Youth Springs Eternal - It's Not Wanting To Be Young Again, But To Be With Someone Young Again

 Herman, Abe, and Art were lamenting their lost youth – not the days of their youth gone by but the fact that the young women who had loved them in their later years had long gone.

“She was wonderful”, said Abe, “a real gem.  An early Christmas present.  An unforgettable charm”. 

Laura had been thirty-two when they met, Abe sixty-four, stretching the May-December relationship to its outer limits.  Abe was reaching the end of his sexual shelf life, and she was in full bloom.  He had been surprised that such a woman had any interest in him at all.  Yes, he still had much of his hair, was in good health and good physical condition, but as his doctor had advised him, ‘Numbers don’t lie’.  In other words it was about time that he began to look more seriously at his end-of-life priorities.  Even the best actuarial estimates gave him only relatively few more years, so he had better turn his attention to more important matters.

“Why bother”, Dr. Kaplan had said when he first heard the news. “What will she give you that God won’t?”

It was obvious that Kaplan had never strayed from his marriage of forty years, let alone with a younger woman.  Those who had been more adventurous or fortunate knew that they had been extremely lucky.  No one wanted to relive their youth – who would want to repeat the adolescent bumbling, the adult mistakes, missed opportunities, and downright shameful episodes of the past? Better done, gone, and forgotten than sifting through the discards to see if there was anything worth retrieving, anything worth  a second look.

In Abe’s case, his life had been satisfactory enough – a successful career on K Street, a good marriage, well-placed and respectful children.  He never saw cause to wish the genetic cards his son and daughter had been dealt had come from a different deck, or to have chosen a more beautiful wife; or even to have had more affairs.  At 70 he was sitting pretty, atop a considerable retirement fund and investment properties, a home in Boca Raton, and good friends. 

Yet everything in his life seemed predictable, tired, and worn.  A life of no regrets did not mean a life with a happy ending.  Encroaching old age was ugly, dispiriting, and frightening.  He did not envy the young people around him.  He had had his day and it was their time.  Nor did he wish that there were some wormhole through which he could be sucked into the past.  Youth was overrated, especially when one saw the depressing consequences of disappointments, un-achieved success, illness, bad choices, and bad luck.  The years took their toll, and since one could neither go back and fix them, what was the inherent, innate value of youth anyway?  Little more than a stop along the way. 

Konstantin Levin, a major character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina saw great irony in God’s having created man - an intelligent, creative, insightful, intuitive, and enterprising being – allowed him to live for a scant few decades, then consign him for all eternity in the cold hard ground of the steppes.  If there was no point to life, reasoned Abe, then there was certainly no point to youth.  Other than reproduction and carrying capacity of course.  On an existential plane, youth was wasted on everyone.



Laura Peterson came into Abe’s life unexpectedly, a work meeting, drinks, a conference in Cairo; dinners, and finally sex.  The scenario was not new to Abe.  He had always had affairs, but because of circumstances, they were all ‘commensurate’.  The women were like him all professionals, travelers, within a few years of age, happily loosed from the fetters of marriage or partnership.  There was nothing remarkable or particularly interesting in these short-term relationships.  They were almost de rigueur, part of the business traveler’s benefit package, a no-strings-attached rider to one’s contract.

Abe’s love affair with Laura, however, defied the actuarial odds and the lottery.  An old man was not supposed win big.  He was designed to lie down and take it easy or die in his traces, not get back in the saddle.  He knew that eventually she would give up on him for a more expected life; and more importantly would no longer be able to overlook his stoop, his ailing hip, his older children, and his futurelessness.  Since Abe had as little enthusiasm for the future as the past, and since consequently the present was the only tasty morsel in the buffet, he gorged himself.  His affair with Laura Petersen was right out of a ladies’ library romantic novel.

"Shh," he said, pulling her up so they were face-to-face again. He slid his hands between her legs, positioning fingers and thumb the way she'd taught him. Except that wasn't right. She hadn't taught him. They'd figured it out together, how to make her come. He nuzzled against her, his lips on her neck, nibbling and kissing his way up to her earlobe, where she'd always been ticklish. "Ooh," she whispered. "Ooh! Oh, oh, oh," she sighed, as he worked his fingers against the slick seam . . . and then she forgot to pose, forgot about trying to look good, and lost herself inside her own pleasure. Andy watched her squeeze her eyes shut as she clamped her thighs against his wrist and snapped her hips up, once, twice, three times before she froze, all the muscles in her thighs and belly and bottom tense and quivering, and he felt her contract against his fingers (Jennifer Weiner, Who Do You Love?)

He wished he could have felt instead like Cormac McCarthy:

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different (The Road)

The problem is that with Abe, like all older men in an affair with a younger woman, it was the pulp fiction that said it all.   There were no existential thoughts, no God, no kindness and compassion, just adolescent wet dreams.  The rotten prose captured the pure physical responsiveness of the sex act; and that was all that mattered.  It was the only reliving of the past that made any sense.  It wasn’t reliving a particular event or recreating a circumstance – staying in a familiar hotel, eating in our restaurant – it was playing the part of a youth as an old man, and voila la difference.

Phillip Roth’s character, Coleman Silk, says in The Human Stain, describing his affair with a woman half his age,  “Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?” Abe was Coleman Silk.  “It’s all about the sex, isn’t it?”, asks Silk’s friend; but although Silk denies it and criticizes his much younger friend of his own romantic notions and unfilled sexual demands, it is indeed about the sex.  The book has a happy ending only in that Coleman Silk dies without ever having to give up his woman.  His last memories are of her body.



“Too soon old, too late schmart”, said Herman after hearing Abe’s story.  “You’ll never learn.  The putz is not the way to figure things out.”

Cheating - It's In Our Genes, Everyone Does It, So Sit Back And Enjoy The Ride

You have to hand it to the Somalis. They went from pirating cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden - a tricky, dangerous affair, attacking huge Maersk container ships on an outboard over choppy seas - to pirating the public treasury of Minnesota.  It took savvy, opportunity, smarts, and the credulousness of a government in love with asylees; but the sheer chutzpah of it was marvelous. 

When reporter Nick Shirley decided to visit the now infamous Learing Centers, supposed pre-schools funded though generous grants by the state, he found them empty - not a child to be seen, doors locked, a few men hanging around chewing kat, but nothing even resembling a pre-school. 

The Somalis didn't even try to cover up their fraud - create some semblance of a working school, a few coloring books and toys on the floor, perhaps even one or two children whose parents were paid for their appearance.  Nothing, nada.  

The cheating - at this multi-million dollar level it is called fraud - but cheating is what it is, taking something from someone on false pretenses.  It was the gall of it, the sheer scale and scope of the affair that was impressive. 

Sven Carlson, born and raised on the Minnesota prairie, Sinclair Lewis country with some originalist American Midwestern values but still a windy, cultureless, ramshackle place surrounded by emptiness, had moved to St. Paul after business school and hung out his shingle, S.P. Carlson, Accountancy and Tax Preparation.  

He did well despite the incursions of the big Eastern accounting firms.  He knew Minnesota and federal law and how to avoid and in some instances evade it. He had been cheating the government for years, and so when he learned of the Somali escapade right in his backyard, he was delighted.  Not only would the government be occupied with the Learing Center debacle, but it showed how easy it was to take from the public trough. 

Not everyone was on the take in Minnesota, of course, but there was enough cheating going on everywhere to make one think that the state had a monopoly on it. Looked at another way, Minnesota was the land of opportunity - for what else to expect of a people who had survived the harsh winters of the prairie and made a home and a living there?  

Cheating was just the questionable edge of doing business.  Donald Trump, after all, made millions by inflating the value of his properties and counting on the credulousness of buyers looking for a good deal to fall for his his sleight of hand.  He did nothing wrong in a buyer beware New York real estate market.  No one took a number at face value in that heady environment. 

And what else would Sven’s father's friend Halve Swanson have done other than woo the wife of Henrik Olson, take her on the corncobs in the far shed in the dead of winter?  Halve's wife had frozen up on him years ago citing all manner of discomfort, desuetude, and disinterest, and any red-blooded man would naturally seek solace and sexual comfort elsewhere.  Yes, he cheated on his wife, but who wouldn't? Married to that woman was penance in and of itself. 

The Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he is not such a bad guy, certainly not worthy of the calumny heaped on him since the Fall.  I am a vaudevillian, the Devil says, and without me life would be a bloody bore, three hundred and sixty five days of Sunday mass, penitence, good works, and vain hopes for an unattainable better life. At least with me around life can be fun. 

 

He is a trickster, a con artist, a carny barker, a snake oil salesman - anything to spice things up in what Hobbes would describe as a short, nasty, and brutish life.  'You should be thankful for me', the Devil tells Ivan. 

Talking about chutzpah, what about the two best con artists of recent years?  Bernie Madoff bilked his Jewish friends out of millions in a Ponzi scheme which when uncovered by the FBI had not one red cent of assets left.

Madoff was brilliant - suave, convincing, playing on his Jewishness, his natural financial wizardry, and his charm - and convinced hundreds of investors that his fund was the best way to double and triple their profits.  

 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian who made millions selling dreck as high-quality vintage wine to investors who would never drink it but buy and sell it at enormous profit.  

Rudy bought up leftover French barrel wine, became a master at 'aging' bottles, corks, and labels, and claimed he had a wine cellar unmatched for sophistication and unrivaled quality.  On occasion he would buy an actual high-end wine (he was gifted with a remarkable palate), share it with investors, and con them into thinking this would be the wine they would be buying. 

'That's what I'm talking about!', Ivan's Devil would certainly have said had he known of Bernie and Rudy, 'my kind of guys’

Who in America could not have marveled at former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford who went on fugue, a long absence from the statehouse to be with his Argentine lover in Buenos Aires, and when questioned insisted that he had been hiking the Appalachian trail.  'I needed headspace', he said. 

Or John Edwards, another American politician who bribed a minion to take the fall for him and announce that Edwards' illegitimate child was his; or former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich who gave his dying wife a bouquet of flowers, an 'I love you', and then went off to the Bahamas with his lover.

 

Politics of course is an easy target.  'They all cheat', said a Washington Post Watergate era reporter; but religion is the motherlode.  Bible hucksters since the days of Billy Sunday and Amy Semple McPherson have been making millions off the spiritually bereft.  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tammy and Jim Bakker were brilliant at filling their personal treasuries with only the promise of prayer. 

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friends and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he would say. ‘I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

Nigerians are the kings of cyber trickery.  Snake oil salesmen on a grand scale.  Tens, hundreds of thousands of appeals go out at the click of a mouse and if only a fraction of one percent bears fruit, the Nigerian scammer is set up for life.  

After the genie was out of the bottle and the whole scamming landscape quickly evolved into a barely recognizable, untraceable universe, there was no limit to the money that could be made. Brilliant. 

Husbands cheat on their wives every day of the week, cheating on your taxes has become patriotic, keeping a thumb on the scale was the way Katz's Delicatessen turned a profit.  Cutting corners and reshaping them to look full is an American talent.  

Advertisers cheat with every seductive, persuasive ad, always keeping one step ahead of the FCC.  Politicians tell bald-faced lies, are found out, apologize, and are re-elected.  Televangelists who have an unaccountable product keep on praying and passing the basket.  

Looked at through the prim, censorious lens of the social and moral reformer, all this cheating is corrosive, destructive, and hurtful; but looked at through a more forgiving one, it is the only thing that keeps us awake. 

Without it there would be no television serials, no gossip, no kibbitzing by the water cooler, no locker room stories, no lawyers, no politicians, empty shelves in the supermarket.  Cheating, and its handmaidens lying and confabulation, are what make the world go round. 

War, A Love Affair - The Allure Of Fiery Destruction

Imagine Genghis Khan with an army of ten thousand men thundering out of the Steppes, slaying all in his wake, laying waste to village after village, and nothing but carnage and death in his wake from the Far East to Europe.  It must have been a grand and heroic  spectacle.

Khan was charismatic and fearsome; and he and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the feel of the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves were enough to send enemies into retreat; but the thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior would have been enough. 

Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening figure of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.

 

The Crusades were Christian but just as barbaric.  Pope Urban’s armies were sent out to destroy and annihilate the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem, to rid the world of them and their godless, heathen, insidious religion.  The mayhem and slaughter wreaked by the crusading armies was little different from that of Genghis Khan.

The battles of wars past were exalting in their ferocity –  banners flying, swords flashing, and thickets of arrows flying them through the dust of battle.  Armed horsemen – mammoth, incredible figures to most enemies who had never seen horses – charged through the enemy lines, slashing all from their mounts until the battlefield was littered with dead.

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking while Genghis Khan added an almost untamed savagery to his victories.

The battles of the Aztecs were more like those of Genghis Khan, for in addition to classic military strategy, organization, and a half-civilized barbarism, they added a powerful spiritual element.  Soldiers dressed in the skins of animals whose spirits they possessed.  When they attacked the enemy, they killed like a panther would; or ripped and tore flesh like an eagle.

The army of Montezuma which pursued the enemy across the Mexican highlands was not just comprised of men, it was made up of powerful animal spirits. It was the panther which killed, the eagle which ripped enemy flesh, and the jaguar which tore at enemy throats. There could be no greater spectacle of battle than that of the great Aztec armies and the wild soldiers dressed in animal skins, talons, and feathers charging across the plains.

The armies of the European Crusades fought for their Christian God, and felt his spirit within as they attacked the Infidel.  Theirs was a military engagement with strategy, operations, and tactics; but it was also a holy war, inspired by a holy cause, and guided by God himself.

Early modern warfare was tame by comparison.  World War I was a war of mud, trenches, barbed wire perimeters, mortar fire and infantry charges.  It was a war without spectacle, fought without clear cause or purpose, and was responsible for the deaths of millions.

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war.

It was not until Vietnam when the spectacle of war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were once again Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

Despite Hinduism’s image as one of shanti, Om, and peace, its mythology is based on endless cycles of destruction and rebirth.  The goddess Kali is the Destroyer and the god Siva dances for its rebirth.

Despite our intentions to end war and to progress towards a peaceful, accommodating, compassionate, and respectful Utopia, brutal, bloody, insensate conflicts will – as always – exist.   How can millennia of violent, aggressive, brutal, human history not be of relevance? Genghis Khan is more expressive of human nature than Jesus Christ ever was.

The Old Testament, of course, reads in parts like the chronicles of Genghis Khan.  Yahweh having seen how badly the Garden of Eden turned out, destroyed the world in the Flood.   When the world repopulated and returned to its evil ways, God sent a message to the sinful.  He destroyed the entire populations of Sodom and Gomorrah – men, women, children, and babies – in a vengeful, murderous purge.  That too did not work, and he sent Jesus to deal with a seemingly irremediable world.  His message of love, compassion, and brotherhood went unheeded, and the world now is no different than it ever was.  God anticipated this, of course, and vowed to destroy the entire universe in a fiery inferno.

So Genghis Khan, the Crusades, Sodom and Gomorrah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Dresden, the napalming of Vietnam, and the nuclear intentions of rogue states are all part of the same, predictable scenario.  The comic books of the Fifties were not aberrations but prophetic.  It would not be aliens who would destroy the world, but ourselves.  The same inevitability, the same destiny.

A few years back American boys played with He-man figures and created out of imagination and popular lore their own existential battles.

Hindu philosophy teaches cycles of destruction and regeneration as the natural order, but the destruction is much more human than the regeneration.  Nietzsche believed that an expression of pure Will – one beyond morality, beyond good and evil – is the only thing that validates our humanity.  The F-16 fighter pilot raining terror from the skies, the panther man ripping the throat out of his enemy, or Genghis Khan, Nietzsche’s perfect Superman rampaging his way through the civilized world, are all very much like us all.

Although we may live in a quiet, orderly, predictable world, there is something violently primitive still in us all; and as much as we talk about peace, community, and diversity, we cannot ignore it.

Our religions have become tame and tepid compared to the animistic and supremely powerful religions of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, where the Zapotecs worshiped thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and violent storms and sacrificed their own to appease their gods. Our wars have become tame, remote, and surgical. Acts of human will and expressions of pure power are – for the time being – things of the past. 

This period of temperance, judicious political restraint cannot last,  Our lust for violence, our blood lust, sanctioned by acts of war must be satisfied and it soon will be. The New Age has tried to tame such lust, and boys are encouraged not to destroy things but to build them – trucks, cranes, and bulldozers are sought-after toys by concerned parents – but little boys find ways to engage the trucks in battle, to crash them, overturn them, and destroy them.  It’s in our genes.