“Um,” said my wife, “anything good on TV tonight?”
The Political Nut picked up the cable guide. There’s Amal and the Oslo Peace Process, No Room at the Homeless Shelter, or The Grinch Who Stole Kwanza—and Your VCR.
“Still working on Christmas Eve?” said my young assistant, Max.
I’m rewriting famous tragedies for Democrats, I said. I figure that, after the tragedy Democrats suffered in the Supreme Court, they need a little cheering up.
“Do they?” said Max. “Hillary just got an eight-million-dollar book contract with Simon and Schuster.”
Yes, but Pope John Paul the Second got eight-point-five million, and he’s pro-life. Anyway, I want to do something to help the healing process begin. At the moment, Democrats are doubtless feeling that tragedy, as an artistic form, does not respect the public will. Therefore I’ve fixed An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. Reproductive rights have been preserved by courageous moderates in a narrowly divided Congress. Roberta Alden is able to obtain an abortion. She sues Clyde Griffiths for sexual harassment in the workplace. Roberta’s lawyer is the local heiress—and former Griffiths love interest—Sondra Fichley. Fichley saw Theodore Dreiser interviewed on TV by Diane Sawyer, read An American Tragedy, became a feminist, and went to law school.
Faust, a sensitive adolescent who is suffering painful alienation caused by the pressures of conformity in a materialistic society with suburban sprawl, is able to connect to other lonely teens who worship Satan through Internet chat rooms. Thus a nurturing sense of community is fostered. Faust decides to sell his soul to the Devil. His single-parent mother is supportive, and society respects his alternative spirituality. The Pew Charitable Trust endows a chair in Satanism at the Harvard School of Divinity. Faust (that’s Doctor Faust, now, thank you) writes a best-selling book, Hades in the Balance, which is turned into a critically acclaimed series on PBS.
Oedipus Rex thinks he has killed his father and married his mother. Of course he does. At some level, all men in Western cultures believe this. Fortunately Oedipus and Jocasta go into therapy, work on communicating, and avoid a prolonged custody battle over the Sphinx after their divorce. Since health care reform has been recently enacted in Thebes, Oedipus is able to get his crippled feet reconstructed, thereby raising his self-esteem and leading him to form a better-adjusted relationship with his new partner. The Riddle of the Sphinx, by the way, is: “What requires extensive government programs as a child and an elder but needs to pay a lot of taxes in between if he’s a white male?”
Because multiculturalism is taught in Algerian schools, Camus’s “stranger” understands the oppressive nature of French colonial rule in North Africa. He becomes politically committed and moves to Paris, where he causes the downfall of Adolf Hitler’s vast right-wing conspiracy by writing poems, plays, and novels.
Anna Karenina leaves her husband to pursue a career with the military but discovers that proper day care is not available for her child. She almost throws herself under a train. Her support group stages an intervention. Anna decides to run for an open Duma seat in a distant oblast. She introduces needful legislation protecting children’s rights.
In A Tale of Two Cities (now set in Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas), David Boies regains his legal reputation by using DNA evidence to obtain Sidney Carton’s release from death row. Carton becomes a tireless advocate for abolition of capital punishment and the WTO. The whole world has a revolution that brings social justice to all.
It is in the works of Shakespeare, however, where I’ve found the most fruitful material for rewrites. Perhaps this is because Shakespeare, like the modern Democratic Party, has certain identity issues that I feel we should honor. A critical reading of Shakespeare’s texts leads me to believe that the Bard of Avon was a minority-college-student-male-inner-city-soccer-mom who belonged to an ecology-friendly labor union.
I need hardly say that Lear receives appropriate medication (for free, with Medicare prescription benefits) and realizes that Goneril and Regan are strong independent women with lives of their own who are members of the “sandwich generation” that finds itself burdened by both child-and elder-care responsibilities. When Cordelia gets back from her fellowship year in France studying textual deconstruction, she helps Lear find a cheerful assisted-living facility. The Fool is symbolic of HMOs.
Hamlet understands the Freudian implications of seeing his father’s “ghost.” With the help of a sympathetic mental-health professional recommended by Polonius, Hamlet comes to terms with his true feelings for “Uncle” Claudius, who subsequently leaves Gertrude. Hamlet and Claudius are married in Vermont. Ophelia’s attempt to drown herself is recognized as a plea for help. She has an eating disorder.
Thanks to timely intervention by the president of the United States (a Democrat), the Capulets and Montagues are engaged in negotiations that lead to mutual respect and understanding. Meanwhile, UN peacekeeping troops have brought calm to the streets of Verona. Romeo and Juliet engage in some youthful sexual experimentation, normal for their age. Fortunately, Mr. Laurence, a former Catholic friar who now heads the local chapter of Planned Parenthood, has instituted a program providing free contraceptives at Romeo and Juliet’s high school. A citywide midnight basketball league rescues Mercutio and Tybalt from gang involvement. But Juliet’s nurse spends many sleepless nights in her quest for universal health care because, tragically, 35 percent of Verona’s citizens still lack adequate medical insurance.
Affirmative action helps Othello achieve a high position in the Venetian political system, where he works to achieve economic fairness and the elimination of prejudice based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Othello’s leadership is undercut when Iago gains a majority in the Venetian House of Representatives. Othello almost wins the following election but has his victory stolen from him by means of politically manipulated ballot undercounts in a southern peninsula of Venice. Now, that’s a tragedy.
5
JANUARY 2001
Tonight is the actual beginning of the new millennium, I said. [We journalists are great repositories of such knowledge.]
“I notice nobody’s going on about Y2.001K bugs,” said my wife, looking up from a long list of New Year’s resolutions headed “P.J.”
I could have told the world nothing would happen. In fact, I probably did tell the world nothing would happen. Let me look through my article clippings. After all, you know what computers do?
“I do know,” said my wife. “But you had better ask Max.”
What they do is count. They count very fast. But that’s all they do. So here we have a machine, all it does is count, and someone tells me it can’t count to 2000? I can count to 2000.
“Given enough time,” said my wife.
There is some deep-seated need in humans to believe things are awful, I said.
“Also,” said my wife, “a deep-seated need to pay the rent. My guess is that Y2K was a tidy little moneymaker for obsolete computer experts about your age. They’d been out of work for years until they hit upon the idea of saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, back when we were making all those punch cards for Univac, we forgot to put in the number after 1999.’”
We always were a resilient generation, I said.
“Bill Clinton, for example,” said my wife.
He was the perfect fin de siècle president. The end of a century is notoriously an era of decline and dissolution. And in this case it was the fin de whole thousand years. We wrapped up a Mauve Decade for all time, mooning the ages with our big hairy ars gratia artis of Platinum Card bonus-upgrade dilettantism, high-yield neurasthenia, and heavily leveraged degeneration of manners and morals. Awful decadence reigned. “It is made up,” said the awfully decadent poet Paul Verlaine, “of carnal spirit and unhappy flesh and of all the violent splendors of…the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets.”
“Or,” said my wife, “the sound of George W. Bush trying to
speak in public.”
We were bored and surfeited, I said. We sought strange forms of sensuality. Pretty darn strange, to judge by the president, the fat girl, and the sink in the Oval Office pantry. The 1990s were the time of the ten-cent conscience brandishing the twenty-dollar cigar. Corruption was considered a mere luxury, mere luxury was had in dreadful excess, and dreadful excess was…just dreadful. Also excessive. Our institutions crumbled. Right and wrong lost their meanings. Men wore shorts in public. Young women from good families got tattooed on parts of their bodies that young women from good families didn’t used to know they had. Aerosmith was still on tour. Decay was all I saw before me. I saw a pale, unhealthy overripeness. I saw flaccidity. I saw—
“Yourself in the mirror with your clothes off,” said my wife.
I’ll almost miss the decadence, I said.
“What decadence?” asked my wife.
All those nights we stayed up till dawn.
“The baby was teething.”
Oh, well. It was an era of decline and dissolution, anyway. Unfortunately the dissolute thing that was going downhill was me. It was ever thus—at least since the first century B.C., when porky, middle-aged blowhard Horace wrote, “The age of our parents, inferior to that of our grandparents, brought forth ourselves, who are more worthless still and destined to have children still more corrupt.”
People over fifty always think things are going to heck in a handbasket, or in one of those Prada backpacks, or in something. The world has been collapsing for more than two thousand years. Either the world was once a very wonderful place with a long way to fall (of which there is no historical evidence) or people my age are full of crap. They certainly were in the late 1800s, when decadence and Paul Verlaine were last being denounced.
The scholar Richard Gilman, in his scholarly book Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet, points out that there was nothing actually decadent about the French décadents. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Huysmans, and Baudelaire were sometimes preposterous and often creepy, likewise their English confreres Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. But decadence (from the medieval Latin “to fall away”) means decrepitude, debilitation, senescence. These words do not describe Les Fleurs du Mal, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the illustrations in the Yellow Book. The art of the fin de siècle before this one was alarmingly vigorous and shockingly new—and preposterous and creepy, but more from the bumptiousness of callow youth than from the dissipations of jaded age.
What the artsy types were up to was a rebellion against the cuteness-loving, happy, upright, optimistic bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Paul Verlaine was bugging the squares. This is what Dr. Dre, Pokémon, and Calista Flockhart have been doing to me, with notable success. And everything else is bugging me, too. I’m at that stage in life where everything does. I call it decadence because I’d like to think that all of creation is turning into a superannuated poop at the same rate as myself.
But if I take my acid reflux medicine and blood pressure pills and look at life with a gimlet eye (vodka gimlet, make that a double), the world appears to be a healthy young place.
The human race has not decayed. People are longer-lived and more prosperous than they’ve ever been and are breeding like gerbils. Some of my querulous age-mates feel that’s a bad thing and, taking an example from elsewhere in order Rodentia, claim people are breeding like lemmings. I don’t know. If the earth’s population ever runs off a cliff, it will probably be because we’ve all decided to take up hang gliding at the same time.
Perhaps the environment has been degraded. It’s certainly fashionable to say so. But I have always held with writer Larry L. King that “The world would be a better place if it was half-dark, indoors, and air-conditioned.” Set up the high-resolution digital TV in the McMansion great room, and, lo, it’s coming true. Meanwhile, species extinction is sad, in a way, but it’s nonetheless pleasant to go get the paper in the morning without being bothered by pterodactyls. And a mastodon would wreck the lawn.
Western civilization is full of vim, expanding on all fronts and doing lots better than any other civilization has lately. Contrast it, for instance, with the civilization of the Plains Indians. Our friends don’t come back from abroad complaining that London is jammed with families in feathered headdresses dragging travois through Piccadilly Circus or that Rome is full of franchised restaurants serving fast dog.
And business and industry flourish, or at least I hope they will, if the Fed cuts interest rates enough.
As for culture, I’m sure there’s plenty extant. I don’t happen to understand it. But that’s the point. If artists wanted to be understood, Raffi and the lady who writes the poems for the “With Deepest Sympathy” greeting card line would be our most revered cultural figures.
I find no evidence that we’ve been living in a particularly tired or desiccated period. The epoch is pressed by the eager swellings of fecundity and tumescence—albeit with help from little blue pills and in vitro fertilization for forty-five-year-old career women. It is a green and growing day. We sojourn midst a riot of vigor.
I guess. And yet there’s a whiff of rot in the air. Putrefaction wasn’t absent from the millennium’s end. Something stinks. One doesn’t need to be a geezer using a dial phone to call the truant officer on Britney Spears to think that decadence is real.
If we examine the spirit, the essence of the twentieth century, it’s surprising how much of that zeitgeist has already become nouvelle cuisine for worms. Most of the woolly concepts and great slobbering ideals that ran wild through the past hundred years—chewing the slippers of custom and ruining tradition’s rug—are now roadkill on the path to the future or buried behind the intellectual garage with phrenology, Zoroastrianism, and the rest of mankind’s dead mental pets.
We are surrounded by the decomposing remains of things that, just a few years ago, seemed so modern. Modern, for example—the word is now mainly used on tags at yard sales to increase the price of ugly lamps. Modern lamps were the product of Modern Design, which was the product of Modern Art, a product that turned ugly because its producers thought art should constantly change. Art quickly ran out of things to change into that weren’t stupid. The modernists believed that artistic creativity—like the manufacture of kitchen appliances or flint spear points—should progress. This is like believing that sex appeal should progress. Sandra Bullock has a marvelous behind. Now if only she could grow a third buttock.
Modern designers responded to modern artists by making furniture that was comfortable for people with three buttocks—and nobody else. And modern architects cooperated by building homes and offices of such astonishing ugliness that random drools of paint on canvas, bum-punishing armchairs, and light fixtures from yard sales looked good inside, by comparison. This was all visionary stuff in its day. This was how we were all going to live. This was the future. Now it’s the decor theme of retro martini bars.
As went the visual arts, so went the others. John Cage, Philip Glass, and the rest of the Atonal Def Crew proved that, if you abandon rhythm, melody, harmony, and so forth, you get noise; anyone with a toddler and a piano in the house could have told them this. Dance became so silly that tap shoes and Irish bog stomps are being taken seriously. Theatergoers grew bored enough waiting for Godot that they didn’t mind when Andrew Lloyd Webber showed up. Modern prose stylists, taking possession of the vast and fabulous mansion that was the nineteenth-century novel, burned the house down to get the nails. And poets? Comparisons being odious, only a comparison will do to illustrate the odium of modern poesy.
Here is Robert Frost, last of the antiques, celebrating the inauguration of old-fashioned high-binder John F. Kennedy:
Some poor fool has been saying in his heart
Glory is out of date in life and art.
Our venture in revolution and outlawry
Has justified itself in freedom’s story
Right down to now in glory upon glory.
Not Keats, perhaps, but not bad, and with in
teresting use of the dactyl and amphibrach in the final tercet.
Now here is Maya Angelou, foremost of the contemporaries, at the inauguration of that most modern of all presidents, Bill Clinton:
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Host to species long since departed
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor.
No rhyme, no meter, and it’s about dinosaur turds. Maya Angelou, celebrating the most solemn and momentous ritual of the republic, can think of nothing to write about except dinosaur turds—and that mastodon who’d be playing the devil with our dethatching and reseeding if it weren’t, like modern poetry, mercifully extinct.
The works of Ms. Angelou do, however, prove that art does not progress. And it’s good to have that proven. Because the modern progressive art of the twentieth century was just a come-on, a shill, a barker for a whole brain circus of much larger and more dangerous modern progressive ideas.
Fascism, for one. What was that about? Only a generation ago this political movement almost conquered the world. Now we have to look it up in an encyclopedia to find out what it was. Fascists must have been reactionaries because that’s the other word we always called them when we were calling the draft board fascists in the 1960s. And yet, in the 1920s and 1930s, fascists considered themselves way-modern and a hot source of progress. They had admirers ranging from Charles Lindbergh and the Duke of Windsor to that arch instigator of modern poetry Ezra Pound, who was jailed for treason and not, alas, for his verse.