The Not So Magic Realism of the Bush Years

During the 1960s and 70s a literary sensibility known as “Magic Realism” emerged in Latin America. Its most illustrious practitioner was the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature, and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read the Colombian author’s capital work is a literary experience like no other, especially for readers from the so-called First World where, since birth, we have been taught that there is a clear and essentially non-negotiable line between the realms of reality and fantasy in our lives. One of the keys to the success Garcia Marquez’s novel can be found in its clever use of situational irony, that is, the way in which he employs a deadpan narrative style to explain “incredible” occurrences.
When critics gather to discuss the grandeur of Garcia Marquez’s writing, they talk about many things, his descriptive might, his politics, and his keen sense of history.

What they seldom mention, however, are his readers. Without them, or perhaps more precisely, without their deeply internalized sense of what constitutes social normality, his literary project would be considerably less compelling. He delights us, or at least those of us raised in the so-called developed world, precisely because he breaks our expectation of how one should react before ostensibly abnormal events.

Over the last eight years, the Bush Administration has executed series of policies that, when viewed in the context of our nation’s core ideals, are nothing short of deviant. These include, among many other things, a belief in the government’s right to wage pre-emptive war (something that certainly exercised us greatly when Hitler and Hirohito invoked it!), imprison citizens without charge, spy widely and with virtually no oversight on American lives, kidnap and torture anyone the president deems dangerous, and withhold from the congress and the general citizenry any information the president himself considers proprietary.

Taking a page from García Márquez, the American political press, deeply indoctrinated with the belief that being “objective” means treating all claims to morality and truth as equally compelling, narrated these abridgements of liberty in wholly non-plussed tones. And their brothers and sisters in the commentariat, who had long since internalized the idea (propagated expertly by the Right in the wake of the sixties and seventies) that expressing anger and outrage are antithetical to being intellectually serious, followed suit, writing article after soberly anguished article about the competing claims of liberty and security in the “new” age of terror. (As if “security” had not been a concern in the decades when these constitutional freedoms were first hammered out, times when, for example, the White House itself was burned down by foreign "terrorists").

Faced with the clear disconnect between the gravity of these constitutional infractions and the ever-equanimous tone of the reportage, American newspaper readers, like those of the great Colombian novelist, have sat back in their easy chairs and learned to laugh and dream with the wryly ironic literature now being served up to them as news in the daily press. Right?

Well, actually, for the most part, they have not. Indeed, the prestige of institutions such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN remains pretty much intact, largely unaffected by their recent off-Broadway run as situational ironists. The question then becomes, Why? While one can never be sure when meditating complex issues such as these, the time may have come to confront a logical, if highly disturbing, explanation: the majority of the readership no longer has an internalized precinct of constitutional normality from which to gaze upon the crimes of the Bush administration and their poker-faced treatment by the media.