America the Carnivalized

One of my favorite films is a performance of Die Fledermaus at Covent Gardens, starring Kiri te Kanawa.  It is the perfect New Year’s Eve performance, with all sorts of masks, mistaken identities, and even a man going to jail in someone else’s place (although he really does deserve to go to jail).  The most typical New Year’s Eve motif, though, is that of a housemaid dressing up in her mistress’s dress and attending a party to which she has not been invited, as a member of the nobility.  It is a delightful performance, complete with the great music Strauss wrote for the occasion.

I call the housemaid’s performance the most typical because the idea behind it goes back at least to the Middle Ages, with its motif of what has come to be called carnivalization.  Carnivalization involves “the topsy-turvy world,” in which everything is revealed to be its opposite.  Most of us are familiar with the practice of a beggar’s being dressed up in royal robes and paraded through the streets as the king.  Presumably that is where the phrase “king for a day” originated.  On those occasions, distinguished professors from the local universities would open up their robes to expose the clown costumes they had on under them.

The theme of carnivalization and the world upside down became popular in literary criticism a few decades back because many works of literature and films exhibited it.  It is remarkable how many times the theme of a commoner’s being a perfect double of a king and assuming his place in order to protect that king showed up for a while.  In my opinion, one of Peter Sellers’s best vehicles is his Prisoner of Zenda, with a delightful twist on the theme.  That theme forms a large part of The Great Race, for just one more example.

As I have noted before in this column, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra has an archetypal El Señor, a dictator who assumes any number of identities through the ages.  At one point he gives an order to his subordinates only to realize that they have already started to act on their own.  There is also an archetypical savior sprung from the lower classes who menaces his rule over the centuries.  In one of his manifestations El Señor remarks that the time will come when everyone is king.  When that happens, he says, no one will be king.

We are living in that age, and what bothers me about it is that we have bought the remainder of carnivalization along with the reversal of governing roles.  We seem to be in the process of turning the world upside down by inverting all the values that made us great.  For example, what could be more insane than a court’s acceptance of a lawsuit by a burglar who has fallen through a skylight and demands compensation because it should have been made strong enough to support a burglar?  Tell that one to your contractor!  Or how about the burglar who shut a garage door on himself and couldn’t get out for several days?  He successfully sued the homeowners for not providing a way for burglars to get out of the place.  The rest of the world considers us insane for allowing such topsy-turvy values, and they’re right.

Now our government is making sure illegal aliens get rights that are denied to hard-working citizens.  Is there anyone out there who is capable of looking at the word “illegal” and realizing its basic meaning?  That is only a minor example.  If my information is correct, the first session of Congress following the ratification of the Constitution was opened with a three-hour Bible study and prayer meeting.  Now people are being forced to take down a simple cross out in the desert because it’s on government land.  There’s a huge rebellion brewing in this country, and I hope it leads to a reevaluation of which values made America great.  There is nothing more hypocritical than the practice of “defending” American values while destroying them.