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Having
lost Vonnegut so recently, it's nice to be put on the path
to recovery by The Braindead Megaphone, a book of essays
by George Saunders. Since 1997, Saunders has been amazing
readers with stories that venture into absurd universes, narrated
by dryly intelligent characters who always manage to draw
out the latent morality in humankind's behavior. It's one
thing to be a funny writer, but it's another thing entirely
to engage one's audience so much that they are willing to
accept thinly-veiled discussions of morality.
In last
year's In Persuasion Nation, Saunders appealed to the
decency in all of us when faced with rampant consumerism and
social conditioning; in The Braindead Megaphone, he
reexamines many of the same themes, though it might be a little
difficult for some readers to swallow the undisguised sentimentalism
of a real human—George Saunders, the author—rather
than the usual narrator of a structured story. Megaphone
is a succinct and richly coherent work whose main concern
is the question of human empathy.
It's
interesting to note that the collection opens with an essay
on the dulling power of the media, then follows with essays
originally written for GQ. Of course, the title essay,
"The Braindead Megaphone," does come with a brief disclaimer
that, duh, Saunders knows, not all our media is stupid. Using
one of his trademark Inventive Metaphors (which so often drive
his short fiction), Saunders compares the "stupid media" to
a guy with a bullhorn at a
party, who doesn't know what he will say before he says it.
It may be obvious that this guy is an idiot but, nevertheless,
everyone at the party will find their conversations turning
to whatever inane topic the megaphone guy wants to discuss,
simply because he is loud. Many of us can identify with a
growing impatience toward stupid media on occasions when reports
on Anna Nicole Smith take precedence over world affairs. Saunders
is eloquent, entertaining, and dramatic all at once. The essay
builds power as he examines how we got to this point, and
(surprise!) it has to do with storytelling. "Our venture in
Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of
the imagination," he writes.
The rest
of the book shines with the illumination cast on it by this
opening essay. Saunders launches into reports from Dubai,
from Nepal, from the U.S./Mexican border in Laredo, Texas,
and from Britain, all searching for points where completely
different human experiences collide. "A New Mecca," the report
from Dubai, finds Saunders tearing up while watching a group
of Arab families ice skating on an artificial ice rink who
are unable to hide their obvious excitement at the exotic
novelty. "If everybody in America could see this," he concludes,
"our foreign policy would change." There are half a dozen
other teary, compassionate moments in The Braindead Megaphone,
which, in 2007, are a risk for an American writer who got
his start in The New Yorker, but absolutely necessary
in the context of the book.
Even
the essays on literature—a short piece on Johnny Tremaine
and an effusive essay about "the best American novel," The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—find their conclusion
in the power of fiction to humanize us. Comparing Johnny
Tremaine to his textbooks, Saunders says of the latter,
"the sentences…seemed to have given up on life, or to never
have taken life sufficiently personally. They weren't lies,
exactly, but they weren't true either. They lacked will. They
seemed committee-written, seemed to emanate from no-person,
to argue against the intimate actual feeling of minute-to-minute
life." Of course, readers of any of Saunder's previous work,
know that clinical, bloated sentences are the exact opposite
of what he writes.
Perhaps
the greatest thing about the book is its simultaneous use
of satire and empathy—a combination which makes writers
like Saunders and Vonnegut so powerful. Readers are seduced
by the hilarity of an absurd situation, and then they are
thrust into a thrilling insight on the human condition. Pieces
like "A Brief Study of British Literature" and "Nostalgia"
are written in Saunders's recognizable confused-American voice,
complete with statements turned into questions ("To me? Those
are not lyrics") and idiotic enthusiasm ("What is the essential
quality of the Pessimist? They think too much, then get all
depressed and paralyzed!…Me, I prefer to think as little as
possible and stay peppy!"). Never verging into very dark territory,
these snippets offer real relief for those of us who feel
dismay over the state of American culture on a daily basis.
The idea
of America is a somewhat overheated one in the years following
9/11 and all its repercussions, and much of what Saunders
says here about the nation will not seem radical to some readers.
In fact, the arguments of these essays are so common-sense
that they can seem obvious—Mexican/American relations
are summed up thusly: "put a poor country next to a rich one,
and watch which way the traffic flows." His solution to the
"loud and stupid" state of our media might seem anticlimactic:
"Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of
intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying
stance, is the antidote." Combating Megaphone Guy with a pen
is not quite the battle some people were hoping to see.
But the
connectedness of the ideas in this book increases their power
exponentially. What does a Buddhist boy in Nepal, who meditates
without food and water for seven months straight, have to
do with Huck Finn? Both strive for transcendence, from poverty
and from the inequality of social hierarchies, respectively.
Saunders seems to say that while other countries struggle
with the limited world view that comes from a lack of access
to the media, Americans are drowning in exposure to the same
force and use it for all the wrong reasons. Just as Buddha
Boy wants to rise above his existence of suffering, Americans
ought to rise above the ease provided by wealth and use the
power of the media to promote empathy and repair cultural
connections. It all begins with turning off American Idol,
and everything like it, one little bit at a time.
(September,
2007)
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