KULTUR-KAMPT REDUX ET REDUX DE NUEVO

I say again,
Let no man think me a fool;
if otherwise,, yet as a fool receive me..........."

1Cor 11:18

(The author here partakes, to make a point, of his weaknesses and includes the elements of which there is a surfeit to be sure, in the terminal stages of our kultur. That would include sarcasm, irony, self-exposure, and the comedy of self-deprecation. This seems epidemic, of necessity, amongst people groups who can no longer boast that they know the difference between good and evil. Which is rather remarkable since this ability was God's creation --and privilege--and Satan's first illegitimate gift. But,as with many stolen items , the thrill of the initial revelation and the pleasures of sitting in judgment of oneself and everyone else, quickly come to ennui. We do suffer from a glut of knowledge--not wisdom--and cannot decide even whether or not to put that tomato in the fruit salad--"because I can" seems to be reason enough for those who are committed to the principle of arbitrariness alone as a basis for life alone--"We got lucky, that's all."

I understand from viewers that the "House" physician goes by the assumption that, "Everybody lies." I wonder how many people-all liars apparently-have actually analyzed this unprovable assumption and massive broad-stroked condemnation. On my view of course, "There is therefore now no condemnation." and the worry of having to know it all and make grandiose assumptions is dissolving as we speak.(and that not fast enough. Look at the time!)

Here's the problem: If lying is a real category, then so is truth. So the fictional House is not only implying that "The truth is out there" but that we can know it after all. This in addition to the obvious moral dimension which is really nothing but recycled Calvinism! (Hobbes is still having trouble getting through-- but, after all, he is just a talking animal-by his own admission--and we all know how much we can trust jungle cats--"we like to cultivate that impression.")

I don't doubt that the TV House, by virtue of his writers who of course haven't done a day's work of medicine in their lives, calls himself a liar and a cheat and one self-deceived as well. But this blanket, if it covers us all, is really just a theme of the ages--Eugene O'Neill comes to mind--so the building blocks of this sardonic comedy are entirely borrowed as a convention and tradition--the only startling part, esp for those who are naif re:history and esp. art history is the application to the current medical scene.Funny doctors we will always have with us. Hugh Laurie has done his share of Shakespeare and does know and use history and the aphorism that we never learn from history. (His skit wherein he plays Shakespeare to his editor Rowan Atkinson is a real stitch-you may have to be sown back together after a viewing!!--available online of course on U-tub)

As we begin 1/1/11 (so easy to write!) I at least will be coming back to this controversy, on the human level, time and again. The best work in my view is still The Screwtape Letters and its ever-so-accurate devil's advocacy. It's portrayal of hell ("she's the sort of person that would find ME funny!) as a poor and backwards imitation of Light that still cannot escape "inconvenient truths' about it's own wholly derivative existence, is also a sort of "Divine Comedy" --such that we who choose by whatever means to follow that Light, with much stumbling due to our hand-made fog machines, may indeed "laugh all the way to the bank"!!!)

(see Ralph Wood's book, "The Comedy of Redemption" , and of course his book on Flannery O'Connor, who said of her own art: "Mine is a comic work, but that does not detract from its seriousness.")