Living in Cloud Cuckoo Land

The Cloud Cuckoo Land I refer to in this post is that of Aristophanes, as depicted in his play The Birds.

It's not the one referred to in the recent novel bearing that title, nor is it the one referred to by assorted German philosophers.  The Germans once thought themselves the successors to the ancient Greeks, for reasons I don't understand, and perhaps still do, but I do not. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land as it has been referred to in more modern times is a place where absurdity reigns, or a fantasy land.  As pictured in Aristophanes' play, it is a kind of kingdom of birds, made by birds who are thought to be the real or original gods.  It's built by birds on the recommendation of a couple of men, who tell them (the birds) of their divinity.  

As might be expected, the play has been interpreted as intended to communicate this or that profound insight, and may well have been intended to do so.  The most obvious interpretation--that it is a comedy written by a great writer of comedies, intended to make people laugh--is thought too vulgar.  But Aristophanes could be quite vulgar when he wanted to be, and the ancients were, in fact, quite vulgar in various respects according to modern sensibilities.  

But Cloud Cuckoo Land may be an appropriate description of the world in which we live, at least as a synonym for absurdity.  The mid-term elections didn't pan out as it was supposed to according to  our ubiquitous media, pundits and politicians, and that may be because of a rejection of the lunatic rantings of Stercus Magnus (as I'll call him for purposes of this post) and his cohort of brown-nosing (if not yet brown-shirted) imbeciles.  That of course would not in itself be absurd, and may even be encouraging.  But, the world in which we live remains one in which people who have no business governing anything run for and even obtain public office; one in which money is deemed speech; one in which it's easier to obtain a deadly weapon than it is to obtain accurate information.  So the dismal failure to predict the outcome of the elections may merely be the result of stupidity instead of a sign of sensibility.  

All part of the Cloud Cuckoo Land we've built, not the birds.

We humans built our Cloud Cuckoo Land believing ourselves to be gods or to be made in God's image, or at least to be the most intelligent creature living on this woefully small and insignificant planet.  We needed nobody to tell us that's what we should do.  Perhaps that's what gods do.  Alas, our Cloud Cuckoo Land is a disaster.

But here's another interpretation of Aristophanes' play.  Perhaps the obvious was, or is, the message of the play.  Perhaps Aristophanes was quite serious. The birds' Cloud Cuckoo Land would be better than any city of humans.  Birds are worthier gods than we are.  In fact, any animal would be.  There is wisdom in the worship of animals engaged in by our ancestors.  Unlike us, animals aren't selfish, greedy, stupid or malicious.  They subsist, they merely are, and live according to nature--that's all they can do, in fact.  They have no pretensions, no dreams or nightmares to confound or confuse them.  They don't make war.  They're what we strive to be and cannot be, perfectly in mesh with the world (at least until we've remake it).