The Boy in the Bubble: Our Perilous Postmodern Predicament (Revisited)

Each of us, whether conscious of it or not, lives inside a meta-narrative — a story that gives shape and meaning to our experience. These frameworks help us interpret suffering, progress, history, morality, identity, and hope itself. The songs we listen to, the books we read, the films we absorb, and the headlines that bombard us daily all reinforce or undermine these narratives.

The New World Encyclopedia defines a meta-narrative as: “A theory that tries to give a totalizing, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, and social or cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values.”

For centuries, the dominant Judeo-Christian meta-narrative placed God at the center of human history. Life had meaning because history itself had meaning — a beginning, a moral structure, and an end toward which humanity was moving.

Modernism gradually displaced this framework. The new narrative suggested that humanity no longer needed transcendence. Progress itself became the faith. Science, technology, education, democracy, medicine, and human ingenuity would build a brighter tomorrow. The future became our secular heaven.

But as the twentieth century, these Utopian visions encountered the reality of world wars, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, gulags, terrorism and alienation. The collapse of trust and the realization that technological advancement does not necessarily produce moral advancement became self-evident.

From these ruins Postmodernism emerged. It questioned whether progress was ever truly progress at all. It distrusted grand narratives entirely and hope itself became suspect.

It is in this sense that "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon feels so prophetic.

Listening to the song again recently, I was struck by its architecture. The verses arrive like fragments from a newsfeed: terrorism, drought, celebrity spectacle, scientific breakthroughs, violence, medicine, wealth, and technological marvels. The modern world flashes before us in disconnected images.

-- A bomb in a baby carriage.
-- A baby with a baboon heart.
-- Lasers in the jungle.
-- These are the days of miracle and wonder.

And after each unsettling verse comes the refrain: “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.”

But the reassurance feels hollow, which is the genius of the song. The Boy in the Bubble captures the emotional contradiction of late modernity — astonishing technological achievement paired with spiritual exhaustion and civilizational anxiety. The narrator seems convinced that technological wonder should somehow compensate for spiritual dislocation. Look at all we can do, he insists. Look at the miracles. Look at the progress.

Yet beneath the surface lies exhaustion and dread. The one being comforted appears to understand something the narrator cannot: human beings can surround themselves with spectacle and still feel abandoned. We can cure diseases, transplant organs, photograph distant galaxies, and instantaneously transmit information across the planet — yet remain spiritually adrift. The modern world increasingly resembles a giant illuminated carnival trembling atop a void. 

One thing that makes the song enduring is how it captures the emotional texture of postmodern life long before social media intensified it. Today we scroll endlessly through catastrophe, innovation, entertainment, outrage, tragedy, and distraction in one continuous stream. We are flooded with information yet starving for coherence.

Even the most amazing reels soon leave us bored. Nothing satisfies.

And what makes the song so incredibly pointed is that while the narrator doesn't see it, the one he's trying to comfort sees it perfectly. She's not only crying because of the brokenness of the world but because the one who seeks to comfort her is so oblivious to it. It's like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in which the narrator tells the whole story, yet can't see that which is plain to everyone who hears his tale. Listen to this song several times and hear the painfulness in his appeal at the end of each verse. 

We reassure one another with the language of progress while quietly sensing that something essential has gone missing. Perhaps that is why the song still haunts listeners nearly forty years later. It understands that our crisis is not merely political or technological. It is metaphysical.

The Boy In The Bubble

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shopwindows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turnaround jump shot
It’s everybody jumpstart
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Thinking of the Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
a loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires, and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry

© 1986 Words and Music by Paul Simon and Forere Mothoeloa

Space Oddity and the Quest for Connection

Photo courtesy NASA

THROWBACK THURSDAY
This past week I read an article about loneliness, which simultaneously brought to mind The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby and a book by Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier, Escape from Loneliness. This post on that particular theme was shared 11 years ago today.

Ground Control to Major Tom
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills 

and put your helmet on 

Ground Control to Major Tom 

Commencing countdown, engines on 

Check ignition and
may God's love be with you
 
[spoken] Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Liftoff 

These opening lines from David Bowie's Space Oddity were such a radical departure from the contemporary pop of its time. Contrast this to Honky Tonk Women (Rolling Stones) or Build Me Up, Buttercup (Foundations). The space race was in full swing when this was being written. The title is a transparent take-off on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had been continuously playing in New York for years. But the song is clearly about something else. 

 
This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare
 
You can picture the astronaut, out there alone, cut off from the world floating beneath and away from him, separated not only by space but by his strange experience, uniquely disquieting because how many people can understand or imagine what he is thinking, feeling, going through at this moment, his fears, his anxieties... and that strange comment about his fame... "the papers want to know whose shirts you wear" as he ponders the meaning of his life.

I don't always sleep well, with so much on my mind so much of the time. You have to wonder how these astronauts got any rest at all, wrapped in Mission Control outfits that can't possibly have been as comfy as being in one's underwear between sheets.

As with all great poetry, a rose is not a rose. And the capsule Major Tom is to emerge from is more than a capsule. He is leaving the security of what he knows for the uncertainty of the unknown; he is leaving the domain where he is in control. He is letting go.

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do
 

Tom Wolfe's bestseller The Right Stuff is one fat book, but it's a fascinating read and a great picture of the audacity of the space program and the space cowboys who made it happen. Not everyone has what it takes.

There are many endeavors to which we are suited or ill-suited based on our personal dispositions. Career choices, if at all possible, should not only dovetail with our interests but also our personalities. Some people have to be outdoors and find office space stifling. Some are more social, and others most comfortable in solitude. Some like being active, others prefer contemplative tasks.

Wolfe made it clear that The Right Stuff is more than physical toughness. There's a mental facet involving courage, risk taking and steel nerves, among other things.

Wolfe made them out to be America's heroes, and on one level they were thus. But if you trace the aftermath of their space walks, moon walks, multiple cycles 'round the globe, you find that they were mortals, just like you and I. They struggled with the basic needs we all struggle with, how to make peace with ourselves in a world that often fails to understand us. Learning to overcome the loneliness of our isolation and find peace within our solitude.

Here's the culmination of Bowie's song.

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows

Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you....
 
Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.

Is it tragic, or beautiful? Thomas Wolfe (author of Look Homeward Angel, and not to be confused with Tom Wolfe above) once observed, "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence."

Perhaps Space Oddity makes a connection because nearly all youth feel to some degree a measure of alienation, a disconnection with friends and family, partly out of fear of revealing our most vulnerable selves. When we recognize that nearly all have struggled with self-doubts, uncertainty and apprehension, then we understand we're not so alone as we imagined.

Of these things much more can be said. Have a thoughtful day. For those around you struggling with their isolation, reach out and share your ray of sunshine.

After the Crash

SHORT STORY MONDAY

"We are all so much together, but we are dying of loneliness." ~Albert Schweitzer

After the Crash

Standing outside in the misty dark, Jess felt unusually quiet. A rusty pipe propped open the door of the tin shed, its butt end digging into the gravel driveway. The single dim bulb in the shed revealed a green John Deere and the dusty clutter of four decades -- old car bumpers, boxes of paper, pitchfork, rusted garden tools and engine parts. The haze made the whole scene appear fuzzy and colorless as if draped in a shroud of gauze. Only the green John Deere reflected any color, sitting in a cleared space in the midst of, but seemingly detached from, the labyrinth of rubble. Hank Denmark stood alongside the rear wheel of the tractor, his greasy cap pulled snug over his brow.

"It's got to get more gas!" he shouted to Stanley Ross, who had climbed up into the tractor's seat and was now attempting to disengage the clutch. Stanley pulled the stick up, and then back part way.

"It needs more oil here," Stan said.

Hank told him why it had to be stiff like that, and stepped back as the engine turned over, the old John Deer lurching backward with a heave.

Stan quickly cut it off. "This thing's dangerous!" he laughed, dropping down now from the green behemoth.

Jess looked across the way to a streetlamp softly diffusing its light through the evening fog. The thickness of the moist misty night made everything seem strange. Hank and Stan seemed different, too. Their bodies seemed thicker, bulkier, more real.

Hank and Stan closed their business with the tractor and shuffled out of the shed. Hank turned out the light.

Over by the truck Hank asked a question about a guy who had recently returned to town who was now divorced. Jess continued watching and listening as the two men talked on, standing in the shadow of Stan's box-shaped truck.

A loudspeaker was blaring from some remote distance, but not enough to distract from the story Stan was telling.

After a while, Hank said, "Let's go in the house." The temperature had been dropping quickly.

The three went inside, but feeling awkward and alone, Jess said goodnight and stepped back out again, a nauseous churning in his gut.

He wondered how much of his life work they would be able to recover, and why he hadn’t backed up more often. And how did it happen this time? Folding his arms across his chest he shivered against the cold.