Kitschtopians

I live in a very pleasant and picturesque hamlet, pretty, safe, convenient, liveable, even rather diverse and cultured -- for Virginia. It's the kind of place John Aschcroft fantasizes about when he's choking the chicken, the kind of place where anybody is welcome, provided they have the $750,000 to buy one of the very quaint little bungalos that the railroad workers used to live in -- back when there was a railroad. It's not especiallly kitschy -- except in the little shops down on the main drag, where they dangle cuteness before the hipsters and the yuppies. And I like a lot of the people I encounter in this place, Flanders-esque Christian souls, who, because I am sort of a Rockwellian WASP, take me for one of their own. And in fact I often like these people a good bit, but only insofar as they are not Kitschtopian.

The Mecca of Kitschtopia is Branson. The mantra of Kitschtopia is "family values." The sacred state of mind for Kitschtopians, their Godliness is a very specific fantasy mode of fantasy, the Disneyfied fairy tale. Kitschtopians do not call themselves Kitschtopians -- they are often naive of any notion of kitsch, and so are wildly attracted to it -- they usually call themselves, with unintended diametric irony, Conservatives.

Kitschtopians believe that belief has a moral aspect, that simply having the right belief (owning the right belief, that is, not coming to it through study, experiment experience or thought) makes one morally superior to those who do not have the same belief, or any belief. Thus, if you believe in a Magic Book dicated by God and transmitted inerrantly to the motel rooms of Branson through many centuries, Holy Wars, Inquisitions, Persecutions, Heresies, Schisms Reformations and languages, you are morally superior to the pagan who simply believes in fairness, charity, tolerance, and that hypocrisy is abhorrent. People who believe the Book are rewarded for their moral superiority by the Fairy Godfather (the source of Something for Nothing) with an afterlife of Eternal Paradise. Others go to Hell.

Kitschtopian culture puts pantaloons on piano legs. It is a G-rated Neverland cosmology, without sex, excrement or death -- except when cocooned in gauzy sentiment. It denies the finitude that gives human existence meaning, eclipsing it in visions of Happily Ever After.

The Kitschtopian world view is rooted in nostalgia for a cheaply imagined sin-free past, a mythic time of sweet, easy decency, wherein people knew and their place in the cosmos and accepted it with a happy silent prayer. (This is almost always based in in roseate retrospections of white, middle-class life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) They seek to universalize Mayberry, or some other benevolent dictatorship, some Bowdlerized, monogamous, heterosexual free-market future. They think that queers, dope and adultery were invented around 1965, probably by the Godless Communists.

The end of art is beauty; the end of kitsch is cute: prepubescent beauty.