MODERN WISDOM
NUMBER 290
SEPTEMBER 2022
Copyright 2022 Francis DiMenno
dimenno@gmail.com
http://www.dimenno.wordpress.com
1. AMBITION
PART NINE: GUDRUN
As for my son, young Eddie, he continued to be nothing to me but a disappointment. I sometimes thought that maybe he was a child who had been left to us by fairies–the kind with wings, not the Greenwich Village characters who kick up such a ruckus nowadays. He had a rather tendentious mystical streak, while at the same time he also tended toward the blasphemous, the irreverent, and the sacrilegious. Perhaps one example of his extraordinary and abhorrent behavior will suffice. His mother and I were in the habit of taking him to the supermarket on those rare occasions when we thought that such an outing would be salutary for the lad. To mingle, as it were, with the hoi polloi. (Usually, Williams did the shopping, or Cook. I preferred Williams. He had a sharp eye for a bargain. Nor did he seem reluctant to perform this chore. Not that money was much of a consideration. Groceries were rather cheap in those halcyon days.)
I well recall the first occasions we took Eddie to the supermarket, which was situated in the interstices of the faraway city and the nearby suburban communities which newly ringed it. The place was a gleaming, modern structure–I would be tempted to use the term superstructure if that word weren’t so regrettably associated with Communist theory–and in it were displayed a veritable cornucopia of consumer goods, beginning with the Produce section, with its seeming miles of glistering fresh fruit and gleaming fresh vegetables glowing beneath their spray of cold water. Next came the Dairy section, with its glass milk bottles standing in their cooler cases like rows of proud soldiers. Next was the Meat section, with its cuts of beef, chicken and veal meticulously shrink-wrapped and arrayed in a staggered display with their prices clearly marked. And so forth. Hard to believe that, previously, more for the sake of convenience than anything else, we had held a running account, paid monthly, with the dingy corner “Superette,” a most insalubrious place with fly-blown window displays which looked as though they had been there since 1958.
I suppose that this is a rather roundabout way to relate an anecdote about the fantastic imaginative proclivities of young Eddie. On our visit to the place–it bore a name like Food Behemoth or Bargain King or some other vulgar appellation–it turns out that young Eddie had become strangely engrossed by the Produce section. I silently sneaked up on him to see what he was about, only to discover, to my horror, that he had taken the crucifix off the wall of his bedroom and was pretending that Jesus Our Lord was on a pogo stick. In other words, the image of our crucified Savior was made to hop from the oranges to the grapefruits, and from the apples to the pears, and from the lemons to the kumquats. Next, he was pretending it was an airplane. Appalled, I snatched the sacred relic from his pudgy little fists and was all set to smack him, but I forced myself into a state of unsteady calm and informed him, through gritted teeth, that what he had been doing was blasphemous and sacrilegious and that Jesus is not a toy. He looked as though he were about to stop blubbering. Then he stammered out that he only wanted to show Jesus a side of life that he had never known.
It was then that his mother hovered into view. Females do have the damndest aptitude when it comes to the protection of their young. I suppose that their offspring, no matter how defective, always holds a piece of their heart. Penelope swooped down to comfort Eddie, who was now actually crying, and then she looked up at me–I was rather tall in comparison to her–and with a look of mingled anger and anguish she said to me, “Edward, what’s the matter? Why must you upset him so?” “Penelope, I said,” rather firmly, “just look at what your son brought with him on our little expedition.” And I brandished the crucifix at her. I could swear she gasped a little. I expected her to start shaking little Eddie right there, in the middle of the produce section, with the little old ladies saying tut tut tut and the elderly pensioners scowling in scorn and the sniggering stock boys gaping at us.
Well, wouldn’t you know it? Instead, she used her gentlest bedtime voice, and said, “Why Eddie? Why? Why did you bring Jesus to the store?” He was still blubbering and at that moment I swear I wanted to smash his fat little face. Eddie said to her, between gasping sobs, “Because…I wanted Jesus…to see…that everything is all right.” Penelope burst into laughter and then tears began to flow freely down her peach-like face and her mascara ran, creating a rather macabre effect. Eddie, hearing his mother’s laughter, but, fortunately, not seeing her tears, looked up at me to gauge my reaction. I forced a grim little smile. What more should I have done? “Should we wrap Jesus?” Eddie asked, in a small, almost girlish voice. I was startled. “What was that?” “Should we wrap Jesus so he doesn’t get cold? It’s cold in here.” It was indeed. The store was air-conditioned, and, as was often the case, they had turned the thermostat too low, so that some of the shoppers who were in their shirtsleeves were actually shivering. I said, “We’re about done here, aren’t we Penelope?” She assented. “Jesus says he wants a bag of oranges,” said Eddie. Penelope looked at me. I looked at her. I said nothing, but nodded slightly. My tongue had a metallic taste, and I felt at that moment as if I were swimming underwater. Was I about to die?
Penelope wordlessly put the bag of oranges in the shopping cart, and we went through the check-out counter and left the store.
It seemed as though Eddie were always doing something to attract attention to himself, even if it was–or especially if it was–negative attention. This is normal in a small boy perhaps. I sometimes have morbid thoughts, and I admit that these sometimes take the form of thinking of how much happier the firm of Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Lackner Wrollax would have been if Eddie had never been born.
As I have asseverated a number of times, Eddie was an odd child with few, if any friends (admittedly, there were very few small boys his age near our rather vasty demesnes). Perhaps that is why he resorted to some rather unorthodox playmates. When he was but a very small lad, he treasured up an oak leaf he had found upon the estate, and took it with him everywhere. When I asked him about this, he rather solemnly informed me that it was his magic rocket ship (too much television!) that would take him to exotic lands (of which he had no notion, unless it was through the picture books that his mother brought home from the Public Library, ten at a time) and even the planet Mars. Many’s the time I saw him happily roaming along the paths of our superbly tended gardens, pretending, I suppose, that the leaf he held in his hands was a magic carpet of sorts.
He was very protective of that leaf, according to our Japanese Gardener Hirosage Usui. My curiosity inflamed, I asked Eddie on one occasion whether I could hold his leaf. “Daddy, noooo,” he said. I asked him why not. “Because then it would lose its magic,” he childishly prattled. “You let Hiro play with it,” I teased. “Yes, because he knows that the leaf is magic.” I wanted to tell him–and perhaps I should have–that there was no such thing as magic. But what sort of brute would disabuse a small child of such enchanted notions? He would have time enough to learn the ways of the world. After all, childhood is fleeting. My own certainly was. Not that I suffered any great hardships on the ranch. But there was always work to be done, and although of course we always hired ranch hands–a great many of them–to do our chores, my father saw fit to have me “earn my keep” by having me perform some of the more degrading drudgery about the place, such as digging fence posts and shoveling cow manure. “Builds character,” he would snicker as he watched me struggle with the spade of the heavy shovel or the wooden handles of the wretched post hole digging tool. And then he would aim a squirt of tobacco juice at my boots, and wink.
By way of contrast, Eddie had it mighty soft. Rather too soft, I fear. No heavy lifting for him! His mother would not countenance it. I did buy him a little red wheelbarrow so he could “help” Hiro with his gardening chores, but after about two days he left it in the shed, and there it remained, dusty and disused for the rest of its existence.
I had conveniently arranged my schedule by the time I was in my mid-30s and had, I hoped, acquired some gravitas (the greying hair at my temples bore mute testimony to my seriousness of purpose). I often did not have a compelling need to be in the office until 10am, and I seldom scheduled meetings before that time. I had a reputation for keeping meetings short. I would do them while we all were standing up, if I could. Saves time.
So I was home when Eddie had his first meals upon his premature return from Kamp Wandervogel. I observed what he took for breakfast with a weather eye. No frosted flakes–this time. Three fried eggs, sunny side up, two slices of rye toast smeared generously with both butter and jelly, and five strips of bacon. Your standard breakfast at a truck stop or diner, excluding the coffee, which Eddie did not yet drink. He had, instead, a tall glass of milk and a small glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. This was, one must remember, the late 1960s, when only food faddists and hippies indulged in such breakfast novelties as yogurt, fresh fruit, and wheat germ. My own breakfast, by contrast, was Spartan. One egg; two slices of bacon; one piece of dry toast, orange juice, and three or four cups of black coffee was my quotidien repast, and Cook knew it well.
I said to Eddie, rather more pleasantly than I felt, “Good morning, my little man.” I was determined not to rile him up unnecessarily. He paused just long enough in his eating to grunt by way of reply. I could already see that the talk I had planned to have with him would not end well. He began shoveling his food into his gaping maw ever faster, no doubt so he could excuse himself and retreat to his room and listen to the likes of The Shouting Morons and The Marijuana Smokers and The Monstrously Untalented and Damaged Youth and whatever other “rock” bands were in vogue this week. We granted him a rather generous allowance, and this, I suppose, allowed him to set up shop as a self-styled “record collector,” this being his sole investment strategy, other than comic books (I had loosened the restrictions on these) of a most deplorable kind, in which bearded hippie mystery men menaced fat, crooked slumlords while a veritable United Nations of minorities stood back and cheered. We were, it seemed, a long way from King Arthur and Joan of Arc and the Three Musketeers and were verging instead into rather subversive Robin Hood territory, at least on that trivial front. I, too, had enjoyed comic books when I was his age; the difference being that I knew, even back then, that the entrancing adventures of Captain Marvel and Donald Duck were nothing more than kiddie fare, and that real books were not overburdened with a superabundance of charming pictures.
After Eddie had mopped up the remainder of his bright yellow egg yolk with the last of his jelly-smeared rye toast, I told him that I wished to speak with him. He said that he needed to use the bathroom, first. I knew that once he holed up in there with a comic book, or several, it might be nearly an hour before he emerged. And I wished to strike, as it were, while the iron was hot. “You can surely hold it for five minutes,” I said. “What I have to say won’t take long.” He agreed to wait. I plunged right into the heart of the matter. “Your mother says you’re miserable. As you may have guessed by now, women notice these things, while we men (this was a concession designed to flatter his vanity) go about our business largely oblivious to the ‘sensitive’ feelings of others. Now, I know a good Doctor–“
“What kind of Doctor?” he said, instantly becoming hostile and defensive.
“A counselor, who–“
“You mean a shrink?”
“A child psychiatrist, yes.”
“Why don’t you just ask ME what’s wrong?”
“OK, son–what’s wrong?”
“Oh Dad–you shouldn’t have to ask.”
“But you should tell me.”
“Mostly, it’s because you’re always making me do things that I don’t want to do.”
“Don’t you give me any credit for perhaps knowing better than you? Do you think we’re all out to sabotage your fun? Don’t you realize that I was a boy once, too, and that maybe I thought the exact same thing once, and now I know better?”
“Shut up, Dad. I don’t want to hear it.”
And he retreated to his bathroom, his temporary refuge when life became too oppressive, and thence to his room, where he locked the door and no doubt sought to shut out the ever-encroaching world by listening to The Shouting Monkeys or the Silver Scarabs or the Rocking Catamites or whatever silly faddish rock group he was engrossed in at the time.
I knew better than to respond with intemperate anger to his childish outburst. I simply let him be. I knew that in six short weeks he would be entering the second form (they had discontinued the first form) at Stropmuth Manor. I was quite convinced that the monks would straighten him out, and that, perhaps, he could find some measure of contentment or perhaps even happiness at the sheer joy of being alive.
My wife, Penelope, was a very intelligent woman, but I fear that she was rather too indulgent with Eddie, and so we engaged in the usual rather banal push-pull regarding permissiveness versus liberty–the very same push-pull which, incidentally, has animated the American Republic since its founding. Up-down, stop-go, left-right, systolic-diastolic: Our life seems to be ordered, if not ruled, by dualities. Strictly in the interests of scientific inquiry, I briefly accompanied Wasson on his pioneering trip to South America and sampled the mushrooms there, so I might say that I was well ahead of the hippies when it came to cosmic consciousness. And let me tell you this–that’s about all there is to it.
Allow me to gently suggest that if you’ve seen one hallucination, you’ve seen them all.
And yet, one morning very recently I awoke from my solitary bed to find an entire array of kitchen products stacked at the foot of it. No doubt the rare phenomenon of the waking dream.
Of course, as Penelope had her own round of social obligations to attend to, due to her station in life–initially somewhat higher than mine–but, as Virgil said, Omnia vincit amor, and no, I will not provide a translation; you can jolly well look it up–little Eddie, the poor little Googen, had nurses attending to his whims for the first four or five years of his life. Perhaps this is what spoiled him. But, well, the past is the past–to commit that most commonplace of solecisms, the tautology. We were, of course, permitted unrestricted access to the boy. At first. The first nurse we employed was a pretty little French au pair named Antoinette. Although soon that was shortened to “Toni”. She lasted about six months, until my wife noticed the tent in my trousers every time I saw her and heard me blurt out her name while I was dreaming. It was certainly not the poor girl’s fault, and my wife gave her a stupendous reference and she later found employment, I was told, with another affluent Catholic family.
The little Eddie’s second nurse was named Gudrun; she was a formidable Teutonic battleaxe, built as solidly as a diesel engine, with a square head, a strong, determined jaw, and lavish blond hair. By far her best feature. Which she kept inexplicably short for a woman. I recall how she would look on approvingly as I would read Aesop’s fables to the little Googen. All the classics. The Fox and the Grapes. The Man and the Lion. The Boy and the Nuts. Usually those tending to reinforce my viewpoint of government. “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.” (Still my favorite.) “You can share in the labor of the great, but don’t expect a reward.” (Conservatism.) “We can easily represent things, not as they are, but as we would like them to be.” (Liberalism.) “People often begrudge to others what they cannot have for themselves.” (Socialism!) “We often give our enemies the means of their own destruction.” (Appeasement of Communism!) “It’s easy to despise what you cannot get.” (The negro question.)
Gudrun, I should mention, was a staunch conservative. She confided in me that her family had fled the Nazis. She told me that they had fled because her family were good Catholics and they thought Hitler and his gang were “too liberal”. I had a larf at that. As did Penelope. Gudrun looked puzzled but, sensing it was all in the spirit of fun, she also began to laugh. Uproariously. Looking back on it, I suppose she realized that it was just too funny.
Gudrun would often murmur her thoughts in German, half under her breath, while watching the television news with the family, an evening ritual we encouraged as we thought it would help her iron out her heavily-accented English. What Gurdun didn’t realize, for quite a few years, was that I had studied German for four years in high school and two years in college, and I was still fairly fluent in the tongue. German, leaving aside the words native to that language, is an awful lot like an archaic form of English, back in the days when people addressed one another as “thee” and “thou”. Her pithy remarks regarding many of our American politicians were often quite amusing. Adlai Stevenson: “a degenerate!” Joe McCarthy: “a brute!” Vice-President Nixon: “a thief!” President Eisenhower: “that old fox!” Tom Dewey: “a shrimp!” Harry Truman: “a fumbler!” Senator John F. Kennedy: “a wealthy cheapskate!” Jaqueline Kennedy: “A mere mannequin!” Allen Dulles: “Look at his eyes! This is a man without a soul.” Estes Kefauver: “a foolish clown!”
I was in entire agreement with her about Kefauver. Everybody in the know knew well that Estes had an eye for the ladies and was also mobbed up to the hilt. And that his coonskin cap business was merely protective coloration for his hick electorate: “speaking for Buncombe,” as it were. I did not attempt to explain this to Gudrun. She tended to take her politics hot and black, it seemed, operating on the level of emotion more than intellect.
It was also interesting that she dismissed–or diagnosed?–young Tom Dewey as a “shrimp,” considering how agonizingly close he came to unseating the incumbent, Harry Truman. Alas, as Teddy Roosevelt’s rambunctious daughter Alice once opined, Dewey did indeed look like “the little man on the wedding cake.” This insult was particularly devastating because Dewey was not a tall man. In fact, he was a shrimp, and, like most short fellows, he had a perpetual chip upon his shoulder that he seemed to be daring you to knock off, and he did not accept perceived slights with equanimity. Which suggested a volcanic temperament ill-suited to the highest office of the land. Dewy would have made a good president, I think–of a midsized Elk’s Club.
As for Truman, there is a famous anecdote about him when he was Vice-President. He was ordered by a fireman to leave a burning hotel. He refused, saying that he was the vice-president. The fireman left, and then returned, ordering him again to leave, because “I thought you were the vice-president of the hotel.”
It was, I think, Truman who had the intelligence and temperament to cope with the Communist menace. FDR was a trimmer, and, in the words of a later pol, he was “squishy-soft on Communism.” Truman was actually something of a fumbler, sure, but I think he had his heart in the right place; I have always found it amusing that, right up to his dying day, he bore no love for Nixon, claiming that he was an inveterate liar, and, worse, that he lied “even when he didn’t have to.” Of course, Truman was no saint; as the former Senator from Prendergast, he attracted a particularly unsavory bunch of mink stole party grafters. But that’s all water under the bridge.
As for Nixon being a thief, that precise word was open for debate, but again, people in the know were well aware that the man was a money-hungry degenerate gambler who owed the mob some favors on account of his spectacular losses at the gaming table. There was also loose talk going around about how Nixon “saw something” in Germany during the occupation; some information that rendered John Foster Dulles eager to help him in any way he knew how.
And as for the partially untranslatable thing she called John Foster Dulles, I can only surmise that she saw something in his demeanor that she was repulsed by. Soullessness is a particularly devastating charge, though not, perhaps, one that would stand up in a court of law. I wonder–how much did Gudrun really know about our politics? We received Time Magazine in the mail every Tuesday. Perhaps she read it.
As for Joe McCarthy being a brute, I patiently tried to explain to her that he was actually a great patriot who was taking on the thankless task of extirpating the Red Menace from within our midst. She laughed. Laughed! “Vot is this red menace you speak of? A few deluded fools who spent too much time reading Hegel and Marx in College. There is no conspiracy, Herr Wrollax–the Soviets cannot even make a decent refrigerator! There are a nation of fumblers–all their pint bottles of vodka have twist-off caps that do not go back on. They are a land of drunken incompetents! Your Senator McCarthy, if I may be frank, is chasing after an illusion. And he keeps company with degenerates. He is not a man on whom you can rely.”
I disagreed with her at the time, but later on I had to admire her prescience.
Regarding the moral turpitude of Adlai, I once heard an amusing anecdote in relation to this. Eleanor Roosevelt was speaking, or, more accurately, trilling, as was her wont, in high superlatives concerning this particular warrior for democracy when a disgruntled audience member interrupted her rhetorical flights with the rude interjection that “Adlai Stevenson is a Coc——-!” The grand old Dame of the Democratic party paused for a crucial moment, gathered up her wits, and resumed. “Nevertheless….”
It puzzled me that Gudrun referred to JFK as “cheap” and to Jacqueline Kennedy as a “mannequin”. I was under the impression that the Germans in particular all adored Jack and Jackie. Apparently not. Gudrun tried, with only partial success, to explain her disdain for the 35th President. “He is a pretty boy. A compromiser. A playboy. A rich man playing at politics. An Ice Cream Soldier. And his wife is a plastic doll. You dress her up. You tell her to go places. She goes. He will come to a bad end. That is my instinct.”
I never did think to solicit her opinions of German or Soviet leaders. I’m sure her verdicts would have been equally as forthcoming, as well as devastating. I had the feeling that there was more to Gudrun than she was letting on. For all her Germanic bluntness, there was an almost Italian subtlety about her.
I would have been interested to hear her take on LBJ, but by that time she had left us and set up her own agency where she oversaw a phalanx of employees for families in need of temporary nursemaids. When I confided to her at during her exit interview (there’s an oxymoron) that I knew German perfectly well, she blushed bright red (for the first time ever, I suspect) and stared at me with her eyes agog, fearful that she might have committed some vague indiscretion. I heartily assured the poor woman that her political views and my own were in near-perfect alignment, with the caveat that I didn’t think of Eisenhower as being particularly “klug” (clever). ‘Ahh,” she said. “But he outmaneuvered the Wehrmacht! That is no small feat!” (By then her English was perfectly idiomatic, I was proud to note.)
“But why,” she said, “did you not tell me you spoke such flawless German?”
“Flawless?”
“With a slight British accent. But not Amerikanisch. Preferable.”
“Well, Gudrun, you were in America. We wanted you to learn to speak good English. That is the only way to get ahead.”
“Ahh–sehr klug,” she said. And she gave Eddie a hug and hugged Penelope and gave me a peck on the cheek and she took her grips which she insisted on carrying herself and she loaded them into the trunk of the taxi that was to take her to the airport. And then she was gone.
The little Eddie was disconsolate. At first. But after about a week he stopped asking about her and we assumed that he had forgotten about her.
In my day, of course, I have met with a great many luminaries, as befits a man of my position and elevated social station. Oddly, my father was a teetotaler–never touched a drop until he was fifty, and then only on the orders of his doctor, who said that modest consumption of fermented beverages–to use the vulgar appellation, ‘booze’–would do him a world of good, provided that he didn’t overindulge. My father took his trusted Physician’s medical recommendations to heart. He laid in a substantial stock of fine liquor–again, to use the vulgar sobriquet–some “top shelf hooch”. It was understood that the liquor was communal–to be doled out to any thirsty wayfarers who frequented or even lit upon the Wrollax demesnes. I recall the occasion when I shared a single spine-tingling sip of champagne with baby Eddie, when he was suffering from a cold. At first, the little Googen recoiled. Then he reached for the flute and eagerly lapped up the remainder. He fell fast asleep, a smile plastered (or a plastered smile?) on his drooling fat lips.
Regrettably, I could never show Eddie off at these assemblages of the great and powerful, which included prominent politicians, businessmen, professional men, academics, and even artistic types who were “right” and could be relied upon to refrain from creating an unseemly ruckus.
Which is not to say that our cocktail parties were staid and boring affairs. On one occasion–this is rich–around Christmastime–but first I must supply a backstory, as they say in Hollywood. For Christmastime I decided to add to the menagerie on our estate a pair of (rented) reindeer. After about my second drink, and midway through my third, I thought it would be a hilarious idea to induce those tame beats to mingle with the assembled festivity attendees. It was, indeed, hilarious, but not in the way I intended, for the hungry animals proceeded directly to the table bearing the canapes and hors d’oeuvres and rapidly proceeded to scoff the lot. It took the redoubtable Gudrun to take them in hand (or, say rather, hoof) and return them to their accustomed habitat on the grounds of the estate. Curiously, they refused to roam the grounds, as was their wont, but instead, to the vast amusement of the guests, they stood directly outside the bay windows of the ballroom, staring wistfully at the proceedings the whole of the night. A two-star general who was in attendance said to me, rather tipsily, “Whoops! Wrollax, you give the best d–n shindigs in town!”
I liked to introduce Gudrun to the party guests. I found her insights refreshing, and I imagine many of the partygoers did as well. She was also an accomplished pianist, who played delightfully. In addition to an impressive repertoire of classical pieces, she was even able, in slight prodding, to summon up some respectable version of the popular and jazz standards of her day. Bear in mind that this was during the late 1950s and the dreaded “rotten roll” had yet to exert its distressingly ubiquitous sway, and such youthful dance crazes as the vulgar “Twist” had yet to thoroughly infiltrate the collective consciousness of the sober adult population. As a reward for her piano-playing prowess, I noted that invariably several guests would discreetly slip her sealed envelopes, presumably bulging with greenbacks. (Needless to say, I heartily approved of such an enterprising spirit.)
I declined, for several reasons, to introduce my son Eddie to these omnium gatherums. First, the little Googen was painfully shy, and simply did not like crowds, and, during such noisy affairs he preferred to keep to himself. Secondly, I could well imagine the spectacle he would have made with his fat sleepy face, rubbing his puffy eyes with his fat little fist, wearing footie pajamas embossed with some garish design–the disembodied heads of grinning clowns or the like–and in his fat fist clutching a favored battered plastic sippy cup full of contraband apple juice (I feared that sweet juices would rot his baby teeth and oblige me to invest in expensive orthodontia down the road). In his other hand he would be holding, of course, his tattered and beloved stuffed animal “Bear Bear”. I have always personally found such spectacles–in which the scion of the family is trotted out at a party to be fawned over by the womenfolk like some award-winning poodle and appraised by the more sober menfolk like some prize hog–to be an enormous bore. So, naturally, I always interdicted such a display, as I did not believe in spoiling children with inordinate attention.
2. TABLOID HEADLINE SHAKESPEARE
OTHELLO: CAKED SNOT-RAG COOKS DESDEMONA’S GOOSE: JEALOUS EMPLOYEE HELD
MACBETH: TWISTED SISTERS GIVE BUM STEER TO MURDER MOM AND HUBBY: MACDUFF SAYS HEADS WILL ROLL
KING HENRY IV PART TWO: KINGLY PROTOCOL DICTATES PRINCE DITCH DRUNKEN FATSO: CAROUSING FALSTAFF PISSED
3. THE ECONOMIST
Is the Economist run by the same jokers who front the long green for the Rhodes scholarship? They seem to have the same eerie agenda. Namely, that the U.S. and the United Kingdom must remain chummy at all costs, and woe betide any force which threatens to unyoke them from their symbiotic cum parasitical cum co-dependent-and-loving-it relationship.
By the way, isn’t it ironic that the most prestigious publication of its kind is published in the UK, whose dreams of empire went kaput in the after-echo of a vintage 1945 buzz-bomb? (OK–Great Britain or England or call it what you will.)
Anyhoo, riddle me this, Brahmin: what’s going to happen when The American Empire takes a pie in the face and Uncle Sucker begins to shamble off to the tusker’s graveyard? Will the Economist continue to churn out their sprightly but conservative, meticulous but stodgy, painstaking but sometimes disastrously wrongheaded commentaries on the US/UK axis? Come Dystopia-time, will the Economist continue to have the same cachet once the UK is little more than an undersized, undistinguished, yobbo-choked gobbet of black and tan rocks heaving on the sooty Atlantic, and the US a measly Balkanized confederation divided into wretched Prosperity Zones, all owned and operated by Disney, Monsanto, GE and Microsoft?
4. GEORGE CARLIN’S FINAL CONCERT
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.–Mark Twain
George Carlin was very bitter near the end. It’s an American tradition of sorts. Mark Twain was another humorist who became notably bitter in his final years. Ambrose Bierce started out bitter and grew steadily more so. Mark Twain seems to have always had a kernel of sadness and even rage concealed inside of his outwardly antic disposition, but the death of his beloved daughter, as well as his business setbacks, were probably a factor in his growing disillusionment. Not surprising. The human sensibility is a delicate mechanism–one that sometimes grows more so with encroaching age.
Carlin was an early influence on my own sense of humor, although I liked him far more for his social commentary and somewhat less for his silly phase of the late 70s. The desire to be a humorist is quite often the result of early trauma. A truism repeated many times by critics, but seldom explicated, because humorists don’t talk about this very much and most critics simply cannot and do not feel it.
What are the lasting effects of such an early trauma? Picture yourself in your very worst mood and imagine feeling like that all the time. Rather than plunge into despair, the human instinct for survival at all costs will cause many persons who are so afflicted to seek to busy themselves with some distraction. For some, this distraction takes the form of constructing an elaborate rationale which may also serve the ancillary purpose of distracting them from their woes. Many find such a rationale within a body of work. For others, the saving distraction takes a destructive form. What we often refer to as “lashing out.” Child trauma victims very often take the second route, either sooner or later.
As one grows older, and more cynical, and one begins to realize and to actually feel the evanescence of earthly accomplishments, one may turn aside from the constructive impulse and decide instead to take a Radical approach and devote one’s energies to tearing down all seemingly artificial constructs “Radical” in this instance means “going to the root or origin”. Picture the contrast between a brave young sailor tying strong true knots and a weary old seafarer resignedly undoing all the tangled nets which have always dragged his lines. When you look upon the world from the point of view of a person who has given up all hopes of participating in its further explication, it seems very much like a place which needs an intervention–a jarring shock to the system which will peel back all the self-delusions and falsehoods and state the case so plainly that nobody can possibly mistake the message. Though he was no humorist, Eugene O’Neill seems to have followed such an impulse in his late masterpiece, “The Iceman Cometh”.
For all of these reasons, perhaps, late works by certain masters of their form often betray what we might call a “deep simplicity”. This “deep simplicity” might be characterized as the culmination of their lifelong message made plain by their stripping away of all superfluous “crafty” impulses, and following instead the undeniable impulse to recast all of their final pronouncements as the Truth (as they understand it) told plain–or not at all. You may refer to this impulse as “nihilism,” but it is actually at its root an attempt to resolve, once and for all, the tangled knots of a fleeting existence.
A final sacrifice. Perhaps even…a love offering.
5. ASSASSINATION IN AFGHANISTAN
Part of the series:
BUTCHERY IN BHUTAN;
CARNAGE IN CAMEROON;
DEATH IN DJIBOUTI;
EXTERMINATION IN ECUADOR;
FOUL PLAY IN FIJI;
GENOCIDE IN GRENADA;
HOMICIDE IN HONDURAS;
INFANTICIDE IN ICELAND;
DOING THE BIG JOB IN JORDAN;
A KILLING IN KIRIBATI;
LIQUIDATION IN LIECHTENSTEIN;
MASSACRE IN MACEDONIA;
KNOCKED OFF IN NAURU;
OFFED IN OMAN;
PULVERIZED IN PALESTINE;
DRAWN AND QUARTERED IN QATAR;
A RUBOUT IN ROMANIA;
SLAUGHTER IN SLOVAKIA;
TERMINATED IN TONGA;
UNDONE IN UZBEKISTAN;
EVISCERATED IN VANUATU;
WETWORK IN WESTERN SAMOA;
X’D OUT IN XIAMEN;
YOKED IN YEMEN and
ZAPPED IN ZAIRE.
6. DICK CHENEY
Cheney wasn’t entirely the bad guy of the Bush II Presidency. Sure, he
was ideologically warped; morally stunted and twisted, and W.
acquiesced to all of his devices. But Cheney was the Éminence Grise;
the Falstaff to W.’s still-callow prince Hal. Chumps like W. are born
and raised beneath the abject delusion that they are Born to Rule. But
W. lived during a time when the apparatus of world dominion had fallen
into desuetude, and so W. inevitably became a useful idiot, a weak
ruler who was guided, though not necessarily manipulated, by Cheney–a
sequestered Solon whose intricate sneer betokened an abject contempt
for the very government in which his very own father had served, as a
minor official. What a fine story Chekhov could have written about Mr.
Cheney!
7. SPORTS
Sports is working class strength in its socially approved form.
You hate sports? You despise the working class.
Not good.
There may be rooms full of people who are richer than God who are
deeply rooted in sports culture.
Doesn’t really disprove my point.
None of those folks are ever going to own up to how much they inwardly
despise, and secretly envy, the working class. It’s bad form. The
upper class is predicated upon its members pretending
to know all about what they do not and cannot know about, solely to
give off an aura of omniscience.
It could be that fanatic allegiance to sports has taken over the
‘transcendent’ role formerly reserved for the arts.
This is just a theory of mine, but it could be that deeply vicarious
engagement in sports–or nearly any activity–may stimulate the
sympathetic nervous system, which regulates actions requiring quick
responses. Spikes in Acetylcholine (excitement) and Norepinephrine
(racing heart, increased attentiveness) are the inevitable result.
Quite stimulating.
Quite addictive.
8. COMICS AS TRASH
There is a long tradition of nay-sayers in the comic book/graphic novel field, and sometimes their comments can be very helpful, all the more so because their caveats cause people who love and respect the medium to question widely-held assumptions which may be tinged by the soft-focus lens of nostalgia or mediated by a lower standard which is perforce in place for the literary aspects of the graphic novel.
What if I were to say that, in spite of many fine collections which have been released over the past 25 years, comics are still, in many respects, a sub-literary medium? That only about 5% are worthy of serious consideration as literature? Would you reactively defend your favorites and dismiss my argument, or would you take the time to ask me to define my terms and defend my argument?
I would hope that scholars would choose the latter choice.
Jack Cole and Will Eisner have gotten a free ride for a long time, for work which is of highly variable quality. Call it the Halo effect. Read the early Plastic Man and Spirit stories and tell me that these are timeless classics. I don’t think you can. We could say the much same of our beloved Jack Kirby, who, according to some, is a veritable God. But, as significant as Kirby is to the history of the development of the medium, he is not above criticism. Nor is Alan Moore. Frankly, a good deal of Moore’s most celebrated work is little more than Genre Clowning. For an explanation of that term, refer to Thomas J. Roberts. An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. A useful precis is here:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/terra55.htm
The preceding essay opened a can of worms on the comicscholars listserv….
I suppose my point was that we should not make the mistake of over-valuing the early work of an artist in light of his or her later work.
As it happens, I know quite a bit about the background history of the comic strip and the comic book, as well as the graphic novel. It is more in sorrow than anger than I make the gentle suggestion that a good deal of the so-called landmark works of the medium have been overrated.
I have studied the earliest Spirit strips and have found them to be quite pulpy. The earliest Plastic Man stories are not only pulpy, but are rigidly constrained by plot imperatives. Both are instances of superior craftsmen who are only beginning to find their way to mastery. This is my opinion, but interested dissenters are invited to actually read those early stories, which DC comics has thoughtfully reissued in hardcover.
I might also refer the interested reader to the aesthetic dimensions of comics as laid out in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: http://blog.visualmotive.com/2009/understanding-comics-with-scott-mccloud/
This is not to say that I do not find comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels fascinating, and in some instances, compelling.
Jules Feiffer, in 1965, said that comic books were “frankly, junk.” When I came across his comment a few years later, I resisted his assessment. Did he not, in the examples he gave in The Great Comic Book Heroes, himself distinguish between the “good” junk and the “bad” junk?
I find the comic strip and the comic book, as well as the graphic novel, interesting not solely on the basis of the works themselves, but also on account of their subtexts. I further believe that even the most meretricious work can be useful to study insofar as it informs the reader about what was going on at the time it was created.
Let’s not mistake this interest in subtext as merely a reactive response which expresses “nothing but disdain for comics and other forms of pop culture.” But let’s not utterly forgo an assessment of the aesthetic dimension.
Incidentally, I found Michael Feldman’s comments about Film in the 1960s to be an insightful and useful yardstick in regard to the state of the art:
“Sure, comics are junk food. Burgers not steaks. But as popular culture has slowly moved to centre stage in large part due to generating vast amounts of revenue and of course being less demanding on the brain – there is an attempt to retroactively legitimize them as great art. And there can be tremendous complexity in the finished product just as there is with film, rock music, etc.
Maybe part of a larger trend to go downscale with dignity. Where I live expensive upscale burger joints, gourmet pizza, organic real sugar candy – are the new rage for those who can afford them. Some kind of deferred status like wearing high end name brand clothes or only consuming fine wine, I guess.
Comics are coming to the debate of whether they are true art late in the game. It happened with film in the 60s. And though we remember the isolated critical successes and classics, most movies were really commercial junk too. But multimillion dollar budgets, movie star adoration and misplaced nostalgia obscures that perception.”–MF
Nota bene: After about 2008 I stopped reading every new graphic novel that came out and slowed down some. But as a professional librarian, I like to keep my hand in. So I am very glad that work by my five heroes–Walt Kelly, Al Capp, Elzie Segar, Harold Gray, and Chet Gould– are all currently getting some kind of comprehensive reissue–continuities in volume 2 of Gray’s Orphan Annie hadn’t been seen for 80 years. I hope that in the years to come we will see a lot more classic comic strips reissued, because they were really my first love. I have recently realized that when I was very very young a rather obscure comic panel called The Good Old Days by Irwin Hess was one of the first works of art which made a strong impression on me.
http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2008/06/erwin-l-hess-1913-1999.html
But lest I forget, J. R. Williams, Gene Ahern, and many many more also made a very strong impression on me. I loved them all. Still do. Always will.
9. THE SHEER AWFULNESS OF BILLY JOEL
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2009/01/the_worst_pop_singer_ever.html?wpisrc=obinsite
Equally useful to shooting this troublesome fish in his excruciatingly
puny barrel is the term Poshlust (пошлость), popularized by Nabokov,
who usefully defined it as: “Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism
in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities,
crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious
examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing
we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies,
social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern
with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poshlost
dimenno 