We Gather Together

Happy Thanksgiving, you guys!

And to you Chosen People, a double whammy, Happy Chanukah, you can celebrate both. A rare conjunction.

You don’t know where I am, but I know where you are. You’re sitting around the big table in the winery. Somebody just checked his phone looking for someone else, and found me. Now you’ve all got me up.

Either you guys are predictable, or I’m clairvoyant.

Or you’re a damn fool, Wayne, because you’re totally wrong. Things have changed since you’ve been gone.

Doreen’s not here; Doreen and Billy are on the Left Coast – visiting her sister. What the hell, her man skipped out on her. Why should she hang around mooning over him? She’ll take a trip out to California and let herself be consoled by its beauty. There’s little left here; leaves are brown, there’s a patch of snow on the ground, and the sky is a hazy shade of winter.

The good doctor Wise has been thwarted. His love has gone off to California. It’s that jerk Wayne’s fault. Even when he isn’t here, he’s running interference. No matter what he tells his patients, there are good and bad people, and Wayne is bad. Sets himself up with a pair of unstable relationships, skips out on everyone who depends on him; fortunately they all seem aware that he’s completely undependable. Still, give him credit; he’s smart enough to see his situation is untenable and stubborn enough to decide that the one thing he won’t change is his mind.

But where is he going to go? Where is there more freedom? Maybe that’s the wrong tack. Perhaps a remote tropical island somewhere with a favorable exchange rate and a language he doesn’t understand. It will be more comfortable to fret about the future of his country from outside its borders. But he wouldn’t be happy anywhere else. He wants the tension, thrives on it, lives for it. That’s why he picks fights, makes himself loud, pushes his own buttons, gets carried away. Is it his political ideology that keeps getting him in trouble or is it his propensity for trouble that drives his politics? Maybe he’ll write a paper on Wayne’s case. It would ease the sense of competition he feels. After all, Wayne is his client. Better to be analytical than personal or political.

He’d had other plans for today. Romantic plans. Instead, he’s in his office, catching up on work, when his computer tells him he’s got mail.

Picking up where we left off, he reads:

I have become the low-information voter, and I can tell you, it feels good – damn good. I wake up and think about mundane things like what I’m going to have for breakfast. I don’t wake up and dwell on the news. I don’t know what it is.

For me, this is almost as profound as finding myself in someone else’s body. Before, I knew every little thing they were doing to the country. Now, it’s as if it isn’t happening. I go about my day doing ordinary things – the ordinary things of ordinary people, as our president calls us.

I have all of you to thank for this incredible change. I realized there is nothing I can do. Not even enlighten those nearest and dearest to me about what’s happening to our country. Why should I live in a perpetual state of misery over something I can do nothing about?

Why, indeed, smirks the good Dr. Wise. He’s glad to be rid of the creep. Doreen will come back. Maybe Wayne won’t.

The letter goes on, speaking to an empty room. The winery has seen the sweetest and best grapes in memory but the proprietor is having a tough time. Ann still hasn’t been able to sign up at the insurance exchange. Their old policy has been canceled; it had been paying for her shrink (not the good Dr. Wise – she was wary of sharing him with Doreen). She’s begun to have anxiety attacks every time she turns on the computer to try once more to enroll. Donny has taken her out for their dinner.

They’re eighty miles upstate at an ecological, environmental green restaurant Ann read about, where she can eat to her hearts content knowing that no slaves were involved in producing the chocolate for her torte, and no endangered species were accidentally caught when they snagged her tuna.

But Steve has picked up the letter. Steve hasn’t quit school as his father suggested, but he does have a job at Walmart. His co-workers love him; he’s so smart; he’s doing half their work. And it’s a breeze for him. He likes it. He likes it a lot better than school. It’s straight-forward, and it’s not personal. Not yet.

His mother didn’t take his father’s advice either. She didn’t get a job. She found another way to get money. She got a grant to finish her education degree. Melissa had dropped out of college to get married, just in time to have Steve. All she needs is thirty credits, most of them electives.

She’s taking a course in Audio Production, and this entitles her to be at the Student Thanksgiving Day Party, originally meant for out-of-county kids, but which this year has turned into an extravaganza; so many college age kids don’t want to go to the parental gathering. Some of you may have noticed that when your kid goes to college, he disavows you and everything about you.

Not Steve. Steve misses Wayne. He feels unbalanced. At home, he has to become him, conversationally. If both sides weren’t represented, it wouldn’t feel like family. He was brought up in a house divided. He knows that no matter what their ideas are, his father is still his father and his mother still his mother.

Little tables fill the lounge. Steve is at one of them, with a lady on each side. His mother, and Brittany, who had been thrilled to learn of a man driven from his home by politics, and is curious about his wife.

They’ve had a good laugh over how wrong Wayne is, imagining the crowd at the winery. Steve is reading out loud:

That doesn’t mean I don’t still think I’m right. Common sense and your own eyes will tell you I’m right, but there’s no talking to you people. You want things to be the way they aren’t. Three people, all teachers, have proudly told me that they don’t think anymore; they feel . One lovely young lady said, “Don’t try to convince me. I like myself the way I am. I like that I’m a person who believes what I believe.”

 I eat alone, with plenty of time to eavesdrop, so I hear a lot of conversations. Like the guy in the suit having lunch with his sister, who wasn’t bad, and her new boyfriend, who was a down-and-out, scruffy looking guy with a sour expression on his face, like he was too good for the food he was eating. Obamacare comes up, and the suit says, “Why can’t we go back to how they did things in the old days? You pay the doctor. No middle-man. Why do you want to pay a middle-man? It drives up the costs. It leads to cheating. Pay the doctor direct, and be done with it.”

 I see the sister trying to shush the boyfriend, but he’s off. He’s standing up, yelling at the man who’s buying his meal that since he has no money, and the suit does, the suit damn well ought to pay for his health care. He’s covered with tattoos and looks like he’s got cirrhoses of the liver. You can tell he blew it all on the equivalent of wine, women and song. “Nobody can afford to pay a doctor” he yells. “The fees are too high!”

I don’t rise to the bait anymore but I wanted to jump in with, “The fees wouldn’t be high, if government hadn’t gotten involved.”

“That’s it!” Brittany has spoken so loudly, she’s attracted the attention of her professor, across the room. Monroe, drawn to whatever seems to be where it’s happening, has automatically risen from his seat, and is winding his way through the tables, with his Elmer Gantry smile and his golden Hogwarts hair.

He arrives just as his grader, half-standing, with one knee on her chair, leans past Steve, to Melissa, eagerly saying, “He’s got it. It doesn’t matter what party’s in power. They’re two branches of the same party, the ruling party.” She sits back down in her seat and proclaims, “Wayne is the lone voice of sanity in a world gone mad.”

Melissa answers, “Wayne went crazy. This time he’s broken with reality for good.”

Brittany is about to dispute this, when she notices that Melissa isn’t looking her way; she’s looking into the eyes of Monroe, and Monroe is looking back. Perhaps it’s the pheromones generated by the two youngsters that has caught him, but Melissa is looking good – new hairdo, short and blunt, the latest eye treatment, and she’s lost a few pounds, worrying.

At the upstate restaurant, Donny and Ann are sitting side by side in a big booth waiting for their wild mushroom and mashed sweet potato appetizer. He’s reading:

The more the sister tried to shut her boyfriend up, the louder and nastier he got. Finally, the sister came around to the dead-beat’s side of the argument, turned on the suit, and blubbered, “When those kids start dying because their mothers can’t get them medicine, it will be your fault!”

Donny, you said Medicare’s been good to you. Well, Obamacare destroys Medicare. Medicare was a paid program, not a redistributionist’s dream. Somebody’s always got to pay. It’s just a trick if they tell you otherwise.

What’s more, it’s never a good deal if the government has an interest in your being dead. And that’s exactly how it is. If you’re alive, you’re asking for money to keep you that way. And there’s not going to be any money. We’re doing away with rich people, so who the hell is going to pay the bills?

“Good old Wayne,” says Ann, in a new, blue caftan, happily drinking someone else’s wine. “I wonder where he is.”

The beauty of virtuality. You can be in the next booth, or on the other side of the world.

Wayne is in New York. He figured it was stupid to leave the country, that he could live in a cheap hotel – he found one – keep going to work where they couldn’t care less about where he lived. Child support, alimony? He’s doing his family a favor spending his money on separate quarters.

This is the former land of Stop and Frisk. Not something a Libertarian like Wayne would like. There’s such a thing as rights, you know. But rights only work in a civilized society. Cities are war zones.

But let’s get out of the early-cold Northeast, where it’s been freezing, and snowing, and windy, and drop in on Doreen and Billy, who are enjoying a California Thanksgiving.

Billy and Doreen haven’t read Wayne’s message. They’re in a retreat, with a band of Tibetan Buddhists who believe in discipline, but also in pleasure. They used to live in New York, where they drank alcohol and coffee, but shunned marijuana because it wasn’t legal. Since they do most of their business on line, they moved to California, and like everybody else who wants to, have prescriptions for marijuana for various illnesses, real and imagined; it’s all the same to the doctor, and all the same to the drug.

Doreen’s sister is their guest. And Doreen and Billy are her guests.

“It will ruin your appetite” does not apply to little chocolate tarts laced with oil of marijuana that the acolytes have purchased and are sharing at the party. And nobody’s looking at the kids. They’ve been told what it is, and of course they wouldn’t touch it.

The rules are strict. No cell phones at meals. And this meal is going to last all day and far into the night. Let’s get out while we can.

Finally, someone at the winery gets the message. Natalie is picking up her parents’ mail. She’s all alone in the closed shop, watching the story of Thanksgiving on television. The Indians, the Pilgrims, the sharing, the tolerance… all that jazz. And she reads:

So Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. And don’t forget the lesson of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims tried Socialism – the fruits of their labor belonged to the community at large. Nobody did a lick of work and they almost starved to death. If they hadn’t come to their senses, seen what was happening, and restored private property, you wouldn’t be chowing down together now.

“Hmmm”, Natalie says to herself, “I never heard that.” She takes a nice long toke from the bong she’s brought into the big room, and wonders what else she doesn’t know.

Ringing of the Division Bell

Hi Guys,

I left this morning. After the returns came in. Doreen thought I was watching with Melissa, and Melissa thought I was watching with Doreen. I already had my bags packed and was watching the sport in a bar.

Bill De Blasio’s going to be mayor of New York, so New York is going back to the hell it came from under Dinkens. No more walking in the park. You’re gonna get mugged. Always have a twenty in your pocket if you’re coming home at night. You’re gonna get mugged. It’s a cheap price to pay.

The criminals are laughing their heads off. They’ve already got their guns out of storage – the cops can’t hound them anymore. They were picking on minorities to stop and frisk, and that was deemed unfair, even though those are the people with the guns. It may be our fault for not recognizing their worth, but they’re still the ones with the illegal guns.

This is an open letter; I hope I don’t embarrass anyone. I want it to seem as if we are at a party, only I’m doing all the talking.

Let me give you an example of the kind of crap that finally made me quit. I’m sitting on the subway, listening to fragments of a conversation in the seat in front of me.

            “The Tea Party’s not about winning; they’re about venting. And grand-standing…”

            “It’s unforgivable that the government was shut down. Ted Cruz shut down the government for three weeks…”

            “They have deeply unpopular ideas. They’re going to the mattress to defend tax cuts for the wealthy, or to cut food stamps for the poor.”

            “They want to cut popular programs in ways that inflict lots of pain and don’t actually save money.”

            “They’re not offering smaller government they’re offering worse government. They’re unpopular populists. It’s bizarre.”

So naturally, I leaned over to enlighten these two ladies. The train was making a lot of noise, and I had to turn in my seat, but I did not loom over her, as she told the cop – not a real cop – some transit dude they called when the train stopped, who was standing out there on the platform.

Anyway, all I said was, “It would be bizarre if it were true, but that’s just propaganda you’ve been fed. I’ll bet you listen to NPR, and it’s a sure thing you read the Tiimes. The Republicans may be dumb, but they’re warm-blooded human beings, just like you, with a different slant on life.” I was nice as could be. “The government isn’t shut down. It’s unfunded. We are paying our obligations. We have plenty of money to do that. It was never in question.”

They didn’t say anything, but they were staring at me, so I took advantage of having their attention, to explain that the government shut down didn’t cost money, it saved money, that it was Obama who wanted it to be as painful as it could be so the Republicans would look bad, that the Tea Party is very popular with real Americans who want everybody to have the freedom to become rich, rather than to be kept like barnyard animals, and that it was the Democrats who shut down the government because they wouldn’t pass a bill that funded everything in the government but Obamacare, and that was because most Americans don’t want Obamacare, and the government forcing it down their throats is ignoring the will of the people, which this country is all about.”

After I got done repeating it for the so-called cop, out on the platform, you know what one of those women said to him? She said, with a hand on my arm, no less, “The next few years are likely to be hard for people like him,” like I was a mental case or something, and couldn’t understand what she was saying. “They’re going to lose all the time now. They’re going to lose legislatively. They’re going to lose electorally. They’ve already lost culturally.”

And there, my loved ones, she is absolutely correct. We’ve lost. They’ve won. At least they think they have. But they’ve lost the best country ever devised by mankind. A country devoted to man, rather than to man’s master. Man has always been ruled by masters. Except here. Now we have masters, too. And for some reason, they’re happy about it. They welcome their chains. They think their chains are golden. They think they can slip in and out of them. They’re going to be surprised.

I told the three of them, right there on the platform, that I was leaving the country. They wished me luck, and we all parted friends.

Not so with the guy on the stool next to me. We were drinking beer, and, I thought, having a good discussion, when suddenly, he turns on me and says, “You arrogant, know-it-all! And so self-righteous! The Tea Party, Hitler, and the Unibomber all in one!” I think it was my reply to the info-babe (who was talking about Ted Cruz) that set him off.

Let’s leave Wayne and take a look at his handiwork. He sent a long message, by old-fashioned e-mail. We’ll snoop around the neighborhood and look over the recipients’ shoulders as they encounter it.

Doreen had an appointment with Dr. Wise, and didn’t check her e-mail this morning, but the good doctor did. He has to. Suicidal patients could be trying to reach him. He’s reading to Doreen from his desk-top computer – a message from another client. Unheard of, and often done.

“I can’t sleep with someone who won’t think. It’s no better than masturbating.” At this, there’s a sharp intake of breath on Doreen’s part. Masturbating! With the likes of her next to him? And he puts it in a letter he sends to everyone she knows? The pig!

The good doctor is watching her face, and is quite satisfied with his decision to read it out loud to her. She’s the one patient he wishes would have “transfer” issues. He’d take her up on it. Plenty of psychiatrists believe it’s the best way for patients to work through the problem. Give them what they want. They’ll soon tire of it. Shrinks are only human, and that’s what they find out. With nowhere else to go, they begin to trust themselves.

The doctor has work to do, bringing out Doreen’s latent hatred of everything Wayne, and establishing himself as the bringer of peace via revenge. We move on.

Melissa has just opened her laptop at the kitchen table where her hands start to shake, and she spills her coffee as she reads, “My wife and family will be better off without my income. You know what to do, Melissa. Go right on down to Government Central, register your newly single state, and start letting good old Uncle Sam support you and your big baby.”

Steve picks it up on his phone, over his first coffee of the day in the student lounge, and gags over that “big baby.” But it’s going to get worse. “Yes, Stevie, my boy, yes, you’re still Stevie, still a little boy. You’ve got no mind of your own! Spouting your mother at me all the time. (Wayne doesn’t know that to his mother, he spouts his father; it’s worse than he thinks.)

“And what the hell are you doing in that half-assed college of yours, taking a course in Communism. OK, it’s cheap. But now you’ve got a chance to make it even cheaper. Get out. Go support your mother and save her from having to get on line to steal from the genuinely poor who need those food stamps. Even with the big screens and cell phones, there still are some people with no food. Get off your ass, my boy, and try being a man instead of a bigger baby.”

Woo! That’s a father talking?

Steve spots Brittany, looking a little haggard as she drinks her own first cup of the day. She’s fiddling with her phone, but he knows there’s nothing on hers that’s as interesting as what’s on his.

“Hey,” he says, “listen to this,” and continues reading. “When you go to college you get stupid. They take away your common sense.”

Brittany puts down her phone. “That’s good! That’s good!” she says. “Keep going.” Steve reads on. “They become drunks. Not you, of course. You had a proper upbringing at the winery. They become drunks because they don’t learn how to drink socially. They just learn how to drink. It used to be by the time freshman year was over, almost everyone was of drinking age. Now, it’s not until you’re ready for graduation, or after. Kids get out of school without having learned to hold their liquor in civilized company. That is a severe handicap.”

“Who is this guy?” Brittany asks.

“My father,” Steve says.

“Your father! Read me more.”

He sits down next to her, stretches out his legs, and lets his father woo her. “People are not participating in making the country better, and our rulers are not allowing the will of the people, which is the House of Representatives, to be heard. We have taxation without representation, because a lot of our representatives don’t listen to us, and the ones that do aren’t listened to by the big boys.

The people who have taken over won’t allow checks and balances to work. The House is supposed to stand in the president’s way when he becomes dictatorial. The whole entire idea of the goddamn Constitution was for the independent states to get together and form a government to build minimal protection against foreign foes, but never get the upper-hand with its own people. Obama is exactly what the Constitution was meant to guard against.”

“Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Brittany is standing. “You’ve got to read this to Monroe. I insist.” She takes his cup and they go up to his office. She’s the boss. She’s four years older, and an official part of the faculty. Plus, he’s kissed her. He follows like a puppy. Monroe is behind his big, ornate desk that has as many curlicues as his hair. He, too, is sipping America’s drug of choice.

Monroe and his grader have become quite chummy. They had to. She’s got a little nest in a corner of his office, and they’ve had a few “governmental” discussions, kept civil because of the man-and-a-maid situation.

“Professor,” she says, “you’ve got to hear this.” Steve picks up where he left off. “The strange thing is that even when we see how bad it is, when it’s there in pubic view how bad it is, if the press doesn’t report it, people don’t believe what they see around them with their own eyes.”

“That’s what I was telling you,” Brittany pleads with Monroe. “People don’t know what’s going on. We have no more free press. Just the big lie.”

She gives him an exasperated look, and he gives her a blank one. He’s not going to argue with her in front of a student.

“Oh, go on,” Brittany prods Steve, who doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. His gonads have taken over, and led him to this place where he’s giving his father a go at his professor.

He reads, “You don’t start to build a supermarket by upsetting every apple cart on the block. None of this is supposed to be about winning elections. It’s supposed to be about making the country work. The Republicans are sick that they didn’t win the presidential election. And even though they have the House, they’ve decided they’re going to abandon the very things that gave them control of the House, because they think if they do, they’ll win an election three years from now. Ted Cruz, who did what his voters wanted him to do, who expressed his real, avowed opinion, shared by half the country, is vilified.”

Brittany starts applauding. She nods in encouragement to Steve, who keeps reading.
 

“And Obama is happy to be a destroyer. His view of the future is very similar to thinking that virgins await you in the next life. This life doesn’t matter… it’s the next life. Ditto America. We’ll kill it off to make a new one. It doesn’t matter how bad we make things now. Heaven awaits.

“Nobody is concerned about the intrusion on privacy, that the government will have all this data. They know more about your life than you do. They know things you don’t even realize. That you favor vanilla and have a predilection for artificial sweeteners. They know everything you eat, everything you put on or in your body. What the doctor didn’t tell you, what your boss wrote up on you, what your wife wrote to her lover about you, every bit of gossip that ever passed through cyber-space with your name on it, they’ve got access to, and now they know how to use it.”

Monroe is aroused. “Who wrote this garbage?” he asks.

“His father,” Brittany says proudly. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

What a sour smile that is on the professor’s face.

Wayne didn’t send the letter to any kid but his own. However, he sent it to his good friends, Donny and Ann Harris. Their computers sit side by side at the big table when there isn’t company, and they often read their e-mail to each other.

“Listen too this!” Ann commanded, and her tone was so imperative that Natalie, sitting on the floor behind the big bar, looking for boots on the Internet, tips down her phone to listen:

“What happened to you guys?” her mother reads. “Don’t you remember being out at the log when we were kids, smoking homey (remember how good we thought it was? Now you couldn’t even get a buzz from it) talking down the government? You were so smart then. What happened to you? Before, you knew government was the enemy. Now you’re making excuses for it. You’re still going to the barricades, but you’re on the wrong side. How the hell did you get there?”

Smoking buddies, was the most interesting aspect to Natalie. She thought her parents never touched wine’s rival… and anti-government? That she could not imagine. They worshipped Obama – at least her mother did. Her father was beginning to have doubts.

“What do you think of that!” her mother asked her father, who was slow to answer, then said, “Maybe he‘s got a point. I thought it was the Republicans who were bad, but maybe it doesn’t matter which party it is. Look what’s happening with Obamacare.”

“That’ll work itself out,” his mother said. “I’m sure even Medicare had problems when it first started up.”

“Not like this, it didn’t!” Her father was warming up. “This is never going to get fixed. It’s not just a technical glitch. They can’t get people to behave and do what they want them to do. People are too smart to co-operate, when their instincts tell them it’s not in their own best interest. Young people don’t want to buy insurance they don’t need so they can pay for some old codger hooked up to machines for his last stay at the hospital. And surprise, surprise, they aren’t!” Here he cackles. “It isn’t going to work!”

Now don’t get hysterical, Donny. Your daughter is crawling away, so you won’t know she was eavesdropping. Eavesdropping isn’t nice, Natalie.

Later in the day, when school is over, she’s going to repeat it all to Billy the Kid, who has become very interested in state’s rights since he met a girl from California who told him her parents buy marijuana bars to eat before they go to concerts. He has been mulling the inconsistencies, and feeling short-changed. He doesn’t like being governed, and he pretty much isn’t. Still, he knows it’s dangerous to do anything illegal, and he’s plotting to get his mother to move to California. He’s a sharp kid, but he doesn’t know that he’s already attracted official attention. Let’s hope his mother gets him out of there before the government takes it into their own hands.

But back to Wayne. Yes, he is coming to the end of his rant. “I go to a psychiatrist, and I find out that there’s no sense in my talking to anybody who disagrees with me. So there’s no sense hanging around, since there’s no one I can talk to.

“I love all you people, but what does it mean to love people who have no use for what you think? I have come to the conclusion that to be decent, life for me here has to be a matter of hiding my real feelings and thoughts. That, Dr. Wise, seems unhealthy. I have to go where there are people who have common sense. Common sense isn’t a plant that grows here anymore.”

Don’t call us; we’ll call you.

Later,

Wayne Wright (not Wayne Wrong).