I recently started re-reading John Kennedy Toole's great comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces. For a New Orleanian, it's kind of like Scotsmen reading Burns. It's our "national literature." It's also a very funny book.
And, for the first time, I realized it's a prescient book. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, spends most of his time in his bedroom on Constantinople Street scribbling diatribes in his endless supply of Big Chief tablets, drinking Dr. Nut cola, and practicing onanism. When he ventures out, he wears a hunting cap, flannel shirt, and desert boots to survive the harsh New Orleans winter. He fails hilariously at a series of jobs because of his fantastic self-regard, absurdist attempts at political activism, and general sloth.
Sound familiar? John Kennedy Toole was describing pretty much half the people on the Internet. Overweight, peevish, sharing their thoughts with the world, filled with self-pity, angry because the world refuses to recognize their talents . . . he even got the flannel shirts and boots right! Add a Leatherman tool and a comp. sci. degree and Ignatius is the template for Information Technology professionals from Bangalore to Burbank. Switch the green hunting cap for one of those odd Peruvian knitted hats and he's every stoner activist from Zuccotti Park to Athens.
A Confederacy of Dunces has a reputation as a great portrait of New Orleans in the mid-Twentieth Century, but it also managed something greater: it predicted the future course of American society in general. We are all Ignatius J. Reilly now.
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