Not too long ago I was watching the most recent movie version of Oscar Wilde's great satire, The Importance of Being Earnest. I can't say that I am very exceptionally well read in English language plays, but I can't imagine there has ever been many, if any, better satires of society than this comedy.
For those who aren't familiar with the work or may have forgotten, Wilde's comedy skewers English society of his time in a most delightful way. Even the title is a delicious, ironic play on words. The main character pretends to be named Earnest when he is not. And the underlying theme is the double entendre of earnest, i.e., sincere, which the characters pretend to be, but are not. In short, the play holds up 19th Century English society as a model of artifice and shallowness. Additionally, we have characters with the name of Jack Worthing, who is required to show his worthiness, a vicar named Chasuble, and Miss Prism who is anything but prismatic. Lady Bracknell, who seems quite brackish, is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. To say she commands respect and obeisance would not say the half of it. To say she demands respect and obeisance is closer to the truth. Better yet, for someone to show anything except respect and obeisance would be, to her, absolutely unthinkable. It would be the same as a zebra with spots instead of stripes--unnatural.
The play shows characters who are tightly bound by the mores of society. So much so, in fact, that they do not realize it. A most telling point comes when Lady Bracknell checks on Jack's "worthiness" by asking him a series of questions to see if he rates high enough for Bracknell's niece's hand in marriage. He must be of the proper stock, you know. He seems to fall short until Lady Bracknell learns that he has a very large income resulting from his inheritance. Immediately Mr. Worthing is deemed qualified. I believe that Wilde is telling us that phony hypocrisy was at the core of English society. Birthright status was deemed all, except when trumped by wealth.
I mention all this because I believe it speaks to many of the ills in today's America. How ironic that our Revolution was forged, in part, due to a revulsion to the idea of an inherited nobility. Thus, we have the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all men are created equal. This was a truly revolutionary thought at a time when the "divine right of kings" was still the predominant viewpoint in the world. And yet now, it would seem, there is a major segment in our society which believes that wealth indicates superiority, even when that wealth is hereditary. If someone is rich, it is because they deserve it; if someone is poor, it is because they aren't worthy or deserving. The move in the last 15 to 20 years to abolish the estate tax is nothing less than an attempt to perpetuate an aristocracy of the very wealthy. The tax cuts for the rich and the even more preposterous cuts proposed by the Ryan budget and now Republican candidate Pawlenty will lead to a much greater consolidation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, at the expense of the rest of us. We are well on our way to becoming a third world country and a nation of haves and have nots. And yet, like the characters in Earnest, too many Americans can't see how they are being manipulated by the modern day mores of our society, as reinforced by conservative media. Like those characters, they cannot even envision questioning the way things are and whether they should be any different.
