Cat Show 3/12/2021

VG: I remember how terrified I was as a child when I read Edgar Allan Poe’s ”Pit and the Pendulum.” Pendulum sharp as a knife, and as it goes from side, it lowers, until it reaches the victim. Scarier than the widening gyre of Yates, this pendulum seems to be a good image of our lives in general and the concrete cultural moment in particular. Our opinions go from one extreme to another, yesterday’s heterodoxy become today’s orthodoxy, people cancel each other like mad, and yet, the pendulum goes lower and lower till it hits the poor victims caught in the middle.

ALICE: Since when you’ve become such a pessimist? Didn’t you tell us about the Hegelian spiral and how it unfolds, and embraces former opposites, and reaches the higher degree of complexity and progress. Yes, rich white men used to run the show. Yes, the culture nowadays privileges non-white, non-men, and non-rich, but uber-rich. But eventually, there is a correction and advancement. Look at the stock market. There is a temporary correction, and then things go up.

HOBBS: What kind of a correction? Formerly suppressed Jews and Italians can now form a corporation for the professional advancement of young uneducated girls, and call it, Weinstein, Epstein, and Cuomo. And they don’t even need a token member of a British monarchy on board, reducing poor prince Andrew to the role of a client, rather than a CEO. I wouldn’t call it progress.

VG: I wish I could agree with Alice and Hegel. But this spiral-like unfolding of the world’s wisdom rarely finds confirmation in reality. In Swift, the inhabitants of two islands butcher each other over the way they break an egg. Well, then two other islands would start butcher each other over they way they look, think, or the way they place a pronoun upon a noun. Like a random jump of a grasshopper, we jump from one way of dividing people to another.

ALICE: Not the case. In a true Hegelian fashion we now have the new rules of diversity and inclusion. We’ve reached the state of the progressive synthesis. Everyone is welcome. Of course, when a white male Catalan poet wants to translate a black poet from United States, he is excluded. American publishers told him that he could translate Homer and Shakespeare, but not Amanda Gorman. And that’s progress too, since you can’t really include without excluding. We need to exclude some people so that the unheard voices are finally heard. And the Catalan poet can surely wait.

HOBBS: Indeed. Let people wait for Godot. Look at Biden. He was waiting for so long, he finally forgot what he was waiting for. And now he got it. Once again, the US has become a land of American Dream. You wait and wait and wait, and then you collect enough money for your dream lot at the cemetery. Prime peace of real estate. Highly desirable. Biden got himself a whole bunker from where he leads his war on invisible virus. If that’s not a fulfillment of an American dream, I don’t know what is.

VG: Yes, that’s a pendulum, all right. Dems, Reps, Reps, Dems. Individuals, masses, masses, individuals. Liars, demagogues, demagogues, liars. Where is the justice, where is the thief?

I think the only way out of this morass is humor. At least, it gives one perspective. Not to be mesmerized by the relentless trajectory of a pendulum.

HOBBS: Gee, you scared me with your image of the pendulum. Poe had his tragic humor, I guess. Only a few chosen souls are capable of possessing or appreciating it. Not Alice obviously.

Rocking and rocking in a widening gyre

The pendulum can’t relent in its descend

It’s breath smells, it’s sound swells,

While we wonder, is that the promised end?

ALICE: Tragic humor is for those who are too weak to consume. For those who can’t find self-realization through getting hundred likes or re-tweets of their posts. For those who can’t see that the happiness is the plural pronoun. And Vladimir, by the way, only pretends to be capable of tragic humor. I saw how he scribbled on a piece of paper the other day: “I always thought that happiness is she, but now I realized it is they.” So welcome to the club, Vladimir. You are one of us, "the chosen pronouns."

VG: I can’t believe, Alice, you were going through my papers. It is none of your business. Plus, you, with your brain of a Democrat, can’t really understand the depth of my dialectical thought. You talk about the progress. How is it a progress, when today’s students can make up stupid accusations against teachers, which are then believed by everyone, frequently causing violence, if not death, as in the case of this French girl, who missed a bunch of classes in her school, and then made up a story about the teacher showing sacrilegious cartoons in the class, the class that she actually never attended. Yet, her father believed her, and went hysterical online, provoking others into believing his anger, until one misguided Chechen decided to kill the teacher. This manufacturing of outrage and alienation seems to be the only function of social media, whose original purpose, was of course, manufacturing unity and connection.

HOBBS: Vladimir, did you tell us that for every bad student or father or teacher, there is always a good student, father or teacher. And we should concentrate on them. For every Alice, there is Hobbs, remember that. So why don’t the two of us revisit the refrigerator and see if there are some pancakes and salmon left from this week of Russian Mardi Gras. And yes, you and Alice can have pancakes. Speaking of pendulum, do you really want to subject us to Alice diet of smoked kale and other veggies? You know, what’s good for the goose, is not good for the gander.