WHEN THE ABSURD AND RIDICULOUS CONJUGATE AS THE PALLIATIVE TO BOREDOM!

WHEN THE ABSURD AND RIDICULOUS CONJUGATE

AS THE PALLIATIVE TO BOREDOM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 25, 2014

This is being written three months to the day before Christmas, which isn’t Christmas anymore but a Season Greeting.  

As Christmas is upon us, people will catch themselves saying, “Merry Christmas,” then quickly correct to, “Happy Holiday.”

Life has become so absurd to the point of ridiculous that entrepreneurs have successfully conjugated our angst into acceptability.

This is the creative genius of social networks in this electronic media age.  

More than a billion souls across the globe are posting their inanity and insanity on smartphones for the world to see.    

Cable television news and shock jock radio have used this device to generate the hysteria of “breaking news” or someone's salacious fall from grace, of course, always between commercials.

Mary Shelley may have created “Frankenstein,” but modern media creatively assemble personalities to match her inventiveness in Howard Sterns, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart. 

Terrorists, deviants, and malcontents have to share the media stage with weirdos as source material as the absurd and ridiculous conjugate to boredom.  Sometimes this has the patina of the sophisticated.

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Most recently National Public Radio Television presented a several hour hagiography of the “Roosevelt’s”: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.  Film biographer Ken Burns was the creator of this entertaining assembly.

Having read books on these people, it must be admitted that their sins seem more palpable and provocative on film.  Scholars, biographers, journalists and pundits parade across the screen on what these people were like.  We eat this up because they make our sins feel venial in comparison. 

For example, Teddy Roosevelt comes across as a manic achiever with a perverse need to destroy in order to create.  His legacy of hegemony or empire is brought out to give the impression that the sleepy United States in late nineteenth and early twentieth century was treading water, and that was just not acceptable to little Teddy.   

The Theodore Roosevelt era, rich in achievement, also demonstrated the mindset of the overachiever.  When he graduated from Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, Magnum Cum Laude, with a class ranking in the top third of his class, he was proud to point out that none of those who graduated above him "were gentlemen.”  Not only was he born into elitism, but it was the fire in his belly.

Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand was a mommy’s boy with the embedded solipsism that goes with such nurturing.  Just the opposite of his cousin, Theodore, he was a charmer not a student.  Elected four times to the presidency, but living only three months into his fourth term, he left a mess for Harry S. Truman, his vice president, that still haunts us today. 

At the Yalta Conference, near the end of the WWII, he, Great Britain’s Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin divided the world, especially the Middle East, into the quagmire it has become for leaders over the last three quarters of a century.

Patrician Roosevelt and Churchill were both solipsistic.  This no doubt played a role in their under assessing pedestrian Stalin, who completely finessed them at Yalta.  For that blunder, the world has been paying the price ever since.

Now we come to Eleanor Roosevelt.  Much as Ken Burns had wonderful things to say about her, not dodging her husband's great betrayal, she was clearly the brightest star in this firmament of stars, more able, centered, mature, and effective than this lot of men, including Stalin. 

Eleanor was also patrician by birth, but never wore it as a badge, as her instinct was to treat all people with dignity.  My wonder is where the “New Deal” of FDR's administration would be without her.  She was not absurd or ridiculous but close to divine.

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What precipitated these reflections on the absurd and ridiculous conjugating to the boring was “ah hum” columns that appeared this week in the Op Ed pieces of my local newspaper.  I have lived through the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era to the present, and at what you could call the “bottom of the barrel” or working class poor. 

My da was on Roosevelt’s WPA, I’ve contributed the maximum all my life to the Social Security System, and now have that benefit.  I also graduated from land grant public universities, and so you could say I’m indebted to FDR and his “New Deal.”  So, if I seem less than obsequious at my good fortune, it is to misread my gratitude.  Having an opportunity to get an education, and therefore the experience of my many jobs in life is not because of what he did, but what he didn’t do.  He didn’t expect me to live through other people’s lives, imitating their deeds, but allowed me to find my own way on my own terms without getting in my way.  Now, it seems we have so many safe guards and so much pressure to be like everyone else that the Clarian’s Call is uninhibited unabashed exhibitionism.

People are more interested in what others think of them than what they think of themselves.  They’ll post everything under God’s sun on Facebook or some facsimile of it for God only knows why.  When did we become so interested not in being interesting but simply in connecting?  Then it must be asked, where will this preference likely to go?   Will we have anytime to think or get anything done if we spend most of our time posting and viewing postings of others?

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My “oh hum” reference was to New York Times columnist David Brooks on “Things aren’t that bad, but many leaders are.”  I know he has to writes these columns to get paid.  I also sense that like the rest of us he has bad days, or bad weeks and doesn’t have anything of any importance to say, but yet he has to fill up column space.  True, I don’t have to read it.  And if I read it, I don’t have to be exercised about it, but unfortunately, I was and am, because I can’t believe he believes what he has written.

In the column, he’s saying our cities are doing great: “Widening the lens,” he says, “we’re living in an era with the greatest reduction in global poverty ever -- across Asia and Africa.”

If this is an endorsement of capitalism, he’s leaving out the pollution, the instability and disappearance of rural life for nearly three billion souls (China, India, and Africa), not to mention the wars and terrorism that feed on inequality, chaos and confused priorities.

This brings us to the second point of David Brooks.  Given this upbeat picture, what the world suffers from is not enough elite leaders.  Yes, elitism, he claims, is the key palliative to the world’s troubles.

I’m sure he saw the “Roosevelt’s” on TV and feels a manic Teddy and solipsistic Franklin is lacking in our current firmament.  He also reminds us of the elitism of our Founding Fathers, and where would we be without them, right?  Absurd and ridiculous as this is to bring up in this context, he speaks of Senator Ted Crux and Karl Marx in the same breath as being champions of the masses, believing the masses can rule, when clearly Brooks thinks this is absurd if not ridiculous. 

Obviously, I don’t agree.  From my point of view, we are at the brink of a watershed moment when the world literally turns upside down, and leadership comes from the rank and file, from the educated class of working professionals who know what is wrong and how to fix it, but fawn at the authority of those in power, often programmed from elite schools and solipsistic nurturing. 

Consequently, those with answers wait and react to elite authority, and then clean up the mess afterwards as part of their modus operandi.  So, it has been since the beginning of time, but clearly that time has a diminishing capacity and suspect future efficacy.

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Two men of the early twentieth century that understood the absurd and ridiculous conjugation were Jean Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud. 

Sartre wrote plays (“No Exit”), philosophy (“Being and Nothing”), psychology (“Nausea The Wall), was a proponent of existentialism (“Situations”), biography (“The Words”), and turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I suspect he is not read much today, but his presence is obvious in everyday life, as we are behaving precisely as he predicted, or automatic pilot only now with a smartphone.    

Sigmund Freud, as my readers can attest, has been an inspiration for me, not because his psychology is not suspect, but because he understood and has reported laboriously on the secular, self-indulgent world Frederick Nietzsche predicted.  God was not dead, but Nietzsche was telling Western society he no longer resided in a church, which had gone secular.  There was no longer a place for God.  Islam, if not totally consciously, is fighting desperately to keep God in their mosque, which has instead given rise to Islam terrorists.

Perhaps I relate to Freud because people so often in the public eye behave as he described people will behave.  The rest of us behave the same way, but we are not high profiled characters, for example, like such people as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, both Nobel Prize recipients.

Faulkner put a “u” in his name thinking it was more distinct.  He went to Canada during WWII, and came back to Mississippi with a limb and in a Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform, yet he was not in any military unit, and the limb was a manufactured plot to add to his distinction.  He once said the basic requirement of a novelist was to be a good liar.  He qualified, writing inspiring works about people in his region, and about warriors that resonated with me in my reading as a boy.

Hemingway was manic like Theodore Roosevelt.  Both men like to kill for the sport of it, and then mount their trophies as if reflecting their prowess.  Roosevelt created a volunteer army for him to lead as a self-appointed lieutenant colonel, and made his reputation in the Spanish American War.  Hemingway, also like the spirit of war, becoming attached to the Italian ambulance corps in WWI, and being wounded, and in WWII, searching for Nazi submarines in the Caribbean, then being a quasi-war correspondent and fighter on the Western front in WWII.  To give evidence of a common sickness Theodore Roosevelt and Hemingway shared – they gloried in their wounds in battle. 

No two men better demonstrated Freud’s “death instinct,” which, incidentally, we all have.

Many others come to mind as little boys who never grow up, and hardly upset with their behavior, but decide instead to deify them for their achievements. 

So, my sense is that the absurd will continue to conjugate with the ridiculous as long as man walks on this earth, the preferred palliative to boredom.

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