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

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Divorced Men–Old Girlfriends First, Then Floundering In Uncharted Sexual Waters

It is not surprising that men, especially those of a certain age, Google old girlfriends within months of their divorce.  What easier, more accommodating and cheap way to reenter the sexual marketplace than to look up familiar women, tried women, safe women before trolling in unfamiliar waters.  Ray Handley hadn’t been divorced for more than two weeks when he searched for Laura Bloom, a girl he always regretted not marrying.  His wife, Maggie, didn’t exactly play second fiddle to Laura Bloom, but by comparison to this vital, energetic, beautiful, and passionate girl, she belonged far back in the orchestra.

Of course marriages that last are not made on such flimsy grounds – nothing fades more quickly than energy, beauty, and passion – and Maggie was the model of marital sense, a tenured professor, published author, and – thanks to her post-modern, enlightened feminism, also a good mother.

A key to the longevity of the marriage was Ray’s happy participation in his wife’s struggles for women’s equality and social justice.  He was one of the few men on the front lines demanding ‘revised justice’ on university campuses, protocols that assumed the rightness of women’s claims of rape and sexual abuse and set aside due process because the entire justice system was nothing more than a male, misogynist hierarchy.

He attended every feminist conference from ‘Queerness as a Metaphor for Un-Civil Society’, to ‘Slavery, Dykes, and the Colonial Transgender Holocaust’.  While at first women were suspicious of him and his motives, his bona fides were more than enough for them.  He had been on the first buses to Selma, first across the Pettis Bridge, first to stand with Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton against white privilege, an early supporter of Rev. William Sloane Coffin and the Peace Movement.  The cross-over to feminism and women’s issues was an easy elision and not a leap.

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Of course most of the straight women in the assemblies wondered what he was doing there.  They were women after all, in search of confident male pursuers and not feminist, people-of-color, stand-with-the-oppressed groupies like Ray.   While they might praise Ray for his principled stance and solidarity, they really wished that he would leave the floor to women, and be men.  Contradiction and irony were not unknown within The Movement.

Ray for years rode his wife’s coattails – or rather in her politically charmed chariot – proud of his ultra-progressive persona and his feminist, woke, inclusivity.  There was no progressive cause that he didn’t embrace, and his commitment to feminism was only an entrée to bigger and even more important causes like global warming and The Environment.  His reputation and curriculum vitae was continuously burnished, updated, and fine-tuned.  He was a progressive’s progressive, and a champion to many.

Ray was surprised at his wife’s growing sexual diffidence.  She was not exactly cold, but indifferent.  They were well into middle age, but not past their sexual pull-date, and had had many – for them – exotic parties for two with vodka, wine, and anal sex.  Some loss of sexual interest was to be expected, but not to this degree.  Was she finally, after all these years, growing tired of him?  Had she taken a lover?

In fact all the feminist polemic and gender-persuasive insistence had indeed turned her head.  Why not? she thought, when an attractive black women made her sexual desires clear.  And what better way to lose her lesbian cherry than with an oppressed, put-upon, marginalized woman of color?  She was surprised to find the experience not only pleasing but exciting – more passionate, in fact, than any she had had with a man.   Ray quickly faded and was moved to the margins.   Here was the perfect epiphany – a revelation of sexuality that Maggie had repressed for so long merged with political intensity. Nothing with Ray could have been or could ever be so satisfying.

Maggie chose the proper moment to make her announcement to Ray and her children – after a dinner of roast chicken with rosemary, bliss potatoes, and farm-fresh corn, she said that she was leaving them, Bethesda, and the straight world for the first true love of her life.

A flash in the pan thought Ray, hopefully.  She will have her bi-sexual, bi-racial fling and return to the white, straight core from which progressive causes originate and function; and back to a husband who loves her.

It was not to be.  The affair between Maggie and LaShonda Harris was neither an experiment in bi-sexual fantasy nor a new, short-term, half-baked racial experience.  As the weeks and months went on, it was clear that the two women loved each other, and there was no returning to a white, middle class,  heterosexual life.

Separation does many things to a man, not the least of which is a re-assessment of life and sexual ways.  Ray had known from the beginning that  Maggie was no Laura Bloom, no free spirit, no hedonistic, let-it-all-hang-out, purely sexual being; and that his choice of partners would entail compromise.  Yet after the separation and the impending divorce, Ray wondered whether his life of rectitude, civil temperance, and doing the right thing was worth sacrificing his spirit.  The answer was ‘No’, and so began his search for his former girlfriend.

Time had not been kind to Laura Bloom.  From pictures pasted on social media, she had become fat, un-comely and unseemly, yenta-looking and far from the ideal woman she had seemed decades earlier.  What was he thinking?  Only one look in his bathroom mirror should have been enough.  His former paramour had three adult children, an early Teamster retiree as a husband, a home – of all places – in Mantaloking, home to ‘Jersey Girls’ and Mafioso goombas from Newark, and an interest in ‘gardening,, self-help, and autism’.  Needless to say, he never called, wrote, messengered, or texted.

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The problem wasn’t with Laura per se, but with the past and reconciling it with the present.  He was past-due on sexual attractiveness.  Although men his age routinely had lovers thirty years their junior, they had come to these affairs knowledgeably.  Women, whether young or old, are attracted to maturity, sexual confidence, financial security, and maleness – the savoir faire of an older man – but Ray had none of these.  His only hope was pairing with a woman of his own age,  someone like himself who had made wrong early choices, realized too late that it was time to change, and had to settle for what she had agreed to in the beginning.

This was not at all what he had expected or hoped for.  There were such things as bright beginnings; but where to look?  In his day there were singles bars, library reading rooms, and alumni seminars; but virtual dating – more controlled, more efficient, and more cost-effective – had taken over.  How could he possibly navigate this new electronic universe; and would the output be worth the input?

So, he continued to mine the alumni resources as far back as country day school.  He had heard that Nancy Boothby – his eighth grade love - had moved to California; and that had possibilities; not like resettling in Iowa or Nebraska, and might signal a sexual and emotional freedom that had lasted since the Sixties; but she had died of breast cancer many years earlier.

There was Belinda Dandy who, despite her name, was from solid Chicago stock – the Dandys had built a paper empire to rival Scott – and Belinda had hoped that Ray would marry her and join Daddy in running the company; but rumors were that she had married an Italian and was living on the Riviera – or a Mexican with a Cancun villa; or a Serbian with holdings throughout the Adriatic and the Black Sea.  Ray saw that he had no hope in this company of international gentlemen, chose not to renew contact with Belinda, and closed the book on her, Smith College, and weekends at the Taft.

After two years of this, Ray realized that his old captain’s license was no longer valid.  Navigating these new sexual waters – coursing the gender spectrum, afraid of ending up with a half-woman, but so dying for sexual encounter with another human being that he might look the other way in the morning – was not an easy task.  So much had happened over the decades since he and Maggie were married that he felt that he hadn’t even a toehold.

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Of course there were women as sexually dépaysée as he was – adrift in sexual waters, hoping for a familiar buoy, but grasping more than getting purchase – but where were they? Finding the right woman would be like finding a needle in a haystack unless the gods intervened; and pray he did for divine guidance  if not resolution, to no avail.  He was as alone and lonely as he had ever been; and if the personal columns in a recent edition of NOW newsletter were correct, Maggie and LaShonda had bought a condo in Pacific Grove and were as happy as clams.  Why had he been so unlucky?

He continued to mine the Internet for old loves, even marginal ones like Lacy Birnbaum whom he had taken to the Lefferts prom and who had been laughed at because of her gimp and misunderstood because her father had short-changed customers at his clothing store and in a very Republican town campaigned on behalf of ‘the little man’.

Resignation to old men’s bathrobes and Chinese take-out was on his horizon because it already had happened to many men of his age.  Watch out, he told himself, but with no words of self-encouragement.

The list of old girlfriends had dwindled to nothing.  They either had died, persisted in bad marriages, were divorced and living on generous personal incomes, or were resigned like him to incidental contact.

It would be nice to report that Ray eventually found his soulmate; but he did not.  He was simply too inflexible, too fixated on ideas and principle, and too stubborn to give an inch.  There were plenty of women who would gladly have had a fling with him, married or not, but he was too sexually dense.  He had never had to rely on clues and suggestion – if progressivism is anything, it is not subtle; things are either right or wrong - so he was lost with women who react first on instinct and intuition, and only second on fact.

The best he could manage was a condo in retirement home for the years before his death and a memorial bench on the C&O Canal after, made possible by the generous gift of his nieces and nephews.

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Sex, while instinctual, basic, and primitive, still needs to be learned.  Ray Handley was one of those men who thought that sex came naturally and always missed out.  He missed out on his first go-round with an impossibly serious cause-chaser, lesbian-in-waiting; and missed out on all other chances and opportunities because he had learned nothing at all about women.  Not exactly the war between the sexes, but poor intelligence.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Women–Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them–A Cautionary Tale

Handel Brachman had a lively sexual interest every since he was a young boy – the first in his fourth grade class to kiss girls in the woods; the first in his seventh grade class to notice Nancy Boothby’s breasts; the first in his eighth grade class to fondle them; and the first in his tenth grade class to have sex with her.  Whose budding sexuality led whose? Nancy’s or Handel’s? Who followed whom into the woods and who led? Handel could only remember being there, unsure of whether he should or shouldn’t do what Nancy asked, but forgot his question soon enough.

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Boys are always a few steps behind girls in both emotional and physical development; but they never learn the lesson of female desire properly - not only do girls want it as much as boys, they want it even more.  Nancy helped Handel gain a step, and ever after his time in the woods with her he never hesitated to make a move.  Rejection never occurred to him – of course there would be some women who would turn him down, but most did not, and if they did he never took it personally.  One size does not fit all, de gustibus non disputandum est and all the rest. Demurral was never rejection, no time was to be wasted on unrequited pursuits, and new opportunities always awaited in study hall, the library, and on the Mall.

The second lesson that Nancy Boothby taught him was that women adore confidence.   Why put up with beating around the bush while a boy gins up his courage to manage a kiss?  Better to deflect an unwanted kiss than have no kiss at all.

The cult of demureness, chastity, and hard-to-get is an insecure man’s creation.  It is all well and good for a man to sleep around; but a woman’s vagaries can very well end up in a pregnancy not of her husband’s making, and then where would he be? Obliged to care for both an unfaithful wife and a bastard child.  No thank you.  While the Saudis have taken male insecurity to the extreme – burkas, women only quarters, lock-and-key security – it is a very visible reminder of what awaits the unaware spouse.

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If it weren’t for men’s physical strength – the foundation of income-generation as well as spousal fidelity – women would be as profligate as men.  Handel Brachman and Nancy Boothby grew up before the age of feminism when women were finally able to throw off their traces and pull on their own, so it was felicitous and advantageous for both of them to meet as 10-yr olds.  Handel learned about female sexual desire early on, and Nancy learned quickly about men’s easy complicity.  Men’s wholly irresistible sexual urge was a thing to be used to advantage – to put the brakes on when it did not suit them, and to floor the accelerator when it did. 

Of course sexual harmony is not as easy as all that.  The two lessons learned in the woods had to be followed by many others before Handel could navigate adult sexual waters.  He had his first dose of female perversity when Marta Phillips went off for the weekend with Timmy Brixton, an unlikely candidate but a wealthy one, with a Porsche and a summer house.  It was her way of corralling him.  He would be so happy to have her back after her affair with Timmy that a weekend with a dud – especially at his place on the Vineyard – would be worth it if it could close the gate on his adventures.

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Pregnancy ‘scares’, intimations of sexual improprieties, and suggestions of sexual insufficiency – are all good lessons.  Going with women was not as easy as Handel had thought those many years ago in the woods.  Women are far more complicated – and interesting – than men; and life with them will not always be smooth sailing.  One has to keep one’s vigilance up if not one’s guard.

D.H. Lawrence better than any other writer understood the dynamics of sex.  At its best it would be a complementarity of wills, of dominance and submission by no means a one-way street and central to sexual expression.  Women in Love is a long, windy tale about four lovers looking for the sexual harmony that Lawrence first suggested in The Rainbow and completed in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; but it does fix sex within sexual dynamics.  While Lawrence was never indifferent to social class and its influence on sexual pursuit and behavior, it was far less important than the much more indefinable element of will – a desire to dominate or submit; and as importantly to find a sexual partner of complementary desires.

None of the men in Women in Love come out well, and Gerald dies alone, frozen on an Alpine mountaintop.  Mellors the gamekeeper finally has his sexual epiphany with Connie Chatterley, but it doesn’t last, and their life together, only hinted at in the closing paragraphs of the book, will not be a bed of roses.   Lawrence’s men all cast their lot with women far more complex than they, more determined, and more able; but could not resist so doing.  Only when they get caught in the warren of their lovers’ impossibly twisted sexual desires and find no way out, do they realize they had gotten trapped in it.  They had no way of knowing because their own sexual demands narrowed their perspective and limited their vision.

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Only one character in Women In Love, Loerke, understands women and how to get from them what he wants.  He suffers from no philosophical, moral, or physical uncertainty. He is beyond good and evil, amoral, and unapologetic about it. His appeal to both Ursula and Gudrun is unmistakable. In this passage, Gudrun thinks about him.

To Gudrun, there was in Loerke the rock bottom of all life. Everybody else had their illusion, must have their illusion, their before and after. But he, with a perfect stoicism, did without any before and after, dispensed with all illusion. He did not deceive himself in the last issue. In the last issue he cared about nothing, he was troubled about nothing; he made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything. He existed as a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous…

Handel learned this lesson as well, perhaps the last in his notebook because of its finality.  Yet there was too much simplicity in him to be a Loerke.  He was as amoral, but less inclined to use his amorality as an instrument of sexual power.  Yet he wanted to be Loerke, for although Loerke was physically unattractive and intellectually diffident, his absolute confidence and unquestioned sexual potency made him irresistible to women.  Loerke connected with women on a far more essential, primitive level than Handel ever could.

There is a delicate balance between suspicion and trust.  Too much looking around corners and under beds leads to too many blind sexual alleys.  Too much trust, and too many noses are left wide open and men taken to the cleaners.   Handel was always fair – not to the women in his life necessarily, but to himself.  Circumspection, confidence, and acceptance were all part of the bargain.

Every man remembers his first love, and since Handel Brachman’s happened before he even knew what was what – when Nancy Boothby asked him to take his pants down – he could never forget it, nor did he want to.  Nancy sat next to him in school the day after the woods, so close together in the auditorium that their legs touched.  She smelled fresh and clean, like talcum powder and lilac soap, and she was wearing the same dress that she had worn in the woods.  He noticed a bit of dried oak leaf on her dress that she had not seen and remembered how she had put her clothes neatly in a pile on a mossy patch under his father’s favorite tree.  How could he ever forget that?

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Girls, Movies, And Pizza–The Bright Beginnings Of An American Capitalist

Roman Davies was twelve years old when his mother asked him what things were most important to him.  “Girls, movies, and pizza” he said.  His mother sighed, and wondered where he had come from.  Certainly not from her, head of the New Brighton Women’s Auxiliary and the Blue Ribbon Women Of New England, whose ambitions were elective office.  Not in New Brighton which had been poorly run, mismanaged, and left to vacancies, truancy, and high taxes by a succession of mayors with their hands in the till; but perhaps in the State House, a step up from New Brighton but only a short one.  Even the legislators from Fairfield and Greenwich who were supposed to know better thanks to the wealth, sophistication, and education of their constituents, were as clueless about governance as any ward politician from Rhode Island.  Washington was in her sights, and although she would run in an era long before women were everywhere, she knew that she stood a better than average chance against Hughie Bando, the Azorean immigrant who had run for Congress as an ‘ethnic’ candidate, a man of the diverse community – black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican – whose voters cared little about the native place of their representatives, only if they would treat them right.  And treat them right Hughie Bando did, playing on the liberal sentiments of the Assembly, challenging the powerful defense lobbies in Washington, and diverting at least some of the supposedly secure ‘military’ funds to the less fortunate of his district.

But Hughie did not come to politics on a morality ticket.  He was as corrupt as the rest of them, learning how to prosper from a father who had bilked thousands out of Portuguese administrators who, given their unclear administrative role and indifferent to local affairs because of it,  lent Bando Construção Ltd. millions from the Portuguese State Bank Overseas Development Fund treasury, more than the entire five-year budget of the capital,  Ponta Delgada, to build a modern shopping plaza.  A plaza which never got built.  Thanks to Bando’s dual citizenship, his canniness, and  the generous funds from Portugal,  Bando Pere built two luxury homes, one in Providence and the other in Miami.

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Hughie like his father had a nose for politics; but whereas his father simply used politics where it suited him, Hughie felt there was a lucrative career in being a politician.  A Congressman could stay in power forever and benefit for just as long thanks to the support of wealthy constituents; and the Congressional District which he came to represent was among the wealthiest in the state despite its pocket of minority disadvantage.  Mrs. Davies mounted an unsuccessful but noteworthy campaign against Bando, made a name for herself in Republican circles, and went on to influence State and Washington politics although, given the pre-feminist era in which she lived, did so behind the scenes.

Roman’s father had no interest in his wife’s doings, and was happy enough as a dentist serving the well-heeled residents of New Brighton’s West End, no end of fees from the privileged who never took good care of their teeth.   He played golf on Wednesdays with his medical colleagues, belonged to Rotary and the Lions, caused no one any concern, went to church regularly, and was recognized for his citizenship by the New Brighton Chamber of Commerce.

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Roman was at an age when both his father and mother were well on their way to forming his character, purpose, and definition when he uttered the nonsense about pizza, girls, and movies. Odile Davies insisted that her son focus on ‘making something of himself’, make personal choices that lead somewhere, and use whatever abilities God had given him to ‘become someone’.  Success in America began in the cradle, and no one who was a success had ever gotten there without stern and purposeful parents, a strong will, and clear-minded determination.

Yet his mother badly misjudged the good sense, genes, and instincts of her son.  His infatuation with Nancy Boothby who sat by the window in French class, open to the Spring breezes blowing across the fields of his country day school, dressed in sleeveless blouses exposing just enough to distract him from declensions and to sexual adventures he could only imagine, was not in vain, nor some hopeless common interest, but the first of many encounters with women.  If it hadn’t been for the coquettish, sensuous Nancy Boothby, he would never been alerted to female desire, response, and his very male ability to use it to his benefit.  The movies showing every week at the Palace showed exactly what adult sexuality would be – strong, determined male heroes, alluring women after men’s attention, and happy endings.  The women were adult versions of Nancy Boothby and he was Errol Flynn.  

Which left only the pizza parlor, a nursery for male camaraderie – guys hanging out, later to form business partnerships and political alliances based on little more than a feeling of kinship and implicit trust.

Wall Street was the perfect place for Roman to end up.  It was indeed a male redoubt and women could not keep away. Few had any interest in gladiatorial bloodletting on the trading floor; even less in the high-risk, make-or-break, billions-at-a-throw decisions of the big investment banks; but what they loved was the maleness of it all, not to mention the fabulous wealth of these thirty-somethings who knew it could be gone in a minute so spent it on Porsches, coke, and Biarritz with gorgeous women like them.  The older he got, the more powerful and wealthy he became, the more women were attracted to him; and like Donald Trump, Nicholas Sarkozy, and Vladimir Putin, he understood the value of younger, alluring, women.  Many men were jealous of him, but thanks to ‘Lessons from Luigi’s’ he defused by engaging.  His enemies thought they were his friends.

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By the age of forty, Roman had indeed made something of himself but not enough for his mother who hoped that soon all the glitz and glamour would be replaced by something more temperate, that his financial competitiveness would be quieted and turned to less personal and more communal investments, and that he could settle down with a nice girl and have a family - a more subtle, final, and even more lasting tribute to personal success.  It was not to be, his cards had been dealt from his mother’s deck; and although she might have preferred some other measure of success than this very obvious American one, she knew that she was at least partly responsible for the road he followed.

All mothers have an influence on the babies they suckle.  Volumnia, the mother of Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s play creates a Roman hero she sees as Emperor but who, unconfident, flawed, and politically innocent could never be one; and when he falters, she destroys him.  Dionyza, Tamora, Margaret, and Eleanor of Aquitaine are other powerful Shakespearean mothers who make their sons.  Margaret, the mother of Paul Morel, the main character in D.H.Lawrence’s Son’s and Lovers, is morally incestuous and jealous of her love for her son, destroying his confidence and character and making love with other women impossible.  Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted, manipulative, but ruling mother of the family is equally demanding of her sons but destructive. 

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Odile Davis was not a harridan like these women, only interested in her son’s welfare and success for her own sake; but she propelled him just like they did.  The consequences of her influence were unexpected – she had hoped for more rectitude, more civil authority, and more compassioned leadership; and got something far more crass and undisciplined – but unintended consequences are part and parcel of influence.

To be fair, Roman Davies ended up the way he did more because of his mother’s genes than her influence.  His intelligence, arrogance, moral diffidence, and confidence came more from genetic bits and pieces passed on by men of her tribe.  A mother’s influence can only go so far when compared with the genes of famous Great Uncle Warford, railroad genius and stock manipulator in and out of federal court but never convicted; or Harold Binghamton, livery servant who rose to power in the Court of Queen Mary not unlike Elizabeth I and her Robert Dudley.

Jack London's Call of the Wild is closer to a more traditional view of maleness. There is something even more compelling about the story of Buck – his aggressiveness, and male dominance.  There is a completeness and perfection in the male character of Buck – he has no feminine side – and his will is male, one unmistakably virile, potent, and forceful.  This cannot be taught.  Roman Davis was a success in his own right.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Bart Blevins’ Frantic Search For Meaning–He Was Simply Looking In All The Wrong Places

“What is the meaning of life?”, Bart Blevins asked his old college roommate, surprised that after all these years his friend had neither found the answer nor realized that the question was meaningless.  Yes, they had shared philosophical intimacies over coffee in the Trumbull dining room, hashed over the arguments of every important philosopher from Socrates to Heidegger, theologians from Athanasius and Origen to Barth and Sartre, and Yale’s own Paul Weiss; but still, wandering down blind alleys was a waste of time. No one really cares about the meaning of life.  Only how to get through it – not even to get through it as innocently as possible (Do No Harm), but simply to keep on an even keel, away from reefs and shoals, and in and out of harbor without shipping too much water.

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Bart thought his roommate overly cynical; surprisingly so since he had led a charmed life – success at work and with women, money in the bank, a trim figure and all his hair, and a dutiful wife.  Life might indeed be meaningless, but there was no reason to be dismissive.  Henry Towne had become an intellectual poseur – cynicism was part of the fey persona he affected.  The otherworldly gentleman of means, summering at St. Martin’s, wintering at Gstaad, without either a mundane or existential care in the world. 

“Couldn’t be”, thought Bart.  There had to something more substantial under that philosophical greasepaint.  Something worthy, hopeful.

Bart Blevins not only sought meaning for himself but wished that everyone realized the importance of plumbing the depths of existence.  “Too soon old, too late schmart”, said Abe Marx, a friend fond of Yiddish-isms, “but in your case, it’s hopeless”.  Bart didn’t have what it takes to sort out this from that let alone being from nothingness.  He was better off not thinking so much, playing golf on Sundays, and paying more attention to what his roommate meant rather than what he said.  Yes, Henry Towne was a hopeless poseur, but who could say that anything, let alone life itself, had meaning?  The man wasn’t as stupid as he seemed.

Despite all this, Bart continued his search.  Tolstoy read history, religion philosophy, science, art, and literature to try to figure out what’s what before it was too late. By the time he was fifty, however, he gave up, capitulated, and gave in.  Not so much because he had found the answers he was looking for or realized they were not to be found.  He simply wore himself out.  Konstantin Levin, one of his heroes in Anna Karenina, was his alter ego, a man after the truth.  How ironic, thought Levin as a young man, that God created man as an intelligent, perceptive, humorous, insightful, and passionate being only to let him live for a few scant decades and then consign him for all eternity to the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  As an older man, he had softened, and like Tolstoy, had given in, not just rested from an unproductive search, but found the most treacly, warm-and-fuzzy retreat – goodness.

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I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.
Epiphany comes in all sizes, and another of Tolstoy’s heroes, Count Andrei in War and Peace, has two, the last before his death not unlike Levin’s; and is as comforting.
As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now always occupied his mind - about life and death, and chiefly about death. He felt himself nearer to it.
“Love? What is love?” he thought.
“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting.
Bart wanted none of this.  He would never back into or back out of the truth.  He was much more like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich than either Levin or Andrei.
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.
"So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!"
To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours.
Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.
"It is finished!" said someone near him.
He heard these words and repeated them in his soul. "Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more!"
He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.
Perhaps he had missed the boat and been an Epicurean.  Life has no meaning except for its enjoyment – no light at the end of the tunnel.  In fact no dark tunnel at all, no epiphany, no aha! experience; only light and pleasure.  Wine, women, and song.  Life was never nasty, brutish, and short as Hobbes had suggested.  Just the opposite.  Short though it might be, life was la dolce vita, lived without principle morality, or purpose. “I didn’t ask to be born”, said Bart.

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Poor Bart.  As hard as he tried he could never be entirely rid of the niggling, bothersome thoughts about what it was all worth.  It kept him up at night, and it was the first thing he thought of when he got up in the morning.  “Too bad I was born a Presbyterian”, he said, brought up to believe that parsimony, temperance, righteousness, and godliness were all that mattered.  That Papists were kidding themselves with all their idolatry and holy water.  The whole cult of consecration was an abomination.  Imagine, all those obscene statues of a nude Christ on the cross, some gay priest’s idea of suffering, emblematic of the whole physicality of the Catholic Church.

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Perhaps, Bart thought, not without some reason; but it would be good to give oneself over to body and not entirely to soul.  That might be the compromise he sought – belief in the suffering, physical Jesus as an acceptance of life as it is, but also belief in his glorious resurrection.  No wonder the Catholic Church flourished for so long! What a great story and so fulfilling!

But he could no more set foot in a Catholic church than he could any longer in a Presbyterian one.  Catholicism might be sensuous and physically appealing, but it shut the door on pleasurable excess and taking life easy.

There of course was sex.  Many a man far more desperate than he had fallen for a younger woman, suddenly regaining his youth, his optimism, and his satisfaction that this indeed was the best of all possible worlds.  But when his affair with Lisa had gone bad, and she had left him for a younger man, he felt worse than when he had begun.  The comedown, the abject fall from the Christmas gift fantasy of sex with a thirty-something, made him realize how old he actually was, how no love is the answer, and that December-May relationships always end up on the curb unless big money is involved.

As he got older Bart kept waiting for the epiphany of Ivan Ilyich.  “It is finished”, he hoped that his mind would tell him at 5:30 in the morning as he pulled off his pajamas. No such luck.  Nothing had worked and was unlikely to work whether embracing meaningless, continuing a fruitless search for meaning; satiation, sexual adventure, or affecting a fey persona.  A ‘given’, his roommate had said a while ago.  Bart’s fruitless search was as much a part of him as were his eye teeth or his hammer toe.  There would be no respite, so get over it, Henry Towne had said.

“Just like him”, Bart thought, dismissive and unconcerned to the end.  But then again, Bart had a beautiful wife, a seductive mistress, and homes in Palm Beach, Rimini, and St. Moritz.  Why shouldn’t he?

Saturday, August 17, 2019

What Ever Happened To Arthur Hicks? The Short, Happy Life Of A Social Activist

Arthur Hicks never met a social cause he didn’t embrace.  Whether global warming, the glass ceiling, income inequality, the gender spectrum, civil rights or peace, he was on the front lines.  He was indeed a Social Justice Warrior – a lieutenant in the war against the reversal of progressive values, an officer in the struggle to restore the rightful balance of liberal democracy, a soldier in the movement to right the political ship of state.  America had indeed been loosed from its moorings and no longer resembled the fair, just, equitable society envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

The era of the Robber Barons had never disappeared.  The captains of industry today, secure and arrogant in their monied fortresses in Cupertino and Silicon Valley, were just as ruthless and rapacious as John Paul Getty, John D Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.  While they made a big show of distributing their wealth and aiding the poor, this largesse was only window dressing – a deflective, self-interested gesture to win public opinion.  Worst of all the American public had bought this canon of greed lock, stock, and barrel.  They were less and less attentive to the needs of their less fortunate brothers and sisters, indifferent to the coming environmental holocaust, and dismissive of the new realities of transgenderism, the consecration of same-sex marriage, and the dismantling of the market economy.   It was the job of Arthur Hicks and his equally committed colleagues to reverse the trend, to educate the masses, and to take down the shibboleths of wealth, white privilege, and crass commercialism.

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A mighty task indeed, but Arthur and his friends had no doubt that they were up to it.  They were insistent, enrolled for the long haul, and as devoted to their cause as fundamentalist Christians are to the Second Coming.  In fact the social justice movement was in many ways a religion.  It had a canon, liturgy, commandments, saints, sacraments, texts, and a hierarchy of priests, bishops, and archbishops.  There was confession, retribution, penance, and restoration.  Arthur and his friends embraced this comparison.  Their fight was no less than that of the Crusades, a fight to rid the Holy Land of the infidel.  Their ambition was celestial – the pursuit of absolute good would be rewarded by a higher power, if not God then some Universal Something.  At the very least they would be remembered in the history books of The New Utopia which they would create.

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Arthur was a very busy man, for in addition to his government job (a GS-14 responsible for the reshuffling of labor regulations) and his family, he attended all important conferences, seminars, and colloquies on social, economic, and environmental justice. Washington was the only place to be, for it was not only the seat of formal power but the locus of all anti-establishment activism.  The Washington Progressive was a newsletter published by Friends of Democracy, a non-profit organization created to coordinate and guide those who had come to Washington to lobby, agitate for, and demand social change; and every weekend Arthur Hicks used it to set his agenda for the week.

Prominent as he had become in the movement, he was asked to lecture, moderate, or at least offer comments on feminism, climate change, sexual transformation, and the economic ladder.  Little preparation was needed for these events, for he was so well-versed in the chapter and verse of every issue and so eloquent and emphatic in his delivery that it all came naturally.  There was no danger of repeating himself or boring his audience with old claims because repetition was the point.  Everyone knew exactly what he was going to say and how he was going to say it.  They waited for his dramatic pauses, cheered when he took on Exxon Mobil, Goldman Sachs, and Kennecott Copper, and took their seat only when he smiled, reached out his arms, and walked back to the podium.  They would have been disappointed had he changed focus, rhythm, or tone.  It would be as if the Offertory preceded the Kyrie; or if the Agnus Dei preceded the Canon.  There was power in repetition and universal, passionate sentiment.

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Social activism defined Arthur Hicks more than anything.  It was the cause that gave his life purpose, his character definition, and his personality spirit and energy.  Before he had become a follower, his life had been one dreary, predictable episode after the other.  School, marriage, children, mid-level career, and a diffident religious faith – nothing of any uniqueness or special importance.  If he had gone on this way, he would have died unhappy, unnoticed, and soon forgotten.  The movement gave him visibility and longevity.  It would last far longer than he, but he would never be forgotten as a soldier-saint.  He woke every morning a happy, satisfied man.

Until one day, he woke out of sorts on the wrong side of the bed.  Perhaps it was his dream – a sexual adventure with a much younger woman – or the Japanese woman who caught his eye during his lecture on economic perversity who reminded him of an Edo woman on a swing in a garden of cherry blossoms; or the jackbooted contingent from Bernal Heights who had disturbed his notions of sexual equality (why did they have to dress so dykey?); or the jeers and catcalls from the balcony every time Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland was mentioned.

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Something was not right.  He felt irritated and disgruntled and slogged his way down K Street to yet another conference on blackness, the black man, and the pity of the inner city.  Even worse, niggling, unsettling thoughts began to creep into his mind. ‘Lock ‘em up’….’Who needs these buggers anyway?’….’Let the fucking place burn’ – nasty, destructive, hateful thoughts.  What gender spectrum? Who cares about the spotted owl? Round Up got rid of my weeds.   Man up, shape up, get right and off drugs and welfare.  Let the F-35s napalm the whole lot.

But worst of all was this crisis of personal doubt.  How could anyone with so many years of righteousness; such dedication and purpose; such moral certitude be beset by such questions?  Perhaps he was really a closet conservative who simply found the movement congenial and fraternal – God knows how lonely he was as an adolescent and a young man.  Or the adulation, the rush of standing on the podium before an enthusiastic, adoring crowd?

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Was he really only a charlatan, a poseur, an actor without grounding, a comedian on any given stage?

Was it weariness?  Being always up for goodness can be tiring, like holding a smile.  It certainly would be more fun to be in the devil’s swarm – doing whatever, wherever without worrying about right and wrong, never having to hold up anything.  Life was short, after all, and now well into his late middle age he was feeling it more than ever.  If there was no God (probable) and if we all die alone (certain), then what was the point of his political blather and St Vitus dance?  Had he wasted his precious life on nonsense? Was not the lesson of history that it repeats itself predictably and there can be no such thing as progress?

Arthur Hicks was not the first social justice warrior to suddenly go missing.  Thousands simply gave it up as a phase, like dope before children, or sky-diving.  Many thousands more were seduced by Mediterranean dolce vita or que será será and never looked back at what, from the perspective of Cannes or St. Tropez, looked terribly tedious and boring.  Others simply went around the bend and realized that the conservative agenda was not as retrograde as they once thought. 

There are enough young recruits to keep the movement going, for it is youthful enthusiasm, idealism, and emotional sympathy which is at the heart of progressivism.  As long as at least some young people turn down investment banking and marketing for social causes, there is no danger of its disappearance.  All well and good.  If there were no MoveOn, MSNBC, Pacifica Radio, The Nation, Al Sharpton, and the Daily Kos life would be boring.