W.R. Marcy lives in Westchester County, New York. After the Army and NYU, I spent 25 years in the overhead electric crane and hoist field. I began writing short stories in 1996 (won a prize with the first one) and have had thirteen published in literary journals. I stopped writing in 2002 because of an illness in the family, and only began again two years ago.

I have three grandchildren and two dogs. What more could a man ask for? I can think of only one thing: that the damned dogs wouldn’t hog the bed at night.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 

Since legislators write the laws covering malfeasance or felonious behavior by legislators, we do not have laws with teeth in them to discourage such behavior. Neither the legislature or the judiciary system is to be trusted with matters of this sort. Upon further review, they are not to be trusted in matters of anything within the purview of the human drama.

Elected officials convicted of felonious and/or a malfeasant act(s), forfeit their pension and all benefits.

Elected officials convicted of a felony and/or malfeasant act must be sentenced to a term twice that of the ordinary citizen, and serve every day of it. Elected officials would not be eligible for parole nor would they be eligible to serve their sentence in a minimum security facility.

Elected officials convicted of a felonious and/or malfeasant act that involves a specific dollar sum are to be penalized triple that sum.

As for the laws, that would be the responsibility of the Supreme Court to assemble a convention of esteemed law professors and have them convene at public expense until the body of these laws are completed. If deemed necessary,  an amendment(s) to the constitution will be submitted to the voting public within 90 days after completion of the legal convention. No branch of federal or state government will be permitted to approve or disapprove its submission to the people.

This set of laws would be applicable to both national and state legislators, and when adopted would be so retroactively.

Politicians, God bless them, will pose in flagrante delicto in the privacy of their world wide web, but are as modest as a maiden in a nunnery when it comes to a scrutinizing of their ethics or lack of same.

Politicians who require a bill of ethics to be negotiated in camera have something to hide, have broken a law, have sold their office, otherwise such a bill would not require all the lights be turned out during the negotiating process. What is there to negotiate in the first place? What are they hiding? From whom are they hiding it? I don’t know why they are the least bit shy about their behavior or in the least disturbed, the voters don‘t seem to care,

see: William Jefferson, former congressman from the state of Louisiana, arrested, tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, re-elected by his clueless constituents, and sentenced to 13 years in prison years ago, and is still on the streets, and when his stalling tactics are finally exhausted, he will suddenly develop a health issue that precludes his incarceration. Makes a guy proud to be ‘merican). Allowing the input of politicians in such a bill means there will never be teeth in any bill of ethics to make them think twice. By putting such a bill before the legislature we are asking the foxes to guard the hen house.

Boys and girls, it is time to do what needs to be done: an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The ethics bill unveiled by governor Cuomo is just what the state of New York needed if the politicians in Albany had ethics, but you see skipper, they don’t and it’s nothing but busy work. The level of corruption is such that it requires the intervention of the federal government by way of an ethics bill with very sharp teeth. The bill presented was negotiated with legislatures that when they got through with it was certain to be useless, toothless, and a threat to no one with their hand in the till  .  .  . high fives for the guv.

What in the world made Cuomo think he could have a meaningful ethics bill passed? Well, he didn’t, it was a stick he invented with the intention to beat an opponent with during his re election campaign, a demonstration of his deep concern with truth, justice, and the American way. Talk about cynicism.

I am ashamed of and for Cuomo since, by offering such a bill to be gutted                         by the princes of Albany, he revealed himself to be part of the problem and one more corrupt politician that besets the taxpayers of New York, and like all politicians incapable of shame. I thought he was a man but he is nothing but more of the same problem.

I’m sure there are many who would tell me I do not know how politics is done. That everything is negotiation. To which I reply, one must know the difference between honest negotiation and  overt corruption to serve at the pleasure of the people. If I am governor, my negotiation stance is, pass a meaningful ethics bill, one that will draw blood from the corrupt, or I’ll formally call in the feds to rescue the people of New York.

We need the feds to come in and clean the Albany house. We need to get rid of no show jobs, commissioners that have no commissions, and everyone else that is feeding on the public teat. And we need to do this with an amendment to the constitution now.

As things presently stand, what have we to lose?

Cuba, Vietnam, & Constitutional Embarrassments

     As for placing hero worship in historical perspective  .  .  .  a little night music, maestro, if you please:

     Jack became president since he was the next in line, and the office was his by right of primogenitor as Joe was no longer available, his having been killed in the big one and all, but first a gig in congress to get everybody’s feet wet and figure out which way was up and where all the hot babes hang out, and that went well or at least no one got caught with their pants down.

     But he found his seat in the House confining, and his ego pulled at its leash. He was ready for something on the world stage. And this dabbler, this handsome, this charming, this self-assured, this persuasive, this enormously personable self promoter, and at the same time this profoundly unqualified dilettante brought with him to the White House an ivy league diploma, and a laser like focus on his Barcelona. And then three months later came Cuba, and the Bay of Pigs.

           The only explanation for our role in the Bay of Pigs is, without it the state of Florida could be at electoral risk. Doesn’t that fully explain why the lives of 1500 men, the honor of the United States, and the credibility of the Presidential office were thrown away?     

     Why in the world would Jack Kennedy be a party to such an ignoble exercise? Given the tenor of the times, the collapse of colonialism, our public posturing with regard to the absolute and unconditional resistance to Soviet tyranny, our ostensible revulsion to oppression, why would he give as much as words of comfort or even tacit approval to invading a sovereign country in our backyard that had all the moral underpinning of the Nazi invasion of Poland .  .  .  to install a Gandhi in Cuba?

     The blame for our moral lapses are to be found in the hedgerows of our fear and the thickets of our cowardice.

     There is then a contrived pause in Jack’s concern with Cuba while our Nibelung in their castle keep fashion super slippery banana peels for Castro to skid on and exploding cigars to surprise him with, and boy-O gives a bravura performance of Camelot, and our Commander and Chief  pretends to a loss of interest in our neighbor while having surreptitious conversations with equally inept Mafia personnel regarding a bearded someone of interest who was an annoyance. The result of which was a full bore babe alert in the person of Judith Exner so it shouldn’t be a total loss. There must have been times when the White House looked like a deli counter with all the honeys lining up and taking a number for their turn with the presidential Barcelona.

     And then came Cuba redux.

    Having made an amateur’s shambles of his first military venture and while, we assume again distracted by his favorite affairs of state, he came near putting an end to all of us, every man, woman, and child on earth. And for the second debacle we are given a bumbling of circus clowns coming and going, endlessly climbing into or pouring forth from sleek and phallic limos, tripping over one another, a company of highly placed buffoons and gomers officiously replying, “No comment,“ to questions not asked, who did not have a grown up idea in their heads, performing intellectual pratfalls by way of making laundry lists of responses to the Russian fait accompli one might expect from the patrons of O’Brien’s Bar and Grill at closing time after a long and wet evening, till someone on the Russian side thought to handle it with a quid pro quo, a heretofore slick diplomatic maneuver that ten year old street kids the world over take to as a matter of course to settle their disputes that our best and brightest had seemingly never heard of, and who took thirteen days to get to, and they got to it only because one of the Russian who was thoughtful enough to suggest it, .  .  . sweet Jesus, and these were our best and brightest?

     And don’t we thank whatever God we worship there wasn’t a twelve day clock that one side or the other was working with, and having finally got to it and the world could then exhale, it was then expected of us,  the pool of insignificants from central casting that fill out the crowd scene before the big flash in the sky, to deliver to he who rules the required hosannas for not having botched that matter so that all of us were incinerated?

     It is simply beyond belief that the Russian navy shipped multiple manifests of ballistic missile launch pad assemblies, support equipment, and the necessary technicians to the island of Cuba, whose government we had created reasons not to trust for domestic consumption at the behest of what was then obscure agencies of our government that operate in camera and furnish Intel reports to lead PROTUS to believe the end is nigh, and who controlled the day to day business of the executive branch like the grown up in a room full of preschoolers, and no one could confirm the existence of the missile launch pads?

     Cubans, who had far more reason to distrust us than we them by way of our support of Batista, and the consequential body count at the Bay of Pigs, unloaded the launch pad shipments from the Soviet Union, trucked it at full teeth chattering convoy volume down the docks in Russian trucks onto third rate dirt roads, with rattle and clatter through the night to the assembly sites where Russian technicians erected the launch pads that by the time they were outed were completed with missiles and warheads .  .  . in the Caribbean .  .  . Ninety miles away .  .  . and yet no one could confirm the existence of missile launch pads?   

     We had people in the Soviet Union on our payroll, we had a Department of Naval Intelligence, we had companies of covert CIA agents collecting bits and pieces of data on the Russian ships and cargo from the Artic circle to the Caribbean, we had our Navy, surface and submersibles tracking the Russian ships, we had a Coast Guard that watched the Russians sail into the port of Havana with their end of days cargo, we had the  most powerful and sophisticated air force in the world, we had a CIA equipped with U 2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft with camera technology that can spot a flea crawling across a rat‘s rump from the edge of space, we had operatives on our payroll on the island of Cuba, we had sympathizers of field grade rank within the Cuban military .  .  . and no one could confirm the existence of the launch pads?

     JFK had taken an island in the Caribbean of no geopolitical importance and successfully transformed it into the linchpin of Armageddon .  .  . and no one could confirm it?

     Did the best and brightest think that Castro would bend his knee when they stamped their foot? Castro was not a suck up politician, or the pudgy wannabe office boy you send for coffee, he was not yet one more third world country lap dog. This man was someone who had lived for years as a guerilla, under constant threat of death. This was someone whose politics consisted entirely of freeing his country from the yoke of our hand puppet and American corporate interests. If he was a communist, it was we, by our corporate colonialism who made him so.                 

     Allen Dulles, an old friend to the sugar barons and their families, sitting on their verandas sipping something cooling, and not so much the peasants working under a semi tropical sun in the fields. The man of steel with X-ray vision, who could visit Cuba in 1955 and see only the threat of communism.  As a practical matter he could have saved himself a trip when the only way out of the cycle of poverty for the man working in the sugar cane fields was communism. There sure as hell weren’t any capitalists running to give him a helping hand or cooling drink.

     Allen Dulles and his dim and self righteous brother, John Foster Dulles and their congenital camaraderie with tin pot dictators and oppressors of all stripe within the hemisphere of the Monroe doctrine that asserted the right of the United States to intervene as it pleases. A Doctrine that filled precious  few children’s hungry bellies. It did however fill the pockets of many a greedy son of a bitch.

     To be fair to JFK, had Eisenhower trusted his instincts more than he trusted the Dulles brothers, dark and stupid men with a 19^th century agenda, JFK would not have had the problems he had. But of course Ike, a military man, had been trained to rely on the word of men exactly like the Dulles brothers, men who he may not have personally admired, but men who he had to depend  on to know what they were talking about, and to give an objective recitation of a dicey situation with such hard facts as there were. From dumb and dumber, Ike got neither of those two decision making necessities.   

     Castro was and remains an enigma. There is nothing in his history up to and including his overthrow of Batista that would lead anyone to suspect that he was anything other than what he said he was which is, a man bent on saving Cuba.  As it turns out, he would take assistance from any source were it of  help to the Cuban people. That help could come from the U.S. or Russia, he did not care. When the U.S. turned its back on him, and it came from Russia, he was a communist. Had it come from us, he would of been a capitalist, or at the very least a card carrying Democrat.

     There is also our history in Cuba that Castro had to get past. Most likely given his temperament that might have been the biggest stumbling block. But somewhere in all of this there was a solution that went begging for the stupidity on our part.

     How would history have changed had Ike forgone that golf game and met with Fidel when he visited this country? What is the worst that could have happened? Someone might have pointed a finger at Eisenhower, the man who led the crusade in Europe, and called him soft on communism? It is extraordinary that small, rodent-like calculating men have the capacity to emasculate their betters; but even brave men become cowards in the arena of politics.                                           

     The realities of the times were, Batista was our hand puppet, and Castro, though an unknown quantity, was not apt to step and fetch, and if he did, it would not be for us, but for Cubans. Another reality was, and still is, every island nation in the Caribbean has had and still has more than its fair share of communists since the day Czar Nicholas II was given the boot. Doesn’t anyone ever wonder why, when the land of plenty, the bastion of democracy and freedom is at their door step? And still another reality was, it did not make a whit of difference who was president, they were all afraid of the accusation of being soft on communism.

     The blame for our moral lapses are to be found in the hedgerows of our fear and the thickets of our cowardice.

     But the fact is, Jack bungled it. The entire legacy of JFK is based on the what-might-have-been, a set of closely managed and disinfected scenes and scenarios that are released periodically to preserve and protect the fictional JFK, much like Camelot itself, that no one dare find fault with because he was martyred.

     Followed by LBJ with more of the best and the brightest at his behest. Johnson was simply a hack with an ego to be led by the nose who had not the discipline or intellect or the courage to forego the urgings and advice being given him. Tailored counsel designed to go directly and appeal to what he, this Texas buffoon with all the grace of a ward heeler, considered his rightful place in history that instead led to a tragedy of his making and his making alone in Vietnam. And by not turning that dog’s breakfast  over to the South Vietnamese government and getting our people out of there, by not being man enough to do so, man enough to say, no more, it stops now, we will have no more, and by allowing himself to be used by  bureaucrats as he was because he too was too weak, too narcissistic, too spineless to resist, condemned tens of thousands of men who would have but did not return alive or intact to their families, their wives, their children, to sweethearts, friends and neighbors. It is way past time for someone to come up with a rational explanation why our young must die for the egos of wretched self-important men.

     The blame for our moral lapses are to be found in the hedgerows of our fear and the thickets of our cowardice. Is there the smallest reason to suspect that these embarrassments that we elect to high public office will be different in the future? 

Homosexuality

     Homosexuality is a fact;  it’s not going away, and it’s time to get over it. There are doors to the mind that have yet to be opened, but smart people are picking the locks and when finally revealed will illumine the nature of all of us.

     The first door to be opened that will light that dark place we have been stumbling around in, and almost certainly will amend the reality of our place and purpose is the answer to the question, what is mind?

     We do not know from whence this amended reality of place and purpose will come. It could come from quantum mechanics or auto mechanics, who cares? If we have an insight of who and what we are we can rid ourselves of the collective mass of societal mythologies that have caused needless pain and held us all back as human beings.

     To most everything there is a upside and a downside, but I think that it will be a bright and sunny day when the alchemists of humanity stop trying to turn homosexuals into something they are not and will never be. It will also be the end of near-speak, buncombe, and twaddle, with regard to human sexuality.  All of that misdirected energy might be turned to something useful, I mean one can only hope.

     Personally, I do not think there is an urgent need for additional heterosexuals. It has become obvious that unless we at least slow down the be fruitful and multiply thing, quite soon we will be unable to feed all the hungry mouths of this world for our increasing numbers, and what then? Well  .  .  .  Armageddon, that’s what, and it won’t make any difference what one’s sexual preference is.

     With regard to bisexuals:  Webster got it right the first time around: men who perform homosexual acts are homosexual. Duh! My feeling is, any other view on this category is hairsplitting and sheds more heat than light.

     I do not have the educational background or gender to delve into the basic emotional construct or the menu of societal demands and expectations imposed on women to understand and to speak to lesbianism. I assume there is an impelling non-sexual dynamic of lesbianism that is different than that found in male homosexuality, and that is as far as I am willing to let my guess work graze. Anything else I have to say on the subject is either in the form of a opinion or question.

     There are concerns I have with homosexuality. One being, the rate of STD contagion male homosexuals generate because of their promiscuity, as reported by the Center for Disease Control. These diseases are not to be dismissed as nothing more than a bad cold as in some cases they have become an epidemic leading to an aggregate health profile that is a burden on the available health system infrastructure and its resources, and the long suffering taxpayers, and aggravate existing non STD medical conditions.

     As for AIDS there is an enormous medical cost to the victim and the world’s economy, and it is anything but a bad cold, more like a bullet in the heart but not as merciful. The thought that comes to mind as a heterosexual is, the next homosexual connected disease may be virulent to the Nth power, a Spanish influenza type disease, and transmitted like influenza: a cough, a sneeze, a crowded elevator, and kiss an entire civilization goodbye.

     Then almost as bad as the Spanish influenza are the politicians, fearless with other people’s lives, luring homosexuals into the cul-de-sac of civil rights, their only interest in the matter being the large block of active votes at stake. Politicians, a pox on them and all their houses, most of whom are lawyers, therefore twice cursed by God, and who would be of far greater service to mankind were they all turned into pillars of salt, know full well there are no civil rights for homosexuals as there are no civil rights for K-Mart shoppers, or vegetarians, or dieticians, oh, and yes, or heterosexuals. Homosexuals are easy prey for this sort of horse an pony show because it has the ring to it of the one thing they want to hear, a mainstream acceptance with which to live their lives in; to not always be the outsider.

     What we do know about sex is, the mind plays the central role in all sexual activity. But the central and most important question, what is mind, so far remains unanswered. I remember reading in or around 1995 that this question would be answered by the millennium. It hasn’t been, and in order to understand an individual you must have a idea of how he or she is wired, and you cannot do that until you know what the mind is. It is frustrating to know what needs to be known, and yet that need continues to be elusive to the detriment and pain of so many.

     What we do know is this: people have lived their lives with great masses of their brain missing; they did not know it and either did anyone else. It did not handicap them. They lived normal lives. There was never a need or an occasion to image their brain, and only if they had an autopsy would the fact of their condition come to light. The answer to the question, what is mind, when and if it is forthcoming will incorporate far more of the human body than the brain, and will, I’m sure be startling.

     I am a seventy six year old male who knows no more about women now than he did when he was sixteen other than they are a treasure. Thus having completely disqualified myself to speak to lesbianism, allow one remark and small commentary directed at the heterosexual ladies if you please. Given the choices that women have I don’t know why they all didn’t go the lesbian route several millenniums ago, since when they are not being disemboweled by a sweet talking sociopath, they are being savagely beaten into a bloody and unrecognizable lump by some pot bellied, bad smelling, ignorant, drunken bully who is getting his Saturday night jollies before ensconcing himself on his worn out couch to surf for porn, and who was at one time the lady’s dream boat. Go figure.

     What’s the attraction? Is it the bad boy thing? Listen ladies, and make sure it gets around, but if you partner or marry someone who has a steady job, makes a good living, keeps regular hours, most of which are spent sober, goes to a gym twice a week, expresses themselves in a manner you can be confident he or she graduated from the sixth grade, and buys you a red rose once in a while, you’ll have more fun out of life. Don’t go getting upset with me, it’s just a thought.

Lower Case Treachery

     The new idea on child rearing is the acceptance of an old idea that is, there is such a thing as a bad seed  .  .  .  a child who will be a vile adult and capable of dark and contemptible acts traceable to a mind in full concordant with evil.

     Some people are simply wired wrong in the womb, infected with whatever it is that afflicts them, and enter this already troubled world as psychopathic personalities who when they get older can mimic caring and friendship well, but are pleasured most when causing pain or humiliation in another.

     The Germans were the ones to put a name to it, schadenfreude. I don’t know why, but the very sound of the word seems to fit its definition; a case  of tintinnabulation in German? No gain is involved in this sort of loathsome behavior, no money or sexual coercion, only the gratification of inflicting a hurt on another human being.

     Ordinarily, treachery is a crime or sin against a prevailing code, but lower case treachery is different in that there is no quid pro quo of any sort and thus there is no recourse in the courts. It is craven, it is cowardly, it is an act that often uses a dupe, someone to take the brunt of the victim’s anger thereby increasing the pleasure of the creature that put the hurtful event in motion to begin with.

     Lower case treachery is the sin from whence other sin springs, the sin that is the thrust between the shoulder blades of God and man. This sort of treachery is perpetrated against those who have given the purveyor of such treachery their trust, the sin against those who had no reason to believe they would be betrayed by a friend, a cold and covert evil act, a spineless act of malice by one who can never be trusted to be on either side of a confidence, or to ever do the right thing.                                                                                 

     Lower case treachery is more often than not the specialty of the insecure, one who resents his lack of abilities, disregarded by his peers, relegated to the outer fringes when in the company of his betters, one who strives to pass off the fiction that he is a formidable power behind the throne of whatever mindless melodrama he thinks someone of importance has made him a part of, one who uses his obscurity as a shield against the discovery of his less appetizing activities. Someone who works diligently to be above reproach. Abjures foul language. An active member of the PTA and political party of his choice. Someone never out of step with the popular and conventional flow of the moment.  A Boy Scout on the surface who makes all the right mouth noise, particularly if there are important ears to take in his fatuous sentiments that should a finger ever be pointed at him accusingly the very idea of his involvement in any scurrilous matter would be dismissed without the slightest probative examination, someone who swears oaths to God, country, and individuals he would betray at the drop of a hat.

     What kind of man will with premeditation and malevolence set out to bring pain or humiliation to another simply because he can? A bad seed, a man who is wired wrong,  a psychopath, and there is no legal remedy for his victim. The only hope for the victim is a providential tragic accident for such a person that will have a permanent remedial affect. Do not send flowers. Make a hallelujah donation

COMING ATTRACTIONS

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Famous People

and The Duty of Dirt Bags

Plus

24 Other Great Short Stories

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The Purging of Man

A Novella

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God will provide, but what if He doesn’t? What if God is not what we want Him to be? What if the God we worship is a result of our inability to face reality and our blind denial of same? What if God is malevolent? What if He sends the Angel of the Bottomless Pit to prepare a pleasing table for Him, you and me? How do we defend ourselves? How do we question God? How do we bring God to trial for crimes against humanity? What is there to anticipate in this life or the next under the aegis of a malevolent God? Who is there in this cold cosmos besides our fellow humans to give us comfort and love? This story is about the failure of man, a metaphor if you will  .  .  . the ultimate cul-de-sac for those without charity in their heart and egos grown large; of those whose hearts hold only schadenfreude and little forgiveness. When their time comes to whom do they appeal? When they are in need of mercy, who do they petition? When besieged, to what haven do they flee? When the great of the earth are brought low what inn shall they go to for shelter? The Sturm and Drang of life is wholly unbearable if we do not live lives with the righteous temporal qualities we would ask of God.

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The Necessary Adjustment of Pincus Zuckerman

A Novel

Pincus Zuckerman grows up to be seventy eight years of age and then drops dead, the only thing he ever did right without erasure marks. As one of the newly dead he must go to the Idyllic Island that is straight out of a 1940′s south seas movie for his Getting-Used-To-Period and do his penance. He keeps bumping into people he knows such as his uncle Boris who, when Pincus was a kid was famous for moving lamps for bored housewives when the husbands weren’t around, and his best friend, Phil Kaplowitz, who had to move away in the middle of the night. He also meets pope Pius the IX and the Fat Man who is in charge on the island and who lets Pincus think he can leave the island and go to paradise any time he wants to but in fact Pincus must atone for his life that he wasted. He then meets Elizabeth Anne Crowley from Philadelphia, PA. and against impossible odds they fall in love. Pincus and Elizabeth, dead as a door nails learn a thing or two about life, and while feeling feelings they never felt before, learn a thing or two about being dead, but most of all they learn about the power of love. 

‘LUCIAN’S PRINCIPIUM’

THE TITLE CAN BE FOUND ON AMAZON.COM

William Beauchamp, clueless, somehow graduates from college with a student loan that Saudi Arabia couldn’t carry to find he can’t get a job. He leaves home for Gotham and a job no one else wants. Eight years later he awakes to find he has two new companions: Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, and Lucian the Skeptic, first century philosopher, both of whom are real only to him. Later that day at lunch he meets Henri Gasson, a famous hangman who wants to retire but can’t until he finds a suitable replacement. Over the next eight weeks Gasson persuades him that he must discover his true niche in life, otherwise his death will be as if he never was. A run of surreal events while on a noxious errand in Brooklyn shakes Beauchamp from his life-long apathy. That he chooses a path most of us would not to find his purpose, leads him to discover many things, one of which is love.

The American Dream

          Why does one need a four year college degree and a crippling debt load to be a worker ant in the 21^st century when a six month course after the fifth grade will do nicely. One that devotes itself to the fine art of sucking up and responding to one’s betters with, “yes sir” and “very good sir” and “will there be anything else, sir?“ thereby certifying one as qualified to spend a working lifetime with one’s hat in one’s hand being the Second Assistant to the Associate of the Telephonic Communications Supervisor’s Second in command. And if one must ask, how do we know who our betters are? Then the answer is, anyone who is drawing a breath until advised differently.   

     Why is a four year degree necessary to be an accountant, or programmer, or a middle manager? College is a befogging with false import upon the dross and drivel of commerce and its unbearably monotonous activities. And the reason why it is a good thing that the odious bureaucrat has a four year college degree is? And what useful collective purpose does a college degree serve when the majority by an immense measure of those having had a college degree conferred upon them are ill-educated or uneducated or functional illiterates?

     Those pursuing a true profession or a hard science need attend an accredited University for academic proficiency in their field of interest and to demonstrate a level of competence within a set of testable standards .  .  . In the case of a medical doctor, knowing a lung from a liver, or a cosmologist, knowing the last night plane out of Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid on it from alpha centauri, or a licensed attorney, knowing what is billable so that the stray nickel is not left on the table in error, and in every case with the fervent hope that there will be in the syllabus ethics courses to protect the likes of us from the likes of them. None of this includes the pseudo professions that sprout up like crab grass to give thin cover to the intellectually barren, the lazy, and those who are parking themselves until the movie producer skids to a stop at the curb, jumps out, and discovers them.                

     And to those missionaries without portfolio who would pursue a social science, spare us the workings of minds that refer to those paper stapling activities as science, as social science is to the work of real science as the block corner is to an archeological dig, and are but a trifle without merit or challenge and a sanctuary where the ungifted flock to avoid the dreaded pick and shovel.

    Consider the politics of eighty years ago when most voters did not have a college degree. Devastated by the great depression, haggard and hopeless people, if they had a bed to go to, went to it hungry .  .  .   Philosophy? The Greeks? The Romans? Lit 101? Economics? There was nothing left at the end of a day for a stroll through the rooms of those ivory towers, as every ounce of strength and every waking moment was taken up with finding a crust of bread to put into the growling bellies of their rail thin and sickly children. The politics of the depression were the sort that simply promised white men a chicken in every pot.

     Then compare that with the college educated sophisticate of today who cannot be bothered developing a cogent opinion regarding the universe of unintended consequences of the First World War, its impact, and how it changed the lives of everyone on this planet, or if given a world map could not point out Guadalcanal, or the Ardennes, or Colleville-Sur-Mer upon it, or cannot recite a line of poetry from memory, or have never sat down and listened to a rendering of Bach’s Partita III  and Loure, minuets, Gavotte en Rondeau, Bouree, and Gigue by an accomplished violinist because, Barney, that’s not where the big bucks are, and the big bucks is what it‘s all about.

     But those precious youthful years will be gladly wasted fulfilling the requirements of some diluted and worthless graduate school program that qualifies them to buy and sell derivatives, or for a job in government that inadvertently hold the lives of all of us in hands that have never known a callous or a mind that knows nothing but the counting of beans  .  .  .   Day in and day out until they turn grey of face and pass away as if they never were.

     These, the new, the college educated, the informed electorate of today have the moon and the stars promised to them but somehow in spite of their savoir-vivre, wind up in Korea, Vietnam (and for some reason, Laos and Cambodia don‘t count), the island of Granada, Lebanon, Kuwait, Gulf Wars one and two, Afghanistan, Iraq, and whatever that thing in Cuba was called, plus threatening to nuke Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea, and if Russia or China would like a little of that too, why just step right up, there‘s plenty to go around.

     And if our foreign policy falls a little short of sanity, or the credible, or the least bit comprehensible to anyone who was promoted from the sixth to the seventh grade, then there is always the powerhouse American economy that won World War two but disappeared overseas around 1970 and that means we no longer have a heavy industrial capacity, which in turn means the only job left out there in the cruel world is being a rock star .  .  .   a country of three hundred and twenty five million rock stars. Apparently it’s true, God punishes the wicked and makes them deaf.

     God also punishes the wicked by having thieves elected to congress who sell their sacred office to the highest bidder which is not to say that an immense amount of money is required to buy him, as his representation isn‘t worth very much to anyone to begin with, nor is it to say the congressman is always from Louisiana, it just seems that way. Or elect unpleasant little trolls with bad hair and a foul mouthed wife to, for the lack of a word, govern Illinois. Should they ever skim the scum of politics off the pond of Illinois they will be left with a dry ditch.

     It also makes the chicken in every pot pitch sound like statesmanship or Grand Opera, because, Skippy, what more is it we want from government than that? But in the 1930’s only rich white men got the chicken in their pot as there were only so many chickens and, as fate always has it, there were exactly the same number of rich white men as there were chickens.                       

     Today, there is the woman vote, the Black vote, the brown vote, the green vote, the gay, lesbian, and chicken plucker vote, there is the Liberal vote, the conservative vote, abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, the war vote, the peace vote, the death penalty vote, the national Health Insurance vote, and ten thousand other groups as well as the ever omnipresent rich white men vote with their very special important problems that must be attended to without further delay, or ado, today, at once, immediately, now! And to every one of these groups promises sworn to on a stack of bibles are made by sincere sounding politicians who will fix all these problems a week after they’re elected with a wave of their hand .  .  .   especially those truly serious problems of particular annoyance to all the suffering rich white men.

     Are we morons?  

     We are morons!

     That is when we briefly consider  marching up and down Third Avenue in our ratty blue bathrobe with a placard nailed to a wooden slat:

REPENT – THE END IS NEAR

And callow teenagers point their finger and holler insults at us.

The end

First Love And Other Major Hemorrhoidal Issues

by

W.R. Marcy

      We met in October of 1950 when we were sixteen; she was going on thirty five and in early menopause; I was going on twelve and in arrested development with a pompadour slicked up so high it had permafrost.

     She was a pretty girl, maybe beautiful, but I was not ready to make such distinctions,  or what beauty was apart from the eye of the beholder, or value the inner beauty of someone otherwise homely when it shines through to the surface.

     She was a girl who was  impossible to understand, who would create  whirlwinds of confusion in me if I got too close, and by too close I mean emotionally, and  by too close I mean in the same galaxy.  A girl who drew me in over my head, a girl who, despite how much I thought I’d become to her or what I thought I would do for her, never let me know what she was thinking,  or what she was feeling, or what went on in her world when I was in absentia. 

     A secretive girl who was at the one pulling me toward her and at the other pushing me away, a girl who had constructed an attractive castle in her emotional desert with high impenetrable walls to keep me and the storms of life outside without as much as a cup of comprehension to slake my thirst, a girl who would brush off  a pointed question as if it had never been asked, or if pinned down, walk away without looking back. A girl who lived in a shell of something granite-like that made her needlessly hard, a girl who was a pain in the ass.

     Was it a case of sexual incompatibility? We never had sex, so how would I know? The immutability of that logic notwithstanding, I had no doubt  we were sexually incompatible from the beginning as I was the male, and thus I wanted to whether I did or not, and I didn’t; she was the female and she had to pretend she didn’t want to, and she didn’t. I think it was more a matter of us not having sex to avoid discovering we were sexually incompatible, as we had more than enough problems without that fire breathing dragon.

     But for reasons I still do not understand she did not appeal to me sexually, nor apparently, I to her. How was that possible? What was the problem? She should have appealed to me, I wanted her to. She had lovely breasts, long shapely legs, a wonderful figure. And if she was not sexually attractive to me, then precisely what was it that drew me to her? At sixteen, the double yellow lines in the middle of the road or a parking meter could set me afire. And to give her her due, we even tried once near the end of whatever it was we were doing to one another, and my guess is that neither of us could put a name to that, but by then it had become  too complicated, and too late, and anticlimactic of a sort.    

     Her indifference to everything  .  .  .  sex, me, the world, was of such a size it overwhelmed my libido. She lacked a joie de vivre, I lacked maturity, but for three years I kept returning to her, assuming each time I did I would find a changed, a less blasé, a more engaging person.

     I read somewhere that sort of behavior is a symptom of  insanity, that is, to keep doing the same painful thing in the same way over and over and expecting a different outcome every time.

     Had we not done in today’s world what we did not do then, given the lushness of her, our age, and our glands, there would be talk of closets and repressed homosexuality, since in today’s narcissistic whorehouse of  a world, if you have doubts about someone of any sort you simply Google them and the answers come pouring out, right answers, wrong answers, who cares? And if you don‘t like the answers then check the spelling or rephrase the question. 

     I was afraid, of  what exactly I’m not sure, but at the time my being afraid was as natural as breathing, and besides, I had been for years warned of the consequences that went with  .  .  .  with what? Premarital sex and outraged fathers with shotguns? An infant in its crib completely dependent on me?  That was closer to home. How  could I take on the responsibility of a girl-woman and a child when I could not take care of myself.

     Why did I keep returning to her? I suppose I had my own problems, but who doesn’t? Wouldn’t it be an equally legitimate question to ask, why did she continue, not so much to take me back, but not oppose my returning? What is it that the two of us wanted from each other? When we were in each other’s company we were scorpions in a bottle. I don’t remember a moment I spent searching for that which I wanted from her. Were the two of us going through the motions until the right one came along? But there must have been something that each of us had that the other wanted.

     She went off to Rhode Island the summer she turned seventeen and got pregnant by a college boy. A healthy baby girl came the following spring. This was the early 50’s and it seemed only girls in cashmere sweaters, tartan plaid skirts, and bobby sox were getting into ‘trouble.’ I asked her to marry me. She thanked me, the only time I ever remember her generating a tender emotion with me, and turned me down. I didn’t love her, I’m not  sure I even liked her that much, why would I, but I was inexplicably drawn to  her. I wanted to protect her. Protect her from what, poverty? Had she said yes, had we married, poverty would have been our faithful companion to the end of our wretched days. Public censure? To protect her from the shame of foregoing the conventional administrative prelude before giving birth? Surprisingly, at least to me, she never seemed unduly bothered by the out of wedlock thing, the single motherhood life and all the freight that went with it at the time showed a great deal of tough-as-nails grit on her part, because even though the boy’s family arranged a light speed marriage to give the baby his name, then immediately started divorce proceedings, the matter had become common knowledge by way of gossips. Why did I want to marry her? To be gallant? At that time and at that age I set great store by things like chivalry, a code of honor to live by, and I  wanted so to be a romantic; that was my mother coming out in me, and I should have known better. To show the world I was a man? That I had the same sort of courage that she had? I didn’t. I was not a man, and marriage wouldn’t make me so. It would take a long time and an extraordinary woman to make a man out of me. So what was that all about?

     There was a destructive streak in my mother borne of the bleak and hopeless 1930’s depression and a source of  problems for her, me, and everyone around her, the symptoms of which were dismissed out of hand at the time by the medical profession as female troubles. It is not love that makes the world go round, it is the bullshit of the medical profession that furnishes the necessary methane for the engine of rotation to maintain the spin.

     I was cursed with a similar streak. To about the age of 43 I was  discontent,  going through the motions and hating it, wasting my life and my money, drinking too much, making destructive choices, waking up sick and ashamed and frightened because I knew I would be tossed whichever way the wind was blowing that day. Something was missing. I did not know what until I was in my 50’s. I avoided confronting my failings, but when I did, it was a pro forma sort of thing, and I got back to business as usual, destructive, stupid, warts and all.  I mention this only because this was me from the start, and the package of problems I had would have been no solution for the girl’s problems.

     Recently I read a piece where psychiatrists are beginning to retreat from their long held belief that there are no bad children, which is interesting as everyone but them seemed to know it, going back thousands of years. The article did not go into detail other than to state that some are born without conscience or compassion and are wired for the moment. I found that to be an unsatisfactory model in that it lumped everyone into one pot, the serial  rapist child killer, with the selfish son of a bitch, or the passive aggressive bully, making no provision for degrees of badness, or at least did not imply that degrees of badness existed that I assume was an oversight in the article.  I also mention this because maybe we, the girl and I were two people who were not bad people, but not good enough for one another. Go Figure. On second thought, all of this is tough enough to navigate without the “expert” input of the medical profession.

     I knew when I was thirteen years old I had no future. I knew there were things I should be doing, preparing myself for matters the young must begin to deal with, but all of it was too much trouble and required too much from me. I ran from responsibility, I put no effort into anything, I had no self control, no discipline, I expected nothing but good luck all my life, and was only surprised when it did not happen. Later, the only real talent I had I was afraid to commit to because if I was wrong, if it turned out I did not have that talent, then there was nowhere I could hide from me or from those who took pleasure in  mocking me for pretending to such talent. Regrettably, had I shown courage at nineteen or so with regard to what I wanted to do with my life, my life and the lives of those I loved would have been easier and more fulfilling. What’s the worst that could have happened if I committed?  I find out I have no talent and I better get a job. Other than I would not have had the uncertainty regarding that talent on my back all my life, how is that different from the way things turned out?

     Did I think that running into a marriage with someone who also had problems was the solution to my problems? Insane. I have come to suspect that the two of us did not know who we were. Why we weren’t introduced to ourselves was not a finger pointing fault, it was more a breach of good manners, a social faux pas that we, she and I committed  .  .  .  pardon my rudeness, but it appears I somehow forgot to introduce myself to me . . .  am I to believe we were two people who couldn’t get to know one another because we didn’t know ourselves? That sounds crazy enough to be plausible. About the only thing good I could say of that period was that I learned what I was not looking for in a life’s partner, and I‘m only guessing, but I think the girl must have learned the same lesson, at least I hope she did. As it turned out, the thing I had going for me when I was young was an  unbelievable lucky streak I ran in my early twenties. Her name was Linda.

     The girl and my mother had both suffered wounds. Is that sufficient to explain anything? It doesn’t explain a thing, and it’s too New York Jewish intellectual for my liking and would mean I’d have to give up my Saturday softball game in the beer league to go to my house of worship, but it would have given me, if not an explanation, than at least a starting point at which to try to pull together the loose ends or the ends of me that did not fit.

     The girl was attractive, my mother was beautiful. The girl was intelligent, my mother was talented. Both of them kept people at a distance. They both had an emotional wounds, my mother from the crushing weight of  poverty by way of  hard times, the girl, by way of  her father’s walking out on his family when she was ten. Both women lived in a protective shell. Both women inflicted needless pain on themselves.

     And then there is the incongruity of what precisely was my interest in the girl? It must have been platonic, because it wasn’t sexual, but if  platonic then why all the adversity between us? Sexual tension? And knowing me, and at that age, how could it not have been sexual? I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t a surrogate for her father, daddy dumbest. Didn’t I have the same unattractive qualities as him, didn‘t I walk out on her regularly? What a mess that would be .  .  .  . me looking for mommy, she looking for daddy. Maybe we could get a twofer with a shrink.  I think a very good idea about now is to shrug my shoulders and walk away from it.

     I do not know how much of this I should, or I want to explore. Over the past thirty years I have beaten up on myself in an ever increasing tempo over more important matters, matters far more on point. I have come to that bedraggled place in my thinking where there isn’t that much more to be gained by continuing to do so.

     But there is the nagging something.

     There is a great deal of parallelism between the girl and my mother, but, so what, and should I be surprised? Were I to find some great rift in me caused by either of these two women what would it explain and to what purpose? The problem I have with things like Oedipal explanations is that psychiatry is like constitutional law, we all know what the words mean, but it is the take on the words in total that is the difference. Do psychiatrists like the Supreme Court have the final say on those words, or are they suggesters of plausible explanations? No one has the final say.

     I was always afraid. What I was afraid of I don’t know, but there was always something I feared from the time I was a boy. But don’t all kids live in fear of something?

     Besides the things that kids are typically afraid of, I think I also feared rejection  .  .  .  discovery. I was afraid that my father, the greatest, strongest, most fearless, wisest, and kindest man on earth would find out, would come home from work one day at the bank keeping everyone cool in the summer and warm in the winter at exactly the same time he always did, and realize that I was not the son he wanted, he hoped for, wished for, could be proud of .   .   .  And the Nobel prize for very difficult  and impossibly complicated organic chemistry that only smart people who do not always disappoint their father have the smallest chance of knowing anything about goes to .  .  .  No, not you, Billy, not in this lifetime and not in the next, and not until you learn the goddam multiplication tables.

     Of course that’s dad taking the hit for failings that I had and admonishments I richly deserved, and besides, my father was a good  man, a man who did his utmost for all of us, a man who, if he had problems made of hemlock would have swallowed them whole not inflict them on us.

     My father loved the game of chess and was good at it, being rated a B or C level player by the ruling chess federation. He tried to teach me the game and succeeded only in teaching me how the individual pieces move. I had no patience in learning the openings, much less chess exotica, such as the end  game. I do remember him telling me, “control the center of the board, castle early, and develop your pieces.” My father’s style of play was passive, one that allowed his opponent to beat himself. I would launch an attack on his position at the first opportunity that was furious and left nothing to the imagination, or in reserve, ignoring the fourth, the most important, and last thing I remember him telling me . . . “never underestimate the resources of the defender.”

     I am sure it would not come as a surprise to anyone that I  approached the girl as a game of chess with my father, but much like the game itself, I could not control the center of her board, nor was I smart enough to castle early to protect the king, which of course was me, and never got far enough into the game where I could develop my pieces, but most of all, I fully underestimated the resources of the defender.

     I do not know what it is that is needed for people to overcome their problems, other than to  grow up and live a life. How the grown up  life is lived is the story, not what mom or dad did or didn‘t do, and the jury is still out on that.  

     I do know this, people can learn and people can change. That it is harder for some than for others goes without saying. But it is not a question of how hard it is, but whether or not we have deep down inside us what it takes to do it.

     There is something though, something small and far from profound. My Linda, my wife, my love, was the only woman I ever knew who when she walked into a room I was in, I smiled and felt happy.

     First Love? It was many things, not all of which were bad, but  in time, a lot of time, I would come to know what love is, what friendship and caring and passion and holding someone dear is, and this was not it, none of it.

The end