American exceptionalism. Unburdened by the sins of the Old World. Innocence is a commodity and we consume it on a vast scale. How else to explain the inexplicable persistence of lost innocence. American innocence can be killed repeatedly, yet magically picks itself and re-invents itself anew.Halpern’s theory centers on the concept of disavowal and innocence and all the fantasy’s , delusions and disappointments that accompany it. The process is based on unconscious decisions to idealize the world and innocence is manufactured through a process of disavowal. He says that Norman Rockwell’s work is noteworthy in its ability to stage disavowal in such a way that it finishes by analyzing us…
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Richard Halpern:
On October 10, 1980, Mark David Chapman sold his beloved lithograph of Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait to a Hawaiian public relations man for $7500. Chapman, who was strapped for cash, used the proceeds to quit his job, purchase a .38 revolver, buy airfare to New York and book a room at the Waldorf Astoria. From this base of operations he would stalk John Lennon at the Dakota and finally, in December, take his life. I find it suggestive that one icon of innocence was used to fund the assassination of another. For many, John Lennon’s death marked the end of ’60s idealism, summed up in his song “Imagine.” Chapman’s rage was fueled largely by his sense that Lennon had become a rich phony who had betrayed those ideals. Rockwell, with whom Chapman was also obsessed, represents another, earlier style of innocence, associated primarily with the postwar years.
Read More: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/314405.html ---Halpern: When, in the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud brought the unwelcome news that even small children harbor sexual and violent fantasies, he managed to shock middle-class sensibilities, but he arguably did no more than revive and affirm an older form of theological wisdom. Our sense of Rockwell’s world as an innocent one has a great deal to do with the prominence of children in it, but childhood innocence is less a fact than a construction by “adults.”
While Freud would not approve, I want to propose an ethical distinction between repression and disavowal. In repression, the conscious mind finds something so objectionable (though also desirable) that it simply expels it and will have no more to do with it. Repression therefore involves, for better or worse, a genuine renunciation. In disavowal, however, consciousness both retains and banishes something. It thereby allows itself to enjoy that forbidden thing on the sly while denying that it enjoys or knows it. Disavowal is not exactly a way of having your cake and eating it too. It’s rather a way of eating your cake and nevertheless being able to deny to yourself, with apparent sincerity, that you ever ate it or had any intention of doing so. Indeed, it’s a way of eating cake while declaring that people who eat cake are disgusting and ought to be locked up. Disavowal is therefore a short-circuiting of ethics, insofar as it refuses to take responsibility for what one already knows or wants or does, engaging instead in childish forms of denial. It substitutes a false conviction of personal purity for a complex engagement with the self and the world as they really are.
Read More: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/314405.html ---We learn to disavow in many ways from a very early age, and our different forms of disavowal soon become hopelessly entangled. But sexual disavowal is nevertheless a very potent form of it, and people under the sway of sexual disavowal are, more often than not, unusually vulnerable to other forms as well.---
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ADDENDUM:
from a readers letter: Chapman was a patsy set up for the hit by the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. Why? Because Lennon was due to win his U.S. citizenship a few months later, and they needed to eliminate the chance that Lennon would have joined the opposition to thei
rderous counterrevolutionary wars in Central America (esp. Nicaragua and El Salvador), just getting underway as Reagan’s transition team was taking power in December 1980. Think that’s nuts? Read _Who Killed John Lennon?_ by Fenton Bresler, and __John Lennon: Life, Times, Assassination_ by Phil Strongman. And visit ciakilledlennon.blogspot.com
COMMENTS
Chapman was a patsy set up for the hit by the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. Why? Because Lennon was due to win his U.S. citizenship a few months later, and they needed to eliminate the chance that Lennon would have joined the opposition to their murderous counterrevolutionary wars in Central America (esp. Nicaragua and El Salvador), just getting underway as Reagan’s transition team was taking power in December 1980. Think that’s nuts? Read _Who Killed John Lennon?_ by Fenton Bresler, and __John Lennon: Life, Times, Assassination_ by Phil Strongman. And visit ciakilledlennon.blogspot.com