The Thing From Beyond the Vom
This is a long post that is, in fact, despite all beginning appearances to the contrary, about America in the world of 2005. It comes out of a number of things I've been thinking about lately, including some of the stuff I've been writing about in the pseudo-series I'm calling "The New New World". Accordingly, I'm subtitling this post "The New New World, Part 5",

The Theater of the Absurd

It is an oversimplification to assume that any age presents a homogeneous pattern. Ours being, more than most others, an age of transition, it displays a bewilderingly stratified picture: medieval beliefs still held and overlaid by eighteenth-century rationalism and mid-nineteenth-century Marxism, rocked by sudden volcanic eruptions of prehistoric fanaticisms and primitive tribal cults. Each of these components of the cultural pattern of the age finds its own artistic expression. The Theater of the Absurd, however, can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time.

The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions.

That was written forty-four years ago, describing the world as Esslin saw it in 1961. Has the world changed since then?