Like a tsunami, we are besieged by a flood of absurdity. No matter where we turn we see not only the improbable, but the downright ridiculous, the absurd. "Every absurdity has a champion to defend it." So said the 18th century Irish writer and doctor, Oliver Goldsmith. Look around. The most casual of glances shows these would-be champions as thick as ants on a summer picnic. They are everywhere. No need to imagine it. And everywhere they are you ask yourself: Can it get any worse, any more absurd and silly?
Movie stars are dragged away to jail for using drugs and alcohol. To what purpose? For themselves, nothing more harmless than a greater sense of personal happiness. And for us? For society? The social absurdity that is our needless obsession to enforce foolish rules as if they were sound.
Elsewhere, in the farthest reaches of the nation, an Eastern-elite, Yale trained lawyer and West Point graduate shows himself off on TV with a rugged outdoorsy three day growth of facial hair and a countrified, wilderness look. He's running for public office saying that unemployment insurance benefits - the money feeding millions of hungry Americans - are unconstitutional. That's what he's running against, as if he'd never learned, along with every other law student in America, that the case was settled by the Supreme Court already (and not to his liking) a long time ago. In 1937. Joe Miller of Alaska, a Tea Party champion of the absurd.
You've probably seen the FOX NEWS babes; puffed up lips soaked with collagen or whatever they put into them these days; bras nipped so tightly their breasts push upward and together as if reaching out for you through the camera. Is there a plain looking woman with on-screen duties to be found there? I saw four of them - champions all - soundly, roundly and unanimously scratching away at pop star Katy Perry and the dress she wore to sing a duet with a Muppet character on Sesame Street. High minded matters, and these high-breasted FOXy ladies - the HOOTERS girls of cable news - were complaining about... Katy Perry's breasts. Did she have to show she had them - two of them to be exact - on children's TV? Frankly, Katy Perry wouldn't get a call-back at a FOX NEWS audition, not with the average sized breasts and rather normal cleavage she showed on PBS. But then, you expect FOX NEWS to be champions of the absurd.
Maybe you've also seen one of the apparently dozens of Christine O'Donnell "crazy clips" making the rounds on TV video these days - the one where she says, yes indeed she would stop all premarital and extramarital sex in America (including masturbation), and as proof it can be done she offers up her own self as evidence. "I'm a woman in her thirties" O'Donnell proudly proclaims in an interview from only a few years ago, "and I'm chaste." Never been touched - you know where - by a man, a woman or even by herself. And cute too, which makes it all the more absurd. I hope she makes to the Senate where she'll actually stand out less. Perhaps her stubble-cheeked Alaskan Yalie, Tea Party colleague will join her there. They'll certainly feel at home in that chamber of champions.
As art imitates life (or is it life that imitates art?), the absurd is hardly limited to affairs of a civic nature. All sportsmen, in the generic sense to include women as well, watched Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees engage in the absurd as he faked being hit by a pitch - which actually struck the knob on the handle of his bat - and as the super slow motion replays repeated over and over on television, the modern-day Pride of the Yankees writhed in fake pain, took fake comfort from a not-fake trainer and finally faked his way to first base. All across the country fans, fellow players, former managers and sportswriters saluted Jeter's unsportsmanlike behavior. More champs of the absurd.
In another generation Fred Allen once remarked that TV was the sincerest form of imitation. So it was this week on what is still called "the small screen" despite today's huge flat screen HD sets, we got to see yet another fictional black President being bamboozled by his military advisors and generally stumbling about as Leader of The Free World without a clue - this time about what "The Event" is, or was, or will be. On this absurdity you and I are the champions since millions will continue tuning in hoping he finds his way, or perhaps hoping he doesn't. Maybe he's a Socialist. Maybe he wasn't even born here. Maybe that's "The Event." Absurd or not, it's not HBO; it's only television.
And we've also learned of the continuing absurdity at the highest levels of real life. The real President of the United States, the one who made the most absurd of all promises - Change We Can Believe In - has apparently been conducting a Nixonian-style secret war in Pakistan using foreign mercenaries as troops under the control and supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency. That constitutional absurdity breaks all the rules usually governing the ridiculous. A self-proclaimed peace President fighting a secret war. Think about it. Could a woman in the Senate who's "dabbled in witchcraft" and never ever had sex of any kind be any more... absurd?
Of course, these are only my thoughts, my opinions. The great American writer, Ambrose Bierce, defined the word - Absurd - this way: "A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion." Do you find that absurd? I don't.