Judd Apatow’s new comedy starring Amy Schumer, Trainwreck, confirms that the narcissistic culture launched by baby boomers like me is indeed in extremis.
It’s not just that “the inmates have taken over the asylum.” It’s that America has become one big asylum with inmates and staff competing with each other for awards as the leading poseurs.
We—including the entire political class—are now nothing but and nothing more than poseurs. Hillary Clinton is Grandma as Big Nurse, Bernie Sanders reincarnates Eugene Debs as a Geriatric Jewish Boy, Scott Walker as The Man Who Stood Up to the Totalitarian Unions, Marco Rubio as Hispanic Flavor of the Month, Jeb Bush as the Boring Man who fails to register on the radar even of uber drivers, and Donald Trump as of course Despicable Me. The only thing the current political universe lacks is Caitlyn Jenner’s declaration of candidacy.
Can anyone believe that, sixty years ago, the U.S. was heading into a presidential contest between Dwight David Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson? In that era, Joe McCarthy was deemed a unique aberration and national shame by Ed Murrow, among others. Now, on our “See It Now,” if we had one worthy of that program, he would just be one malignant political talking head competing for a place on the debate stage.
I’m not a religious person, but there is something to be said for political-religious tropes from Jeremiah’s Wrath of the Lord to the Chinese’ passing of The Mandate from Heaven. I believe that divine grace and blessings can be withdrawn as well as given to a nation, and that ultimately God will not be mocked.
To judge from the Lord’s choice of an American negotiating team with the Iranians headed by Secretary of State John Kerry and under the auspices of President Barack Obama, He or She has lost none of His or Hers wicked sense of humor.
