[Cue Alice Cooper] Now that for me school’s out forever, I have ditched academics, abandoned trying to explain sprung rhythm[1], deep-sixed Victorian bric-a-brac, and turned my attention to my first love, my av-av-av-ocation, anthropology.
For the last two weeks, between book signings and interviews,[2] I’ve been hanging out with Oscar Wilde, the great-great grandfather of Diana Ross/Lady Gaga, while pondering the relationship among peace, prosperity and decadence.
Wilde embraced the dark velvet decadence of Poe and Baudelaire, cocooning himself in aromatic rooms with lily-stuffed vases, handcrafted furniture, and arrases. His conversation, to quote Lucinda Williams, “was like a drug,” and he somehow managed to produce two minor masterpieces The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest in his downtime between partying and lecturing.
The Great British Empire had enjoyed peace and prosperity for so long that it seemed, as Oscar’s pal Willy B put it, “it would outlive all future days.” Far from the horrorshow in Africa and India and elsewhere, one lolling on a divan in Chelsea could focus one’s attention on decor even while mocking decorum.
However, World War I eventually turned people’s attention away from wallpaper design to spiritualism, as widows attempted to contact via seance their dead husbands and sons. In fact, Wilde’s own son Cyril would die in the trenches at the age of 29, fifteen years after his father’s checking out of this Vale of Tears Days Inn of Woe.
Hit it, Willy B:
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
WB Yeats “Nineteen-Hundred-and-Nineteen”
It was not an enemy’s bullet but the Book of Leviticus what eventually done Oscar in.
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
20:13
Although increasingly, we outside the MAGA cult resemble the Greeks more than Victorians in our attitudes towards same sex relationships, we, like British Victorians, live in a homeland that has not been invaded by foreign armies for hundreds of years. Our wars are fought abroad, and not necessarily by our best and brightest.[3] We can choose not to enlist and focus our attention elsewhere, which in Late Empire America means pursuing the good life, a life of hedonism, of epicureanism, which is all fine and dandy (I confess having stashed away behind a custom-made maple cabinet one bottle of the limited Malt Master’s Edition of a Glenfiddich, a single malt double-cured in oak and sherry casks).
However, if my 1500+ acquaintances on Facebook provide an accurate sample of the bourgeoise, there seems to be a sort of insecure compulsion to woo-hoo about how wonderful their lives are, to snap photographs of luscious dishes (whether prepared at home or eaten out) or inviting beach vistas (perhaps with propped-up bare feet peeking up from the bottom of the photo). Typical captions read “not too shabby” or “life is good.” And every coed in America seems to have adopted the preening, narcissistic pose of Kim Kardashian.
This preening worries me because it smacks of pride, and if Oscar were given the second chances that our politicians claim as their due, he certainly might have embraced that other profound pleasure-seeker’s advice, Sir John Falstaff’s, about discretion’s being the better part of valor. Flaunting, which can create resentment and contempt, tempts fate. Some envious psychotic Trump cultist reads this post, finds out where I live, breaks into my house, takes an ax to my custom-made maple cabinet, and pours out my Glenfiddich before being taken down by our ninja dog KitKat.
By all means, let’s enjoy life but try not to be so smug about it, for O, my brothers and sisters, trouble’s brewing everywhere, in the Atlantic as glaciers melt and hurricanes incubate, in sub-Saharan Africa as bacteria mutate, in Russia where Putin is rattling nukes, in the Far East as Kim Jong II preens into the not-so-funhouse mirror of megalomania.
Happy summer, everyone!
[1] Sprung rhythm is associated with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: E.g.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
[2] I’ve been promoting my novel Today, Oh Boy, which you can buy HERE!
[3] Beau Biden was the first presidential offspring to serve in combat since Ike’s son John Eisenhower.
You Do Hoodoo 