Crowding out death: White Noise

it still is…

THIS is an America where no one is responsible or in control; all are
receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers. Some join Simuvac, which
signs up local school children as volunteer victims in simulated
evacuations (“Some people,” Gladney tells his daughter in response to a
question about the Nazis, “put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger,
safer”). Gladney and his wife, Babette, live with four of the children
of their previous marriages in a rambling house filled with
“possessions that carry a sorrowful weight … the unused objects of
earlier marriages, gifts of lost in-laws,” things that have “a
darkness attached to them, a foreboding.” Babette, a low-key and
adaptable faculty wife who reads tabloids to the blind and teaches
senior citizens’ classes in posture, is distinguished by her
forgetfulness and her preoccupation with death.