Misanthrope's Corner - Brief Article

Many societies have made life miserable for their citizens, but none has ever driven them crazy. A few, such as Louis-Philippe's self-satisfied bourgeois France, may have bored them to distraction, but sturdy sanity has always held sway among the commonality even when their rulers fell into hereditary fits and had sobriquets like "the Simple" and "the Mad."

Enter America, where presidential candidates dare not admit to seeing a psychiatrist and the masses go on daytime TV to boast volubly about "seeking professional help." Of all democracy's unintended consequences, this one takes majority rule where no one ever imagined it could go.

Driving people crazy is easy to do. You don't have to give them electric shocks or put them in solitary, all you have to do is make them doubt the evidence of their senses until they whimper, "What the hell is going on?" This is where America is now. There's a war on, and it's not in any of the places likely to become Bill Clinton's next Ruritania du jour. It's in our heads, and the enemy is the unrelenting flux of American life. Every day is Gaslight, and we're Ingrid Bergman.

Advertisers used to pound home their messages in the simplest possible way, but watching some of today's TV commercials is an experience akin to reading Beowulf. There's the one showing a car sitting in the middle of the desert while an Irish tenor voice sings "Home on the Range" in Italian. In another, a geeky guy sits down alone at a set-up chess board and nervously wipes sweat from his face while a clock ticks away menacingly in the background. After a moment, a driverless car pulls up beside him, and he rises and walks off.

At least we can tell these are car commercials. More puzzling are the ones that seem to have no sponsor. These are in black-and-white and feature a man in a white dinner jacket with a satanic goatee who fires off sneering, mocking questions along the lines of, "So you think you did the clever thing, do you? Who would want you for an employer?"

Are they trying to convince us to keep up with the sadomasochistic Joneses? Do they believe the economy is so good that we might be willing to buy the product to figure out the ad? It's probably another online trader, but either they don't say or else the name goes by so quickly that it doesn't register. Then, after the program returns, we keep on trying to solve the mystery of the commercial until we forget what's going on in the mystery we're watching.

In a column written shortly after the death of Vincent Price, Alston Chase said that because good guys mumble, Price's perfect diction had gotten him typecast as a villain. Now all movie dialogue consists of bad diction drowned out by background noise. Characters mumble while revving engines, chopping wood, sharpening swords, hammering anvils, and operating machinery. Movies used to muffle background noises when characters spoke, but today nothing is muffled except their lines. Much of this is meant to convey the stress and strain and general unpleasantness under which working-class characters live, but Joan Crawford waitressed, barmaided, and factory-girled her way through dozens of movies in which we could understand every word she said. Today's cinematic noise has the same purpose as the rock music that SWAT teams play for holed-up criminals.

The desire to leave one's mark by cluttering up the works has been the motivation behind petty vandalism since time immemorial. More recently, it has manifested itself in the plangent wish, "I want to be a part of history," uttered by grief junkies on pilgrimages to sidewalk memorials for dead celebrities. Now the ante has been upped to a constitutional guarantee of the right to time-travel. Edmund Morris shows us how to do it in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, but Morris is not the first author to hit on the idea of driving his readers crazy by inserting himself in a book.

In The French Lieutenant's Woman, a novel of Victorian England published in 1970, author John Fowles imitates the omniscient Victorian novelist's technique of stopping the action cold to deliver homilies. This is no more than what most Victorian writers did, but Fowles goes them one better by climbing into the story as an unnamed character who trails the hero around.

When the two share a train compartment, the author-character confesses to a writing block and studies the dozing hero, thinking: "Now what am I going to do with you?" At the end, he waits outside the Rosetti house while Charles goes in to persuade Sarah to marry him. Does she or doesn't she? We never find out, because the chortling author-character admits that he has no idea what happens. He supplies the book with two endings, either of which we may choose provided we can find someone to turn the pages for us after they put us into our strait jackets.

Now that Morris has gone Fowles one better by climbing into a biography, it's only a matter of time before the teachers' lobby puts pressure on textbook publishers to leave blank spaces in history books so that pupils can insert their own names: