Lena Dunham and the Banality of the Disgusting
The recent publication of a close-up of Lena Dunham's naked bottom as season's greeting from America's new sweetheart prompts a moment of psychoanalysis.
Fundamentally, Dunham's repulsive presence is political propaganda. Totalitarianism maintains its control through fear and imposition of the irrational, inhumane, and self-destructive mental condition generally termed dissociation. The vulgarity and obscenity of many female comics play a role in inducing that malleable mental state in people who have fallen into attenuated connections with God and conscience. Dunham leads the pack of the propagandistas of the disgusting.
On the material plane, it is wrong to draw any comparison between contemporary American sociopolitics and the horrors of Nazism. But on the psychological level, especially regarding the psychodynamics of the descent into totalitarianism, parallels exist. In her fervent promotion of the prosaic abortion, Lena Dunham plays the role of an Adolph Eichmann for today's creepy American totalitarianism.
Last Halloween, looking for a costume that would be "newsy and sexy" Dunham arrayed herself as a Planned Parenthood (PP) abortionist. The newsiness is obvious. Last October, PP was in the news with videotapes of doctors talking about extracting fetuses to preserve body parts for sale and films of those procedures. The sexiness to Dunham of performing abortions is less obvious, but here's a hypothesis. For Dunham, sexiness and power are inseparable. Sex has nothing to do with physical love shared in private. The purpose of sex is power publicly claimed. Dunham's impact lies in inexhaustible variations on the theme of disgusting, valued not for her number of actual admirers, but for her corrosive effects on morality and culture. She is enabled by the inescapable HBO, which no longer has to care if anyone is actually watching.
Dunham has exploited her ability to be impishly disgusting all of her life. It is her only talent. She works it unrelentlingly. That which many people find cruel or repellent Dunham celebrates as trendy, sexy newsiness. She claps and coos at a PP clinic as if she is at a festive occasion, because she is. Doctors who save lives are not her heroes. She idolizes abortionists because unconsciously, she wishes to share in the sexiest power of all – to kill human beings.
Dissociation is a mental state caused by abuse in which the mind dulls and clouds over, making it more difficult to act for one's own happiness, welfare, and safety. A totalitarian regime, be it communist, Nazi, or progessivist, cultivates this overcast and immobilized consciousness in several ways. It undermines the personal, private sphere of life – the home and natural family – and places the pre-eminence of the state, aka the village, above the home. Secondly, totalitarianism undermines morality based on God and theistic religion. In the United States, that is the Judeo-Christian code. The state, through its educational and propaganda systems, tries to indoctrinate a new code of conduct based on the regime's ideology. The regime redefines good and evil, ostensibly to benefit the volk, or folks, a word often used in Obamaspeak. Private economic success is redefined as greed. The natural family becomes a harmful patriarchy, where abuse and oppression arise. The state assumes control over basic necessities for children. Privacy of personal information protects only people who have something to hide.
But American progressivism departs from communism and Nazism in its special reliance on moral chaos. There is no propaganda for a worker's Shangri-La or an Aryan paradise. In America today, virtue is the stumbling block to pacification. Apart from hopes for heaven, the temporal benefit of morality based on spiritual absolutes is that it conserves energy to be used for important purposes. Moral chaos makes any lawful, worthwhile political progress almost unattainable. For example, students preoccupied with sexuality and "gender," no matter how gifted they may be, are prisoners of the unimportant and will be easy to placate and control.
Unlike the great communist powers or the Nazi Reich, the United States has not had a revolution since its founding and has not explicitly overthrown or replaced the statement of identity contained in the Declaration of Independence or the plan for government called the Constitution. Therefore, the descent into socialist tyranny is led by hypocrites spouting about rights but really just enriching and aggrandizing themselves in destroying the economic and moral order, without proposing a workable alternative.
Eichmann's role was antithetical to celebrity. He was a cog in a massive, out-of-sight killing machine. Today, celebrity is essential to the destruction of morality and in the service of the American killing machine.
Comedy, especially, seems to serve the cause of desensitizing the public to raunch. Female comics in particular have abandoned the craft of humor in favor of dull crudity. Whether Kathy Griffin's bucket of female genitalia or the lewdness of Amy Shumer or Chelsea Handler, female comics seem to lead the way in distasteful unfunniness.
Historians make it clear that Adolph Eichmann was not very intelligent. He was an average man with a knack for the bureaucracy of evil. Lena Dunham has a parallel knack. Eichmann was called the "desk murderer." Dunham characterizes her nationally televised sex acts as just another day at the office. Eichmann and Dunham were and are ordinary people playing special roles in the respective totalitarian initiatives of their times. In Not that Kind of Girl, Dunham brags that when she was eight, she could shock and disarm adults by saying, "When I'm bad my father sticks a fork in my vagina." At twelve, she describes riding a bicycle with a boy of similar age, pulling her shirt off; the feelings of the other child did not seem exist for her. While at Oberlin, she writes that she threw a used tampon into the bushes in front of a church.
There is a tendency to want to view an Eichmann or Dunham as sick. But they are not sick. They are self-deluded with a hunger for power.
The Nazi regime did not exterminate Jews at its onset, and the earliest American progressives could not have foreseen the enormity of government support for Planned Parenthood clinics.
The totalitarian regime reaches full psychological dissociation when a class of human beings is deemed a threat to public welfare and its elimination is necessary and salubrious, and comes to be regarded as banal. Eichmann reportedly said five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction. Lena Dunham is also pleased with herself and passionate for her cause and its millions and millions of successes.