California to Ohio: Pondering Mania

An audio book by Lionel Shriver is almost perfect. Almost.

[I’m sending out these travel posts for paid subscribers as a thank you, since I would not be able to take this trip otherwise. Some of you have used the Tip Jar too, so if that’s the case and you are not able to read this, let me know]

The best way to get through a long road trip, and one of the reasons I love going on them, is hours on the road just listening. Sometimes it’s the daily podcasts. Sometimes it’s just the sounds of the road, the wind, the rain, the traffic. But much of the time, it’s audiobooks.

I like to get on the road, so I don’t look at the news very much, which can make us needlessly angry about things we can’t do anything about.

Driving across the country woke me up to the reality of how people really live. If you were like me and you spent most of your time working and living online, sucked into the bubble of the Left, you would have long since lost touch with everyday life in this country—as most have—in Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the media.

But driving across it, it’s impossible not to see Americans. While it’s true that so much of our shopping is in mini malls and big box stores like Walmart and Lowe’s, there are also smaller independent shops with character, like coffee shacks or breakfast diners.

Dumb and Dumber

On the Left, we had this fantasy that we could rid the planet of plastic bags. But one trip across the country will rid you of that notion. They’re everywhere, just like water bottles. In our utopia, we really believed we could force people to comply with our moral superiority.

Driving across the country puts things into perspective. That reminds me of the line from This is Spinal Tap when they visit Elvis’ grave, “too much f*cking perspective.”Spinal Tap is funny because the characters are dumb. Dumb is funny. But it’s also true that brilliant thoughts shine through, like that one.

A society afraid to make fun of the dumb and stupid is the mania at the center of Lionel Shriver’s novel, Mania.

I picked it up after hearing her talk about it on the Triggernometry podcast. But I did wonder why I hadn’t heard of it. Why didn’t it make much of a splash? Why wasn’t it a scandal? Why did almost no one talk about it?

Here she is explaining manias and the kind of mania her book is about:

In Mania, it is verboten to be smart. Everyone must be dumb so everyone can be equal. It parallels mostly the antiracist movement, I’d say, though she steers clear of any racial component - the enemies are the smartists. Even Barack Obama fails to do well in this kind of climate.

Mania is about a smart woman whose life unravels once she is outed as a “smartist.” She loses everything just for snapping one day and accidentally speaking the truth. It is chilling to see her life and friendships unravel all for being a non-conformist.

Having lived through something similar, I can attest to its authenticity. As I write that sentence, I imagine the novel’s narrator correcting me because that probably isn’t the right use of that word, authenticity.

That makes Mania a good read, because it isn’t so far into the realm of satire that you can’t understand how people can get caught up in it. Ultimately, a stupid society can lead to a society falling apart. Nothing works. Planes can’t fly. The economy crashes. But this need to conform and be good takes over, and there seems to be no way out.