I was in the Bullseye book exchange, a poorly lighted, largish alcove across from the café proper, crouching over and sorting through a stack of newly arrived paperbacks. I had just come across an ancient copy of I, the Jury and was trying to decide if I had already read the novel when I became aware of someone just behind me.
Before I could turn, warm, slim hands encircled my head and covered my eyes.
“Hello, Meg.” I struggled to rise. Having my eyes covered somehow threw off my balance, but her hands fell away as I managed to stand upright and turn to face her. “How are you today?”
“Terrible. Depressed. In crisis.” She gave me a frown that would have melted most men’s hearts and sent them off to slay dragons for her. “I’ve lost my faith.”
“I thought you were an atheist.”
“I was. I’ve lost my faith in atheism.”
“It’s probably only a stage you’re going through. Maybe you’re only a ‘lapsed atheist,’ to use C. S. Lewis’s phrase.”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. I’m afraid I’ve found the truth, and I don’t like it. It frightens and depresses me.”
“The truth about what?”
“About everything. You know, ‘life, the universe, and everything.’”
“Forty-two?”
“No. Unfortunately my answer to the ultimate question makes all too much sense . . . explains too much . . . more than I really wanted to know. What do you think the answer is?”
“Well, when I was in college I had a flippant reply to metaphysical questions. It boiled everything—the meaning and purpose of life—down to a single two-syllable vulgarity, apt for a man at that stage in his life, but not suitable for the ears of a young lady.”
“Tell me!” she demanded, throwing back her shoulders and squaring them. It’s amazing to see how imposing a five-foot-three, hundred-ten-pound blonde knockout can look.
I told her.
Red Meg’s expression might have reflected mock offense, but she recoiled slightly from me. Then her thin hand flashed out to slap my face. But it stopped just short of contact, the swift motion suddenly transformed into a tender caress as her fingers ran slowly over my cheek.
“You need a shave, Books,” she observed.
“Are you flirting with me?” I asked. It wasn’t as clever a comeback as you might think; I’ve used it on a number of occasions, usually on women who have been ignoring me. It gets their attention.
“Probably. You know, I don’t think I know anyone else who has ever applied that particular juvenile slang for an area of the female anatomy in just that way. It displays the typical wrong headedness of your gender . . . you know, men so often think with their wrong head.” Her smile teased, but didn’t acknowledge the double entendre.
“Okay, so what’s your ultimate truth?”
“If there is any obvious purpose to the universe,” she said slowly, “it’s to explore the possibilities. If anything can happen, it will happen eventually, because the universe is so big and there is so much time involved. Billions upon billions of stars and planets form, crash into each other, die, and are reborn from the rubble, all over billions of years. It’s like evolution on a cosmic scale. Evolution isn’t simply survival of the fittest. At its heart it’s trial and error—seeing what works, then building on that. It’s the process of elimination through trial and error. What works, prospers; what doesn’t work, dwindles. That’s the logic of the universe. Just as evolution works in biology, giving us antibiotic-resistant germs and poison frogs, evolution works on the cosmic scale, giving us atoms and black holes and neutron stars—and life.”
I was nodding my tentative understanding.
“Don’t you see?” she went on. “It’s a grand experiment. Someone—something! —has set up this experiment to see what is inherent in the system—what can happen. The universe is like a gigantic Petri dish. I don’t mean to imply that life is the goal. It may just be an offshoot of the process. The goal is to learn everything that is possible.”
“And like a good scientist, this Something doesn’t interfere with his experiment once it’s begun. Sounds a lot like Deism to me.”
“Yes, but there’s more. There are things in quantum physics that hint at the true scale of the experiment. You’re familiar with the Uncertainty Principle—Schrödinger's Cat—that at the quantum level things are neither one way nor the other until they’re observed? And the Many Worlds Theory? That every decision splits the universe into two, one where x happened and another where it didn’t. If that’s true, then every time a quark changes its spin—I’m just using that as an example; I don’t understand quarks—another universe is created.”
“You’re starting to make my head spin, Meg, but I’m still with you—just barely. Go on.”
“Well, you see where I’m going with this. Panpeiron, the Great Empiricist behind all this, has set up a system where everything that can possibly happen will happen, or has happened—when we figure out time, we’ll really start to understand the universe. Do you see how troubling this is? We’re going about our daily lives worrying about our little problems—will I get that job, will I be late for work, does my boyfriend still care about me. None of it really matters, because whatever we do or decide, there is another universe where we do or make the opposite choice. Every single possible permutation will be acted out. All our struggles are just vain attempts to prevent what will happen anyway, somewhere. We’re just one of a virtually infinite number of virtually identical clones. And more than that, it means that we are not unique in any meaningful way. I think that’s what really troubles me.”
“Where did you come up with the name Pan-whatever?”
“Panpeiron. I made it up. It helps me crystallize my thoughts to have names for concepts. It’s from the Greek, pan for ‘all’ and peiran for ‘try,’ ‘attempt,’ or ‘test.’ It’s the same root as empirical.”
“So why has Pan-whoever done all of this—all these inter-linked universes, differing from each other by the tiniest detail?”
“To know everything that is possible, everything that can possibly happen,” Meg said with a sigh. “But if you mean why does he want to know everything, I can’t answer that. He—or more properly It—isn’t human and certainly doesn’t think at all the way we do. For all we know he may be searching for the perfect slime smear left behind by a slug, or perhaps he’s the greatest Elvis fan of all.”
“At least that would mean that Elvis really is still alive, in some of those other universes.”
“Singing his heart out.” Her smile was bittersweet, then flashed into a lopsided grin in imitation of the King. “Thanks for listening to me, Books. ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’”
“A scientific experiment must be closely observed,” I said. “Do you think Pan-whoever is watching us?”
“A creature capable of creating such a multitude of universes would not be satisfied with casual observation. Panpeiron would want to know everything about everything, down to our most fleeting thought or emotion. He would know more about us than we can ever know about ourselves—know us inside and out, perhaps even experiencing everything with us—but as an outsider witnessing and recording our lives, not really as part of us—because when we die, he continues. Our memories would live on in him while we are snuffed out.”
“There’s a long religious tradition holding that we are all part of God. Why couldn’t we each be part of your Panpeiron?”
“That’s the comforting interpretation, but less likely, I think. When we watch a movie, we and the movie aren’t one. The movie ends and we go on. When we end, Panpeiron will go on. Frankly, the idea gives me the creeps. It’s like a consciousness parasite. It reminds me of H.G. Wells’ description of the Martian invaders: ‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic’ that scrutinize and study us the way we study bacteria in a drop of water—but from the inside!”
“But you aren’t really worried about this, are you?” I asked. “It’s an interesting idea, but even if you’re right, nothing in your daily life changes. And personally I’d be reassured to know that my thoughts and memories won’t die with me.”
She paused to contemplate her answer. “It does trouble me, Books. I’d rather feel like an accident of mindless nature than a lab rat. At least as an accident, my uniqueness would have some meaning. As to the survival of our memories, I don’t know.”
I put an arm around her shoulder and led her toward the restaurant area.
“You know, Meg, if I had to choose between your meaning of life and the one I arrived at in college, I think I like mine better—and its name is easier to pronounce. It gives understandable purpose to a man’s life. And you might say that it, too, is about exploring the possibilities.”
Meg managed to grimace and smile at the same time. Then her mood seemed to change on a dime. “So what cute name shall we give the female meaning of life?” she asked.
Then she did something provocative with her eyebrows, making me wonder what she and I were up to in some of those other universes.
_________________________
Wikipedia Links of Possible Interest:
I the Jury by Mickey Spillane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_the_jury
Forty-Two: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything#Answer_to_Life.2C_the_Universe.2C_and_Everything_.2842.29
Uncertainty Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_Principle
Schrödinger's Cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_Cat
Many World theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_worlds_theory
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=98461
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
The Literature of Delight
“Ahoy, ya swabs—ya gots some horshpitaliky for an ol’ sea dog likes me?” Van asked as he joined us. He was carrying a large bag under one arm.
“Is it Talk Like a Pirate Day?” I asked.
“Naw, Ah gots ya thar—it’s Talk Like Popeye Day. Arf! Arf!” With a flourish he pulled a huge volume from the bag and displayed it to me.
“Great! Volume Three. Have you read it yet?”
Fantagraphics Books has been issuing the complete Popeye comic strip as drawn by Popeye’s creator, E.C. Segar. The books, six volumes in all when complete, are oversized, about 150 pages each, and contain a complete reprinting of both the black-and-white daily strips and the color Sundays. Van had loaned me the first two volumes, and I’d been looking forward to the third for a year or more.
“Ah yam done, and it’s yers to enjoys.”
“How is it?”
“Just like the first two—wonderful.” He dropped the painful dialect, or whatever it is that Popeye speaks. “Except for the pretentious introduction, which I skipped.”
“Anything noteworthy?”
“Well, probably the most memorable thing is Olive Oyl doing a fan dance at the World’s Fair. Bluto shows up for the first and only time in the Segar strip, Swee’pea is introduced, and Popeye gets his own country, Popilania. Not a bad cargo for one volume.”
Red Meg was watching us with unconcealed amazement and perhaps a bit of slightly concealed scorn. Finally she said, “And here I thought you were both grown ups, even Van. Why on earth would you care about an extended commercial for spinach?”
Van and I exchanged glances, then grins, and finally turned simultaneously to stare her down.
“Meg,” Van proclaimed gravely, “you are talking about one of the great literary characters of the 20th Century. Don’t confuse the real Popeye with the cartoons you may have seen on television. Segar’s Popeye inspired those cartoons, but it’s a completely different ‘aminal.’ You have to read a fair amount of it to really appreciate it, but it’s a dark, gritty, Depression-era comic masterpiece.”
Meg looked at me. “Do you agree with that appraisal?” she asked. “Are you crazy too?”
“Pretty much.”
I passed the book to her and she started flipping through the pages.
“To understand the appeal of Popeye,” Van said “and why the character is still universally recognizable eighty years later, you have to read the original comic strip. As cartoonists go, Segar wasn’t much of an artist, but the raw quality of his drawings actually adds to the appeal in a strange sort of way. As a storyteller and humorist, though, he was inspired. Imagine the great new popular hero who took the early 1930s by storm—a crude, rowdy, virtually illiterate, physically deformed, one-eyed ne’er-do-well who cusses up a storm and gets in fights at the drop of a hat, but has a heart of gold and a curious philosophical streak. Combine this character with long, complicated, imaginative adventure stories that take Popeye and his friends on trips around the world, add a sprinkling of fantasy like the Sea Hag or the Whiffle Hen, a pinch of political or social satire, and a large serving of hilarious characterizations like J. Wellington Wimpy and Olive, and you start to have some idea of the power of the original Popeye.”
“It’s historically important, too,” I said. “As far as I know, Popeye was the first widely successful humorous adventure strip. That would make it the forerunner of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse strip, and through Gottfredson of Carl Bark’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books.”
Meg was rolling her eyes in earnest now. “Donald Duck! Uncle Scrooge! I suppose you’re going to tell me those are great literature too.”
“I haven’t read much of Gottredson’s work,” I said, “though the little I have read makes me want to read more. But Carl Barks’ work is brilliant, both as art and as storytelling. Wonderfully clever, with great insight into human nature. But above all else, his stories are great fun.”
Meg let out a sigh of exasperation. “Next you’ll be telling me that the Three Stooges should have won Pulitzers. On second thought, maybe they should have—for their deep insight into the male psyche!”
Van and I looked dubiously at each other, tilted our heads as if considering that possibility, then shook our heads simultaneously, dismissing the idea.
“Meg,” Van said, reaching out and patting her hand. “You have to toss off your literary snobbery. There are brilliant works of commercial art and literature waiting to be discovered. I know that funny talking animals seem innately childish, but don’t be fooled by that. Truly great art can be created for both children and adults. In the case of Segar and Barks, it was. There are things in both that will escape most children and some adults.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that in principle,” she said, tossing her head so that her blonde hair swirled around her head enticingly. The girl flirts without trying. “I’ll even take your word that Popeye is more than the silly cartoons. But Donald Duck?”
“Yes, Donald Duck. And Uncle Scrooge,” Van insisted. “Segar’s Popeye and Barks’ Donald Duck comics are examples of the best in popular culture. Both bear sure marks of genius. Carl Barks basically created all the comic book versions of the Disney duck characters, and they’re very different from the animated versions. The animated Donald is very one dimensional—irascible with a speech impediment. Barks’ character is much more complex, with a full range of emotions. Barks didn’t scrimp on or dumb down his work for children, either. He was wonderfully inventive and clever. You can’t be a fully cultured person if you don’t know how Uncle Scrooge and Flintheart Glomgold settled their bet on who was the richest duck in the world.”
She stared at him through disbelieving eyes.
“String. It all came down to who had the largest ball of string.”
Slowly her disbelief faded to amazement as a big smile spread across her face. “I remember that story! A friend made me read it when I was a little girl!”
“No one ever forgets it. Barks was a highly talented artist and a great writer of comic book stories. He was capable of being very subtle, too. There’s one Donald Duck story—I don’t remember the title” (it was “Luck of the North”) “where Donald gets so fed up with Gladstone Gander, his insufferably lucky cousin, that he tricks him into going on a wild goose chase to the Arctic. Then Barks devotes two or three pages to the gradual evolution of Donald’s thoughts and emotions, from riotous delight to pleased self-satisfaction, to the realization of the deadly predicament he’s put Gladstone in, to concern, to guilt. Just brilliant, and this in a ‘children’s comic book.’ You really have to read this stuff. If you like, I’ll loan some to you. I have a couple of thick collections that would make a good place to start.”
“There’s something else that the Barks comics offer that I’ve found in very few traditional works of literature, if any,” I said. “It’s hard to exactly explain, but what comes closest is a sense of—delight. I find that I take delight in Popeye and Carl Barks. They somehow allow me to recapture the untroubled joy of childhood for a little while, without insulting my adult mind.”
That brought the conversation to a temporary halt. Finally I said, “You might as well tell her about Barks’ successor.”
“Barks was so good that he has inspired generations of fans who collect his stories and argue over details in them. Don Rosa is Barks’ great disciple, a sort of nerdy fan turned commercial Disney artist. He knows the Barks Duck Universe inside out and has been writing new stories that knit together different aspects of it. He did a sort of biography of Scrooge McDuck as separate stories set in different crucial periods of Scrooge’s life. He’s an excellent artist and good writer, though perhaps a little too detail obsessed. Worth reading, but only after reading Barks.”
Van moved his arm in such a way that it nudged the bag he had put on a corner of the table near him. It reminded him of something.
“And I just got this,” he said, reaching into the bag and removing a book from it, which he displayed with a flourish. “Volume One of the complete Prince Valiant.”
He passed it to me. Another oversized volume from Fantagraphics, with sumptuous color, it contains the first two years of Hal Foster’s adventure masterpiece and is the first volume of a planned series reprinting the complete Foster run.
“Foster was the greatest artist ever to grace the newspaper comics,” Van said, “and possibly the greatest storyteller, too.” He took the volume from me, turned it toward Meg, and flipped slowly through the pages so that she could view the gorgeous artwork and breathtaking layouts. “Now what do you say to that?” he demanded.
I could see by her expression that she was impressed. She pursed her lips, exhaled audibly, then grinned and said, “Well blow me down! Toot—toot!”
__________________
Links of possible interest:
Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19):
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html
Wikipedia entries for—
E.C. Segar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.C._Segar
Carl Barks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks
Don Rosa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa
Harold Foster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Foster
Prince Valiant — An American Epic: “The biggest, most beautiful, most expensive comic book of all time.” For serious collectors, full color, full newspaper page size reproductions of the first three years: http://www.io.com/~norwoodr/order.html.
“Is it Talk Like a Pirate Day?” I asked.
“Naw, Ah gots ya thar—it’s Talk Like Popeye Day. Arf! Arf!” With a flourish he pulled a huge volume from the bag and displayed it to me.
“Great! Volume Three. Have you read it yet?”
Fantagraphics Books has been issuing the complete Popeye comic strip as drawn by Popeye’s creator, E.C. Segar. The books, six volumes in all when complete, are oversized, about 150 pages each, and contain a complete reprinting of both the black-and-white daily strips and the color Sundays. Van had loaned me the first two volumes, and I’d been looking forward to the third for a year or more.“Ah yam done, and it’s yers to enjoys.”
“How is it?”
“Just like the first two—wonderful.” He dropped the painful dialect, or whatever it is that Popeye speaks. “Except for the pretentious introduction, which I skipped.”
“Anything noteworthy?”
“Well, probably the most memorable thing is Olive Oyl doing a fan dance at the World’s Fair. Bluto shows up for the first and only time in the Segar strip, Swee’pea is introduced, and Popeye gets his own country, Popilania. Not a bad cargo for one volume.”
Red Meg was watching us with unconcealed amazement and perhaps a bit of slightly concealed scorn. Finally she said, “And here I thought you were both grown ups, even Van. Why on earth would you care about an extended commercial for spinach?”
Van and I exchanged glances, then grins, and finally turned simultaneously to stare her down.
“Meg,” Van proclaimed gravely, “you are talking about one of the great literary characters of the 20th Century. Don’t confuse the real Popeye with the cartoons you may have seen on television. Segar’s Popeye inspired those cartoons, but it’s a completely different ‘aminal.’ You have to read a fair amount of it to really appreciate it, but it’s a dark, gritty, Depression-era comic masterpiece.”
Meg looked at me. “Do you agree with that appraisal?” she asked. “Are you crazy too?”
“Pretty much.”
I passed the book to her and she started flipping through the pages.
“To understand the appeal of Popeye,” Van said “and why the character is still universally recognizable eighty years later, you have to read the original comic strip. As cartoonists go, Segar wasn’t much of an artist, but the raw quality of his drawings actually adds to the appeal in a strange sort of way. As a storyteller and humorist, though, he was inspired. Imagine the great new popular hero who took the early 1930s by storm—a crude, rowdy, virtually illiterate, physically deformed, one-eyed ne’er-do-well who cusses up a storm and gets in fights at the drop of a hat, but has a heart of gold and a curious philosophical streak. Combine this character with long, complicated, imaginative adventure stories that take Popeye and his friends on trips around the world, add a sprinkling of fantasy like the Sea Hag or the Whiffle Hen, a pinch of political or social satire, and a large serving of hilarious characterizations like J. Wellington Wimpy and Olive, and you start to have some idea of the power of the original Popeye.”
“It’s historically important, too,” I said. “As far as I know, Popeye was the first widely successful humorous adventure strip. That would make it the forerunner of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse strip, and through Gottfredson of Carl Bark’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books.”
Meg was rolling her eyes in earnest now. “Donald Duck! Uncle Scrooge! I suppose you’re going to tell me those are great literature too.”
“I haven’t read much of Gottredson’s work,” I said, “though the little I have read makes me want to read more. But Carl Barks’ work is brilliant, both as art and as storytelling. Wonderfully clever, with great insight into human nature. But above all else, his stories are great fun.”
Meg let out a sigh of exasperation. “Next you’ll be telling me that the Three Stooges should have won Pulitzers. On second thought, maybe they should have—for their deep insight into the male psyche!”
Van and I looked dubiously at each other, tilted our heads as if considering that possibility, then shook our heads simultaneously, dismissing the idea.
“Meg,” Van said, reaching out and patting her hand. “You have to toss off your literary snobbery. There are brilliant works of commercial art and literature waiting to be discovered. I know that funny talking animals seem innately childish, but don’t be fooled by that. Truly great art can be created for both children and adults. In the case of Segar and Barks, it was. There are things in both that will escape most children and some adults.”
“Okay, I’ll accept that in principle,” she said, tossing her head so that her blonde hair swirled around her head enticingly. The girl flirts without trying. “I’ll even take your word that Popeye is more than the silly cartoons. But Donald Duck?”
“Yes, Donald Duck. And Uncle Scrooge,” Van insisted. “Segar’s Popeye and Barks’ Donald Duck comics are examples of the best in popular culture. Both bear sure marks of genius. Carl Barks basically created all the comic book versions of the Disney duck characters, and they’re very different from the animated versions. The animated Donald is very one dimensional—irascible with a speech impediment. Barks’ character is much more complex, with a full range of emotions. Barks didn’t scrimp on or dumb down his work for children, either. He was wonderfully inventive and clever. You can’t be a fully cultured person if you don’t know how Uncle Scrooge and Flintheart Glomgold settled their bet on who was the richest duck in the world.”
She stared at him through disbelieving eyes.
“String. It all came down to who had the largest ball of string.”
Slowly her disbelief faded to amazement as a big smile spread across her face. “I remember that story! A friend made me read it when I was a little girl!”
“No one ever forgets it. Barks was a highly talented artist and a great writer of comic book stories. He was capable of being very subtle, too. There’s one Donald Duck story—I don’t remember the title” (it was “Luck of the North”) “where Donald gets so fed up with Gladstone Gander, his insufferably lucky cousin, that he tricks him into going on a wild goose chase to the Arctic. Then Barks devotes two or three pages to the gradual evolution of Donald’s thoughts and emotions, from riotous delight to pleased self-satisfaction, to the realization of the deadly predicament he’s put Gladstone in, to concern, to guilt. Just brilliant, and this in a ‘children’s comic book.’ You really have to read this stuff. If you like, I’ll loan some to you. I have a couple of thick collections that would make a good place to start.”
“There’s something else that the Barks comics offer that I’ve found in very few traditional works of literature, if any,” I said. “It’s hard to exactly explain, but what comes closest is a sense of—delight. I find that I take delight in Popeye and Carl Barks. They somehow allow me to recapture the untroubled joy of childhood for a little while, without insulting my adult mind.”
That brought the conversation to a temporary halt. Finally I said, “You might as well tell her about Barks’ successor.”“Barks was so good that he has inspired generations of fans who collect his stories and argue over details in them. Don Rosa is Barks’ great disciple, a sort of nerdy fan turned commercial Disney artist. He knows the Barks Duck Universe inside out and has been writing new stories that knit together different aspects of it. He did a sort of biography of Scrooge McDuck as separate stories set in different crucial periods of Scrooge’s life. He’s an excellent artist and good writer, though perhaps a little too detail obsessed. Worth reading, but only after reading Barks.”
Van moved his arm in such a way that it nudged the bag he had put on a corner of the table near him. It reminded him of something.
“And I just got this,” he said, reaching into the bag and removing a book from it, which he displayed with a flourish. “Volume One of the complete Prince Valiant.”
He passed it to me. Another oversized volume from Fantagraphics, with sumptuous color, it contains the first two years of Hal Foster’s adventure masterpiece and is the first volume of a planned series reprinting the complete Foster run.
“Foster was the greatest artist ever to grace the newspaper comics,” Van said, “and possibly the greatest storyteller, too.” He took the volume from me, turned it toward Meg, and flipped slowly through the pages so that she could view the gorgeous artwork and breathtaking layouts. “Now what do you say to that?” he demanded.
I could see by her expression that she was impressed. She pursed her lips, exhaled audibly, then grinned and said, “Well blow me down! Toot—toot!”
__________________
Links of possible interest:
Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19):
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html
Wikipedia entries for—
E.C. Segar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.C._Segar
Carl Barks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Barks
Don Rosa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa
Harold Foster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Foster
Prince Valiant — An American Epic: “The biggest, most beautiful, most expensive comic book of all time.” For serious collectors, full color, full newspaper page size reproductions of the first three years: http://www.io.com/~norwoodr/order.html.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
For the Children
“What incompetence! What breathtaking ignorance!” Red Meg’s green eyes shot sparks. “And it’s not just reporters. Have you every watched Law and Order? They find a spent shell or dig a slug out of a corpse, and proclaim that it came from a Glock 17!”
“I think some gun models do have unique rifling,” Pops said. “Apparently it is possible to narrow down the type of gun by the grooves the barrel makes.”
“Yeah, maybe under a microscope, but nobody can glance at a slug and tell what kind of gun fired it. That’s a total fantasy. If you’re a high-paid network scriptwriter, shouldn’t you do a little research? These TV and movie writers think you rack a semiautomatic every few minutes to make sure it’s loaded. You’d spew shells all over. Or if you’re writing articles for newspapers, shouldn’t you know something about your topic? I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read about gun control where the writer obviously didn’t know the difference between a bolt-action .22 and a Thompson submachine gun.”
“It’s ignorance combined with parochialism,” Pops said. “Those people base everything on what they’re familiar with—just like the rest of us. They think their laws apply to the entire country. They don’t know that most of the country doesn’t have gun registration or licensing—and is adamantly opposed to such things. In fact, they don’t know what the laws actually are. They confuse concealed carry licenses with licenses to own a gun, which most of us don’t need. If it looks scary, it’s assumed to be an ‘assault weapon,’ and ‘assault weapons’ are all machine guns in their minds. We have to face facts. Something like two thirds of the population doesn’t own a gun or live with anyone who does. They don’t know or understand guns, so they fear them. It wasn’t nearly that bad when I was growing up. There were shooting galleries at county fairs where everyone could handle and shoot a real gun.”
“When you were growing up,” I teased, “everybody still shot muskets.”
Pops grinned. “Yep, Sonny, I learned everything I know from Natty Bumppo.”
Meg wasn’t to be distracted from her topic. “Most of the reporters, actors, scriptwriters, and producers live in effete areas where self-defense is viewed as ‘vigilantism.’ They think owning a gun is not just abnormal or primitive, but criminal—that we’re all potential criminals, just waiting for our chance to kill somebody. How do we change that?”
“Well, you don’t do it by carrying ‘assault weapons’ to political meetings,” I said.
“You know the media distorted that,” Meg objected. “Those guys were a block or two away from the President. They were demonstrating for open carry—displaying their second amendment rights.”
I shook my head vigorously. “They need to understand the difference between a demonstration and a provocation. Panicking people and painting gun owners as in-your-face extremists and would-be assassins isn’t a very productive way to educate the public. You don’t give ammunition to your enemies.”
“They say they’re trying to accustom the public to the sight of firearms in civilian hands,” she explained. “To normalize guns in everyday life.”
“All they’ll do is scare people,” I said. “What’s needed is a real education campaign. Take friends to the range, show them how to safely handle firearms. Better yet, we should have firearms safety and marksmanship taught in schools. Firearms responsibility, too. If you want to normalize guns, so that they’re no more extraordinary than a chain saw or a blow torch, that’s the way to do it.”
“The Boy Scouts served that purpose years ago,” Pops said. “We got merit badges in marksmanship.”
“You’re right!” Meg said, warming to the idea. “We should have programs in every school in the country, starting in Kindergarten with Eddie Eagle. Then gradually work up to actual gun handling and shooting by middle school or high school. Use Airsoft pistols, then BB or pellet guns, then single-shot .22s. Make it part of P.E. Maybe a couple of days each quarter could be spent on it in the early years. Have intramural competitions, just like other sports. Everybody should take part. The idea would be to make everyone familiar with how to handle a gun safely and effectively. If we did that, there’d be a lot less gun phobia in this country. The subject would be demystified.”
“And crime would plummet. Many schools had rifle teams back in the old days,” Pops said, putting on his old codger voice. “It worked fine. There were never any problems, and a lot less crime. I don’t know why we got away from that.”
“Just how are you going to get the schools to go along with this?” I asked. “There are schools that won’t even allow pictures of guns in class. Students have been suspended for drawing stick guns.”
“Well,” Meg said, “the NRA has been very successful over the years in getting states to pass gun-owner-friendly legislation. The concealed carry laws are probably the best example, but they were also behind the state preemption laws—so that every little town can’t throw you in jail just because you have your gun in your car when you pass through their boundaries. They’ve passed the Castle Doctrine in a bunch of states—and Emergency Powers legislation that prevents states from confiscating weapons during emergencies, like hurricanes. This could be another item for the NRA agenda—to convince states to incorporate gun safety programs into their school curriculums.”
Meg grinned, pleased with herself. “I like that!” she continued. “The gun control people always try to clothe their evil intentions in fine sounding phrases. We can co-opt ‘gun safety’ for our side. We can say we have to do it ‘for the children.’”
“You know the critics will have heart attacks,” I said. “But even aside from them, how do you answer the person who objects that we’ll be training future criminals and murderers? As it is, most of the gang members can’s shoot straight. That’s why they scatter lead everywhere. Your plan will make them more dangerous.”
Meg grimaced. “They can’t hit anything because they hold their guns sideways.”
“Yes, but the point is valid. Trained gangsters would be a lot more dangerous than untrained gangsters. They’d hold their guns upright if they were properly trained.”
“Maybe they'd be a lot more dangerous—but it would be to each other, instead of to innocent bystanders,” Meg insisted. “They mostly shoot other gang members.”
“The people who turn into criminals almost always do poorly in school,” Pops said. “They display behavior problems early on. The marksmanship courses could be treated as a perk, something that rewards the good student. Act up and you can’t take the classes where you actually shoot weapons, even Airsoft pistols. You run laps instead. This is the sort of self discipline that the Boy Scouts used to instill, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to impose it on our middle school students.”
“And when many people are armed, criminals become more cautious. We’ve seen that in the concealed carry states,” Meg said. “Violent crime would probably drop. If nothing else, there’d be fewer accidents with guns.”
Pop’s watch began to beep. He silenced it and stood up. “Sorry, friends, but I have to go now. ‘Early to bed, early to rise,’ as my old friend Ben Franklin used to remind me.”
Meg started to gather her belongings, too. “I have a long book waiting for me,” she explained. “But I think this is a great idea that really should be followed up on somehow.”
Before going our separate ways, we solemnly exchanged the secret NRA handshake.
________________
Links of possible interest:
NRA Institute for Legislative Action: http://www.nraila.org/
“State ‘Emergency Powers’ vs. The Right to Arms ”:
http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=191
NRA Eddie Eagle program: http://www.nrahq.org/safety/eddie/
Natty Bumppo entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Bumppo
Airsoft guns entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airsoft_gun
“I think some gun models do have unique rifling,” Pops said. “Apparently it is possible to narrow down the type of gun by the grooves the barrel makes.”
“Yeah, maybe under a microscope, but nobody can glance at a slug and tell what kind of gun fired it. That’s a total fantasy. If you’re a high-paid network scriptwriter, shouldn’t you do a little research? These TV and movie writers think you rack a semiautomatic every few minutes to make sure it’s loaded. You’d spew shells all over. Or if you’re writing articles for newspapers, shouldn’t you know something about your topic? I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read about gun control where the writer obviously didn’t know the difference between a bolt-action .22 and a Thompson submachine gun.”
“It’s ignorance combined with parochialism,” Pops said. “Those people base everything on what they’re familiar with—just like the rest of us. They think their laws apply to the entire country. They don’t know that most of the country doesn’t have gun registration or licensing—and is adamantly opposed to such things. In fact, they don’t know what the laws actually are. They confuse concealed carry licenses with licenses to own a gun, which most of us don’t need. If it looks scary, it’s assumed to be an ‘assault weapon,’ and ‘assault weapons’ are all machine guns in their minds. We have to face facts. Something like two thirds of the population doesn’t own a gun or live with anyone who does. They don’t know or understand guns, so they fear them. It wasn’t nearly that bad when I was growing up. There were shooting galleries at county fairs where everyone could handle and shoot a real gun.”
“When you were growing up,” I teased, “everybody still shot muskets.”
Pops grinned. “Yep, Sonny, I learned everything I know from Natty Bumppo.”
Meg wasn’t to be distracted from her topic. “Most of the reporters, actors, scriptwriters, and producers live in effete areas where self-defense is viewed as ‘vigilantism.’ They think owning a gun is not just abnormal or primitive, but criminal—that we’re all potential criminals, just waiting for our chance to kill somebody. How do we change that?”
“Well, you don’t do it by carrying ‘assault weapons’ to political meetings,” I said.
“You know the media distorted that,” Meg objected. “Those guys were a block or two away from the President. They were demonstrating for open carry—displaying their second amendment rights.”
I shook my head vigorously. “They need to understand the difference between a demonstration and a provocation. Panicking people and painting gun owners as in-your-face extremists and would-be assassins isn’t a very productive way to educate the public. You don’t give ammunition to your enemies.”
“They say they’re trying to accustom the public to the sight of firearms in civilian hands,” she explained. “To normalize guns in everyday life.”
“All they’ll do is scare people,” I said. “What’s needed is a real education campaign. Take friends to the range, show them how to safely handle firearms. Better yet, we should have firearms safety and marksmanship taught in schools. Firearms responsibility, too. If you want to normalize guns, so that they’re no more extraordinary than a chain saw or a blow torch, that’s the way to do it.”
“The Boy Scouts served that purpose years ago,” Pops said. “We got merit badges in marksmanship.”
“You’re right!” Meg said, warming to the idea. “We should have programs in every school in the country, starting in Kindergarten with Eddie Eagle. Then gradually work up to actual gun handling and shooting by middle school or high school. Use Airsoft pistols, then BB or pellet guns, then single-shot .22s. Make it part of P.E. Maybe a couple of days each quarter could be spent on it in the early years. Have intramural competitions, just like other sports. Everybody should take part. The idea would be to make everyone familiar with how to handle a gun safely and effectively. If we did that, there’d be a lot less gun phobia in this country. The subject would be demystified.”
“And crime would plummet. Many schools had rifle teams back in the old days,” Pops said, putting on his old codger voice. “It worked fine. There were never any problems, and a lot less crime. I don’t know why we got away from that.”
“Just how are you going to get the schools to go along with this?” I asked. “There are schools that won’t even allow pictures of guns in class. Students have been suspended for drawing stick guns.”
“Well,” Meg said, “the NRA has been very successful over the years in getting states to pass gun-owner-friendly legislation. The concealed carry laws are probably the best example, but they were also behind the state preemption laws—so that every little town can’t throw you in jail just because you have your gun in your car when you pass through their boundaries. They’ve passed the Castle Doctrine in a bunch of states—and Emergency Powers legislation that prevents states from confiscating weapons during emergencies, like hurricanes. This could be another item for the NRA agenda—to convince states to incorporate gun safety programs into their school curriculums.”
Meg grinned, pleased with herself. “I like that!” she continued. “The gun control people always try to clothe their evil intentions in fine sounding phrases. We can co-opt ‘gun safety’ for our side. We can say we have to do it ‘for the children.’”
“You know the critics will have heart attacks,” I said. “But even aside from them, how do you answer the person who objects that we’ll be training future criminals and murderers? As it is, most of the gang members can’s shoot straight. That’s why they scatter lead everywhere. Your plan will make them more dangerous.”
Meg grimaced. “They can’t hit anything because they hold their guns sideways.”
“Yes, but the point is valid. Trained gangsters would be a lot more dangerous than untrained gangsters. They’d hold their guns upright if they were properly trained.”
“Maybe they'd be a lot more dangerous—but it would be to each other, instead of to innocent bystanders,” Meg insisted. “They mostly shoot other gang members.”
“The people who turn into criminals almost always do poorly in school,” Pops said. “They display behavior problems early on. The marksmanship courses could be treated as a perk, something that rewards the good student. Act up and you can’t take the classes where you actually shoot weapons, even Airsoft pistols. You run laps instead. This is the sort of self discipline that the Boy Scouts used to instill, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to impose it on our middle school students.”
“And when many people are armed, criminals become more cautious. We’ve seen that in the concealed carry states,” Meg said. “Violent crime would probably drop. If nothing else, there’d be fewer accidents with guns.”
Pop’s watch began to beep. He silenced it and stood up. “Sorry, friends, but I have to go now. ‘Early to bed, early to rise,’ as my old friend Ben Franklin used to remind me.”
Meg started to gather her belongings, too. “I have a long book waiting for me,” she explained. “But I think this is a great idea that really should be followed up on somehow.”
Before going our separate ways, we solemnly exchanged the secret NRA handshake.
________________
Links of possible interest:
NRA Institute for Legislative Action: http://www.nraila.org/
“State ‘Emergency Powers’ vs. The Right to Arms ”:
http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=191
NRA Eddie Eagle program: http://www.nrahq.org/safety/eddie/
Natty Bumppo entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Bumppo
Airsoft guns entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airsoft_gun
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Red Meg
Red Meg leaned a black plastic rifle case against the wall, dropped her range bag and purse next to it, and slid into a chair across from me.
She’s a petite thing, somewhere in her twenties, probably about five-foot-three and just over a hundred pounds. They say that good things come in small packages, and Meg’s lithe, supple form certainly doesn’t belie that adage. She was wearing black, almost leotard-tight slacks and a loose black blouse with the tail knotted in front to display an enticing expanse of taut, bare midriff.
There’s no denying that Meg is startlingly beautiful, with a fine, symmetrical face framed by neatly styled, shoulder-length blonde hair, sparkling green eyes, and a perfectly chiseled nose. I watched Ray’s eyes traveling back and forth between her and the rifle case. Ray is an old friend. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years and had invited him to eat with me at the Bullseye Café so that we could catch up on each other. Knowing his political, philosophical, and religious beliefs as well as I did—he seemed incapable of talking for more than five minutes without bringing them up—I suspected that Meg’s unexpected appearance might turn out to be inopportune.
Pokey, the waitress, ambled over and took Meg’s order: iced tea, a salad, and baked catfish. Meg eats healthy.
“We were just talking about global warming,” Ray ventured, pointedly ignoring the odd black case and obviously intent on getting to know Meg better. I couldn’t blame him for being interested in her; he is male. But I was pretty sure I knew where his efforts would lead. I also decided to let him twist in the wind for awhile and not satisfy his curiosity by explaining that obviously, after her meal, Meg was headed for the shooting range to do a little target practice with her recently acquired AR-15.
She sniffed at Ray’s suggested topic of conversation. “I have the answer to that. In fact, I have the answer to most of the world’s problems.”
I held my breath. You see, Meg was born with a severe disability. It’s the primary reason that, although she attracts men like honey attracts flies, she disposes of them as quickly as Raid. She is constitutionally incapable of moderating what she says. If she thinks it, she says it, with no apologies. And what she thinks is—umm, shall we say “out of the mainstream”?
“The answer to everything!” Ray exclaimed, grinning. I think he thought she was joking. “A lot of people would pay money for that. You could sell it to the government.”
“No I couldn’t,” she replied, favoring him with a pleasant smile. “Those leprous toads are incapable of understanding anything but graft and votes.”
If her reply took him back, Ray managed to conceal it. “But what’s the answer to everything? I’d like to know that.”
“Most of the world’s problems are caused by too many people,” she said. “If we had a quarter of our population, we’d need a quarter as much food, a quarter as much energy, a quarter as much housing, and we’d produce a quarter as much garbage. The seas wouldn’t be overfished, or polluted with mercury. There’d be three times as much raw materials for everyone.”
“Okay,” Ray said slowly, not certain if she was serious. “But how do we do that? Should we do like China and restrict how many children a family can have?”
“Certainly not! Governments muck up everything they touch and should never be allowed to restrict human freedom. It has to be done through persuasion, by changing the culture so that stupid and defective people are too shamed to breed. With education, even dolts are capable of acting in their own best interest. We have to stop paying people subsidies for breeding.”
I started to point out that large populations produce a critical mass of scientists, engineers, and so forth, producing an explosion in technology and the arts, but decided against becoming entangled in this conversation.
“That sounds like eugenics!” Ray barely concealed his horror.
“You say that as if eugenics were a bad thing!”
Ray sat suddenly upright in his chairs, his eyes growing wider. “Of course it’s a bad thing. Think of what the Nazis did, killing thousands of disabled people, not to mention the Jews, Gypsies, and other groups.”
Pokey brought Meg her tea and salad, and Meg slipped a straw into the tall glass and took a sip before continuing. “Eugenics means ‘good genes’ or ‘good breeding.’ We use it all the time in raising animals, only we call it selective breeding. Only a fool would intentionally engage in malgenics. It’s simply a matter of getting people to think before they make children. We should have public service announcements on radio and television explaining it to the illiterate. Signs on busses, on billboards. If you’re going to have children, you should have strong, healthy children—children you can spend time with, that you can educate and make into moral, intelligent, productive, fully developed human beings. We’re taking the opposite approach—have you ever read ‘The Marching Morons’?”
Ray shook his head.
“You should.” But instead of explicating Kornbluth’s story, she turned to her salad.
“Children used to be considered an asset,” Ray objected. “More hands to work the farm. You seem to consider them a liability.”
“Too many children certainly are a liability in an industrial society, unless you’re very wealthy. Even then it’s impossible to give them enough personal attention. Parents only have so much time.”
Ray shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “I believe God loves everyone, regardless of how smart or slow they are.”
“He has a funny way of showing it.” Meg speared lettuce with her fork. “He lets millions of His little loved ones starve to death. Others struggle their entire short, miserable lives just to scrape a little food out of the ground. Still others wallow in poverty, drugs, and crime—only to end up in prison or early graves.”
“Everyone deserves a chance. Everyone is of equal value.” Ray sounded shocked.
“You’re kidding yourself if you really think everyone is equally valuable. We are an experiment of nature, each with different abilities. We’re like seeds scattered in the wind. Some land on fertile ground, take root, and blossom. Others land in the parched desert and never even germinate. Still others might get wedged inside cracks in rocks, put out a few crippled sprouts, then wither and die—or, miraculously, bloom into healthy, gorgeous plants. Some are genetically unsound from the beginning and grow into misshapen mutants. Experiments fail. That’s nature. That’s life.”
She chewed and swallowed a bite of her salad, then continued, “Equality is the great delusion of our time. In what way are you and I equal? Strength? Certainly not. Obviously you’re bigger and stronger than I am, but I’m probably a better shot. Knowledge? No, indeed! Our life experiences have been completely different. We had different parents, different families, different innate abilities. We went to different schools, read different books, and have different friends. You know things I don’t know and vice versa. You’re male and I’m female. You’re tall and I’m short. Whatever similarities there may be between us, there are hundreds or thousands of differences. I don’t believe in equality. I believe in uniqueness!”
“But we’re all equal under the law. You do believe in that, don’t you?”
“Of course. Anything else would by tyranny. The government can’t be trusted to judge people’s innate abilities. Neither can scientists. Only nature can do that. You might say, ‘Let God sort them out.’” She shot a mischievous glance at me.
“So we should just let the sick and the old die? That’s what nature would do.”
“We’re wealthy enough as a society that we don’t have to go to extremes. Education will take us a long way. It already has in some countries, where births are below replacement levels. We don’t need government bayonets, just education, time, and will.”
Ray was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Do you believe in God? What religion are you?”
“Social Darwinist—reformed.”
Ray didn’t know what to say and Meg went back to her salad.
Finally I said, “Ray, I think I failed to introduce you. This is Megan. As you’ve gathered, she’s a very unusual person. In fact, she’d be an outlier in any demographic. We call her Red Meg around here, because, like Nature, she’s ‘red in tooth and claw.’”
Red Meg bestowed one of her man-killer smiles upon the two of us.
------------------------------
Link of possible interest:
“The Marching Morons” by Cyril M. Kornbluth – entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
She’s a petite thing, somewhere in her twenties, probably about five-foot-three and just over a hundred pounds. They say that good things come in small packages, and Meg’s lithe, supple form certainly doesn’t belie that adage. She was wearing black, almost leotard-tight slacks and a loose black blouse with the tail knotted in front to display an enticing expanse of taut, bare midriff.
There’s no denying that Meg is startlingly beautiful, with a fine, symmetrical face framed by neatly styled, shoulder-length blonde hair, sparkling green eyes, and a perfectly chiseled nose. I watched Ray’s eyes traveling back and forth between her and the rifle case. Ray is an old friend. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years and had invited him to eat with me at the Bullseye Café so that we could catch up on each other. Knowing his political, philosophical, and religious beliefs as well as I did—he seemed incapable of talking for more than five minutes without bringing them up—I suspected that Meg’s unexpected appearance might turn out to be inopportune.
Pokey, the waitress, ambled over and took Meg’s order: iced tea, a salad, and baked catfish. Meg eats healthy.
“We were just talking about global warming,” Ray ventured, pointedly ignoring the odd black case and obviously intent on getting to know Meg better. I couldn’t blame him for being interested in her; he is male. But I was pretty sure I knew where his efforts would lead. I also decided to let him twist in the wind for awhile and not satisfy his curiosity by explaining that obviously, after her meal, Meg was headed for the shooting range to do a little target practice with her recently acquired AR-15.
She sniffed at Ray’s suggested topic of conversation. “I have the answer to that. In fact, I have the answer to most of the world’s problems.”
I held my breath. You see, Meg was born with a severe disability. It’s the primary reason that, although she attracts men like honey attracts flies, she disposes of them as quickly as Raid. She is constitutionally incapable of moderating what she says. If she thinks it, she says it, with no apologies. And what she thinks is—umm, shall we say “out of the mainstream”?
“The answer to everything!” Ray exclaimed, grinning. I think he thought she was joking. “A lot of people would pay money for that. You could sell it to the government.”
“No I couldn’t,” she replied, favoring him with a pleasant smile. “Those leprous toads are incapable of understanding anything but graft and votes.”
If her reply took him back, Ray managed to conceal it. “But what’s the answer to everything? I’d like to know that.”
“Most of the world’s problems are caused by too many people,” she said. “If we had a quarter of our population, we’d need a quarter as much food, a quarter as much energy, a quarter as much housing, and we’d produce a quarter as much garbage. The seas wouldn’t be overfished, or polluted with mercury. There’d be three times as much raw materials for everyone.”
“Okay,” Ray said slowly, not certain if she was serious. “But how do we do that? Should we do like China and restrict how many children a family can have?”
“Certainly not! Governments muck up everything they touch and should never be allowed to restrict human freedom. It has to be done through persuasion, by changing the culture so that stupid and defective people are too shamed to breed. With education, even dolts are capable of acting in their own best interest. We have to stop paying people subsidies for breeding.”
I started to point out that large populations produce a critical mass of scientists, engineers, and so forth, producing an explosion in technology and the arts, but decided against becoming entangled in this conversation.
“That sounds like eugenics!” Ray barely concealed his horror.
“You say that as if eugenics were a bad thing!”
Ray sat suddenly upright in his chairs, his eyes growing wider. “Of course it’s a bad thing. Think of what the Nazis did, killing thousands of disabled people, not to mention the Jews, Gypsies, and other groups.”
Pokey brought Meg her tea and salad, and Meg slipped a straw into the tall glass and took a sip before continuing. “Eugenics means ‘good genes’ or ‘good breeding.’ We use it all the time in raising animals, only we call it selective breeding. Only a fool would intentionally engage in malgenics. It’s simply a matter of getting people to think before they make children. We should have public service announcements on radio and television explaining it to the illiterate. Signs on busses, on billboards. If you’re going to have children, you should have strong, healthy children—children you can spend time with, that you can educate and make into moral, intelligent, productive, fully developed human beings. We’re taking the opposite approach—have you ever read ‘The Marching Morons’?”
Ray shook his head.
“You should.” But instead of explicating Kornbluth’s story, she turned to her salad.
“Children used to be considered an asset,” Ray objected. “More hands to work the farm. You seem to consider them a liability.”
“Too many children certainly are a liability in an industrial society, unless you’re very wealthy. Even then it’s impossible to give them enough personal attention. Parents only have so much time.”
Ray shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “I believe God loves everyone, regardless of how smart or slow they are.”
“He has a funny way of showing it.” Meg speared lettuce with her fork. “He lets millions of His little loved ones starve to death. Others struggle their entire short, miserable lives just to scrape a little food out of the ground. Still others wallow in poverty, drugs, and crime—only to end up in prison or early graves.”
“Everyone deserves a chance. Everyone is of equal value.” Ray sounded shocked.
“You’re kidding yourself if you really think everyone is equally valuable. We are an experiment of nature, each with different abilities. We’re like seeds scattered in the wind. Some land on fertile ground, take root, and blossom. Others land in the parched desert and never even germinate. Still others might get wedged inside cracks in rocks, put out a few crippled sprouts, then wither and die—or, miraculously, bloom into healthy, gorgeous plants. Some are genetically unsound from the beginning and grow into misshapen mutants. Experiments fail. That’s nature. That’s life.”
She chewed and swallowed a bite of her salad, then continued, “Equality is the great delusion of our time. In what way are you and I equal? Strength? Certainly not. Obviously you’re bigger and stronger than I am, but I’m probably a better shot. Knowledge? No, indeed! Our life experiences have been completely different. We had different parents, different families, different innate abilities. We went to different schools, read different books, and have different friends. You know things I don’t know and vice versa. You’re male and I’m female. You’re tall and I’m short. Whatever similarities there may be between us, there are hundreds or thousands of differences. I don’t believe in equality. I believe in uniqueness!”
“But we’re all equal under the law. You do believe in that, don’t you?”
“Of course. Anything else would by tyranny. The government can’t be trusted to judge people’s innate abilities. Neither can scientists. Only nature can do that. You might say, ‘Let God sort them out.’” She shot a mischievous glance at me.
“So we should just let the sick and the old die? That’s what nature would do.”
“We’re wealthy enough as a society that we don’t have to go to extremes. Education will take us a long way. It already has in some countries, where births are below replacement levels. We don’t need government bayonets, just education, time, and will.”
Ray was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Do you believe in God? What religion are you?”
“Social Darwinist—reformed.”
Ray didn’t know what to say and Meg went back to her salad.
Finally I said, “Ray, I think I failed to introduce you. This is Megan. As you’ve gathered, she’s a very unusual person. In fact, she’d be an outlier in any demographic. We call her Red Meg around here, because, like Nature, she’s ‘red in tooth and claw.’”
Red Meg bestowed one of her man-killer smiles upon the two of us.
------------------------------
Link of possible interest:
“The Marching Morons” by Cyril M. Kornbluth – entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Saturday, August 15, 2009
A Confederacy of Dunces
The most interesting thing about A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is probably how the book found its way into print. Toole wrote his thick manuscript in the early 1960s, basing it in large part on his personal experiences, but could not interest a publisher. Eventually he underwent what appears to have been an emotional collapse, and in early 1969 he killed himself. In most cases, the story would have ended there; but Toole’s tenacious mother became determined to see her son’s work published. She gave a copy to renowned Southern novelist Walker Percy and imposed upon him to read it. Percy fell in love with the book and convinced a local university press to issue a small edition in 1980. A year later Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Subsequently the novel was translated into eighteen languages and has sold more than a million and a half copies.This is one of those books I’ve put off reading for years. Many people have recommended it to me, usually with the comment that they know people exactly like the characters in the book. Confederacy is also reputed to include a skewed, but dead-on depiction of New Orleans in the early ’60s.
Had not so many trusted sources spoken highly of the work, I probably wouldn’t have persevered to finish it. After a fairly strong if somewhat farcical opening chapter or two, the story becomes quite dull and repetitious for nearly three quarters of its length, only perking up again in the last quarter.
Ignatius J. Reilly, the primary character (the book has no heroes, only protagonists) is an elephantine, over-educated, egotistical, sociopathic, slovenly, unemployed thirty year old living at home with his mother. He is a fool and so is everyone with whom he interacts. The book is an overlong depiction of those interactions.
For a good part of the novel, I had the feeling that I was reading cobbled-together absurdities and caricatures. I found myself struggling to figure out just what kind of insanity Ignatius suffered from. He fit no standard diagnosis—not schizophrenia, not bipolar disorder, not clinical depression. As a result, Ignatius seemed unconvincing and I began to doubt Toole’s skill at creating believable literary characters.
I’m chastened to admit that it took me until the very last chapter, as Ignatius stands cowering and blubbering before his outraged mother, to finally diagnose him: He suffers from some form of infantilism and has the emotional development of a child. He is a spoiled brat, completely self-absorbed, with no consideration or empathy for others. (All small children are sociopaths.) He thinks like a child, concerned only about his own wants and needs, his “revenge” against those who have slighted him, and his fatuous writings and “crusades.” He is self-indulgent, cramming himself with hot dogs, confections, and his favorite soft drink, almond-flavored Dr. Nut. He scorns real women for a rubber glove. Ten years in college have not provided him adequate time to grow up. He is incapable of acting like an adult and certainly can't hold down a job in the real world.
Now that I better understand what Toole was attempting to portray, I have more respect for him as a writer. Toole’s prose is good, but there is too much of it. Through most of the novel, secondary characters say the very same things over and over again, like catch phrases, so that by midway it all becomes quite tedious. I generally dislike reading dialect, but have to admit that Toole generally succeeds in capturing the speech of some segments of New Orleans. His lack of political correctness (a concept for which no term had been coined when he wrote this) gives a refreshing freedom to the dialog.
There is a major flaw in the work (if one lets reality intrude into the often cartoonish presentation): At the end the plot hinges on a defamatory letter that leads to a threatened half-million-dollar libel lawsuit. I’m pretty sure that private, uncirculated communications are not subject to libel laws and that to libel someone, you have to publish a false accusation—that is, distribute it to multiple people, not just to the party it concerns.
It’s instructive to look at Amazon’s reader reviews. Of 976 reviewers (of an earlier edition) 653 give the book five stars and 96 give it only one. This reflects a surprising disparity of opinion, with an approximate sixty-six percent considering the book excellent and about ten percent thinking it poor.
So why should anyone read this book? A lot of readers have liked it, and you may find something in it that eluded me. It presents an interesting picture of a bygone era and some of it is quite funny. It cautions against the vagaries of literary awards and gives bittersweet hope to rejected writers everywhere. One can’t help but wonder how many dusty manuscripts lie abandoned and half-forgotten in desk drawers or on closet shelves around the world, and how many of them deserve a wider audience.
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Links of possible interest:
Reader Reviews at Amazon
John Kennedy Toole entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy_Toole
Walker Percy entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Percy
Dr. Nut (local New Orleans soft drink):
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/traderz/DrNut.html
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