Confederacies
I laughed my head off last week after reading that item that said Miriam Defensor-Santiago had apologized to people with Down Syndrome. After slamming the Down Syndrome Association of the Philippines for threatening to sue her for using “mongoloid” in a derogatory sense, she relented. “I extend the hand of friendship. Out of goodwill, I will impose self-censorship, by avoiding in the future any word that refers to a person with disability.”
The case stemmed from Santiago saying, “I tell all my enemies who just want to get rid of me, stop molesting me, you mongoloids!” That brought the Down Syndrome Association down on her.
In her defense, Santiago said she was just quoting from “A Confederacy of Dunces,” the novel by John Kennedy Toole that won a Pulitzer Prize. When Toole was alive, Santiago said, he was never criticized for using “mongoloid,” and his work was even praised by literary critics.
The funny part here is not that Santiago should compare her fate to that of Toole, though that is epically funny enough in itself. There are many reasons why Toole was never criticized for using the “m” word while he was alive, the most compelling of which is that he was dead. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is doubly tragicomic in that Toole committed suicide in 1969 at age 32 shortly after writing it, thinking it would never see print, never mind find a readership. It was only through the persistent efforts of his mother to get a teacher-writer in Loyola named Walker Percy to read it—who was astounded by it and went on to fight for it—that the world got to know about it. It swiftly became a cult classic and won the Pulitzer in 1981.
But there are other reasons Toole was never criticized and even praised for his book, chiefly literary. Which brings me to what’s truly funny about all this. Quoting literature doesn’t always make you literate.
“A Confederacy of Dunces” is the inspiration for the title of my collection of columns more than 20 years ago called, “Dance of the Dunces.” My reaction when Santiago first said, “Stop molesting me, you mongoloids” was to ask myself, “Now why is that so familiar?” Then I remembered Toole’s book. I was about to comment that Santiago’s comment reminded me of a character in a novel who also liked saying “mongoloids” when she confirmed the fact.
Toole’s protagonist—though one is at pains to call him thus—is one of the most marvelous creations in fiction. He is Ignatius Reilly, a fat slob, a misogynist, a “perverse Thomas Aquinas,” as Percy himself calls him, who is on a one-man crusade against the world. In his late 20s, he still lives with his mother and lets her do all the work, while he goes to the movies every night with the express purpose of expostulating—loudly, to the chagrin of the movie house manager—against them. He rails at anything and everything, from Mark Twain to Freud, from TV to music, from cars to cops.
The specific part Santiago quotes is when Ignatius answers the phone and screams at the cop who is asking for his mother, “Stop molesting us, you mongoloid.” The cop was in fact trying to help his mother who had crashed her car into the façade of a building. Which leaves the reader in doubt about the irony or satire of it: Ignatius might as well have been addressing himself.
But that is Ignatius Reilly, paranoid, outrageous, delusional, quite literally out of this world, if not indeed out of his mind. Someone given to outbursts, sudden swings of mood, phantasmagoric views of life and the world. The embodiment of what we ourselves would call may tililing. The quintessence of what we ourselves would call “Brenda.” That can be the funniest thing in literature, a picaresque character that can make you laugh out loud at his inspired lunacy and lunatic inspiration. At his mad philosophy and philosophic madness. But it’s not so in real life. Or if it’s so at all, it’s the kind where you’re not entirely being figurative when you say, “I’m dying of laughter here.” At the end of “Confederacy of Dunces,” Ignatius’ own mother is plotting with her best friend to commit him to a mental institution.
What can one say? It helps to first read the book from which you are lifting passages.
It helps at least to keep you from joining the confederacy.
* * *
The United States is getting scarier by the day. The latest in its increasing slide into insane behavior is someone opening fire on a crowded movie house during a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Doubtless a lot of things will be blamed for it—probably including Barack Obama, the GOP having blamed him for everything that has gone wrong in America—but not the one culprit Michael Moore positively identified after the massacre in Columbine. Which is the proliferation of guns.
But that’s not the scariest thing about America today. What is is the proliferation of people like Mitt Romney et al. who would like to hold America’s guns in their hands. Their campaign is a mind-boggling throwback to the 1950s, complete with its witch-hunt of Americans engaging in un-American activities. Chief of them Obama, whom they continue to accuse of having done the most un-American thing there is, which is being born non-American. The levels of vituperation against people they tag as “ashamed of America,” aided by Randolph-, or indeed McCarthyist-type, media like Fox, have grown strident.
Right now, Romney seems to be putting up a fight. Which makes you wonder what America will be like when the lunatic fringe becomes the lunatic mainstream. Which makes you wonder what the world will be like with America’s nuclear arsenal in their hands while America’s economic woes deepen.
Makes you empathize exceptionally strongly with the victims of that movie house. What can one say?
The confederacy rises.
