Wayne is a wounded warrior. His closest ally, Caesar, thinks no more of his political prowess than do his closest enemies – wife, mistress, shrink… everybody would like him, please, to shut up. So he has. And he’s miserable. Everybody can see it, and according to their nature, have taken an attitude toward him.
Like a wet noodle, they pick
him up and drop him where he falls. He bends, he flops, he goes through
motions; the shapes he takes are graceful, because they’re random and have no
mind behind them.
His mind has fled. It’s sick
in bed somewhere deep inside his skull, hoping some good medicine will come and
take away his malady. He’s in mourning. His country is being given over to its
enemies. The Iranian big-wig has announced to his people that the world powers
have surrendered to Iranian will. They are now free to build their nuclear
bombs, as they have been doing all along, and with them they will do whatever
they damn please. Obama has made a deal, spitting in the face of Congress who
did not want this and, in fact, wanted further sanctions. Here, even some of
the Democrats opposed him. They are after all, still Americans.
Obama… never was, and never
will be. Brought up in Muslim schools, tutored from an early age by Communists.
Taught that what’s good for the world is the downfall of America. That’s what
he’s here for, and that’s what he’s bringing about.
He says he has a pen and he
has a phone, and we are not going to wait around for legislation. This is what
we in America used to call “dictatorship”. He’s ended representative democracy.
The “house of the people” no longer has a voice. We are now governed, not by
laws, but by innumerable executive edicts and unfathomable executive agency regulations.
Yes, well, let’s get out of
Wayne’s head, and into his body, which is stretched out naked on a bed, being
oiled by a statuesque beauty, also naked… (Aren’t you glad you didn’t stop
reading?) who, straddling his back, is sweeping her long, dark hair, out of its
bun and down, rhythmically across his neck, as she kneads his shoulders. He
groans, and she puts pressure on the front of his right shoulder, to turn him
over. He complies, weightless and amenable, flexible and without will. He finds
himself looking into her fine brown eyes, seeing colors he never before
noticed. And seeing nothing else.
“Wayne,” she says, wiggling a
little, in case there’s someone inside him who can take a hint. The patient
lifts his hand and gently runs his fingers down her cheek. He looks lovingly
into her eyes, and thinks, “Liberals are sweet, but they don’t understand
money. The country’s in big economic trouble. It needs money. Why won’t they go
to the dread Republicans, whose crime is making money, and ask them how to do
it, instead of going to the people who are always complaining that they can’t
make money, and asking them to please try again, and again, and again?”
Right here in his lover’s
bed, with her long, strong legs squeezing him, and her more than amazing
breasts jutting their perky nipples right in his face, Wayne is beginning to foresee
that to talk the talk would mean to walk the walk. If he adopts their rhetoric,
if he accepts that it’s about what they think it’s about, he has to give
up his principles. He has to concede. And he can’t. Because the country is
going to hell, and they’re taking it there.
He raises both hands and a
breast moves into each one. Big, more than he can handle. He spreads his
fingers, to receive the bounty, but it’s automatic, like catching a ball. What
he’s thinking is, “People like being part of the crowd. If you’re with a bunch
of people all saying something, you say it too. And if you say it, you’ve got
to believe it, or it won’t be any use. That’s what herds are about.”
And it’s not what he’s about.
He’ll render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and go back to being who he is.
Ever since New Year’s Eve, when he made that resolution to shut his mouth, both
his women have been trying to stick their tongues in it. There’s either a
competition, or a co-operative movement.
He’s sick of them both. They’ve
been fawning over him, making him feel like an invalid. He has nowhere to go
for respite. He vaguely remembers that girl (What was her name?), the grader,
Steve’s friend, talking to him over lobster, or was it salad, at the long table
that night. He can’t remember what she said. He knows it fired him up for a
minute, and that’s when he made the resolution, and turned away from her. How
rude is that?
Suddenly, he’s impatient to
get out from under this Amazon, and seek the skinny, stringy blonde, the
thought of whom now springs up under and then into Doreen, whose face brightens
as – he doesn’t know which – she’s won the competition, or done her sister a
service.
She finishes him off, and
like a good nurse, covers him with a blanket, and happily leaves him to his
contented sleep. But Wayne is neither contented nor sleepy and when the bedroom
door closes behind her, he dresses, as quietly as he can and slips out.
He’s in his car, driving to
the college, where his search will start. The weather has been crazy,
alternating winter and spring. One day it’s green, and the next day it’s white.
Today it’s white lined with green.
He’s on the prowl, but only
for one particular prey, that rare commodity, a female who understands his viewpoint,
who shares his beliefs. It’s his brain that needs release, not his body, though
the release of his body seems to have triggered his flight. Which came first,
the chicken or the egg?
As he drives up into the
hills, past the striped green and white fields, he’s thinking about his loving
Liberals, and how they’re ready to risk American civilization, and maybe that
of the world, because “there must be a better way,” when ours is the best way
yet found. They don’t realize that when the dam is breached the results are not
slow and calm – there is a crashing flood. Downfall and overthrow are not
pretty processes. Revolutions are never glorious. They’re bloody and awful. The
hate engendered doesn’t dissipate for centuries. If ever. It’s hard for Wayne to
believe that it’s happening here, in his lifetime.
Well, our boy is getting
morose again, and we’re going to let him continue without us, while we look in
on Dr. Wise, who has just received a phone call from a patient who was crying
and needed to unburden herself to a professional. A man he had told her not to
take home with her, disappeared from her house minutes after they did the dirty
deed.
One thing he both hates and
appreciates about his profession is the necessity to rise above it all, and
speak as if he had no feelings, no predilections, no desires of his own. He
hasn’t seen Doreen since the New Year’s Eve party which he attended only to
protect and comfort her.
He didn’t understand why
people got excited about the New Year. That particular night wasn’t any more or
less significant to him, but he knew, from years of practice, that it was very
important to most everyone else. He would have preferred to celebrate the New
Year by treating it the same as every other night. And he should have, for all the
good it did him. He felt like an unnecessary appendage whose bandage Doreen had
to change every half hour, while she lavished her attention on the man on her
other side.
He was more than a little
miffed at his patient, and remembers that girl, Brittany, trying to make
conversation with him. What had she said? She’d been talking to Wayne about
German doctors, and it had sent his fancy to the state of medicine in Germany,
to their hospitals, which he’d seen, that were like hotels with parks, and the
operations they performed that were so far in advance of everything here – science
fiction. He didn’t manage to hear what her point was.
But then, that academic,
she’d turned to him, and tried to make him defend Obamacare, which wasn’t fair.
As anyone can see it’s taking away options and diminishing what people can get,
all in the name of equality. The point is, after the suffering, will things get
better? The suffering is already here.
He knows, because his
patients are calling him up in hysterics when they find out the policy they
bought is one that does not include him. They don’t want a different doctor. But
they can no longer afford him. It’s beginning to look like the search for
equality is a downward journey, and we only reach our goal when we’ve all hit bottom.
This is actually making the
good doctor angry, and he’s wondering in whose name and by what authority can
anyone come along and demonize inequality. Inequality is the engine that
creates wealth. It is the ambitious, perhaps greedy, people getting ahead and
dragging the rest of society up with them, people with energy to burn, and
imagination to create, who are responsible for our heightened quality of life.
And the poor? Jesus said the
poor will always be with us. Well, he can not help but see that the Obama
administration has assured this. They have defined poverty to be the bottom 20
percent of American households. Even if, miraculously, everyone were able to
live in luxury, there would still be a bottom twenty percent.
Dr. Wise can not stand
nonsense, and this fooling with the language is beginning to make him sick. Inequality
is the way of nature. You would think that nature-loving Liberals could see
that, and they would be able to if they weren’t taken in by words. It can’t be
helped. If you grow thousands of tomatoes, some will be better and some will be
worse. It’s the same with people, as he well knows, because he knows people.
Half his practice is freeing
his patients from words, from ideas. Mao, Fidel, Hitler, Stalin, brought real unhappiness
and destroyed a huge percentage of the population in the name of an idea. Get
rid of the rich. The rich Jews, the rich Bourgeoisie, the rich Americans. Take
what they’ve got; give it to the poor. Only the poor never get it. The buck
stops here, with the government. Nobody but the rulers can get ahead, and that
they do, truly, on the backs of the people.
A semanticist will tell you
these socialist ideas are null because they embed contradictions. But you don’t
need a semanticist to see that “from each according to his ability” leads to
the slave mines where you work till you drop. How else to determine “ability”? “To
each according to his need”? Who determines what need is? The government? You’d
find yourself with very few needs. The individual? Practically the definition
of “conflict of interest”.
He’s even taken a new dislike
to Lennon. Not Lenin, but Lennon. “Imagine no possessions.” Yes, John, you imagine
it. Eating on the sidewalk, shitting in the gutter. Like animals without the
brains they were born with. No, he can’t buy it.
The good doctor is none too
happy with the turn of things, and he’s not a man to let himself be tricked. Envy
and jealousy are being rewarded in order to tear down what we’ve got, to “build
anew.” Political pathologies are all based on envy. We’re already addressing it
in our schools. You can’t have scores in games, everybody gets trophies, nobody
is allowed to be better than anybody else.
We now have 3 unhappy people.
Isn’t anybody feeling good?
Let’s skip on over to Caesar
King, who’s preparing for Martin Luther King Day. We can find him at the
college, in the student lounge, where we have had so many good times. Everything
is in chaos here for the big whoop-de-do tomorrow. There isn’t anybody who goes
up against King – Martin Luther, that is – and Caesar is going to take full
advantage of that.
The NFL playoff game is going
on high on a wall at one end of the room. Big audience, mostly male, drinking Coke
and eating bagged snacks, getting excited, raising up in shouts or groans… and at
the other end of the room, the band is setting up for tomorrow when there is
going to be a celebration… of guess what… the racial unity that Martin King
dreamed of. Racial unity. Not what we’ve got now, but what we were on the way
to when the Dems decided it wasn’t happening fast enough, and they’d give it a
great, big shove in the wrong direction, just to get people thinking about it
again.
The show will be a Bob Marley
tribute. Not rap, but Reggae will represent the brothers and sisters, because
Rick Zapata is in charge here, and he’s a friend of the family from a long time
ago when he lived in Florida and shared Bob’s sensibilities, and a lot of his
ritual herb.
Caesar has been quietly
assembling the pieces of his project. It’s Rick who applied for use of the room
and volunteered the services of Caesar, who stood by, hat in hand, patiently
awaiting the thanks of the bureaucrat in charge who asked nothing about his
politics, but assumed, from his color, that he knew them.
Brittany and Steve are
watching the game. They’ve made up, since she refused to go to Zapata’s with
him New Year’s Eve. She came eventually, and it was flattering that she’d had
to struggle to get there. Even if the struggle was with herself.
Not far from the screen,
Professor Monroe is sweetening up a sweetie with talk about his lack of
interest in violent sports, and the threat they pose to innocent people who
don’t know how dangerous they are. He’s full of statistics about concussions
and suicides, and also full of himself, which the sweetie can detect. Poor
Monroe. So good-looking, and so not-looking-good. The sweetie tells him that
this is a duel between two gods, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, and that these
are two of the most desirable men on Earth. So much for the egghead.
Speaking of looking good,
here comes Wayne, invigorated from the cold, filled with speeches, stomping the
snow off his feet like a good boy, no matter how much of a hurry he’s in,
looking around to see if she’s here, because if she isn’t, he doesn’t know
where to look, and THERE SHE IS! Under the big screen, looking up at the game.
He makes right for her. He’s
got a million things to say. He’s been preparing all the way over in the car. He
wants to fill her in on everything he’s got in his head right this minute. Let’s
look into his grey matter, and see what it is.
Obama and the Democrats are
thwarting our rules. We’re losing America. The Republicans don’t represent the
people who elected them. For all of them, their livelihood, their power, depends
on how much they get to spend.
If their business is addressing
problems, it is not in their interest that there be no problems. Some 90% of
Americans have expressed no confidence in Congress. Our “representatives” feel
the need for black boxes for cars, so they’ll know where we are every second,
for smart meters so they know and ultimately control when we’re cooking or
drying laundry. Terrorists aside, they’re happy that NSA is checking calls, e-mails,
and texts. In the information age, it is even more true that knowledge is
power.
Through it all, while the
state’s tentacles reach out, we’re losing jobs, homes, health care, and worse,
the concept of personal preference.
Okay! He’s reached her, the
ideas in his head throbbing to get out. He puts a hand on her shoulder. She
turns. She sees who it is. She smiles. They’re beaming at each other, when a
voice at her side says, “Hi, Dad.”
