1 Boring Old Man

 

When the picture a man has of himself is provided by those who see him, in the distorted image of himself that they give back to him, he has rejected what the philosopher has called reality. He has, moreover, rejected the possibility of projecting himself into his future and existing in the fullest sense. In social situations we play a part that is not ourself. If we passively become that part, we are thereby avoiding the important decisions and choices by which personality should be formed. After confessing her sins to Garcin, Inès acknowledges her evil and concludes with a statement as significant as Garcin’s definition of hell. She needs the suffering of others in order to exist. The game a man plays in society, in being such and such a character, is pernicious in that he becomes caught in it.

In the Play, towards the end one of the characters tires of their confessions and character creation and recreation and demands to be let out. The door flies open. But no one leaves. They’re trapped in the game forever. Thus the name, No Exit…

The French never tire of thinking about the symbolic Existential dilemmas. In America, we live them out in fact. Our current leaders spent the years when they were out of government in rooms dreaming of a future where they could play out their ideas: Unitary Executive, Pre-emptive War, Regime Change in Iraq, the Wolfowitz/Bush Doctrine, the New Republican Century, a whole series of ideas that bounced back and forth as they mirrored each other trying to shine up their tarnished pasts. When they were thrown into real life in 2000, they continued to live in the un-reality of their shared delusional world. In fact, they still live there, still bouncing back and forth the lingering remnants from previous experience and shared distortions. There truly is No Exit from the Iraq War. They continue to fight the fictional war they envisioned before they started it. They still sit in rooms reflecting each other’s heroic self images, bearing no relationship to reality. They amplify the bizarreness of things by justifying decisions that were flawed when made, but must be jury-rigged into flawlessness. They can never exit. To exit would be to admit that it is a failed enterprise – even worse, that it should never have happened in the first place. Their mantra is that the War has been "worth it."