The Capital Tunes
Economy of Pain
By Crispin Sartwell
Maybe you've heard about the Crash Cafe.
The restaurant, planned for the south side of
the harbor in Baltimore, will be hard to miss,
what with the tail of an airplane sticking out
of the front wall. Inside, giant-screen televi
sions will show satisfied patrons an endless
video loop of building implosions and train
wrecks.
Crash Cafe's developer, Patrick Turner, in
tends the Baltimore restaurant to be the first
of a national chain. The idea has stirred con
troversy, and there's no doubt that Turner's
taste is atrocious. But overall it is a little too
late in America to worry about taste. All our
media are dedicated to one thing: turning
people's suffering into money. In America,
pain is a commodity.
There are two kinds of movies: movies
for men and movies for women. Movies for
men feature a nonstop barrage of explosions,
beatings, and fire fights, until in the end jus
tice is re-established in a gorgeous orgy of
violence. Movies for women describe ter
rible romantic calamities that would leave
Ten Good Reasons
Most people have a long list of complaints
about everyone and everything around here,
and so to be fair, this is what some students
said they liked about Penn State Harrisburg:
!. “The couches.”
2. “Level 1 F-words come to mind: like fun,
frustrating, etc.”
3. The clubs and people.”
4. Couldn’t imagine a better place to be for
thirty hours a week (unpaid).”
5. Learning that having class on the third
floor is not a good idea if you plan on having
dinner downstairs in the Lion’s Den right be
fore. Take the elevator.”
6. One word: Tuna-wraps.”
7. Convenient, accessable for night classes,
small classes.”
8. If you attend stuff in the Gallery Lounge,
there's always free snacks offered.
9. I loved the sound of planes buzzing the
place.”
OPINION/EDITORIAL Wednesday, April 21,1999 9
most of us mumbling randomly in a rubber
room. In both cases, everything comes out
alright in the end, but whether it's Payback
or My Best Friend's Wedding, the suffering
makes the solution possible, and it's the suf
fering that makes us lay our money down.
Television, likewise, constitutes an endless
spectacle of affliction. The doctor shows wel
come enthusiastic viewers with fearsome dis
eases and slow torturous deaths; the cop
shows are built around gritty characters who
love nothing more than a good pistol-whip
ping. The average character in a
soap opera goes through more hell in a month
than most of us experience in a lifetime.
Television news is a running sore of pesti
lence, with saturation coverage of murders
and natural disasters. You can wallow for
years in, say, the death of Jonßenet Ramsey.
The Weather Channel provides upclose and
personal coverage of tornadoes and hurri
canes. Everyone involved in the impeach
ment has been suffering on television for a
year. And the suffering of the audience has
reached a kind of crescendo as Linda Tripp
Diane Finnefrock
'*)- - ’’-tv ■ ,i
The Capital Times
Barbara L. Roy
Layout
Brad Moist
meets Larry King.
Let’s not even bother to talk about Jerry
Springer, Cops, Vicious Animal Attacks, or
the NFL. Seen a Roadrunner cartoon lately?
Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network are
dedicated to training our children in the de
lectation of
pain, so they can take their place as consum
ers and content providers in the marketplace
of mindless destruction. America's Funniest
Home Videos has a magic formula: folks get
kicked in the crotch or take terrible falls or
fooled into thinking they've won the lottery.
Humiliation is the thing-we find most deeply
comic
Or consider the music industry. The voices
of Bono Vox and Eddie Vedder and that dude
from the Goo Goo Dolls come apparently
from an infinitely deep well of wretchedness;
these guys bellow through their ditties about
suicide
like the damned burning in eternal hellfire.
Rap, the blues, metal, punk, opera: all of it is
basically about pain, both the pain it describes
and the pain it inflicts. Marilyn Manson mu
tilates himself on stage, which in the economy
of suffering is a guaranteed road to stardom.
The guys in Marilyn's band generate their
names by combining starlets with serial kill
ers: Madonna Wayne Gacy, Daisy Berkowitz,
Barbara L. Roy
Editor
Kim Glass
Photographer
Staff / Writers / Contributors
Kristy Pipher
Ken Lopez
Sara Lee Lucas. A starlet who really was a
serial killer would be worth more than the
annual GDP of the EU.
Now you might think that all this shows
how sick we've become recently. But when
you get right down to it the entire Western
tradition is dedicated to torment. Think about
Jesus nailed to a cross, lacerated and wear
ing a crown of thorns. Contemplate Oedipus,
Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Les Miserables,
Madame Bovary. Think seriously for a mo
ment about socrates, Augustine, Beethoven,
Tolstoy, Picasso.
The severe pain of others gives us an en
dorphin rush, a little burst of adrenalin. And
watching people suffer is morally edifying,
because the pain is happening to people who
deserve it: that is, to people other than our
selves.
We might as well admit that the affliction
of others is delectable. We are epicures of
agony; all of us have dedicated much of our
lives to perfecting our consumption of pain.
Suffering is valuable; extreme suffering is
extremely valuable. That's why the Crash
Cafe makes sense: watching people get
mangled in a fiery cataclysm is good; but
watching
people get mangled in a fiery cataclysm while
you chow down on Buffalo wings is really
good. See you there.
Crispin Sartwell
DanZehr
Adviser
Jesse Gutierrez
Matt McKeown