Carnival

I am amazed at the orgiastic outpouring of popular sentiment that is taking place outside my window. Who could imagine that our indifferent, distracted, hopelessly self-absorbed young people could care about something as abstract as politics? But that is just the issue - how is it possible to care this much about the victory of one candidate over another when the actual differences between them are so slight?

Doubtless, it is good that Obama has become the president of the United States. The alternative was far worse, and perhaps he really will infuse some remnant of youthful (since when is one young at 47?) idealism into American politics. But all the same, what explains this "shrieking into the heart of the night" that I have just heard outside my window? Surely it is not the shriek of implacable life, rending apart the bonds of all lifelessness and annihilating the dead world's blind resistance, as in Rilke's letter?

No, the title of my post is misleading: this eruption of mass feeling is utterly monological. There is no equivocation, no sideward glances, no travesty, no duality of creation and destruction. It is as if scripted - the mass voicing, on cue, of the masses' support of the status quo; the cathartic release of formerly undirected energy in a form perfectly safe from censure. This transgression is allowed, and we can transgress with a good conscience. That is, after all, the problem with Bakhtin's carnival. The authorities allowed the stupid peasants to have their fun a few times a year because the moment of anarchy merely perpetuated the permanent rule of king and pope.