Dr. Metablog

A Bad Case of Irony Overload (IO)

O m' god. I'm having a serious attack of Irony Overload. This is no joke. In the last few days, the news has been saturated with extreme instances of Natural Irony. It's dangerous stuff. Left unchecked, you know, IO can progress to Morbid Cynicism (MC), which is terminal. The cases to which I refer are not your run-of-the-mill family-values preacher caught pants-down with a male prostitute. These are more colorful, more exotic performances.

Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank prexy and ferocious campaigner against corruption and nepotism, "directed" that his very own girlfriend or house mate or whatever she might be called, be hired at a handsome tax-free salary at a State Department agency where she's to be guaranteed superior evaluations and inordinately large salary increases. It's a variety of cronyism that we can call "nepotistical irony."

Another: Robert E. Coughlin, deputy chief of the criminal division of our very own US of A Department of Justice, which is overseeing the investigation of Jack Abramoff, suddenly needs to spend more time with his family when investigators scrutinize his financial relationship to Kevin Ring, an Abramoff stooge. What are the odds? The investigator supervising his own investigation! There's enough irony in this story to fill a barrel with monkeys or, alternatively, an industrial size hen house with packs of famished foxes. And there's more to the story. Last year, the very same Robert E. Coughlin received, at the hands of Alberto Gonzalez himself, the highly coveted Attorney-General Award for Fraud Prevention.

And just yesterday, when I thought that my IO index couldn't rise any higher, Global AIDS Ambassador and Deputy Secretary of State Randy (actual name!!) Tobias, a big abstinence guy and the overseer of a program designed to help men in poor countries "develop healthy relationships with women" resigned "for personal reasons" when it was revealed that he had been regularly dialing up an "escort service" that sent shady ladies to his home.  Asked "if he knew any of the alleged call girls," Randy replied that in "he didn’t remember them at all. He said it was like ordering pizza." Women are like pizza?  To a man whose mission is "to help men in poor countries develop... etc., etc."  In the face of such a revelation, how's an ordinary guy supposed to keep Morbid Cynicism at bay. 

By the way, Randy T. has chosen to go with the Ted Haggard defense. Yes, he frequented prostitutes, but not for sex, only for massage.

So here we go again, dear readers. Pop quiz, multiple choice. Your back is hurting and you need a massage. Whom do you call?  Two choices:  a) massage therapist, or b) a notorious madam.

If you answered A, you win a lifetime membership in the Committee to Stamp out Morbid Cynicism.  If you answered B., you receive a lucrative patronage appointment in the Department of Justice plus a secret e-mail account with the Republican National Committee. 

What We Read in the Fifties: Scaramouche

For the life of me, I cannot remember whether I read Scaramouche because I was entranced by the movie, or whether it was the other way around, and I surrendered my 16 cents to the Leader Theater because I had already fallen in love with Rafael Sabatini's historical romances. I know that I gorged myself on huge helpings of Sabatini -- not only Scaramouche and Captain Blood, but everything else in the rich collection of the McDonald Avenue library. Scaramouche, first published in 1921, enjoyed a second burst of popularity when the Mel Ferrer-Stewart Granger Technicolor swashbuckler hit the screens in 1952. I've now re-read the novel, and while it lacks the magic that it had for my 13-year-old self, and, moreover, is awkwardly plotted, and stilted, and thin, and obvious, it's nevertheless an engaging adventure story. The central figure is the dashing and resilient Andre-Louis Moreau, who survives crisis after crisis with a witty, devil-may-care sprezzatura. The novel itself overlays elements of picaresque (on-the-lam Moreau becomes an itinerant actor, then a fencing master, and finally a politician) onto a traditional romance plot (in the novel's final pages, our bastard hero discovers that he's an aristocrat by birth). At heart it's yet another version of the secret-sharer, doppelganger, Jekyll-Hyde plot so common a hundred or so years ago. Moreau is haunted by his wicked double, the Marquis Gervais de la Tour D'Azyr, with whom he competes for not one but two different women  -- one fallen and one pure, as was the custom in those days. D'Azyr claims that Moreau has been "the evil genius of his life," but he's got it backwards: he's Moreau's evil twin. In the thrilling climax, so-called, Moreau wins Aline de Kercadiou -- the upper-class paragon whom both he and his double desire. The novel is set during the French Revolution, but the historical context is dimly realized  -- a much paler embodiment than The Tale of Two Cities, which, like Scaramouche, is also a novel of doubles (remember Charles Darnay and his dissipated friend Sidney Carton!).  A dyspeptic reader might assert that the novel is nothing but dilute Dumas; it would be hard to challenge such an opinion.

The film, which I remembered fondly, was a bitter disappointment. It's appallingly, embarrassingly bad. There's some good theatrical dueling, but the plot is a mess, the dialog is ghastly, the humor infantile, and the acting vaudevillian. Eleanor Parker is hopeless as a cliche "spitfire" who alternately kisses and smacks around her admirers; however, a young and rondelet Janet Leigh, swathed in whole hectares of taffeta, manages to redeem the part of Aline. All the characters, even Aline, wear their hair in the oddest configuration: highly artificial, upswept white wigs. They look like well-groomed sheep. I suppose it's too late to shoot the hairdresser.

The Sesquipedalian Sibilance Society would like to extend its appreciation to Mr. Sabatini for popularizing the word "spadassinicide," which is much-used in the novel. It's from Fr. spadassin, "assassin," and from the Latin verb meaning, "to kill."  Etymologically speaking, spadassinicide ought to denote a person who murders murderers, but the author uses it to mean a person who kills by taking advantage of the etiquette of the duel. It's a handsome old neologism, although not easy to work into everyday conversation.

An Informal Survey

OK, it's time to get going. Could we put the house lights on, please. Here's the first question. Raise your hand if you think that the loss of 5.000,000 e-mails by the White House was simply an accident. That it was unintended. Anyone?  Yes, I see a couple of hands in the back, and there's someone here on the left. I guess most of you think it was 'accidentally-on-purpose.' Fine. OK now, here's another question. The White House claims that Karl Rove didn't use the Republican National Committee e-mail address to bypass the records act, but just simply to keep politics and government business separate. If you believe that, please raise your hand. I'm not seeing any hands at all -- oh yes, there's someone, and there's someone else near the center aisle. There's two hands -- no, I'm sorry, three.  Ready for another question?  The President is willing to let his advisers talk to congressional investigators, but not under oath, not publicly, and with no transcript. If you believe that he's not trying to hide something, raise your hands, please. Did I make that question clear? Let me say it again. If the president's argument is persuasive to you, raise your hand. If you think he's just protecting himself and his advisers, keep your hand down. Hands? I see two on the left, and one there in the back. Same person as before, I think. OK now, -- next question. Karl Rove's lawyer admits that Rove systematically erased his e-mails, but only because he thought that they were preserved elsewhere. Anyone believe that one?  Please raise your hand. Nobody?  OK, there's someone down here. Sorry, I almost missed you, ma'am. So we have only one person who believes that story. Ready for another question?  Attorney-General Gonzalez says that he would never fire anyone for political reasons or to interfere with an investigation in progress. Do I have any hands on that one? No, none at all?  Interesting?  I'll wait. Still nobody? Let me try another question. Anyone here believe that Gonzalez is a tool of Rove and that he does exactly what Rove tells him to do?  OK, now we're finally getting some response. I thought no one was paying attention. Looks like about two-thirds, maybe three-quarters of you. Maybe more. We only have time for one last question.  Anyone here convinced that Karl Rove is a vicious liar who deserves to hang by his thumbs in a Gitmo prison, please raise your hand. Whoa, almost everyone. Please, I can't keep count if you raise both hands. Just one hand, please. Look, shouting isn't necessary  -- I just need to count the hands. What's that you say?  I can't hear you -- there's so much noise. Oh, you think he should hang by his nuts. Very good. OK, thanks a lot, everybody. Thanks for your cooperation. That was very helpful.         

Sex and the Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Conveyance

Regular readers of this blague are well aware that I have repeatedly indulged my bemusement at the names of extinct or obsolescent horsedrawn conveyances. My point is that modern readers, who know precisely what is signified  -- in design, in metal, rubber and plastic, and especially in social value -- by such words as Jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, know just about zip about "fly," "trap," "landau," "chaise," "phaeton," "cabriolet," "sulky," "surrey," "curricle," "gig," "hansom," "buggy," "four-wheeler," "spring-van," "berlin," "barouche," "britchka," "troika," "wurt," "tandem," "caleche," "tilbury," "dog-cart," "wagonette," "go-cart," "victoria," "brougham," "diligence," "clarence" or "post-chaise."  If we notice these words at all, we tend to savor them as archaic Victorian music rather than to identify and evaluate them as specific forms of transportation.

Return with us now to the unthrilling 1950s, before pre-marital cohabitation became ordinary. In those days, automobiles reeked of sex. Indeed, I can remember that one sociologist described them as "portable bedrooms" -- a witticism that produced profound envy in those of us who came from automobile-less families.  While I knew that Nashes and Studebakers and big ol' DeSotos could serve as mobile boudoirs, I must confess that I had never suspected that horsedrawn vehicles could perform the same function. The eye-opener came by way of some sly and wicked goings-on in Flaubert's Madame Bovary.  Here's the situation: Emma has been wooed for a hundred or so pages by her young admirer, Leon. They are both eager to consummate their affair, but there's no convenient venue. Taking fate into his hands, Leon "pushes" Emma into a cab. "'Where to, Monsieur?' asked the cab driver. 'Wherever you'd like,' said Leon."  And then Flaubert describes the route around Rouen taken by coachman, cab, and lovers. He give us a page and a half of paragraphs like this one:  "The coach promptly began to move again, passing through Saint-Sever, along the Quai des Corandiers and the Quai aux Meules, over the bridge once more, through the Place du Champ-de-Mars and behind the gardens of the Home for the Elderly, where, in the sunshine, old men clad in black jackets stroll up and down a terrace green with ivy. It climbed up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, traveled along the Boulevard Cauchoise, then right over Mont-Riboudet as far as the hill at Deville."  At discreet intervals, Flaubert interrupts the narrative: "'Keep going," cried a voice from inside...."  "'Keep going!' shouted the voice, even more furiously...."  "The coachman could not understand what rage for locomotion could be compelling this pair never to stop." Eventually, the cab "drew up in an alley near the Beauvoisine district, and a woman stepped out, walking off with her veil lowered, never looking back."

Nineteenth-century writers were not allowed to be explicit about sexual events, so they had to adopt various circumlocutions and codes. They lacked the freedom of both earlier (Fielding, said Thackeray, "was the last of our writers who drew a man") and later (post-Joyce) novelists. To write frankly about the act of intercourse was absolutely taboo.  Despite the obstacles, Flaubert does a excellent job of suggesting both the duration, the energy and the jouissance that Emma and Leon experience while their coach was "tossing about like a ship."

I suspect that Flaubert's readers had little trouble comprehending what is meant by the passengers' sudden "rage for locomotion."

Book Report: Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods

In The Lake of the Woods sold well and was much adulated in 1994. It's been on my reading list for a long time, and I've finally gotten around to it. In plot, it's uncannily reminiscent of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (on which I reported some months ago). Wilson's novel is post-WWII; O'Brien's is post-Vietnam. In each novel, the semi-autobiographical ex-soldier protagonist has committed unspeakable acts that he conceals from his loving wife; his silence embitters the marriage. In both books, the central figure embarks an ambitious career, but he is haunted by his past. Eventually, by force of circumstance, closeted history re-emerges and a crisis is precipitated. Deliberate and willed amnesia is the common theme of both books -- in fact, neither the characters nor their creators can bring themselves to confront the past except obliquely.     

I've come to In The Lake of the Woods thirteen years too late. I'm sure that it had immediacy and power when it was fresh and new, but now it seems contrived and obvious. The machinery of the novel  -- multiple interlocking flashbacks, third-person commentary, authorial interjections, etc. -- may have worked in 1994, but is now marvelously self-conscious and ostentatiously "literary." I know that Vietnam was a trauma for all concerned and I respect O'Brien's sincerity and pain. I just wish In the Lake of the Woods weren't so thin and pseudo-mysterious and evasive.

Is there a great novel of Americans in Vietnam or is it still waiting to be written?  It was a particularly ugly war and it was the watershed experience for people of my particular generation. Do we have a War and Peace?

Question:  How many masterpieces would it take to compensate for the disaster?  Answer:  There isn't enough paper.     

What We Read in the Fifties: A Death in the Family

I remember exactly when I first heard of James Agee's A Death in the Family. It was in Ithaca in 1958. The late Edward Ruhe, who was then a young instructor in English, stopped me on the street and asked if I had read it. He said I must, and, obedient lad that I was, I immediately purchased a copy. I can't remember much from my fifty-years-ago reading, except that I was put off by the novel's long italicized flashbacks and by what I regarded as its excessively intimate tone, which I then judged to be sentimental and false. But I've now re-read the novel. It's authentic, it's emotional, and it's so very American. I'm very glad to have had a chance to revise my earlier opinion. Perhaps I was too young. It's curious that I didn't connect Agee to the autobiographical poets that I was then reading, for the ground that Agee covers was then being explored by Lowell and Snodgrass and Roethke and of course by Sylvia Plath. 

It's a novel not only about death (it's told through the observing eyes of Rufus Follet, the six-year-old whose father dies in an automobile accident) but about the details of American life. There's very little in the way of plot, but Knoxville in 1915 is wonderfully evoked, mostly through concrete images. It's very much a novel of things. Perhaps I'm especially conscious of this technique because I've been re-reading Flaubert. But in Flaubert's novels, almost every object is laden with satirical significance (which is also the case -- to choose an American parallel -- in the novels of Mark Twain). Agee, however, loves the objects that he describes. Although there's puzzlement and mystery, there's not an ounce of satire or cynicism anywhere in A Death in the Family. Rufus Follet and Huck Finn -- it's not as unlikely a pairing as it might at first seem.

The facilitator of Agee's achievement is James Joyce. A Death in the Family could not have been written without the precedent of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But it's an American not an Irish portrait -- not as complex or as original, but fully as real as Joyce's. If an extraterrestrial visiting our lovely green planet wanted to understand the difference between Europe and America, he couldn't do better than read Portrait and A Death in the Family side by side. 

Headline: Dr. M. Patronized by Five-Year-Old Grandson

We take the small aluminum bat and the "safety" baseball to the concrete schoolyard and I try to pitch the ball at the exact level where the grandson swings.  Every time he makes contact, the ball rolls a hundred or so feet until gravity and friction kick in (I have no fielders behind me). Grandpa retrieves the ball. The grandson says, "Grandpa, why don't you run after the ball?"

Even without running, Grandpa manages to pull a muscle in his side and experience some interesting numbness in his left leg.

We play a board-game called Narnia. It has three separate kinds of dice; it has "sword cards" and "event cards," "wolves" and "white witches."  Grandpa doesn't seem to grasp the game's subtleties.  The grandson says, "Grandpa, why don't we play something less complicated."

We play chess. Grandpa manages to lose the first game, but despite his best efforts, takes a lead in the second match (perhaps because he's fully mastered the way the knight moves). Grandpa makes a gracious offer: "why don't we just say it was a draw?" The grandson responds by flying his queen over the ranks and files and knocking Grandpa's king off the board. The grandson says, "Why don't we just say I won?"

Cheney + Suicide

Why doesn't Dick Cheney put a bullet in his brain?  It would do him (and his reputation) a world of good. What could possibly stand in his way?  Once he sprinkles the ratsbane on his porridge -- and, of course, leaves behind a detailed and humble letter of apology --  he will begin to free his soul of sin and to enjoy some piece of mind. When he has fallen on his sword, his lackeys and toadies will be able to claim that while he was a black-hearted knave, at least he wasn't a shameless black-hearted knave. They can try to persuade us that although he was egregiously and dangerously wrong, he was, like another suicide, Othello, "great of heart."  But if Cheney continues in his surly, obstinate, unapologetic lip-curling silence -- why then, he'll go down in the books as an unrepentant demi-devil like Iago ("From this time forth I never will speak word"). 

Cheney has brought disgrace upon our beloved nation and upon himself.  Using faked spy data, he suckered the ignorant, feckless Decider and almost the entire Congress into invading Iraq. His war has been a monumental disaster. "Full of scorpions [should be] his brain."  At this moment of writing, Cheney is guilty of killing 3260 American soldiers and maiming (by official count -- who can possibly guess at the truth?) 24,314 others. If Cheney has even the most rudimentary of consciences, on it lays the heavy burden of 60,000 to 100,000 Iraqi souls. The Dickster has cost America $414 billion dollars, loss of prestige and the squandering of oceans of good will. Like Anthony, he "has lived in such dishonor/ That the gods detest [his] baseness."  But Antony took the proper course. When Cheney dispatches himself -- "after the high Roman fashion," let's hope -- he'll have taken the first step toward rehabilitating himself and the nation. For him not to do the deed would be ignoble. 

Dick:  I know that you're hunkering in your bomb-proof shelter. I know that you're up late at night, sleepless with guilt. You're cruising the internet, perchance googling "Cheney + suicide," and you're wavering in your purpose. Dick -- take my considered advice. I'm thinking of your place in history. At this point, "you have no friend,/ But resolution and the briefest end."  You'll immediately feel better.  It's a no-brainer.  Go for it.

April 10.  Spike Schapiro comments:  "Dr. M. -- I've read your exhortation to suicide and also Otis Brown's Comment (see below).  You are, as usual, falsely optimistic, but OJB is right on target.  Cheney can't off himself because a) he's shameless and b) he's a total coward, and c) he has no self-knowledge and d) he can't point a shotgun. You cite the precedents of Othello and Anthony but they're both great spirits and therefore irrelevant.  Cheney is a slug."