The Poet of Distractions
Saul Bellow called Joyce’s great novel Ulysses a comedy of information. In his essay “Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology,” Bellow writes that the protagonist Bloom is “the bearer, the servant, the slave of involuntary or random cognitions.” He refers to the microscopic narrative, its attention to every detail of ordinary life, calling it “the Faustian dream of omniscience.” Almost as an afterthought, he adds, “But he is also the poet of distractions.”
2018 might have been a comedy — of misinformation — but the tragedy inflicted on the American democracy bears no resemblance to humor. Perhaps better classified as tragicomedy, the death of moral leadership constitutes the dark narrative upon us.
A master of distractions — no poet — sits brooding in a White House once associated with lucid authority. In place of cogent executive action, debatable as part of a democracy but recognized as legitimate, we have the machinations of a criminal enterprise meant to pass for a duly elected administration. The Faustian dream of omnipotence, as ventriloquism.
Our narrative begins abroad: an unreliable narrator on Pennsylvania Avenue acting as agent for Putin’s depredations. A master of televised entertainment, with an adolescent (at best) grasp of realpolitik, Drumpf struggles to purvey larceny and bigotry in the guise of politics. He struggles despite the assist from his meretricious Republican co-conspirators, because the patriots among us will not tolerate the scam.
Do not underestimate the dark narrative. Having exploited Facebook’s unprincipled network, Putin now builds out his story against the backdrop of domestic discord in the U.S., and an international community weakened by a so-called U.S. president bent on carrying out his master’s orders.
Narrative strategy rewards its practitioners. Conventional politics has no story beyond the pursuit of power and money, not necessarily in that order. It’s time to evict the tinhorn cliché meant to pass for an administration. We deserve a better narrative, and certainly a better strategy.
