A Nation Of Dreamers - America's Dalliance With The Pure, The Righteous, And The Good...Which Has Never Existed

Bob Muzelle was a creature of the trenches, the barricades, the million man march, protests, demands, and jamborees. 

'Going to the abortion thing?', he asked his friend and comrade in arms. They were brothers, both hewn from the same timber, both flying the same jib, both tacking towards Utopia.  They had both been acolytes of the Reverend Parker Allworth Morris, Yale Chaplain and Negro First freedom rider, a man of unimpeachable rectitude, honor, courage and commitment. 

  

Bob thought that Morris was more than just an honorable main, but a prophet, a secular saint, and a man of vision, purpose, and import.  Bob's apprenticeship with the Chaplain was seminal and epiphanic. After four years at the altar of this man-god, Bob's life's work was ordained.  He would fight for social justice until he drew his last breath. 

So the two of them - Bob and Jackson Finch - went down to the National Mall and joined there sisters in demanding abortion rights for all women.  'Abortion - any time, any place, any moment' was the rallying cry, for the protestors had had enough compromise.  Late term abortion was just as viable and righteous as early term.  A woman's body was hers and hers alone, and no man was going to abridge that right.  The fetus was nothing but a piece of phlegm, an unwanted visitor, an intruder, a violator. 

Bob particularly liked abortion rallies because they were existential and personal.  Climate change was indeed existential, for if global warming continued, the human species would cease to exist; but abortion was immediate, real, with visible consequences.  Pregnant women had been violated by predatory, pleasure-seeking, Paleolithic throwbacks whose 'article', that bit of unwanted scum needed to be flushed and removed. 

Both crises - blatant male patriarchy and forced pregnancy; and the warming climate - were stimulants to Bob's limbic system.  His perpetual state of euphoria was one of generic happiness.  A more verdant, peaceful, tolerant, and compassionate world was at hand, and that was cause for emotional bliss. 

Bob did not let things rest there.  While he had a particular fondness for abortion and climate change, his panoply was festooned with the black man, the transgender, the disenfranchised, and the poor.  He marshalled his resources and parceled out his energies to that all causes could be addressed.  Utopia was not simply a world of women, but one of a diverse, multicultural universe of plenty.  

Now, Yale should have taught him something.  Back in the day it was a beacon of rational discourse, serious study, analytical thinking, and promising scholarship; but Bob had been shanghaied by the Reverend Morris, caught in his web of earnest compassion, and from Day One did not listen to reason. 

It mattered not that the world had been eternally violent since Cain killed Abel, that wars killed millions each century, and that the most recent, the Twentieth, was the bloodiest of them all.  Humanity was not progressing towards a new, peaceful, communal world, but mired in the same brutal territorialism that had always characterized it. 

 

Social distinction - 'Stick to your own kind' - had been the rule ever since the first human settlements.  There would always be the most intelligent, the most ambitious, the most productive, and the most wealth.  They would reside at one asymptote of the bell curve, and the least able at the other; and yet, despite the infamous, failed  Soviet Communist experiment of recent years, progressives like Bob earnestly believed that it could work - that a communal, fair, just, and equal society was possible. 

Despite natural law, the physio-genetic determinants of sexuality, and millennia of heterosexual reproduction, Bob and his associates truly believed that sexuality was a social phenomenon, open to choice, and open to all. 

Despite slavery challenging prostitution as the world's oldest profession, and despite the incontrovertible fact that there would always be slaves and slavers of one kind or another, Bob hammered away at 'racists' everywhere.  He held a particular animus for the American South, vowed never to set foot on desecrated land, and continued to blame the region for the most callous racist recidivism in the West. 

Something had happened to Bob at Yale where he lost his way.  Perhaps it was Reverend Morris - one had only to remember the leader of the cult religion in Guyana a few years ago who convinced 1000 of his followers to drink poisoned Kool Aid and commit suicide to understand how much an influential leader can have over the desperately credulous and gullible. 

 

It might have been a resurgence of his childhood religious faith.  One does not get rid of Jesus and his Christian mission that easily.  Or perhaps it was that mystifying randomness of genetic combination - Bob was predisposed by a compassion gene for looking out for others. 

One wonders how much is left in the tank, and whether the generator has enough spark to keep the engine running, especially at the full speed Bob was used to.  He was getting on in years, and sooner later the Great Beyond would be too close to ignore; but Bob seemed to be as tireless as he was in the freedom ride years, marching across the Pettus Bridge with Martin and Ralph, being set upon by Bull Connor's dogs and beaten with ax handles and iron pipes, sitting in with Negroes in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.  Ahh...those were the days, and they had not dimmed one bit. 

Nothing else mattered to Bob other than doing the right thing.  He lived in a rented, shabby Fifties rambler, disparaged his neighbors' petty bourgeois insistence that he mow the lawn and trim the hedges, and laughed at their garden parties.  The older he got, the more immersed in this febrile vision of Utopia.  Anyone who did not do his part for world betterment was automatically a reprobate to be cancelled.  

There was no such thing as half way when it came to social justice, no sitting on the fence; and so it was that the list of cancelled grew.  He was as thorough as Stalin's secret police, East Germany's Stasi, or the Shah's Sevak.  His purges were legendary, but he was left with only a very tight circle of friends now as unhinged as he. 

 

Bob was not alone, despite his narrowing cabal of zealotry.  America itself had become almost as launched into political reverie as Bob.  Trump hatred was viral, nasty, ugly, and insistent.  Ordinarily useful men and women went complete around the bend when it came to the President.  Once stabile intellects wandered into uncharted, wooly, dark and desperate conspiracy theories.  The level of Trump's transgressions,  thievery, lies, duplicity, and villainy reached unimaginable proportions. Americans were apoplectic about the man, and like Bob lost all sense of grounding, objectivity, reasoned thought, and intellectual distance. Half the country had turned into a rabid mob - exactly as Alexander Hamilton had feared. 

Bob died in his traces as he had often wished he would - face down in a tumbled stack of policy papers, dead as a doornail, found by the after-hours cleaning service who thought he was finally taking a much needed rest from his fatiguing schedule.  One last nudge before leaving toppled him onto the floor, and such as the end of Bob Muzelle. 

His wife, expecting accolades, public eulogies, ceremonial last wishes, and the presence of the leaders of America, was disappointed.  A five-line obituary in the Washington Post, a gathering to celebrate his life attended by the few who kept him company, and that was that. 

Obsession is never a good thing especially when it is for a lost cause - or rather a cause never worth pursuing.  

'It was that fucker Parker Morris', said one Yale classmate who had missed the bus along with Bob; and perhaps it was, but the viral disease that has infected millions cannot be laid at his doorstep.  

Bob's will stipulated that he wanted to be buried next to the Reverend Parker Morris, but there was no room, so his wife opted for cremation, a flowered urn, and his picture on the mantelpiece.