And now for some necessary comic relief.
Me: It is possible that some people might have found the plot a little improbable. They might find it hard to believe that, in order to garner political support for his tax cuts, George W. Bush would secretly arrange a giant parade in Washington honoring the richest people in America, who would march front to back in order of their net worth. Or that a cadre of earnest, teetotaling college students would get wind of this and, encouraged by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, rise up to stage a heroic counter-parade honoring basic American values like morality and hard work. Was this perhaps deft satire, a nifty Swiftian touch?
Burrows: No.
Me: Ah.
—from Gene Weingarten’s interview with Robert Burrows on his novel, The Great American Parade.
I should probably fall back on Aristotle at this point and note that the comic is properly the ridiculous, which is itself a species of the ugly—and one must admit that the ridiculous (especially as a species of the ugly) is not without its own (quiet) dignity. (“Dignity!” cries the Gene Kelly in the back of my brain. “Always dignity!”) —For all that The Great American Parade sounds truly, ridiculously wretched (if not so much the worst novel ever published in the English language), Burrows has earned a hallowed footnote in the history of holy follies.
Or, at the very least, he’s made me smile. Here’s one to him, then.
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