Thursday’s announcement of the Nobel Literature Prize (to American poet Louise Glück) found this former English teacher sentimentally reflecting on past works of high-minded literary expression.
Like so many other fields, literature has lately become a victim of the pernicious PCism and partisan cancel-culture that threaten any empirical, truth-seeking explorations into human nature.
Even nonfiction disciplines like history and journalism are not safe from the clutches of ‘woke’ social activism.
A group of scholars recently wrote the Pulitzer Prize committee asking it to rescind the award bestowed upon New York Times fabulist Nikole Hannah–Jones for her essay that inspired the controversial 1619 Project—a work of brazen historical revisionism that applies the newly fashionable “critical race theory” to our nation’s inception.
“The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit,” their letter states.
While it’s often been said that truth can be stranger than fiction, it now seems equally applicable that fiction is truer than “truth.”
Perhaps it’s because wordsmiths like Glück charge head-on into their work, unhindered by the constraints of what is considered real.
Or maybe, it’s that our reality is itself built on a pack of lies and false assumptions.
That’s the implication brought forth in the modern classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee.
Like Hannah–Jones and Glück, Albee received plenty of Pulitzer plaudits for his feats of fiction.
Debuting in 1962, his best-known play would go on to become a 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
It performed well at the once-meaningful Academy Awards, garnering Taylor her second best-actress Oscar.
The psychological comic-drama is steeped in symbolism, with many scholarly deconstructions aptly linking its subtext to Albee’s sexuality.
But a more intriguing interpretation would be to apply its deeper allegorical meaning to the tenuous precepts that bind any sort of toxic relationship—including America’s current cultural and political rifts.
That the play revolves around characters patriotically named George and Martha suggests that Albee might have intended just such a reading.
George, an ambitious academic, marries the privileged daughter of a university president in order to better himself—much the way that the social compact of e pluribus unum, woven inextricably into our nation’s founding documents, promises to mutually benefit every stakeholder in American democracy.
But a pair of unwitting newlyweds who are invited to have late-night cocktails with the aging George and Martha learn that the foundation of the couple’s relationship is actually an elaborate hoax.
From there, the play’s cascading action indistinguishably blurs the lines of fact and fiction on what seems to be a collision course with calamity.
Sound familiar?
It likewise seems to be getting harder and harder for the American Left to sustain its delusions now that the Right has decided to stop playing ball.
Plenty of political theorists have weighed in on the Hegelian dialectic and its facade of individual agency in a two-party system dominated by the deep-state/military–industrial/corporate/globalist complex.
According to such theories, the two sides that appear to be in conflict are, in fact, working in tandem toward the common goals of oppression and public manipulation.
In essence, there is no real difference between red and blue since both are designed to screw you.
But when President Donald Trump called the elite establishment’s bluff by authentically pledging to drain the DC swamp, pandemonium ensued.
Seeing this house of cards on the verge of collapse, we discover what a tangled web of deception was holding it together:
- The declassified evidence of the Obama intelligence community’s Russia hoax now seems irrefutable, as do reports casting light on the corrupt foreign dealings of presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s family members and close business associates.
- Left-leaning media’s phony narratives on the Antifa-driven race riots and Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic have also begun to seriously strain credulity.
- And the clear problems with mail-in voting initiatives—among them, Democrats’ outrageous 11th-hour attempts to loosen election-integrity laws—carry more than a waft of bad faith.
Rather than working harder to clarify facts and rationally refute skeptics, panic-stricken liberals have gone into overdrive on their propagandist gas-lighting and censorship efforts.
Using every anti-Trump platform at their disposal, they scramble to persuade constituents that there is “no evidence” to support further scrutiny AND that the plain-sighted evidence undermining their claims is mere “disinformation.”
Alarmingly, their efforts seem to be pretty effective.
For those who are too deeply invested in the ruse, the left-wing establishment’s ever-thinning thread of plausible deniability remains a desperate lifeline to validate their own complicity in such farcical theatrics.
In fact, radical Democrats are so overcome with hubris that they have begun openly plotting ways to “burn down” democracy in order to ensure permanent, monolithic majorities for their party.
That involves eliminating all of the constitutional checks and balances intended to preserve the status quo via:
- Supreme Court packing
- court-forced gerrymandering
- statehood for DC and Puerto Rico
- eradicating the Electoral College
- ending minority-party filibusters
- defunding law-enforcement
- open borders
The Left justifies each action by insisting the current system is stacked against it.
But the current system—aka democracy—happens to be working exactly the way it was designed to. That is, absent the subversive efforts by powerful, shadowy figures to erode it from within.
The true problem that the Left’s coalition of special interests and intersectional identity groups continues to run up against is its own ‘systemic’ shortcoming: that success and prosperity among free-thinking, independent citizens have a pesky tendency to undermine the entire progressive platform.
Unfortunately, Albee does not offer a reassuring resolution to guide and comfort us in the third act of Virginia Woolf.
The fate of George’s and Martha’s marriage, once it becomes untethered from the bedrock of lies and diversions that sustained it, remains ambiguous.
Our story, too, is still being written. There is room for optimism; after all, most tragedies and comedies follow a similar trajectory of plot twists until they reach a climactic tipping point.
But rather than forging ahead into a happily-ever-after denouement, the misery-dependent Left now strives to stealth-edit the storyline in order to perpetuate its contrived crises into an eternal drama.
Follow Ben Sellers on Parler at parler.com/profile/Sellers.
