Where'd It All Go Wrong, America?

"What happened to you, McGonagle?  You used to be a GOOD cop!  Where'd it all go wrong?!", she demanded, or rather begged from the other end of the alley.


"It's these damned city streets, America.  These filthy, rotten streets.  No matter how hard you try, no matter how clean and upright a man you are when you walk into them, you walk away a putrid animal."

It was glib bullshit.  Or at least I thought it was at the time.  But it seemed like the only reasonable answer to a faded highschool princess who'd just seen the former star quarterback completely take the head off a total stranger in a darkened alley with a Midnight Special at point-blank range.

"You're a god-damned savage now, McGonagle . . . a god-damned . . . savage . . ."  Her voice quavered off into a blubbering white noise in the background as I massaged my temples, trying to force back down the bubbling cauldron of terror and self-loathing I'd come to recognize as the inevitable aftermath of committing an act as abominable as I'd just done.  I was now experiencing such things with a shocking regularity and had begun to formulate a list of suggested responses to them in the back of my head.

America, on the other hand, had no friggin' idea what the hell she was going on about.  She seemed to carry on for decades as if she were still the lilly-white pure virgin painted on some old Mary Pickford movie poster.  It takes increasingly massive doses of heroin to sustain this illusion, of course.  Certainly after a career as checkered as America's.  How could I put this to her?  COULD I put this to her?  She was certainly no virgin.  She'd probably serviced more people of all descriptions than the entire McDonald's(tm) franchise, sometimes simultaneously both at the front drive-through window AND from behind the counter.

No.  I decided quickly.  No, I could not explain this to her.  It was simply beyond the mental, moral and imaginative resources left to her after decades of self-abuse.  The denoument of this particular matter seemed pretty clear to me, however, and the re-education of a smack-addled whore figured in no part of it.  I was going on the lamb.  If-and-when the "Law" caught up with me, I would be on my own and offer no excuses.  Under no conditions was I going to render a mundane-factual account of events which had transpired, of how I had actually been duped by America into the wholesale slaughter of complete strangers in a dark city alley. 

First of all, even if a factual account were believed, it could not hope to save me from the hangman.  Second of all, it would only result in snapping the final barrier between America and decades worth of filthy deeds waiting to revisit her from the other side.

Oh Cupcake, Where Art Thou?: The Search for America's Next Sweetheart



AA Veteran Lindsay Lohan:  America's next Little Cupcake?

The U.S. spiralled into decades of romantic uncertainty and self-loathing after the heartbreak of Mary Pickford losing a leg to gangrene following a vicious tavern brawl in 1929.  Where will we find America's Little Cupcake for the 21st century?

Well, 2011 certainly is shaping up to be quite the year for Wisconsinites.  Douchebag Senator Paul Ryan not only escaped the noose for his role in engineering the AIG bailouts in the mid-terms, but also became the budget committee chief this January.  Newly elected RNC chair and former ethical giant Rancid Priebus, a Kenosha native, began in earnest his party's campaign to contest the health care reform law that he himself claimed was unassailably constitutional.  And of course, just this week, America's Team, the Green Bay Packers took the crown in the fairly eventful Superbowl XLV.

Whew!  Pretty heady stuff--but the ride's not over yet.  Valentine's weekend is almost upon us, and as the United State's official Capitol of Love is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is once more at the center stage of world events.  Yeah, yeah, fuck populist uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia; screw the over-hyped utopian romance of Marianne du France, WISCONSIN is the place to be.

On the surface that might seem like some kind of sick, cynical joke--but only if you've never actually been to Wisconsin or never actually known a Wisconsinite.  We Wisconsin folk are, in fact, are the true heirs of the SPIRIT of St. Valentine, not some fromage-swilling, knee-breech wearing, bewigged European aristocrats.  No, our love is the pure love of chaste devotion rather than decadant sensuality--a love as honest, callow and enduring as the heartland fields of corn whose bounty forms the pith and marrow of our very bones.  Some may accuse us of being naive and inexperienced hayseeds, but this we take as the highest compliment: it is only the birthright of the Most Typical Americans of All.

My overseas friends will recognize this fact immediately and uncontroversially.  Americans value no virtues more highly than simplicity and earnestness.  This is reflected time and time again by our selection of popular culture romantic icons, whose primary qualifications are a bland, uncomplicated physical symmetry and a conventional, unchallenging cast of mind.  Realizing the verity of the old adage that "God doesn't open one door without closing another"--and being properly skeptical of the horrors that may lie behind the impenetrable secret of the human soul--we Americans have made the supremely sensible compromise of raising to our national pedastal only the most physically stunning but mentally and morally mediocre women.  Let's take a brief tour of some of those icons of yesteryear and meditate a bit about what it takes to be raised to the pantheon as the American Venus.

For my money, it all began with Doris Day in the late '40's.

Doris Day

 

Mary Pickford

The archtypical Midwestern girl-next-door, Doris Day radiated a down-to-earth wholesomeness that you wouldn't be ashamed to take home to mother.  Silky blonde hair, big fawn-like blue eyes and a clear, fresh complexion she presented exactly the virginal image the Mormon Church would have taken for its own concept of a native American Mary of Nazareth had not the Nazis beaten them to the punch in the 1930's.  Starring in uncomplicated and unchallenging film roles depicting women who had to be saved from themselves, Doris really brought out the best in American patriarchy.  Which was exactly what we all needed during the long confusing malaise that followed the tragic events surrounding auburn-haired Mary Pickford and a gang of merchant marines on shore leave in Atlantic City 1929.

Yeah, Doris was great, maybe even the best of the lot.  She never once bucked a trend or challenged the status quo.  But tragedy haunted her, too.  Sadly Doris Day died in 1968 leading a squad of marines against a Viet Cong outpost, a tour of duty bravely undertaken to publicly rebuke the cowardice of Cassius Clay's anti-draft ravings.  If only all-American leading man Rock Hudson had proposed to her in real life as he had so many times in film, he might have kept her down on the farm and she might still be with us today.

The next 2 decades were a mixed-up, confusing time in American culture, marked by radical change in everything from hairstyles to hemlengths to heroine doses.  We seemingly couldn't make up our minds about what we were looking for in an "ideal woman".  Schizophrenically cycling between the edgy subliminal threat of the ambiguous Dianna Ross and the more reassuring gingam-tinged appeal of Karen Carpenter, a vast canyon-like chasm seemed to have opened in our collective romantic imagination, one that no single woman seemed capable of completely filling.  These I call "America's Lost Years".

Dianna Ross                                        Karen Carpenter     

 However hope eventually triumphed over experience, and America did find another sweetheart in 1983, a darling Detroit lass by the name of Madonna Ciccone. 

Madonna Ciccone

A natural blonde born with black roots, classically European features, and technically Christian1 despite the unfamiliar, vaguely ethnic nomenclature, Madonna was the 1-in-200 million girl who could actually fit the bill to make America whole again.  Her unique presence and musical gifts are unparalelled assetsin a highly competitive and demanding entertainment industry, it's true.

But even more than that, Madonna seemed to have a deep, innate understanding of the divided character of the American soul and flawlessly combined in one stunningly attractive paradox the virtues of amoral shark-like ethic of rabid self-promoting capitalism and the familiar and homely comforts of our obsession with crypto-Nordic blondeness.  Madonna made us feel ourselves again, a tidy and organic whole, untroubled by socialistic notions of income equity, morality in foreign policy or even plain common sense.  She was a perfect counterpoint to the politics of Ronald "Uncle Dutch" Reagan.

Alas, even the reign of fair Madonna must come to an end, just as "Summer's lease hath all too short a date" within Shakespeare's famous Sonnet #18.  She died as the First Lady of Argentina, in the arms of her ruthless caudillo husband in 1996, after a bout of pneumonia brought on by standing out all night in a cold driving rain feeding her devoted peasants at a local soup kitchen.

But if Madonna was gone, she was hardly forgotten.  Her un-self-conscious worship of Mammon reminded America what our nation has always been about deep at heart:  the amoral pursuit of material gain.  Her legacy guided us through some lonely times, with the help of the new-fangled VCR, remained firmly on our retinas and in our minds as well.  It wasn't long until our next female love fetish, our next Beatrice Portinari, if you will, appeared: that Louisiana lovely,  Britney Spears.

Britney Spears

Britney was not simply a Madonna clone, however.  She, or her corporate handlers at Jive Records, at any rate, had a subtly different take on the feminine mystique--one that was perfectly in tune with the complex changes in the American zeitgeist since the 1980's.   America was in danger of becoming complacent with its seemingly unchallenged status as the world's only remaining superpower, and maybe even a little jaded by the potentially troubling complexity of Madonna's ambiguous natural blonde status.  Britney would bring a more straight-forward, heartland-wholesomeness back:  she promoted her 1999 breakthrough album "Baby One More Time" with an elaborate stage show and series of videos featuring her in the short plaid kilt of a private school girl.  Once again American males were given exactly the right message at exactly the right time:  borderline paedophilia is acceptable again.

But while Britney's classic Southern-belle appeal seemed to perfectly coincide with the tsunami-like resurgent fortunes of a Dixie-dominated Republican party, led by Connecticut-born Texas cowboy George W. Bush, nothing good lasts forever.  Euridice-like, Britney died in 2008 of septicemia after trolling barefoot through the lavatory waste and spent heroine needles covering a petrol station's restroom floor.

Britney angel being taken from us too soon, America went through kind of a tail spin in 2008.  Feeling mired in a decades-deep rut littered by two seemingly endless wars, scores of foreign policy failures and a collapsed economy, we just couldn't continue to ignore reality any longer without the aid of some distracting gris-gris or love idol, America was just plain desperate.  Shit, we even contemplated Hillary Clinton at one point.  Sunk in our grief and national trauma, we leapt at the first voice that seemed to promise us change--something, anything different.  So we tried something really new and gave Barack Obama a go.

America's last little darling, Ms. Barack Obama

Sure, Barack may not have been blonde.  But the Americans of 2008 were hardly the simple bumpkins that their grandparents had been back in 1929; we're more sophisticated these days.  And she said all the right things at precisely the right time, talking about change and possibility, hope for the future, and harnessing the energies of the American people to take on the challenges of the 21st century. Also, I'll let you in on a secret: middle America has always had kind of a thing for Spanish chicks, even if Barack's hands were a little larger and hairy than we normally like in a lady.

But now . . . Now I don't know.  After the first couple of dates, things are starting to seem a little funny, a little suspicious.  Like maybe America hadn't gotten quite what it asked for back in 2008 when we met Barack outside the Chi-Town VD clinc.  She began acting differently: smoking, starting fights, talking like the trashy girls we used to go "hogging" with to fraternity keggers during the 1980's.  To tell the truth, some of her friends seem a little shifty, too.  Don't like 'em, don't trust 'em.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget that night in December.  We took her out to a fancy DC bistro and she left with some other dude--and stiffed us with a $900 billion check to boot.

Not that we regret the experiment, but let's face facts:  the bloom is off the rose here.  Time to move on.  But where to?  Who will be America's next little cupcake?


Footnote

1  It's true.  Technically Roman Catholicism is a variety of Christianity.  And if Msgr. Fitzgibbon's say-so isn't good enough for you, try Wikipedia on for size.

American Death Cult Part III: Pavlov Speaks*

A creepy house in backwoods Wisconsin funded by bloodmoney, built by a minion of  the Aztec Night Lord Tezcatlipoca, and a talking Chihuahua seeking redemption and to end the millenia-old feud with the Ho-Chunk culture hero Red Horn.  Must be Thursday.

The first and most cardinal rule of any heavy drug habit is to hold fast to your center, not allow yourself to panic at the inevitable bad trip. Assenine braggarts are likely to tell you that it’s an inborn character trait that you simply either have or do not have, and that it is not possible to cultivate a tolerance.

Utter and complete bullshit.  Dangerous bullshit.  Because it denies the essential primacy of DISCIPLINE in the process and is a telltale sign of the feckless self-indulgent irresponsibility that means imminent death or at least a lengthy sanatorium stay.  No, what is required is a steely willfulness and intense focus.

There are several techniques to achieve this focus and they all work, even under the most insane sensory assaults--provided you employ them with an iron discipline.  One method is to always remain in the company of a responsible, experienced user whenever you take a new drug for the first time.  But even more important is the technique of listening to your heartbeat.  It alerts you to any potential medical problems early enough to seek professional care should that be necessary and it grounds you, reminds you that you are still John or Jane Q. Ordinary living in Normalsville, Planet Earth, complete with all the standard plumbing.  You know that you have a living, breathing material avatar to take care of here, even if you can see and count the quarks vibrating through your hands.  Or, as in this particular case, if you haven’t taken any illicit substances (that you know of), but find yourself engaged a in a twelve hour conversation with a Chihuahua dog1 claiming to be the exiled ruach2 of the Paul Ryan, the Republican chair of the House Budget Committee.

“So you see?  I couldn’t tell ANYONE about this stuff until you’d spoken my name out loud and broken the taboo.3  You’re the only one who understands this nefesh/ruach/neshama stuff AND gives a flying fuck about my welfare.   The ONLY one.”

“YOUR welfare?  Let’s not exaggerate here;  I only care about stopping your wholesale destruction of the—“

He grimaced and interjected impatiently:  “Okay okay okay!  You’re the only one who gives a shit about what my neshama is doing.”

Fair play.  I wasn’t going to argue with a frantic talking dog.  Especially one that was such a cutie pie, complete with the lisp of a five year-old child.  If he said I was the only one who could save all three of his souls from eternal damnation, who was I to argue?  I continued.

“Okay.  Agreed.  I don’t want you to destroy the country by undermining its social and economic infrastructure . . . “

“You don’t want my NESHAMA to destroy the country by undermining its social and economic infrastructure, you mean!  Get it right!  Not me, my NESHAMA.  Remember, I'M the ruach, that blabbering gobadaw you see prattling away on television is just an empty shell of a soul--an impoverished neshama leaning on a hollow nefesh.  I was ejected by the force of pure moral disgust when that eejit proposed the 'Roadmap to America's Future'".

"Er, yeah.  Got it.'  I recapped the nonsense as best as I could, as much to keep my own mind from imploding under the stupifying weight of its absurdity as to placate Pavlov's wrath.  "And when you ended up in the netherworld, Red Horn pleaded on your behalf for a second chance, a chance to defeat the dark corruption of The Roadmap.  But the only way you could do that was to incarnate in an avatar, an avatar that reflected the nature of your sin and wouldn't provoke Tezcatlipoca's wrath or attention."

"Basically, yes."

"Okay.  Now  I get you.  You didn’t mean for all this to happen.  You just wanted a little attention, wanted to be loved.  You didn’t think all this would happen, that it’d spin out of control so quickly.  You didn’t mean for grandmothers to get thrown out on the streets ‘cause they couldn’t make rent AND afford their meds or little kids to get pulled off chemo because the insurance company—“ But I couldn’t go on that line.  The little fella had melted into the settee, whining as his eyes began to tear up.

I could hardly believe this.   Not the part about Paul Ryan being a Midwestern hayseed who didn’t know what he was doing and found himself sucked into something he didn’t really understand on his first trip to the Big City.  That’s the oldest and saddest story in the world.  What I couldn’t believe was that I FELT SORRY for the sonofabitch who was planning to do all this horrible shit . . . er, that his NESHAMA was planning to do, anyhow.

I couldn’t take in all of this in one sitting.  It was all too much.  I wasn’t yet ready to feel sympathetic towards this scumbag, and I wasn’t yet ready for Pavlov’s description of the building of the House on Maiden Lane.  Nor was I ready to hear an epic narrative describing the battle between the Ho-Chunk culture hero Red Horn and the Aztec Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Night.  And the sun was sinking fast, too, covering the sittingroom in a cold shadowy blanket.  I got up and made my excuses, saying I was going to the back yard to get lumber for a fire.

Pavlov just curled up into a fetal sleeping position and quietly ignored me.  He had no reason to fear that I was going anywhere.  We were in the middle of Bum-Fuck, Wisconsin, and Siobhan had cobbled my truck the prior night.  No one was going anywhere without Pavlov.

Footnotes

*  Again, people, this is allegory.  A fictional narrative attempting to describe certain social realities using poetic or figurative language.  Don’t get your knickers in a bunch or hit the DEA on your speed dial.  Check out the friggin’ footnotes already, will yah? Sheesh! . . . . The readership of William F. Buckley’s “National Review” got this when they published it, why can’t you?

1     Pavlov, the Chihuahua dog who called out to Liam at the end of Part II of this story.

2    This is NOT a trivial point that you can just gloss over in order to get to the punchline.  The Kabbalistic scheme of the soul’s architechture is a primal key component of this plot and you’ll never be able to achieve any satisfaction until you have a working knowledge of it.  I’m not claiming that it’s necessarily a factual reality that you’ll need to function adequately as a moral human being, but it’s one of the cornerstones upon which this narrative is built.  According to the simplified (purists would say ‘bastardized’) version of Kabbalah that I’m cobbling together here, the human soul is comprised of 3 parts:

a.    The Nefesh:  Representing man’s base physical, instinctual or ‘animal’ nature.

b.   The Ruach:  Representing man’s emotional or moral character.  This describes the ways in which a person relates to others.  It recognizes the non-materialistic links of psychic interdependency between individuals that transcends the immediate claims of biology.

c.   The Neshama:  Representing man’s rational, intellectual character.  This describes the meta-cognitive structures and biases that inform a person’s thought processes.  In and of itself the concept of neshama is completely value-free. 

However in practice the latent bias of its various particular structures has profound spiritual consequences that can either amplify, complement or negate the moral polarity of the ruach.  For example, a simple, earnest man such as the image of St. Patrick conjured for us in his Confessio seems likely to have originally been possessed of a rather kind, but simple ruach despite lacking the polished social graces or academic credentials favored by the Roman hierarchy of his day.  Patrick’s quintessentially compassionate brand of holiness seems to shine forth all the more brightly because of his neshama’s lack of sophistication. 

On the other hand, an urbane Church Father like St. Augustine seems to have been possessed by a considerably more impoverished ruach, though it was more than offset by an uncommonly refined neshama.  Turning his back on a youth spent in debauchery and the thoughtless indulgences of a citified sophisticate, he devoted the rest of his life to creating the foundational intellectual doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church regarding numerous moral issues such as slavery, the role of women in society, the extent to which warfare may be considered morally justified. 

St. Augustine’s legacy is considerably more complex than that of St. Patrick and I will not attempt to make a final evaluative comparison of the two here, but merely emphasize again that the careers of these two exceptionally influential and holy (though not uncomplicated) men serve as excellent illustrations of the interaction between ruach and neshama.

             

3    Pavlov, the Chihuahua-dog avatar of Paul Ryan’s exiled ruach could not explain himself or plead his case, could not deal openly with Liam, until Liam had spoken his name, as occurred at the end of Part II.  This is just one variation of a narrative trope repeated ad infinitum throughout the world’s fantastical and spiritual literature (e.g., the Grail King cannot be healed or turn the Grail to its destined guardian, Percival, until the king had been asked the specifically what ailed him; Rumplestiltskin’s devious plan to steal the princess’ firstborn cannot be foiled until she has pronounced his name; Superman cannot defeat the villain Mxyzptlk until he chants his name aloud, etc., etc.) 

           I was inspired to use this motif here by further meditation on the Obama’s disconcerting betrayal of his own legislative caucus in December, which I satyrically treat here.  My current thinking (admittedly wayyyyyy behind the learning curve of many Disinformation commentors) is that as parties, both the Democrats and Republicans are whoring shams whose platitudinous rhetoric is a stark contrast with their actual immoral actions, and that perhaps the only way to achieve any real progress will be to get the public and the media to call this thing like it is.  It’s not a deistic democracy, it’s not a ‘Christian’ republic.  It’s an amoral plutocracy.

      But that seems extremely unlikely in the short term because people are in such deep, deep denial.  It’s easy to see why:  no one’s going to any great lengths to hide the facts and the level of guilt that is incumbent upon the realization of the truth is so fuckin’ horrible that few people have the guts, the moral integrity or whatever you care to call it, to simply own up.  Shame that nothing will ever get any better until we as a whole nation own up to the fact that we’ve all become soulless whores in thrall to an amoral beast.

      That said, while I’m 100% certain that Obama’s lame “rain puddles in heaven” tripe will never help us confront the national demons that consume us, neither will my traditional tack of single-minded satirical focus on the obvious excesses of the right wing.  That only papers over the equal culpability of limp-dicked, lilly-livered approach of traditional Dems.  So what I intend the story arc to do going forward is to try to take the most sympathetic view of the many and horrible failings of our leaders as possible, while still forcibly decrying their stupidity and innately immoral character.  A tough balancing act, but that’s why it took me nearly two months to come up with Part III.

American Death Cult Part II*: Welcome To The House on Maiden Lane

I arrived at Siobhán’s new digs in late evening, after more than three hours of driving north through blustering gusts of cold air, along deserted Wisconsin state highways and country lanes, ringed with a seemingly endless succession of pale grey and weather-worn barns, silos and stubble fields of harvested corn, punctuated every 30-40 miles by the glistening plastic pillars of some shopping center, gas station or outlet mall.  And while the sterile fakeness of it all might seem utterly foreign on the surface, I was soon reminded just how integral a part of this place’s heritage Death worship is.   When I passed the familiar gloom of the Lac Butte des Morts^ fens, I recalled that this place used to be Winnebago country, supposedly the prehistoric stomping grounds♦ of Red Horn, the Ho-Chunk culture hero who freed the land from the tyranny of monsters hunting his people like vermin, and the native place of Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, rival brother gods of the Aztec people who led their people from wintry Aztatlan in the north to their current patrimony in the Valley of Mexico.  The White Man displaced most of those first nations people from this part of Wisconsin long, long ago, but in some ways the deathgrip of the old gods and monsters is stronger than ever.

“Oh, hi, Liam!  C’mon in!”  Siobhán greeted me at the foyer door of the shabby-genteel Victorian pile on Maiden Lane.**

“Uh, wow, I didn’t see you as the ‘dog-in-a-handbag’ type of girl, Shivvers ,“  I was trying to be cute, witty, sardonic—anything to  suppress my shock at her drawn and wan appearance when she came to the door.

She shot back a weak, snarky smirk while wrestling with the little Chihuahua wriggling in her arms.  “Yeah, well, it’s a long story.  Take a load off.”

Oh, shit.  Éamó was right.  He’d tried to warn me but I never fuckin’ listened to him, and now I couldn’t do anything but play through.  The scene swam back to me as I followed sullenly in her shadow into the sitting room.

Flash back almost one week ago:  As soon as I’d hung up after Siobhán’s call my uncle Éamonn asked me with an unusual bluntness what I’d intended to do.

“Head up north.  What else?  She’s basically offered me a blank check to do renovations on some rich doctor’s summer house.”

“So just like that you said ‘yes’?”

“Well, what are my options?  Winter’s coming on hard and I’ve lost probably a good three weeks of work with the downturn.  Gotta make hay while the sun shines.”

“Think about it, boyo.  Didn’t her voice sound a little uptight to you?  A little clipped?  Like the vocal chords were stretched to snapping?  Don’t you think that merited a few questions?  Like: ‘How long do you figure it’d take?’, ‘Just what type of work does he need done?’, ‘Why the Hell aren’t you living it up on the Gold Coast or getting ready to vacation in Vail?’  Does it really make sense to you that a party girl like Shivvers is holed up in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt?”

“What?  She didn’t sound that bad.  Could have been the connection, or maybe she’d caught a bit of a cold—the weather is changing.  Besides, she’s never done me a bad turn.”  My thoughts now turned to her holiday card last year—a pickkie of her in a Colorado ski lodge, clad in a bear-skin bikini, posing with biceps flexed triumphantly and sitting astride an enormous stuffed moose head.  THAT was the dominant image of her in my mind.  I was constitutionally unable to even imagine a scared, uptight Siobhán, much less register any micro-decibel of doubt in her voice over a shaky cell phone signal.  Still, Éamó did sound insistent . . .

“I’m not saying she has ever done you wrong.  Just saying you should stop, look and listen a bit. Ask a few questions before plunging in.  Wait for answers.”  This old bullshit artist was serious and it caught me like a deer in headlights.  Pulling an Obi Wan-style mind bender, he gave one final parting shot, “Yes, she’s a lovely girl, but you know a person’s judgment isn’t always what it could be when they’re stretched.”

And even now, while my consciousness flashed forward again to the present, with me taking a seat in a plush fashionable settee at Siobhán’s invitation, that last word echoed in my mind:  “stretched”.  That was a perfect description of her appearance now.  No artful application of make up could conceal the dark rings of fatigue swelling under her eyes or the pale, hollow cast of her cheeks.  Something WAS wrong and I’d committed myself to dealing with it for a matter of weeks at least—all without asking a single pertinent question.

But Siobhán’s mind was a million miles ahead of me on that curve.  Gently setting the beast down on its little canopied doggie bed she rushed into the kitchen and returned unbidden to hand me a glass brimming with red wine.

“Yeah, I admit I’ve been a little short on sleep lately.  I’m kinda keyed up to get settled in to the new situation, y’know?”

“Like the dog.”  I thought I was being clever and disarming by starting out slowly, but Siobhán shot a tense glance back at the animal.  Its eyes glared back at us with a weird green sheen from the flickering darkness of its throne just behind a covey near the fireplace.

“Uh, yeah, Pavlov# is a big part of it,” she said, launching into what seemed like a well-practiced recitation of a drama worthy of Dostoevsky.  She’d had a grand setup in a Gold Coast suburb of Chicago, working as ‘au pair’ to a handsome, older ophthalmologist and all was well—until the shrill old bitch of a wife got to ‘imagining’ some kind of shenanigans afoot in the household.  Siobhán kept her cool and made every effort to be above the board with the older woman, but she would simply not be placated.  The old man clearly wasn’t able to ‘keep up’ his end, and in the end the best deal he could strike with the wife was exile for Siobhán in return for getting rid of the dog, which he never got on with.  "Kept pissing in his shoes at night.” 

I would’ve sworn that even the dog reacted with a dry little laugh at that last part.

“Well, at least this gives you some breathing room, time to make a few calls and pick up the pieces before you blow out of Dodge altogether.  Soon as your pals in Vail or Saint Tropez can return your calls, right?  The only awkward aspect might be dropping off the dog.  But that’s hardly any big deal:  ‘Wham, bamm, thank you, ma’am’.”

“Er, yeah . . .   Say, would you like another glass of wine?” and without waiting for an answer she returned with another glass of the red stuff, filled to the brim.

She plopped down next to me on the settee.  “Listen, there’s more than enough work to be done around this place, but it’s late tonight.  And it’ll still be here tomorrow.  So what’s the hurry?  Let’s just relax some now and leave that kind of heavy talk for tomorrow, hmmm?”  Her tone had segued into a warm, throaty purr that coaxed a blush of warm blood to my face.  “I’ll turn on some tunes and you can tell me about your adventures since getting the boot by A-Visa or whatever her name was.”  Waving the plastic magic remote-control wand, she activated her iPod’s playlist of mellow-mood tunes from the likes of Mumford & Sons and Iron & Wine. 

She spent the rest of whatever I can still recall of that night seducing me, drink by drink, into unwariness, vanity and stupor.  She laughed at all my shitty jokes, told me that I didn’t need Aviva anyway, and massaged away any tension that became apparent in my shoulders whenever I started to evince any regret about the way things had ended.

“Awww, you can do better than that, Liam.  And you know what they say anyhow—“If it don’t fit, don’t force it.”  I let out a low chuckle and then she got really bold; she physically drew me over to her on the couch, and began to gently stroke the back of my ears.  That’s about the last thing I remembered before drifting out of consciousness—that and the weird fact that Pavolv seemed to take the gesture as a cue, and sprang out of his cubby and shuffled out of the room, his nails click-clacking on the kitchen tiles as he left.

It must’ve been shortly after noon when I woke up shivering—and alone—on the couch.  Glancing around to get my bearings I felt kind of lost at first—the place had a cold, pale hollowness when viewed in broad daylight that was fundamentally from the psychic geography of the rich warm, brown-ness it radiated by last night’s fire.  It seemed tidy and in good order, but cavernously empty as if nobody had really lived in the place for years.

Siobhán had exhibited enough class to throw a comforter over me and as I pulled it tighter, I began to mentally review the chronology of last night’s events; the wine, the music, the talk, the embrace—shit, did anything happen?  I checked my junk.  Nope all dry and packed as tight as if it’d never been brought out of storage.  Damnit, blew it!

Before I could start to pity myself too much I noticed a light scratching noise coming from the kitchen that turned out to be Pavlov’s nails pouncing against the pantry doors.  I pitied him; he looked just about starved, with the corrugated edges of his ribcage protruding though a hide pulled too tightly over him.  So I didn’t even bother to check and see if there was any dog food in the place and immediately dug into the fridge and shot him a couple of wet hot dogs on the floor that he gobbled up greedily.  Yeah, his mummykins back home in the Gold Coast would probably shit herself if she found out her baby was eating anything other than a precisely measured quarter cup of Doctor Parnassus’ Fat-Free Specialty Beluga Caviar Canine Mix, but fuck her and fuck her dog.  Siobhán and I were only here ‘til we caught the next train out of Maiden Lane, which wouldn’t be long at all.  Little did I know.

I spent the next hour or so doing my best to respect Siobhán’s space, and retreated to the sitting room to watch some low-volume television and waited for her to wake up and talk about a work plan.  I’d brought most of my tool kit and supplies, including a portable drill press, table and jig saw, so I doubted that I’d need much additional stuff other than the lumber that I could only assess adequately after getting a tour of the place.  But as one hour stretched into one-and-one-half and into two, my patience ran low and Pavlov’s eerie stare began to creep me out and I longed for some human companionship, so I started to roam the inhabited west wing looking for her room—which I found empty.

WTF? Did she pick up and leave camp altogether?  I stormed out to my truck and immediately noticed the vicious crumple of the rear driver’s side quarter panel that turned in on itself into a dagger threatening the tire with a nasty puncture if I even thought about turning the ignition key.  Stooping down to read a faded yellow Post-It™ note I saw her large, loopy writing:

“Oops!  Sorry ‘bout the mix-up!  Text you at 2:00!

Love, Shivvers☺”

THAT FUCKIN’ BITCH!  Just then I heard the digital ‘plink’ of my phone announcing the arrival of a new text message.  Must have hit 2:00 that moment.

“LM, U THR?”

“Y.”

“TLK 2 PVLV YT?”

What the hell was THAT supposed mean?  “Talk to Pavlov yet?”  Had she gone completely mad in this Wisconsin wilderness?

“Y.  D’ U TLK 2 HM YT?”

I blew my top at this altogether and began shouting out loud to no one in particular.  “No I did NOT talk to Pavlov yet!  He’s a fucking DOG!!!”

From over my shoulder I heard the rejoinder:  “Who the fuck is Pavlov?  My name’s Paul.  Paul Ryan.”

Footnotes

*Remember this bit?  It’s allegory:  a fictional narrative presenting in symbolic form actual events or persons intended to make rhetorical rather than strictly factual or historical points.  Remember that when interpreting the events described here.

^ Actually Lake Butte des Morts—I changed it a bit to sound more exotically French.  It’s the name of a small town in Winnebago County.  Translates literally to “Lake of the Hill of the Dead”.  Apart from some fishing, there’s nothing much to see here for the casual traveler but the low-lying shallow lake fens that stretch below part of I-41.

♦This stuff has only a rough, historical basis to it.  It’s true that this is the native country of the Ho-Chunk (aka Winnebago) people, and that Red Horn was their mythology’s great culture hero—like Hercules to the Greeks or Cú Chullain to the Irish.  And while I’m unaware of any strict canonical interpretation of his tradition, what I present here is only my rough re-imagining and is in no way to be interpreted as either recapitulation or violation of the authentic Ho-Chunk legends about him.  Similarly with Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca.  Some proto-archaelogists like N.F. Hyer thought that the legendary prehistoric homeland of the Aztec people, Aztalan, was located in Wisconsin, but I am unaware of anyone taking that idea seriously today.  True there was definitely some kind of culture interchange between ancient Wisconsin and the Valley of Mexico—they both were centers of maize cultivation—but the extent and nature of that contact is far from clear to me.  Far more important for the purposes of my narrative will be re-interpreting in the context of modern American politics the status of these figures as mythical hero, founding father and Death God, respectively.

** I chose the name ‘Maiden Lane’ for this house’s location because it just happens to be the name of a series of special-purpose entities established by the Federal Reserve Bank in Q3 2008 to deal with the liquidity crisis precipitated by the failures in the mortgage and insurance business, particurarly of two of Paul Ryan’s biggest customers, AIG and JP Morgan Chase.  I’ll go into more detail about how socializing the cost of these failures has impaired the effectiveness of federal government later in the next installment of this series.  But for now you might want to peruse the Wikipedia page description of their activities.  I know it’s Wikipedia, but it is a fair high-level summary of the entities’ purpose, structure and timeline. There’s more technical stuff, like their financial statements, available here.

# Pavlov, the surname of the famous 19^th century Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, whose experiments with dogs established the notion of involuntary physical response to psychological stimuli.  Etymologically it happens to be cognate with the English or Scottish surname “Paulson”—son of Paul.

Is Wisconsin the Epicenter of an American Death Cult?* Part I

Did Jack Torrance stumble upon a truth much deeper and more primal than he knew when he wrote, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”?   My girlfriend seemed to say as much a couple of weeks back and subsequent events in Winnebago County, Wisconsin lead me to believe that she just may have a point.

Aviva kicked me out.  Said I was “no fucking fun anymore” since I started crusading against the Brylcreem Brigade1 and their weird rhetorical war on the middle class and just plain common sense.  “Goddamn it, Liam, it was funny at first, but it’s getting old.  Now you’re starting to sound more like my econ professor than the writer I thought I was living with.”

I guess I could see where she was coming from.  When we’d met at a mutual friend’s holiday party last December I was riding high on the crest of a fresh wave of creativity.  I couldn’t stop blabbing about this novel I’d planned to write.  It was a Kabbalistic parody of contemporary American religious culture centering on a cabal of ambitious up-and-coming angels who set up to hit God’s target numbers of human souls by dealing in volume rather than quality.  They’d try to do it by exploding the human population, stretching the available supply of human souls by patching them with bits from the souls of animals like foxes, sharks and sheep, who at any rate would be dying off due to the environmental  damage caused by the extra human population.  It seemed like a great crack at the time, with no end to its scope to satirize religion, finance and industry.

Aviva ate it all up with a spoon.  She’s a pretty sharp girl who appreciated the seamless elegance with which it seemed to comprehend all the sickest contours of 21^st century American culture.  And she had more than a little to add to the mix herself; she was in the middle of a rebellion against what she saw as the stupid complacency of her conventional, limousine-liberal Reform Jewish parents.  With a business career closed to her not only by the economic downturn, but by an undisguised personal disgust for the stupid banality of Rotary Club wankers, she’d settled for draining her college fund pursuing a degree in comparative religion—with an emphasis in Kabbalah, the loopy esoteric tradition of her Polish great-grandparents.  The same great-grandparents her father couldn’t stand living with as a ‘progressive’ secular kid during the Boomer era.  Using the Kabbalah’s legends about angelic hierarchies and the architecture of the soul to collaborate on a big literary ‘fuck you’ to her parents’ generation was just the sort of gig she was looking for.  And if she could top it all off by sleeping with some big, nasty Mick, it’d be all the sweeter.

I admit it was pretty heady, those first few months.  Within a couple of days of that first meeting we began regular pow-wows at the local café to discuss the project’s outline.  From there we ambled over to her place, and the sessions never seemed long enough to cram in all the ideas that were exploding out of our pores.  One thing led to another, and within three months I’d unceremoniously ditched my roommate and moved in with Aviva full time.

Which rather limited my exit strategy options when shit hit the fan.  If I’d been more pragmatic I’d probably have seen this thing coming a mile away, at least as far back as July and planned accordingly.  With the unemployment rate hanging steady near 10%, and a lot of folks who otherwise would have been good customers for the type of carpentry/renovations work that I do hanging on to every last red cent in a deathgrip of fear, I’d been spending more than the usual amount of time at home—coinciding with her own off-semester break.  Other than the novel and the sex, we didn’t really have a lot else in common.  Sure, we coasted for a couple weeks on the fumes of her parents’ initial disappointment upon being introduced to her new ‘roommate’—a stinky, crude joiner from a working class background and who was, after all, not all that much younger than her own parents.  But that couldn’t last forever, and my near obsessive involvement in the Russ Feingold campaign and blogging about the gory aftermath were like the final insults to the type of aloof artistic remove that she’d carefully constructed between herself and her parents’ passé notions of political engagement; her old man is actually a big fan of Russ’.

Still, as Plan C’s go, crashing with my uncle Éamonn was not half bad.  Éamo’s the black sheep of his generation of the family, as I am of my own, and we have always shared a strong bond of mutual understanding and sympathy.  No one really knows exactly how he made his money and no one’s ever been rude enough to press.  But then again he’s never been stingy about sharing the wealth or the entertaining stories of his early days in Chicago.  He claims to have walked hand-in-hand with Ted Kennedy during the civil rights marches in the mid- ‘60s, been a frontline eyewitness to the Right Wing cabal’s bloody crackdown during the ’68 Democratic convention following RFK’s assassination, and pleaded passionately with Eldridge Cleaver to drop the codpiece-themed fashion line in favor of launching a private barbecue sauce label—an idea that Éamo claims Bobby Seale later stole and adapted into a goldmine of a cookbook franchise.  “The sheer grief of it all!  No wonder Eldridge lost his mind!  If only I’d been able to convince him!”

Yeah, more than likely Éamo’s just full of shit.  But before his shaggy dog stories could begin to get old a familiar face returned and the whole scene over flipped over on its head yet again:  Siobhán.

 Siobhán’s a beautiful girl, lithe and auburn-haired with a smooth, porcelain complexion, about my age, and from the Old Country.  I don’t know exactly what she does for a living, how she met Éamonn or what their precise relationship is or was, but like a bad penny she keeps turning up—thanks be to God!  Since the summer of ’92 I spent staying at Éamo’s place in Oak Park she’s been an on-again / off-again fixture in my life, punctuating its low, dull troughs of with exciting pivot points and vaulting me on to the next great adventure.  And this one would be no exception.

Éamonn hands me the phone one afternoon; it was Siobhán.  “Liam?  How’s it hanging, you rat bastard?”  I laughed and launched into the Webster’s Abridged Version of the Aviva story.

“Hmmm, well then, it appears my timing is excellent.  Seems that our biorhythmic waves have just crashed into one another once again.  Just so happens that I’m in a bit of a transition period myself, and I could have a bit of a job for you.  If you think you’re up to it.”  And she recounted a typically labyrinthine tales, replete with overtones of Byzantine romantic complexity.  Apparently her regular gig as ‘au pair’ for some rich Chicago doctor had come to an abrupt end and she suddenly found herself instead the caretaker of his summer home on a lake up in Winnebago County, Wisconsin.

“It’s a grand old place to be sure; a three-story Victorian job on a tree-lined country road and all.  But to tell the truth it’s gotten the worst out of the last few winters and I’m not sure it’s quite ready for this coming one.  I’ve persuaded the ol’ fellah to put up a reasonable budget for repairs and whatnot.  Could take you a few weeks to finish, but the west wing’s dry and comfy and I could use the company anyhows."

Clearly Siobhán had lost none of her native talent for understatement.  I knew that neck of the woods very well—too well.  Yes, technically it was part of the Oshkosh-Neenah metro area, but that house’d be a good half hour drive to the next human soul, and frankly you’d be taking your chances even then.  Oshkosh is the hometown of Charles Murray-loving, half-witted local-boy-married-good, senator elect Ron Johnson, the very man who’d taken the election from Russ. 

Actually, the area’s history of nutty, Right Wing politics goes wayyyyy back beyond Johnson.  Nearby Appleton is the home of the loony John Birch Society, the 1960’s precursor to the Tea Bag movement that urged parents to check beneath their kids’ beds for any errant Soviet surveillance equipment before beddy-byes.  Batshit demogague Joe McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, and he made a good run of it, too, until he had the nuts to accuse WWII veterans baptized under fire in their nation’s defense of being corrupt fellow travelers.  When he died of the drink in ’57 they buried him at St. Mary’s in Appleton.

Ripon in adjacent Fond du Lac County even claims to be the 1854 birthplace of the Republican Party—although that was clearly a very different creature from the atavistic beast we’ve come to know today.  My God, Old Abe Lincoln would have vomited all over himself if the national committee tried to foist a babbling idiot like Sarah Palin on him as vice presidential running mate.

And the true origins of Right Wing, fear-based politics in America probably stretch back to the dawn of human memory, even further back than that.  In 1835 the proto-archaeologist N.F. Hyer claimed to have located in Jefferson County, Wisconsin Aztatlan, the legendary original home of the fierce Aztec people, whose gory rites of human sacrifice on the steps of Mexico City still send shivers up the spine today.  Some people say the Aztecs were simply enacting in a more openly public, literal form the cannibalistic esoteric motifs woven through Roman Catholicism’s Doctrine of Transubstantiation, and others say that it was just a crudely brutal method of policing political dissent, scaring the shit out of anyone who might otherwise dare to oppose the will of the Emperor.

But all that shit may as well have been a thousand miles away and a million years ago for all I cared now.  I needed to get on with it.  And it’d be horribly ungrateful to decline what promised to be a blank check.  Certainly there’d be no need to fear boredom, either, not with Siobhán’s company at hand.

Footnotes

*The following is allegory, okay?  By nature it is a symbolic, fictional narrative illustrating in a subjective way factual realities whose tangible real-world importance could get lost in a dry technical account.  I’ll furnish links and footnotes pointing out the relevant facts where necessary, but I recommend reading this thing first from beginning to end without stopping to hunt down the citations along the way.  Don’t ruin the flow at the first crack.  You can always revisit those later.

1Ever notice the sad aping of Ronald Reagan’s hairstyle by the current crop of Gen-X’er Right Wing wannabes?  Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity, etc., etc.  Its helmet-like plasticine inflexibility is like a contemptuous challenge to sixty years of cultural development and nature itself, kind of a legionary standard to rally the forces of Entropy in their struggle to wipe out the last remaining pockets of dynamism in North American culture.