The Devil Made Me Do It - A Life Of Good Is As Boring As Can Be

Ivan Karamazov’s Devil is a vaudevillian.  ‘Imagine how dull life would be, church every day of the week, fidelity, obedience, what have you without me.  I am here to make life livable.’

The allure of the bad in a good world – as familiar as dew on a rose petal since the dawn of time. Humanity, the devil’s workshop, the playground for happy hookers, philanderers, and bookies.  We might all have been born innocent and pure, but it doesn’t take long for the itch to begin, for the lure of the bad boy, the mark, the dirty tricks to percolate up and start to feel good, far better than Holy Communion, straight A’s, and an orderly room.

Yet some people make a life out of doing good and simply can’t help themselves – they are obliged to help others, change the world, give selflessly, and refuse temptation.  Doing good was not just a part of an ethos, a subscription to Christian values, or a political commitment; it was identity.  It was a permanently defining quality that dimmed all others.  Doing good was worn proudly, a moral suit of clothes never taken off, stiff collar and all.

Bob Muzelle had been a particularly happy youngster, all smiles and coos, a little boy to make any mother full of joy.  As he grew older, none of that sweetness and pretty innocence disappeared, and he was a model child, obedient, faithful, and good natured to others.  ‘Mother, may I’ was his signature, and he never strayed from that particularly  beautiful intimacy.

Even as a teenager when all norms of patience and propriety were thrown to the wind in a fuck you, jack off stupid orgy, Bob paid attention to his parents, teachers, and priests.  It seemed as though this boyish piety was there to stay.

‘Just you wait’, said Marge Helander to Mrs. Muzelle; but that curse never took.  Bob stayed on the straight and narrow and never missed a step.  He took a lot of shit in college – the frat boys were a pack of dogs and the bitches merciless – but he held his own, joined the right groups, started early on the road to social justice, did the right thing, demonstrated, argued, defended and showed his true colors with insistence and purpose.  He had a mission, a goal, and a raison d’etre of a higher order.

He never got drunk, never got laid, and never said a bad word about anyone except as groups – conservatives were befouling the country with their lies and distortions and should be strung up, beheaded, and their heads impaled on spikes up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.  As horrible as that may sound, it was in keeping with Bob’s holy mission and his innate rectitude.  Hatred for a sworn enemy was part and parcel of doing good.

 

The cracks began to show during the days of black power redux – the Black Lives Matter movement which defiantly protested the abuse and oppression of the white majority.  Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation did not disappear with the Civil Rights Bill.  It only picked up steam in a fury of white resentment and anger.  It was time to off whitey once and for all.

LaShonda Williams, head of the Washington chapter of BLM was a pushy, uppity black woman without an ounce of charm, complaisance, or good will.  She was a bitch, a nasty cunt who had her hand in the till from day one, but thanks to her bloody invective and riling, blasphemous speeches calling for the end of the white race, she was a hero.

‘Whatchoo doin’ up in here, white boy?’ she yelled at Bob as he came into BLM headquarters to offer his services to the movement. ‘The days of Uncle Tom are over, dead, and buried’, she said, ‘so take your Doctor King i-dol-a-try and go back to the ‘burbs, boy.’

‘I just want to help’, Bob stumbled, shuffling his feet like a black minstrel, cap in hand, ‘Yes, Massa’ out of his mouth before he could help it; but LaShonda was having none of it.  ‘Fuck off’, she said, showing him the door.

Where was the solidarity he had known with Martin and Ralph?  Where were the heady days of integration, not this pissy go-home separatism.  Black people have never been able to do anything on their own, he knew, so she had no business…

Here Bob stopped himself in mid-thought.  What was happening to his proud rectitude and temperance? Of course black people were capable of real independence, intelligence, and promise.  What was he thinking?

But this summary rejection hurt.  It shook his resolve.  The whole progressive thing was supposed to be a happy, congenial affair, good people in solidarity with good.  Could he have misjudged others and badly overestimated his own sense or right?

Well, the progressive tent was a big top, he knew, and there was room for all, so why not shift gears and go up another hill.  Climate change, for example.  Now, that was an issue everyone could agree upon, hands down.

However a succession of brutally cold winters had broken the ranks, and the movement had become desultory at best.  The central idea – that the world faced climate Armageddon – was being dismissed as presumptive evidence, much of it cooked by climate zealots, was outed. The whole thing was being shown up as a charade, another hobby horse, a wacko theory that somehow gained currency until the weather turned Arctic.  Too late to board that bus, thought Bob.

And so it went from blacks to climate change to transgenders.  ‘They stole my youth’ said Bob melodramatically.  ‘Never had a fun day in my life.  That’s about to change’.

Epiphanies usually are from bad to good.  People see the light of their wayward ways and find good; but in Bob’s case it was the reverse.  The very thought of that harridan cunt LaShonda turned his head.

But how?  Decades of being a goody two shoes had crimped his style.  Dishonesty, seduction, infidelity, chicanery, disregard for consequences were not in his portfolio; but since it was high time, he would learn how.

Every time he slapped on his aftershave, adjusted the knot on his tie, and polished his shoes, he hated himself.  A dowdy, frumpy, politically buggered choirboy at his age!  A life down the tubes.

‘I’m outta here’, he said to his wire Corinne one evening.

‘Where are you going, dear?’, she replied.

‘None of your business’, Bob snapped back and headed down to the Blarney Stone for a shot and a beer like any other red blooded male; but neither the Wild Turkey nor the young hooker at the end of the bar were his cup of tea.  So seedy, so uncomely for a Yale man.

Which is where we must leave Bob to his own devices and hope that he can defy inertia and do a volte face.  After all, he deserves some compassion.

‘Attention must be paid’, Willy Loman’s wife says to her sons in Miller’s The Death of A Salesman. Some recognition for a human being who has given his whole life for an idea and ended up with nothing.

Ivan Karamazov’s Devil, however, would have laughed at Bob's dogged, soggy purpose.