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.
