Let me uncork the bottle of bile once more and fling
some pungent last words before your expectant eyes. I take
up this task solemnly and with a sniffle of regret that
happens to coincide with a minor head-cold. I've now taken up
the same task seventy times and I won't be doing it
again. Friends, this is my final tirade.
I'd like to reassure you that I haven't run out of ideas.
Neither have I been called to a greater and more consuming
task, like fathering a child or being elected president of
Latvia. Yes, my domestic duties as husband and homeowner
have diverted some of the energy from my monthly eruptions.
I've noticed a partial cooling of the brain cells, but
nothing fatal. The formality of essay writing, with all the
carefully constructed clauses and fussy wordsmithing, all
those wearisome nouns and conjunctions and prepositional
phrases, is beginning to tax and tire me, though I still
enjoy the challenge of tossing words into a tasty and
coherent omelet.
If you want to know the primary reason for my abdication,
here it is: I've found it increasingly difficult to extract
humor -- even my customary brand of dark and rueful humor --
from the unyielding ore of our dismal new era. I no longer
find much amusement or solace in commenting on the
surrounding scene. Instead, it hurts.
I could continue to ponder my personal struggles to rid
my abode of houseflies or open a diabolically resistant bag
of corn chips, but those innocent themes seem quaintly
irrelevant now. Better to ring down the curtain and close
the show.
Cynical humor thrives in peaceful and affluent times. We
feed on the follies of the assorted pretenders, charlatans,
overinflated eminentoes and other amiably clownish
characters who seem to proliferate in such eras. Back in the
1920s, H. L. Mencken romped happily amid the Aimee Semple
McPhersons and William Jennings Bryans who populated his
landscape. The seventies offered a dippy smorgasbord of
self-indulgence, from bogus therapies to whiny
special-interest politics; those were the glory days of National
Lampoon. The nineties threw us an orgy of burgeoning
McMansions, millionaire computer geeks, comically
pretentious restaurant cuisine, celebrity worship, corporate
jocksmanship, political correctness and other heady
stimulants to satire. It was a sublime time to be alive and
cynical and writing tirades.
But the new century, from what I've seen of it, promises
to make the Great Depression look like a lawn party. We've
been shipwrecked on a particularly bleak and treacherous
shoal of history. A significant slice of the Islamic world
has gone irretrievably mad. In response, some of America's
leaders appear to have had their own eggs scrambled.
Overnight the United States has gone from peacekeeper to
warmonger among nations. We've embarked on a potentially
endless crusade against scattered fanatics who could be
hiding in Libya, Pakistan or Peoria. Our nation could still
be wrangling with these congenital desperadoes when our
unborn grandchildren are collecting Social Security (or
struggling to collect it from a bankrupt system).
Meanwhile, the corporate world has finally been revealed
as the hotbed of avarice and chicanery we cynics always
suspected it to be. This revelation doesn't make us merrier
cynics, only poorer ones -- thanks to the accompanying stock
market collapse that magically turned our money into so much
smoke and vapor. Some of us victims will never again know
fiscal bliss. What we began to take for granted in the
nineties turned out to be a sad fraud, an impossible
illusion like Santa Claus or lasting happiness. We should
have known better.
The gap between haves and have-nots continues to expand
to a degree unseen in our enterprising republic since the
original Gilded Age. It's almost as if Andrew Carnegie and
Henry Clay Frick are still partying on that manmade lake
above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, blissfully unconcerned that
the dam could burst and inundate all those nameless
working-class folks in the row-houses below. Fifty years
ago, you had to travel to Brazil or Manhattan to observe
such sharp disparities between rich and poor. Now you simply
have to check the annual incomes of your local CEOs and
compare them with yours.
After three decades of affirmative action, American
blacks still aren't making the grade in significant numbers.
We don't really know why, and we don't really want to know.
So we persist in schooling black kids with methods that
obviously don't work for them, holding out the vain hope of
success to the next generation of ghetto-dwellers, and the
generation after that. What if it never happens? I shudder
to think of the animosities that will seethe as the
technological elite leave the undereducated (and miseducated)
minorities further and further behind.
At the same time, adolescent boys of all races seem to be
embracing a brute culture that inspires violent fantasies
and substandard test scores, not to mention a general
oafishness that can't entirely be explained away by puberty.
Their throbbing minds flash with video images of mayhem and
jackassery culled from electronic games and rap albums. Not
since the Viking era has a generation of Western males
embraced brazen stupidity to this degree. Boys seem set to
become the lumpenproletariat of this century -- sullen
unskilled laborers bound in servitude to a savvy ruling
class of diligent, well-educated women. An exaggeration,
perhaps -- but still a dispiriting trend for all those
pimply heirs to Caesar, Napoleon and Alexander Graham Bell.
Meanwhile, the planet itself seems to be undergoing a
vast allergic reaction to the apelike species that has
stripped it, gouged it, poisoned it and pummeled it into
submission. Global warming might be a fever the earth is
running in an attempt to ward off a deadly infection known
as homo sapiens.
What a dramatic and depressing shift in the tone of our
times! What a miserable age for humor! The nineties called
for a mirthful social critic in the tradition of Mencken,
and I was happy to oblige (though hardly anyone noticed).
The new era requires an Orwell, sober and full of eloquent
outrage. I doubt if my outrage is sufficiently eloquent, and
I have too much fun tippling with words ever to be entirely
sober. Thousands of writers can project intellectual
sobriety more convincingly than I can, and I leave that
joyless job to them.
So the time has come for me to stop inveighing against
the times in the grand manner, to dismount from my charging
steed and find him a suitable green pasture with fresh grass
to nibble on. I'm about to trudge off into the sunset like a
more curmudgeonly Charlie Chaplin, grumbling as I go. I
could probably find employment somewhere as a writer of
brochures or a compiler of home-repair reference books. I
could attend optometry school and finally discover a useful
trade. I'd be financially secure but vaguely discontented
and full of trapped spiritual gas, as I was before I wrote The
Cynic's Dictionary all those years ago. Probably I'll
always need to fling words. I just won't be flinging them in
the form of monthly tirades.
Over the past six years I've tried to give a voice to one
of our most neglected minority groups: the intelligent and
sensitive outsiders who constitute a vast, overlooked
fraternity of the thwarted. Society makes it difficult for
such gentle outlaw souls to thrive and express their
talents. Out of necessity they take jobs that grate against
their best instincts; they work in environments that crush
or trivialize their spirits; they put up with chronic
frustration and subtle rejections; they watch the rewards go
to drones and bullies; naturally they become cynics. Yet
through it all they refuse to surrender their integrity.
That accursed integrity: keep it and you lose; lose it and
you win. But keep it they must.
These aren't the hard-boiled, chain-smoking,
what's-in-it-for-me cynics of yore. These latter-day cynics
are civilized and wounded. They're innately decent. They're
isolated from (and searching for) kindred spirits. They're
you and me.
Sometimes it seems as if the gods have it out for us; the
forces that foil us seem destined to knock us prematurely
out of the great Darwinian boxing ring. Like corporations
and high school in-crowds, natural selection is cruel to the
misfit. But misfits don't have to be losers; square pegs
simply need to find a square hole.
I like to think I've provided something like a square
hole for all the disgruntled, disillusioned idealists who
have stumbled onto my doorstep. I understand how hard it is
to lead an uncompromising life when the world rewards you
for doing just the opposite. I understand how easy it is to
lose faith when the rewards don't drift your way. Don't lose
that faith, no matter how battered and exasperated you feel.
Don't let your cynicism swamp your soul and send you to a
sorry defeat.
If I had to impart just one nugget of advice before I
leave you, it would be this: be selectively cynical.
Rant about greed and cruelty and shoddy overpraised art;
don't rant about being alive. Believe it or not, despite all
the evidence to the contrary, I'm still firmly convinced
that life is an astounding gift. On any given day you can
find a hundred treasures out there for the snatching. Go
ahead and seize as much joy as you can. After all, the world
needs you at your best, happy and fulfilled -- not raving at
shadows in the street, not forcibly pressed into service as
a team player or a chronic consumer of branded
footwear.
Be merry in your cynicism, and proud. Steer clear of
ideologues and fanatics; embrace kindness and heartiness and
open laughter. Your selective cynicism will help you shun
evil and propel you toward the good. Can you think of a
better path to enlightenment?
I can't promise you a Hollywood vision of earthly
paradise, especially with all the madness lurking out there these days. You might not reap the rewards we shower upon
sitcom stars and vice presidents of marketing. Your reward,
if you choose to accept it, will be that you've lived life
on your own terms, on good terms that harmonize with
the music of your soul. And that, my fellow cynics, is
nothing to sneer at.
Monthly tirades ©1996-2002 by Rick Bayan.
Fear not -- this isn't the end of Rick's Notebook. Look for new and
different features here beginning in March.
