Confessions Of A Moral Zealot - A Life Of Good Causes, Left On The Curb, Then Death In A Chaise Lounge

Bob Muzelle was a social justice warrior.  From his earliest upbringing by his father Isaac and mother Cordelia, he was imbued with ideas of charity, compassion, duty, and The Other - this catch-all term used by his father to include all dispossessed, marginalized, suffering people of the world.  'How can anyone call this country great', his father said at Sunday dinner, 'when so many people cannot sit at the feast' and from there launched into his retelling of the Wedding at Cana, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the absolute responsibility of every Christian to follow the example of Jesus Christ. 

Not that old Isaac was a fundamentalist Christian.  Far from it.  He was an indifferent Methodist, a scattered and questioning one at that who had kept his union card only because The First Universalist Methodist Church of Great Neck had recruited a fiery preacher from Bayonne who gave the Bible a modern, socialist twist.  'Jesus was the first community organizer', Pastor Evans said from the pulpit, 'the first social activist, a man of faith and action'. 

Bobby went to church with his parents but was more interested in flipping through the hymns, replaying Bach, and waiting to get into the fresh air; and was only rightly initiated when he met the Reverend Sloane Beveridge at Yale, a man of moral rectitude and Christian faith but schooled in the ways of Saul Alinsky and Paolo Freire.  God and Man formed a distinct, foundational partnership, and was in New Haven to promote the interests of both. 

Beveridge was the first of the lot of nouveau missionaries - men who, instead of carrying a civilizing message to the Jivaro and Aymara Indians of Amazon and altiplano, brought it home; and marched arm in arm with his black brothers and sisters to Selma and Montgomery. 

To all but his coterie - Yale students who thanks to upbringing (like Bobby), predilection, hero worship, or absent parents - Beveridge was just a windy poseur - a political panderer feathering his own nest and headed, he hoped, for The Church of St. John the Divine, Upper West Side bastion of 'social worship', a term coined by the then pastor, Parker Amory who, Beveridge hoped, would soon retire and leave the pulpit to him. 

Beveridge spent many long weekends in New York with Amory, currying favor, cajoling, enticing, and finally wringing a tepid commitment from the old man. 

All this was not beyond the notice of the St. Grottlesex crowd - young men from old, patrician New England families who had been anointed at birth to continue their aristocratic tradition.  'He's a jerk', said one, laughing at Beveridge's goatlike prancing to meetings here and there, popping up where he was not wanted, talking ad nauseam about the black man and his rightful place atop the human pyramid. 

Beveridge was as ubiquitous as Billy Graham, counselling deans, college presidents, and wealthy alumni, preaching his message of Christlike love and activist compassion.  A St. Vitus' dance, a peripatetic whirling dervish performance better suited to vaudeville or the male ward at St. Elizabeth's loony bin. 

 

Bobby however, found the man irresistible.  A man of good Puritan stock - he claimed heritage to the Davenports and Potters, founders of New Haven and Yale - Hollywood looks, and a potent message of love and militancy.  Bobby wanted not only to be with him but to be him. 

Bobby, for all his social commitment and Christian purpose had no real moral spine, no theology of his own, no real agenda.  In other words, he was a perfect follower - a credulous, insecure person needing only a kind word of encouragement to send him to altar and barricades in a flash. 

So he went with Beveridge on freedom rides, sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and protests, finding his voice in harmony with the Reverend, feeling blessed and motivated.  He would do anything for the man. 

When Beveridge died - dead from hysteria said the St. Grottlesex crowd - Bobby was disconsolate, bereft, and all alone.  His mentor, friend, and supporter was gone, and now what? Yet the answer was as clearly writ as the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai.  He would take up Beveridge's progressive cudgel and leave no issue unattended.  In tune with the temper of the times, he took up the causes of nuclear disarmament, world peace, the black man, women, gays, capitalism, and the environment.  He was a whirligig of good works, a tireless advocate for every cause, every issue, every bit of intemperance trouble he could find.

 

'He's a worse jerk than Pepsi', the St. Grottlesex crowd said, referring to the dead Pastor Beverage. Bob of course, given his anointment and holy mission was undaunted.  They were the jerks, the white privileged has-beens who would soon be left out in the cold by the likes of him and his missionary followers. 

Bob whinged and whacked on for decades, never losing a step, never doubting for a minute the rightness of his causes.  Who, if not him, would look after the moral health of the world?

He never saw the handwriting on the wall, how women whom he had admired and put on their well-deserved social pedestal were paying no attention to him.  They sat him in the back row of the auditorium at women's conferences, never once invited him on the dais, and gave him the bum's rush during coffee breaks.

Black people were even worse.  Gone were the accommodating white-black love-ins of the Sixties with Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy and King.  Now there were only do-ragged, gold-toothed, silver-grilled pimps from Anacostia and South Detroit, Black Lives Matter Fuhrers and racial terrorists who hadn't a clue as to who these great men were.  Bob couldn't even get a word in edgewise when they started rapping their ghetto rhymes about the white man, aimed at him, he thought, one of only a few white faces in the crowd. 

 

His excitation concerning the coming climate Armageddon was old hat now that 37 separate predictions of doom had come and gone, and the country was well on its way to adapting to new climate reality, happy in fact that they could simply move their truck farms north and be cooler along the way. 'Listen', Bobby shouted, 'Listen!', but not a soul within earshot was paying him any mind.  He was a supernumerary, a leftover sandwich, a soggy Oreo cookie. 

'Isn't time to let it go?', his wife of fifty years said to him one evening over her famous pot roast; but Bob still had fire in his belly, and the problems of the world were increasing, not decreasing.  Gays, transgenders, Palestinians, and octoroons were still damned and insecure, at any time exterminated, eliminated rather than included.

His wife couldn't tell him what everyone but he knew - he was old hat, a tired, limp, piece of yesterday's sponge cake that nobody wanted.  'Let's move to Florida', she said. 

Now, nothing in the halcyon days could have been more unthinkable - sunning himself on a Miami beach in a chaise lounge sipping pina coladas.  Nothing could be more bourgeois, anti-progressive, a downright moral failure, a dismal, pathetic end; but there he was actually considering the option. 

Luckily the reality of it all - a life that nobody really cared about, all his social activism either for naught or coopted by goons and comers, an existence as pedestrian and unremarkable as any.  He could have been a Walmart greeter for all his social conscience had gotten him; and now that that spawn of the devil Trump in the White House again, a President who in all probability would sweep under the rug every last bit of progressive reform that Bobby had worked so hard for, it was indeed time to cash in his chips, buy the farm, go into That Great Beyond.  And to do that better on a tacky beach in Miami than in some nasty Baltimore slum.