Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

Doc Lawes and the L Word

Young men are foolish.

This is the reason for much of the world's domestic violence, about half of its wars and nearly all its venereal disease. It is also the reason for much of its great romantic poetry, a tremendous amount of its art and music and at least one great opera. The foolishness of young men is both the tender shoot and the dung it grows from.

I was no less foolish than any other young man.

For one, I thought I was immortal. Or, at least, I thought I was too smart and too tough to kill easily, not really understanding that high explosive and high-velocity metal had no way of detecting intelligence and toughness. This meant that they would, as Bill Mauldin said of artillery shells, "kill the smart soldier hiding in his foxhole as quickly as the dumb one standing on top of a knoll". Which explained why at the rollicking age of 27 I was sitting with a dozen other paratroopers in a dingy and rather worn deuce-and-a-half rattling down the MSR towards South Base Camp.The Sinai burned around us; the arid mountains to the right marking the edge of the central massif, the coastal strip curving asymptotically before and behind us down to the blinding glitter of the Gulf of Sinai. Dusty black, the asphalt terminator of the coast highroad divided land from sea, deserted save for our convoy and the occasional frightening Egyptian bus. These, rocketing past in their frantic haste to leave the vast nothing behind them and get to the nowhere up the road ahead, looked like the restless rolling dead of rural Alabama coach routes, battered fenders and paint scars testimony to past victories in Egyptian traffic.

We had come 5,000 miles to this place, involuntary tourists in one of the great wastelands of human history, to show the flag and maintain the peace between Egypt and Israel, a peace that both sides publicly tolerated while secretly loathed and embraced. We were ambassadors for the United States, a visible commitment to World Peace - our opinions on thin thighs were not solicited. We were hostages, of a sort, expected to die in place rather than tolerate trucebreaking. We were "soldiers for peace", the Salvation Army but with a more lethal range of persuasion.We reacted to this with the respectful discipline that American footsoldiers have always been known for; that is to say we mocked the land and its people, speculated endlessly on the chance of acquiring intoxicating spirits, the merits of various popular musics, and the carnal versatility of the female of our species actual, hypothetical, and fantastical.

We passed through the land where the Pharaohs and the Israelites passed, where history was made, where madmen and visionaries and millions of common men just like us had come and gone. And we made crude jokes about the black-robed Bedu women and spat sunflower seeds out into the desert.

For another, I was in love.

Actually, I was in the midst of love, congeries. I was actually in...ummm..."loves". I felt blessed, despite my recent geographic celibacy, with a largesse of girlfriends, an embarras de richesses of inamoratas, an absolute harem of sweethearts. Not to mention the sultanesque prospects of concupiscent rapture! We were talking a sheriff's posse of poontang, a smack-down, pure-D torrent of tail, a plethora of the sweet poozle.

I had three girlfriends. Three young women who professed to each delight in me, were complete strangers to each other, and were so distant geographically that the possibility of my getting busted was mathematically incalculable.

I was a happy Specialist Fourth Class sitting that long ride back to South Camp.

Along with the usual dissipations of sunbathing, hot chow (or as hot as was tolerable in the alkaline sauna that was the edge of the Gulf), sunbathing, endless games of hearts and dominoes, scuba diving along the coral strand, sunbathing and working out there were the closest thing to home we had: the MARS radio-satellite telephones that allowed you to call back to the States.

During the returns to South Camp between periods "in sector" this normally meant a pleasant afternoon exchanging romantic nothings seriatim with my trio of houris. Given that I had little to say other than unobservant observations on the general desert-y quality of the desert and the peculiarities of my squaddies, and they had little more than the inanities of badly-educated, self-absorbed young American adults, the three conversations total contained about enough mental and emotional content of what I would come to realize later was one genuinely adult conversation. But they were all I had at the time, and I felt smug about them.

You see, I had been an awkward, socially inept child and adolescent, and my experience with women was still limited to an overmastering interest in them as possessors of genitalia designed to accommodate my own and the beginnings of a vague sort of appreciation for women as individuals, many of whose tastes and temperaments seemed delightfully different, and as a gender whose form and features seemed designed to please the male mind and eye. The notion that one woman, let alone three, would express a willingness to spend time in my company was an unaccustomed delight. I hugged my little trio of girlfriends to my ego like a little drake with his first ducks. I felt like Casanova, like Don Juan, like Mark Sanford would one day feel "hiking the Appalachian Trail" all the way to Buenos Aires...I felt fiendishly naughty.

This salacious anticipation lasted until we cleared the front gate and rolled up through the cheap metal buildings to the mobile homes that were our company area. There I climbed down and slapped the dust off my "chocolate-chip" uniform, slung my ruck into the sterile rectangle that served as my billet, showered and mooched up to the HQ Company orderly room to check my mail.

The first sign that something was wrong was no letters from Kissy.

Kissy was the Japanese-American girl I had been dating off and on since college, a plumptiously curvaceous nineteen-year-old with a helium giggle and the sultriest sloe eyes I had ever lost myself in. Of the three I was perhaps the fondest of her, because she seemed like the most genuinely loving and kind of the three, because she was built along the lines of an Asian Dolly Parton, and because her mom made the best shrimp-and-vegetable tempura this side of the Ginza.

Beauty won't 'elp when your rations is cold, mate.

She was the longest-running of my then-girlfriends, and she was also a manic letter-writer, filling pages of awful high-school-writing-class glurge that seemed to flow from her in a completely unfiltered fashion. In the Sinai I had received letters from her that kept me entertained for days simply jiggling the puzzle-box of her mind trying to figure out how french fries, sheet music, her period, kissing, her brother's skateboard and step-dancing related to one another.

But there were no letters.

(I didn't know it but this was the beginning of the longest "off" period of out off-and-on dating. She simply drifted off without animus but without any real explanation. We would reunite briefly a year later and then part for good without ever really understanding each other. She eventually did pop up in perhaps the single most peculiar incident in my entire life; literally running into my bride-of-one-day at a restaurant on our way to Europe for our honeymoon. We exchanged rather stunned greetings, I introduced my wife, and she said all the right, conventional things. But after my parents and bride had gone on ahead, she stopped me and asked, apparently seriously, why we had never gotten married. Because, I reminded her, she had never even evidenced any interest in having carnal knowledge of me, let alone marriage. That was because I was waiting for you to MAKE me sleep with you, she said conversationally, eyeing me with the fizzing coolness that had always been her way, and her charm. For a moment - just a moment - I felt the regret that I had missed her signal. But then I shook myself angrily.

That's called rape, darlin', I said to her, and people go to jail for it, and I passed her on after my family and never saw her again.)

But I think I knew, standing there in the noisy sunlight outside the orderly room, that my trio was now a duet.

Ah. Well.

Time to call Lizbeth.

The most recent and most passionate of my beloveds, Lizbeth was a local girl out of Carolina. We had met when she had come to Fayetteville with her friend, my friend Woodus' ex-wife. Minta and my pal had a professionally bizarre relationship. Woodus was a real good ol' boy. He liked drinking, he liked shooting things, and he liked fucking, in that order. Minta, a steel and kudzu Southern doll with ambition like a carbide-tipped ripping tooth, realized within moments of their marriage vows that if she didn't crave the life of a perpetually-pregnant slattern that she would have to drop Woodus and all his works like a live grenade.

She did so, but with enough remnant affection for the good ol' boy that several times a year she'd return to the piney woods of North Carolina from Atlanta or Charlotte or where ever it was she was trying to sack some corporate fortress, show up at my friend's door and within moments would have them horizontal, unclothed and indecent. This connubial gluttony would last the weekend with breaks for food, drink, and cigarettes and then she would leave. Woodus would sober up, swear never to take her back again, and the entire business would reoccur in a hundred days or so.

Lizbeth was her wingman; smaller, plainer, less...well, less everything than sleek Minta. She was a small-town girl from Dunn and enjoyed being a small-town girl from Dunn. She worked the night shift in the packaging plant there and lived in a shoddy second-floor apartment with a roommate who smoked clove cigarettes and liked stock-car racing and whose lover used to call for her by driving up to the front of the rental and throwing whatever debris was in the front seat of his car up at the windows. Since this was largely fast food rubbish the entire facade above the central door looked as if a large bird roosted on the eave above and shat ketchup, mayonnaise, french fry bits and hamburger condiments down the front wall.

Any Southerner would have pegged her in a glance: po' white trash.

But she was a bright, passionate young woman who wanted, or at least thought she wanted, to be more than a small-town girl from Dunn. We liked each other from the first, progressed to hand-holding and kissing and within two weeks I was staying over at her little rat-trap in Dunn. We ate dinners with her parents, a frightened little man and his awful wife, still holding some newlywed failure of his over him, we walked or jogged together, read, even went riding at some sort of local livery stable thing. She seemed like a good woman, and I really wanted to know her better.

Before I left for the Sinai I asked her if she would come live with me in Fayetteville. She didn't seem thrilled, and we had left it up in the air when I trudged up the boarding stairs to the charter jet to Ras Nasrani...but after about three weeks in-country I got a letter from her.

She was as poor a letter-writer as you can imagine the product of a bad Southern public school system to be. It took me a bit to decipher the message, but the gist was that she didn't want to wait - she wanted to get married. Now. Today. As soon as I came home. Whichever came first.

To say I was shocked would not be overstating the case. I was shocked. I wrote back, suggesting that I was open to the idea and that we should talk about it as soon as we could, over the phone or when I got home. Since then I had tried to call her several times when I got back in from sector but had missed her every time.

Perhaps now was a good time.

I plodded down to the battalion headquarters building through the heat I was already beginning to learn to ignore. The line for the phones wasn't long on a weekday afternoon, and I was soon seated in the spartan metal cubicle listening to the peculiar clicks, hums and buzzes that preceded the telephone connection to the United States, presumably as the electronic signal passed from antenna to satellite to antenna to undersea cable to transmitter to receiver to junction box to telephone.

But once again I didn't talk to Lizbeth. The person who answered the phone was her mother.

Not just her mother, but her mother in tears, almost hysterical, sobbing and moaning like a fundamentalist preacher getting worked up about the Day of Judgment.

I had never really known what to say to her mother, a hard-eyed slab of sagging muscle that I considered as mean as an adder and less trustworthy. I usually approached her emotionally armed and was utterly helpless to deal with the woman as a wretched mess.

My immediate thought was that something awful had happened to Lizbeth. She was a bad driver of legend, disregarding traffic rules and her own safety magnificently. But the heaving cries did not contain the words "killed" or "dead", so I settled myself in to try and untangle the emotional mess on the other end of the long, long line.

After a lot of soothing and coaxing - imagine soothing and coaxing some large, frightening beast that you are not confident won't attack you once you've got it down out of the tree it's stuck in and you get some idea of both the process and my enjoyment of it - mom's sobs subsided enough for me to start getting some sense of her.

"She...she's run off...off...with that...that..." barked Mom. I cursed silently. Well, shit, I've been dumped. Oldest story in the world. Goddam it. I wonder if it was that guy Kevin she used to see..?

"...that...that lezzie slut bitch Rondalee from her shift at work!" wailed mom from the Hell that gapes only for conservative Southern Christian women fall whose only daughters hook up with out butch lesbians.At that second I had two thoughts: one, that I had been dumped for a woman, and, two, that the woman in question was the sexiest woman in Dunn (admittedly, not a deep gene pool, but still...) and I'd have dumped Lizbeth for her, too. God, I was a fool.

After that we didn't have much to say - we never had, really - and I hung up, rather rueful rather than angry, depressed or grieving. My main concern was getting my stuff back from her place. The first hint that things would not be that easy was at the staff duty desk on the way outside.

"Damn, Doc, tough luck..." commented the staff duty runner, a guy from B Company I barely knew named Horner. "At least you know that you're still the last man in her life..."

"Unh...what?" was all I could think of to say. Apparently Lizbeth's mom's voice had been louder than I had thought. A couple of the hangers-on waiting for the phones smirked in an unpleasantly superior fashion. I stomped out in my shorts and flip-flops, a particularly unmilitary and indignified exit.

By the time I made it back to the HHC company area the news had fled before me like winged Rumor, full of tongues. Three of the loudest mouths in the medical platoon met me at the steps of the billets.

"Heard your old lady dumped you, man." said one.

"Damn, that sucks, dude." commented another.

"Well, I guess at least you can say that when ol' Doc has a woman she never wants another man..." said the first, whereupon they all shouted;

"...SHE WANTS A WOMAN!"

I slunk away to the messhall, but not before checking to see whether the Egyptian hired messboys weren't hanging out by the fly-aerodrome trash bins to taunt me with my apparent ability to turn formerly douce heterosexual women into ravenous, rug-munching lesbians.

It would not have surprised me a bit to encounter a Bedouin hawking camel rides outside the perimeter fence who would greet me with the universal tongue-between-finger-vee gesture of oral-genital contact and the falsetto crow "'Ey, Doc! You woman, she like woman, yes? No like you man, no?"



For a day I was the butt of everyone's joke. I heard the Ten Thousand Names for Cunnilingus, and was roundly and loudly applauded as the Most Throughly Dumped trooper in the battalion. I was angry, and spend a lot of time in the gym working that off, and was foolishly surprised, as young men often are, that my infamy was the merest of passing entertainments and was forgotten within a sunset, replaced by newer news and fresher gossip. The hothouse innuendo about our Headquarters Company commander and his slavering lust for the lady lawyer from the AG detachment was a particular crowd-pleaser...And I had the last of my scattered trio of girlfriends, and another two weeks in sector coming, and young men to doctor, and the empty Sinai to explore, and a slightly wiser appreciation for the vagarities of life and love. Somewhat to my surprise, my foolish life went on pretty much as foolishly as before.

And the sun went down behind the mountains to the west.

Holly Jolly Christmas

I remember loving Christmas as a kid.

(And, no, even southeastern Pennsylvania isn't this balmy in December; this is my family's back porch, Kennett Square, PA, circa 1966. That's my sister Shrew in the coolie hat. I'm in there somewhere.)

I didn't get it, of course. We were Christianus gregarius, common or garden-variety Presbyterians, whose primary object of devotion (as far as grade-school me could determine) was the money everybody put in the beautiful brass plates with the red velvet in the bottoms on Sunday morning. Sure, I remember stuff about this "God" guy and some "Jesus" mook, but the real magilla was when the organ rose to a swelling throb and the neatly-suited ushers came by and passed the lushly heavy metal plates full of lovely money. We passed it along with a fervent hush, the grave men bore it to the altar where we worshipped it with song and prayer.

Church was all about the cash, baby.

But every December we did have a cool change in the decor. We got pine and holly, candles and swags and creches. We trolled the ancient carols, the only Jesus songs I could sing along to, I mean, shit, what second grader can remember the tune to Old Winchester? We heard the story about how the shepherds were watching flocks, angels were heard on high, Baby Jesus hung with the ox and the ass and Three Kings turned up, the Star shone and the multitude of the Heavenly Host proclaimed Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards Men.But of course, all of that paled alongside the lovely, lovely Stuff. Shining lights, pretty music, jolly Santas beaming the promise of Christmas Day loot. Food; mountains and oceans and prairies of tucker, all converging on the things that a little boy enjoys: a full belly, hands full of unearned loot, days full of freedom from the drudgery of schoolroom and full of parents free from work and obligation.

Plus, let's face it: kids of the Sixties had the Most Kick-ass Christmas TV Evah. From Rudolph (1964) through Charlie Brown (1965) to the Grinch (1966), my elementary school years were lit up with the Yuletide glow from the cathode ray tube. If you couldn't feel Christmassy listening to Linus explain the holiday by quoting the Gospel of Luke...well, you were just a scroogy old Scrooge.

The glow of that childhood affection for all things Wenceslausy remained with me a long, long time. Christmas for single servicemen, for example, has a kind of rosy second-hand warmth to it.You get to feel like you're standing guard while the families celebrate, and you get sentimental about phone calls and letters from home far away. My first marriage made Christmas very pleasant and painless; enjoying the kid happiness of my in-laws while remaining free to celebrate by flying off to Baja, or skiing Yellowstone in the winter...

It is only slowly that the grinding commerce and gaudy sentimentality began to wear down my affection for the holiday. Watching my own child, as Godless as I was but with less churching, enjoy the same worldy greed that I enjoyed helped remind me that what was "special" to me was what came from Christmas, not what went into it. Adulthood freed me from dependence on the largesse of parents and Santas. With a skeptical and independent mind I couldn't help noting that the written documents fail to support the tradition of a winter Nativity, or of the supposed trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, or pretty much any of the rest of the traditional version of Luke that I remembered from Linus' Christmas speech or from Sunday School Christmas stories.

The Christmas story is a wonderful one, as is so much of the story of Jesus' life and work. I hope it's true, I wish it might be, as I wish that Jesus could live in the hearts of so many of His believers who hate and reject others in His name, who believe that if they kill them all God will recognize his own, whose acts make a mockery of faith and a terror of religion. But I have no reason to believe that, contrary to much of what I see and hear, that celebrating a God and the birth a Savior whose believers are no better (and in many cases worse) than other men and women is something to be cherished. Mojo is considerably more practical than I am: she likes the lights and she likes the trees and she likes the presents and the family togetherness and the music and the vacation and the general "Christmassyness" of December. She has no problem picking out the "holiday" elements and simply ignoring the religious foundations. If anyone is sapping the foundations of Fortress Christian Christmas it is she - Bill O'Reilly really needs to know about her, the godless wench.

I am simply an atheist, a pagan. I'm not fighting a War on Christmas; I'm in neutral Holland, placidly reading about an event that touches me not a whit.

For I cannot embrace a religious holiday without the religion. For me the slogan is correct for all its triteness: Christ IS the reason for the season. If I cannot accept Him then I feel more honest and respectful celebrating Zappadan or Festivus or the rebirth of the Great God by celebrating Sol Invictus.

I feel hypocritical, when I think about it, decorating trees and singing carols. The trees and the lights ARE lovely, and the music is glorious. But at bottom I am unmoved. I love my family, and I love enjoying Christmastime with them. But keeping Christmas in my heart?

So this year I will enjoy the family gathering around the tree and the wrapping and the lights and the faith of my mother-in-law and the Santa-worship of my son. But inside I will only raise a silent glass of Talisker to Frank, and Mithras, and the returning Sun. An end to winter cold and the return of Spring and life I can celebrate: a religious festival that is not my religion?

I cannot.

But I can enjoy some delightful Christmas snark with you, though. So here, with the holiday toast of the contentedly godless, is Ebenezer Blackadder in Baldrick's Posing Pouch from "Blackadder's Christmas Carol":Noel!

The stranger's pyre

So it begins, the final stage of the contest between the two sides of the coin we call our political parties. I do want to try and sum up what I've seen and heard of the past week as the GOP has strutted and fretted their hour upon the stage.

But I'm tired, and I'm still at work. And I'm working again, tomorrow. I'm so sick of not seeing my family in these last Indian Summer days of September...

One thing I did note today with a cynical smirk was the headline in The World's Worst Newspaper: "McCain pledges change!"

WTF? Electing the man who has publicly discarded every ideal he supposedly held to embrace his former despised enemy is change? Another four years of the rule of the oligarchs and the plutocrats and their Congressional creatures is change? More war is change? More tax cuts for the two-yacht familt is change? Less concern for the nation's poor, the nation's infrastructure, the nation's economic breadth rather than its height...that's change..?

Jesus wept, John...

I'll let my man Thuycidides have the last word, in his commentary on the effect of the Pelopponesian War on Athenian Democracy:

"Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.... The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions... not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation... only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it... thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since... success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence....

The leaders in the cities... on the one side with the cry of political equality... on the other of a moderate aristocracy... [recoiled] from no means in their struggles... in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard.... Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries..."

I'll be back later. Right now I need a drink.

Damn, I think I need a couple.