Bridge to Somewhere

Here we go again, and to begin with I must apologize. But it's not my fault, because every time I watch The Colbert Report I find something to write about, a reason to be optimistic, and more confirmation that the line between fiction and reality is as only as strong as the metafiction that connects it.

Colbert has a Midas touch when it comes to metafiction, which for those who don't enjoy reading yawning theoretical treatises like I do is basically fiction about fiction, its systems, its themes, its memes and onward. Which might sound like a mouthful of mumbo jumbo, but as the acclaimed poet and author of the influential metafiction actually named Mumbo Jumbo Ishmael Reed wrote in the novel, "This is the country where something is successful in direct proportion to how it's put over; how it's gamed." America's chosen vehicle for gaming the system, any system? You guessed it!

The reason metafiction matters is that it's used and abused to sew or fragment fiction and reality in ways that makes you wonder which is which. Take Colbert for example: One minute he's pranking Hungary with an online campaign to supplant Miklos Zrinyi and name the country's Northern M0 Danube bridge after himself, the next minute he's actually having the bridge named after himself! And so it was that the September 14th installment of The Colbert Report found the "real" Hungarian ambassador Andras Simonyi turning Colbert's hyperreal joke into a bonafide Hungarian citizenship, replete with a passport and fifty American dollars worth of Hungarian florint, and...the bridge! First, Colbert had to fulfill some pressing entry requirements, including proving his fluency in Hungarian (he used the Magyar term for "bridge," of course) and...being dead. That alarming realization calmed affairs down faster than Tucker Carlson got booted off of, what else, a reality TV show. But this was not one of Colbert's Kaufman stunts (Andy, not Charlie): Simonyi gave all signs that the rules could be bent to give Colbert the bridge -- not hard to figure considering how easy Colbert passed the fluency test -- even though he's supposed to be dead to receive the honor. Rules aren't what they used to be in our mediaverse. Nowadays, you can break any one you want and just drop your Hancock on a signing statement to make it...what's the word? Oh yeah. Real.

Need more proof? Chew on this: Stephen Colbert has not one but two entries on Wikipedia in his name, because that name (and its identity, depending on the receiver) is used to describe both the man and the character he plays on television. But which is which? Which Colbert was it that unleashed those succulent slams of Bush administration incompetence at the Washington Correspondents Dinner, where the "real" Bush sat through clenched teeth, trying to answer the same question himself? He must have wondered, knowing full well that it wasn't too much earlier in the evening he was talking to a simulation of himself. My unanswered question is whether or not Bush took the exchange further and wondered if he in fact was not himself, but rather his metafictional twin, sitting there through those clenched teeth, listening to Colbert blow holes in some president's legacy.

You laugh, but it was Moby Dick author Herman Melville himself who in one of his greatest, if most maligned, novels about American culture had one character ask another "Who knows, my dear sir, but for a time you may have taken yourself for somebody else? Stranger things have happened." The name of that novel binds all of these ideas together: The Confidence-Man. That the character asking the question is trying to game the other, recalling Reed, to get his cash is as instructive as the fact that Melville's America filled with thieves, hustlers, charlatans, and obsessives. Captain Ahab's desperate quest to destroy a whale for he what perceives as a personal attack (yeah, Ahab, the whale took your leg on purpose) takes the readership and characters of Moby-Dick through hundreds of densely knotted pages only to kill them all but one at sea. Sound like anyone you know?

That the only character left alive in Moby-Dick is named Ishmael connects nicely back to Reed, who delivers us back to Colbert and his metafictional exploits, whether they're exploiting the loopholes of language like his "Word" segment or identity like his dual Wikis. Or whether he's totally gaming systems from Washington to Hungary with a bifurcated persona intent on destabilizing party lines and international borders. That Hungary agreed to name their bridge after him at all is a testament to the power of metafiction, and the way Colbert freaks it, as hip-hop would say, as a cultural weapon. That the Emmys decided to crown Manilow over him shows you just how scared they are of him.

And they should be. With a joke, he got a bridge named after him in Hungary. How long will it be before his metafiction spirals into the juggernaut it can become, before it can make things move that fast here at home? Colbert was born a aggregated simulation of blowhard Bill O'Reilly (who?) and those like him, and now his narrative has superseded O'Reilly's, whose ratings are going nowhere but down. Wikipedia is deciding whether or not Colbert's identiities online, which are nothing but collected synopses and analyses of his "real" self, should be merged at last. (True-school Colbert fans should get in on that action and say hell no.) Sensing his growing power and cachet, The Washington Correspondents Dinner invited one Colbert to deliver a crowd-pleasing speech, and the other showed up with a stream of killer jokes couched in tragic reality.

Some may laugh and others may condemn, but they're the ones who were for the war in Iraq before they were against it, mostly because they couldn't see through the Bush administration's proof-challenged postmodern pitch on Saddam and Baghdad. Right after, I might add, Osama bin Laden and his crew of fundamentalists (literary critics call them formalists) brought down some of the tallest buildings in Manhattan, killing thousands. If that's not proof that the mechanisms of metafiction are to be learned or ignored at the nation's peril, what is? Colbert employs metafiction for laughs and to get bridges in Hungary named after him. Our president, Commander-in-Chief of the greatest superpower on Earth, employs it to take our eyes off of Saudi Arabia, a monarchy trying to align itself as funamentally as possible with the subverted texts of its faith, and keep them on Iraq, a once-secular nation now under the repressive thumb of a leaking fiction called democracy.

Who's laughing now?