The Art Of Deception - Without It The World Would Be A Very Dull Place Indeed

The Devil in The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he has always been misunderstood. I am always seen as this grotesque evil, he says, a macabre figure responsible for the worst things in the world, but I am nothing of the kind.  I am a trickster, a vaudevillian, a jokester responsible for making life worth living.  Without me it it would be a sodden, sanctimonious affair, an endless string of holy masses, propriety, and good sense. 

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what's irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course ... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious

 

Franchot Gunn, a man of infinite charm, seductiveness, and an irresistible wit who was neither a politician nor a vaudevillian, was profoundly dismissive of tedium and the 'truth' ; and as such was the best and most telling example of the America's dalliance with deception.  How hungry for it, desperate for it, needy for it we are!  Gunn was modest in aspirations and crowd appeal; but in a way he was as deceptively seductive as Ivan's Devil. 

Franchot Gunn had a silver tongue and an effusive charm, and no one could resist him. Professors, women, colleagues, supervisors, and competitors were all seduced by his grace, intimacy, and personal concern.  They had no interest in really knowing who he was, what motivated him, or from what compassionate or spiritual spring his sympathy and understanding came.  He was so good at his elegant ballet, that people were enticed, engaged, and finally hooked

They needn’t have bothered.  There really was nothing of great interest beyond Franchot’s engaging smile and direct, warm gaze.  He was complex, deeply introspective, and rigorously disciplined. He knew that the only thing that mattered in life was figuring out What Was What, wrestling with the same angels as Jacob and Job, and taking the words of the Teacher of Ecclesiastes to heart – eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we die.

“Charm and a silver tongue will get you everywhere”, he told his young son. “The only lesson you will ever need to know.”  This bit of wisdom is of course not new, and ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’ was the the guiding principle of P.T. Barnum, the greatest huckster in American history.

 

Vicki Brand didn't consider herself a particularly credulous woman - she kept her own counsel, was chary to engage with the wrong kind of man, recondite in her opinions, practical and rational in her business decisions, and all in all very stable and well-ordered. While it was true that she had made some bad romantic decisions, she had learned her lesson, was back in the saddle as remote and confident as ever. 

She met Franchot at the Old Ebbitt Grill, watering hole for White House aides, Treasury Department accountants, and K Street lawyers but for her a convenient stopping off place for a martini and oysters before heading home to Bethesda.  She went there with no expectations - she was not looking for anything or that particular someone.  She had been through a number of unhappily ended affairs and was not looking to enter another.  

She had just treated herself to a second martini - bad girl, she knew, especially since John did not spare the Stoli - when Franchot sat down beside her.  'Is this seat taken?', he asked in the polite protocol of the Washington bar scene.  No, she replied, at first irritated - it was nice to have leg room at the usually crowded bar - but then gracious.  

The man who sat down and signaled the bartender ('Ah, Mr. Gunn, the usual?') was not the usual government employee - slightly frumpy, badly tailored suit, scuffed shoes, and badly knotted tie. On the contrary, he was dressed impeccably - Armani, designer glasses, Italian shoes, silk socks with a touch of color - and he could have been taken for a model. 

A man like this was not a Washington bureaucrat, nor even one of the capital's power attorneys or real estate investors.  He was simply...dreamy.  As soon as this wholly romantic, cheap dime store novel thought came into her head, she dismissed it.  There was no room in her universe for treacly love-at-first-sight, and she quickly returned her attention to her drink - was it the second or third? It never really mattered once you were on your way. The world looked nice and sparkly either way. 

The fact that he was irresistible and that he knew it added to his allure.  That diffidence, that seeming uninterest, that vacancy was always his long suit.  Women were simply, ineffably, irresistible drawn to a man who not only seems indifferent to them but is as desirable as Franchot Gunn, and so it was that she spoke first, the chit-chatty nothings that are the stock-in-trade of the bar scene.

Franchot replied courteously, spoke to the man on his right, signaled John for another drink, but showed Vicki no interest; but such was her feminine pique at such indifference that she spoke again and again. 

Now, Franchot had been down this road many times before.  He knew exactly what was going on in this woman's head, knew exactly the kind of bait to use, the right hook, and the proper tension on the line.  He was a ballet dancer with graceful moves.  From feigned indifference to faux interest, all carefully choreographed and scored.  He was a master of deception, seduction, and marvelously evil intent. 

Not only that, he understood women - the ones recovering from a badly-ended affair, those who had been months even years without a man, and those who had that clueless vacancy when it came to men.  They were still trying to sort the wheat from the chaff, the good men and the predators, the liars and cheats from the sincere, honest souls. 

There is always some degree of credulousness in women - a tendency to believe despite all odds and conditions that they are desirable, and that peculiar susceptibility clouds their eyes - the man who recognizes their inner beauty must be someone special. 

So Franchot realized immediately that Vicki was one of these needy sorts, and knew that the evening would end up well. 

Why should a man like Franchot Gunn even bother with wallflowers like Vicki?  Why should he waste this time when other more beautiful, desirable, and alluring women were there for the asking?

Because they were there, that’s why; because for a man like Franchot whose very case in point was virile confidence and universal sexual appeal, reeling in the desirable and the undesirable was simply a day on the river. Why not?

For all Vicki's assurances that she had recovered from Jason, a woman does not easily get over being left on the curb.  She had loved Jason, or at least thought she did, and then one day he was gone, disappeared into the woodwork, absent, and not even a note on her pillow.  

She cried for days, sniffled and snuffled at work, drank more than she should have, and finally recovered her composure.  Months passed and she felt she was back on an even keel. 

Franchot sensed all of this like an animal.  He had a feral sense for emotional pheromones and knew when a woman was aching.  He took pride in this sensitivity and in his ability to bed any and all comers. 

And this was why he was a worthy descendant of Ivan's Devil.  He was out to make trouble, to stir the pot, to sniff out the most needy and wounded partners, and to make hay. 

Women needed him to show them how to behave; men needed him as an example of unfeminized manhood; society itself - now more sanctimonious, censorious, and thin skinned as ever - needed him. 

He was just like the Aaron Eckhart character in the movie The Company of Men who seduces a deaf girl - the most lonely, forgotten woman in the office.  He does it because he can, because such deceit and conscious duplicity are part of the most satisfying game in the world - the Devil's game. 

Of course women who have been pursued, bedded, and left by Franchot - and other fortunate men like him - cry 'Cad!', the most despicable, heinous example of misogyny ever; but yet they forget complicity. It takes two to tango.  

Worst of all, women are not the strong, independent, fiercely confident women feminists make them out to be.  They fall hook, line, and sinker in the thousands for men like Franchot Gunn.  It is not a level playing field nor has it ever been. 

The Devil exposes himself to Ivan in another bit of chicanery, but no one else knows of this vaudevillian, this mountebank; so he goes on causing trouble to his heart's content; and so it was with Franchot Gunn, an unrepentant, uncontrite, master of deceit and troublemaking duplicity.  

There will be not much to say about him when he is gone, nor was he expecting anything - nor more than the Devil expects his due.

A Memorial Day Tale Of A Woman Who Hated War - Just Wars, Civil Wars, Existential Wars, All Wars

Brenda Elderberry shuddered at the thought of war. Ever since she read The Red Badge of Courage, a novel about the American Civil War, she was a pacifist.  It wasn't just that story, but combined with her grandfather's tales of trench warfare in World War I and her father's accounts of facing withering fire as he stormed the beach at Normandy, the history of violence was so brutal, untamed, and savage that she vowed never to consider war - even as Clausewitz argued that war, 'diplomacy by other means' - was a viable option. 

 

The Red Badge of Courage described the carnage and horror of the war, a conflict where more men died than in any other war (as a function of population).

The regiment bled extravagantly. Grunting bundles of blue began to drop. The orderly sergeant of the youth's company was shot through the cheeks. Its supports being injured, his jaw hung afar down, disclosing in the wide cavern of his mouth a pulsing mass of blood and teeth. And with it all he made attempts to cry out. In his endeavor there was a dreadful earnestness, as if he conceived that one great shriek would make him well. 

World War I seemed the most brutal and senseless.  No one was exactly sure how it began, something about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, but that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, a casus belli. Europe was itching for a war and got one that decimated the continent. 

She couldn't imagine hearing the officer's whistle, scrambling up the cold, muddy sides of a trench, and charging across an open field to face withering machine gun fire, an assault which would lead to certain death. 

Nor could she imagine her lungs ripped apart by mustard gas and dying on the frozen fields of Flanders, gasping for breath, choking, strangling; or dying a long painful death from infection, pneumonia, or tetanus.  How her grandfather managed to survive was one thing, how he dealt with the misery was entirely another. 

Erich Maria Remarque wrote eloquently about WWI:

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.

Earth!--Earth!—Earth!

Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!

 

Brenda admitted that World War II was a just war - England and the United States had to destroy the armies of Hitler whose panzers had wreaked havoc from Czechoslovakia to the English Channel and who threated the very survival of Great Britain; but war was still war, a horrible and horrific event that seemed to recur every generation despite the best efforts of pacifists like her. 

Enshrined in the principles of the Geneva Convention, just wars must adhere to certain principles:

In most presentations of the theory of the just war there are six principles of jus ad bellum [undertaking just wars], each with its own label: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, necessity or last resort, proportionality and reasonable hope of success. Jus in bello [conduct in just wars]comprises three principles: discrimination, necessity or minimal force, and, again, proportionality. These principles articulate in a compressed form an understanding of the morality of war that is, in its fundamental structure, much the same as it was 300 years ago.

Philosophers and theologians have always been concerned about the concept and nature of a just war.  Most believed that there was such a thing, and tried to fit conflict within larger religious and ethical constructs. In Ancient Rome, war was always potentially nefas ("wrong, forbidden") and risked religious pollution and divine disfavor.  

A just war (bellum iustum) thus required a ritualized declaration by the fetial priests More broadly, conventions of war and treaty-making were part of the ius gentium, the "law of nations", the customary moral obligations regarded as innate and universal to human beings. 

Augustine, perhaps Christianity’s most influential theologian was one of the first to assert that a Christian could be a soldier and serve God and country honorably. He claimed that, while individuals should not resort immediately to violence, God has given the sword to government for good reason (based upon Romans 13:4).

 In Contra Faustum Manichaeum book 22 sections 69-76, Augustine argues that Christians as part of government should not be ashamed to protect peace and punish wickedness.

Nine hundred years later, another influential theologian, Thomas Aquinas set forth the conditions under which just wars should be fought:

• First, just war must be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state. (Proper Authority is first: represents the common good: which is peace for the sake of man's true end—God.)
• Second, war must occur for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain (for example, "in the nation's interest" is not just) or as an exercise of power. (Just Cause: for the sake of restoring some good that has been denied. i.e., lost territory, lost goods, punishment for an evil perpetrated by a government, army, or even the civilian populace.)
• Third, peace must be a central motive even in the midst of violence. (Right Intention: an authority must fight for the just reasons it has expressly claimed for declaring war in the first place. Soldiers must also fight for this intention.) 

These principles have rarely adhered to, even in the more innocent age of World War II.  America’s firebombing of Dresden, or the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could hardly be called proportional; but obviously the generals who planned these attacks certainly thought so.  

Curtis LeMay, a senior officer in the Air Force who advocated annihilation of the enemy through massive air bombing, said it best.  War is hell, he averred, saving American lives was the only priority, and all calculations and equations of Japanese dead had no relevance whatsoever.  

Bombing the Japanese back to the Stone Age was perfectly right and acceptable because it would shorten the war and stop the killing of American soldiers.  His argument, indifferent to the numbers of Japanese dead, was only focused on the morality of victory and lives of the victor saved.

The Civil War might not have been fought at all.  The Southern agrarian, slave-based economy would collapse on itself, said economists, given the fallacy of the economic principles which underlay it and the increasing dominance of a rapidly industrializing North.  The South had no industry, no shipbuilding, no fleet of merchant ships.  

The Quakers, outspoken abolitionists, argued for restraint.  Yes, slavery was an ignoble enterprise, but was the toppling of a slave-owning regime worth the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in battle?

 

The pitched battles of Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Bull Run were slaughters - warfare was still armies facing each other, firing volley after volley across the line of demarcation, and soldiers falling in the thousands in each battle. 

There are no flags on Confederate soldiers' graves now that liberal American governments have been determined to erase all memories of slavery.  To fly a Confederate flag in any venue was tantamount to racism, a statement meant to signal the righteousness of the defeated cause, the honor of the South, its manorial traditions, and its defiling, brutal treatment of the black man. 

This is not true. The boys who fought under the Confederate flag were not traitors or heroes; but young men thrown into battle thanks to no wish of their own.  They did not die for a cause but because they had the misfortune of being men in 1863 sent to be slaughtered in a war which may or may not have been foreordained.  Historians debate to this day whether slavery would have collapsed under its own weight, buried by the North’s industry and enterprise. 

The Confederate flags that fly and the Confederate statues erected in most Southern cemeteries belong there, for they honor those young men who died not for a cause but who simply died young.  They died heroically because they were forced to fight.  They had no preeminent will or purpose to fight, but fought nobly; and it is this sacrifice – the sacrifice of youth in unwilling but obedient service.   They are as much veterans of the Civil War as their Northern brothers. 

History has shown that war is perhaps the most common and the most predictable expression of human society.  War has been the rule since the first human settlements, and every century has been characterized them. Although idealists have insisted that we as a race are progressing towards a peaceful, congenial, harmonious place, the facts show anything but.  

The Twentieth Century was one of the most bloodies in a history which included The Hundred Years War, the interminable War of the Roses, and a thousand other conflicts in Imperial China and Japan, tribal and colonial Africa, and the Americas. 

If violent human conflict is not hardwired as part of a Darwinian imperative, then what is?  Conflicts over territory, power, money, and influence are endemic in individuals, families, clans, tribes, and nations.  Why should anyone ever assume that they will ever disappear? 

So are the Brenda Elderberrys of the world just pie-in-the-sky dreamers? Idealists, Utopians, One World optimists, harmlessly ingenuous people? Peace - i.e. a world without war - comes in two forms.  A Pax Romana where one nation has universal supremacy; and a Cold War, a standoff between two powerful nations neither of which wishes to risk annihilation.  Both are rare; but the second is derived from natural human competitiveness.  Human nature dictates competition, the survival of the fittest, and nations will always fight for territorial or economic dominance.  Two countries when equally matched in terms of resources, will, and ambition arrive at a stalemate, peace is the result. 

We need Brenda Elderberry to remind us of the horrors of war and the desire for peace, but it will be geopolitics which will always rule and hopefully will result in more standoffs. 

No Country For Old Men, The Last Roundup - How A Reasonable Man Believed He Could Cheat Death

Not all old people get the picture - life is not endless and theirs is coming quickly to an end. Instead of facts we all were given a willing suspension of disbelief.  Death is supposed to happen to us, but maybe it won't. 

 

L. Peter Barnes was a rugged old coot, born and raised on a ranch.  He learned how to ride the back forty before he was ten, rode herd on the hundred head rustled from Texas, and managed the tribe of Utes who worked the crops in harvest season to pick strawberries and rhubarb, fish for salmon on the Columbia river, then head south to California for the big pick in the Sacramento Valley. 

Petey could fix anything - tractors, backhoes, small motors, and diesel engines.  His ranch was an Indian burial ground of fenders, brakes, wheels, and pistons.  Nothing went to waste, not a screw, nail, or grommet.  He was a parsimonious man and  carried his spare practicality with him when he left the ranch and the West for greener pastures.  He got a an appointment to West Point, graduated, and was commissioned; but was retired in the final year of the war when the Navy did not need any more Second Lieutenants. 

 

Petey's life was unremarkable, but successful - a Fulbright to London where he studied physics at Kings College, Cambridge; was deployed during the first years of the Marshall Plan to North Africa, and with his practical and academic engineering he was able to set himself up in business.  Pacific Tool and Die grew by leaps and bounds as American industry turned civilian, and before long he was secure enough to sell the business, join the faculty of the University of Virginia, and settle down to a good, quiet life in suburban Charlottesville. 

He had four children, three girls and a boy, all of whom followed in their father's practical, sedate, mature, and honest footsteps.  Petey never had to worry about them or their future.  He could rest assured that the life he had built for them would carry them through. 

As he grew older, Petey became more and more preoccupied with his health, and took extreme measures to assure that he would live well beyond his allotted four-score-and-ten.  He stripped his meals of all fat, bulked up on raw vegetables, whole grains, unfiltered molasses, and organic spices.  Thanks to his engineering background, he installed industrial-strength air filters, triple-filtered water purifiers, and the most efficient electric stoves. 

He ran ten miles a day, worked out at the gym, kept trim and to fighting weight, and consulted medical advice for every aberration of the norm.  His calendar was filled with dermatologists, cardiologists, neurologists, and orthopods.  

Now, Petey Barnes was not a stupid man, and knew that when the Grim Reaper came calling, one had to invite him in; but still there must be, there had to be a way for delaying his visit, deferring the inevitable, for even...denying him. 

Petey so believed in mens sana in corpore sano not simply as a credo for healthy living but as a firewall against death.  If he tried hard enough; if he willed body and soul into defiance of death, if he showed God his determination to stay on earth, and do whatever was was asked of him in exchange, then he might be granted deferment or even exoneration. A death-defying bargain with Mephistopheles.

    

Accordingly, his life became a hamster wheel of revolving intent.  He cleansed his body of foul pollutants, filled it with the stuff of organic life, tempered it with proper weights and measures,  aligned his mind with purity and good will.  If anyone was going to live to one hundred and beyond, it was he 

To an outsider Petey had become an unhinged, emotional mountebank loony.  'There he goes, poor man', said Mavis Purdy to her next door neighbor as the watched neurasthenic, stringy, gaunt Petey Barnes do another lap around the neighborhood.  

Mavis' husband Alphonse had been on a similar punishing treadmill until she pulled him off it, yanked him back to the here-and-now, and told him to fire up the grill and not be late for dinner.

Petey had no Mavis in the wings, no hook to pull him off stage when his routine got tiresome; and so he banged on about clean air, proper and correct blood levels, and a good outlook without restraint.  His jousting with Death went from a medieval event to a fight to the finish.  He woke at night seeing images of nothingness, that vast, immeasurable void that we are told awaits us. 

Most men of Petey's age deal with the forthcoming end of existence with equanimity, poise, or cavalier bonhomie.  The bell curve fits all.  Harvey Flint drew down the last of his IRA and offshore accounts, threw his grandchildren's inheritance to the four winds, signed off in Floriana on his way to the Marquesas with just this note in the log. 'Sold the house, sold the car, liquidated the accounts, and soon will be far from you all'. A last gasp but one full of rich, tropical breezes.  

Billings Philby, long widowed, said goodbye to family and friends, bought a young Filipino wife and lived out his days in East Timor.  

 

Petey had neither the gumption nor the will for such extravagant behavior, and could only continue counting calories and joules of energy.  He looked around him and saw only treadmills, shelves of organic vegetables, bins of frozen, inedible innards, cases of almond milk and not a beer in sight. 

The clock was ticking.  He had far fewer years on earth than had gone by.  His life was cluttered with the tools of longevity, but without warranty. He would soon be gone, and the machinery of exercise and promised happy aging would be sold at auction. 

Yet he could not help himself - up at 4, on the treadmill by 4:15, tiger's milk, beet and radish juice by 4:45, a cored pear, melba toast, and a fermented sardine by 5, and the long day had barely begun. 

Yet each day was one of victory, one with lungs-full enterprise.  He had squeezed another 24 hours from The Reaper, but was at sixes and sevens to know what to do with them. Oh, for a yacht in Rimini or a Filipina concubine. 

'But I could have had both' he said, and so he could have; but therein lies the lesson of Petey Barnes.  Life has a way of cheating you out of your birthright, snookering you into corners you never would have chosen, dragging you down paths leading nowhere, tidying up odds and ends in later years, but never completely fulfilling. 

Petey had enough insight to know that his life of grouting, 1/4" screws, old washers, brake jobs, resurfacing, tiling, and recalibrating was not exactly what he would have wished.  Where did this dutiful obligation to physical righteousness and order come from?  Why hadn't her been born with some dolce vita?  

All his figuring, his calculations of omega-3, hem-iron, saturated fat, purification, and determination to live forever amounted to nothing.  He sat at his workbench surrounded by cannibalized motors, pieces of sheeting, coils of wire, piles of gypsum, wanted desperately to go into the kitchen and cook himself a big, rare, ribeye steak, but couldn't. Too many years at the grindstone, too many hours taking care of things, righting them, and not enough....

Here he was stumped, for he like everyone, the inevitable product of genetic imperative and a tampered environment could do nothing else.  And the thought that he had spent so many hours trying to extend his prescribed, determined life was the worst of all.