“These are stupid times, intertwined bombast and bullshit whipped to a fine fizz.” – John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia

What could be more pertinent to our times than this bitter quotation from John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia (1973), an epic novel in verse?  Gardner’s retelling of the classical myth reflects the politics, literary eclecticism, and feminist issues of the 1960s and early 1970s – and now our own. As a power couple, Jason and Medeia are a failure.  Jason is a brave hero and a spellbinding storyteller; she is a powerful witch, an adoring wife, and devoted mother. Madly in love with Jason, Medeia committed nefarious deeds, including murder, to  help Jason achieve his questionable heroic goals.  Without her magic, it could not have been done. And she has not wavered in her love for him.

Jason is now an ambitious politician having a midlife crisis. Midlife crises come earlier in antiquity, with a shorter life span: Jason was perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties when he decided to leave Medeia to marry a princess in a prestigious family. This power move was a very bad idea, because men and women have equally bad ideas, and few couples make worse decisions than these two. 

Poetry is not Gardner’s forte, and this novel is far too long , but that quotation haunts me. It is just one damned stupid thing after another in the 2020s.  In the twenty-first century, the greatest challenge is climate change, which is barely addressed, despite the rising temperatures, pollution, wildfires, droughts, storms, and water shortages that will eventually kill the planet.

Politics is not my field, and I read as little about it as possible. But here are some amateur observations:  the red states are like mini-republics, with an agenda to ban books, cut funds to education, promote guns, even recommend that teachers arm themselves, and ignore an uptick in Covid cases (the evidence is found in the waste-water).

Some of the censorship issues are almost too cartoonish to believe:  two Moms for Liberty in Florida  called the police to report “porn” in a  high school. The porn proved to be  a Y.A. fantasy novel by Jennifer Armentrout, Storm and Fury, in the school library. Since the fantasy novel is about gargoyles, it is impossible to take this incident seriously.  But one of them  compared the book to Playboy, and demanded the arrest of two school librarians.  No arrests were made that day.  

Now if they could harness that energy to ban guns, I’d join them.

As Donald Barthelme said, “Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.”