(Don't?) Stop the Carnival

It being February, it seems appropriate to address the ritual, or celebration, of carnival in the West.  It's a time of feasting, parading, drinking, role-reversal and excess.  Reveling, I suppose it could be called; silliness, joyous stupidity, on glorious display.

It seems we can't attribute carnival to the ancient Romans, or for that matter blame them for it, as we can certain other celebrations.  The only festival of ancient Rome I'm aware of taking place in what we call February was that of the Lupercalia.  That festival was in the nature of a purification ritual, a cleansing of he city before spring.  A kind of spring cleaning?  In any case, it seems it involved the sacrifice of a male goat or goats and a dog, after which members of its priesthood would run naked around the Palatine Hill, striking onlookers with strips of the sacrificed animals.  This was apparently a cause of laughter.  Still, it hardly seems like carnival as we know it today.

It was a pre-Christian celebration though, and one the early Church decided was so popular it had to be allowed to continue, though Christianized.  And so it marks the period before Lent.  Thus, we're allowed to wallow in our animal nature and indulge its seemingly endless capacity for depravity of some sort or another before we do harsh penance for being human until Easter, that time of the Resurrection and, oddly, bunnies and eggs, real or chocolate.

The title to this post is taken from a novel by Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival.  The novel involved the efforts of an American business man who decided to try to run a hotel on a fictional Caribbean island.  As might be expected, he found it difficult to do, mostly as a result of the fact that he, as an American, was incapable of understanding that the islanders were not nearly as concerned with, or impressed by, the needs of operating a business in the American way.  As also might be expected, it is a stereotypical portrayal of a clash of cultures, particularly that of the Caribbean, for comic effect.  Fans of the Caribbean (I am one) may find it enjoyable, even for other reasons.

There's another kind of carnival, though, that Americans are familiar with as traveling shows involving amusement rides, games of chance, freak shows, vendors of various kinds of unhealthy food, and operated by those known as Carnies or Carnys, who have the general reputation of con artists.

I begin to wonder whether our Glorious Republic has taken on the aspect of this latter kind of carnival.  Whether, in other words, it has become a vast, stationary show put on by con artists of one kind or another, who seek for selfish reasons to distract and amuse us while they fleece us like the dumb, gullible sheep we seem intent on being.

It's a show where freaks abound, and are on permanent and blatant display.  There are rides and games aplenty, shills, hawkers, barkers, con artists are everywhere.

It's a carnival of the irrational, even of the absurd.  Professional athletes praise God for their victories, and this is found admirable but should be viewed as blasphemous--what kind of God intervenes to decide the outcome of a football/basketball/baseball game?  A very small one, I would think.  At least Homer's gods intervened in the serious business of a war, though even a war on this tiny dot in the universe can only be of slight significance.

There are outcries over the fact that a character in a movie is not portrayed as being openly gay, because the author of the work decided to indulge an impulse, incomprehensible to me, to declare the character's sexual preferences.  If Dumbledore is gay, what's the sexuality of the other non-existent characters in those books or movies?  Does Hagrid practice bestiality?

Our politicians are too busy trying to win political points, accumulate cash, and browning their noses to engage in the nation's serious business.  Our artists, such as they are, thoughtless and mendacious.  Our statesmanship is short-sighted, our culture--well, perhaps Oscar Wilde was right about us.

Should the carnival that America has become stop, or continue?  Epictetus wisely said that life is a feast, and that we should sample what comes our way during the feasting that's to our liking, taking never too much or too little, without hurry.   We can't control the carnival; neither can we control the feast.  The show will go on, it's fruitless to protest or deplore the fact that it does and will.  What can we do but the best we can that's within our power?  Enjoy the carnival, if you can.  If you can't, ignore it.