Beyond the Farce

I do believe that understanding in every field of human endeavor is both necessary and helpful and perhaps that’s why I’m a lifelong teacher. Understanding the forces that brought us to this particular impasse in our political history helps relieve some of the outrage and the shock. Once we understand what is behind where and who we are in this moment, we have the possibility of re-writing the script. That’s why genuine education and knowledge and understanding is always a threat to the fascists. 

 

I’m re-reading a novel I remember loving called The Brother’s K by David James Duncan. First published in 1992, it follows a family in the Pacific Northwest through the 50’s and on through the early 70’s, an almost exact parallel to my own upbringing and so a perfect mirror to some of my experience. Along the way, we encounter a lot about baseball (the father is a pitcher in the minor leagues) and includes the names and exploits of some New York Yankees I knew and followed. The brothers in the book come of age in more or less the same years I did. One becomes a political radical and draft-dodger, another a spiritual seeker interested in Buddhism and Hinduism, one gets drafted and goes to Vietnam. To top it off, the mother is a born-again Christian fundamentalist—the whole nine yards of that exhilarating and difficult time when all our cultural premises were under question and new worlds opening. 

In a particularly powerful passage (p. 351), the author gives clear insight into the dynamics that drove the 60’s and continue to echo today. As we read and recognize the same playbook with different characters and language, it might help us understand why what is happening is happening. In many ways, it is not an anomaly in what used to be a more fair and equitable democracy, but a logical extension of our brutal history, side-by-side with the resistance that held the dyke from complete flooding democracy’s promise. Here is the passage: 

 

In the decade after World War II a number of very powerful American politicians discovered farce. These politicians had such Machiavellian philosophies and rudimentary senses of humor that they didn’t recognize it as a cathartic or comic genre. But they did recognize its power over people. They therefore began applying none of farce’s funniness but all of its unscrupulousness to such tasks as smearing opponents to win elections, groveling shamelessly after the lowest common prejudices of the people, blacklisting dissent, whitewashing corruption and prostituting themselves to wealthy private backers who used them to de-democratize entire constituencies.

 

Take a moment to pause here and read that last sentence again (boldface mine). Do you feel how deeply it resonates and perfectly expresses exactly what’s going down now? Read it again. And again. Post it on your refrigerator. If people can begin to see through it, it all loses its power. Read on.

 

Though quite a few citizens soon recognized that incredible abuses of power were taking place, there seemed to be no rational, non-farcical way to combat them. The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard government by force of farce…Farce worked like a charm, and no one who cared about integrity or truth had any idea how to protest or resist. 

 

The McCarthy hearings, the Birmingham bombings, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s welfare queens and trickle-down theory and Star Wars shields. Farce, farce, farce. And none of it was funny.

 

…it eventually became apparent to a great many Americans that we were no longer the audience of our D.C. farce-writers: we had become the boobs and butts of their humorless scripts…Our lives were being violated, trivialized, and in tens of thousands of cases terminated by the trite machinations of these sickenly powerful men. 

 

All of which led to the greatest farce of all time— a twice-elected narcissistic psychopath, liar, cheater, adulterer, pedophile, brainless, heartless, pitiful excuse for a human being. And still speaking of the early 70’s, the author continues:

 

This was when the resistance finally began. Having nothing to lose and the autonomy and integrity of our lives to regain, several million upstarts like myself began fighting fire with fire by launching little farce-missiles right back at Washington D.C. Though for a while our efforts didn’t help much politically, they were immediately therapeutic literarily—because as long as we defied the feds with light hearts, as long as we protested with humor, we were doing our puny but honest best to wrestle the sword of farce away from these humorless enemies of peace and art. 

 

Do you feel the resonance with the spirit of yesterday’s protests? We are descendants of that Abbie Hoffman theatrical spirit, but now endowed with greater clarity, understanding and 50 more years of determination and experience.

 

Thanks to David James Duncan for the reminder that we have been here before. And stay tuned for the next post with some evidence that we have also been here as far back as Julius Caesar, with a suggested end different from Brutus’ solution.