Last Tuesday, North Korea opened fire on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, killing four people, including two civilians. As per usual, the motives of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s erratic dictator, are less than clear. There was no provocation from the South, and the North’s supposed justification—that the whole thing was a response to drills carried out by the South Korean artillery on the island—was less than satisfactory. But so goes diplomacy on the Korean peninsula.
Sarah Palin, never one to miss an opportunity, used the crisis to show once again how utterly incompetent she is for higher office, saying, “We’ve gotta stand with our North Korean allies.” Presumably she misspoke and wasn’t suggesting a cataclysmic shift in our foreign policy, but the gaffe was still an embarrassment. And to think there are people out there who want to put her in charge of the free world.
Then we found out that secret peace talks between coalition and Taliban leaders to end the war in Afghanistan were all for naught. The talks were supposedly going well until we learned that the senior insurgent with whom our allies had been bargaining turned out to be nothing but a shopkeeper posing as a member of the Taliban. That pretty well killed those negotiations.
Lest we begin to worry that all the news from last week was so grim, it’s important to remember that Palin’s daughter Bristol didn’t win in the finals of “Dancing With The Stars.” Aside from a television set in Wisconsin, nobody seems to have suffered permanent damage from Bristol’s inexplicable run on the show.
In a world on the brink of disaster, threatened by carbon emissions, unstable dictators, inept politicians, ballooning deficits and the like, there are mornings on which I wake up, open the newspaper, and can only hang my head. Just when I think things can’t get any more insane, North Korea pounds Yeonpyeong, a Taliban leader turns out to be a masquerading shopkeeper and Bristol Palin makes it to the finals of a reality TV show.
My first reaction is despair. How can sense be made of so much senselessness? Then comes fear; how long before it’s a nuclear weapon being launched from Pyongyang?
But then comes laughter. Laughter at how terrifying and awful and just plain silly the world is. Laughter, because it’s the only thing left.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a group of writers looked around and found that all the certainties that had once given shape to civilization had fallen away. After the horrors of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, cosmic order seemed impossible. These authors turned out work that embraced and even celebrated the irrationality of the universe. Later, they would come to be called Absurdists. Their worldview can be summarized by the first line of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: There’s “nothing to be done.”
Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, we wait for a salvation that may never come. We endure in a world long since given up to irrationality. Some see that as a very cold existence. But not me. I take comfort in knowing that we’re all in this together, laughing at the world’s absurdity.
Nathaniel French is a senior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
