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Down the rabbit hole

February 26, 2021   ·   0 Comments

CONSTANCE SCRAFIELD
WITH YOUR PERMISSION

Do you feel as though things are a little odd these days? How are your dreams? Has the world’s reality shifted a little – or a lot – on some level of your mind? I mean, we know the difference between a cup of tea in our actual cup and a virtual cup of tea, right? 

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, that parody of Victorian life, seems in for a re-run. In many ways, he barely exaggerated the real-life people in his world. A book he wrote to entertain the children of a friend of his, his satirical portrayal of British society and politicians was pretty close to the bone in many cases. Alice in Wonderland rose to high popularity and gave his pen name self – Lewis Carroll – fame throughout Britain and North America.

At about the same time, Punch magazine, the satirical magazine that invented the cartoon, naming such illustrations first, was read at every level of society in the UK, loved for its intellectual and clean dig at society and its foibles.

It seems to me, we are more than ever parodies of ourselves. Satire, of course, has its own way of debunking villainy and chaos, hypocrisy and the self-serving. We have lost the knack of it, I think, and to our loss. Nowadays, we are all so serious in our criticism and, in dealing with our realities in black or white, make them almost too hard to face. 

In this household, we do check in with the likes of Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers, American comics, each with their own shows, who do a so-so job of humorous analysis of current events and the people running them. In Canada, This Hour Has 22 Minutes works at taking on the job of making fun of the difficult issues of the day.

Perhaps, the trouble is that we are overwhelmed with mediocrity when we are badly in need of excellence: of leadership, science, peace of mind. Especially since the ‘60’s, we have been searching for excellence in our leaders –in politics, industry and business, – and they have dragged the world down a path that is nearly at its end. Warmongers that we are, wasteful of bounty, cruel to the extreme and so short sighted that we can hardly think beyond lunch, we have little or no regard for the proofs all around us of the consequences of our ways. 

This all true in every land, in spite of the specifics with regard to kindness and wisdom, our basic flaws control our better natures to the detriment of all. 

If only for logic’s sake, it must evident that mere short-term and, really, fictional financial gain or the falsehood of employment blanches in the face of harm to come: imagine that we are once again planning to open new coal mines – right here in Canada, we who have, in decades past, lead such a campaign against coal – done so much to shut it down. It is so bad that it is hard to be funny. 

Lots of what we laugh at is far from funny and I notice there’s little humour addressing the political calamities in the US, where a deeply criminal ex-president is still at large. He is forgiven and supported by lawyers, senators who should long-since have turned their backs on him and apologized to their nation and the world for ever allowing him into their midst.

Well, there are heroes. They are not running countries or a big enough portion of the world’s industry, farming or medicine but they are working hard to build ways to live, to eat and turn the lights on that are safe, wise, clean. Their influence is marginal until they are rich enough and there is a large enough number of them to bring the political will in line.

Sorry – enough gloom! Let’s look at what is really funny.

Space travel!! Don’t you love it? People lined up to make the one-way trip to Mars and beyond! You think Earth is tough? Earth is paradise. People are hell and guess what earth species is going to Mars – which will already be hell, by the way – People! Is that like Hell x Infinity? 

Everybody wants a piece of the next frontier! Elon Musk wants to run Tesla’s on the streets-to-be on Mars – he’s got space travel all figured out. Jeff Bezos will offer package delivery to the vast and weird covered cities that are planned for the Red Planet. 

Richard Branson will fly Virgin space shuttles for tourists – if not all the way to Mars, at least to the moon and more. Just picture the costly tours of the Space Station, everybody floating weightlessly but still in a line, the guide showing points of interest. Gosh. They’ll have to double the size of it and the medics better be ready for those sudden deaths! 

Internationally, the decades-old race to space is well and truly on, while people starve and our planet stumbles and fails.


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