Amerika

For years people have told me that I’m a paranoid wingnut for seeing “secular Christianity” in modern liberalism. I thought it might be useful to expound on a fragment from the smarmiest and cheesiest and most greeting-card-ish palaver our society can produce. Enter Avril Lavigne with “Sk8er Boi“:

Sorry girl but you missed out
Well tough luck that boys mine now
We are more than just good friends
This is how the story ends
Too bad that you couldn’t see
See that man that boi could be
There is more than meets the eye
I see the soul that is inside

Oho, what’s this about a soul that’s inside? This song is a familiar archetype in Western media: rich girl falls for messy/poor boy, turns him down and faces regret. After seeing any of these you have to conclude you’d be a fool for taking someone at face value, even though the someones in your life don’t look like Hollywood stars either. This song is trying to convince you of the same: that no matter how fucked up someone appears to be, they’ve got a soul inside and that’s what counts (dualism). As the song illustrates, it is these souls that determine whether or not we succeed (“get onstage”) in life or not, not how competent, balanced, intelligent we are. It’s hilarious that this cheese is a source of profound revelations about the nature of this technocratic, liberalized system, and ironically fulfills the “promise” of democracy to show us what the average thinks.