From Another Wonderland

I've never been much of a Tim Burton fan. I can take him or leave him. The talent is obvious but the genre of Grinches and Halloween hauntings in darkest cartoonery isn't my cup of tea. But, speaking of tea parties, this week-end we've got psychedelic meets psychopathic with the relase of Alice in Wonderland.

Kids probably don't read Lewis Carroll's delightful story anymore. They don't read anything these days except text messages and Tweets. Maybe after being technologically awed by this story of pills, madness, elixirs and beheadings, they will be enticed to seek out Alice's Adventure in Wonderland on their ebook reader.

The reviews are in and they somehow reflect the unfamiliarity of the entire generation with the history. Yesterday I saw a blogger breathlessly expounding on the truth that during the period that the book was written there really were mad hatters. Hatters, lacking OSHA to protect them, were commonly driven mad by exposure to the mercury which they used to cure fur into felt for hats.

Here's some comment on the flick:

Wonderland is Like Weird, Ya Know?

It is weird. Ostensibly it was a "nonsense tale" created to entertain Alice and two friends on a road trip in old England. At that level it is fantasy of a high level and entertaining in its own right.

But, many critics have been successful at overlaying a rich political commentary on the book. Certainly there was a monarchy under Queen Victoria who was recognizably a bit weird when viewed from some angles. And there is the mad hatter business.

You could start at that jumping off point and begin to associate other characters in the book with real-life actors in the political scene. The Cheshire Cat would be a Victorian counterpart to our own Bamster; a hollow entity, mouthing platitudes and without substance easily disappearing into nothing but a huge grin.

Eric Holder might have said this:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

Nancy Pelosi has been know to utter profundities such as these:

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or if you'd like it put more simply--'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'"
"I think I should understand that better," Alice said very politely, "`if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it."
"That's nothing to what I could say if I chose," the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone.
"Pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that," said Alice.

And hardly a press conference goes by that we don't get some of this from Robert Gibbs playing the Dodo:

Forward, backward, inward, outward, come and join the chase! Nothing could be drier than a jolly caucus-race. Backward, forward, outward, inward, bottom to the top, never a beginning there can never be a stop to skipping, hopping, tripping, fancy free and gay, I started it tomorrow and will finish yesterday. Round and round and round we go, and dance for evermore, once we were behind but now we find we are be-forward, backward, inward, outward, come and join the chase! Nothing could be drier than a jolly caucus-race. For backward...

It would have taken a fertile imagination for Lewis Carroll to come up with such a rich fantasy on his own. But if he looked at the political scene, it would merely have been the more mundane task of ordering the characters into a meaningful sequence and then letting them speak their minds.