American Fez

The Collaborator

One of my earliest memories concerns a crude picture of a rainbow taped to the classroom wall on my first day of kindergarten. Rendered in broken crayon on cheap white paper, it was more of an elongated hump shape than an elegant arc. The spectrum of colors were probably incorrectly ordered, also, and there was no blue sky or green grass to add context. It was just a wonky rainbow suspended in blank space, signed Alice Stilton in a combination of upper and lower case letters.

But the picture's message was clear, nonetheless: "Fear not. School is not as bad as it seems. You Are Here at the start of the rainbow and there is an educational pot of gold at its end. Perhaps, in time, if you don't blot ink all over your books, daydream while staring out of the windows, or repeatedly kick the back of Peter Reynolds chair, you too might be rewarded with a picture of yours taped to the wall like Alice."

I wasn't fooled, of course. Partly because even at such an early age I had wisely developed a deep mistrust of institutions, but also because I happened to know Alice Stilton. She lived on my street. Hers was an ugly, vinyl-sided modern house, fronted by an incongruously Victorian solid oak door with a huge decorative brass knocker that I thought might turn into the face of Jacob Marley at any moment. 

Most adults in the neighborhood seemed to think of Alice as the proverbial girl-next-door. Sure, if the girl-next-door was a ponytailed Quisling who invariably denounced her playmates' wrongdoings to their parents. Had she lived in occupied France, I have no doubt Alice would have drawn rainbows for the Nazi officers. Alice Stilton was a collaborator with the enemy as far as I was concerned.

So it was no surprise to me when Alice was afflicted with a case of hair lice and the nurse threatened to shave her head. Poetic justice for a traitor to her own peer group, we all agreed. The phony rainbow had finally faded from Alice Stilton's sycophantic life and clouds were rolling in. A case of "Vita Longa, Ars Brevis" I think you'd have to conclude.

Send In The Clowns

If it is any kind of race at all, the "race for the White House" is a carnival sideshow pitting a senile slug against a psychotic slug, dragging their aging sacks of slime across a strategically salted course in the general direction of a disputed finish line. Other sideshow attractions include the Congressional flea circus and the fire-eating Supreme Court justices. There is Nancy the bearded lady and some sort of squid-faced pinhead freak called Mitch. Roll up, roll up.

These red, white, and blue spangled hucksters have pitched their greasy, stinking Big Top tent in town for far too long. Surely it's time for them to move on? Unfortunately the inbreds who live around here seem to enjoy betting on the slug race, watching the sleight-of-hand fleas jump around in the senate and the justices swallowing more balls of flame. Meanwhile, outside the Big Top tent, banished to the fringe, the Libertarians and Greens go around and around the Wall of Death, the ostracized looping circuit that for them has no beginning and no end. 

Fantasia On A Theme By L. P. Hartley

These days, I'm not so sure the past is a foreign country where people do things differently, but is really more of rogue nation under martial law. In short, if I had to pin the past down with a geographical simile, I'd say the past was rather like Turkmenistan.

And of course you are President for life in this Turkmen past. Revisionist memory erects colossal equestrian statues of yourself in the most de Chirico-esque squares of your mind. Interior monologues are restricted to only repeating the self-aggrandizing party line, and any dissenting synapse that dares questions your supreme authority is ominously "disappeared."  

Of course, establishing your sense of the past in Central Asia means it's always threatened by revolutionary insurgents, which is why you still feel anxious and exposed when remembering that thing that happened eight years ago. It's a stress point in your ego's Great Wall. Frankly, you'd be better off renouncing this dictatorial sovereignty over the past and relocating your new Anarcho-syndicalist awareness to Switzerland.

So henceforth the past will be like Switzerland; people don't dwell on it there. They are simply forever in the cuckoo clocked moment.

But what does all this say about the future? Well, the future is usually like an Orwellian dystopia where everything people do is supervised by Big Brother. Or perhaps the future will be like a spaceship traveling to an unknown galaxy where people can't actually do anything anyway because they are all sleeping in suspended animation for centuries. Or maybe there will be no future to speak of since humanity has been wiped out by Coronavirus? It's a tough call.

Personally, I think the future will be much like the present; people will do things much the same way only with different tools. At our current precarious point in time, I'm not sure whether such a passively apathetic vision of Things To Come is optimistic or pessimistic. But at least we'll have one. So there's that, I guess.

Invasive Species of the Political Season

No longer green, the local gardens have turned red, white and blue. Political placards now bend in the breeze where summer's flowers were: clumps of cardboard Trumps and fluttering Bidens all in a row. Why do people willingly plant such poisonous weeds in front of their houses? They only attract angry, militant locusts instead of thoughtful butterflies.

Meanwhile, angry neighborhood 'activists' both red and blue are grinding up their candidate's agenda into a potpourri of bullshit bullet-points; a stinking compost heap of half-truth and platitude arranged in a decorative presentation basket which they leave on my porch. But I'm not bringing such parasite-laden herbage into my home. Vote for him? No, but I will spray him with powerful pesticide.

Politics, of course, is a type of self-perpetuating fungus that feeds on infected human brains until it becomes a pulsating, walnut-sized ball of inflexible rage. And once politics has entirely consumed the host, its venomous slogan-spores are spat into the world. Stuck to the bumpers of collaborating cars, these slogan-spores scatter their dogmatic contagion around town, seeking to impregnate gullible brains with militant seeds to propagate even more of their kind.

I limit my own gardening to a simple evergreen border of bemused detachment. The only decoration is a modest pumpkin carved into the likeness of the sort of benevolent spirit I'd like to see become President. There's a lantern inside but the light just gets dimmer with every passing year. It's almost extinguished altogether.

Birds of North America

Mid-autumn, flocks of squawking ideas take flight against a darkening skull. The annual migration of neurons to the southern hemisphere of the cerebellum has begun. Alas, only half of them will complete the journey. Some will fall out of the ears when heads are shaken in disbelief; others are expelled through the nose when snorting with incredulity.

My own idle thoughts, however, are hardy fellows and hang around the whole winter through. They neither hibernate nor wither but go bob bob bobbin' along like a Robin Redbreast of the mind. What does that mean for this blog? It means there will always be a warm nest of insignificant nonsense to welcome the news-weary, even if from time tot time it's not inspired

Dark Greensleeves

As a child, I was not afraid of whatever eldritch phantasms might be hiding in the shadows beneath my moonlit bed. They were swiftly vanquished by merely shining a flashlight in their fanged and hairy faces. What did frighten me, however, was the wild-eyed, forked bearded, and rictus grinning countenance of the clearly demented musician featured on the 1960s-era record album sleeve of 'Thirteen Favorite Melodies For The Glockenspiel.'

No doubt he was merely trying and failing to express enthusiasm for the hitherto unknown tonal qualities of this rather boring and rudimentary instrument, but he looked more like a cruel dungeon master intent on torturing his victims with a bloodcurdling clink-clank rendition of She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain. Or perhaps an evil warlock summoning his demon legions by pounding out a profane version of Greensleeves backwards. No matter the spine-chilling image conjured, clearly this glockenspiel maestro's face was a warning to the curious: herein was a vinyl equivalent of Pandora's Box and listening to its contents would unleash aural terror upon the world. 

Alongside an equally ancient and macabre copy of The Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra housed in a crumbling cardboard slip-case, Thirteen Favorite Melodies For The Glockenspiel took pride of place in my junior school's record collection. It was as if the educational authorities actively wished to dissuade students from developing an interest in music, like stocking their libraries with nothing but musty, leather-bound editions of lengthy Victorian novels to discourage reading.

Consequently, I have always viewed the process of institutional education as a dark, satanic mill grinding impressionable minds into philistine dust. Imagine a glockenspiel mallet hammering a human eardrum forever, if you enjoy Orwellian paraphrase, as I certainly do. The ineradicable memory is almost enough to drive me to purchase a CD of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Almost, but my subsequent nightmares are not that desperately bad, thank God.