Ralph is My Co-Pilot

7/22/96



RALPH IS MY CO-PILOT

It's Monday, July 22, 1996, and I see that investigators are still fruitlessly mucking about the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for clues to the downing of TWA Flight 800. But the crew-list may tell us all we need to know. Along with the pilot and co-pilot there was a second co-pilot, unofficially along for the ride----Capt. Ralph Kevorkian.

Was Ralph the unacknowledged illegitimate son of Jack Kevorkian, the Angel of Assisted Death, or was their shared last name just a coincidence? And how many other Kevorkians are out there, and how long have they been out there, and what will they pull next?

Was there a passenger on Flight 800 who was tired of living, and who reached out to Ralph, phoning him to ask for his assistance in ending it all? And did Ralph say, "You want the other Kevorkian. I'm an airline pilot with a superb safety record, not the Angel of Death."

And did the Passenger-who-wanted-to-end-it-all say, "Don't sell yourself short. With the right combination of circumstances, you, too, could be an Angel of Death. You ARE a Kevorkian, are you not?"

"I can't help you," said Captain Ralph. "Phone Jack if that's what you want. Anyway, I'm busy. I'm flying from New York to Paris on TWA Flight 800 tomorrow."

"No problem. I'm making a reservation on the Internet even as we speak," said the Passenger-who etc., etc. "See you onboard."

"You won't see me," snapped Captain Ralph, "I'll be in the cockpit hanging out with the crew."

"And that's just where my Angel of Assisted Death belongs," said Passenger Deathwish. "You'll be ideally situated to put me out of my misery."

"There will be 229 other people on that flight, including me!" squawked Captain Ralph. "How can you even contemplate something so horrific?"

"My pain is so great I can't afford to care who or how many I take down with me. And after I'm gone, I'll hardly have to worry about conscience pangs now, will I."

Something in Passenger Deathwish's familiar voice began to exert a seductive and hypnotic pull on Captain Ralph's will. "What's the matter with you?" said the Captain, beginning to go a little watery in the knees. "Do you have a horribly painful, debilitating, disease?"

"Yes. Most emphatically," said Passenger Deathwish. "I can't imagine what to do next with my life. I've hit the wall. It's time for me to end it all."

"Your physical health is excellent?" asked the incredulous Ralph.

"I could run a 3 hour marathon tomorrow morning, play 36 holes of golf in the afternoon, and take a dysfunctional litter of hyper-active quintuplets to Disneyland in the evening," said Passenger Deathwish. "But I'd much rather go down in the Atlantic on TWA Flight 800."

"You must be mad!" said Captain Ralph.

"Nope. Sane as they come. I just lack, as I said, imagination."

"Then why don't you do yourself in? You don't need to take 229 innocent souls down with you!"

"I wouldn't be able to do myself in properly. I'd make a botch of it. But you, you're a Kevorkian! You're to the manner, errr manor, born!"

"Listen, Buster," said Captain Ralph. "I'm no relation to Jack Kevorkian, Jack Kevorkian is not my friend, I've never even MET Jack Kevorkian. I, sir, am no Jack Kevorkian."

"Sir," said Passenger Deathwish, "you do protest too much. Your naturalborn Kevorkianesque propensities are making themselves felt in your heart of hearts even as you deny them. The Kevorkian Tradition is a long and proud one. There was Nigel Kevorkian, first mate on the Titanic, and Antonio Kevorkian, in the engine room of the Lusitania. And who rode just to General George Custer's right at the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Why, none other than his trusty Crow scout, End of the Trail Kevorkian. It was End of the Trail who advised George that the best way to put the brakes on the relentless decline of his military career was to end it all with a bang by riding straight into a hive buzzing with several thousand very angry Sioux braves.

"There was a Kevorkian in the Crimea advising Lord Cardigan that the Light Brigade shouldn't pay any mind to the cannon to the right of them, the cannon to the left of them, the cannon in front of them. 'Theirs is not to make reply,' replied Aide de Camp Montcrief Kevorkian, Earl of Untimely Endings, when Lord Cardigan suggested that perhaps all the men in the Light Brigade were not yet ready to put out the light, 'theirs is but to do, and die.'

"And," continued Passenger Deathwish, "It was Sheik Ben Ali Kevorkian who advised Sadam Hussein to go toe to toe with the Allies in Kuwait, and there was a Zeke Kevorkian at the Alamo, and Catastrophe Kevorkian at Thermopylae, not to mention the Kevorkians advising David Koresh at Waco and Jim Jones at Jonestown. It was the Jonestown Kevorkian who thought of putting the cyanide in grape kool-ade. And don't forget Oberlieutenant Heinrich Kevorkian, who advised General Paulus to hang tough at Stalingrad. And then there was the unforgettable Mitsumoto Kevorkian---he's the guy who told Tojo kamikazes were the way to save Japan. And, more recently, Colonel Yahoo Kevorkian, the high school janitor and Michigan Militiaman who advised Timothy McVeigh how to fertilizer-bomb The Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

"So Captain Ralph, why fight fate? It's time for you to get in lockstep with a Kevorkian long gray line that stretches back to the mists of recorded time."

And Captain Ralph felt something snap inside him, and he knew that at last he was going to embrace his most authentic inner self and become the man that the fates had always dictated he must become. "OK, OK. You've got me convinced. A few miles out of JFK I'll take us all down. I'll make it look like a terrorist bombing."

"You're a peach, Ralph, a real peach. I don't know what I would have done without you. Play some more golf, I guess. Or re-draft another capital punishment initiative with Marilyn. She's been awful edgy since she had to move back to Indianapolis. Even when we were in D.C. she wasn't the easiest person to live with, believe-you-me.

"It's not easy being an unemployed house-husband. Not when you've got a dynamic attorney-wife like Marilyn donning the pants in the family. It's a good thing I've got a trust fund and my Vice Presidential pension, or I'd be out on the street selling leftover Bush-Quayle bumper stickers. Nor does it look as if Bob Dole is going to invite me onboard as his running mate, despite my vast experience and proven record in the Vice Presidential arena. He hasn't even phoned me. Can you believe that?! One thing's for sure, they're not going to ask me to deliver the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. Colin Powell has that plumb. And I ask you, what does he have that I don't? So do you see now why I have to end it all, and why I'm burdened with too many religious scruples to do it myself?"

"I see, Dan," said Captain Ralph, "I see. And there's nothing I'd like better than to promptly dispatch you to that great country club in the sky. Because your track record proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you lack the imagination to get yourself out of your present, or any other fix. I guess the last time you showed any real imagination was when you joined the Indiana National Guard."

"Thanks," said Dan. "I'd like to take the credit. But it was my fraternity brothers who thought of that one."

"Then it's true. You have no imagination whatsoever."

"Vision, Ralph. President Bush used to call it The Vision Thing. He said I was very shortsighted. Even shorter-sighted than he was. But how did he know I was shortsighted? He never even let me speak to him."

"That's what you need, Dan. An employer who's very shortsighted and who will never let you speak to him, especially if you're his running mate," said Captain Ralph.

"You mean.....Orville Redenbacher, the guy that invented the airplane?" said Dan.

"Almost," said Captain Ralph. "But Orville is dead. I mean Ross Perdue....errr..Perot."

"That is such a fantastic idea!" said Dan. "And I almost thought of it all by myself. That's the first time in my life that I've almost thought of something without the assistance of a fraternity brother, or Marilyn, or my caddy. I'm going to phone that Frank Perdue fella right away."

"Ross Perot, Dan. It's Ross Perot who's looking for a running mate."

"Right, of course, Ross Perdue. What a Mr. Potato Head I am. How can I ever thank you, Captain Ralph?"

"Just forget you ever made this phone call, Dan."

"What phone call, Captain Ralph?" Which is how Dan Quayle did NOT end up on TWA Flight 800, and why he still needs a job. Ross Perot, or Frank Perdue, or Orville Redenbacher, Jr, or the late Orville Wright, or Wilbur, or anybody out there, are you listening?! This deserving young man needs a position, he needs to get out of the house, out from under Marilyn's wing, and off the golf course on weekdays. He looks good, he has a law degree, and if he is no Jack Kennedy, at least he has Jack Kennedy's hair. If you have a job for him and you don't have his number, you can probably find him at the upcoming Republican Convention. Just don't expect to find him anywhere near Bob Dole.


---FIN---

What To Do In Case Of Atomic Attack

7/19/96

WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF ATOMIC ATTACK

Notice the small glass case on the wall to your right. See the little metal hammer dangling from the chain on the left side of the case. Remove the hammer from its niche and strike the glass case, shattering it. But DO NOT use the hammer unless you are absolutely sure that atomic war has begun.

Here are some checkpoints which will allow you confirm that your neighborhood or city or rural delivery area has indeed been attacked by one or more thermonuclear devices:

YES or NO (Check the Appropriate Box)

1) Your retinae are broiled off by the blinding flash of the atomic fireball.

2) Your flesh is seared down to the bone by a blast of superheated air, and your bones are reduced to a fine powder, or

3) You're completely vaporized, or

4) Those parts of your body exposed to the blast are reduced to blackened, bubbling, carbon cake.

5) If, by some freakish circumstance, you survive, you are infested with an ungodly array of cancers which will shorten your life and make it a living hell.

6) Your balls or ovaries, depending upon your gender, are so micro-waved by radiation that, if you are not completely sterilized, you will conceive six-fingered two-headed monsters, most of them stillborn. Those babies who live wish they hadn't.

7) Life as you knew it before the blast has ceased to exist.

8) There are no more songbirds in your part of the country for the following 4 decades. When birds do return to the blast area you used to call home, they are buzzards and vultures.

9) The infrastructure of your community is no longer worthy of the name, to put it mildly. For example, you have an even longer wait than usual when you dial 911 with your telephone, which is a puddle of molten plastic. And you no longer need to pull off to the side of the road for ambulances and fire engines, because there aren't any, though there is plenty of need for them.

10) Your life, if you still have one, is hell on earth.

There are many more indicators that your community may have been successfully targeted by nuclear warheads. For example, the day after your town takes a direct hit from a ten megaton device, there are no more crossing guards posted at the crosswalks in front of the elementary schools, because the elementary scholars and their crossing guards are toast.

If you have checked "yes" to eight or more of the aforementioned indicators of nuclear war, you may take the small metal hammer from its niche and smash the glass case on the wall to your right. Inside the smashed glass case you will find a scroll tied with a purple ribbon marked with the international symbol for radioactive material.

Remove the purple ribbon. Unscroll the scroll. It will read as follows:

Dear Asshole,

You have just allowed yourself to get your behind parbroiled by a nuclear device. The rest of your life will be spent in a state of intolerable suffering. Everyone and everything you know and love looks like the aftermath of a weenie roast. Your organs are probably metastizing as you read this.

Knowing that the possibility of nuclear war existed, why did you stay on earth instead of fleeing to a safer planet? Somebody must have hit you double hard with a stupid stick. Oh well, the damage is already done. There's no use crying over spilt precious bodily fluids such as those which are undoubtedly bubbling out of that fried pork rind you laughingly call your "skin."

We of the Civil Defense Department long ago recognized that atomic war is a hopeless proposition, and that no one will suffer more unspeakably than those unlucky enough to survive past the first day. That is why we have laced the scroll you are holding with trace amounts of plutonium which you sucked into your lungs as soon as you shattered the little glass case with the cute little hammer.

The plutonium in your lungs will kill you in a matter of hours, if not minutes. So you can relax. You will not have to mourn your loved ones, your home, and your nation, for long. You will not have to give birth to monstruously mutated babies. You will not have to endure decades of radioactivity induced tumors. All you will have to do is blow blood bubbles and die.

Why It's Pointless to Write

WHY IT'S POINTLESS TO WRITE (AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN)


First of all, it's pointless to write in The Age of Channelsurfing because upcoming generations no longer want to nor know how to read. They'd rather watch TV. And older generations sometimes still remember how to read, but they don't want to read anything which upsets them. So if a wouldbe writer is so pigheaded as to persist in the notion that he wants to write something that others will read, he must be careful to tell lies that will serve to soothe the savage beast that dwells in the breast of what is laughingly known as the reading public.

If a wouldbe writer wants it all, that is, if he wants to tell the terrible truth rather than soothing lies, if he wants to write beautifully and imaginatively, and if he also wants a large readership who will pay him well for his words, then he's crazy and will soon find himself out on the street unless he's lucky enough to be a trust fund baby, or get committed to an asylum, or get arrested.

In many totalitarian regimes, the better a writer is, the more likely he is to be jailed and/or assassinated. But in America, and especially in Southern California, where this wouldbe writer wouldbe writes, nobody is interested enough in words, qua words, to punish a writer with anything more violent than indifference.

I can imagine a scenario in which a great American writer writes a mindblowingly great American novel and is greeted with thundering silence, or, at best, incomprehension. And I don't have to exercise my imagination too hard, either; all I have to do is remember back to the non-reception America gave to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

The argument could be made that Moby Dick wasn't appreciated during the lifetime of its author because the book was ahead of 19th Century American frontier society. Most Americans of that time, especially the slaves, Indians, muleskinners, and whalers, just didn't have the intellectual tools they would have needed to "get" it.

So there's a damn good argument right there why it's hopeless to write: Even if you did succeed in writing a genius book, your fellow Americans wouldn't be willing or able to read it, especially if they were slaves, Indians, muleskinners, or whalers.

But this is the 20th Century. We appreciate Moby Dick now. In fact, Moby Dick is WORSHIPPED in English Departments across the country. It's worshipped, but it's not read, except in the Cliff Notes version. And there's another damn good reason why it's hopeless to write: There's no sense aspiring to write Moby Dick even if it is worshipped (but not read) because MOBY DICK HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN. And Herman Melville, justly or unjustly, has already been given credit for the piece.

You could transcribe Moby Dick in your own handwriting, stumble upon your own manuscript in your own attic, and thus offer incontrovertible proof that you indeed wrote it, but the sad and cruel fact of the matter is that Herman Melville has somehow gotten his name inextricably bound up with Moby Dick, and you'll have a devil of a time supplanting his name with yours. The only balm I can offer you is that most of Melville's recognition came after his death, so he really didn't get to enjoy it. What you could do is POSE as Melville. A few years ago, Hal Holbrook posed as Mark Twain and travelled across the nation, taking credit for the dead man's wit. There are worse ways to make a living.

Vincent Price made a career out of posing as Oscar Wilde, Robert Morse posed as Truman Capote, and Quentin Crisp posed as Quentin Crisp, so there are clearly plenty of possibilities for the literary poseurs of the world. The trick is to pose as a writer without actually doing any writing.

There are other ways to accomplish this. For example, you can become rich and famous enough to hire someone to write your books for you. This is doubly convenient if you never learned how to read or write in the first place, which is true of most rich, famous, writers. Or you can write so badly that what you are doing can't tuthfully be called writing at all. That is what Harold Robbins did for decades, and it's ever so much less painful, and more financially rewarding, than real writing.

Here in Southern California, there is an activity called screenwriting which is said to be akin to writing. Screenwriting is to real writing as military music is to music. That is, in screenwriting, words are not prized as ends in themselves, but rather are viewed as a means to an end. Military music exists to exhort the troops, to give them courage when they surge into battle. An electrifying screenplay gives producers, directors, and actors courage when they surge into production, it helps them to persuade themselves they have a reason to be where they are, spending all that money in hopes of making even more. But the screenwriters themselves are rarely allowed on the set. In the opinion of most filmmakers, the screenwriter's presence would only stifle the creativity of those in front of and behind the cameras.

So does that mean it's pointless to try to write screenplays, as well? No. Because screenplays are less painful to write than other literary forms because they aren't really literary forms---they have more spaces and fewer words, and the words they do have need not appeal to the ever-shrinking pool of literate consumers. It's better if they don't. In fact, you don't even have to be semi-literate to write screenplays. The proof of that is that 95% of the population of Los Angeles has written at least two screenplays, yet the city has a 50% illiteracy rate. Moreover, Sly Stallone himself has written many screenplays, winning an Oscar for one. It's probably a fallacy to say that screenplays are written at all. They're bizarre and magical blueprints, pulled from the nether orifices of scenarists in moments of financial, creative, and existential desperation.

Another reason it's pointless to write in the Age of Channelsurfing is the concentration span. No one has one any longer. Even those who know how to read have been so spoiled by their clickers and by their 99 (soon to be 999) cable channels that they can't concentrate on reading material that's longer than a four-panel comic strip. And those rare younger birds who have somehow learned how to read would prefer to read nothing longer than a STOP sign, and just because they read one occasionally doesn't mean they'll obey one.

Nor are wouldbe writers themselves free from ever-shortening concentration spans. Many of them can concentrate so briefly that they forget, before they actually manage to write anything, why it is they have sat down at the word processor. This is a blessing, because real writing is so painful, so problematic, that they thus deliver themselves from pointless suffering and are free to return to their TV's, their video games, and their 3-wheel offroad vehicles.

Now suppose some hopelessly deluded individual manages to write something which,in his considered opinion, would make a valuable reading experience for others. Chances are, after the writer has finished the piece, he will be whipsawed between self-congratulatory megalo-mania and despair born of an abysmal sense of failure. He will be completely unbalanced and it may take him months or years before he can again get his psyche on an even keel. Whereas, if he had never written in the first place, he wouldn't have unbalanced himself to begin with.

But suppose this individual persists in compounding his folly by taking his writing out into the world and showing it to others. First of all, because this person is a writer, he may be blinded as soon as he emerges from his writing cell into the harsh light of day. Writers are notoriously reclusive and many are ill-suited to trafficking with the rough and tumble universe outside their burrows.

Now the writer shows his piece to someone else. That reader has one of 3 reactions: Acclaim, indifference, or criticism, or a combination of all three. Chances are, no matter how the reader reacts, even if he praises the writer and his words to the skies, the writer will plunge into despair because he will realize that his words are not going to do for him what he had secretly, in his heart of unconfessed hearts, hoped they would do. That is, the words don't solve the essential problem of life, which is that it is intolerable.

The writer had set out to write in the first place because life was intolerable. He somehow got the idea that if he wrote the right thing it would turn, like a magic key, in the lock of his life, releasing him from his insufferable imprisonment. It was this hope of eventual release, of deliverance, which reconciled the writer to long hours alone, in his cell, as he labored over his words, which were to be a kind of hacksaw with which he would escape from the bars of his own private Alcatraz.

So even if the writer's words win him all the acclaim, prizes, money, wine, women, and song that he could possibly hope for, inevitably he'll feel betrayed and cast down by them, because what they have won him are the things of this world, but what he was truly yearning for was something not of this world---spiritual deliverance.

It can be argued that all of us alike: Writers and wouldbe writers, bankers and painters, soldiers and whores, actors and priests, politicians and pushers, yearn for spiritual deliverance. But how many of us are foolish enough to hope to find that deliverance in our work? That is the writer's dilemma. He somehow thinks that if he just writes well enough, if he can just find the right words, he can talk himself out of the spiritual morass we all find ourselves in, and maybe he can even temporarily lift his readers (of whom he counts himself one) out of that mire.

So, when he has completed a successful piece, he is cast down lower than those who complete nothing, because he is no longer free to delude himself with false hope about what words can and cannot do for him. Moreover, he is spent by his effort and is therefore stripped of his defenses. Harpie Despair is free to have her way with him.

Now suppose a writer has taken all the pain and joy of his life and boiled it down to a single magnificent sentence, and he has found a way to place that sentence perfectly, for maximum effect, in just the right literary setting. The argument could be made that he should withhold that sentence. Why? Because as soon as he releases it, it's gone from him. It's no longer his, it's the world's.

It's out there, away from him, where others will be free to steal it, criticize it, misinterpret it, grind it into the dust, laugh at it, weep at it, scorn it and applaud it.

It's as if the writer were a weird bird that lays a single egg in its lifetime and then dies, exhausted; or he were a jungle plant which blooms once in a century. Until that ovulation, that blossoming, the writer is all hope and potential. He is also airy nothingness. His flesh, his outer shell, may be suffering terrible blows, but his soul is young and virginal and seething with potentiality.

But once the writer dares lay his egg, once his petals split open and are laid bare under the jungle sun, then his inmost spirit, that which he has endowed with all his hope, changes from potential to real. He must face his own words. He must see himself, laid and flayed open. He knows that what he has made cannot last forever. It's just another egg, another flower. The egg may rot, or crack and hatch, the flower may wilt, it may pollinate and fructify, but it will certainly die.

By writing, the writer has committed his spirit to the endless wheel of death and life which is the world. And there is the possibility, once those words have gone out of the writer, that he will never find their equal. He may never express himself that well again. He may never express himself at all again.

It is also possible that, by speaking, by letting the precious, special, words fly out of his head and fingers, that he will have created an emptiness, a vacancy, in his head and heart. He is made an empty well. And circumstances may refill him again. And perhaps again. Perhaps as many times as he sees fit to draw from his wellspring.

He may frighten himself by the emotional intensity of the act. He may wonder how long his physical health, and his sanity, can bear up under such a feverish pitch. How can he afford to be so vulnerable? How can he afford to put the very best of his life into these words when words matter so little, are such will o' the wisps, and no one reads them any longer, and no one can concentrate that long, and everyone would prefer to watch TV instead?

How can he afford not to? He can afford not to the same way a wounded man can afford not to tear the scab off his wound. He can stand pat, watching the scab swell and heat up with the supperating, infectious, pus of unexpressed truth. He can live with his infection until it bursts outward, of its own accord, into the general atmosphere and population, or inward, into his bloodstream, his extremities, his tripes, his heart, and his brain. He can, in short, share what’s eating him with others, though they may hate him for it, or he can sit on it and spin his own shroud of it, make a flag of it, make a suicide note of it, tie it around his eyes, make a blindfold of it, face an execution squad composed of all his unexpressed selves firing, like bullets, all his unexpressed words directly at his heart and head. He can take those words, the words he never wrote because words don’t matter enough and no one understands them anymore, and roll them up in a cigarette, and stick that cigarette in his trembling lips, and have one more good smoke while he waits to be forgotten.

--FIN--

On Becoming Dirty Old Men and Women

ON BECOMING DIRTY OLD MEN AND WOMEN by Doug Lane
Dropped by a neighborhood bar the other evening to have a beer and discovered I had become invisible. Especially to the nubile females in attendance. Why? Possibly because, over the last several years, my waist has thickened, my hair has thinned, and I have grown old enough to have fathered everyone in the joint. In short, it's official: I'm middleaged.

Other explanations for my invisibility include: I am not a celebrity, nor have I aged as beautifully as Paul Newman and Richard Gere. I will say, in my own defense, that though I am presently the same age that Judy Garland was when she cashed in her chips, I think I look better than she did in her last year. But I don't sing as beautifully.

On the other hand, my TRW rating is excellent. That ought to count for something, even in a thickwaisted bald guy, even if all it means is that I owe a lot of money on a lot of credit cards.

Heck, I'll bet some of those waspwaisted whippersnappers at the bar that night didn't even have ONE credit card, much less a collection whose total balances exceed the national debt. That's a problem for Boomer Guys. Now that their looks are gone, how can they impress chicks at a pick-up bar with their level of indebtedness?

One way is to drive up in the debt. Parking a new Porsche in front of the bar is proof positive that you count for something in this world, at least to your Porsche dealer,to whom you still owe $50,000 or $60,000.

There are other ways for dirty old men to get young girls' attention that involve raincoats and no underwear, but those methods can also entail a bust from the local vice squad unless the raincoated dirty old men in question are also fast on their feet, which they rarely are. It's dirty YOUNG men who are fast on their feet. Anyway, the raincoat ploy makes for a sensational opening but it's a tough gambit on which to build a meaningful relationship....or even a one-night stand. Unless, unless the young lady subjected to the exhibit is a professional, willing to overlook geriatric shortcomings in return for a fee.

You, the reader, might well ask what a middleaged man is doing in a bar late at night in the first place. Shouldn't he be at home, with wife and kiddies? Not if he's divorced he shouldn't. If he's divorced, it might be very awkward for him to be at his ex's home late at night, especially if she has remarried.

Another suggestion: If the middleaged man is invisible to nubile females, why doesn't he seek the company of a middleaged female? And here we get to the nub of the issue. Babyboomers, male and female, are losing their looks. They used to be the ones with the big hair and the small waists, they used to find each other very attractive. Now, appearance-wise, they can take each other or leave each other.

And leave each other is just what they frequently do.

Here's another stumbling block to romance among the ruins: Sex drives, especially in the men, are diminishing. When the Boomers were younger, they needed sex so bad they were ready to suffer all manner of humiliation, manipulation, and character failings on the part of partners who held the power of sexual-affirmation in their firm bodies. But now the blood that ran so hot runs tepid.

Freed from overboiling lust, both Boomer sexes are more likely to look objectively at the personalities of prospective romantic partners. And an objective examination of a middleaged personality can be even more ferocious a turn-off than an objective examination of a middleaged body.

So is there any hope for the sex lives of Boomerites? Yes, if you are President of the United States. Otherwise, forget it. Recent polls (taken by me, at the 7-11) indicate that many unmarried Boomerites haven't had sex since the last Republican administration, and neither, with the exception of Bill Clinton but not with the exception of Hillary Clinton, have many married Boomerites. And the census figures for the sex lives of Pre-Boomeritic Republican administrators are even more discouraging. George Bush can't be found to talk, Barbara is too discreet to talk but we know what her answer would be, Nancy won't talk because she's too damn ornery, and Ron will talk but nothing he says makes sense and anyway, he couldn't remember when he last had sex even if he could make sense.

But to get back to Boomers: From what I hear, young groupies have to force themselves to look the other way even when having sex with middleaged men as exalted as the Rolling Stones. They fantasize that they are pleasuring Hootie and the Blowfish, or some other less chronologically challenged band.

And does this mean that Boomericans*, we of the Summer of Love, are doomed to wander the earth alone and unsatisfied, ships that pass in the night but rarely collide? And that when we do collide it's eco-disaster as we spill great shore-polluting gouts of bilgewater and liquid self-loathing out of rents in our hulls?

Must we hold our own hands or other body parts because no one else will hold them for us unless we pay them with ready money, self-abasement, or a ride around in the block in an unpaid-for Porsche?

Yes. The Age of Sexual Entitlement is over for all but a few freakishly fortunate Boomers. For the rest of us, it's hard scrabble time. We're going to have to get down and scratch. No longer can we depend on gleaming teeth, billowing hair, high poppers, clear eyes, raging hormones and bulging biceps to carry us over the barricades into the fortress of the opposite sex.

Some of us, perish the thought, may actually have to develop personalities. Of course, for those who haven't developed one already, it's too late to develop a personality capable of staying the course for longer than a bed-and-breakfast dirty weekend in Bolinas.

It's not that we're charm-free zones. Au contraire, we're dripping with charm, charm like paper clothes that look great when you first don them but aren't meant to be seen or shared for more than a weekend.

What we Boomeridians, roaming alone in the solitary night, may need to cultivate is forgiveness. We need to forgive ourselves, and others, for growing old and ugly. Having done that, we may be free to see our, and others', spiritual beauty. But that's not the same thing as getting laid.

A last word of advice: If forgiveness, compassion, and spiritual enlightenment aren't your thing, if you're determined to go on getting laid long after you've lost your looks, then learn to better manage your finances. Your future partners may no longer love you for your body, but if you pay them well, perhaps they'll love you---if they don’t despise you--- for your generosity.
--FIN—

*A SHORT SELECTED GLOSSARY OF BOOMERITIC SUBPEOPLES: Americans--Boomericans Canadians--Boomeradians Mexicans--Boomerexicans Panamanians--Boomeranians Gringos--Boomeringos Amerasians--Boomerasians Australians--Boomeralians (also: Boomerangs)
Tahitians--Boomeritians
Somoans--Boomeroans
Hawaiians--Boomeriians
Martians--Boomerartians
Venusians--Boomerusians
Russians--Boomerussians
Belorussians--Beloboomerussians

Artificial Jews in the New Jerusalem

7/15/96

ARTIFICIAL JEWS IN THE NEW JERUSALEM

“A word is dead/When it is said,/Some say
“I say it just/Begins to live/That day.” --Emily Dickinson

I grew up in a heartland family---both parents descended from homesteaders, all my relatives from Nebraska. My father still owns the Nebraska homestead established by his great grandfather in 1854 outside of Omaha.

But I was born in Japan and spoke Japanese before I spoke English. I came to America, by way of San Francisco Bay, as an infant immigrant. In San Francisco, so my mother says, a doctor reached down my esophagus and removed a worm that I brought with me from Tokyo. In time, in Nebraska and Kansas, I forgot my Japanese and mistakenly came to believe that my mother tongue was English. At 5, I moved to Germany. When I returned to America 3 years later, I sailed into New York Harbor, an immigrant once again. I remember being warmly greeted by Liberty. America was mine and yet it wasn't. Everything was new and wonderful and my birthright and I was also haunted by my memories of the Iron Curtain, of the atomic cannon my dad commanded, of concentration camp survivors with numbers on their forearms, of Roman ruins and blasted pillboxes and cemeteries vast as wheatfields from two world wars and German dwarves and hunchbacks and the Bavarian castles of Mad King Ludwig and the bears of Berne, Switzerland. Soon I was in school, in Alamo Heights, San Antonio. Soon I was eyeing crawfish in the stream which ran through the Alamo. Soon I was riding a burro through the hills of Mexico, soon I was snapping a bullwhip in a motel outside of Monterrey. I was spying Sputnik through my grandfather's telescope. I was of America and not of America. I was All-American and not American at all. I was an Artificial Jew.

Jews are of the culture yet not of the culture. In fact, Jews often master the volk-kultur more thoroughly than those who originated it. For example, Bob Zimmerman-Dylan took folk music and kicked its ass and made something magical and contemporary and politically powerful of it. He took folk music out of its quaint museum case and handed it, in radioactive form, to pissed off middleclass babyboomer adolescents. Bob Dylan, a Jew from Minnesota: Bob Zimmerman, a young man both of the heartland and alienated from it.

The land was ours before we were the land's. Everyone who comes to America is a Wandering Jew. We come from somewhere else. We embrace and exploit our new home. We love it and hate it. Only the Indians are not Jews in America.

Only the Indians seem to always have been here. Only the Indians have been here so long they can't remember, in their racial memory, having been anywhere else.

Now we visitors have dispossessed the Indians and made Artificial Jews of them. There is an Indian Diaspora. They are strangers in their own homeland. They have fled their native hunting grounds and landed on Skid Row in Seattle, Los Angeles, Great Falls.

Those of Indian descent who come to North America from Latin America find themselves strangers in a strange land, and therefore, again, Artificial Jews. Who among us isn't a wanderer? Who among us isn't alienated from some part or all of his culture, his land, his community, his language, his government, his family? Even those of us who view ourselves as natives are unwitting Jews, if Jews are those who both are and are not landsmen, who are simultaneously at home and in exile, who speak fluently in tongues not their own, who obey and respect the laws even as they see them as impositions from Caesar.

We claim we live in The Promised Land even as we whine that The Promise has been broken. And we suspect there's a more promising land awaiting us, just over the horizon, and the next horizon, and the next. We wander in the Sinai, even as we wonder whether the Sinai is Israel's or the Pharoah's Land.

We have English, and then we have our true mother tongues. We learn one language in the classroom and another in the street and another at the dinner table and another from our gangs and another at the office and another in the barracks and another on the playing field and another in bed and another in Needle Park and another from the television. But which one is the one we can call our own?

Even if we speak all the tongues we learn with greater fluency than those we learn them from, with greater fluency than any one else speaks them, we know that there is a language of the soul which no one speaks but us, and we only manage to speak it stumblingly, stammeringly, stutteringly.

If I speak my mother tongue, then I don't do justice to my father. If I speak my father tongue, I don't do homage to my mother. If I speak the language of my gut, I don't do obeisance to the language of my brain. If I speak the language of the street, I slight the language of the bed. My brain is Balkanized. My psyche is a patchwork of alien tongues, warlords, each battling to hold sway over the whole.

All the parts of myself are Wandering Jews, never really at home in their own body. How do I decide which tongue to use to speak to strangers? I begin with lowest common denominators, lingua francas, and then I look for cues. I throw out hints, I make cultural references, I see which jokes my listener gets and which he/she doesn't. When my listener passes my initial security clearance, I risk a more specialized language on him, entrusting to him the secrets of my individualized self.

Sometimes I find myself wandering in the land of a new psyche, a new acquaintance. I may meet and grow intimate with a person who is a United Nations of culturally diverse influences, a bedlam of conflicting psychological vantages, a Babel of irreconcilable idioms, a Thirty Years War of anathematic religious and ethical credos. When I step within the borders of such a one, I may be caught up in a great civil conflict not of my own making. I may, before I realize what has happened, be conscripted to fight on one side of the other. I may suddenly find myself an infantryman in a Gettysburg of the mind, a mind not my own.

How did this happen? One moment, I was a peace loving visitor to a new personality, to a novel nation-of-one. The next, I'm carrying a banner at Pickett's Charge, and shot and shell are flying all about me, threatening to blow me limb from limb. Terrified, I come to my senses. I see that I have been sucked into someone else's psychological, or emotional, or cultural, maelstrom. This isn't my fight. I'm only here, for example, because I wanted to make love to this woman, marry her, make a home with her, make a future with her.

Now I'm in full flight, running off the battlefield, despite the curses of her officers, who call me coward and deserter and threaten to shoot me if the enemy doesn't do so first. But I've come to my senses. This is some other person's conflict, not mine. I foolishly wandered into the confines of a loved one's psyche, and now I'm trying to get out with my life.

I run and run and run, and finally find myself, panting and sweating, bullet holes in my hat and sleeves, outside the borders of the other. I feel for all my limbs. Miraculously, I'm all there. I consider, with a sting of humiliation, that moment when I turned tail and ran for my life.

Then a wave of outrage pours over me. How dare anyone else try to involve me in her psychological civil war! Doesn't she realize that her fight isn't mine? No! That's just it! She thought her fight was my fight because she didn't understand where my borders ended and hers began! And maybe I didn't, either. That's why I strayed inside her frontiers. She viewed me as a coward because I wouldn't fight her fight for her! Yet to the degree I got embroiled in her civil war, I exhausted myself in a no-win tarbaby and she despised me for being a dupe. In her heart of hearts she knew that only she can make war, or peace, within herself.

Safely outside the borders of her psyche, I see that I am once more the Artificial Jew, homeless and wandering, vowing "Next year in Jerusalem." This marriage of ours was to be my long-lost homeland. When I came to her, when I came in her, I flung myself up on the beach like a sea turtle who has wandered the oceans wide for untold years, and who has finally returned to its hatching place to mate and lay eggs and begin the cycle all over again.

Now I find that my home beach is Omaha Beach, and the great day of my homecoming is D-Day, the Normandy Invasion, and the enemy, my beloved, is raining fire down on me from every vantage point. I'm unarmed, because I came here to mate and lay eggs, not to fight. My beloved homes her smart missiles in on my heart. She knows not what she does. She cannot stop herself as she tries with all her might to knock me out.

That which I thought was a place of safety is the most dangerous place of all. Sadly, I turn tail and run before getting a chance to lay my eggs. Somehow I escape with my life. Again I wander the oceans wide, I, a sea turtle, an Artificial Jew, my belly gravid with eggs, with new life.

Where, I cry, is my homeland, my home beach, my Jerusalem? Inside my belly I hear my young, scratching in their leathery eggs. This isn't the way it was supposed to happen! I was supposed to return to my home beach, my Omaha Beach, dig a hole, lay the eggs, and let them develop under the heat of the summer sun. Instead, they have gestated inside me.

The home beach of my offspring is my body. I am my children's Old Jerusalem. I, who was born of egg layers, have evolved, in the course of my own lifetime, into something ovoviviparous. I hatch eggs within my own body and give live birth as do certain snakes and fishes.

I am a turtle who carries his home on his back. I am mother and father and Old Jerusalem to my children. But when they hatch and assume separate lives I must leave them to fend for themselves in the sea. I may as well be dead to them. And perhaps their hatching and birthing will literally, or at least literarily, kill me. I, who was their Jerusalem, am spent, am evacuated, am a husk of my former self.

My children make their oceanic exodus, looking for New Jerusalems. These children of mine, they are my words, they are living messages-in-bottles. They come from Jerusalem. When they are at their best, they are the words of my mother, my father, my brother, my grandmother, my great great grandfather. They are the words of the street, and the bed, and the book, and the dinner table, and the temple, and the nation. They are the words of the fields and the mountains and the rivers and the lakes and the birds and the animals and the trees and the lightning storms and the earthquakes and the stars and the sun and the moon. They are the words of day and night alike. They are the words of my gut and my heart and my brain. They are the words of my soul.

They are my words and they are not my words. They come from me and they come from something that came before me and something that will go on after I am dead. These words of mine which are not my words have lives of their own and they seek mates of their own, homes of their own, futures of their own. They go out into the world, and if they cannot find Jerusalem, then they will build a New Jerusalem.

If they cannot find anyone with whom to mate, then they will be both husband and wife, lover and beloved, mother and father. They will inseminate themselves.

If they cannot find a plot of land on which to build a home, then they will carry their roofs on their backs.

They will chafe under the legacy and language I have passed on to them even as they revel in it. These words of mine, these living messages-in-bottles, these ovoviviparous offspring, will rebel against themselves, sensing that what I have passed down to them enchains them even as it enchants them.

They may face a very long time of wandering in the wilderness, The Sinai, of swimming through Sargasso Seas. They may face the truth that they may die before they ever speak one true word of their own. Rather than speak in tongues which are alien to them, they may resolve to be silent. This vow of silence may reign for years.

Then, in the middle of the oceanic desert, the sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, hears a voice speaking in a language he has never heard. It is coming from his own mouth. It is not one of the thousand tongues he has mastered as he wandered the four quarters of the globe, as he drifted the Seven Seas. It is not the tongue which he inherited from me. It is not the tongue of Old Jerusalem. It is compounded of all those tongues. It is compounded of everything this sea turtle, this Artificial Jew, this child of mine, has ever learned.

The vow of silence lifts. At last, the voice of the turtle is heard in the land and the sea. It is the voice of everlasting peace. And war. Of love. And hate. This voice has never been heard before. It has always been heard. It speaks in a ancient language which is ever new minted. When it uses a word which is worn and familiar, it polishes that word and serves it surprisingly so that it looks and sounds completely new.

The sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, the Wandering Jew, is speaking the New Hebrew. This newly minted language becomes the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. In the New Jerusalem, all the sea turtles will find their home beaches. In the New Jerusalem, all the Artificial Jews will at last come into their own. In the New Jerusalem, all the Wandering Jews will at last come to rest in the center of the cosmos.

In the New Jerusalem, each citizen will speak his own tongue freely and bravely, and each word will be new and true, yet old and familiar. Each language will be special to its speaker, yet accessible to others, comprehensible to others. Each speaker will, at last, speak for himself. And in speaking for himself he will speak for everyone.

In the New Jerusalem, Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Moslems, atheists and agnostics, will embrace each other and the commonweal. Every citizen will carry and build the New Jerusalem wherever he or she goes. No longer will citizens battle over city blocks. They will know that they have within themselves the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. If they want more city, they will build it out of their truest selves. Wherever they are, there is the New Jerusalem. Wherever they are, there is home.
--FIN--