The American Pain

 

I noticed years ago that the American Pain, which used to die in shacks and mansions unheard, has migrated to the Net to be heard – for every pain wants an ear, desperately. Thus, my morbid fascination with the comments on YouTube videos, a vast lamentation. It is here that mothers grieve daughters gone to overdose, daughters grieve mothers gone to Covid, and crooked lives find, at least for a comment, some airing.

This is, I believe, a unique  ethical and aesthetic phenomenon. The blues came out of the American heartland, and scattered singers throughout the land. Seriously. I remember in Shreveport, in the 1970s, when I was working as a janitor at a warehouse, that at break, this one old battered warehouse lift operator would sometimes bring a guitar and sing “a shaky song”. Interrupting the ongoing dominos games.

It makes sense to me, in a painful way, these voices, these anecdotes shared with nobody. The boy who overdoses and dies with the headphones on, the Dad who crashes and burns listening to some R.E.M. song. It is surprising and not surprising at all that so little ruckus is made about the more than million overdose deaths in America in the last decade, or the way suicide has become the number one way out for the under 35 year old cohort. In other times, this amount of pain would have moved mountains, would have somehow rocked the boat.

But it hasn’t, so it ends up in YouTube video comments. This could be one of those YouTube video comments.