SOUVENIRS, NOVELTIES, PARTY TRICKS . . . Everyone likes to have mementos of important events that have touched their lives and, failing that, souvenirs from trivial gatherings that were nonetheless exciting and widely attended. (I'm thinking of the drumsticks in my closet labelled "Fishbone" and "RHCP", respectively, and bearing dates from 1992-93.) We anchor ourselves to moments of significance by consecrating objects as relics; reminders not only that we were there but of what it was at that moment to be there. To this end we buy t-shirts, take pictures, or smuggle found objects out of more or less secure locations. (Please. Yes you have.) Such objects have particular power when the events they commemorate are difficult for us personally -- making the act of consecration more serious, even controversial if the events are complicated or painful for some or all of us collectively.
The potential for controversy is particularly acute when those consecrating the relics are agitants or advocates who intend to deploy them as symbols in ongoing campaigns of political or spiritual re-organization. To do so is, in effect, to work a kind of sorcery that propagates a less-than-fully theorized sympathy for the consecrators' preferred perspective on issues related -- or entirely unrelated -- to the event the symbols commemorate. There is accordingly, in every such deployment of symbol, the potential for tendentious profanity and bad faith on an order of magnitude proportional to the depth of feeling evoked in each of us by the event or issue symbolized.
Those of us who are wary of partisans and the social power of symbols and relics are left to watch anyone who would deploy mementos and reminders in this way and wonder: Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? If we accept your symbols, what else will you ask us to do?
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