'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This...' When Conviction Grows As Stale As Week-Old Bread

Vicki Pastor had given the best years of her life to social justice.  She had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, joined Freedom Riders in Montgomery, braved the ax handles and dogs of Bull Connor, and had come back to Washington to continue the struggle for equality and fairness.

She had put up with Ronald Reagan and the Bushes – conservative politicians of reasonably good will but misinformed intentions.  You couldn’t help but like Reagan, a jolly old soul with a self-deprecating sense of humor. George Bush I was a patriot, whose noblesse oblige was memorable – WWII combat airman, long service in government, patient and dutiful Vice President, and finally Chief Executive.  

His son, George II was a bit of a cowboy but within reason, and took 9/11 with  proper stolid American commitment; but the man now in the White House, Donald J Trump was another Republican altogether.

He was a bully, a racist, and a warmonger in bed with his Wall Street cronies and New York real estate mogul, a self-satisfied criminal who had avoided the law for himself but went on to abuse and distort it for ordinary Americans.

Vicki hated him with a visceral passion, an unrestrained, immoderate, bilious hatred; and although she was not proud of such unchristian behavior, she felt that such animus was called for.  The more hatred for this hateful man, the better.

It wasn’t just his politics that was so upsetting, but his lack of culture.  The man was a crass, bourgeois caricature of America’s worst instincts. His yachts, his Mar-a-Lago, his glitz, faux glamour, and arm candy were revolting examples of his excess.  His gross superficiality, his disdain for high culture and intellectual sophistication, his defiance of reasonable social norms and outright determination to create a cheap, tinsel-and-sequin Washington were disgusting.

Yet here Vicki was in her later years, widowed, children in San Francisco and Paris, rarely invited out, disconsolate and feeling hopeless, with nothing but memories and Trump hatrcd to support her growing despair.  ‘I need to do something’, she said; but the climate conferences, rallies on the National Mall, letters to the editor, and speaking at college reunions were not enough.

She thought of Coleman Silk, the Phillip Roth character in his The Human Stain who takes a much younger woman as lover in his later years.  ‘She’s not my first love nor my last’, he says to a censorious friend, ‘but she certainly is my last. Doesn’t that count for something?’

Men, Vicki knew, had it in them to take young lovers even at seventy; yet here she was a shriveled up old prune whom no man wanted any more, let alone a younger one.  Men were the lucky ones.  Only a nice bank account and a flat stomach – and not even that – could assure a December-May affair while she languished alone, tending her petunias and hating Donald J Trump.

It was at the poetry reading she had arranged at her home, an event to celebrate the works of a local artist whose verses had been overlooked for the many decades she had been writing them, that she had an epiphany, a conversion, a bright light of possibility.

The poet stood up before the gathering and began to read from her works – one treacly, predictable, crushingly adolescent poem after another. The guests smiled at a simile, shook their heads at a painful metaphor and took the whole brutal recital as though it were the Second  Coming.

The theme, of course, was social justice.  ‘Oh, what these eyes have seen’, she read, ‘and wept tears of love and warm embrace’ and from there went on to speak of the black man, ‘the sentient soul of the forest’, the inheritor of God’s first graces, noble creature maligned, dismissed, and damned. 

This was only the beginning, for she went on and on until even the adoring crowd began to grow restive;  but their love for the poet, her poetry, and her heartfelt emotion was stirring, and they kept their attention.

But Vicki was shaken.  The poetry was so awful, so irremediably bad, so self-assured in its miserable sentiments, that she had to leave the room, down three shots of chilled Stoli, and turn the oven to high.  In a fit of pique and resentment at her own idiocy, and with a hateful desire to be done with the whole disgusting mess – the horrible poetry, the black man, the insufferable toadying of her friends – she would burn the canapés to a crisp, serve them on a silver tray, and watch her guests eat them, swallow the bitter bits and thank her profusely.

‘No mas!’, she shouted as she drank another shot. ‘Basta’, and with the last remaining reserves of patience let the old bitch finish her recital, sit down, and be feted.  What was she thinking?  How could she have let her sympathies go so far afield?  She and the event she had arranged were caricatures, horrible reminders of the penitential years spent promoting old chestnuts, goodness, promise, halcyon years to come.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said, now drunk beyond control but relieved of the Sisyphean burden of doing good once and for all.  Like the Coleman Silk character, it was time to give it up, clear the decks for running, and be done with it.

Her friends and colleagues could not believe the transformation.   Every last trace of her fidelity, obedience to and respect for social justice was gone.  What was left was a pissy, dismissive bitch of a woman who had finally come into her own. 

She was off to parts unknown, drawing down on her private income, so long hidden from the censorious view of her progressive colleagues, and finally happy. Joyous actually, as only anyone who has finally given a last goodbye to the sodden past can feel.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said as she drove past the White House for the last time, waving to the beautiful blonde young things along Pennsylvania Avenue.