Not a neat fit, but on the topic of utter cynicism I came across the following yesterday. It's from Philip Roth's review of Saul Bellow in the current New Yorker (Oct. 9). Specifically, Roth is discusisng _Humboldt's Gift_(1975):
"How sad," says Citrine, "about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the larger truth." But the human nonsense is just what he loves - at least loves to recount - and what delights him most about being alive. Again: "When ... would I rise ... above all ... the wastefully and randomly human ... to enter higher worlds?" Higher worlds? Where would Citrine be - where would *Bellow* be - without the randomly human driving the superdrama of the *lower* world that is the worldly desire for [fame, money, revenge, esteem, hottest of hot sex] not to mention that worldliest of worldly desires, Citrine's own, the hellbent lusting after life eternal?
Why does Citrine wish so feverishly never to leave here if not for this laugh-a-minute immersion in the violence and the turbulence of the clownish greediness that he disparagingly calls "the moronic inferno"? "Some people," he says, "are so actual that they beat down my critical powers." And beat down any desire to exchange even the connection to their viciousness for the serenity of the everlasting. Where but the moronic inferno could his "complicated subjectivity" have so much to take in? Out in some vaporous Zip Codeless noplace, nostalgically swapping moronic-inferno stories with the shade of Rudolf Steiner?
And isn't it something like the same moronic inferno that Charlie Citrine excitedly memorializes as it rages in the streets, courtrooms, bedrooms, restaurants, sweat baths, and office buildings of Chicago that so sickens Artur Sammler in its diabolic nineteen-sixties-Manhattan incarnation? "Humbolt's Gift" seems like the enlivening tonic Bellow brewed to recover from the sorrowful grieving and moral suffering of "Mr. Sammler's Planet." It's Bellow's cheerful version of Ecclesiastes: All is vanity and isn't it something!
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If Bush is elected, bizarreness will abound and it is pretty scary if you think about it; however "cooler heads" - like Greenspan and Cheney and daddy - will be behind the scenes. And if he engages in a likely full-frontal assault on the labor movement, maybe it will really piss them off.
Peter