The Life And Death Of An Overachiever - Doing Good Isn't Worth A Piece Of Cheese In The End

Franchot (Frank) Billings had been born and raised in an unengaged family, much like Fowler, the Graham Greene character in The Quiet American who sees no point in striving for right in an indifferent world, and is happy enough with a quiet, settled, sensual life in Southeast Asia.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Nietzschean Superman for whom the exercise of pure will is the only validation of existence in a meaningless world; and in between are the Stoics, Epicureans, and Buddhists who take life as it is - there is nothing in life but change, an inevitable changing of the moral and social guard so certain one cannot help but react to it; but that reaction should only be acceptance. 

The world is maya, illusion, say Hindus, and the path to enlightenment is realizing its temptations and turning away. 

Despite his parents' moral laissez-faire, Franchot somehow felt that there was something more to life than taking it lightly without consequence.  He was a natural born doer with a need to effectuate, to make a difference, to right wrongs, and to do the right thing.  Where this instinct came from, his parents never knew.  For them life was such a complex, ever shifting tangle of options, decisions, consequences, and unexpected bounties that it was better to leave it alone, maintain a good posture, and see what comes next.

'It was that Yale preacher', said his father, referring to the Reverend Berkeley Sloane Bierstadt, a pretentious religious windbag who made headlines thanks to getting bitten by an Alabama attack dog on a Freedom Ride - an accident of happenstance because the dog had been sicked on a black man with a tire iron but bit too early and took a chunk out of Berkeley's leg.  Berkeley had actually been running the other way when the police line charged, knowing that he would never be a Christ on Golgotha but always a simple grocer's son from Babylon, Long Island.   

 

Yet when he returned to Yale, he in a most recondite but leading way suggested that he had been on the first line of demonstrators defying Bull Connor and his Dobermans; but the credulous, impossibly eager, and hopelessly idealistic undergraduates took the bait, and from that moment on lionized the Reverend and looked to him for hope and inspiration, 

Franchot's father always knew there was something 'off' about that flatulent blowhard in New Haven, and now his own son was an acolyte. Reverend this, Reverend that was all he ever heard from the boy, besotted, smitten by a charlatan, an ambitious whiner who had the chutzpah to stand up in front of an assembly of incoming freshman, bless them, anoint them, and insist that their real purpose of being at Yale was to do good. 

'God Almighty, what a jerk' said Abel Billings, and asked his son as politely and respectfully as possible, what he saw in the man.  With that innocuous overture, the emotional floodgates of the young man opened, and Abel could only sit there and listen to one treacly love story after another.  'Hooked', Abel said to his wife as his son boarded the New York, New Haven & Hartford back to Yale.

Abel looked at his wife with a strange, inquisitive, nasty look.  Could Franchot be the offspring of some other man?  That was the only way to explain such an apostate, a boy so far off the Billings family rails that he must have come from somewhere else. 

'Don't look at me that way', said his wife, knowing what was on her husband's mind, and although she resented the thought, shared it.  Although she had always been faithful, perhaps Franchot was a Rosemary's Baby, spawn of the devil.  A big joke, a laugh when she made the reference to her bridge partner, a woman whose own child was seemingly from another planet let alone the one of a sexual interloper; but when push came to shove genetic splicing and recombination could be the only reason. 

'Uncle Harry', she blurted out, remembering the great-uncle on her mother's side who was a crazed follower of Eugene Victor Debs, Samuel Gompers, and the early 20th century progressives in Chicago, a man who had been institutionalized for his fevered, inchoate, Biblical rantings.  The family, profoundly conservative, laid his mental debility to socialism, but of course it more likely was because of the DNA of one of his infantile ancestors. 

In any case, Abel Billings sat his son down to consider the larger context - Epictetus, Vivekananda, Gautama Buddha, and Sartre, the insignificant nature of the universe, the futility of purposeful human enterprise, and the final end of all of us tossed dans un tas pele-mele. 

'Enjoy life', Abel urged his son. 'Don't waste it. Do you have a girlfriend?', this last comment causing the young Franchot to hit the roof.  How typical of his father's generation, how ignorant and obtuse.  A get it up, get it in, wham bam, thank you ma'am mentality that sickened him.

Back at Yale, Frank spent more and more time with the Reverend Berkeley (Call me Berk) at the barricades for black people, women, peace, and the environment.  Studying was a desultory pain in the ass, and he was called up by the Dean of Students and given a warning.  He was at Yale to study and to shine academically not to fritter away his time with streetcorner preachers.  

The Dean was politically farther right than any Ivy League administrator and one hundred percent of the faculty, so this ad hominem attack on a colleague - after all both he and Bierstadt were paid by Yale - was not surprising although given the upper class manners of the place, was looked at askance. 

No admonishment by Yale or his parents did any good, and Franchot left Yale with a burning desire to make a difference.  After a short sojourn at Chicago where he had time to at least begin his dissertation Socialism And Porky Pig - America's Wallowing in Excess, A Conundrum before he left for a position at Physicians For International Responsibility, a conscientiously objecting, deeply Quaker, morally Christian peaceful organization with an anti-nuclear agenda. 

 

It was the perfect place for Frank for it was as wildly enthusiastic about its purpose as was Berk Bierstadt and his minions at Yale.  Within its walls there was not a scintilla of doubt about the rightness and sanctity of their cause - world peace - and to a man believed that they could make a difference, edge the doomsday clock back a few seconds, shake some sense into the powers that be, and go to bed in a world slightly more sane than before. 

Year after year he went, from one passionate cause to another, to the barricades, burning the midnight oil penning anti-capitalist screeds, and appearing everywhere in a perpetual St. Vitus' dance of dervish-like energy.  

As the times moved on, Frank was quick to follow suit - black people morphed into gay men who morphed into transgender queers.  Peace became universal moral suffrage, raising the poor from poverty, which evolved into African judicial reform which turned into...the list was endless. 

Only in his late seventies did he bank his fires - or rather they simply died out on their own.  It was on a Florida beach one January evening as he scrolled through his emails and Internet sites of interest, that he looked over at his wife snoring on her chaise lounge, mouth agape, arms akimbo, and it suddenly all came together. 'It' being the sum of the ridiculousness of old age and the beating of the political bush that never produced any tigers -  a sad and miserable state of affairs. 

At that one moment, the words of his father came back to him. 'The guy's a jerk'. Franchot had never paid his father any mind, but now, suddenly he could feel the vaporous, flighty winds of the Reverend Berkeley Bierstadt.  He could smell the foul nastiness of the Anacostia slums and see nothing but pimps, ho's, and Fentanyl dopers.  The 21st Century was starting off as bloody-minded, territorial, and militarily ambitious as the hundreds before it.  Women were uppity, transgenders were circus freaks, and there was no climate Armageddon in sight. What the fuck had he been doing all his life?

His wife farted and a dog barked.  It was time for sundowners.  He closed his computer, not even bothering to shut it down properly, folded his beach chair and headed home.  

This wasn't the end, of course.  No story except murder ends so finally.  Frank went back to Washington, banged on about social justice at a few conferences and seminars, but the attendees had only desultory interest, and the scattered few in the audience mumbled and scratched their way through half his speech and then made their way to the exits.  

Trump was in town and ready to throw out the whole progressive kit and kaboodle for which Frank had struggled for five decades. The country wanted no more black this, black that. Glass ceiling or not, women should make their own way.  Agriculture was shifting north, so what? and with the likes of Putin, Xi, Kim, and the Ayatollah no one was giving peace a chance. The cycle had reached its nadir and was starting up again.  'Fuck 'em', said Franchot again, uncharacteristically crude and dismissive, but at his age, who cared?