The Awful Misery Of Social Reform - Doing Good Is Seeing Everything Bad Until One Day...

Bob Muzelle woke up one day - the kind of summer day that inspired Shakespeare, a day of warmth, sunshine, fair winds, and the promise of love:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate

He looked out the window, smelled the scent of apple blossoms and freshly-mown grass, saw the sun sparkle on the water of the birdbath where bluebirds and finches had come to drink, felt the light breeze that fluttered the lace curtains...but before he could smile, he remembered who and what he was, and that the beauty in his garden was just a chimera, a false prophecy, an errancy. 

Bob was a progressive, one committed to doing the right thing for decades; and there had always been wrong to right.  The black man still suffered in penury and pain, millions of women trapped in men's bodies suffered every time they lifted the toilet lid but wanted it down, tens of thousands of refugees were seeking a better life, the climate was warming disastrously, and pestilential diseases were growing in remote African forests. 

As much as Bob hated to admit it, he was profoundly Christian.  Suffering was both the wages of sin and the way to salvation. Jesus suffered on the cross for the sins of mankind, so numerous that only his death on the cross could absolve the sinner and show the way to salvation.  Suffering was both a sign, a penance, and the way to God's heavenly kingdom. 

He never would have put it this way - religion was an obstacle to social reform and the secular utopia of the progressive future; but there it was.  He, a suffering man out to right the miscreancy of the world and to relieve the poor, the marginalized, the put upon, and the destitute of their suffering, was a martyr. 

In this ironically Christian universe so abjured by Bob, one filled with ignorance, arrogance, and brutality there was also a devil - a satanic creature at the very center of a world turning at his command to to evil.  Donald Trump had arrived out of nowhere as devils do, installed himself at the center of the world and began dismantling the organs and architecture of good.  Since his arrival in Washington, America had become a fiery hell. 

Bob glanced out the window before leaving for the day ahead, and the scent of apple blossoms brought him back for an instant to years past.  As a child he sat in the apple orchard on a day just like this, the sound of bees buzzing for pollen, and the whirr of a lawnmower the only other sound.  God was in his heaven and all was right with the world thought the little boy, having just received his First Communion and as happy as anyone could be. 

Bob shook his head at the impossibly romantic, absurdly treacly memory, something confected out of his Catechism and the fairy tales of Robert Louis Stevenson read to him in bed when he was sick.  He could quote The Land of Counterpane by heart, and that day the verses came back to him as though he were still a child

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

 

'What's happening to me?' Bob wondered, for reminiscences like this were almost a daily feature. There was no way that he could shake visions of toys under the Christmas tree, Easter dinner, summer days in the orchard,, the sound of his mother singing to the wartime tunes on the radio.  He remembered her apron, the high heels she wore even in the kitchen, the voices of his friends from across the lawn. 

These were not the visions of his political memory.  His childhood was one of bourgeois sanctimony, selfishness, and heedless social insularity.  It was a time of brutal confinement of women, the consignment of the black man, the insidious, corrosive influence of the Church, and the manners of pomposity; and yet he could not fixates on these, the forerunners of the racism, misogyny, and homophobia of today. Scenes of baseball on the green, boating parties on the lake, and the smell of Thanksgiving dinner were crowding them out. 

He slammed the front door and stormed out of the house, barreled down the Parkway and made his way to his downtown office.  There where he should have felt at home - photos of Martin and Ralph crossing the Pettus bridge, gay pride flags ripped and torn by police thugs at a demonstration on the Mall, a large, Rothko-like tableau of a multicultural rainbow, a small desk figurine of Rosa Parks - he was only irritated, angry that the happy visions he had come with were crowded out by a roomful of anger. What was supposed to energize him, reinfuse him with the passion and zeal for social reform, only depressed him. 

He had spent his entire adult life bemoaning the way things were, damning them for a faux, infectious stolidity.  Everything in his world was wrong, in need of reform and recalibration.  Every black face he saw on K Street reminded him of Jim Crow and the pain of enslavement; every Lexus shouted white supremacy, every tarted up woman had been bought, bartered, and sold by the patriarchal system, every hot wind blowing down Independence Avenue brought the impending reality of climate Armageddon. 

Now in their place were treacly thoughts of childhood? A meandering into an invented, childish fairy tale?  Was it old age?

That night at dinner, head hung low over the meatloaf, he sobbed, 'I can't do this anymore' and looked pleadingly at his wife, Corinne. 

'Why, Bob, what on earth is the matter?', she said, incredulous at the sight of this usually upbeat, energetic, positive man in such a state; but Bob could only shake his head, mix a few peas in with the mashed potatoes, and sob again. 

A copy of the Yale Alumni Magazine was on the coffee table, and this morning he had read about his classmate Fielding Cabot.  'Spent another glorious summer on the Vineyard with Marty and the grandchildren, son Alexis a presiding judge in Schenectady of all places, daughter Phylicia managing her brood in Paris and St. Tropez...'  A parody, the usual outlandishly self-promotion perhaps, but it sounded good to Bob whose life was closer to the poor souls he was anointed to help than his wealthy, well-to-do, successful classmates with their sailing on the Sound, winters in Gstaad, and summers on the Island. 

 

'I feel shabby', Bob said to Corinne. 

Could he actually chuck the black man?  Let him stew in his own juices in the ghetto? Give him up for good to his pimps and ho's after fifty years of trying to civilize him? Or the fucking climate?  More ice than ever on the Antarctic ice shelf, no sea level rise, no apocryphal incineration of Iowa cornfields.  Were the dykes of Bernal Heights really worth a second thought? Or the flouncy queers parading from Bay-to-Breakers?

The dam had broken, and long-simmering, long held-in-check abominable presumptions burst forth.  It felt good, like a healthy upchucking after a plate of bad fish, a release, a catharsis.  He had spent his whole life manufacturing throwaway, cheap things.  Life had never been a bowl full of cherries.  What was he doing trying to reform a world which had never changed from its Hobbesian vision of being 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'? Folly.  A waste of time, and he had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. 

'Fuck it', said the new Bob once he had shaken himself out of his self-pity and sickening moroseness. 

He had never made much money from his travails, certainly not of the likes of his classmate, Fielding Cabot; but enough to punch his ticket to a small condo not far from the beach in Sarasota, no view of the Gulf, and no swimming pool but a metaphorical step into a new life - the last step perhaps, given his age, but a comforting one nonetheless.  He was going to...God forgive him for his apostasy...enjoy himself.