"Whenever I go into a restaurant, I order both a chicken and an egg to see which comes first"

Monday, March 18, 2024

Delaying The Last Supper - The Penance Of Inconsequential Dinner Guests

The Altons were a perfectly good, decent, and friendly couple.  The problem was that they were an unmitigated bore - and why his wife insisted on inviting them to dinner was a mystery to Howard who was in the process of cleaning the basement, emptying closets, and finally attacking the attic - getting rid of his old Santa Claus costume, hardened grout, unreturnable gifts, and boxes of saved memorabilia which, after so many years, had become so much trash. 

It was time, Howard insisted, to clear the decks for running, to make his life's last passage smooth sailing; and the Altons were included in his battening of hatches, furling of canvas, tightening of sheets, and running close to the wind.  

His wife wondered at the energy of a man who had never done anything around the house, a live-and-let-live husband with a call-the-plumber approach to leaks and drips, an otherwise good soul who had a hardwired indifference to broken things and an irritating workaround attitude, who now was working like a demon at all hours of the night until the bins and dumpsters in the alley were overflowing. 

If he wasn't sorting through accumulations, he was obsessively enforcing routine. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner had to be precisely and exactly the same.  There could be no variation in the porridge, the salad, or the meat-and-potatoes - the same steel-cut Quaker oats, the same spring mix from the same supermarket bin, and the very same, exact cut of flank steak from the butcher.  Bed time and rising were as regulated as on a marine base, and daily activities were ordered and performed with precision - all of which he said made the sailing easier, a kind of permanent trade wind at his back. 

Now, Howard was no end-is-nigh evangelical waiting for the Last Judgement.  He had grown up in an indifferently Catholic family who greeted Father Brophy warmly and cheerily on Easter Sunday but who otherwise gave St. Anthony's a pass.  He had gone to Sunday school, did the occasional Stations of the Cross, but left home and church behind at an early age.  

 

So, this newfound attention to his final days was surprising.  His wife had always assumed that he was no bell-ringer when it came to God, and that his death would be taken with the same disinterest as he had towards a leaky roof; but no.  

He kept talking about Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a story of a man who had badly misjudged everything, and who had no sooner resigned his post because of illness, than the crows began pecking at his leavings. 

Ivan had built a comfortable, unengaged life, designed to keep insignificance and irritation far from his door, but had neglected to consider the ultimate; and when he did face the yawning uncertainty of life after death, he became completely unmoored. 

'That will not happen to me', Howard said, and from the moment he woke up to the minute he closed his eyes, he channeled Ivan Ilyich.  'Too soon old, too late schmart', say the Jews, and he was bound and determined to figure out what was what before it was too late.  

Easier said than done when the extraneous bits kept seeping through chinks in the timbers.  He had nothing against the Altons or the Finches or even the Porters but demurred, deferred, and outright refused to consider anything to do with them.  More unnecessary cargo in the hold, rusty containers on deck, sacks and barrels that took up space. Which was why his wife became worried about him.  He might consider himself a latter-day Tolstoy, but he was hemming her in, a woman whose last decade was never meant to be a socially penurious time. 

Her husband was becoming a hermit - no, not a hermit but a misanthrope, a nasty old man who wanted no part of life, of others. No marital split could have been more renting - it was a question of valuation, of moral philosophy, of, well, everything. 

Yet there was Howard at three in the morning trucking the dolly out to the alley with waterlogged boxes, motheaten clothes, and ripped beach chairs.  He was making progress, and the emptying spaces were satisfying even if his mind was still cluttered with images of old Father Brophy shaking the chalice as if he were fixing martinis; and mumbling Domine, non sum dignus as he went down the altar rail; or the bloody crucified Christ on the cross hanging above the tabernacle, or the choir, or the nuns. 

Betty Alton clacked on about her great uncle Robert and his 100 acres in West Virginia, Lyme disease, and her latest recipe for blood sausage, and Howard at each sally fixed himself another martini until he was well boiled and numbed. '...so he sold them all', she rattled. 

'Sold what?' thought Howard having lost the gist of the story long ago.

The Bob Bridgers were a catty, scratchy pair that seemed unhappy about everything under the sun from garbage pickup to Americana, a nasty couple with some connection to Iowa State and the Midwest in general; and the Albert Coughs whose son was a doctor at Beth Israel and would soon be Chief of Staff blah blah and their daughter, a beauty, etc. etc. 

For Howard's wife there was a value in company, any company.  Community, she had often said, regardless of its cast and composition, was the stuff of life and breaking bread was its communion. 

And so it went until the last stalwart went by the wayside and the doorbell rang only when a sign-only delivery came. Silence is golden, and Howard's streamlining and trimming of sails could now go on uninterrupted.  Thank God the Altons, Bridgers, and Coughs had disappeared.  At Howard and his wife's age there would be no new crop of friends to eat their pot roast, so in a few years the attic and basement would be as empty as the day the foundation and roof beams were put in; and Howard would finally, happily at peace. 

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Sybaritic Pleasures Of The East - Donald Trump, The Pasha Of Foggy Bottom

Donald Trump's accession to the White House was not exactly a second term when presidents coast through to the Constitutional end of their tenure.  The former President, now the current President once more, was planning for eight years on Pennsylvania Avenue not four.  Time to settle in and enjoy the full sybaritic pleasures of victory.  He would be the ruler of all he surveyed, a shah of the new Persepolis, a Chinese emperor in fine silk; Suleiman, father of Turkey and lord of a thousand harems. He would be Cleopatra, queen of Alexandria, unmatched for her beauty, intelligence, and canny political rule.

 

Enobarbus in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra speaks of the Ptolemaic queen

I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion--cloth-of-gold of tissue--
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

'Ah, to be a queen', thought the President. 

Now, in the runup to the election, in the infamous campaign of 2024, Donald Trump had been called Imperator, a Caligula, and a Nero - the worst of Roman imperial rule, one who would defy man and the gods to expunge every last trace of the Republic and to rise to divinity himself.  A murderous, pitiless, Richard III.  A Stalin, a Hitler. 

 

Of course Donald Trump had no such ambitions.  To be a vicious, intemperate, bloody ruler takes a Nietzschean will, a Miltonian Satanic defiance, a pure, unadulterated amorality; and The Donald was nothing of the kind.  He was a buffoon, a pretender, a second-rate vaudevillian, a clown and a Borscht Belt tummler.  From him nothing was to be feared.  Only the febrile Left took his bombast and braggadocio to heart, his words for meaning; and his outrageous personality for character. 

The Left was not unlike Brutus, Cassius, and the Roman plotters who felt the urgency to kill Caesar before he arrogated imperial power to himself. He had done nothing, and as an epileptic believer in the supernatural, a weakling equally swayed by his wife, the mob, and soothsayers was no threat to Rome; but just in case his fanciful notions of kingship should mature into action, he should be assassinated. 

The only imperial streak in Donald Trump was his temptation by the pleasures of the East.  He was more a Mark Antony than a Caesar, an older man besotted by the indescribable comforts of Egypt and the warm embraces of its queen.  Antony had had enough of battle, the internecine fights of the Triumvirate, the suspicions, doubts, and plots.  He wanted nothing more than to retire in the arms of the  incomparable Cleopatra. 

 

Trump never felt entitled. Against that fallacious notion he had railed for four a decade.  No one is entitled to anything but in his case the spoils of war were deserved and merited.  He was like Agamemnon who, victorious over the Trojans, took Cassandra back to Mycenae as his concubine and watched over the palace of the dead Priam as his officers and confidants divided and apportioned the wealth of the kingdom. 

The republican regime of Joe Biden was a sagging, sorry, dismal affair - a deadbeat, musty, airless administration of cant and assumption.  An old fool surrounded by a cackling Rasputin and his claque of political comers? How far America had fallen from the manorial greatness of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton - aristocrats, lords, rulers in spirit and enterprise. Biden would not retire to Mount Vernon, Hyde Park, or Monticello, but walking distance to the Ocean City boardwalk. 

Installed in Washington for a second time, the White House would become an Ottoman palace, a Topkapi, Yildiz, or Dolmabahce; and he would be a Sultan as admired as Suleiman or Mehmed II. Melania could never make the residence palatial, but the appointments could add the measure of luxury and elegance that the old place had always lacked. Lots of gold filagree and embroidery, sconces and Persian carpets.  Servants as elegantly attired as those of the emirs of Arabia or the maharajas of Jaipur, Bikaner, and Udaipur would would serve at the new formal White House dining room with a hundred-foot long table, gold and silver settings, crystal and fine linen, all arrayed before him, the Pasha of Foggy Bottom. 

 

The Second Trump Inauguration was a magnificent affair - a Pennsylvania Avenue cavalcade reminiscent of Cleopatra's barges on the Nile, a procession of regal, imperial floats festooned with gold standards, rowed by Nubian slaves, adorned with urns of forest flowers, marshalled by the handsomest young men surrounding beautiful Grecian virgins. 

Fitting of the investiture of a monarch, there were representatives of the governed- not the scattered, helter-skelter smattering of people of color, but separate arcades of cheering black, Indian, Latino, Asian peoples.  The music was eclectic and grand, as resonant and heroic as that of John Phillip Sousa. There were horses, and carriages, and military phalanxes marching to the sharp tattoo of snare drums, timpani, and cymbals. 

Of course it all didn't happen exactly this way - even the President's wildest dreams could never replace the dowdy reality of Washington - but enough of it survived, and the Nation's Capital once again became Camelot or rather Constantinople, a place of harems, maidens, and concubines; a palace of wealth, glamour, and glory.  

 

The fear of a politically imperial Trump presidency were of course unfounded.  He has had no interest in channeling Vladimir Putin and is content to serve out his term amidst the sybaritic pleasures of his Sultanate. 

The Left, of course, after so many years of hatred of the man, are scurrying for cover; but Trump has no interested in slaying the defeated.  They lost yet again in a devastating rout, and will cavil and hector from the wings, but are incidental irritations, nothing more. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Gender Spectrum, DNA, And Designer Babies - LGBTQ+ Upfront And Real

There is a lot of talk these days about gender. The old standard of male and female sexuality has been dismissed in a 'who says?' populism, and everything in between has become an option.  Social media sites have lists of nearly 100 points on the gender spectrum, and each week it seems, new ones are added. 

Some are simple as saying the rosary - naming it makes it real - and there is an attractive fungibility built in to gender choice.  That is, if you are not happy with one sexual identity, try another. 

This to many undoes the seriousness of the choice.  If gender selection is as easy as ordering from a Chinese menu it demeans the whole intention.  As it is, the facile sexual self-definition and the whole discussion about pronouns has already deflected attention from the more fundamental issue of human sexuality.  



On the other hand, opting for irreversible sexual identity requires more drastic measures. Surgical sexual reassignment is not for the faint of heart, and what man of a certain age can possibly forget Lorena Bobbitt and her straight razor? So if there were some way of avoiding that eventuality it would be welcomed. 

Enter recombinant DNA and designer babies.  Now that the human genome has finally been deciphered, and the process of relating specific bits of genetic material with human attributes turning up new associations every day, the DIY baby generation has arrived. The futures market is already active, and those attractive personalities who are still alive have already sold rights to their DNA; and the estates of those who have died have cleared legal hurdles for the rights to disinterment and gene harvesting. 

 

Soon online prospective parents will soon be able to purchase Michael Jordan's incredible athletic ability, Marilyn Monroe's sexual allure, and Albert Einstein's genius. Prices will vary.

It has been long contended that gayness is an inborn, innate, genetic trait.  Although not yet pinpointed on the genome, it is only a matter of time before it is; and if gayness is genetic, then each and every one of its variations must also be hardwired. ABC News has recently published an approved list of 59 sexual options of which the A-C listings are illustrative and suggestive of the varied sexual array possible Agender, Androgyn, Androgynous, Bigender, Cis.  

While some options like two-spirit and neutrois seem unlikely to have a spot on God's genetic palette, most others will; and if so, then future prospective parents - whatever recombination and sexual permutation they may be - will be able to order respective DNA. 

So, in addition to ordering beautiful blonde blue-eyed, seductively attractive, genius-brained, triple-event athletes, parents can have genderqueer ones as well.  Diversity in this soon-to-come world will be beyond a progressive's wildest dream, a cornucopia of sexual choice, a banquet, a feast. 

The only problem with all this is that no one can remain on the fence - once the embryo has been engineered to conform to the specifications on the order sheet, there is no going back.  A queer Marilyn Monroe it is, like it or not.

Of course like any other retail item, there will be a money-back guarantee period.  The embryo can't be tinkered with forever, but within the first two weeks, retraction and re-modification will certainly be possible. 

Some cynics have claimed that the whole idea of sexual diversity will ironically disappear with genetic modification.  When ninety percent of parents want the same birth outcome - the standards of feminine beauty have not changed in millennia, nor have those for intelligence and athletic ability - there is a risk of millions of identical clones, with only some deliberate leaking around the edges - shades of coffee skin tones, eye color, height, and symmetry - but generally all people will be grouped around the norm.

The market, say conservative economists, will sort things out.  There will always be innovators who diverge from the norm and pave the way to new standards and ideals.  While popular culture will always be relatively homogeneous, there will always be deviance from the norm.  

God knows what future generations of human beings will look like.  We can only imagine. More than likely the leather, chains, whips, and harnesses of Folsom Street will be things of the past and bi-sexual sadomasochism undoubtedly passé . 

 

Yet and still, what happens to the gender variant, intersex man/woman who wants to go retro - back to the Fifties with bowties, crinoline, and oxfords, men and women?  Will the future hold the possibility of DNA retrofitting?  Genetic kitchen remodeling? Surely swishing and sashaying are not genetically determined, so DNA rewiring to turn back the clock to macho-man times should be possible. 

'Brave New World', warn social pessimists - not the dystopic, autocratic world imagined by Huxley and Orwell, but a chaotic nonsense.  An anything goes world, unmoored from any traditional human values, a chaotic mess of sexual promiscuity, superficiality, and fantasy. 

Very likely, given America's proven taste for all the above. However the new world will be no better or no worse than any other, neither the best of all possible worlds nor the worst, but advocates will whoop and holler and cheer the eventuality of a diversity finally embedded in human nature and not just a political ideal.  Conservatives are doubtful, and hew as always to the universal adage, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. 

In any case humanity will be unrecognizable after the DNA revolution.  Human beings recombined in millions of ways will constitute a new race, a highly evolved one.  Even if the standard traits of human nature have been removed - aggression, self-interest, territorialism, etc. - others just as problematic will replace them.  There is no such thing as Utopia, and there never will be.  A nice ride on a carousel is about all we can expect, so enjoy it.