Playing The Hand You're Dealt - The Inalienable Predictions Of Genetics

Bobby Lucca got his mother’s red hair, his father’s oversized lips, Uncle Harry’s long, Roman nose, and Aunt Betty’s ears.  Every Easter when the family got together at Aunt Tilly’s for antipasto, lasagna, veal roast and ham pie, the family marveled at how much Bobby looked like just about everyone around the table.

“Let’s hope it stops right there”, said Lou Lehman, the next door neighbor, referring to Harry Grillo’s temper, Leona Petrucci’s drinking, and Joe Bello’s womanizing.  Lou had seen generations of Luccas come and go, chips off the old block, clones of wayward fathers and flighty mothers, and colleagues of the second and third cousins who sat in Tilly’s living room, gossiping about their men and how this irresponsible, wayward strain would someday have to peter out.  Lou doubted that the men would ever change, and that as caring and pleasant as the women were, there would always be a succubus in the bunch.

Angie Panto, for example, was an apple from a different orchard, and as much as the Luccas tried to figure out where this nasty, brutish, harridan came from, they came up empty. Genes and heredity being what they are, searching in a more distant past might be revealing.  Bits and pieces of genetic material come down through the generations, get twisted and gnarled and show up in the most unusual places in the most surprising forms.

Of course memories of anyone that far back had been so distorted by telling and retelling that after two generations of false recollections resembled nothing like what they might have been; but she had to have come from somewhere, so the Luccas pinned Angie on ‘The Fat Lady From Silver City’.  In fact, in Lou Lehman’s opinion she was a lot like Tilly’s sister, but no one had ever brought that up.

In any case, everyone knew where Bobby came from, but, given the vagaries of genetic code, they watched him carefully to see how closely his DNA matched that of his parents, aunts, and uncles.  There were early signs of stubbornness and inattention, and later a certain moroseness and funk, all of which traits were unfortunately recognizable.  He got none of the intelligence of his father’s side of the family, and certainly none of the looks and charm of his mother’s; and his personality was just as jumbled and Francis Bacon-looking as his face. 

The argument over Nature-Nurture goes back and forth depending on socio-political ethos. In a progressive era, few want to nail anything down.  There can be no such thing as an immutable, predictable human nature, for if there such a thing one would have to accept territorialism, aggression, and implacable self-interest as givens in human society.  If, on the other hand, human nature was only genetic predisposition – a predilection for putting one’s family first, expanding one’s horizons and fields, and guarding against one’s enemies – then it could be tinkered with and reconfigured to fit the time’s utopian vision.

In a conservative era, few want to accept any kind of genetic weak wiring.  We are as we have always been, and better off for it.  Competition between weak and strong always end up in evolutionary progress.  Wars may be unpleasant but necessary to clear the chaff from the wheat.  There is no such thing as the best of all possible worlds, just worlds as they are.

'Play the hand you've been dealt', Bobby's mother said to him when she saw him studying his face in the mirror, hoping that the right tilt of the chin, the left profile, a Burt Lancaster smile might give the face he saw more viability.  But there was no refuge.  There was no denying that he was an unattractive boy whose cards dealt were undeniably those of his relatives.  It was no luck of the draw, one which at least could have given vent to a hatred of his Creator.  It was genetic destiny.  His parents were to blame if anyone. 

Yet there too he couldn't hate his mother for marrying Emil Lucca, an up-and-comer, ugly as the day is long but promising.   A successful small scale businessman at 25, an entrepreneur by 30, and an industrialist by 40.  She made a good choice, a logical choice, and if she had to put up with a husband with the looks of a throwback, it was worth it.  The Luccas wanted for nothing. 

This did nothing for the lesson of Aunt Tilly's Easter dinner and the genetic reminders getting drunk on Lambrusco and filling themselves with tortellini.  Lou Lehman was right - Bobby had a bit of each and every one of this dismal crowd, and that only went back one generation.  God only knew what bits of random DNA from the past had hooked themselves to his double helix?

Bobby took stock.  He was not the sharpest tack in the drawer and knew this from the very beginning when Mr. Lewis, the math teacher, declared him hopeless, gave him a piece of paper and a box of crayons and asked him to color within the lines.  The teacher was censured for such impertinent and abusive behavior, and thanks to him Bobby's nickname Crayon Boy stuck through high school. 

The crayon insult was ironic, for Bobby was even more inept at art than math - although of course, art had none of the same objectifiable indictors.  Bobby drew stick figures will into the seventh grade, and couldn't seem to manage much more in the way of action than a series of arrows pointing the way. 

Pharoah Jones, a black boy from the town ghetto was as dumb as a stone but could run like lightning. 'Made for the NFL', his coach said and asked the school administration to pass him as long as he scored touchdowns and won the city trophy.  Bobby was as 'uncoordinated as a three-legged pig', the coach said in an aside to his equipment manager, an unnecessary piling on to a boy who meant well but just was, well, no one's model. 

Bobby was slow but not completely dumb and realized the uphill climb he would have in life, this made patently clear by his disappointed father who tried to propel him in this direction and that with no success.  As a boy he was given chess boards, Legos, and puzzles, but he just sat there looking at them, unable to make sense of any except his baby sister's America puzzle, fifty big, colored pieces with pictorial suggestions of where they should go.  Buffalo for Montana, for example, and a ten-gallon hat for Texas. 

How was it that God gave him no compensation.  The ugliest girl in the class could dance like a prima ballerina, Pharoah Jones was a cheetah on the ball field; pimply, short, dwarfish Ikey Cohen was a whiz at algebra.  Bobby had got nothing.  He was and always would be this potpourri of unpleasant bits. 

Now at the time the American progressive movement was just beginning to exert its influence.  One of the precepts of this political philosophy was 'mutability'.  No human or social system was permanent.  There was no such thing as an immutable human nature which determined personal and social behavior.  There might be some residual remnants of the cave man still within, but by and large today's human being was a creature evolving logarithmically to perfection. 

The dysfunctionality of the inner city had nothing to do with genetics but white supremacist oppression.  The slower students in a class had simply not found their place on the spectrum of 'multiple intelligences'.  The full-sized were just victims of capitalist market manipulation, luring them down the candy aisle. Etc. 

So when Esta Feinstein discovered Bobby Lucca, she knew she had the research project she had been looking for.  Esta had known Bobby ever since they were in elementary school together; but unlike Bobby, Esta was an academic whiz and went on to Harvard where she majored in psycho-sociology and based on her performance went on to MIT for graduate work. 

Esta had become a committed progressive along the way, and not only did she believe from an academic standpoint that the Nature side of the Nature-Nurture argument was oversold, but that her political philosophy confirmed it.  Human beings were, as the old Deconstructionists Derrida and Lacan had said, nothing more than products of the exogenous variables of history. 

Bobby's upbringing - his less than generous parents, his intellectual abuse at school, the dismissive elitism of his athletic coaches, and the unholy zeitgeist of adolescent intimidation - was the only reason for his lack of performance in any field.  As for his looks, they would have to be given over to an act of God or Darwinian theory, but they had nothing to do with the 'whole person' vision embraced by Esta's progressive colleagues. 

She would prove that it was society and its false assumptions of success and ability was responsible for the fate of Bobby Lucca.  If he could be coaxed out of his societally confected shell, she would have proved her scientific and political point. 

No dice.  As hard as she tried without compromising the objective integrity of her research, she saw no results.  The young man was simply without the tools to build a future.  He had indeed been dealt a hand from a loaded deck.  He had no mathematical reasoning, struggled with the simplest texts, had no artistic empathy whatsoever and indeed saw the world as a collection of stick figures, and was indeed as uncoordinated a boy as she had ever seen. 

'We love him of course'. said Bobby's parents, 'but we cashed in our chips long ago'. 

'Perhaps I should have selected someone with more promise', Esta concluded after she had sat through one of Aunt Tilly's Easter dinners with three generations of Luccas, Grillos, and Petruccis, an assortment of all those inferior (she hated to use that word, but it was becoming more and more evident) genetic strains which had contributed to the unfortunate DNA of her subject, Bobby. 

If a person is lucky and has an epiphany before it is too late, he or she can change directions accordingly.  In Esta's case, faced with the irrefutable fact of Nature's bad hand, the essentiality of genetics and human nature, and the competitive, winnowing market of modern society, she turned coat.  If the foundational principle of progressivism  - the ability to evolve, progress, and prosper through the creation of a sustaining, formative, and supportive environment - didn't hold water, then one might as well go to the other side. 

And to the consternation of her family, friends, and colleagues she did so.  One simply doesn't abandon one's principles like that, they said in unison; but Esta had become her own woman, conservative to the core, an apostate to many but an intellectual prison-breaker to many, many more. 

The Indelibility Of The Past - The Present Is But Milliseconds, The Future Only A Possibility, And So Romance Is Born

Vladimir Nabokov was a self-described memorist.  From a very early age he knew that preserving the past was not only important, but making it central to one's life was the only validation to existence.  The present is but milliseconds, he said, and the future only a set of random possibilities; but the past is real, it has been lived, it has been an expression of personality, character, and desire.  What more to life is there?

Nabokov said that the past and only the past defines human existence.  The present, Nabokov is  nothing more than a moment of existence before becoming the past. The Higgs boson once produced has a lifetime of less than one sextillionth of a second; and this is slow compared to the passage of the present to the past. The  future is only a speculative time of possibilities and impossible dreams. 

The more one remembers the past, said Nabokov, lives it through constant recollection, and curates it as a personal, existential treasure, the more one’s life has substance and meaning.  Nabokov developed techniques to fix events in his memory and devised ways to recall them from his mental archives and replay them like a movie.  The more he could remember, he said, the more complete he was as a human being.

However one chooses to define the present, it quickly becomes the past, archived in our memory, and without attention can disappear.  If we cannot remember the beach at Deauville -  the umbrellas, the silhouette of the cliffs of Dover on the English side of the Channel, the seagulls, the chill, and the dresses of young girls – then it never happened.  Even if the events of that day had subliminal effects – our preference for colored dresses or our dislike of the chill – if we cannot remember them, they have lost their meaning, integrity, and substance.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an autobiography which was written not as a historical record of the author’s life, but as a pastiche of those memories which define him.  There was no reason to order them chronologically, to link them to future events citing cause and effect, only to celebrate them for what they were – integral and indispensable parts of him.

 'You can't repeat the past', Nick Carroway says to Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  

'Can't repeat the past?', Gatsby replies, incredulously. 'Of course you can'. 

Gatsby had loved Daisy for four years - the long interlude of the war before which she promised to marry him, during which she became frustrated with waiting and married Tom Buchanan, and after which she once again professed her love for her charming prince, home from the wars. 

During his time home from France and before he once again met Daisy, he built his mansion across the water from her home and the blinking green light on her dock was a fetish, a call sign, a signal, a marker, a beacon. It meant not only that the present Daisy was there real and indefinably beautiful as ever, but that the past was there, unchanged and ready to be recovered and relived. 

Nick reflects on Gatsby who embodied all the things he detested in a man but who represented the one quality almost never found in any human being - hope, a sense of possibility, encounter, and irrefutable love.  At the moment when Nick confronted Gatsby with the truth - that love, like every other youthful ambition - has its place in fond memory, but can never be recreated because it was never, nor ever could be, real - Gatsby is incredulous. 

Fitzgerald often writes about young, irreplaceable love - a love that persists without logic, that retains its hold regardless of its fantasy.  It is to be held in trust, remembered, never loosened.  'There are many kinds of love in the world', he writes in his short story The Sensible Thing, but never the same love twice.  In Winter Dreams he writes of a young man who can never forget or move on from his first love, one so romantically cast - a summer night, moonlight, a starlit sky - that the experience even more than the girl lock him forever within the past. 

In Lolita Nabokov writes of the same, almost mystical qualities of young love and how it is not only indelible but pursuant.  Humbert Humbert's adolescent love for a girl who died confines him within his memories of her. He compares every woman to her, but no woman can ever compare; until the past is repeated and he meets Lolita - not a grown woman who reminds him of his young love's innocence and simple beauty, but a girl exactly like the one he loved.  He has done the impossible - he has recreated the past. 

A man I knew fell in love with a Swedish woman and spent a long midsummer's night with her in Stockholm, an idyll he recalled to friends, a deeply emotionally endowed affair that had stayed with him long after the affair had ended.  For months after she left for Eritrea, she was always on his mind. 'I reset the reel', he said, 'and replayed the film over and over again'.  

Nabokov developed a way of fixing in his memory those events, people, and places that he knew would be important to him in the future; and he replayed them again and again to assure that they would never be given to interpretation, editing, or revision. 

The man I knew tried to do the same. He remembered the smell of tobacco in the taxi that took him from the airport to the hotel where Inger would meet him, the arrangement of flowers in the stone planters on the steps up to the hotel, the sound and chatter of the lobby, the chandelier in the ballroom, the music of a string quartet; and every day after he left Stockholm he rewound the reel and played it again - remembering the flowers, the tobacco, the lobby, the Victorian elevator, the smell of the long corridors. 

The fact that the memories faded, intruded upon and confused, was no surprise.  Even Nabokov's assiduousness failed him as the present and anticipation of the future intruded on the past and made it more and more indistinguishable from every other bit of his history. 

Humbert Humbert and Jay Gatsby carried their first loves with them until they were requited - in Gatsby's case his reunion with Daisy, the rekindling of their love; in Humbert's case his discovery of Lolita, the incarnation of his his childhood love, their passionate affair. 

Lolita was called by one critic literature's most compelling love story; and despite the expected criticism from those who saw the book as nothing more than romantic pedophilia and demanded its censure and removal, he held to his view.  A love that had its origins in the most beautifully pure and responsive adolescence, a love which not only was never forgotten but became an emotional point de repere and then found its regeneration and rediscovery in Delores Haze could only be described as the way love should be - irresistible, unavoidable, and beyond censure and expectation. 

Gatsby could never, would never, forget Daisy for all her deceit and selfishness.  He had been won over not just by Daisy but by the affair of young love, destined for everyone to be the love of one's life.  He could never see beyond that. 

Sam Dodsworth, the main character in Sinclair Lewis's novel of the same name, was no different.  He was besotted by the young, vivacious Fran and despite her deliberate neglect, utter emotional depravity, and selfish ambitions, he cannot leave her.  She takes lovers, abuses him, callously turns him away, and leads her gay, empty, ambitious life without him; and yet he confesses to himself and to others that he loves her and cannot do without her. 

He cannot see what she has become or what she is becoming.  His love for her, conditioned by first love and its romantic setting; and responding to some indefinable internal need, was in fact unconditional. 

When men get divorced, widowed, or left behind, they will always seek out their old girlfriends, especially their first loves.  Perhaps, just maybe, the spark that they had when teenagers and young adults can be restruck.  Love especially first love has its indelibility.  It has not yet been conditioned by necessity, obligation, or duty; and therefore can still exist even after decades of hard use. 

Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again, described by one critic as 'a sweeping, emotionally charged journey of a writer exiled from his past, traveling across continents to confront truth, disillusionment, and the enduring human need to belong.'  The book, harsh in tone, critical, offensive, and dismissive of the past which held him captive, has none of the limning, romantic sense of the past of Gatsby or Lolita; but it deals with the same theme - the absolute hold and importance of the past as a human signifier. Despite the raucous journey through America that Wolfe describes and the many disruptive, demanding, and irresistibly alluring moments of it, he cannot shake the dirt from his roots. 

Thousands of romantic novels have been written - romantic fiction for women is one of the industry's most profitable sectors, and the greatest writers have placed love at the center of their fiction, using it as metaphor, dramatic showpiece, popular meme, eternal conundrum - but Lolita and Gatsby stand out because of their rootedness in the past and their understanding that true love is not a matter of happenstance or circumstance, but original. 

The Woods, A Socialist Utopia - From Community Organization To Environmental Justice, A Bronx Tale

Esta Cohen was born and brought up in a Jewish neighborhood of the Bronx, a place, said her grandfather, unofficial mayor of Mott Haven, of 'kosher, kaddish, and kibbutz'. Everyone in Mott Haven observed the sabbath and seder, sat shiva, went to temple, and were supporters of Israel. 

Esta never saw anything other than some scratchy planters the Goldfarb family donated to the neighborhood playground thanks the considerable profit realized from the sale of both their jewelry store and hattery.  The Goldfarbs were an item in the Bronx - successful business people, devout Jews, and dedicated progressives, advocates of the labor reforms of Samuel Gompers and his Jewish union organizers.  Although unionism would certainly affect Jewish trade, the Goldfarbs had the larger community in mind and were all in for socialist reforms.  They were 'Irish Jews' - faithful to Guinness, bar fights, and the Emerald Isle, but good Americans when it came to political favors. 

The Goldfarbs are beside the point, for this is a tale of elision - how a good Jewish girl, daughter of the Brandeis, Lafollette generation of labor activists, and fierce socialist, evolved into a modern progressive who embraced the canon of environmental activism, social justice, race, gender, ethnicity, and universal diversity.

The evolution is not hard to envisage, for the philosophy of utopian social reform is one of general human welfare and the particular causes of which are conditioned by culture, society, and current zeitgeist.  She grew up the daughter of Ladies Garment Workers radicals, fought for workers' rights from an early age, and was weaned from that goodness only when modern threats emerged. 

She took to environmentalism because as mentioned she had never seen a tree growing on its own until she left the Bronx, and when she saw one of many growing in profusion at Anthony Wayne park across the river in Hudson County on a trip organized by the 161st Street YWCA, she knew that this was God's gift to Man; and she had to do everything in her power to protect, promote, and defend the environment which nurtured them. 

 

After Columbia which she attended on a Rosenzweig scholarship, and where she became thoroughly educated in the ways and means of the progressive canon, she joined a Washington, DC non-profit, Citizens For Social Responsibility, a group which, perhaps unfairly but accurately was characterized as a liberal catch-all. Under Bob Muzelle's leadership, the group went from civil rights to peace to women to gays and to the environment never losing a step in what had become a familiar cadence and rhythm. 

Bob had earned his stripes in battle - on Freedom Rides to Montgomery, in sit-ins in Selma, and in marches with Martin and Ralph across the Pettus Bridge where he had been beaten by Bull Connor's thugs, bitten by his attack dogs, and tossed aside by the legions of Dixie crackers along the way. 

Bob saw that the progressive mantel covered a variety of different issues - it was the reform and salvation of humanity which mattered most, whether through resetting the racial compass, admitting homosexuality as an unequivocal gender choice, or most importantly claiming the climate as the existential issue of the day. 

Esta was delighted to be part of the Muzelle 'Juggernaut for Social Justice', but hewed not surprisingly to environmentalism.  For a girl raised on the mean streets of New York City who had to wait until she was sixteen before seeing anything growing wild, having to spend her days in the woods was ideal.  

She loved every minute of protest before dams, proposed data centers, endangered species habitats, and wild kingdoms.  The environment, Nature, was her new home and she would defend it to the death. The spotted owl, snail darter were her orphans. 

 

To be honest, Nature was too buggy, too dense, and too monotonously boring to be a serious existential issue.  She had had it with tents, mosquitos, lumpy air mattresses and gross improprieties, and wondered whether she had made the right progressive choice. Her civil rights colleagues were getting fucked by the likes of Pharoah Jones, super pimp and headman of Anacostia, Washington's inner city, or camping it up with Dupont Circle gay boys in the hottest clubs in the DMV while she was damp and bitten in the Shenandoah. 

 What was this Nature fetish all about, she wondered after having spent her time in the woods and emerged no more enlightened or illuminated than before?  It was a faux idyll, she concluded, a liberal wet dream, a fantasy, a confected utopia of universal harmony. 

'You haven't seen the real Nature, she was advised by a colleague. 'For that you have to go West'; but after a trip to Livingston, Montana where she joined others in a protest against BLM - the rapacious federal bureau of land management - and their intention to turn old growth forests into logging heavens, she was not moved.  She missed the ruggedness of urban life, its symphony, its discordancy, its life!  There was nothing to save here that couldn't be seen virtually.  Who needs the real thing, a childish playground, a kindergarten coloring book?

She grew to like Livingston, not its wide open spaces but its bars that open at 9 am, its open carry permissiveness, its five-mile freight trains carrying coal from the Dakotas to the coast, and its hardly civil tolerance of Eastern ranchers. 

  

She put in her time at the barricades, but then retreated to Dry Gulch, the go-to bat for railroad workers who shunted trains and loaded coal on the east-west freights which stopped at Livingston Junction, her piece of urbanity in the progressive Never Never Land of her colleagues. 

Virtuality trumped reality every time, at least when it came to 'The Environment' or 'Nature'.  Why would anyone hike the Absarokas, or the Blue Ridge or the Catskills for that matter when the virtual experience was far more personalized, engaging, and real?

The virtual world was replacing zoos, penitentiaries for wild animals, and the virgin forests necessary for logging to meet the demand for modern living.  Why would anyone want to bang along with a hundred other tourists on rutted Serengeti, tsetse fly infested tracks when the virtual experience was far more graphic, intimate, and personal?

 

The lure of the wild, the natural, the undeveloped had a particular allure for Etta Cohen when she as a forming adolescent - anything but the projects, concrete, and corner shops - but once she set foot into the woods, an unpleasantly buggy, boring, predictable, and totally uninteresting place, she understood the febrile fantasy of her youth.  

'The Environment' was a non-starter and so was its Apparition, Global Warming. It made no difference to her that the premises of global warming were being debunked - no sea rises, no coastal flooding, no incineration of Iowan corn crops, no decrease in polar ice, no death of tropical coral.  She on her first outing from the Bronx got the picture. Nature was no more than a feature of human settlement, to be done with as conditions demanded. 

Nothing brilliant, nothing existential, nothing more than resources on the one hand and Hollywood idolatry on the other. 

Esta did not return to the Bronx but to Park Avenue from which penthouse she was able to observe the comings and goings of the greatest city on earth and forget entirely her dalliance with all west of the Hudson.