Harper's Magazine reported this month on a proclamation in honor of Dadaism issued late last year by Dennis Highberger, the mayor of Lawrence, Kansas. This year is (according to some) the 90th anniversary of the creation of Dadaism, an artistic movement that has been described as "characterized by absurdism, nihilism, deliberate irrationality, disillusionment, cynicism, chance, randomness, and the rejection of the prevailing standards in art." It "strove to have no meaning" and "to offend."
So, a lot like Rush Limbaugh.
Accordingly, the proclamation declares thirteen randomly chosen days (including last Tuesday, and tomorrow) in 2006 as "International Dadaism Month." It includes the following:
WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and
WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and
WHEREAS: zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;
NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the [thirteen randomly chosen days from February to October] as “International Dadaism Month.”
Mark your calendars, virgin microbes.
