Post-Modern Mardi Gras

Along with many other professors, Dr. Mary Ann Gillies of Canada's Simon Fraser University points out that "post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression." Irony in this context means "the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning," or an "incongruity between the actual result...and the normal or expected result" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/). If Dr. Gillies wants examples to illustrate her lectures, she need look no further than President Obama's speech last Tuesday to the Joint Session of Congress. It was a post modern headtrip.

Arguably the most ironic feature of the speech was the day upon which it was delivered. Is it even possible that his staff overlooked the fact that he was to present the rationale of his budget proposals to Congress on Mardi Gras--Fat Tuesday? According to AmericanCatholic.org, "Fat Tuesday is the last hurrah before the Catholic season of Lent." The other name for the holiday of course, is Carnival, literally an exuberant and hedonistic "farewell to the flesh," a medieval opportunity to revel in sensual pleasures before the denials of Lent. It is a time for indulging appetites, for gluttony, excess, intemperance and dissipation. In other words, it is the opportunity the Democrat Party has been waiting for to call up the overwhelming tide of new spending and pet projects which have been thwarted by twelve years of Republican domination in the Congress. It's just the season for indulging pent-up desires, they say, and the President picked this one day to announce them. That's irony.

It's also bad news for all of us. The Democrat Congress is having the party, but we're going to suffer the hangover. The forty days of Lent began on Ash Wednesday, the day after the President's speech, and are a period of fasting, abstinence and the humiliation of the flesh, to cleanse us from the influences of world, and more pointedly, to atone for the excesses of Fat Tuesday. That's the scary part about the President's budget proposals. The load of taxation and borrowing that will have to be born to pay for the largest increase in government in history cannot possibly result in anything other than tight credit, a depressed business climate, and ultimately Carter Era style inflation. We may be making Lenten payments against the Fat Tuesday Budget literally for generations, which only heightens the irony of his timing.

It can't be that President Obama doesn't grasp the connection. In fact, the President himself clearly has a keen sense of irony. It's no secret that the total cost of his budget proposals, $3.6 trillion, will make Barak Obama the man who spent more money in one year than anyone, ever! One commentator noted that if the Federal Government spent a dollar a minute, a million dollars would last a little less than two years, a billion dollars would last until the year 3911, and a trillion dollars would last nearly two million years into the future. Barak Obama is going to spend over three-and-a-half times that amount in just one year. And what is the title of his budget document? "A New Era of Responsibility." That's either monumental irony or epic arrogance. It's hard to say which.

Perhaps the answer lies in the rest of Dr. Gillies' definition of post modern irony. "Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression," she says, "but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony." President Obama and his Party have promised us change which will stand the conventions of the American system on its head. The change will be what falls out of our pockets.

PS