Studies in Absurdity

By Sean “Dermott” Kensing

I want to apologize for yesterday’s blog. It was not one of my best. It was rambling, poorly thought-out, and hastily composed. In a flurry of over-emotional outrage, I threw together a prose-poem the sentiments of which I still entirely support, but the delivery and style of which I feel left something to be desired. I sounded a bit like a teenager angry that Soundgarden broke up (which, lets be honest, a part of me always will be).

Today, I’m back on my feet. And do you know why? Because I’ve finally come around the bend. I’ve made the transition from impotent anger and depression to an appreciation of the Absurdity Of It All. How else can one react to some of the speeches at the RNC in the past few days? Let’s look at a few of them.

There have been absurd claims, such as Rudy’s attempt to credit his Republican party with the abolition of slavery. Rudy. Babe. Your constituency might be that dumb, but there’s a lot of folks out there who aren’t, and to us your claim would be laughable if it wasn’t so insulting. Yes, the abolition of slavery was championed at the time by a Republican. But you’re crazier than I thought if you actually believe that Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party shares much in common with the neo-conservative platforms of today. If “your” party ended slavery, well….it’s your party, you can lie if you want to.

Oh, and incidentally – could I just bend your ear for a moment about that Abraham Lincoln character? You see, Rudy (this might be tad awkward for you, but just hear me out) – he didn’t have much experience before assuming the Presidency. And, just to be clear: I’m referring to political experience, not the “real life” experience that Sarah Palin has in spades (having children, feeding them three times a day, picking out their clothes, etc). No, Rudy, I’m talking about political experience; his pre-Presidency resume reads much like Senator Obama’s. And yet, I think we can all agree that he sort of rose to the occasion, can we not? “Fondly remembered” doesn’t really being to cover his legacy. So if you want to claim him as representative of the Republican party of today (which is absurd), you have to claim his relative lack of experience along with it. He’s even from Illinois! It’s almost as if history is conspiring to make you look like even more of an attention grabbing windbag than you already do!

Moving along to other absurdities, this past week we were witness to conservatives working themselves up in to a frenzy about a coordinated series of anti-Palin attacks in the media that were simply not occurring (see my previous blog on this subject here). To round things off, we have the Palin camp claiming that Obama’s campaign specifically attacked her pregnant daughter. Only trouble is…they can’t really seem to make the case. Ah, well. Absurdity reigns! Let’s just hope It doesn’t get elected.

Finally, we have John McCain co-opting the word “change”. Nothing, I repeat, nothing seemed to anger conservatives more during the primaries and the last few months than Senator Obama’s emphasis on this admittedly vague word. But if you can’t beat em, lacking the policy ideas to do so, join ‘em! John McCain is now championing himself as the agent of change. John ought to borrow a line from Val Kilmer’s Doc Holiday in Tombstone: “It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds”. News to you, perhaps, John – but not to us! You are, after all, attempting to co-opt a platform of change after having voted with Bush 90% of the time.

In conclusion: U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

Lionel and Juice will be traveling this morn, so Lionel’s radio duties will be covered by Madison, Wisconsin’s Lee Rayburn, surely a familiar voice to your ears by now. Lionel and the whole gang will be reunited on Monday to alternately laugh and cry in to our lattes.

The remainder of today’s blog will simply be a smattering of things that I like very much.

“Invisible Man” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions

A brass-driven, blue-eyed soul rave-up with incredible (and disturbingly timely) lyrics. Delight to the way his voice rises on the lines “who can you turn to, and who do you love?” – and then tell me that this man can’t sing. I am tumescent. Lyrics below.

I was committed to life and then commuted to the outskirts
With all the love in the world
Living for thirty minutes at a time with a break in the middle for adverts
But it's a wonderful world within these cinema walls
Where a shower of affection becomes Niagara Falls
And you wish she could step down from the screen to your seat in the stalls

But if starts are only painted on the ceiling above
Then who can you turn to and who do you love?
I want to get out while I still can
I want to be like Harry Houdini
Now I'm the invisible man…

My head is spinning round faster and faster
Here I stand on the edge of disaster
I'm shattered like a piece of crystal porcelain or alabaster
Crowds surround loudspeakers hanging from the lampposts
Listening to the murder mystery
Meanwhile someone's hiding in the classroom
Forging books of history
Never mind, there’s a good film showing tonight
Where they hang everybody that can read and write
Oh, that could never happen here…but then again, it might.

The following are some of my favorite passages from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. I reproduce them here for no other reason than that I find them beautiful.

· “Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it the time needed for it to love you and you it, then throw it away.”

· “How agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacillation, in one’s first impressions. Perhaps that is what tempers the pangs of death.”

· “I will go further and declare that if I were obliged to record, in a roll of honour, those activities which in the course of my interminable existence have given me only a mild pain in the balls, the blowing of a rubber horn – toot! – would figure among the first.”

· “…I was on my way to my mother, whose charity kept me dying.”

· “All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.”

· “Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remains of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.”

· “The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

· “My life, my life, now I speak of it as something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?”

· “All the things that you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.”

· “And if I speak of principles, when there are none, I can’t help it, there must be some somewhere.”

· “But it is useless to dwell on this period of my life. If I go on long enough calling that my life I’ll end up by believing it. It’s the principle of advertising.”

· “And of myself, all my life, I think I had been going to my mother, with the purpose of establishing our relations on a less precarious footing. And when I was with her, and I often succeeded, I left her without having done anything. And when I was no longer with her I was again on my way to her, hoping to do better the next time.”

· “I took advantage of being alone at last, with no other witness than God, to masturbate. My son must have had the same idea, he must have stopped on the way to masturbate. I hope he enjoyed it more than I did.”

· “And I note here the little beat my heart once missed, in my home, when a fly, flying low above my ash-tray, raised a little ash, with the breath of its wings.”

· “It is the first step that counts. The second counts less.”

· “I put my hand in the hive, moved it among the empty trays, felt along the bottom. It encountered, in a corner, a dry light ball. It crumbled under my fingers. They had clustered together for a little warmth, to try and sleep…The next day I looked at my handful of bees. A little dust of annulets and wings.”

· “The house was empty. The company had cut off the light. They have offered to let me have it back. But I told them they could keep it. That is the kind of man I have become.”