The Babel like tower of Tack: Superflat Part 3

Over the weekend I engaged as I do once a year in the orgy of kitchness and tack that is the Eurovision song contest. If you live in North America and have not seen Eurovision; imagine mixing American Idol with the Euro (the European soccer championships), and then having the the whole thing designed by drag queens from Albania with a penchant for pure grade cocaine.

Well there seems to be three tactics that countries adopt when attempting to win Eurovision. Tactic number one is to go for some absurdist, avante garde production value, in an attempt to show your nations’ appreciation of incomprehensible French post-structuralist theory (see image at top of article). The second tactic, seemingly favoured by former Soviet republics, is the find the hottest model in your country, send her to singing bootcamp, surround her with an awkward dance troop of former  paratroopers, and teach her to dance that Beyonce like dance (which seems to be the United States chief export these days alongside grain and emerging church books) and then send her onto stage in a skimpy dress. If these tricks don’t work, find an out of work former member of a boy band, dress him in white with a pair of giant wings, and get him to belt out the tackiest love ballad in broken English.A European wide phone poll decides the winner, however countries are not able to vote for themselves. So all kinds of strange neighbourly voting occurs.  Half the show is watching the acts, the second half of the show is watching how various countries vote. You would think such a system of voting would see all kinds of former political and ethnic tensions rise again to the surface, however this is not the case. For example despite being at war only about a decade ago, Croatia gave a large portion of their vote to Serbia. Eurovision has become a kind of nationalistic neighbourly love in.

As I watched I thought to myself at least these countries are no longer fighting each other, only just over 50 years ago many of these countries were slaughtering each other over pieces of land and pages of ideology.  Sure what I was watching was tacky but was it all really that bad compared to the past?

 However as I drunk all this bad pop culture in, I found myself asking the same question as the great American poet Allen Ginsberg asked as he looked out across the skyline of a post war booming Chicago, “Is this the best we can do?”. We live post two world wars, we reap the benefits of an economic system that delivers us luxury unparalleled in human history. Therefore we must ask what as a culture are we producing? The engineers of the enlightenment when they began to dream of European society as a kind of humanist paradise, surely could not have imagined that the fruit of this utopia would be a sea of fake tan and Bulgarian techno pop. I must ask as must all people of the book, as whether when God challenged Abraham to turn his back on Ur, to set out and become a new kind of human, and to create a new kind of human society, whether he had shows about D Grade celebrities buying household items at Wall Mart as an end in mind.

As a culture we have become entrapped, our imaginations are held captive by the notion that although our present is not that great, surely it must be better than the past. Any hope of change in the future is held in slavery by the mediocrity of the present. The Russian dissident and Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noted that there was a kind of comfort in slavery in comparison the terror of freedom. And thus as a culture we become stuck in a superflat moment, we take the glossy, shiny yet tiny prison cell over the expansive yet terrifying freedom of the wilderness. We prefer to build our Babel like tower of tack, than to throw our lot in with God’s future of shalom.

Yet like the builders of Babel, we need again to be scattered. We need again to have new and strange dialects placed upon our tongues, phrases that sound strange to those around us, not because they are foreign in language, but because they ask the rarely heard questions “Is this the best we can do?”, “Is this how life was meant to be?”,  ”Is there something more?”. These are prophetic, dangerous questions that subvert the present and note on the horizon the potential of a glorious future of shalom.  We must remember that God’s coming future of Shalom (peace) is not just the absence of war, it is more than that, it is everything as it was meant to be. The good things of our creator turned up, amplified, improve beyond belief. To even to begin to grasp at such a future will change us and those around us in a profound way. Therefore it is imperative that even if it is annoying, even if we become flies in the ointment, to find the prophet within and with Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, turn to our culture and with God ask “Is this the best we can do?”.