Jabberwockies And Melting Watches

One romantic impulse is to turn from the “real” and create the surreal. Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Salvador Dali, Philippe Soupalt and Andre Breton, to name some of the more prominent among the anti-realists/surrealists, all emerged during times of cultural crises. That is, they witnessed what to them was the distortion and deterioration of what had been ennobling in their cultures and reacted by creating visions contrary to what those around them considered the “real” world or “reality.” I use quotation marks around “real” and “reality”, because those are social constructs, temporary understandings of a perceived world beyond the subjective world of the individual. That is, they are understandings limited by acceptable social standards, whether or not they represent what you or I see and perceive.

The issue I want to explore here is the coming awareness that what we would ordinarily accept as our “real world” has begun to emerge as a surreal world. This has been notable in the encroaching political campaigns and the insidious creep of Internet phenomena into our brains, but even more so, I’m reading it in pundits’ attempts to explain what’s going on and/or to ignore it altogether (which might be even more troubling).

Consider, for example, this week’s lead stories in the major news media outlets. Two sex scandals now engross the attention of the casual information seeker. This, of course, in historical perspective, is not extraordinary. What is extraordinary is the style applied by commentators and reporters. In Herman Cain’s case, he manipulated his announced press conference, attended only by the press, into a political speech. And none of the reporters called him out on it. It was a deadpan sideshow worthy of P.T. Barnum. In the case of Jerry Sandusky’s raping of at least one child, the story is not about any of that—it’s about King Joe Paterno and his Shakespearean fall from grace. And what will become of Penn State’s financial viability now that its $70 million per year TV revenues will be threatened? Cue Chicken Little.

In the case of the Happy Valley hoi poloi, the greatest concern is for the media treatment of Papa Joe and the former-agri-school-now-research-center-academic-mecca’s reputation.Somehow the sodomized person has been overlooked, as well as the others whose actual numbers remain obscured by the prurient headlines. My favorite line from Cain’s performance was “I have never acted inappropriately with anyone. Period.”—which makes me feel a little sorry for Mrs. Cain. Cain’s puffery and Dickensian bluster should make us all wonder about how such a style can carry such a person to such heights of responsibility. Is this the de riguer style for high-flying management?

The other thing that gets me about the Cain kerfuffle is that so many people are concerned that he is polling so high in the GOP primary race. What are they thinking about? —And this gets me back to my original point— I can’t be the only sentient person who observes the stagnation in our culture and how the punditry is so timid about calling it out. They allow Cain to be taken seriously. Consider: The absurdity of a national government that refuses to govern, an aloft, affluent financial exchange that has become nothing if not the east coast casino for the really high rollers adrift in a parallel universe (re-read Wolf’s “Bonfire of the Vanities”), a demos that has serious concern for the plight of a talentless factoid woman created out of her father’s one-time claim to fame as the defense attorney for a murderer, and on it goes. We make the Weimar culture seem like a stable, productive society. Money makes the world go round, indeed.

In many ways, thanks not in small part to the immediacy of our digified culture, we have become the surreality that was the surrealists’ escape mechanism from the cultural crises they faced. Lewis Carroll’s famous Queen of Hearts could easily stand in for any of the so-called leadership of bloviators in our politics. And his delightful Jabberwocky satire, “`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
 /Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves,
/And the mome raths outgrabe.” stands in for our serious poetic arts. Joyce’s voice in Finnegan’s Wake, e.g., “or proclaim him offsprout of vikings who had founded wapentake and seddled hem in Herrickor Eric, the best authenticated version, the Dumlat, read the Reading of Hofed-ben-Edar, has it that it was this way” could be the text of what we now call political discourse. Or the poetry of Soupault and its similarity to Bachmann’s ravings: “Wednesday on a barge/and you Saturday like a flag/the days have crowns/like kings and dead men/lissome as a kiss my hand/rests on chained foreheads/A child cries for her doll/and we'll have to start over again/Monday and Tuesday cold-blooded/four Thursdays off from work”. And then we have the visuals dumped online in YouTube to distract and titillate. Compare them to Blake and Dali. These artists visualized how we look from outside our normality, our “reality.”

Or as Poe put it: “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream.”

BTW—"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian." -- Dennis Wholey