Today's need for old-fashioned cynicism

Bastard Hat
    By David Auerbach

Today's topic is bitching and moaning, and my attitude is that there's not enough of it. There's plenty of complaining, yes, but intellectual cynicism seems to have gone out of fashion, particularly in this country. It certainly isn't due to increased optimism on anyone's part; I'd hesitate to make vague generalizations, but if others would like to disagree with me that our faith in politics, job satisfaction, and hopes for the future are at an all-time low, they're welcome to offer me a fulfilling, 40-hour-a-week career. Yet if anyone's actually communicating this angst in any meaningful and substantial way, they're beyond the sights of my telescope.

Cynicism has come a long way since it began with crazy old Diogenes masturbating in the public market. George Bernard Shaw, Nikolai Gogol, Sinclair Lewis, and Proust on his good days were all well-respected social critics who made their comparative riches by telling us that we sucked. Their respectability declined somewhat in the ensuing decades: Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut wrote books significant enough to gain them the status of '60s icons, but the mouthpiece for frustration and unease has since shifted towards comedians like the Smothers Brothers, Mort Sahl, and Lenny Bruce.

Only Bruce retains any degree of name recognition today, and that has less to do with what he said and more to do with the fact that he was persecuted for it, whatever it was. How many Bruce routines can you recall? Appropriately, when Don DeLillo resurrected Bruce for a starring role in Underworld, that extremely paranoid but not-at-all cynical popular novel that no one finished, he removed Bruce's subtleties and instead turned him into a histrionic voice of doom.

Nowadays, the once acerbic Gore Vidal can ridicule Christianity (in Live from Golgotha) and be faced with universal apathy, whereas 30 years ago he was merrily pissing people off by writing about transsexuals. Paddy Chayefsky and his counterparts in Network and The Hospital seem merely boring, hardly provocative. Who do we have today? Do tell! Right-wingers have populist demagogues, so they're out. Left-wingers have elder statesmen Howard Zinn and Alexander Cockburn, but they lack a sense of the wry. Perhaps grumpy socialist Mike Davis (author of the blackly hysterical City of Quartz, about my hometown) would fit the bill, but there's too much resentment in him. Commentator Ian Shoales, maybe, but his concerns are often too trivial to place him in the cynic-as-critic tradition. The only contemporary comedian to take off from the political concerns of Bruce was Bill Hicks, and since he died the other year to mass indifference, his muted liberal conscience didn't have the time to fully give in to id-driven ranting. And even though The Simpsons takes cues from Gogol (his "The Nose" would make a better episode than anything else they've been coming up with lately), it has eliminated Gogol's anti-authoritarian consciousness. For evidence, compare Mr. Burns to the Important Personage in "The Overcoat": the Personage is bureaucracy personified, Mr. Burns is merely an impotent old geezer.

Today, there no longer seems to be a context for me to make fun of that idiot on the plane ride raving about Dinesh D'Souza's biography of Reagan. I believe this is due to the decline of an intellectual class with any kind of a sense of humor. (And by class, I mean something independent from social or economic status, rather a dissipated group of people with too great a degree of self-awareness.) Now, enervation is much more the order of the day.

I remain optimistic that at one time or another there was a place for satire on this campus, too. But when the Yale Free Press is the best you can do, it's time to head for the hills, Ma Barker. The YFP actually does stumble onto the potential of humor on a sporadic basis, but the burgeoning egos of its writers usually leave the paper with a sneering look of Ivy League disdain, making them about as funny as William F. Buckley, Jr., DC '50.

If you've ever read The Onion, you know precisely what I mean: smug, stiflingly unfunny headlines--"PBS to air more of that Yanni shit" and "Raped environment led polluters on"--are only the beginning of a weekly exercise in condescension that presumably does wonders for the contributors' self-images. This ain't humor, kids, it's narcissism. (And narcissism + crudeness = South Park.)

It's because cynicism has its roots in masturbation that its best practitioners tend to remain suspicious of themselves--they remain aware that their art is a self-indulgent sticky mess, and nothing to be proud of. But what passes for humor today is often too instilled with self-promotion and ego-boosting to ever hit its real target. Instead, it turns back on its creator. It was once the cynics' role to safeguard culture from high-mindedness and narrow-minded certitude; now it's just an excuse to mock new-age music and multiculturalism one more time.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• WYBC broadcasts hypocrisy, 1/16/98
• For better organizations, discriminate, 11/20/97
• Making academia irrelevant, 11/7/97

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