'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This...' When Conviction Grows As Stale As Week-Old Bread

Vicki Pastor had given the best years of her life to social justice.  She had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, joined Freedom Riders in Montgomery, braved the ax handles and dogs of Bull Connor, and had come back to Washington to continue the struggle for equality, fairness, and good will.

She had put up with Ronald Reagan and the Bushes – conservative politicians of reasonably good will misinformed intentions.  You couldn’t help but like Reagan, a jolly old soul with a self-deprecating sense of hum0r; and George Bush I was a patriot, whose noblesse oblige was memorable – WWII combat airman, long service in government, patient and dutiful Vice President, and finally Chief Executive.  His son, George II was a bit of a cowboy but within reason, and took 9/11 with  proper stolid American commitment; but the man now in the White House, Donald J Trump was another Republican altogether.

He was a bully, a racist, and a warmonger in bed with his Wall Street cronies and New York real estate mogul, a self-satisfied criminal who had avoided the law for himself but went on to abuse and distort it for ordinary Americans.

Vicki hated him with a visceral passion, an unrestrained, immoderate, bilious hatred; and although she was not proud of such unchristian behavior, she felt that such animus was called for.  The more hatred for this hateful man, the better.

It wasn’t just his politics that was so upsetting, but his lack of culture.  The man was a crass, bourgeois caricature of America’s worst instincts. His yachts, his Mar-a-Lago, his glitz, faux glamour, and arm candy were revolting examples of his excess.  His gross superficiality, his disdain for high culture and intellectual sophistication, his defiance of reasonable social norms and outright determination to create a cheap, tinsel-and-sequin Washington was disgusting.

Yet here she was in her later years, widowed, children in San Francisco and Paris, rarely invited out, disconsolate and feeling hopeless, with nothing but memories and Trump hatrcd to support her growing despair.  ‘I need to do something’, she said; but the climate conferences, rallies on the National Mall, letters to the editor, and speaking at Vassar reunions was not enough.

She thought of Coleman Silk, the Phillip Roth character in his The Human Stain who takes a much younger woman as lover in his later years.  ‘She’s not my first love nor my last’, he says to a censorious friend, ‘but she certainly is my last. Doesn’t that count for something?’

Men, Vicki knew, had it in them to take young lovers even at seventy; yet here she was a shriveled up old prune whom no man wanted any more, let alone a younger one.  Men were the lucky ones.  Only a nice bank account and a flat stomach – and not even that – could assure a December-May affair while she languished alone, tending her petunias and hating Donald J Trump.

It was at the poetry reading she had arranged at her home, an event to celebrate the works of a local artist whose verses had been overlooked for the many decades she had been writing them, that she had an epiphany, a conversion, a bright light of possibility.

The poet stood up before the gathering and began to read from her works – one treacly, predictable, crushingly adolescent poem after another. The guests smiled at a simile, shook their heads at a painful metaphor and took the whole brutal recital as though it was the Second  Coming.

The theme, of course, was social justice.  ‘Oh, what these eyes have seen’, she read, ‘and wept tears of love and warm embrace’ and from there went on to speak of the black man, ‘the sentient soul of the forest’, the inheritor of God’s first graces, noble creature maligned, dismissed, and damned. 

This was only the beginning, for she went on and on until even the adoring crowd began to grow restive;  but their love for the poet, her poetry, and her heartfelt emotion was stirring, and they kept their attention.

But Vicki was shaken.  The poetry was so awful, so irremediably bad, so self-assured in its miserable sentiments, that she had to leave the room, down three shots of chilled Stoli, and turn the oven to high.  In a fit of pique and resentment at her own idiocy, and with a hateful desire to be done with the whole disgusting mess – the horrible poetry, the black man, the insufferable toadying of her friends – she would burn the canapés to a crisp, serve them on a silver tray, and watch her guests eat them, swallow the bitter bits and thank her profusely.

‘No mas!’, she shouted as she drank another shot. ‘Basta’, and with the last remaining reserves of patience let the old bitch finish recital, sit down, and be feted.  What was she thinking?  How could she have let her sympathies go so far afield?  She and the event she had arranged were caricatures, horrible reminders of the penitential years spent promoting old chestnuts, goodness, promise, halcyon years to come.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said, now drunk beyond control but relieved of the Sisyphean burden of doing good once and for all.  Like the Coleman Silk character, it was time to give it up, clear the decks for running, and be done with it.

Her friends and colleagues could not believe the transformation.   Every last trace of her fidelity, obedience to and respect for social justice was gone.  What was left was a pissy, dismissive bitch of a woman who had finally come into her own. She was off to parts unknown, drawing down on her private income, so long hidden from the censorious view of her progressive colleagues, and finally happy. Joyous actually, as only anyone who has finally given a last goodbye to the sodden past can feel.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said as she drove past the White House for the last time, waving to the beautiful blonde young things along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Poetry Reading – Treacle, Bad Bunny, And Latino Housepainters

‘I paint houses, says the Robert Di Niro character in the Martin Scorsese movie, ‘The Irishman’, a euphemism for being a hit man; and Linda Chavez Porter, the poet, chose that ironic beginning for ‘Hollow Men, A Reprise’ her featured work.  Latinos, her group, were indeed housepainters, leaf-blowers, and lawn-mowers and she, a poet of tongue-in-cheek positivism and ethnic solidarity wanted to praise Caesar, not bury him.

Linda was not a poet in the published, recognized sense; but an amateur versifier that Vicki Chalmers has chosen as her political pet.  Women poets, said Vicki, especially those of color, never got their due in a white, privileged world.  Yes, there was Emily Dickenson, she noted, but she was history; and today was today, the era of the new woman, the confident woman, the champion, the spokesperson for civil rights, honor, and justice.

‘Think Guernica’, Vicki told her friends. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about’ – a painting of powerful political import within a framework of modernism and artistic genius.  ‘Linda is of the same ilk’.

Of course she was nothing of the sort.  At best she was good at rhymes and had a way of pronounced the cadence of her lines with melodramatic flourish which made audiences sit up and pay attention to what was, despite Vicki’s praise, rather treacly, childish stuff.

I paint houses, said the man

A distant uncle in a faraway land

With death in his heart, and a gun in his hand

He dealt with the mob to beat the band

The group of matrons and their husbands gathered in the living room of Vicki’s suburban rambler all smiled at the irony, and familiar with Linda’s work, knew what was coming and what they had gathered together for – a screed in verse against Donald Trump, usurper of the American dream, unconscionable liar and intellectual thief, a moral brigand and fool.

Vicki was a multiculturalist, a woman with una gota of Spanish blood which gave her currency in the progressive world of inclusion and diversity.  The drop of blood had been diluted over the years, mixed with enough Palestinian bits to give her even more political credibility, but she clung to the legacy of her forbear who demonstrated in the streets of Madrid to protest the bloody reign of Isabella and demand peasant rights for which he was guillotined in the public square, his head thrown to the dogs.

Suarez in fact was not even a footnote to Spanish history let alone a peasant hero.  Records kept in the Alhambra library cite him as ‘a man without a brain who would soon lose his head’ (un hombre sin cerebro que pronto perderia la cabeza); but Vicki never got that far – myth and popular scuttlebutt were enough for a woman whose ideas about universal social justice had been fixed since her first year at Wellesley where a young firebrand from the South Bronx had been invited to speak.  Vicki had been taken with the Puerto Rican’s politics and, as it turned out, her powerful sexual allure and took a leave of absence from school to live with her charismatic lover in New York.

Be that as it may, Vicki was naturally drawn to the poetry of Linda Chavez and gave her every opportunity to shine, such was her defiant refusal to see the woman’s puerile verse for what it was and claim it to be the ‘new voice of Latina womanhood’.

It so happened that Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper and Latino icon was to headline the Super Bowl halftime ceremony.  The NFL had been criticized for its choice because Bad Bunny was known more  for his cross-dressing and anti-ICE sentiments than for his talent.  Nevertheless, Bad Bunny went on stage, in a toned-down white suit, said ‘We are all Americans’ or some compromising nod to white people, and the show went on.

Vicki loved him for all his Latino looks, salsa, an unashamed piragua, a fancy, zoot-suited icon and hero of immigrants.  This is what white America needed – a jolt, a shot in the arm, a wakeup call heralding the arrival of diversity.  In a few short decades white people would be in the minority and in a few more wiped from the face of the earth.

All this because of a Spanish man without a brain, a South Bronx Puerto Rican lover, and some flimsy indoctrination by The Young Progressives at Wellesley but that’s what the whole diversity thing has amounted to in the first place, so Vicki was just one of those who fell in line. 

‘I am a proud Latina’, she said to the group at her poetry reading, and went on to give her by then familiar disquisition on the native beauty of the Latin woman, body and soul.  She gave Chavez, the poet, a warm embrace and sat down as she began to read.

‘We must do this again’, said one guest about to leave after the empanadas and pupusas; but as soon as she got out the door, turned to her husband and said, ‘I’m glad that’s over’, a wasted evening if there ever was one, subjected to irrelevance – and bad irrelevance at that – and the only recompense soggy Mexican food.

Vicki beamed as she embraced each one of her departing guests.  As far as she was concerned, the event had been a smashing success, one of her best; and she was indeed planning the next in what would become a series. 

She didn’t want to clean up, rearrange the furniture, or even turn off the lights, so ebullient did she feel about the evening.  She wanted to remember it as it was, a happy, engaging, fulfilling time; so she went to bed tired but happy, impatient to start the next day.

There was to be no series as Vicki had hoped.  The awful, brutally stupid poetry of the evening had sealed her fate.  Her friends who had always been loyal to her, patient beyond expectation with her growing reflexive progressivism and airy-fairy political cheeriness, had had enough.  There were limits after all.  At their age, a chaise lounge in Tampa was more their style regardless of Donald Trump and so while Vicki was still whirling like a Turkish dervish, let their rooms be cleaned by Salvadoran maids, and be done with it.   

The Devil Made Me Do It - A Life Of Good Is As Boring As Can Be

Ivan Karamazov’s Devil is a vaudevillian.  ‘Imagine how dull life would be, church every day of the week, fidelity, obedience, what have you without me.  I am here to make life livable.’

The allure of the bad in a good world – as familiar as dew on a rose petal since the dawn of time. Humanity, the devil’s workshop, the playground for happy hookers, philanderers, and bookies.  We might all have been born innocent and pure, but it doesn’t take long for that itch to begin, for the lure of the bad boy, the mark, the dirty tricks to percolate up and start to feel good, far better than Holy Communion, straight A’s, and a clean room.

Yet some people make a life out of doing good and simply can’t help themselves – they are obliged to help others, change the world, give selflessly, and refuse temptation.  Doing good was not just a part of an ethos, a subscription to Christian values, or a political commitment; it was identity.  It was a permanently defining quality that dimmed all others.  Doing good was worn proudly, a moral suit of clothes never taken off, stiff collar and all.

Bob Muzelle had been a particularly happy y0ungster, all smiles and coos, a little boy to make any mother full of joy.  As he grew older, none of that sweetness and pretty innocence disappeared, and he was a model child, obedient, faithful, and good natured to others.  ‘Mother, may I’ was his signature, and he never strayed from that particularly  beautiful intimacy.

Even as a teenager when all norms of patience and propriety were thrown to the wind in a fuck you, jack off stupid orgy, Bob paid attention to his parents, teachers, and priests.  It seemed as though this boyish piety was there to stay.

‘Just you wait’, said Marge Helander to Mrs. Muzelle; but that curse never took.  Bob stayed on the straight and narrow and never missed a step.  He took a lot of shit in college – the frat boys were a pack of dogs and the bitches merciless – but he held his own, joined the right groups, started early on the road to social justice, did the right thing, demonstrated, argued, defended and showed his true colors with insistence and purpose.  He had a mission, a goal, and a raison d’etre of a higher order.

He never got drunk, never got laid, and never said a bad word about anyone except as groups – conservatives were befouling the country with their lies and distortions and should be strung up, beheaded, and their heads impaled on spikes up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.  As horrible as that may sound, it was in keeping with Bob’s holy mission and his innate rectitude.  Hatred for a sworn enemy was part and parcel of doing good.

 

The cracks began to show during the days of black power redux – the Black Lives Matter movement which defiantly protested the abuse and oppression of the white majority.  Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation did not disappear with the Civil Rights Bill.  It only picked up steam in a fury of white resentment and anger.  It was time to off whitey once and for all.

LaShonda Williams, head of the Washington chapter of BLM was a pushy, uppity black woman without an ounce of charm, complaisance, or good will.  She was a bitch, a nasty cunt who had her hand in the till from day one, but thanks to her bloody invective and riling, blasphemous speeches calling for the end of the white race, she was a hero.

‘Whatchoo doin’ up in here, white boy?’ she yelled at Bob as he came into BLM headquarters to offer his services to the movement. ‘The days of Uncle Tom are over, dead, and buried’, she said, ‘so take your Doctor King i-dol-a-try and go back to the ‘burbs, boy.’

‘I just want to help’, Bob stumbled, shuffling his feet like a black minstrel, cap in hand, ‘Yes, Massa’ out of his mouth before he could help it; but LaShonda was having none of it.  ‘Fuck off’, she said, showing him the door.

Where was the solidarity he had known with Martin and Ralph?  Where were the heady days of integration, not this pissy go-home separatism.  Black people have never been able to do anything on their own, he knew, so she had no business…

Here Bob stopped himself in mid-thought.  What was happening to his proud rectitude and temperance? Of course black people were capable of real independence, intelligence, and promise.  What was he thinking?

But this summary rejection hurt.  It shook his resolve.  The whole progressive thing was supposed to be a happy, congenial affair, good people in solidarity with good.  Could he have misjudged others and badly overestimated his own sense or right?

Well, the progressive tent was a big top, he knew, and there was room for all, so why not shift gears and go up another hill.  Climate change, for example.  Now, that was an issue everyone could agree upon, hands down.

However a succession of brutally cold winters had broken the ranks, and the movement had become desultory at best.  The central idea – that the world faced climate Armageddon – was being dismissed as prior evidence, much of it cooked by climate zealots, was outed.  The whole thing was being shown up as a charade, another hobby horse, a wacko theory that somehow gained currency until the weather turned Arctic.  Too late to board that bus, thought Bob.

And so it went from blacks to climate change to transgenders.  ‘They stole my youth’ said Bob melodramatically.  ‘Never had a fun day in my life.  That’s about to change’.

Epiphanies usually are from bad to good.  People see the light of their wayward ways and find good; but in Bob’s case it was the reverse.  The very thought of that harridan cunt LaShonda turned his head.

But how?  Decades of being a goody two shoes had crimped his style.  Dishonesty, seduction, infidelity, chicanery, disregard for consequences were not in his portfolio; but since it was high time, he would learn how.

Every time he slapped on his aftershave, adjusted the knot on his tie, and polished his shoes, he hated himself.  A dowdy, frumpy, politically buggered choirboy at his age!  A life down the tubes.

‘I’m outta here’, he said to his wire Corinne one evening.

‘Where are you going, dear?’, she replied.

‘None of your business’, Bob snapped back and headed down to the Blarney Stone for a shot and a beer like any other red blooded male; but neither the Wild Turkey nor the young hooker at the end of the bar were his cup of tea.  So seedy, so uncomely for a Yale man.

Which is where we must leave Bob to his own devices and hope that he can defy inertia and do a volte face.  After all, he deserves some compassion.

‘Attention must be paid’, Willy Loman’s wife says to her sons in Miller’s The Death of A Salesman. Some recognition for a human being who has given his whole life for an idea and ended up with nothing.

Ivan Karamazov’s Devil, however, would have laughed at Bob's dogged, soggy purpose.