The National and Madmen Grow Up

What the National’s new record, High Violet and Madmen have in common

This past May The National released their new, highly anticipated album, High Violet once again impressing critics almost across the board, including The New York Times and Pitchfork (seriously, wow!) The Ohio based-currently-from-Brooklyn-band, has orchestrated some of their darkest music yet, as singer Matt Berninger throats chilling poetic melodies about sorrow, love, and the not-quite-so-darkly-imagined-reality of modern adulthood. “Sorrow found me when I was young,” Berninger writes, “Sorrow waited, sorrow won,” and you get the sense from his loosely flowing images and words that this is a man grappling with something gone wrong. On “Afraid of Everyone” Berninger goes so far as to say that, “I’m afraid of everyone,” and “I don’t have the drugs to sort it out.” On their single, “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” Berninger writes in the chorus that, “I still owe money/to the money/to the money I owe,” lamenting the current financial predicament of modern living. Though it would be foolish to constrain High Violet to a single theme, it would certainly be one concerning grappling with the reality of adulthood.
July 25th is slated to mark the beginning of the fourth season of the also highly critically acclaimed T.V. drama, Madmen. A show that, also based out of New York, gives us a more than terrifying view of what we thought the 50’s/60’s were all about. Shattering our preconceptions of the Cleaver family, what Madmen does great is transcend the boundary from the 60’s to the current, on the one hand making it easy to scoff at the characters misogyny and shortcomings, yet on the other, hitting us where it hurts, because we realize that we are not so different. We may not chain smoke with the tenacity that they do, but our lungs still feel the weight of trying to stay afloat in this world; and we may not have affairs, but it doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, or even act in certain scenarios; and we may not drink whiskey like water, but it doesn’t mean we cope with our problems any better.
Both Madmen and High Violet seem to be expressing characters disillusioned with their situation. It may be their identity, their family life, the stakes at the office, their desire for status or fulfillment; but both are about the hopeless reality of when life doesn’t quite line up like you thought it was going to—and what comes next. The men at Sterling Cooper are not satisfied with their family life, consider work a higher priority, therefore sending them to seek sexual or physical fulfillment elsewhere, leaving their wives emotionally distant, who take it like sick puppies, and man, we have come so far in the past forty years.

So what do these two things, a current album, and a current T.V. show, have to say about the state of the human condition in 2010? Are they both hitting on a dark theme we rarely like to discuss, or bring up? Are our expectations of what we thought the “real world” would be like, slowly crumbling? Have we gotten so independent and idealistic that the very real worlds of bills, parenting, maintaining relationships etc., are not the epic idea of life we had preconditioned ourselves for? Or are these just examples of the rare, and really we are quite content and happy with how things are going?

I think it’s a good possibility. There definitely seems a certain sorrow to it. A certain grappling.

Honesty, Hypocrisy, and Authenticity

It has been years since the scandal of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, four since we found out about Ted Haggard and three months since we witnessed another allegation against Evangelical George Alan Rekers who hired a gay “baggage boy” to do things like well, perhaps more than baggage carrying. There is a page on Wikipedia completely dedicated to a list of recent evangelical scandals of the past century— but these are just the big ones. There are the little ones that you may or may not ever hear about—the ones that happen in our own towns, which are whispered of in rumors like nightmares and a shake of the head. I have been given a second hand witness to two of these in the last four months in my particular city, and it is one thing to see the body count as a number on the bottom of a television—it is another thing to see bodies on your street.

It is easy for us who are obviously better Christians to begin to get angry and even hurry down the road to condemnation. On the one hand, it is our scream for justice, for the abuse and misrepresentation of the gospel we cling to. But on the other hand, while it is easy for us to look down on these people, there is a little part inside of us that squirms when we hear of affairs and rumors of affairs, because we realize we are capable of the same things. The recent affair I gave witness to happened because a man stopped loving his wife for nine years. He found out yesterday she had recently had an affair, and though he got drunk and passed out in a hotel, he awoke to the realization that he had been causing an affair for nine years. It was not just his wife’s hands that were dirty with blood, he checked out a long time ago. He had been having plenty of “emotional affairs” himself.

They have four kids, the ramifications of that alone are astounding. Even if healing and redemption happen, there will be an unbelievable body count.
My girlfriend Laura broke up with me last week. While break-ups are very complicated things, the reasons she listed on her end included “lack of emotional fulfillment,” obviously there was lack of communication as to what those were, and I like most guys, needs things spelled out in bright purple neon letters or I am just hopeless. But, regardless, I dropped the ball, I got lazy, she felt it. I realize now what I did wrong and what I can do better next time I am in a relationship, but this coupled with the previous affair I told you about, woke me up. Because If I do not examine the darkness in my own heart and have the ability to be honest, I am that guy in nine years if nothing changes. I am that guy already.

So the question always seems to come to: why? Why would someone do something like this? And every so often we’ll ask the question, “What do we do with this pandemic?” but not very often, because more than likely we sweep it under the rug, and exclaim “Too bad for them,” thinking that it has very little to do with us. I am suggesting that this is an issue that needs to be looked at, and not just thought about, but thoroughly examined with a huge freaking microscope. This should be a learning experience, because while we’d like to imagine that it could never happen to us, it’s foolish to live in some sort of self-righteous ignorance.

I would suggest that the main reason, especially with regards to Christian circles, is a lack of honesty. In many ways we have created a culture in our churches that breeds American meritocracy and superficiality rather than honest repentance and transformation. This culture bleeds into our own selves and while at first we find ourselves excited to climb the “ministry ladder” we soon find ourselves being to high up and now there is the thought that, “I can’t let people know.” I can’t let people know who I really am because if they found out that I, a leader, did such things, then, what would everyone think?

You know honestly what everyone would think? “Thank God someone here is actually a true Christian!” Have you ever felt yourself in a scenario where the most refreshing sermon or discussion you could hear involved someone stating, “This is what I struggle with, and I need help.” On the inside I weep for joy because I can’t tell you how encouraging it is to hear someone else say that they are struggling human beings too and in need of God’s grace as they stagger their way to repentance and transformation.

I think another reason could be true repentance itself. Maybe we are just pretending to be Christians. Maybe we aren’t. maybe we are those who when we get to heaven, God will say, “I never knew you,” because we are the ones that either think we are tricking God or earning our salvation on our own merits.

The true beauty of the gospel, of what we call the “Good News” is the brokenness of it. It is the broken parts inside of us realizing that we really don’t have it all together. It is coming to the end of ourselves, the ability to be fully honest, naked even, and in our drunken authenticity, find love.

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