied by a simultaneous violent territorial division along religious lines into present-day Hindu majority India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan. The division is captured in a single, and singularly evocative, word: Partition. This arbitrary territorial division was accompanied by death, displacement and destruction. Sheer numbers cannot begin to capture the loss underlying this catastrophic episode in South Asian memory. Yet, to provide some perspective, the Partition led to one of the largest migrations in world history with an estimated 12.5 million people being displaced or uprooted. Close to a million people were murdered or died from malnutrition and disease. People traveled in trains, in buses, in cars, but mostly by foot to move beyond newly created borders. Again, exact numbers are elusive and impossible, but it is estimated that roughly 75,000 women were raped and abducted by men of religions different from their own. Narratives of Partition are hard to recount even today, 67 years later. This difficulty comes not only from the unreliability and fickleness of memory; but also from the pain, complexity, and enduring effects of loss itself.

The advertisement in question sells Google’s unsurpassed ability to draw bridges between people and borders. Google’s search engine is certainly path breaking in its ability to help overcome many kinds of losses ranging from people to places to material objects. While Google can be a good solution when some things go missing, can it also repair torn connections and easily fill traumatic void? The popularity of this advertisement using the Partition as a theme and its emotionally charged reception by audiences can make us forget that by foregrounding its brand, Google is selling and commercializing feelings emanating from deep, traumatic loss.

In my academic research, I focus on the digital possibilities and constraints for collectives – which I define as an engaged and committed group of people – currently working through trauma by reconstructing and reinterpreting past events publicly. I’ve been analyzing websites, blogs, listservs, and social media sites, as well as conducting interviews with people invested in acts of “active remembering,” or the process of conscious and deliberate recollection and recall. I have found that the present digital cultural moment is indeed powerfully shifting existing narratives of loss and trauma. However, working through this difficult process requires the full agency of its participants as well as a great deal of time. That is to say, the story Google tells with its quick, happy, and concrete answers is deceiving; most narratives remain much more partial and broken.

***

The 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent continues to have echoes in present-day India. In majoritarian politics one sees memories of Partition used to establish the majority’s cultural superiority. In order to gain power the latter not only divests minorities of their rights, but also portrays them as perpetual “outsiders” in ways that fuel both majority and minority anxieties.

Hindus are the majority religious group in India. Various forms of political ideologies emphasize Hindus’ legitimate claim over the Indian nation-state’s territory by alienating and dispossessing minorities. This kind of majoritarian manipulation relegates non-Hindus to a residual category within the Indian nation-state. Advocates and practitioners of majoritarianism use the Partition as a tool to make a case that religious minorities, specifically Muslims, ought to have been excluded from the “sacred Hindu” territory during the division of the subcontinent. Right wing Hindu nationalists manufacture animosity against Muslims through various techniques centering on real and invented differences in cultural practices.

The Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP ) formed a new government in India just last month under the prime ministership of Narendra Modi who was implicated in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. This extreme end of the Hindu right wing has been especially instrumental in evoking memories of the Partition to draw boundaries with the Muslim “other” and unleashing massacres against Muslims. The xenophobic agenda to purge the “Hindu” nation of the ethnic “outsider” and their supporters is renewed by evoking sectarian sentiments that gripped the subcontinent in 1947 in the wake of creating of two separate nation-states.

But as sociologist Dipankar Gupta points out in an essay on majoritarianism and minority politics (Citizens versus People: The Politics of Majoritarianism and Marginalization in Democratic India) right wing Hindu nationalists are not the only ones using the Partition as a lucrative memory for fabricating antagonism between religious communities. A similarly contrived notion of the “other” excluded vis-à-vis the inclusive “Hindu we” was also constructed in the 1980s.

At that time, another religious community, the Sikhs, who had previously enjoyed a relatively comfortable relationship with Hindus and the Indian state, were suddenly targeted as a “threatening and disruptive” minority. This marginalization was deliberately designed to subjugate and repress a call by some Sikh leaders for greater regional autonomy within the larger Indian national space.

A small group of Sikhs did in fact harbor secessionist agendas. Yet, rather than recognize the context and complexity of secessionist sentiments, they were used as an alibi for targeting an entire community and cultivating fear of another Partition.

At the time the federal state was led by the Congress (I) party that had come to represent mostly inclusive, secular politics since the anti-colonial national struggle to free India from British colonial rule. In a bid to gain electoral gains, the Congress (I) used the secessionist movement to create the spectral threat of a second Partition. They pitted Hindus against Sikhs and targeted the Sikh community especially in the early 1980s, leading ultimately to a systematic and planned attack on the community in 1984 that left a gaping hole in the community’s identity and created an unambiguous minority consciousness.

Given the political history of Partition as it stretches from 1947 through today, Google’s ad can be seen as a problematic sanitization and erasure. The ways in which the ad accepts separation as though it were clear and clean, its evincing of binaries and loss, must be evaluated against this complex backdrop more judiciously than is being done at present.

***

Every year, Independence Day celebrations in India and Pakistan commemorate the end of British colonial rule, and intentionally leaves no public space for thought about the loss and trauma that accompanied that bloody exodus. Lives interrupted and broken by the Partition are neglected in pages of history textbooks, and, with the exception of scholarly and emerging fiction and art forms, 1947 is remembered only as a triumph over the 200-year long British colonial rule. Under these circumstances, any attempts at excavating Partition narratives have become highly welcome.

The Google advertisement has evoked much emotion in the subcontinent as reported by various sources including the Pakistani newspaper The Dawn  and National Public Radio. The advertisement went viral and had more than 11 million views at the time of writing.

The only criticism voiced so far has come from people who object to the inaccurate portrayal of the visa process.  It is true that travel between India and Pakistan is not easy, a visa is not guaranteed and permission to visit involves a convoluted and protracted process of obtaining necessary documentation. That said, I don’t think that this error should distract us from bigger problems in what the commercial does and does not tell its audience.

Overall, I agree with the majority of viewers that this ad is moving and provocative. I would even go further and say that the Google advertisement could potentially be a platform to resist state elisions of Partition memories. Instead, Google is only using the Partition as a theme, emptied of its complexities, to sell its brand and instrumentalize and commodify sensitive memories in the process.

Google is using a crucial moment in South Asian memory- the trauma of the 1947 Partition- for purely consumerist purposes. To the extent that Google is casting its search strategies as the centerpiece of the Partition’s grief, it is colonizing people’s agency and emotions in a blatant self-congratulatory but invisible and subtle selling strategy. As NPR reports, Google considers India as a strategic market and the campaign is part of aggrandizing their brand. In a Google + post the company explains the purpose and motivation behind the advertisement:

Google Search helps you find whatever you’re looking for. We’ve brought this idea to life in a short video showing how human passion and hope can overcome time and borders. In this story, a woman in India reunites her grandfather with his childhood friend (who is now in Pakistan) following six decades of separation since the partition of India—with a little help from Google. We hope this is a reflection of the many stories of reunion. If you find it moving, share it—and tell us your own story in the comments. 

This is not the only instance where Google has commodified feelings to sell its brand. Interestingly, Google has itself admitted to using affect to sell products.  In this article, Lorraine Twohill, Google’s vice president for Global Advertising is quoted saying, “If we don’t make you cry, we fail.” For example, their advertisement for the Google Chrome browser “Dear Sophie”in which a father sends multimedia messages to his baby daughter is based on a concerted shift in company strategy to sell by commodifying sentiments.

Rather than considering Google as synonymous with digital media’s transformational potential, it must be situated in the larger socio-cultural digitized environment. Digital technology has ushered in new and unparalleled ways of grappling with trauma, ruptured speech and unfinished experiences. The simultaneous public and private nature of these platforms is proving critical in communicating sensitive, silenced and taboo subjects. It is public because it is collective, shared, and openly accessible. It is also private, however, because people are sharing their unique and idiosyncratic experiences.

Private narratives are converging to create public stories digitally and safe and socially approved spaces for individuals to speak out are emerging online. This unique quality of digital media is proving constructive for writing and talking about difficult themes of loss and grief. These are not necessarily narratives that are finite and finished. Instead they are continuous ways of managing unmanageable residue that trauma leaves in its wake. While the Indian and Pakistani states engender official amnesia around the traumatic origins of their respective nation-states in celebrating independence from British colonial rule, digital technology is making it possible for people to begin to form a language around loss and create an archive of their ongoing experiences and emotions. There are several websites and blogs, run and managed mostly by children and grandchildren of those affected by the Partition, to collect narratives of so far silenced loss and trauma. Websites like www.1947partitionarchive.org and www.1984livinghistory.org are South Asian examples of attempts at making sense of the trauma of Partition and subsequent related events using digital media.

Google’s advertisement fits well within this digital cultural moment. However, by placing itself at the center of loss and asserting that “Google search helps you find whatever you’re looking for,” the company is taking away the agency that people already possess in building their digital narratives. They are claiming attention for themselves and their handy strategy of loss-search-recovery and deflecting it away from these smaller, more organic efforts.

My discomfort with this advertisement and its enthusiastic reception is the way in which the very ideas of loss, trauma and healing are being commodified and sold as rapid, split second recoveries, facilitated by a third-party such as Google. Recovery and repair are slow, simmering and gradual processes of piecing together broken fragments of memory that people must undertake on their own and in their own time, instead of “with a little help from Google.” This deceptive language masks Google’s commercial and self-elevating narrative.

Nations and collectives grapple with trauma just like individuals. Trauma by its very definition entails a time delay between an experience and its integration and the latter continues to be broken, fragmented and has life after life. It is an extremely slow and painful, often impossible recovery to normalcy for collectives as it is for individuals. Google, in its true corporate and American emphasis on rapid recovery, healing and closure depicts a happy solution for loss by placing the spotlight on its highly accomplished and seemingly infallible search brand (the commercialization of trauma in the United States is very well explained in cultural critic Marita Sturken’s book, “The Tourists of History). It’s selling itself by deploying a particularly South Asian predicament while using specific American consumerist strategies in the process.
Given the importance of mediated images and messages and people’s rejoicing and celebration, it is worth pausing to dissect the source of euphoria over the advertisement more carefully. Google search is making a claim for suturing together broken bonds. Is it quite as easy as that? Why is it making that claim? Is Google overstepping itself in casting itself as a protagonist in this long history of loss and grief? Is Google painting all aspects of our social world- from a search of an obscure word, to a quick lookup of a recipe, to our deeply felt emotions- with the same Google colored brush?

Foregrounding broken ties and relationships to sell a brand is treading dangerous ground. There are grounds that are more sacred and fragile than Google and its advertisers seem to realize. In selling Google they are trampling upon sacred emotions for purely instrumental reasons. There is a clear line between Googling details of lost published memoirs versus Googling lost and buried memories of trauma. But the sentimentalism that Google is evoking has made us forget this important distinction. We must be wary of this deliberate blurring that is also made invisible to us. Living in a Google saturated age, we as social actors need to become more discerning of the limits commercial interests place on our agency. Let not the amnesia of Partition be replaced by the amnesia of commodification.

***

Shruti Devgan is a Ph.D. candidate in Rutgers University’s Department of Sociology studying the sociology of memory, trauma and Sikh diaspora. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Lady Shriram College (Delhi University) and an M.A. and M.Phil. in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her dissertation focuses on the interaction between digital media, diasporic location and intergenerational engagement in re-presenting memories of 1984 anti-Sikh violence in India.

The post What’s wrong with Googling loss? appeared first on The Revealer.