Chapter 1: "I am a Moron!"
Wherein are revealed the hitherto unknown facts surrounding the historic visit of President & Mrs. John F. Kennedy to Moronia; the author's first encounter with the future Massiah, Jack Klutz, and; a Supersecret plot to convert the United States of America into a (not entirely) constitutional Monarchy.
PRIOR TO THE EARTHSHAKING EVENTS I described in Book One—all of which, it should be remembered, transpired in less than 9 hours!—the most memorable day in my long (and far from uneventful) life was the 23rd of June, 1963.1 That was the date President Kennedy and his wife arrived in Moronia for the preview of what was to be the history making Ich bin ein Berliner speech he would deliver the next afternoon in the Rudolf Wilde Platz from the steps of West Berlin's City Hall. It was also the day I first laid my eyes on the newlyborn Jack F. Klutz. Although I had no reason to believe at the time such an ordinarylooking baby Moron was destined to become The Massiah—or that our seemingly inconsequential encounter would turn out to be an event of millennial proportions!
Naturally the President's visit caught me completely by surprise. As a result of my persona non grata status inside the State Department most of what I knew about Kennedy's "crusading tour" of Western Europe I learned from reading the newspapers. Not that on this particular occasion I was the only one in the diplomatic loop who found himself unprepared for JFK's suddenly altered travel plans! According to the published itinerary for his European visit the Presidential party was scheduled to arrive in Frankfurt on the evening of 23 June where he would deliver the first of his post Cuban Missile Crisis Cold War policy statements on the afternoon of the 24th at the Paulskirche.2 But, just as Air Force One was making its final Frankfurt approach, the President suddenly ordered the pilot to change course for—of all places—Moronia! Kennedy explained the reason for this "apparently rash act" to his astonished entourage in this way: While he couldn't have been more delighted with Ted Sorensen's brilliant inflight rewriting of Dean Rusk's gutless3 "Berlin Wall speech"—before putting all his post Cuban Missile Crisis policy eggs in the Ich bin ein Berliner basket, he thought it might be prudent to run the revised text up a less conspicuous flagpole to see if a crowd of country bumpkins would salute it with the same enthusiasm it evoked among his more erudite advisors. And what more discreet venue could there be for such a discreet "dress rehearsal" than Moronia?
"If," said the President, "a crowd of Morons can understand what I'm telling them, surely the Berliners on both sides of the wall will have no trouble receiving the crystal clear message of America's resolve to fight the cold war until hell freezes over, if necessary; a message that must resonate with an eloquence which is nothing less than Churchillian—or even Lincolnesque—in its power to captivate the public's imagination!"4
While everyone agreed using the 18 hour hiatus before he delivered the Paulskirche prologue for his Ich bin ein Berliner speech to sneak preview the Rudolfe Wilde Platz performance out of town was a stroke of "Presidential genius"—choosing Moronville as the stage for launching such a trial balloon raised more than a few eyebrows. The objections over selecting it on even the most furtive basis for unveiling such a major foreign policy statement fell into these not unpredictable categories:
1. It was both personally and geopolitically dangerous! Despite (or maybe because of) its reputation as a "city of fools" Moronville was a hotbed of cold war intrigue, espionage and terrorist conspiracies. The risk of having WWIII triggered by the liquidation of an American President in a jerkwater town so similar to the Sarajevo setting for Crown Prince Ferdinand's 1914 assassination couldn't be ignored;2. Since the Morons were congenitally incapable of rising to even such a simpleminded occasion, their reaction to the Ich bin ein Berliner speech would at best be inconclusive—assuming they could actually manage to organize themselves into a crowd;
3. No matter how benignly motivated, a Presidential visit to a neutral microstate hitherto regarded as an ideological noman's land might be misconstrued by the Soviets as a strategic threat to their soft Balkan underbelly, and last but certainly not least;
4. The American ambassador to Moronia was a notorious paranoid, crackpot, sexual psychopath, egomaniacal basket case and cabalistic Jew whose delusions of mental grandeur might be raised to even greater heights of absurdity by his warped perception of the Kennedys' "regal pilgrimage" to Moronia as some sort of personal tribute!
JFK calmly responded to each point in this blistering critique of his Moronic dress rehearsal scheme as follows:
A. Wouldn't exposing its President to some personal danger lend credibility to the resolute message America was sending to her cold war adversaries and allies?B. However, since there was no advance notice of the detour they would be taking through Moronia, any assassination risk would be minimized to an acceptable level by the element of surprise.
C. As for the Morons' brainlessness—what better breed of human guinea pigs could there possibly be for putting the Ich bin ein Berliner Doctrine to the most acidic of public opinion tests?
D. If, as an unintended consequence of their altered travel plans, Kruschev does indeed suspect America has some strategic masterplan for making Moronia into our Cuba, why shouldn't we let the bastard stew for a while in the juice of such an ironic ploy!
E. Concerning our man in Moronville—if only a fraction of what you say about him is true he should help to compensate for the lack of night life in this Lilliputian version of Las Vegas!
So it was that Air Force One continued on its wayward course toward Moronia. For a runofthemillbottomofthediplomatic birdcage Foreign Service officer like me, the prospects of even a scheduled visit by a sitting American President to his remote corner of the world would, of course, cause a panic of seismic magnitude.
And for good reason! As a general rule, those whom the Foreign Service assigned to its least promising outposts were the least promising of its diplomats. "Boondocking" dunderheaded incompetents to such ambassadorial Elbas as Cretiny, Tonga, Belize, Transylvania, San Marino and Lichtenstein has proven to be an effective method for purging incompetents without violating the Civil Service Regulations against such devious practices. No matter how dimwitted these governmental pariahs might be, after spending a few days, weeks or months in a (micro)state of virtual exile they all manage to decipher the hand writing on the prisonlike walls of their deadended careers and "voluntarily" terminate themselves on the spot.
That's what made my case so exceptional. Having been sent to Moronia in 1938 I had willfully remained there for 25 years! Not because I was so vain (or dense) to believe my appointment as the youngest ambassador in American history was a distinction worthy of the sacrifices I was making to preserve it. Nothing could be further from the truth! It was the very loftiness of my alltoo Jewish intellect that had caused the WASPdominated establishment in Washington to banish me to Moronia; and I was determined never to let them think they had gotten rid of me that easily; even if it meant destroying my career—and my life—in the process! Keeping that kind of fanatical faith in the spiritual rewards which come from such righteous indignation wasn't easy. There were many times when my stoic resolve weakened—when I cursed the young "idealist" who had so impetuously doomed me to a martyrdom that was corroding its way deeply into the best years of my middleage!
But, I kept telling myself: Such is the bitter pill one must swallow for the sweetness of a grudge that is revenged when one's enemies least expect it. I knew someday I was destined to triumph over my gentile oppressors—notwithstanding the fact most, if not all of them, would be dead and buried when that victorious day finally did arrive! Consequently, when I got word of Kennedy's visit, it seemed certain the 23rd of June 1963 would, or at least could, turn out to be the Red Letter Day I had been hoping and praying for during all those years I languished in my Moronic wilderness. Far from being panicked by such a challenge, I regarded the prospect of hosting the Kennedys as "a golden opportunity" to vindicate myself by showing them just how overqualified I was for the menial post I'd been manning—strictly from a sense of (unsung) patriotism!—for a quarter century. Hence it was I marshaled my ambassadorial resources and began to organize what would be a regal reception for the President and his entourage—an entourage that might include one or 2 of my old State Department nemeses! In less than 45 minutes I not only completed all the security and protocol arrangements with the Moronian authorities for such a gala event,5 I took the extraordinarily bold initiative of arranging the accommodations for the Presidential party so the Kennedys would spend the night in my apartment! This act of ambassadorial chutzpah could, I thought, be successfully justified on the ground that: While the local hotels might just be marginally acceptable for the members of a Presidential entourage, their Spartan dimensions and seedy decor made them quite unsuitable for the head of superpower.6
Having informed Air Force One of my intentions and received no reply to the contrary I quickly set about removing from my apartment anything the Kennedys might think were its more flagrantly pornographic objects d'art. Off the walls came the Modigliani nudes, Picasso's Bacchanalian etchings and Beardsley's indecent illustrations for Lysistrata. In their place I hung some reasonably respectable (but not unprovocative) scenes of soft core eroticism by Kirchner, Degas and Schiele—with a slyly subliminal emphasis on their menage a trois motif. My collection of African fertility carvings went temporarily into the embassy safe, along with several cartons of books whose titles might be considered as beyond even the pale of that privacy to which a reclusive JewishIntellectual is entitled. As for the anatomicallyexplicit Roman plumbing fixtures in the bathroom there was nothing I could do but hope the Kennedys would view their pagan crudity from a humorous and/or historic perspective. If not I would simply claim they came with the lease.7 The bedroom in which I routinely practiced (and continued to perfect) the art of Superprotracted Foreplay was similarly sanitized of its most prurient accouterments except, of course, for my kingsized fourposter—which I was confident the Kennedys would find worthy of their "regal" status.
While occupied with these "housecleaning" chores I nevertheless took the time to confer with my Moronic kitchen staff on the menu for what I wanted to be a supper the President and First Lady would find unforgettable. Because of my (almost) perfect photographic memory and the instant access it gave me to a veritable encyclopedia of "trivia" I was able to plan a banquet that, based on an interview the White House chef had given to Newsweek shortly after the Kennedys hired him, would feature cuisine both my dinner partners would find tailored to their individual tastes. The result of such a gastronomical tour de force could, I felt, not only be a feather in my ambassadorial cap but indicate to the President that a man of my consummate finesse was clearly wasting his (and his country's!) human resources by remaining stranded in Moronia for another (God forbid) half century.
So efficiently had I set the stage for this most dramatic occasion I found myself left with nothing more to do for a full 30 minutes until the President's ETA of 1830 hours! Naturally I used that time to ponder on the enormity of the events that were about to unfold. It all seemed so dreamcometruelike! Was it possible this was really happening to me? Or was I fantasizing another of those "apotheosis scenarios" in which my suffering and talents are at long last recognized by the American masses in a tumultuous outpouring of gratitude, remorse and unrestrained adulation? How many times had I imagined being welcomed home in a tickertape parade down 5th Avenue that would eclipse even those New York had bestowed on the superheroic likes of Lindberg, Eisenhower and MacArthur! But when I rechecked my decoding of the messages received on the teletype there could be no doubt about it. I wasn't deluding myself! The President's detour to Moronia was unmistakably spelled out in black and white! Still, there was cause for some concern on my part when that 1830 ETA came and went without any sign of the Presidential motorcade making its way through what were now the trafficless streets of Moronville. At 1848 hours the local hot line phone rang. It was the Chief of Moronia's Federal Investigation Bureau, Jedgar Ballbraker, calling to inquire if this was one of my pranks. If so, there would be all hell to pay for setting off a falsealarm of this magnitude! Our longstanding personal friendship and the special relationship between America and Moronia notwithstanding, Ballbraker didn't appreciate being made a fool of by having ordered a nationwide security alert!
While he was still fuming on the line, however, my teletype began spewing out another encrypted message which, because of its brevity, I was able to decipher without the cumbersome paraphernalia normally required for decoding Super Top Secret communiques.8 The message stated that Air Force One had touched down in country B at 1827 hours and the Presidential motorcade was proceeding directly to Moronville with a revised ETA of 1853. Naturally I couldn't have been more relieved. Ballbraker, on the other hand, received this "good news" skeptically. He was still suspicious I might be "jerking him around" because of the spat we recently had over my refusal to attend the latest (and "greatest") of his transsexual crossdressing orgies. Although I was in no mood to deal with yet another of his tantrums this was hardly the time to risk alienating the affections I had spent 25 years so carefully cultivating for the sake of America's possible dependency on what at any moment could become Moronia's renewed strategic importance in the cold war. Paradoxically the 10 minutes I "wasted" mollifying him took my mind away from what might otherwise have been the almost unendurable suspense of my climactic expectations for the Kennedys' impending arrival. In fact, so preoccupied did I become with pacifying Ballbraker that, when the Presidential Motorcade actually did pull up in front of the embassy, I wasn't there to meet it!
By the time I hung up and rushed downstairs my glamorous guests were already in the vestibule! But, once again, fate seemed to have intervened on my behalf. Contrary to my worst fears the Kennedys weren't "offended" by this violation of Presidential protocol. They treated the whole misbegotten affair as if it were nothing more than "a real life scene from an Ionesco farce!" According to Mrs. Kennedy my "breathless and disheveled entrance was a refreshingly human departure from the obsequious pomp and circumstance in which Jack and I are usually received." The President also complimented me for my "graciousness under the pressure of this surprise visit of ours to Moronia." He was, he said, "fully aware of all the arrangements you've had to make on such short notice—all of which were executed with commendable skill and, I might add, a touch of audacity; especially that brilliant decision of yours to put Jackie and me up in your embassy for the night."
Despite these Presidential pleasantries and compliments I was haunted by the specter that the favorable impression I so desperately wanted to make on the Kennedys was damaged beyond repair. Their first impression of me must surely have confirmed—if not exceeded!—the dire prophecies made by my State Department detractors concerning the ineptitude which had rightfully earned me a lifetime of exile in the deepest depths of America's diplomatic dumpster. But no sooner did we leave the embassy vestibule and enter the private domain of my upstairs apartment than any doubts I had about the Kennedys' sincerity vanished with an outpouring of cordiality that couldn't have been more heartfelt!
"At last, Mr. Mordecai Goldberg, we meet in the flesh!" gushed the First Lady; while she embraced me as if I were a longlost friend—or even a member of her family! "To think that I would be standing here gazing into the godlike face of the man who wrote A Treatise On The Art Of Superprotracted Foreplay," she continued. "And quite a handsome face it is!" she whispered while giving my forehead a reverential kiss.
As if not to be outdone by his wife, the President gently brushed her aside, shook my hand warmly, put his arm around my shoulders and proclaimed he was "profoundly humbled to be in the presence of the mastermind who authored A Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism—a document I consider to be a roadmap for crossing the new political frontier beyond which lies the Promised Land of a remodernized America!" And, having praised me so unabashedly, he too put his lips to my brow, whispering into my ear as he did so he would be "eternally grateful for the way you've illuminated what was my gloomy outlook on our country's future with the solar incandescence of your genius!" While the President was so engaged, his wife had dropped to her knees and was fondling the cuffs9 of my trousers as it they were the hem of a Papal or other sanctified garment!
If the scene I'm depicting stretches your credulity, dear reader, you can imagine how I—the recipient of such luxurious adulation from 2 of the world's most exalted personalities—felt! How could I believe this was truly happening to me; a man who, for a quarter century, had been despised and reviled by his own government? Was it possible even my most feverish dreams of revenge and vindication were actually being surpassed by the palpable reality of a Presidential epiphany; not to mention the First Lady's role in my apotheosis? Was it conceivable the Kennedys had indeed read my A Treatise On The Art Of Superprotracted Foreplay and A Diatribe Against The Evils Of Egalitarianism—both of which documents were so obscure I myself had forgotten I wrote them until their titles became the topic of this fantastic conversation? Or was all this Ballbraker's idea of an elaborate hoax to punish me for the way I humiliated him by pooping on his most recent party plans? Ballbraker was a dyedinthewool Moron, but when it comes to practical jokes his race has been "blessed" with a considerable talent for devising the most ingenious pranks. And it certainly wasn't beyond the resources of Moronia's FIB to orchestrate a prank of such idiotic dimensions. Their employment of lookalikes to impersonate celebrities who endorse the "exotic tourist attractions" of Moronia is a welldocumented fact of advertising lore.10 Moreover, the training Ballbraker had received from the Gestapo, OSS, KGB and CIA in the art of statesponsored dirty tricks gave him the wherewithal to stage a sophisticated sting operation—complete with counterfeit communiques, a phony Presidential motorcade and a fake First Family—with me as its victim. If this was indeed nothing but a charade, the next time I saw Ballbraker I would have to take my hat off to him for the masterful way in which he had "outsmarted" me.11
Book Two Chapter 1 Part 2 Return to Index
Footnotes
1 While for purposes of simplification I call it a "day," the events described actually unfolded during the 17 hour period that began at 6:47 p.m. on the 23rd and ended at noon on the 24th.
2 This was the speech that would set the strategic stage for the oratorical thunderclap Kennedy would later unleash in Berlin.
3 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Houghton Mifflin Co. 1965, p.883.
4 Since the Bay of Pigs debacle JFK had learned to proceed cautiously when following the advice of even the best of his "brightest" advisers.
5 Despite the fact that in 25 years I had never so much as hosted a single official visit from even the most insignificant of governmental dignitaries. Like most Americans who came to Moronia, on those rare occasions when a congressman, cabinet officer or Supreme Court justice did make a pilgrimage to his ancestral homeland it was, of course, always done on a strictly incognito basis.
6 There are only 2 "decent" hotels in Moronville, the Moronic Arms and the Turnip Towers, neither of which had any experience catering to clientele that might be considered marginally aristocratic since the early 17thcentury when, during a rare period of peaceful relations, the Duke of (next door) Cretiny used Moronia as a handy venue for conducting his extramarital affairs.
7 As a matter of fact such provocative artifacts aren't all that uncommon in Moronia which, for some 700 years, was more or less ruled by the Romans. "More or less," because despite Rome's normally ecumenical policy toward the cultural proclivities of its conquered subjects, the numskulled behavior of the Morons was a fact of imperial life too hard for most Roman Emperors to swallow.
8 Another example of how my "photographic" memory proved to be well worth the heroic efforts I had made to develop it!
9 This was 1963, remember, and cuffed trousers were in vogue.
10 See Journal of Creative Advertising, July 1957; "Morons Make Tourist Business Waves With Famous Fakes."
11 When one Moron takes his hat off to another he does so as a gesture of abject resignation to the other Moron's intellectual superiority. Since, however, "intellectual superiority" is regarded in Moronia as being antisocial, this custom makes little sense. Nevertheless, in typical Moronic fashion, the irony of such an idiotic practice doesn't seem to have dawned on the Morons.