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August 24, 2009

Two Gigantic Personalities


For weeks now, Nickie has been pestering me to jump aboard this blog raft with him and DC. I'm reluctant to do it but he's plied me with flattery, Valomilk cups and low-cost prescriptions. So far, it's working. He wants to have me nearby. I'm a father-figure to him - compensating for all the wives, lawyers, clerics and parole officers who have let him down over the years. But most of all, he wants me to keep an eye on DC, who can suddenly go Cain on Goomba's Abel, completely without warning.

DC's spontaneous malicious battery on Nickie began years ago when they both worked for The Reader's Digest. Nickie was ghost-writing "Quotable Quotes" for famous dead people who couldn't sue, and DC was fabricating anecdotes for "Humor In Uniform". For a Christmas issue, Nickie conjured a nitwit exclamation for George Armstrong Custer.

"We're winning, lads! When I squint, there aren't as many of 'em!

Nickie didn't know that DC was a Custerphile (see DC's avatar), but it accounts for DC's violence and the debris field that followed, even down to today. Nickie still defends the authenticity of the Custer quote, insisting that it was reported in 1892 by a Harvard-educated Lakota warrior named Swings-Three-Ways, who was at the Little Big Horn as a young man. Nobody believes Nickie. I don't. And certainly not DC, who is an expert on Custer's Last Stand, an occasional blogger, and the top Gatling Gun detailer in Texas.

Anyway, when I'm not destroying the actionable, smutty illustrated notes they exchange, and their letters-cut from-magazines hate mail to each other, I might also lay some intellectual terrazzo on their intellectual cement.

As for me, the less you know the better. I'm nearing retirement age or Box City, depending on the public option or which doctor I believe. I was born into a feuding New England family, but spent many years in the old, de facto segregated South. It was the South of live oaks, swaying Spanish Moss, pecan treats and manners. I can never think of it as a sinkhole of racism, snobbery and ignorance, as many do.

The New England side of me was poisoned by the reformist virus, and I ended up with chronic liberalism, which flared up until the late 1960's. A dose of war and a journey to the ends of my personal galaxy finally cured me. Melancholy is the destroyer of fantasy. Every conservative knows it. Read David Mamet's Village Voice piece "Why I'm no longer a brain-dead liberal". You'll see yourself in it.

I"m also a conservative today because I usually side with the mutineers. If you aren't mocking and piercing the pretensions and charade of all authority, you're shirking the first obligation of a free-born. That doesn't mean you bend the proper rules; you just don't allow the improper rules to bend you or anyone else. Old liberalism used to advance the same creed, but new liberalism is a suffocating army of curtain-twitchers, making sure that life outside isn't happening without some dialectic approved by the authorities. And lots of new liberals are the authorities.

My first principles come from four lines by Blake - not Robert Blake, Goomba, but William Blake, mystic, hallucinatory artist and poet:

This life's five windows of the soul

Distort the heavens from pole to pole

And teach us to believe a lie

When we see with, not through, the eye

For now, though, I'll just be straddling the fault line between two gigantic personalities.

12 comments:

Opus #6 said...

Rhod, what a TREAT!!!! Thank you for agreeing to do this. Yay!

Your avatar is wonderful. That old robot was the brains behind the outfit, I always thoughts.

I recall Goomba telling somebody to "squint, man. Squint!" But I thought that was in a different context...

Well, it is good that Nickie and DC have a friend like you. Somebody has to keep the peace. And who better to do that than a warrior.

You reminded me of the old saying. "Those who do not start out as liberals have no heart. Those who do not end up as conservatives have no brains."

Anonymous said...

The request to squint was during an intimate moment. My ex-wife had no right to air our dirty leggings.

Wetzy said...

This is good writing for a change.

Anonymous said...

Oh, sure, it's good... if stuff like sentence structures and proper tenses impress you.

Rhod said...

OLD robot? A few dozen vacuum tubes and a crank case makes you OLD?

Right, Wetzy. Opie's comment was perfect.

Anonymous said...

Wetzy, that's hilarious. And true. I don't have enough time to look everything up to understand it, but I understood enough of it.

All I can say is ... wow, and I completely agree with Opie.

Rhod, I think you're about the best writer in the internets right now. And you know, but I would like all others who swing by here to know what a joy it is for me to see you above the fold where you belong.

Now that we have that out of the way ...

If you find yourself in the midst of a glorious screed and then you get a burning sensation just north of your arse, it was Goomba that popped your underwear, I swear.

Now I am going to go back and read that post a couple of more times to see if I can understand it.

Rhod said...

Me too, DC. I just entered a few parameters and the software did the rest.

Anonymous said...

Liar.

I just went back and read it again. Absolutely fantastic, Rhod. I tip my cover to you, sir.

Opus #6 said...

Silly Rhod. Wetzy likes your writing. Not mine.

Heck, I can't even tell the new robots from the old ones.

Rhod said...

This is the age of magic realism, DC. Whatever you say is, in some way, true.

Remember, I'm watching you.

That grape needs a haircut,by the way.

Rhod said...

Opie, if you squint we all look alike.

Anonymous said...

Now, let's tweak our betters in office. Blogging is not a hobby. It's a calling.