"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags. But there is no negative pure enough to entrap our expectations...." Edward Dorn, Gunslinger III.
Part dos of this really goes to heart. The "[b]ut" after the "blow it to rags" claim enters a sense of hesitancy--a recognized limit to the laughter. "Entrapment"'s not just social, it's personal--the realm of projection. The great thing about Dorn's reading of America is his razor-thin balancing act--to locate the actual within the impulse. "Laughter" might "blow it to rags", but the impure "negative" knocks the humor down a notch. In other words, it's easy to laugh at these dark and stupid times, but it's quite another thing to see our actions in it. Or from another direction, o ye momentary readers-during-national-poetry-month-at-the-Whitney-museum--crowned camp kings and queens--"there must be some kind of way out of here." One option—"selling out"—while not particularly satisfying, is specifically tempting (Sorry.) In other words, who can help privileging their expectations while awaiting the arrival of some as yet undisclosed possibility? Actually, laughter can blow that to rags, too, if you let it. But then you have to recall the projection and laugh at yourself, a very hard thing for some people to do.
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