Essays in Idleness

It is jolly to watch crowds of enthusiastic Cubans marching about, chanting, “Down with Communism,” after sixty-seven years of experiencing the real thing. I say this even though I know I’m only watching through a TV-like electronic screen, the way I watched the Muslims chant “Death to America,” Israel, &c, over the last forty-seven years. These are reminders that there is a God, and that the correct place to put Communists and (“radical”) Muslims is in Hell, where all their expectations will be contradicted. I am, however, presuming on the divine by rhetorical habit. I do not actually know what happens to them after they are dead, only that, “The best Communist is a dead Communist,” as my friends from Central and Eastern Europe used to say, or their equivalents in contemporary Persia. But this simply blows off steam, for rural electrification.

This much can be known, however: that until American voters, by-and-large, resume their comatose stupidity, and put the Democrats back in power, it will appear that the world is changing. In fact, the world never changes, as I have spent more than three-score years and ten learning to my cost. And for all this time, or at least the last sixty, I have been fighting the good fight against political evil, usually.

I think back to when I was nineteen, and just returned from some first-hand experiences in the Republic of Vietnam. I had been in love with a memorably good German girl for four years, and trying, apparently pointlessly, to be chaste, hoping to win her, by way of subtext. Suddenly, I at last fell for an apparently nice Jewish girl, who was a talented “modern” dance student, and I assumed was sane. She was certainly very attractive. And then Watergate came along, and several other things, including the American abandonment of Vietnam.

The cure for my naivety, then, was listening to my adored oppositely sexed number rant in a café. She spilt not coffee (she actually threw it) because I was a fascist. One of the symptoms of my fascism was my love for Israel. She had given only slight praevisus of these views in our previous conversations, but now, after only a few weeks, I received the whole damp load. A particular poignancy was her lecturing me on Vietnam, on which she knew nothing, whereas I had at least been there and had become acquainted with its history. It was a passion of mine. I loved freedom, as I would have put it then, without the slightest hint of irony.

This “L.” — for I will not name her — was the victim of a “liberal” education and a “progressive” home. And I realized I would never have the time to replace it. Even her formal dance training was of a piece with this. There were millions of these fools, then, and there have been, ever since.