Came To Believe…

…STAYED FOR THE BULLSHIT.

The Roaring Twenties.

Well, no; not exactly. And now, if you’ll forgive my pedantry…

…The phrase started out as Damon Runyon’s collective descriptor for his journalistic night beat, that part of New York City between fortieth and fifty second street, between eighth avenue and sixth avenue. The theater district, Broadway, the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the Great White Way.

The Roaring Forties.

It wasn’t until Mark Hellinger appropriated it for the title of what would be the capstone of the Warner Brothers’ gangster cycle, that THE ROARING TWENTIES came to mean a decade, rather than a neighborhood.

Many popular references often referred to that decade, with its goldfish swallowing, flagpole sitting, Atlantic crossing, Evolution denying, gruesome tabloid reporting, Nietzsche motivated spree killing. and so much more as “The Era of Wonderful Nonsense.”

We find ourselves now halfway through our own Roaring Twenties, with plenty of Nonsense, albeit with limited Wonder.

That said, it might be worth noting that I hold the zeitgeist in very high esteem.

Entre nous, I have been involved in a decade long one-sided shit talk fest with a colleague, who is committed to willfully ignoring that zeitgeist, the cultural cloud through which floats the ubiquity of notions, ideas, and concepts.

As for me, synergy and synchronicity have always played a big part in my life, and not simply in my recently aged and increasingly ancient body and mind.

A few days back, I read a piece in THE ATLANTIC by Anne Appelbaum, about the occultism underpinning much of the world’s devolution into oligarchic right-wing autocracy. I am now reading Mark Lillla’s discursive and extraordinary IGNORANCE AND BLISS: ON WANTING NOT TO KNOW.

Of course, Appelbaum, and Lilla are among those vilified by the Prognoscenti, for their defense of, you know, rationality and reason. The Trognoscenti remains silent in their regard, of course, since neither of them, or others like them, who are targeted by identitarians for blasphemy—excuse me, for being problematic–have a presence in the FoxNews/Rogansphere.

These two readings brought to mind Tom Nichols’ THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE and OUR OWN WORST ENEMIES, both of which address, as the Appelbaum and Lilla pieces do, the collapse of critical thinking, and its replacement by cognitive and confirmation bias that gives fatuous credulity, coupled with a discomfiting embrace of the supernatural, a place at the head of the table.

None of this is new, of course.

Jonathan Swift and Ambrose Bierce lived lives of loud disappointment in humanity at large, and, going right back to that more recent Era of Wonderful Nonsense, Sinclair Lewis’ disdain for the magical thinking of his fellow midwestern Americans was supersized in H.L. Mencken’s bilious contempt for those he dismissed as the Booboisie.

More recently, at least for the long lived and recollective among us, there were two essays in the hindquarter of the last century that the discussion of modern occultism in denial of reality, of holy fools and useful idiots, the misbegotten misrepresentation of innocence as a virtue, addressed in different ways, but sought and found a locus point for me.

I have no idea whether Thomas Disch and Ring Lardner Jr. ever met, but I would imagine they certainly knew of each other. Both published pieces in the late twentieth century that informed and continue to inform my world view.

Disch’s essay, THE EMBARRASSMENTS OF SCIENCE FICTION, insisted that such work was and should be considered as a children’s literature, and, as the completely unrelated non sequitur New Yorker cartoon indicated, to hell with it.

Lardner’s THE AGE OF REASON, 1794-1994, was simply a two-page list of nonsensical ideas that Americans continued to believe two hundred years after Thomas Paine’s pamphlet of that title, proffered without comment.

The Disch piece generated more heat than light, mostly drawing resentment from science fiction fans and his fellow novelists, who, I suspect, didn’t much care for him in the first place. I read it in its first publication, and had, by that time, aged out of SF, so I tended to agree, in general principle. This was before the advent of YA fiction, but that swathe of “chapter books” would fit tidily into his summation, of course.

Lardner’s list was published in THE NATION, so nobody really noticed it, and not too many, Americans or otherwise, gave much of a fuck about it. I still have a copy of that list, and, given very little time, might very well be able to add a few more nonsensical notions held in high esteem by my fellow Americans. And, to be sure, none of that original list can be struck off as no longer part of that delusional brand.

Now, you might ask, what does a screed relegating an entire branch of popular fiction to the children’s section of the library have to do with a bitter iteration of delusional bullshit taken as sacred truth?

In the first place, let us not forget that there remains a sizeable cadre among our fellow Americans, and possibly a bunch of the rest of humanity, who, for example, earnestly believe that the Apollo 11 moon landing was staged. There had, of course, been previous mass delusions, but this, in particular, seemed to be the herald of a new age of fatuous credulity.

In another terrifying regard, my arrival in Southern California coincided with the McMartin pre-school debacle, which was a grim reminder that witch burnings had not been the sole province of the Salem Massachusetts of four centuries ago. Everything old is new again—especially in the land of cultural amnesia.

This sort of mass hysteria is an unfortunate relative of the metastasizing inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to separate reality from entertainment that has taken hold of the culture at large, and has been with us ever since.

My hardly mixed feelings about the phenomenon that is STAR WARS are on record. That it has become a secular religion, escaping the clutches of toxically proprietary fandom to allow everyone to play the geek card (”I was such a nerd in high school!” Of course you were.) is clear, and remains for me a threat to rational thought and critical thinking, not the least of which for its insipid and puerile prudery.

I took shit from friends and colleagues decades ago when I insisted there was a tangible link between the universal success and acceptance of the STAR WARS franchise by the mass culture at large, and the steady and devastating collapse of the space program. Transpose the ancient Roman notion of Bread and Circuses to the modern condition, and I insist that too many of us view the world through the scrim of entertainment—Likes, and all that.

How much more satisfying is the pulse pounding epic of ray guns, speeding star ships, laser swords, PEW PEW PEW, than the shaky footage of all those clumsy and inept men and women galumphing around in those ridiculous deep sea diver space suits?

And no heart pounding John Williams score, to boot.

Crazy, you say? Don’t be silly, you insist? Let’s not forget there are people on the public sphere who think GAME OF THRONES is historical fiction, and that reality television is, like, you know, real.

The depth of credulity has yet to be plumbed, so we’re in for it, and then some.

Accept, if you please, that we live in an era, in a culture, that values professed intentions over actual action. The public performance of piety, be it in the name of a self-serving adjustable Christian god for all seasons for the Trogs, or the specifically exclusive inclusivity of social justice for the Progs, carries far more weight than any real behavior.

Hypocrisy is an all too human trait. I am completely comfortable with my own ability to maintain two contradictory ideas simultaneously. Perfect I am not, and I accept, without any particular pleasure, my occasionally inept stumbling and slogging tread toward the dirt nap. But I make no self-serving claim for myself as a moral beacon, neither Prog nor Trog.

But, as all too frequently noted, we are a culture that has, over the decades, embraced a world of Young Adult fiction fantasy values of heroes and villains, of ignorance presenting as innocence, of prudery performing as moral acuity—with nuance nowhere in sight or on anyone’s mind.

No wonder so many of us are so easily bamboozled by the presentation of Christly behavior, of social justice, so successfully bearding amoral, illicit, or downright criminal acts

At least the Trognoscenti are comfortable with their hypocrisy and self-deception.

The Prognoscenti seem to be constantly taken off guard by such things in their lives.

As noted, an Era of Nonsense, minus the Wonder.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I Remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince.