Central to Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, is a carousel that is able to add or subtract years from the life of each rider. It is merely one of the attractions in Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a carnival that had arrived at a sleepy Illinois town in the dead of night – 3 a.m., to be specific – but if figures predominantly in the nefarious scheme of the proprietors, Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark, who want nothing but to sow evil and discord into this bucolic community. What is particularly fascinating is how age plays into their foul enterprise. One of the protagonists, Will, has a father who believes himself to be too old to be the father of a fourteen-year-old. He is fifty-four and works as a janitor at the local library. Another character, Mrs. Foley, rides the carousel and is made young again but blind. She was found crying under a tree after the event. Even Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark take their turns on the carousel, the former, after being made twelve, pretending to be Mrs. Foley’s nephew, no doubt to lure her into their unholy web. From its arrival to its defeat by the power of love and affection, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is bent on touching as many lives as possible with its sinister mystery – a mystery, I hasten to say, that is wrapped up in time. A few spins in one direction adds the years while a few spins in the other direction takes them away. Perhaps this explains the book’s enduring appeal. Push aside the details and the heart of the matter becomes mortality. Our common fate. This is a story about the thing we all must face, and like the carnival, it steals upon us, often enough, at the strangest of hours.
It is no secret that our culture is obsessed with youth. Before 1945, the obsession was not there. The young were to be seen and not heard. I am sure you have heard the expression before. After World War II, however, public opinion shifted in such a way that the young took front and center. So many had suffered during the Great Depression and the Second World War that all anyone wanted to do was to pile attention onto their young. Gone were the days of scrimping and saving, going without, gritting your teeth to just bear it a little while longer. It was time to have fun. It was time to splurge and play. Good times had arrived, at long last.
Naturally, this spoiling turned into a movement that railed against a war in Vietnam amongst other things. The child watching Howdy Doody and playing with his hula hoop was now the long-haired protestor burning his draft card for all to see. Lone Ranger wannabe turned hippy. Singing Lolly Pop, Lolly Pop, Oh Lolly, lolly, lolly to singing Born to be Wild. It all happened in a little over a decade.
This would all be well and good but for the true significance of this shift. America’s Cold War mission to celebrate the individual as opposed to Communism’s groupthink created a population that grew to be quite comfortable asserting a variety of ideas – some of them even fringe – as truths. Whatever the individual asserted to be true, at least for that individual, was true. It was practically unAmerican for it not to be the case. The subjective overtook the objective, making the latter somewhat oppressive. Black and white reality did not jive with American identity. Individualistic Americans could call their own shots, thank you very much. And those shots could be completely disconnected from what everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear would call true. This, in part, is the Postmodern condition. I have discussed it elsewhere in other episodes.
Nothing was safe from redefinition. Marriage. The beginning of human life. Gender. Pushing the boundaries is precisely what it means to be a good American. But I have to wonder if this worldview is exactly why Bradbury’s book, Something Wicked This Way Comes, is so disconcerting. What is more black and white than death? Even the most patriotic among us cannot redefine or otherwise change that fact.
Our national conversation, however, seems to be testing the waters of mortality. We may not get to decide the what of it, but we can decide the when. I am speaking, of course, of so-called physician assisted suicide. Not-so-suddenly, those drunk on the idea of controlling something – by language, by some philosophical sleight of hand, by misplaced expressions of sympathy – have trained their sites on death. Surely, they say, it should not control us; we should control it. In our current year, some call this conversation humane. In 1962, straight out of Bradbury’s twisted world, it was called a carousel. And it brought misery to anyone who came in contact with it. Perhaps this is another takeaway from the novel. Some worldviews are plainly wicked. Without excuse. Without rival hypothesis. Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark had only one thing in mind upon their arrival at that little Illinois town. Their principles were without compromise. Why should we who know better continue to compromise ours?
