Another note in a series on Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles.
Chapter Eight, “The Modern Gd”
First, let me get this out of the way: Mr. Stiles begins and ends the chapter with what he considers a “clear signal” of the Market’s war on religion, to wit, a bust of Darth Vader on the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Mr. Stiles calls the bust a gargoyle; architects and students of architecture reserve the word for an image that has a water spout, which this does not. Technically, Darth Vader is a corbel head. However, complaining about technical vocabulary is the sort of pissant fisking I try to avoid; in common parlance, a gargoyle is any ugly outside decoration on the upper part of a building. The web site for the National Cathedral calls it a gargoyle. I happen to know it’s a corbel, but if I were writing about it for a mainstream audience, I would probably call it a gargoyle, too, because that would make for clearer communication. So I am not complaining about the vocabulary.
Except ... of course there was an except. I can’t help thinking his use of gargoyle rather than corbel stems from ignorance rather than rhetorical choice. Because is it bizarre and ignorant to think that choosing an image of evil taken from popular culture for the outside of the cathedral is novel. I mean, that’s exactly what gargoyles and corbel heads and grotesques are. The reason I think Darth Vader makes such a good choice for the corbel head is that he is a modern grotesque. Again, here, I’m using the technical language, in which a grotesque is a combination of two or more things; man and animal, or eagle and lion, or man and plant, or such. Darth Vader, particularly pre-prequels, is a man-machine grotesque, particularly appropriate for an American National Cathedral. And, of course, the evil figures on the outside symbolize the evil outside the church; yes, it’s more complicated than that, but if anything the symbolism of Darth Vader on the outside of the church lines up with Mr. Stiles worldview more than it disagrees with it.
As for the Market influence, well, of course the Green Man images all over churches were entirely uninfluenced by popular culture, and of course nobody paid the jongleurs to tell the stories, and of course the Market never existed before and there is no historical context to be considered, in a pig’s eye. I mean, yes, I do see why in some sense it is more overt that the Market is involved, although it is also clear if you are paying attention that Darth Vader is the creative art of George Lucas, no more Market-debased than the Mona Lisa.
Hmph. That went on for a while. The rest of Chapter Eight later, then.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.