Barking Mad

What better way to illustrate the smug, cruel, hectoring and thoughtless nature of the times then through this later sketch by Goya?  Surely you see someone you've seen before among those pictured, here?  Someone you've seen on TV or a computer monitor or smartphone, perhaps (where else do we see anyone or anything, anymore?).

I'm increasingly impressed by what I think are the limits of the human mind, made bare--certainly not glorious--by the vast information available to us and our sad reaction to it.  It must be true that there is more available, more to know if we were to make the effort, than ever before in our history.  But though that's clear it isn't possible to think that we're any the better for it.  We seem instead to be suffering from a collective form of attention deficit disorder.

A particular kind of collective ADD, however.  One in which our failure, or inability, to pay attention is paramount, particularly in connection with information which doesn't comfort us or comport with our preferences.  We seem unable to either process or accept such information.  In fact, more than that is involved.  We also actively doubt and even condemn such information.  It is "fake news" to use the unwittingly stupid parlance of the times.  It's something designed to mislead us, by enemies sometimes known, sometimes unknown, sometimes imagined.

As may be expected, this rejection of what doesn't accord with our beliefs and desires is matched by an unthinking, uncritical, acceptance of what does.  Words and sounds and images appear before us or are heard by us, and if we like them we believe them to be the way, the truth, and the light (there's something religious about the zeal with which we accept what we like, especially when it's transmitted via the technology we use every minute of the day, which increasingly becomes our reality).  So, we pass it along through social media as the truth, without verifying what is said or pictured.

In times when communication was much slower than it is now, someone, possibly P.T. Barnum, noted that a sucker is born every minute.  Now perhaps it's more accurate to say suckers are born always.  Why particularize, or qualify?    We live in the time, or kingdom, of the con artist.  Never before has it been easier to pass on and popularize untruth and exaggeration.  In an age where we come more and more to seek simple answers, an understandable result when a limited mind is subject to unlimited information, it may be the case as well that never before have we been more inclined to be conned.

Lately I've been thinking of the play Marat/Sade, and the movie inspired by it (actual title:  The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade).  I'd like to see it again.  It seems particularly pertinent given the upcoming election here in God's Favorite Country.  Perhaps we're in a madhouse of sorts, under the direction of other, more fortunate inmates, playing out scenes derived from a cherished past for the benefit of those who wish us to be amused and distracted while we do their bidding.