The Success Of A Simple Man In Troubled Times - The Vacancy Of The Dull, Danglers On The Bell Curve

Doug Brandon was a simple man.  Born and raised in the shadow of the Tuscaroras to a simple family, he never lost that stolid approach to life.  'Hard work is all there is' said his father, echoing that philosophical vacancy that characterized the Brandons for generations, a kind of native unschooled nihilism which sheltered the family from the hardships of poverty and isolation.  They had been dealt a bad hand from a stacked deck, but took life as it came, the good with the bad, days sunny and stormy. 

As such Doug was never filled with unrealistic expectations or vain hopes. Someday he would leave Barkerville and make something of himself, but that something would be necessarily modest and down to earth. 

Doug was not the brightest boy in his class by any means, and he managed to make his way with some effort through the grades, ending with some distinction as the top mechanic at Lewiston juncture high school.  Dougie, as his parents knew him, was good at fixing things, especially small motors - outboards, lawn mowers, hedge trimmers and the - and worked summers alongside Bill Baxter of Baxter Repair and Service, Inc. 

 

Baxter suggested two years at Lewiston Community College where the discipline of a higher technical education would stand him in good stead.  He could move from small motors to large ones, and perhaps one day he might find himself on an airline maintenance crew. 

He did as Baxter suggested - the college's fees were nominal and no strain his family's modest budget - and he graduated with a technical diploma that was indeed his union card for employment, even in down times.  He applied for an apprenticeship with Southwest Airlines which serviced Lewiston, was accepted, and after a few years was a bona fide airline mechanic. 

The story, however, is not about Doug's career, but about the particular psychological configuration which got him through troubled times.  Being a dull, uninspiring man of limited intelligence and insight, he was able to weather the storms of a difficult economy, social dislocation, and the radical shifts in political ethos which were affecting the country. 

Now, the character of the Washington-based political opposition to the current president is well-known. In a canny but so far ineffective campaign to discredit him as a racist, homophobe, misogynist, and capitalist tool, the political left hammered away for over a decade.  Lawfare, impeachment, smear tactics, innuendo, and fear-mongering were all tried but failed.  However for very action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and because of the ad hominem assault on the President, the country itself became angry, divided, harshly and reflexively critical, and unquieted. 

Lewiston was small city, like many in the country not known for anything in particular, but still a reasonable place to live and work.  The county of which it was the seat was growing, and a number of major firms opened plants there.  Hankook Tires, for example, moved in thanks to a deal with Doug's community college which promised to train prospective workers if the company would hire them. 

All well and good, but Lewiston could not avoid the divisiveness, racial conflict, and social disturbance affecting the country at large. As a matter of fact, it became the locus of the most aggressive, often violent protests against the President's radical agenda.  The press took notice, and its concerted efforts to rid Washington of this menace to democracy, were well-publicized. 

Although the protests in Lewiston were seen from the outside as unified and a true political collective, they were anything but.  Black Lives Matter holdouts in one corner, angry white, deeply progressive women in another, and organized labor in a third.  These factions were constantly at each other's throats and each angrily assertive about their interests. 

The protests became routine, police barricades and crime scene tape common.  Arrests were made and talk was heard about the deployment of the National Guard.  Things went from bad to worse as a militant group firebombed a military depot causing little damage but giving the restive, angry Left the visibility it wanted. 

Doug had been approached on a number of occasions and asked to join this or that faction; but he politely demurred.  There was nothing in him - not in his character, personality, background, or life - that suited such a political activism.  To be brutally honest, although Doug could rivet and repair, he was as dumb as a stone.  Only thanks to his natural affinity for screws, bolts, wrenches, and hammers was he able to manage as well has he did.  Other than that he was as clueless as the day he was born. 

A co-worker at the airport, a union man angry at the administration's moves to make airport maintenance a right-to-work enclave, tried to enlist Doug in his activism; but Doug, unsure what right-to-work was - the fact that he had a good job was all he knew - and constitutionally unable to parse the simplest articles of democracy, politely demurred. 

 

When the protests threatened to shut down the airport, Doug's co-workers became more insistent on his support. Doug again thanked them but no thanks, and returned home to wait until the dust cleared and he could go back to work. 

'What's up at the airport, hon?' his wife asked one afternoon. 

'Not much', Doug replied.  The sirens of police cavalcades down Egbert Avenue were heard day and night, but Doug slept well.  

Now, this was not from a practiced, educated stoicism or a survivalist reaction to violence.  Beyene Wolde-Gabriel, a co-worker from Ethiopia had survived the civil wars, the brutality of the dictator Mengistu, the pogroms, midnight hangings, and street mayhem by keeping his head down, a partisan of no cause but known as a quiet supporter by all.  

Such political courage and savvy was foreign territory to Doug who had trouble placing Ethiopia on the map, and as far as the territorial struggles with Eritrea and the Somali terrorists who had joined forces with both sides, he was one hundred percent ignorant.  In fact, if his co-worker had taken the time to explain the situation, his words would have gone in one ear and out the other, passing through the complete vacancy of Doug's mind. 

 

That vacancy, as little Doug could appreciate or even acknowledge it, was what kept him afloat in troubled times.  Conrad in his novel Victory wrote about Heyst, a refugee from civilization, preferring a life of incessant wandering, devoid of attachments and commitment to entanglement.  Graham Greene in The Comedians and The Quiet American wrote about the same calculated indifference in his main characters, a kind of existential stoicism. 

All these characters are drawn into concerted action, to engagement, and to entanglement with good and bad ends; but Doug had none of their calculated indifference.  He was too ordinary, too vacant for any such ideas.  He stayed outside the fray because life propelled him that way.  He didn't so much resist his co-workers' pleas for engagement, but simply demurred.  Not the path of least resistance, nor the easy way out, but a simple complaisance, the congenital aspect of his dullness. 

There is a bell curve for everything, and intelligence is no different.  Lack of intelligence, grouped at one asymptote has many expressions.  From the persistent dysfunction of the ghetto where generation after generation intermarries within a confined, uninspired gene pool to class dullards, clueless adolescents, one-issue politicians, minor criminals...the list is endless.  Most of these sub-par individuals cause harm, lesser or greater; but those like Dougie whose lack of brains is expressed only as vacancy, cause nothing, and in so not-doing, survive the worst of times. 

The novel Being There by Jerzy Kosinski is a satire on American politics where a simple man of limited intelligence is taken as a genius.  Chance the gardener, used to talking about the lifecycle of plants, bushes, and trees in the simplest, organic terms is thought to be speaking in brilliant metaphor, and rises up in the political world thanks to the credulousness and intellectual myopia of his handlers. 

No one ever found or recognized the advantages of vacancy in Dougie Brandon.  He just carried on, head down not out of political savvy but habit, hands always busy, emotions always on an even keel. 

Yes, Doug was as dumb as they come, and not one salient, interesting, or provocative thought ever entered his head, but such dumbness is often overlooked, rarely singled out as a positive aspect of diversity. 

The Dougies of the world are everywhere, and most lead lives of remarkable dullness - impossible to be around because of their mental immobility, they are thudding bores.  Worse even than Del Griffiths, says the Neil Page character in the movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles about his boring co-passenger. 

'I could sit through hours, days, and weeks of insurance seminars with a smile on my face. "How do you do it?" my fellow conferees ask. "Because I spent a week with Del Griffiths"'. 

Dougies are suburbanites, office workers, bank tellers even professionals - occupation is no disaggregating filter.  The hopelessly dull, are everywhere unaware of their own boundless vacancy.  At least for Dougie it was a survival mechanism.  For all the rest just a hole in the wall.  

Wind In His Hair - A Bike Lane Prophet Cycles The Great Outdoors, Dopey And Without A Clue

Doug Burnett was an ordinary man - born and raised in a coal town to a pharmacist father and a second grade teacher mother, he was well-behaved, dutiful, and an obedient student.  He couldn't make heads or tails of anything past arithmetic, so he repeated a grade or two, but since there was nowhere else to put him, he moved up and out, and one day found himself at Montgomery College, MK as it was known because of the fourth-grade level of its students. 

The college was a congenial place where there were no unrealistic expectations about Harvard or academic excellence, just a pleasant holding pen for those who would never make a mark, but would just fit in nicely. 

Doug muddled through his two years - MK was a junior college - and was anxious to get on with life, but he had no idea about what or how, so he took a job as a stock-and-errand boy at his father's pharmacy in Chillicothe, cleaned dusty bottles of chloroform and peptides in the storage room, waited on the occasional customer, and had no more ambition than a split-level, a wife, and two children.

Circumstances being what they can be, capricious and unpredictable, Doug found himself in Washington, DC thanks to a chance meeting with the representative for the Second Congressional District of Ohio.

Now, Doug was not a youth of any pretense, and had no thoughts about democracy, contribution, or investment; but when approached by the august member of Congress who invited him to join his staff as an intern, he readily agreed. 

He had no idea whatsoever what the job entailed let alone the role or importance of a member of Congress, but he had been brought up to respect his elders, so acceptance was simply the only right thing to do. 

He had been singled out not because of his intelligence, political savvy, or social appeal, but because he was a working class voter from the eastern half of the Congressman's district and would do well as a poster boy for his rural poor constituents. 

 

Doug was a faithful amanuensis, little more; and when the Congressman finally retired, Doug found himself out of a job.  With few qualifications but willing and able; but with a good recommendation, he joined Scientists For Social Responsibility, a non-profit group organized around 'planet health' a catch-all ethos which gave them cover to advocate for environmental protection, climate change, and social responsibility. 

Doug understood none of the ideas proposed, but was happy to do good; and was a loyal and hardworking member of the team.  

One of the propositions of the group was to encourage dedicated bike lanes in urban areas.  Cars were polluting interlopers and their rampaging takeover of roads and highways needed to be stopped.  Scientists for Social Responsibility intended to be at the forefront of the biking New Age, and Doug, coming as he did from a rural, undulating, bike-perfect region, was asked to be a part of the Bikes Are Our Future team. 

They bought him a bike, took him with them on casual rides on the C&O towpath, and urged him to go farther up the trail to the Cumberland Gap. 

He had only ridden a fat-tired Schwinn in his boyhood so was unused to the 21-gear hi-tech two-wheeler he was given, but quickly took to it.  Riding up the same kind of hills he had struggled over on his bulbous Schwinn was a dream.  If this was climate change advocacy, he was all for it. 

The mystique of cycling escaped him - as simple as he was, there was no vision or epiphany in it. It was simply pedaling, sometimes hard up, other times light and repetitive, nothing more.  When he sat at the Old Ebbitt Grill with his colleagues over a beer, he was lost when the chat turned to mountain vistas, expansive prairies, farm houses and cows in pastures.  

He had taken to biking as a matter of duty - if his organization was all in for bikes, so would he be - but he found nothing particularly uplifting or elegiac about it. 

As a matter of fact, bikes were a pain in the ass. Driving from here to there in Bethesda was slow, interrupted, and interminably blocked because of the presumptive Rulers of the Road, dedicated bike lanes, and the inevitable accidents.  

'Perhaps I'm missing something', Doug said, not giving bikers their due, not appreciating the particularly heady, transformative experience of rushing down a mountain pass, wind in the hair, guided by the natural winds, inclines, and vistas of the open road. 

He gave it a go, joined a weekend biking group that headed north to Poolesville, stopped for beers at a local tavern, then cycled home for dinner.  All without anything more than traffic, impatient drivers, potholes, and dreary, endless trees. 

He gave urban biking a try as well, cycling from his suburban home to his downtown DC office; but that was a gantlet, a medieval joust, a mudwrestling ugly tour better left to others. 

Perhaps because Doug was so limited, so simple and unpoetic, so straightforward, practical, and nose-to-the-grindstone, he decided to chronicle his biking experiences as a kind of clinical record. At first he did it to illustrate his organization's vision and principles, then as a down-to-earth account of the order of biking.  Whether he understood it or not, whether he got or didn't get the essentiality of the open road, it was his duty to paint the picture. In the end, as dull and prosaic as it was, it became his raison d’etre - which of course everyone needs regardless.

 

His chronicle, his biking memoir, his record of traipsing Appalachia and suburban Maryland was the most horrendously boring saga imaginable.  It was a story of gear ratios, brake linings, torque, tire resistance, and ball bearings and nothing more.  A tedious recollection of bike trips in the most predictable places, a soggy, watery saga of nothing but grinding up and down the hills of Western Pennsylvania and points west. 

Why he ever bothered, why he even tried was a mystery.  Why would this man of limited means, desultory intelligence, and without a drop of insight, creative vision, or personal feelings ever think that it would be of interest let alone be inspiring?.

Such is the nature of true belief - febrile, airy, satisfying, and overarching.  It matters not to the believer whether or not his ideas have currency or relevance; or whether his passion and obsession will encourage other to action.  He speaks, promotes, insists because righteousness is hardwired and absolute. 

No one of course paid any attention to his wandering, incoherent, fantastical memoir.  Not only did few care about biking; not only were most people pissed that their civil rights were being infringed upon by the unhinged two-wheeled few, but the fact that some actually believed the absurd idea of a biking heaven . It was a consignment to a Barnum & Bailey side show. 

Doug - Dougie to his diehard friends - never quit, and in all forums, informal dinners, roundtables, conferences, and on streetcorners he hammered on about bikes, bike lanes, and bike heaven.  His old friends tolerated it all but waited for the day that he and Mary Beth took up their residency in Avalon Quarters retirement village, but even there anyone within earshot thought the old man queer and ready for the glue factory. 

Bike Lanes, Recycling, And Electric Cars - The Happy Life Of Doing The Right Thing

Del Barrow was a bike advocate - from dedicated lanes, rails-to-trails, and cycle-friendly rules of the road he was a passionate partisan.  He spent long hours preparing his bike-friendly petition before the City Council, contributed time, efforts, and money to 'Bicycles Are Our Future', the leading bike advocacy group in the Washington metropolitan area. 

 

According to Del bikes could do no wrong.  As inheritors of the climate change legacy, in the avant garde to reduce vehicle traffic on the nation's roads, and the new Thoreau, Walden Pond, Emersonian poets of the soon-to-be pristine urban environment, bike advocates were insufferable  They were pedantic, insistent, hectoring, critical, and tedious.  And yet they never stopped their hammering about the new world of bicycles. 

Bikes were a nuisance. They slowed traffic, caused accidents, and forced unnecessary public investments in bike infrastructure - boondoggles and public scams by green authorities anxious to show their commitment to a better, more verdant, considerate world.  The famous Montgomery County 'bike lane to nowhere' rankled commuters every rush hour as they funneled into a one lane thoroughfare, reduced by half because of bike lane of 500' that ended in traffic, that no one used, and was an example of politically-inspired waste.

Bikes were vehicles when they felt like it, pedestrians when it suited them. Prejudicial laws favoring cyclists passed in the days of radical environmentalism made drivers automatically, ipso facto, guilty in any accident involving cyclists.  This sense of undue privilege and entitlement, particularly when cyclists disobeyed all rules of the road dared cars to hit them. 

Yet Del never once wavered.  Those who complained about bike-share racks lined with unrented bikes, confusing on-off, only sometimes downtown bike lanes on the capital's busiest streets, play-as-you-may observance of traffic laws, the lack of any of the safety equipment standard on cars are ignoramuses, said Del, troglodytes, throwbacks, and inconscient fools.

Bikes made life more worth living, said Del, who suited up in his brand-festooned Lycra biking suit for his weekend peloton, or strapped himself into his beater Schwinn to pedal to the Metro, or volunteered up at Cabin John to fix flat tires.  'Bikes 'R' Us' was the lawn sign Del had put on the front lawn with a bar code and a number to call for more information. 

His wife, initially supportive of Del's efforts to promote cycling was becoming tired of what had become his obsession.  While she approved of the principle, she had become annoyed at his non-stop banging on about bike lanes, car fools, and the dilatory attitudes of government authorities.  From dawn to dusk, Del whinged and complained, and it had become a tedious slog.  He needed help. 

Del wasn't the only one in the neighborhood who had gone 'round the bend for doing the right thing. Margot Billings was a terror about recycling.  Not only was she careful about sorting - she was proud to never mix cans with glass, paper with organic waste, and newspaper with packaging, but she meticulously washed every can she recycled, removed every last bit of dried tomato paste, stray lemon seeds, and stray plastic wrap. 

 

She ran out into the alley at Christmastime to give the garbage men generous tips, arranged her bins so that that they would have an easier time hooking them on to the forklift, and waved to them every Thursday morning as they came by. 

She, like Del, was passionate about her cause, but carried her obsession a step further.  She was a recycling vigilante who called out her neighbors for irresponsible mixing. She left signs on those recycle bins with indifferently sorted trash (she peeked under the lid on her neighborhood walks).  

This vigilantism came naturally, for she was a veteran of the COVID wars during which she was the first to shout j'accuse! at neighbors without masks, disregarding the six-foot rule, or waiting unconscionably long before getting vaccinated.  She was known as The Harridan of Butterworth Place, a woman who still in her bathrobe, but double masked, gloved, and wild, stormed out of her house to confront a COVID denier. 

 

It felt good to be part of a movement to save the environment, and both Del and Margot were happy people.  Because their anger at those who did not comply with biking or recycling was righteous, it was not the bilious kind, the kind that kept you awake at night.  It was part of the passion, the commitment, the progressive faith.

Shannon Biggs drove a Tesla and her husband a fully-electric Toyota; and they were as outspoken and determined as Margot and Del in their desire to help others join the mission for a more livable planet. She wrote letters to the editor, spoke at formal and informal gatherings, and distributed reading material at libraries. 

Now she, like Del and Margot took her cause at face value.  A car with no carbon emissions was ipso facto good.  There could be no doubt, denial, or objection.  Of course this was all idealistic fantasy. Lithium mines were just as environmentally invasive as open copper mines, child labor was used in nasty, war-addled countries like the Congo, coal-fired plants generated the electricity needed for recharging, the added weight of electric cars because of their batteries took its toll on tires and roads, and much more. 

 

Cost-benefit was a fiction for recyclers, electric freaks, and bikers.  Their good was taken as a matter of faith, and no comparative economic analysis of waste disposal or reconfiguration of traffic for a desultory interest in bike travel was necessary.  In fact to do so was to challenge the very premise of a warming climate. 

That - the warming climate - was the issue that brought Del, Margot, and Shannon together.  Despite growing evidence that global warming might not be the apocalyptic threat it has been touted to be - ice sheets in both the Arctic and Antarctic are increasing not decreasing; new evidence from sophisticated AI analysis suggests that man's influence on climate variations is far less than concluded by climate activists - environmentalists are more passionate than ever, and have dug their heels in even more deeply.  Climate change is not received wisdom.  It is fact. 

So, not only does involvement in sectoral environmental issues feel good - biking, recycling, and electric cars - but that advocacy for a reversal of global warming feels even better.  It is the big tent, the big issue, the one idea that puts it all together.  The fact that the three neighbors were one on climate change added to their sense of identity and purpose and gave them a universal camaraderie.  

Hobbes's famous notion - 'Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' - may well be true, but social activism is a good anodyne.  It may not change the existential nature of a penitential life, but it at least takes your mind off it.  So, although the excesses and febrile enthusiasm of people like Del, Margot, and Shannon might be amusing if not laughable to some, some credit is due.  How different is climate activism any different than a round of golf or bass fishing?

University Park, the neighborhood where all three live is an amusing place thanks to its very visible political commitment.  Hate Has No Home Here, BLM, Democracy Matters lawn signs are everywhere.  Compost bins are place in front (not in the invisible alley) of houses, electric cars are charged up on driveways, and bikers pedal up and down the main streets.  

There is nothing quiet about political philosophy there.  Own It, Show It is the mantra, commitment requires evangelism, good works are impactful.  

Yes, it can all be tedious at times, but a side show right around the corner? A must.