Posted 11:33 AM by Gene

I have taken several days off from blogging -- an abscessed tooth will force such things -- and made me further confront the essential vapidity of what I do. Blogging is words and prejudices bound in a digital corset. It annoys me to think how many of my posts fall into so many puny categories:

1. Stupid liberal demagogue says something stupid, hypocritical or dishonest about a conservative;
2. Stupid conservative demagogue says something stupid, hypocritical or dishonest about a liberal;
3. Stupid conservative and liberal sling simultaneous invective, the verbal slime besmirching parties other than those intended;
4. Stupid liberal reveres fellow stupid liberal for saying something stupid.
5. Stupid conservative reveres fellow stupid conservative for saying something stupid.
6. Stupid liberal and stupid conservative mutually revere someone for saying something stupid. (Rare, although think of the comedy team of Slick and Papa or History's Greatest Comic Novelist and you'll get the idea.)
7. Stupid news hack demonstrates he cannot write a sentence without emasculating the language or inserting his egregious prejudices;
8. Government does something idiotic;
9. Business does something idiotic;
10. Another show biz blowhard earns thousands of times his weight in unjustified publicity.

And one could go on and on and on, but one is already benumbed by all this blogging.

Perhaps the problem is words by the oceanful. I have already railed about how the ASSPress disgorges twenty million of them a day; add our almost infinite overcapacity now with newspapers and television and the Web and surely America will be the first nation to perish from verbiage. Even Thomas Paine could not amplify his voice above the deafening scream, a scream which for all its inconsequence is a deafening silence.

The several scathing reviews that have greeted the adaptation of Ms. Didion's latest masterpiece in Branson East point to another problem. Technology has vitiated language's power, and not just through its awful excess. It has ameliorated heartbreak. Once separation could be permanent; today you could live in Australia, and your very closest friend could live in France, and you could scoot back and forth across the globe to remeet within two days. The passionate love letter sent tearfully from the nearest intolerably mute mailbox has become :-*. Even the horrible killings of ghetto infants are becoming routine, routinized in no small part by technology. And Ms. Didion is putatively talking of grief, of the death of her husband and daughter. Abe Lincoln caught the essence in his wrenching letter to Mrs. Bixby (and she lost two sons in the War, not five). Constant technology has slowly calmed the tragic muse. "Memory stops. The frame freezes. You'll find that's something that happens'' will not do. Perhaps only a genius can communicate the depths of heartbreak now, and it seems safe to say there are no Shakespeares on the horizon.

Further let us admit life is not as interesting anymore. Lacking any solider evidence we must assume Shakespeare got his playwriting guts from boozing and fighting and whoring, much like Ben Jonson, much like Hemingway, much like many "classic" writers, who went sailing and boxing and cowpoking besides; that we don't know if Shakespeare was interesting doesn't mean he wasn't, and his plays most certainly are (if not always for the right reasons). Alexander and Attila the Hun did not merely conquer nations. Having just read over Truman a third or fourth time I know how he jumped from one wet rag to another, a seeming failure in middle-age, before stepping into a county judgeship and history. Failure made the man. Today a child goes to a bland elementary school (where, despite the ever-changing always trendy pedagogy, the accent is forever on conformity), to a bland high-school, to a bland college, to a bland Dilberty life; the most he can say is that he'll have had sex with more people than others, usually under a drug-heavy haze. This is experience? This foments maturity and wisdom? No wonder each successive generation looks like a lesser order of infants. Words can have little power when an increasingly contented life robs them of their meaning.

And of course science will be in the vanguard of making words obsolete. It is hard to believe it won't be. As Mustapha Monds seek to enable wi-fi-like interaction among human brains, where all communication becomes non-verbal, sensual, visceral, words will become obsolete. That this must rank with nuclear fission as a cause for the world's end matters not; we must go forward into an ever-speedier, ever-larger, ever-more-enveloping void, not only within our communities, but within ourselves.

So I have gassed why I an abscessed tooth has kept me from blogging the last few days. I can only resume with my usual futile and foolish attempts at aphorisms and wit, realizing no one reads them willingly in the first place, but content with the fact with, if I must make a fool of myself -- and that is the blogger's first obligation -- no one will be watching.

(Corrected 9/4/2010 -- "or "replaces "of" in fourth sentence of sixth graf)