Cross-posted at Political Nexus and Left Toon Lane.
I’m guessing that even Tom Stoppard couldn’t have come up with fictional characters as dislimned from reality as the corporeal creatures who inhabit the uppermost regions of our government.
Stoppard’s play is about as "meta" as it gets. The two unwitting schlumps who, in Shakespeare’s original tale, are peripheral characters recruited by King Claudius to keep an eye on Hamlet and to hopefully get savvy to his intentions, are now thrust center-stage as the lead players. It is Hamlet who is put into the background, as these two buffoons act out roles seemingly with no script, no plot, and no impetus to propel them toward any action. They are caught in a strange existentialist trap otherwise known as the unfolding drama of life on Earth.
We’re in the neighborhood of 140,000 users here on this board, and I’m guessing that there are a good number of folks who may not know the derivation of the phrase "the reality-based community", thereby missing the snarkaliscious edge when it is used self-referentially.
It’s from a now-infamous Ron Suskind piece written for the New York Times in 2004:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors.... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Source: Suskind, Ron. "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush." New York Times, October 17, 2004.
There are a number of things which fascinate me about this passage (for example, the irony of Suskind using the word empiricism, of course in the context of analytical study and reasoning, only to have the word immediately turned on its head by the mysterious Rovian staffer in the next sentence; as if this political magician is pointing out that the rest of us live in a world of "isms", whereas those who steer world events need no such addendum; they act; they create; it is the rest of us who attach isms in our role as observers in the course of our sloppy-seconds reality, while blogging in our boxers and inhaling our fourth.... erm -- fifth -- Chips Ahoy).
But the main thing that strikes me is the plain fact that the mysterious reality-smith is correct.
There have been no less than a kajillion words punched out at this site conjecturing about the possibility of these psychopaths actually conducting an attack on Iran. Will they really do it? When? How? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are walking around with nukes -– remember they are now the lead players; the headline actor went off stage into the wilderness to grow a beard and gain weight and contemplate whether or not he was indeed meant to be the alpha-dog of America’s reality-manufacturing. The libretto, also known as the Constitution, was ripped up. The Director is in an undisclosed location. And Shakespeare has been reincarnated as the guy in the upstairs apartment who keeps trying to break into Hollywood by writing brilliant screenplays but all they’re in the market for right now are stories about talking cars that go fast fast fast.
Suffice to say, we’re all just peripheral characters in each others’ respective dramas. But if you control an arsenal of nukes and use the word empire, you get a lot attention on the stage. If you control a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies and use a lot of isms, you get to do the dishes after dinner real quick so that you can rush off to your "office" only to find yourself reading bizarre treatises about existentialism on a pixelated screen.
More on that fundamental dilemma in the future. For now, I will acknowledge my peripheral status and simply rejoice in another chunk of the reality-edifice crumbling away from this comic tragedy, as Gonzo is now officially gonzo.
Here’s a quick look back with a photo-shoppy image or two as I wax nostalgic over our dearly departed Attorney General.....
Here’s Alberto Gonzales in his office at the Department of Justice, with his ever-trusty bottle of white-out for on-the-spot Constitutional amendments, as ordered on an as-needed basis by the alcoholic monkey that nests in Ronald Reagan’s old cowboy hat.
Here’s the (former) Attorney General spewing geysers of invisible offal on Faux News for the rest of us to "judiciously study".
This is a piece of one of my diaries that fall into the category of what I call "dark snark" ™. They tend to plunge down the Recent Diary List faster than an anvil with an unabridged leather-bound copy of War & Peace duct-taped to it. Feel free to be offended by it; frankly, I’m offended by it too.
And in keeping with the existentialist theme, here are a couple of cartoons that are thoroughly obscure and ridiculous. If you don’t like them, please feel free to fuck right off. I’m on my eighth cookie by now, and the scotch ain’t causing no pain neither.
And I’ll just post this one for good measure -– not a cartoon, just a silly rejoinder for the smarty-pants know-it-alls who will be shocked -– shocked !!!!! -– when Bushco and the Neocons try the next utterly fucked-up depraved adventure that was deemed to be worthy of a shiny-shiny aluminum chapeau a mere two or three Friedman Units ago. Take it and use it at will.