I have received recently my latest issue of the AARP’s magazine, though I have no recollection if I did anything, except the obvious, to get into this organization.   And as always I am subject to that certain rage, that grows a little stronger each time, at the depiction of those carefree seniors, beautifully dressed and expensively coifed, pursuing expensive leisure, or working at a “whole second career” with the same earnestness and assumption of humanity’s deep approbation with which they approached their first.  This picture, now carefully drawn and slowly being filled in with luxurious detail, has color added by the constant ads on TV from folks offering to manage our wealth.  “People told you your dreams were impossible” intones Dennis Hopper, looking fit and trim as if he’d never smoked a doobie in his life.  “You were the generation that made all the difference” someone else overvoices in soothing tones, as a band plays something by the Stones or Beatles or Doors.  “Look at Tina,” crow the magazines, “Still vibrant!”  “Tony Bennett!  Smooth!  Wise!  Ageless!”   Or we find how Mr. and Mrs. Average Joe just love their wonderful life in Cape May or Branson or – dare we say it? – in their own home town!

Articles are served up like warm soup to soothe our imagined worries; how can we keep those lovely homes at the shore and also afford that lovely cruise?  Sally Field sympathizes with women who must “set aside time to take a pill every week!”   And of course every picture, every word, every ad and article panders to the one aspect of our generation which has never been dented or breached, our vanity.  How did people live before we came along?  Whatever will folks do after we are gone, if such a thought is even possible?   We must be in the End Times; otherwise the Earth would have to stumble along without – well, without US!

All the time, what I see being carefully crafted is this picture of the Golf-Playing Seniors who (goes the unwritten subtext) are doing all this on our hard-earned Social Security taxes.  A careful, though probably unplanned, campaign is arising everywhere to replace Welfare Mothers as the cause of every tax we pay, every wish we, the working stiffs, must forego, with Golf-Playing Seniors.   Look how they are living in subsidized luxury paid by for by us who are worried about filling our gas tanks each week.  That one-pill-a-month that Sally is urging on the old folks, we workers are paying for that pill.  I really can’t understand why AARP is so busy stoking that resentment that is brewing; it can only be that the feeling of entitlement that has dogged this generation since birth has led them to monthly publish a magazine that might as well be called “Let Them Eat Cake.”  Those folks in the pictures and in the ads are little Marie Antoinettes playing in Le Petite Trianon, only instead of pretending to be dairymaids, they instead play at having to down-size, to cut back to only two homes.  Quelle horreur! 

Once in a while, into the picture so brightly painted there does indeed slink an asp or two; people tell us how they cope with a spouse’s onset of Alzheimer’s or the like.  In the half dozen treatments of these situations which I have seen, the sufferer freely admits he or she has the disease (unlike any case of which I have known personally), and gratefully and willingly adheres to all the loving little stratagems the healthy spouse has put in place; the healthy spouse mentions “later”, yes, later, might be out there, but that is not “now” when all is taken care of by love and companionship and goodwill.  If an illness is instead a physically limiting one, then the nonetheless-happy couple spend a few tens of thousands to refit the house, to bring the bedroom or bathroom downstairs, to install a lift and so on.  And there is wonderful Marcia or Maisie or Louise, the aide that comes in every day and is just like one of the family.  (At the funeral a few years back, of a cousin who died single at an age well over 90; the cousin’s niece in talking about the difficulties of her last days, said to me and Mom, “Well of course she had aides.” And I saw my own shock reflected in my mother’s face as our jaws dropped a foot; we both thought she was saying, “Of course, she had AIDS.”)

The problem for me is that I don’t know many of these people who need their wealth managed or whose greatest problem is where to buy the retirement home, or second home.  I think these magazines, like history, is written by the winners for the winners about the winners.  The old people I know are often – usually – single, either from widowhood or long ago divorce or single all along.  Most are deeply, achingly lonely.  Those who have children are desperately trying to lighten the burden on those children by pretending to a self-sufficiency that they do not really possess, or they have to live with those children in too-small quarters.  Many are trapped by their infirmities, not having the odd twenty thou to put in the lift or the bathroom downstairs.  Roof leaks go unpatched as houses deteriorate for lack of the money to fix them.  Since the people I know live in rural areas, they often do have houses, about which they are constantly worried; I can only imagine the plight of those many urban dwellers who must make do in rentals on the same amount of money. 

There comes a time in most lives when one reaches the point where things are not going to get better.  There will be no next job, no promotion, no more strokes of luck, or payoffs from hard work; no move to a new place – at least not a voluntary one that represents an upward change in circumstances.  Whatever we have today is as good as it is going to get; tomorrow is far more likely to be worse.  And while there certainly are those who are having their wealth managed by these smooth advertisers, the majority of the elderly are having their lives ‘managed’ by the wealth they don’t have.  Those who are depicted in the pages of AARP’s magazine and Dennis’ ads probably assume that the desperate are a small willful minority who refused to be prudent during their ‘productive’ years and who have only themselves to blame – just as many of the well-paid folks I meet have stories they are eager to share about people ahead of them at the checkout paying for luxuries and sweets with food stamps.  Probably everyone they know is doing pretty A-OK.  But the old people I know were often people who worked their asses off.  They are people who believed that the companies they worked for would keep their promises, as companies once did.  Who knew that the companies and the governments now run by people as dishonorable and greedy as ourselves would prove equally dishonorable and greedy?  These elderly are often  are women who stayed home with the kids as women usually did when I was young, trusting that by doing the right thing, the expected thing, the religiously sanctioned thing, they’d be able to rely on family or their husbands’ pensions or even Social Security to see them through the “golden” years.  But who can plan for catastrophic illness, reverses in fortune, early death of spouses; and even were one to be as prudent and foresighted as possible, if one earns little to begin with, how can one put away nearly enough to see oneself through disaster?   As people who are able to live the magazine lives manage to increase their wealth by purchasing cheaper foreign-made products, what do these folks assume is happening to the man or woman fifty years of age who has heretofore been manufacturing or servicing or selling the American versions of these items?   A second career in the arts? 

None of these realities are allowed to creep into the glossy pages of AARP’s monthly dose of good cheer.  These are the best years of our lives, cry the subjects of their articles.  Beaver’s mom and Bud and Betty’s Dad have done their jobs, their picturesque children have dutifully supplied two grandchildren apiece and come by for Thanksgiving.  Meanwhile, that nest isn’t empty; it is full of opportunity!  After all Beaver’s Mom speaks jive, she can always find a fulfilling second job.  I have the sneaking suspicion that nearly everything I read is being written by Eddie Haskell.   I wonder if AARP might be planning companion magazines called Cancer Is Fun or Wheelchair Whimsy.

At our last class reunion a few years ago, a vote was taken and we decided that the fiftieth would consist of a cruise.  I was all for it.  But now I am beginning to wonder how many of the class we cut out of the festivities by the sheer cost of the event.  I remember when I was in college and some dance was coming up with a $4.50 price tag and I said I would not be going because I couldn’t afford it, my roomie, who was from a large and relatively poor family (but nowhere near as poor as mine) would say, “Just ask your Mom to send you the money.”  There was no way in Hell my Mom could send me that money.  Even if it were the money to keep me alive, it would have been a real sacrifice.  Only a handful of kids at that college really understood that the word ‘only’ did not belong in front of the phrase ‘a dollar’.   I had a ball in college; I am not at all complaining.  I am merely making the observation that there are a lot of people who are much poorer than one might imagine, given that they appear to be the same age as oneself, or in the same circumstance as oneself.  At the time we voted for a cruise, we weren’t thinking of those who might be left out; just of how we could best enjoy time together.   

A lot of people give themselves a lot of latitude because they came from poverty or disadvantage of some kind.  We imagine we are still that guy or that woman who had only a single pair of shoes purchased from Good Will, or none; that we understand, that we have stayed in touch.  But we are not the same as the folks who had less inherent intelligence, or less talent or less luck, whose interest was in the wrong profession, who believed the wrong teachers, who had parents that undercut ambition rather than fostering it.  We are not, when we are earning $70,000, who we were when we earned a tenth of that or less.  There is a profound difference between the person who grumbles at paying a dollar for the candy bar that used to cost a nickel, and those who simply can no longer afford to buy it, even by cutting back somewhere else.  The sharp edges, the hopelessness has worn off the picture; we look at the folks left in our old world and think, “If they would only …”  If we had the good fortune to be above average in intelligence or in anything else, we forget that average means that half the folks in the land are on the other end of the equation, and in many cases it is not a matter of choices.  My folks owned their land; thousands of those who also had alcoholic fathers were not so lucky.  I was not like them in degree of desperation; but did I arrange that it would be so?  Maybe I had shared of the same sorrows, but I was never about to be put onto the streets.  I was born in an area with great schools, again, not my doing.  I am not the same as someone who was born in an area with third-rate dangerous schools.  My former poverty may give me some insight into your current poverty, but I don’t really feel it anymore and I never will, unless (as seems increasingly likely) I tumble back – and even then I will have known hope for most of my life.  Sadly, many people seem to feel it gives them insight into their own superiority at having escaped, rather than an insight into the lives of those not so well off.  The most contemptuous toward the unfortunate, the most angry at any suggestion of sharing with less fortunate fellows I have known have been have been those who made it out of bad situations themselves.  There is really no difference between such folks and those in other lands who shrug off the beggared widows in the streets, whose only crime or improvidence was to marry a man who predeceased her in a land where the single woman has no hope. 

These “golden years” are pictured as Holden Caulfield’s meadow filled with playing children (just slightly older and greyer) with the ever-benign Catcher patrolling the perimeter.  But it is instead a meadow steadily filling with the younger and the stronger, whom we have imbued with our own self absorption and deep sense of entitlement.  And we have finally been crowded to the crumbling edge, the ground splintering beneath our feet, looking cautiously around at our aging fellows to see who has fallen, who remains. 

I am to have the old eyes renovated after all; it seems that there is an alternate procedure to LASIK which doesn't involve pumping the old orbs full of pressure.  Instead of having my eyeballs sucked out of their sockets, there is a process that achieves the same end by gouging at them in situ.  So all of Flooz’s dire thoughts as expressed in her recent comments when it appeared the whole thing was off, are front and center in my thoughts.  Monday is the day, and I have this feeling I should be racing around my demesne, gazing on each plant or rock with a fond intensity in order to engrave them in my memory, in case the worst should happen.  I certainly am not one who cannot read the fine print, despite my poor eyesight, and who cannot see therein the quantity of omens and portents paraded out in sentences beginning with phrases such as, “In rare cases…”  or “A few patients may…”

Instead of gazing deeply upon the incidentals that illumine my visual life, and reading once again those yellowed and folded letters from my past, I am floundering about in a blurry haze because, in that way that Fate tends to make all of my most poignant moments comic and off-center, she arranged for me to drive away from work yesterday wearing, by mistake, my computer glasses which are scaled to see only that which is 1.87 feet from my gaze, rather than my bifocals which allow me to read well up close or to see anything beyond the nose of my car.  I realized this mistake when I was a mile from work, and I was too disheartened to return to make the switch.  So I drove home in a sea of uncertainly with only the thought to sustain me that if I were involved in a fiery three-car pile-up, I would be able to see the oncoming windshield clearly just 1.87 feet before I went though it.  I might not see what my face smashed into, but I would at least know what I had missed by 1.87 feet, a thought not as comforting as one might wish, unless I piled face first into a quantity of cotton confined within a steel barrel 3.74 feet in diameter. 

I did see this morning something that looked very like a deer sinuously oozing along the hedgerow to the west of my yard, looking for the more delicious bits which George has newly planted there.  This deer was even more indistinguishable from the landscape than could be entirely accounted for by my lack of optical hardware, because the music of hunting season has been sounding all about me since first I arose.  With each explosion I think, “Take that for my mangled yew hedge, deer!” or “This one is for my denuded dogwood.”  The invisible hunters would be astonished to know how fervently I am hoping that their larders will overflow with venison this winter.  Already I have heard more gunfire than I heard during the entirety of the First Gulf War, in the midst of which I managed to find myself living my daily life some years back.  At any rate, this deer actually managed to blend with the shrubbery in a way he (or she) would have disdained to do a mere week ago.  Before this week, these beasts added that extra drop of spice to their depredations by boldly sauntering across my stately messuage to munch the expensive plantings before my very eyes.  I’d get my own gun and license if I had a clue what to do with the bloody corpus delicti afterwards.  I have a feeling that there is something not quite comme il faut about a deer hunter calling Animal Control to remove the fruits of his success. 

I will be unable to read or watch TV or use the computer for several days after Monday’s surgery and I am pretty much at a loss for what I will do instead.  It is not like I have this wealth of hobbies or a warm circle of friends with whom to fill my days.  It is rather like being told I can retire, but that I will have to spend the leisured days with my hands tied behind my back.  Reading and watching, that is to say seeing, is pretty much what I do.  Don’t tell me I can start taking healthful walks or doing exercise or something like that; will I not be suffering enough without exercise being added to my burden?  I am considering contacting Guinness to see what the current record is for hours slept without a break.  My hopes of being prescribed quantities of Vicodin for my pain went unfulfilled; I was given a prescription labeled ‘for pain’; but is for something of which I have never heard heretofore, which I grimly suspect may be another term for aspirin which by its very Latinization quintuples its price. 

The end of warm weather, however belated, has brought into sharp relief this aboulia from which I have suffered since leaving Saudi a full eleven years since.  I can’t account for it; I just can’t get going at anything.  It just seems like oldness is rushing upon me as I fiddle and lie about.  Nothing much seems worth doing.  The thought of undertaking anything just conjures up a vision of an old fart doddering around a racetrack or daubing at a canvas or whatever.  I have always had a reluctance to undertake anything that I couldn’t imagine myself being great at.  It didn’t matter whether or not I achieved a high degree of excellence, just that I imagined I could.  I don’t like to do things just to do them.  I do not enjoy the process of doing things; I want to get to the outcome.  No matter how I have tried, I cannot just go walking; I must walk to something.  And then, once underway, no matter how beguiling the scenery and attractions along the route, I am soon in a mad rush to get there.  I once was moving from the Bay Area back to New York, with no particular need to reach journey’s end with any degree of haste.  I could have taken a week; I could have taken two months, so in that fond belief that I am about to become a person totally different from whom I am which overcomes me from time to time, I chose to make the trip a journey across Canada.  My first or second night was spent in Eugene, Oregon which appeared to be a pleasant sort of town, filled with young people being young; there were interesting-looking restaurants, and galleries and things of that nature.  Everyone seemed to be with someone else or, at the least, fetchingly and picturesquely sprawled in a shady nook with a meaningful book.  And all I could think of was that I was outside all the fun.  What are good food eaten alone or objects of art with no one there with whom to discuss them?  I nonetheless managed to maintain a certain pretense of leisure until I left the attractive British Columbian city of Hope, and then it became a pellmell rush to get to my destination; so much so that I accrued a speeding ticket from the Mounties – although to my disappointment, the officer was not mounted on a horse at the time of issue; it certainly seemed the least he could have done to enhance the experience. 

All my life I had seen places like Medicine Hat and Moosejaw on maps and had longed to see places with such alluring names.  And here I was in said Medicine Hat trying to find a place to eat quickly and get on with it.  It is just the way I am; I wish it were not so.  If I am going to smell the roses, they had damn well better be growing close by my motel window.  The benign description of this, I suppose, is that I am goal-oriented, but that is only true in travel.  At work, in sharp contradistinction, I am dilatory beyond imagining.  When seated before my work computer, were I to flash past the login page of MSN, such articles as “Lindsay’s 84 Minutes in Jail” or “Six Ways to Win her Heart” or “Bruins Hand Colts First Defeat” call out to me with an allure that would put the Sirens to the blush.  (Actually, I don’t know if there is such a team as the Bruins, or if they play the same sport as the Colts – I am just saying.).  But given leisure at home with nothing else to do, I would not even bother to read something like “Woman Eats Her Own Foot”.  At work I would do anything to keep from getting to the goal; outside work, I would hurry past Meryl Streep performing “Streetcar” in the nude on the sidewalk, in order to get to the Burger King at which I had decided to dine.  When it is my time, I don’t want to waste it by doing anything at all, and when it is their time, I want to snatch a wasteful minute or two anywhere I can.  If I were given a job where the boss never showed up at all, I imagine I could write the Great American Novel; so long as that was not the actual purpose of the job.  It occurs to me that I have the odd belief that doing anything whatever is wasting time, and that sitting around doing nothing in particular is enjoying myself, even though the brief experience of 65 years tells my head, if not my heart, that enjoying should involve some degree of feeling good or experiencing happiness in the process. 

What the Hell am I talking about here anyway?  It would certainly seem that nothing would suit me more than the doctor saying I should do absolutely nothing for a few days.  But by the very fact that that is what I must do, I am feeling all aggrieved that I can’t do any of the things that I would otherwise spend those days trying to avoid or bitching about. 

This whole eye thing is my way of taking a week off work without actually getting to enjoy it very much.  What was I thinking?  On the positive side, I will use up all those tax free dollars that I have been saving.  Maybe next year I can save twice as much and get my arm cut off. 

With that amazing ability of Serendipity to bring disparate and chance things together, the New Yorker published a brief poem that managed in eight lines to sum up in a rather wonderful way all that I have been thinking about lately, and much of what I said last week.  The poet is Robert Bly, and since I suppose there are all kinds of copyright issues, how about, Bob, if I go buy one of your books, if all your stuff is this good?  And not at the discount store?  At any rate, a river to my people as always, I shall pass it on:  the title is Wanting Sumptuous Heavens.

No one grumbles amongst the oyster clans,

And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.

Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want

Heaven to be, and God to come, again.

There is no end to our grumbling; we want

Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven.

But the heron standing on one leg in the bog

Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content.

Isn’t sumptuous a grand word?   And doesn’t old Bob have his eye on the ball? 

I seem to be already in the winter of my discontent and that bodes ill for, say, February, because now is still the middle of autumn by the calendar.  Don’t you wonder, when you hear a Shakespearian phrase like that, whether it sounded so grand and lofty when it was declaimed on the stage of the Globe, or whether – probably more likely – it sounded more commonplace, as if some one nowadays were to say, “We are in a world of trouble”?  Or something like that.  Wouldn’t it be cool to listen to something from Shakespeare or Chaucer or even Mark Twain and hear it as ordinarily as folks in their respective eras would have heard it?   If I could do that, I might actually read or listen to some of it occasionally. 

What gives rise to this whole discontent thing is that I was reading the New Yorker early this morning – the back section where they give brief reviews of current writing, and then I started an article on criminal profiling which talked about putting oneself in the mind of the perp, and I had just seen on the net that Norman Mailer died.  Things always swirl altogether and my case, always wind up as some form of “How can I make this about me?”  in a depressing way if possible, and today is no exception.  I fell to musing as I often do on what the novel that I will never write would be about, and how I could stay on one tale longer than a single morning, when I can rarely stay on one topic for the duration of a single sentence.  And it occurred to me that one thing that could give rise to any number of subplots and so on, would be a novel where someone average disappears, and the way in which real people might react to the disappearance.  I was thinking of just a ‘not there one morning’ type disappearance, not a ‘go out and say, “I’ll be right back”‘ or a murder or crime thing.  And this led me to thinking how it would be if that person were I. 

(And if you want to get started on your winter of discontent – how about his factoid from my weekend reading:  The city of Abu Dhabi has a population of 240,000 and the average worth if those 240,000 citizens is $17 million.)

My thought novel-wise was that through the various life impacts on, and reactions of, co-workers, friends, family, loved ones, casual acquaintances and so on it would become clear to the reader what the disappeared person was like, and equally that no one in the guy’s life had a clue what he (or she) was like.  This led me to two thoughts – one being the question whether what a person is ‘really like’ is the sum of how others see him – in short, how he behaves – or whether what he really is, is the internal person, the person he believes himself to be.  Are we most ourselves alone or in company?  I am a pretty strong believer that a person really is the external person.  If one steals he is a thief, regardless of the internal process by which he arrives at the act, views the act or justifies the act.  Abusive men often lure and retain their victims by displaying glimpses of the hurt little boy they imagines themselves to be.  All kinds of monsters are wonderful friends or something, and all kinds of sensitive poetic types drive their entire family to suicide.  This is something that I think about now and then, and today was one of those days. 

The discontent, though, arose when I noodled with the concept of the disappeared guy; how I would picture him and so on, and then how I would populate his world with people who were interesting, but real – if that does not reach beyond the paradoxical to the oxymoronic.  I made the fatal blunder of muttering to myself, “Well, for instance, what if I were to just not show up anywhere one day and forever after?”  It is interesting that I have a completely different take on answers to questions when I personalize them.  When I think, “What would a mother, a sister, a boss, a room mate or a friend do?” I have a completely different mental experience than if I ask myself, “What would Mom do?”  “What would Lucy do?” and so on.  I think there is a vast gulf in some people’s thinking (mine, for instance) between our thoughts on what people are like, and our actual experience what of people we actually interact with are like.  Among other things, this explains why most of us are adept at solving other people’s problems, but not our own.  And why we can imagine that President Putin is outrageous and unreasonable when he reacts negatively at our deploying missiles in Eastern Europe to defend ourselves, but we would be horrified and upset if he were to do the same in Mexico or Cuba.  People talk about walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes; but they don’t really do it very often, especially when the other guy is foreign or a threat of some kind, which is arguably when it would do the most good. 

Well, the problem that arose for me when I made myself disappear (so to speak) was that I realized the reaction would be pretty much no reaction at all.  My guess is that my boss might ask the secretary to try to get me on the cell the first day if it were a work day.  Fred, my cubemate might actually go by my apartment at noon if he knows where it is – he likes to walk at noon and I live a block away; he’d knock, and getting no answer, would report that I wasn’t home.  Also, Fred is the kind of person who reacts to the way he should feel about things, more than he reacts to the thing itself, or so it seems to me.  (Parenthetically, I find I am fascinated by Sally Field’s performance in Brothers and Sisters because she plays Nora Walker, who is one of those women who try to behave as she imagines a mother might.  She has to be excited by a grandchild, she has to obsess over the son in Iraq.  Of course there are people who genuinely do both of these things, but Nora always seems to be sort of mentally seeing herself react.  Nora drives her kids crazy, because they are always dealing with the image, not the person.  I’ve met people like that; they drive me crazy.  Nora is a woman who has no chinks in her armor - except, of course, those which the woman whom she imagines herself to be should have – well-insulated chinks they are indeed - because she knows instinctively what a mother, or wife or activist should feel for every occasion upon which that facet of herself is being impacted) .   

If I didn’t show up for two weekends running in Reedville, George might send an e-mail asking what was up.  After a month, if someone mentioned my disappearance to Lucy, who lives on the other side of the country, she’d say something along the lines of, “He always does something like this.” – and a week later, largely because she is closer to Nora Walker than one could wish, she’d call.  She’d tell George or Luke to keep her posted.  You, dear readers, would post about three hey, where are you lately posts among you and then chalk me up to the ‘bloggers only last a few months’, statistic.  Eventually the landlord in Smallville would clean out my stuff – a big difference in his case would be whether my car remained parked behind the house or not.  Actually come to think of it, where (or if) my car was found would make about a 90% difference to most everyone.  The real reaction in Reedville would begin when the mortgage was foreclosed and George had to move out.   Then there would be a general round of great irritation and mild mystification.  I doubt that anyone would call the cops, and if someone did, it would probably be the landlord.  As to friends, several would enquire of each other at widely spaced intervals if anyone has heard from me; the fact is most contact with all but one of them is initiated by me (partly this is because I have been wont to move about frequently, and contact info is often two states and two years behind)..  The one exception is my friend Emily in California who would be very agitated and, I guess, if I were to write the book, it would have to be about her. 

What is even more dismal, is that when I mentally started cataloguing the reactions of all these various folks, I actually realized I didn’t have a clue what they would think.  No one, of course, really knows what is in another person’s head, but if there is any degree of closeness, one usually can hazard a guess with some degree of accuracy.  I haven’t a clue. 

Anyway, all of this led me to thinking for a little bit that I really ought to join something or volunteer for something.  Not so someone would miss me, but because living a life where my existence or non-existence doesn’t make any difference to anyone (except Emily) is not really having a life at all.  I mean from my own perspective.  Periodically I reach this conclusion and then flounder in a sea of wondering what I might do, or what I could do and even what will I do.  Everything I think of seems too demanding (yeah, I know; that’s the point, but …), or too icky, or too complicated or it costs money I really need to save at this point.  Or something.  

After I wrote this, I read a most wondrous article on the new Atlantic by a former reporter who quit her job and moved to Afghanistan to see if she couldn’t actually help the folks there find alternatives to growing opium poppies.  There is actually fertile ground in that land for new ideas for making money, since for religious reasons many of the farmers would prefer to produce something other than poppies, but this preference is somewhat eclipsed by another idea they are fond of which is not starving to death.  My envy for this reporter is massive, and man, how I would love to do something like this.  (And the article is great on the US government initiative - was ever a word worse-chosen? - to effect the very same outcome, and the obstructions the reporter met in trying to work with USAID – for one thing, they preferred to help the farmers in one area that began with ‘H’, and she was helping in Kandahar – it gets even sillier…).  There is one very real bar to my doing something like this and it is not emotional or anything like that – it is a cold, hard fact, which I will not go into here.  Otherwise I would have been there yesterday; I love the Middle East and its farthest flung environs. 

I think I will go fall in the forest to see if I make a sound. 

There was a time within living memory, at least within the memories of such superannuated folk as myself who still have any of that faculty remaining intact, when one could have watermelon only during a two-month period during which these marvels were ripe here in the U.S. of A.  This was a time when one got dessert at the end of a meal occasionally; but certainly not every day.  One had cake rarely, when one’s mother felt like baking and icing it, usually on birthdays.  One got new toys even more rarely, and Christmas was a once a year wonder, the prospect of which could actually inspire one to behave angelically for as much as a month before.  Hallowe’en was a raffish day, celebrated by children only, that brought in more candy in a single evening than the entire sum of that which one had seen during the other 364 days of the year which preceded it. 

And I can remember thinking, “Oh, if only summer lasted forever, so I could have watermelon every day!” (as if my folks would buy it that often – a summer when one had watermelon twice was a summer to be remembered.)  And “Oh, if only it were always Christmas!”  Or “When I grow up, I will have cake every day; cake, hell – I’ll just have a big bowl of frosting!”  And “I never want to grow up; I want to have Hallowe’en every year forever!”  The wishes all boiled down, really, to something akin to “All I want is the frosting, every day, all the time, forever.”  And lo and behold; that is exactly what my generation brought about; I must not have been alone when I closed my eyes real tight and spun around three times and wished for frosting and candy and toys and watermelon all the time.  Because, mirabile dictu, all my wishes came true. 

Twenty-four hours a day, I can zip to my local market, which is – just for me! – open twenty-four hours a day and I will find watermelon.  In January – watermelon.  In April – watermelon.  In October and November and December – watermelon.  And it will have no seeds and it will be cut into bite-size pieces and, I suspect, any day now it will insert itself into my mouth and chew itself, saving my jaws the effort.  The suspicion that it doesn’t taste nearly as good as I remembered, after being shipped and stored and forced and whatevered is beside the point; I can have a lot of it all the time.  Hallowe’en?  Well, it has been taken over entirely by us old folks; houses are decorated, costumes – preferably risqué, but at least ironic – are worn by adults, parties are held.  As for the kids?  Oh no – too dangerous for them and quite possibly ungodly in the bargain.  By “dangerous” of course, we mean “too much fun for them and too little control for mom and dad”.  So the myth is perpetrated that things are different nowadays, the world is so much more dangerous – yadda yadda yadda.  And the whole point of Hallowe’en is lost; it is Disneyized into a wan and tasteless mess whose point is to show how creative Mom is, how much fun Mom is and – just maybe – make the point that you fat little indulged bastards just don’t appreciate how much Mommy and Daddy do for you.  Or it is morally improved, by collecting for UNICEF or collecting for the needy or whatever; lessons learned, and Mummy and Daddy dearest didn’t even have to put down the drinks long enough to teach them!  Because the point of Hallowe’en was the makeshift costumes gathered from the old ragbag and your parents’ closet – the kids were supposed to be the creative ones, not Mummy or some 12-year-old seamstress in China toiling for Wal-Mart.  And the point was to be out in the chilly, dark evening, wondering if there really are ghosts and wills-o’-the-wisp, and banshees, and headless horsemen and witches abroad on that night.  And the point was to soap the windows of mean old Mrs. Jones, and to try to avoid the big kids who might mug you for your candy and to dare to approach the door of Old Man West who was rumored to greet the adventurous with a shotgun loaded with rock salt.  And the point was that this was once a year – one evening, when you got enough candy to make yourself sick, and that you wouldn’t be seeing any more sweets until maybe Thanksgiving, but probably Christmas.  All through history there seems to have been a day or short period of days where the rules were reversed or relaxed and everybody behaved in ways that they would normally not condone.  There must be some widely sensed need for such a thing.

There is a sad, self-fulfilling quality to the misperception that it is so much more dangerous for kids nowadays.  There have always been predators – every town had at least one, and believe me the kids in the neighborhood – who used to talk to each other, rather then text some imaginary playmate halfway across the country, or be chauffered to a carefully screened playdate with some other child who is exactly like them in age, size, family status and love of jesus – knew exactly who these folks were.  Kids who got a big kick out of seeing how close they could get to irritable Old Man West and his rock salt ammo, had no desire whatever to get close to creepy old Mr Eastwood who was – well – creepy.  The vast majority of predators who are successful, if anyone cares to pay attention, are people whom the parents force the child to be with (clergy, teachers, Mom’s new boyfriend), not the strangers they try to force them to avoid.  The incidence of Amber alerts – children being snatched - is amazingly small when you realize how very many clueless kids there are; kids whose parents have banned everything that is too high, too fast, too thought-provoking, too much fun – er, dangerous – to teach the kid how to save himself or herself from anything.  I can’t even recall the last Amber alert in our area; the fact that the TV trumpets them across the nation when they occur anywhere has parents in Georgia in a panic when there has been an incident in Maine.  But the problem is, in a nation where everyone has dessert all the time, predators are no exception, and the community pressure or awareness or vigilance over each other’s children (which also allowed an offended neighbor to administer a good trimming to one’s errant children secure in the knowledge that all those children’s parents would do is mutter, “Hear!  Hear!” and send the kid to his room, or worse, for bothering the neighbors), the factors which once limited these predators’ activities are gone, these folks are as likely as the rest of us to feel that everyday is Christmas, and I can do what I want to all the time. 

And as for that popular NBC entertainment where masses of predators are lured to the homes of supposed children for the enjoyment of viewers everywhere, it is well to remember that the folks shown are not breaking into homes at night or lurking on playgrounds; they are responding to invitations from presumably clueless children and coming in through the front door.  There is a huge difference in degree of risk between people responding to proffered opportunities and folks making unprovoked attacks (and I am talking about a difference in risk, not a difference in culpability).  It is just a similar  huge difference as that among adults between men or women responding to flirting by married or should-be-unavailable adults, and the committing of forcible rape. The lesson is not that your kid is unsafe playing in the back forty with his or her friends; it is that maybe that computer in the bedroom isn’t such a good idea.  But, “Oh,” I hear, “you just can’t keep the kids away from those things.”  Oh?  I bet my folks could have; and so could every parent for miles around.  And what of the idea, which is accurate, that they will do it when the parents are not about, or at a friend’s house, just as we once sneaked a little TV-viewing when Dad was in anti-TV mode?  I must agree – they will.  And when that is the case, I suspect that these on-line romances with Hotstuff77 have a whole lot less time to evolve into meetings in empty houses.  There is no doubt that some kids will always fling themselves into the worst possible choices, which they will manage to do no matter what vigilance is exercised, but most won’t; and those who venture into every dangerous meeting they can think of are not about to be prevented by spoiling Hallowe’en or by keeping them from roaming the neighborhoods with the other kids.

But anyway, that was not what I started out to talk about.  I am talking about the opportunity to have dessert all the time.  I spoke last week about the dessertification of Time magazine; its devolution into gossip, opinion, lists and one-liners.  It is, of course, a reaction to what people want.  Who wants to read five pages on a difficult topic which has no easy solution when one can be amused in a humorous paragraph about some celebrity?  Everyone talks about ‘dumbing down’ like it is someone else’s doing and nearly everyone flocks to anything that is dumbed down (as do I).  It is all dessert.  We are no different now from those kids we were back then, who wanted Christmas every day or who scraped the icing off and ate it, and left the cake, because even cake was too much like real food to interest us.  We are a nation of fat people, not so much overfed as wrongly fed.  Fat and fat-headed. Few of us would have read the better books in school were we not forced to, when there were comic books around to entertain us; few of us will read books at all when the TV is available.  And it is much easier to tune in only to those shows that babble endlessly of what we already know and want to hear; or to ‘balanced’ debates where glib recyclers of cant from the two wings of every issue blather mindlessly, where we can yell ‘Right on!” at the one we agree with, and mock the caricature that the opponent presents, when in fact neither of these sock puppets will ever utter a single fact, let alone one we haven’t already heard a dozen times.  Politics is entertainment, the hair, the laugh, the witticism, the sound bite, the “Aha, gotcha!”  whenever the least nuance strays into a speaker’s remarks.  No one really wants anything new, they just want the same old thing to feel new.  We don’t want to learn something which might be difficult to fit into our already decided view of everything; we want to hear a new clever way to restate the old stuff in a jape we imagine will devastate those who disagree.  There will never be the “next Ronald Reagan” or the “next JFK” or even the next Pauly Shore; specifics do not recur; generalities do.  And thinking in the vein that demands the same exact thing over and over only allows us to miss what is available. 

It is all dessert; it is all icing and no cake.  And it is not them:  the networks, the politicians, the media, the schools, whatever, that is deciding that we will get only pap.  It is us, who eagerly consume it and who are too distressed by reality, too busy doing eight things at once, all badly, to dig into the meat and veggies of events.  Why do they cancel all the good shows?  Because nobody watches them, that’s why.  Why should networks spend millions to produce well thought out nuanced dramas when nearly everyone, given the chance, will flock to counter-programming which features spoiled, malicious, mannerless, vulgar but physically attractive people vying to eat stomach-churning things, or to screw the handsome but vacuous bachelor, or to join indescribably crass magnates in the boardroom for an opportunity to bamboozle the clueless?  Quick, name something other than Tang which was invented as a result of the early space program!  A good many things were, but Tang is what we hear about; Tang which even by name says ‘dessert – tangy!’, and which suggests cheap thrills: poon-Tang! (And don’t think a single adolescent in the U.S. of A. – the male half anyway - failed to catch on to that!)   

It is not that people have changed all that much, though.  The difference between the success of Shakespeare’s plays in the sixteenth century (I hope it was the 16^th – anyway, I am not looking it up) and Jerry Springer today is availability.  When you got something new to see once or twice a year, you were willing to appreciate a lot even if it wound up making you think a bit after the show was over; when you get 24 hours a day on 150 channels, you can pretty much stick with the dessert.  And a good many people cannot do even that; they sit, remote in hand, waiting for a stray idea to slip past the broadcasters’ best security against such an enormity, so they can quickly flick to something less challenging.  It is one thing when folks see entertainment for what it is – even if they are getting way too much of it; the problem arises when they confuse it with reality or fact or ideas.  Folks tend to go to cable news shows when they think they ought to watch more news – like around election time – in the same way that they tend when they decide they should eat more vegetables to go to McD’s, to order French fries and say, “Supersize it.”  Technically one is getting more veggies; but what’s the point? 

And speaking of elections, one could say they are the dessert of democracy.  Handicapping, bloviating, campaigning, performing that supreme act of educated display which is sticking a sign on one’s bumper – these are the fun stuff, the temporary excitements of government; they are not the main event.  The main event is governing: tedious study, endless compromising and trying small tweaks in ideas and researching issues and reading deliberately obfuscated legislation that runs to book length, and having the courage to examine and even report what is good about those ideas of enemies which can be revised to fit our situation.  No one wants to bother with any of that.  So we shove that stuff off on a few good folks and a whole shitload of posturing charlatans.  The latter bellow, “Punish Iran!”  “Fix (or abolish) Social Security!”  “Solve teenage pregnancy by telling them not to have sex!”  “Save the forest!”  “Get fuel from grass!” and on and on.  People want government to tell all the malefactors not to do what they are doing, and seem to expect that experienced men and women who are making bags of loot misbehaving are going to respond to ‘No!  No!’ when they can’t even get their own kids thus to respond.  The few good folks, who pretty much never get to be president, but occasionally get into legislatures where they do 90% of the work and get 0% of the credit, say things like “This will cost money we currently don’t have.” or “This hasn’t worked until now, and there is no indication there is a fix that will make it work” or “This will have repercussions in neighboring states, whose cooperation we desperately need.” or “If you use corn for fuel, there will be less for food.” Or “You can’t have all this and low taxes too.”  Slogans are dessert; solutions are meals: boring, vegetable-heavy, slow-cooked meals where the pot has to be watched constantly and the ingredients carefully measured.  Who has time for that, especially when it’s almost time for Oprah?    

The fault for the shitty, facile programming, and the shallow sloganeering government and the news dominated by drug-addled celebrities, and the empty calorie-laden, nutrient starved everything is no one but ourselves.  Everything of note that has been accomplished in our history has been daring, dangerous, difficult.  The beloved Reagan was taking unpopular positions for a long time before others were convinced there might be something to those positions, JFK was ‘too inexperienced’, the Revolution was dangerous.  Someone had to be the first to say ‘enough’ when Vietnam went on and on and sapped the country’s spirit, and believe me, that someone was called traitor and reviled, until finally he or she wasn’t, because – oh, yeah, they were right.  And more often than not throughout our history, there were a whole lot of wackos spouting deeply-felt ideas which were entirely wrong.  You can never be sure.  Life is inherently dangerous and uncertain, never more so than when no one opens his or her eyes to see the danger; when no one trains his or her child to be self-reliant, and to get out there and see if the goblins are real.  And sometimes it will all go wrong; it will all be a big mistake.  But never will it go as wrong as it does when everyone remains inside, indulging in mental and physical dessert, discouraging the adventurous among us; punishing the independent thinkers, checking the most popular searches lest we stumble upon something new about which we have not been instructed how to react. 

Oh, and I forgot it was Hallowe’en this week even after all the cornstalks and other décor had dotted my neighborhood for weeks before (virtually none of it including jack-o-lanterns which had actually been carved by kids).  I can’t account for it; surely I couldn’t have become a grown-up despite all my best efforts?  Naaaah, that never happens to folks in my generation, at least not until they get a wasting illness or something.  And who wants to hear from people like that?