Happiness Is A Hard Pill To Swallow - Progressivism And The Sad Demise Of A Morose Social Reformer

Bob Muzelle was not a happy man, but in this depressing rectitude, he was content.  What was there to be happy about, he mused, when the world was beset by predatory capitalists, mindless racists, and homophobic fools?

Bob was a man who had always seen the glass as half-empty, a deep, burrowing pessimist who loved dark, rainy days, who even when walking through the park as a young man on a bright Spring day, he could only see the homeless, dead pigeons, the hospital where only the wealthy were interned, and the spires of churches which promised God but delivered nothing to improve his Creation.  

The scent of apple trees, lilacs, lilies of the valley, and honeysuckle - God's marvelous distillation - went unnoticed as Bob, head down, mind in the lunch pails of the poor immigrants slaving over steam presses and lathes at Stanley Works, trudged onward across the park to his three-story walkup home. 

'Happiness is a fiction', said the Reverend Branford Parrish, former chaplain, Freedom Rider, and champion of the black man, women, and the other gendered in a sermon on 'The Inheritance of Good - The Promise of Progressivism' at the Westover Methodist Church, go-to and spiritual home for the suburban elites of Washington.  Westover was a congregation whose flock was shepherded by the Very Reverend Marcus Hawley in whose hands Jesus was an oppressed man of color whose compassion for the poor, the marginalized, the disabled, and the emotionally broken was the foundation for modern liberalism. 

'We not only should follow the teachings of Jesus', Hawley said. 'We must!' and from that point de départ went on to lambaste the incontinent rich, the unheeding, rapacious capitalists who in their desire for untold wealth 'are anti-Christs, distortionists, skulking, miserable, arrogant fools who want to raze the homes of the poor to erect shibboleths of grandiosity...'

When Reverend Hawley got his mojo working, he was unstoppable, a prolix, whirling dervish of passion.  Like the old time Baptist preachers in the South, he raised his worn, well-used leatherbound Bible and shouted, 'This shall not stand!' and the ordinarily temperate, judicious, and recondite crowd leapt to its feet and cheered. 

The two men - Hawley and Parrish made an enviable tag team.  Parrish, a Harvard Divinity School scholar, long time social activist, and dyed-in-the-wool progressive whose sermons and lectures were as academically sophisticated as the classes of Harold Bloom on William Blake; and the fiery, possessed, Old Testament-like prophet Hawley were a good cop-bad cop duo impossible to resist; and the congregation at Westover was simply in tears over their masochistic bludgeoning. 

There was indeed no room for happiness in such a troubled world, they concluded after Parrish had finished his sermon; and after the harangue of Hawley, out the door they went, soldiers of the new progressive millennium. 

Bob Muzelle was a congregant at Westover and never missed a Sunday.  The sermons were advertised on a large display outside the church for all passersby to see, but Bob needed no introduction, so assiduously did he read The Westover News in which the sermons of guest pastors were announced.  All were on heady topics relevant to the current miseries of racism, homophobia, misogyny, climate ignorance, and the devils of Wall Street; but each and every one had a reference to Jesus, Paul, and the Evangelists.  

 

After coming home on Sunday mornings after church, Bob was happily depressed, never dejected, for that would imply defeatism and spiritual loss, but simply delightedly upset by the inglorious, degenerating world around him he was chosen to fix. He had deliberately planted no flower garden, cut back the chrysanthemums, and uprooted the hydrangeas in a kind of penance, a visual hairshirt to remind him of the lives of quiet desperation of the poor and disadvantaged. 

The interior of Bob's modest Bethesda split-level was as spare and spartan as the yard.  There was nothing of beauty there, not one Art Deco figurine, Edo woodcut, Persian miniature, Audubon print, or Sargent reproduction.  Not even a Persian carpet or Kashmiri durrie.  All would be disturbances to the ethos of penitential purpose. Just a lone portrait of Samuel Gompers, labor leader of the Twenties and progressive icon, hung over the fireplace. 

 

Bob's wife Corinne was also a veteran of the culture wars, a dutiful social reformer, former head of an impressive women's organization, and recognized figure on the front lines and at the barricades of abortion, abuse, and male privilege, but had given it all up in early retirement, turned to lesser concerns - book clubs, Pilates, and cooking classes - and had quietly but insistently asked Bob to reconsider his monastic tastes and spruce the place up. 'God knows', she said to him over breakfast one day, 'it wants a bit of color'. 

The Muzelles did not get out much, only to see friends, but for Corinne those dour, unhappy meals were worse than staying home.  Bob's idea of a good time was talking about the worker and the black man or watching King Lear - the most depressing, downbeat play of the canon, a horrible story of an old man abused by his thankless daughters, left to rant and die on the heath with no solace or refuge.  She knew that that type of play suited Bob. On the way home in the car, he could only shake his head in commiserating misery, but contentedly so. 

 

'Things have got to change around here', said Corinne one day, sick and tired of their miserable, sunless life.  For years she had supported, gone along with, and put up with it; but now, the time had come to shift gears and head to Florida.

'What?', replied Bob incredulously. 'Florida?  For God's sake, anyplace but', and with that he turned the page of Sartre's Being and Nothingness and turned off the light. 

Yet Corinne was serious, and when Bob walked in the next day and smelled the floral bouquet his wife had arranged on the coffee table, he said, 'This is not funeral home, Corinne'; but to her it was, for she couldn't resist the irony - flowers he hated disrupting the morose sanctity of the living room.

When Donald Trump got elected a second time, Bob was disconsolate. His depressive morosity turned to flaming, hysterical anger - a St. Vitus' dance of rage and insult.  'At least there's that', Corinne mused, glad at least that something spiced things up and put some spark and pizazz in the house; but the more Bob wailed and screamed, banged his fist and head against the wall, the more she worried about his mental state.  

 

He was  clearly going off the rails.  This abrupt, unexpected shock would be bad for his heart, jacking his blood pressure and overworking his brain; but nothing she said or did calmed him down, and every morning as he headed out the door, she worried; and one day her fears were realized. 

Bob had been picked up by the police in Lafayette Park across from the White House, a ranting, raving lunatic, the arresting officer attested, a threat to himself and to others; and when Corinne went to the station to bail him out, he said he wanted to stay put.  Incarceration was too good for him when the black man was suffering indignities not more than five miles from the White House, in chains and subservience in the ghetto. 

A good lawyer and a good psychiatrist were called in, and a reasonable denouement of the sad and troubled tale could be told; but wigged out on Thorazine and God knows whatever else to keep him quiet, life in the Bethesda split-level was worse than ever.  Perish the thought, but Corinne did think of shipping him off to Green Acres, a private mental facility in Falls Church which cared for the demented. Eventually she did the deed by which time Bob had no idea what was what and was as morosely happy as he could be.