Nevertheless, my dear reader, there are profits to be made by the woman who reads a short story, novel or even a history book that concerns itself with the mistakes of those "military masterminds" who failed to take a Napoleonic or Hitlerian sneeze seriously. If, for example, the truth about our (contrary to what Mr Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. says!130) anything but irreversible SoutheastAsia "domino" policy had been thoroughly critiqued in 1962131 by the wives and sweethearts of the soldiers who returned from Vietnam in flagdraped caskets there would be132 some 56,000 fewer widows and/or spinsters in America today. It goes without saying, does it not, ladies, that at any given time in a monogamous society such as ours there are only so many eligible bachelors to go around? Just ask that generation of fräuleins, demoiselles, fiancullas and ojõsans "lucky enough" to survive WWII with their maidenly skins unscathed only to spend their peacetime lives in a state of permanent (but involuntary) virginity.133 And, of course, the 56,000 fatality figure doesn't include those Vietnam veterans whose warwounds render them all but useless for satisfying a normal woman's (albeit occasional) need for a healthy (or at least therapeutic) dose of oldfashioned heterosexual fornication!
[As long as we're on the subject of geopolitics and its disastrous ramifications for the average female,134 I must tell you it never dawned on me at the outset of this Discourse on the Importance of Art Appreciation to an Average Woman's Pursuit of Sociocultural Happiness that its erudite message would be delivered in a fashion that was so flagrant, to wit: Here we are discussing such "unfeminine" (and totally anti romantic) matters as France's fiascoed fling at European hegemony, Germany's bungled lebensraum escapade and America's snafued salvation of Vietnam within the context of what you were led to believe was nothing more than a bestselling novel! Ask yourself (as honestly as you can) dear reader if such an astonishing turn of events doesn't (at least tend to) demonstrate the truth of that Klutzian Precept which states: "Nothing gratifies a woman's innermost yearning to have her intellect stimulated than a literary masterpiece135 whose author has the b**ls136 to expose his edificational intentions?"]
In conclusion then for all who might yet harbor some slight doubt that as a direct consequence of simply reading Morons Awake! from cover to cover they won't find themselves well on their way to living (more or less) Happily Ever After I leave you to ponder this Advice137 Jack F. Klutz gave to the Lovelorn Females Of Moronia: "The more a woman knows about the Principles of Art Appreciation the less likely she is to mistakenly base her choice of a mate on the conventional Moronic 'wisdom' that a man's virility is measured by the degree to which he fills the space between his loins, rather than that between his ears."138
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: I hate to rain on your parade,
but that socalled "answer" only adds to my confusion about the effect reading
Morons Awake! is supposed to have on me!
EDITORESS: Well, it might make my task a little less difficult if your concerns
in that regard were expressed with a little more specificity!
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: For starters there are all these bracketed
caveats, contractlikedisclaimers, obfuscatory legalisms and alltoofinelyprinted
footnotes you keep using with such infuriating frequency!
EDITORESS: I'm afraid that's part of what is really the minimal price a woman
must pay for the astronomical benefits she will receive at the conclusion
of reading her first literary masterpiece-
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: That's just it! Having tried my damndest
to make some sense out of your "prospectus" I'm still in the dark when it
comes to the bottom line, livinghappilyeverafterwise.
EDITORESS: Ah—
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: What I (and millions of other "average
American housewives" like me) want to know in the plainest possible English
is this: If, by some miracle, I actually do manage to read Morons
Awake! from cover to cover, are you promising me to a moral, ethical
and legal certainty that all of my hopes, prayers, fantasies and/or dreams
of/for everlasting happiness, psychosexual epiphany, sociocultural bliss
and/or (having been repeatedly disappointed by the trashier kind of romantic
fiction) engaging in a loveaffair with a literary makeout artist who actually
succeeds in consummating my wildest orgasmic expectations at the very climax
of his book will be met, answered, fulfilled and/or come true?
EDITORESS: That's a very tall order!
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: And so it should be for someone who had
the "bright" idea of advertising this novel as "The first blockbusting bestseller
between whose covers an average American housewife will find the solution
to all of her (extra)marital problems."
EDITORESS: All right. You've made your point.
CONFUSED AND/OR PERPLEXED READER: Thank God! At long last we're beginning
to communicate on the same wavelength!
Intro Part 9 Return to Index
Footnotes
130 On page 538 of his A Thousand Days: JFK In The Whitehouse: "Whether the domino theory was valid in 1954 by 1961 it had acquired a validity which gave Kennedy no choice but to work within the situation he had inherited." [Paraphrased somewhat and Emphasis added for clarity—J. P.] While Schlesinger admits the "domino theory" was constructed on a series of extremely dubious assumptions about "the monolithic nature of Ho Chi Minh's communism," he seems perfectly content (along with such other Kennedy Whitehousewhizkids as Walt Rostow, Bob MacNamara, Dean Rusk and Maxwell Taylor) to further compound the errors of Eisenhower and Dulles by advising (an alltoo willing or gullible) JFK that: "With your good looks and my brains I think we can dig ourselves out of this Southeast Asian morass by shoveling so furiously God Himself will believe we must surely know what the hell it is we're trying to do." [Quotation reconstructed from circumstantial evidence—J. P.]
131 The argument can be made that: Given our disdain for any history but our own, even if we had known in 1962 all there was to know concerning the bankruptcy of the "Domino theory"—for which America was about to pay such a high price in blood and (borrowed) treasure—it's more likely than not we would still have repeated the mistake made by the French at Dien Bien Phu only 8 years before. More remarkable still (from a historyrepeatingitself pointofview) is the alltoo obvious similarity between our losing strategy to frustrate Vietnam's antiimperialist aspirations by "turning Hanoi into a parking lot" and that of the British when they sent their Redcoated army across the Atlantic "to teach that ragtag mob of socalled 'Minutemen' a thing or two about the art of modern warfare!"
132 Assuming that for every American male who died on the battlefield there was at least one American female on the home front whose marital- or lovelife was similarly snuffed out.
133 Or engaging in those sordid little loveaffairs which, no matter how sublime they might seem at the time, in the final analysis never come close to fulfilling a woman's maternal raison d'être.
134 Make no mistake about it, ladies; the effect of removing a mere 56,000 males from America's vast matrimonial marketplace is a fact of incalculable consequence to every single female who has been searching for a husband (or a lover) since 1962! Whether we like it or not—and of course we don't!—the laws of supply and demand are such that even the smallest shortage of eligible men has the effect of making them much more valuable than their actual worth as breeding stock—and females much less so despite the intrinsic superiority of their sex. This explains why older men are always so keen to send their sons off to be slaughtered for some "noble" cause, crusade or jihad. By culling the competition on a regular basis they not only manage to maintain their lecherous rule of the nubile roost but to do so in the name of "Racial Survival!" "Manifest Destiny!" "God!" Patriotism!" "Statesmanship!" "Revolution!" "Social Justice!" and/or even "Motherhood!"
135 Or, as in this case, the introduction to one.
136 Despite his (semi)sophisticated frame of mind, in the final genetic analysis Klutz was a dyedinthewool Moron. As such he shared the average Moron's Puritanical attitude toward expressing in "mixed company" those (usually 4lettered) Anglosaxonisms which have become so commonplace in even the politest of "civilized" societies such as our own. Paradoxically, when a Moronic author asks his reader to fill in the blanks of partiallyspelledout words like f**k, s**t, c**k, c**t, b**wj*b, motherf**ker and c**ksucker he actually increases their prurient impact by making her play a guessing game no respectable woman should have the slightest inclination to play; and certainly no chance at all of winning! This result is, of course, also produced by those predatory conversationalists who seduce their "unsuspecting" female prey with such innocentsounding euphemisms for the crudest kind of pornographic propositions as: "Fullyfrontalized edificational intentions," "Literary loveaffair," "Artistic machismo," "Predatory conversationalist," "Delusions of messianic grandeur," "Intellectual stimulation," "Penpower," "Sociocultural utopianism," "Psychosexual bliss," "Art over matter (kunst über alles)," "Rampant didacticism," "Yinning & yanging" and "Totalitarian proclivities (die Führerphantasie). Moreover, when used in combination (as they occasionally are in Morons Awake!) these techniques have been known to plunge even the most ladylike reader of a romance novel into an absolute f****y of o***a***c l**t.
137 Posthumously, of course, since prior to the publication of Morons Awake! all of Klutz's artistic and philosophical writings were kept safely under lock and key by that Stoutest Defender of Moronia's Faith in the Blissfulness of Ignorance, the Chief of its FIB, Jedgar Ballbraker.
138 According to our author's "photographic" memory, shortly before his untimely death Klutz reworked this Precept in terms he thought might be more easily understood by the ordinary Moronic housewife, to wit: "As the average (34-28-38) woman doesn't want to be judged by her 'vital statistics' alone, so she should refrain from judging a man from his waist down instead of from his neck up."