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).
