continuation of Footnote 222

     "Am I supposed to answer that question with another question?" Jack asked.

     "That's very droll, Jack!" the CDC responded. "But we haven't begun yet. I was merely trying to make absolutely sure you had no reservations about how this game is played."

     "Well, actually, sir, I don't know if it's what you would call a 'reservation' but there is something that bothers me."

    "All right, Jack—out with it!"

     Whereupon Jack put the following question to the CDC and the 6 other members of his Damage Control Panel: "By winning this war of wits with me—as I'm sure you will—won't your reputation as the Pillars of NonWisdom on which Moronia's KnowNothing community is built suffer some serious—if not fatal—damage?" While Lady X couldn't help smiling with tutorial pride over this remarkable display of mental nimbleness by one of her pupils, like king Gordius, the Damage Control Panelists were anything but amused by the way Jack cut so cleanly through their "untiable" knot with a single slash of (what appeared to be) his razorsharp mind.

     "Let me answer that in this way, Master Klutz," the CDC snarled. "Are you asking us to employ the barbaric techniques we've used in the past so effectively on troublemaking Weisenheimers like you who seem to exhibit a perverse preference for the stick rather than the turnip?"

     Jack realized he had bitten off more than he could chew. To a Moron "Master" and "Weisenheimer" were fighting words. And physically Jack was no match for the CDC; who stood at least a head taller than him and weighed at least twice his 97 pounds. So, taking a page from that Survival Handbook For The World's Dimwits, The Good Soldier Schweik,222s18  he (literally) threw himself on the mercy of his tormentor by collapsing into the CDC's arms and foaming at the mouth as he stammered: "I'm—really—sorry—sir—but—I—can't—help—myself—"

     "All right, Jack; calm down. We're not going to bite your head off," the suddenly remorsestricken CDC said. "Would you like a glass of water? Or perhaps you should lie down—"

     "No—sir," Jack responded. "Nothing helps—when I'm having—an attack of—what our family doctor says—is 'a hereditary case' of that dreaded disease—Tilleugenspielitis."

     "Till what?" the CDC inquired while trying to put some distance between himself and what might be—given the notorious incompetence of Moronia's medical profession—a contagious rather than an inherited affliction.

     "I'm afraid Jack's pulling your leg again, professor," Lady X interjected. "Tilleugenspielitis isn't a disease. Eugenspiel was Germany's most notorious juvenile pranksters who became the subject of a Richard Strauss tone poem. And, since Strauss happens to be my favorite composer, I thought I might use that piece of music for educational purposes—to teach boys like Jack what might happen to them when they misbehave. Eugenspiel's story didn't end very happily, did it Jack?"

     "No ma'am," Jack replied alertly. "Those medieval Germans gave him a preview of what life would be like for the Jews and Gyspies during the Third Reich."

     "So you see, professor, despite my good intentions," said Lady X, "the blame for this entire affair is mine. Somehow Jack got the mistaken impression that: Because a great composer wrote one of his most brilliant works about him, Til Eugenspiel was some sort of role model."

     "Well, all I can say to that, my dear young woman, is: This is what happens when one deviates from the standard lessonplans with which we take such pains to provide our teachers."

† † †

And that, dear reader—thanks to Lady X (whose story about playing Strauss'222s19  Till Eugenspiel for her pupils was, of course, fabricated to atone for having pushed the Panic Button)—is how the first "Klutz Affair" ended: with a whimper quickly forgotten by all its participants.222s20   On the following day, however, when Lady X arrived at work she found a heartshaped box of imported chocolates on her desk. There was no note attached. But none was needed. When the class was dismissed at the close of the school day she asked Jack to stay behind for "a little heart-to-heart chat" about yesterday's events. "First of all," she told him, "thanks for the chocolates—although I'm not going to ask how you got the money for such a luxurious gift. And, while that little 'performance' you put on yesterday at the DOE impressed me with your knowledge of Jaroslav Hasek and Richard Strauss—and I don't want to hear where you got that either!—for better or worse; in the final analysis, Jack, you are, and you always will be, a Moron. So, before our 2 paths diverge forever when I return to the land of my birth and you remain here in yours, let me use this occasion (as there may be no other like it) to give you these words of stepmotherly advice: Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweetly, to the world at large a Moron with a bloody PhD in astrophysics is still an object of ridicule. And, more importantly, to his fellow Morons a scapegoat on whose 'eggshaped' head they can heap all of their AntiIntellectual guilt."

     "Or," she added as an afterthought, "maybe it would be better to just heed that most commonly heard of Moronic homilies: Whatever it is that's going on inside that busy little brain of yours, Jack—keep it hidden under your hat."  Whether Lady X saw in young Klutz some faint glimmer of his future radiance as The Guiding Light Of A NeoEgalitarian Revolution that would one day forever change the course of human history (for the better) is doubtful. At least she never mentioned it to me during what we called our "Brief Interlewd." As for my own opinions concerning Jack's prospects: Even when I was spending the night in his mother's bed on a (more or less) regular basis, and he referred to me as "Uncle Mordecai," I must confess I never gave them a thought. To me this "nephew" of mine seemed like just another of Moronville's perfectly (sub)normal urchins and/or JayDees. Or was I only seeing what I wanted to see? After all, there was still the remote possibility Maria had gotten the dates of her "Belgian Congo Rescue Mission" mixed up and I was in fact Jack's father.222s21  Most likely, however—as I think you will agree when you finally get to read about that other (and manifestly more epiphanal) "chapter" in his childhood—Jack was already practicing what Lady X would preach to him during their afterschool heart-to-heart chat, namely: Keeping the contents of his selfeducated mind safely hidden under one of those plain clothcaps worn by all workingclass Morons.

     Even if I had detected some faint sign of his future Massiahdom it's unlikely I would, could or should have done anything to save him from a fate no less divinely orchestrated than mine was to become his ArchApostle. Although I was in my mid50s when the first "Klutz Affair" occurred, 20 more years had to pass before I possessed all the skills needed for writing the kind of Biblical Bestseller his Worldsaving Message of SocioCultural Redemption demanded. 222s22

     But to resume the story of how I foiled Lord Y's (in concert with Jedgar Ballbraker no doubt!) "Femme Fatale" Stratagem by snatching these precious details about one of the 2 Earthshaking Events in Jack F. Klutz's seemingly lackluster childhood from the trap that dastardliest of Cloak& Dagger Cold Warriors baited with his own wife! It was Lady X who tried to make contact with me by placing the following ad in the Personal Column of The (London) Times:

PRINCE C.—SB has KA info. UWSEOPDQ. RSVP.222s23

Which, when decoded, reads: "Prince Charming (her old nom d'affaire for me): Sleeping Beauty (mine for her) has Klutz Affair info. Urgent We See Each Other Pretty Damned Quick—her cryptic way of alerting me she was in the throes of an MMFP (Major Midweek Foreplay Panic) and couldn't wait for our regular FridayafternoontoMondaymorning marathon of (unconsummated) lovemaking. The RSVP can be construed in 2 ways: (1) As the standard abbreviation of the French réspondez si'l vous plait, or; (2) The collegiate one for Rare Sample of Virgin Pussy222s24—which Lady X used at the end of her mash notes to remind me of our PMA (PreMakeoutAgreement) by whose terms my "expert foreplay services would be limited to just that—sexual acts of a strictly precoital nature" so as not to spoil her plans for the "Whitest of Weddings" with Lord Y.

     Actually, when Jayne Playne showed me Lady X's ad my initial reaction was to dismiss it as: "An obvious ploy by Ballbraker and his allies to entice me into revealing my whereabouts. After which, of course, it would be a routine matter for the CIA, FBI and/or ATF to liquidate me before I can finish writing my Klutz Affair exposé."

     "Aren't you forgetting something?" she asked me in that irritating way an editoress has of asking a 'maiden' author a question whose answer she knows will cut his delusions of Great American Novelistic Grandeur down to a more manageable size—or, as she puts it in terms whose castrational connotations couldn't be playner (or more painful): "Smooth the rough edges of that caveman masculinity you seem to think I find so irresistible."

     "Since, along with my superior analytical faculties, I just happen to be blessed with a photographic memory," I replied (somewhat) satirically in the event she did have me by the cojones, "that's not very likely, Miss Playne."

     "Photographic memory or not, darling," she countered "like so many other absentminded philosophers you get so preoccupied peeling those metaphysical veils from some cosmic mystery that, when one of life's least inscrutable truths stands before you in a state of starknakedness you fail to see it!"

     "Oh?" I responded as calmly as I could in the face of her provocative metaphor.222s25  "And exactly which one of those 'starknaked truths' are we talking about?"

     "The simple fact that—we have done it!"

     "Done what, for Christ's sake?" I roared to manifest my impatience over playing the mouse to her cat.

     "Already turned that turgid, maundering, elephantine, prolix, flatulent, incoherent, linguacious, Brobdingnagian, discombobulated, disquisitionary, Machiavellian, pleonastic, rambling, covinous, hyperbolical, mordacious, abecedarian, supercilious, truculent, convoluted, acephalous, prestigiatory, affusive, overwrought, aimless, Alexandrine, obfuscatory, paternalistic, ambagious, arrogant, misanthropic, artful, pugnacious, redundant, bastardized, periphrastic, battologized, rancorous, bedeviled, serpentine, bombastic, fustian, brazen, Johnsonian, Jesuitical, pedantic, bumptious, Byzantine, cantankerous, captious, largiloguent, chaotic, inchoate, labrynthine, churlish, circumfusatory, punctilious, vainglorious, circumventional, syncretic, compendious, contumelious, deranged, hybridized, desultory, excursive, diabolical, dictatorial, haughty, didactic, garrulous, digressive, pretentious, disconcerting, knavish, rambunctious, discordant, solemn, repetitious, discursive, snobbish, disjunctive, disorderly, salacious, sparegactious, dogmatic, disputatious, doctrinaire, paradoxical, obtuse, egregious, tartuffish, elitist, tetrogenic, preachy, elusory, epicene, extravagant, factitious, fatuous, florid, formless, grotesque, disreputable, idoscyncratic, tumultuous, imperious, surreptitious, insidious, pedagogical, insolent, ironic, jumbled, meretricious, mysogenistic, propaedeutical, outrageous, patchworked, patronizing, peevish, petulant, pompous, shapeless, pragmatical, sly, precious, prurient, subversive, tangled, suggestive, undemocratic, wordy and The Mother Of All Uneditable Manuscripts of yours into a brilliant, masterful, thrilling, seminal, scintillating, spectacular, fabulous, earthshaking, historymaking, sensational, thunderous, revolutionary, stupendous, breathtaking, explosive, ejaculatory, orgasmic, epiphanous, Biblical, blockbustingest of bestsellers and A Timeless Literary Masterpiece That Will Not Only Reverse The Decline Of Western Civilization But (Eventually) Establish A SocioCultural Paradise On Earth Pursuant To The NeoEgalitarian Principles Of Born Again Klutzianity!!!!"

     "I must take the strongest exception to your use of 'meretricious,' 'mysogenistic' and 'haughty,' I responded without the slightest trace of having been horrified—which I most certainly was—by this profoundly distressing news. "As for pleonastic, battologized, contumelious and tetrogenic—I will reserve my judgment until I look them up in the Unabridged Oxford Dictionary Of The English Language."222s26  By launching this (admittedly feeble) counteroffensive I was hoping to: (a) Indicate that having been repeatedly chastised by her for the "mindboggling length" of my "adjectival laundrylists" I had assiduously evaluated each and every one of those 132—excluding "The Mother Of All"—words she used in dilating on my yet to be edited manuscript, and; (b) Change the subject so I could gain some time to collect my wits!

     Which I did.

     Not that there was much—if anything—I could do to alter what she correctly described as "that most climactic of moments toward which you and I have been toiling so heroically since the day we started turning what was the roughest of rough drafts into the Greatest Of Great American Novels it has now become." With my memory suddenly refreshed222s27  I could begin the analysis of how such an apotheosis could have come and gone absent the intellectual euphoria (if not an ejaculatory exclamation point) you would expect to punctuate the culmination of any Magnum Opus—let alone one fated to be my first, last and only fling at bestselling fame.222s28 And, while I can't speak for every painter, poet, composer, sculptor, architect, choreographer, filmmaker and novelist—the wisdom I gained by putting Klutz's otherwise "esoteric" Gospel of Born Again SocioCultural NeoEgalitarianism into terms the average Moronic/American housewife can—with a modust amount of mental elbowgrease—understand, qualifies me (along with my foreplay mastery) to propose this axiom regarding The Paradoxical Nature Of Keeping The Object Of One's Own Hyperstretched PsychoSexual Designs In A State Of Perpetual Suspense, to wit: In the making of art or love, the longer one takes in satisfying a female's Sleeping Beauty fantasies, the more likely it is her Biggest of Big Bang Prayers will be answered with a whimper.

     The obvious reason for (what appears to be) this horniest of dilemmas is, of course: The harder a housewife works at deferring the consummation of her fondest fairytale hopes the more exhausted she becomes in the process.  The result of which is: When that Happiest of All Happy Endings finally does arrive she hasn't the strength to enjoy a triumph attained by the expenditure of so much (emotional) blood, toil, tears and sweat.222s29   Or, in some extreme cases, to even crawl her way over the precipice of those eschatologicald desires the most ladylike readers of romantic trash secretly entertain for hurling themselves (albeit vicariously) into the forbidden depths of a pornographic depravity found only between the covers of a genuine Literary Masterpiece. Such a rule, of course, makes the further attenuation of Morons Awake!'s already dangerously overstretched Promised Land plot222s30 far more problematical than it would otherwise be if, as all NeoBaroque authors, most AdFinitum School of foreplayers and some Mind Over Matter feminists suggest: "There are no outer limits to a woman's patience when it comes to putting what she suspects will be the thrill of her lifetime on hold for as long as it is (super)humanly possible to do so."  But, not unlike those "stiffnecked" Israelites who followed Moses on what turned out to be the 40 years of his "divinelyinspired" meandering, at some point in this seemingly interminable journey toward a PostModern Neo Egalitarian SocioCultural Paradise On Earth even the most faithful of my readers is going to ask herself: "Why the hell it's taking us so goddammed long to get from the Egypt of a housewife's bondage to that psychosexual paradise at the end (if there is one!) of this biggerthanBiblesized attempt to do what no other bestselling novel has ever dreamt of doing?"222s31

     In any event, after such a disappointing end to the seemingly endless torment of cutting (what I'm now willing to concede might have been) my "massively overwritten manuscript down to more manageable proportions"222s32  there was nothing further Jayne and I could do but kill the time remaining before our editorial Love(/Hate?) Affair did in fact culminate with what we remained supremely confident would be the Biggest Of Artistic Bangs when the publication of Morons Awake! was critically acclaimed as "The Bestselling Blockbuster Whose Explosive Arrival On America's Supposedly Mindless SocioCultural Scene Will Be Heard Around The World!" It was during one of these "timekilling" exercises—I had just paused in my pacing of her office to reexamine the framed print of August Klimt's erotic painting of a swarthy (Semitic?) Casanova on the brink of kissing one of Vienna's aristocratic (and whiter than snow) Sleeping Beauties222s33—when Jayne suddenly stopped shuffling the papers on her desk and said: "Let's face it, darling; the delivery of what began as your 'brainchild' is now entirely in my professional hands. Consequently I fail to see what useful purpose is served by all this pacing up and down you've been doing like an expectant father in a maternity ward!"

     "Now just a minute, young lady—" I tried to protest, but she read my mind.

     "Believe me, sweetheart, while I can—and do—sympathize with the deeply disturbed state of your mind there is nothing I can do about it except perhaps to—" she started to say.

    "Jesus, you make it sound as if I'm suffering from some kind of goddammed disease." I interrupted.

     "Don't be alarmed, my pet—AML is seldom fatal," she said.

    "What the hell is AML ?" I asked.

    "After Masterpiece Letdown—" she began.

    "Which I suppose is—" I started to say.

Continuation of Footnote 222    Return to Index

Subfootnotes

222s18 Jack had just finished Jaroslav Hasek's novel. It was one of the literary masterpieces on what he called "The Private Reading List Of A Clandestine Autodidact,"—one of several such TopSecret documents (after his death there were syllabi I saw in the FIB Evidence Vault on such subjects for future study as The English Novel, Baroque Opera, Renaissance Painting & Sculpture, etc.) comprising Jack's extracurricular plans for one day becoming "a reasonably welleducated man." An extremely perilous project for even a nonMoron.222s18ss1

222s19 Being British her favorite composer was, of course, Sir Edward Elgar.

222s20 Except for Jack who, from that day onward never raised his hand again or in any other way indicated he was not a perfectly (sub)normal Moron.

222s21 In which case I might have shown at least some scientific curiosity—if not paternal pride—for the way his hybridized mind was wroking. Although, as I pointed out in an unpublished monograph entitled "A Study Of 65 JewishMoronic Halfbreeds To Determine What Effect , If Any, The Addition Of Semitic Genes Had On Their Intelligence"—only 3 (all girls as it turned out) of the bastards I sired during my ambassadorship manifested even the slightest trace of having what has been described as, "those analytical propensities distinguishing the Jews from all other races in the relentlessness with which they pursue the truth." The "truth" I arrived at in my (thankfully!) unpublished monograph has, of course, been repudiated by Jack F. Klutz himself, who proved: Even the humblest dyedinthewool Moron is capable of raising his or her NeoEgalitarian IQ (the only one that really matters) to the perfect 100 seldom attained by even those whose ethnic credentials (Ethiopian, Oriental or Palaearctic) couldn't be more unimpeachable StanfordBinetwise. In any event, as he was to do so successfully until the time of his murder, Jack F. Klutz fooled me—and everyone else who (thought they) knew him—into believing he was nothing more than what he appeared to be: The most mediocre of Moronic mediocrities.

222s22 In 1975 Western Civilization itself had yet to reach the absolute rockbottom of its decline. It would take another 2 decades before that happened with the arrival at our gates of such mindboggling barbarities as rapmusic, talkradio, punkrock, political correctness, a $5trillion National Debt, multiculturalism, the Windsors washing their (extra)marital laundry in public (yet again), supermarket tabloids, The Bridges of Madison County making bestseller history and, to ice this depressing sociocultural cake, that most Roman of all Massmedia Circuses—the O. J. Simpson Double Murder Trial.

222s23 Which I would never have noticed were it not for Jayne Playne's lunchtime habit of browsing through that distinguished rag for just the sort of "mysterious message" she happened to find addressed to—of all people!—me ("How could this 'Prince C' business fail to ring a bell apropos that 'C. Prince' pen name appearing on your Morons Awake! manuscript?").

222s24 Lady X claims she first heard about "the American debasement of this most aristocratic of AngloFrench reproaches" during a semester spent as an exchange student at Wellesley—where it was explained by her Sigma Chi room mate that the "RSVP" on the invitations she was sending to their opposite male numbers at Harvard indicated that not only was the Guest of Honor "as chaste as unsunn'd snow" in the maidenhead department but, even more enticingly, a total stranger to the mysteries of an IvyLeague PettingParty. "The 'harmless' object of which," she added when Lady X confessed her own ignorance on the subject, "is (short of actually penetrating her Sanctum Sanctorum) to drive some maidenly coed so mad with carnal lust she begs someone—anyone!—'to end this hellish torment of mine with a copulatory coup de grace!'"  My introduction to this crude variation on what I later came to regard as the most elegant of avocations took place when I was a Princeton "frat rat" and attended the petting parties arranged by our female affiliates at the nearby Myra Breckenridge Academy—an exclusive Finishing School "For The Crème De La Crème Of The Garden State's Debutante Crop." Or, as we White Knights of the Crooked Cross222s24ss1 put it rather less gallantly, "New Jersey's hottest and juiciest tomatoes."

     No matter how crude these undergraduate attempts at "expanding the frontiers of precoital titillation" were I look back on them with some fondness as the sophomoric seeds from which grew my lifelong passion for perfecting the Theory & Practice of Superprotracted Foreplay. And there is another reason for my "petting party nostalgia." While as an IvyLeague "Jewboy" during the 1930s I was persona non grata in most social circles, ironically because The Protocols of the Elders of Zion warned its gentile readers that "kikes are Pied PornoPipers whose aptitude for luring blueeyed blonde fräuleins into their cabalistic sexmaniac clutches seems, for some strange reason, to be irresistible" there was a virtual bidding war on Fraternity Row to see which house could entice me onto its PettingParty Team! So it was that, thanks to Sergei Nilus, the Rev. Denny Fahey, C.S.Sp., B.A., D.D, Lord Sydenham, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, Alfred Rosenberg, Josef Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler that Mordecai Goldberg acquired a sexual mystique among the very Nordic Sexgoddesses who otherwise wouldn't have given him the time of day, let alone share the time of their lives!

[EDITORESS' NOTE: All this "IvyLeague PettingParty" business is, as the author himself now freely admits, a complete fabrication. The only reason it hasn't been expunged from this nonfiction novel is: That by calling your attention to his "literary lies" in this way I will actually be reinforcing his credibility—since the absence of any such previous disclaimer proves that (up to this point at least) the author has in fact been telling the truth.—J.P.]

222s25 Notwithstanding Jayne's rise from the basement Salt Mine where she slaved away as a humble Publisher's Reader to the plush, spacious and airconditioned offices of an Executive Editoress, she continued wearing (a slightly more respectable version of) her old "shorts&halter Hell Hole uniform" whose skimpiness produced the same (desired?) effect on me as it did on that other poor bastard (VDOMwise), Leo Bloom.

222s26 The results of which were:

Battological a. A stammerer, one who repeats himself needlessly + -ICAL. [The Greek word is f. the personal name Bárros (see the story in Herodotus, IV, 155) + Aoyos, speaking, speaker.] Given to battology.
1863 C. READE Hard Cash I I. xiv 200. The battalogical author.
Battologist [f. as prec. + -IST.] One who needlessly repeats the same thing.
1653 GAUDEN Hierasp. 384 What perfect battologists they are; what circles they make in their Prayings.
Battologize v; also 8 -ize. [f. as prec. + -IZE.]
1. trans. To keep repeating (a word or phrase).
1634 Sir T. HERBERT Trav. (1677) 191 Battologizing the names Allough Whoddaw and Mohumet very often.
2. inter. To repeat words or phrases with needless iteration; to multiply words.
1712 Sir P. KING Const. Prin. Ch I. ii (1713) 37 When we pray let us not battologize. a 1726 BLACKALL Wks. (1723) I. 480 Do not battologize in your prayers says Our Saviour.
Battology Also 7 -logie, -logee. [ad. Gr. vain repetition, n. of quality f. see BATTOLOGICAL.] A needless and tiresome repetition in speaking or writing.
1603 T. CARTWRIGHT Confut. Rhem. N.T. (1618) 142 The marginall notes...are meere battologies of loathsome repetitions. 1765 TUCKER Lt. Nat. II 440 We are warned against the battology or vain repetitions of the heathens. 1818 SOUTHEY in Q. Review XIX 96 Away then with...the battology of statistics.
Contumelious a. [a. OF. contumélieus (mod F. -eus), ad. L. contumelios-us, f. contumelia CONTUMELY + -OUS.]
1. Of words and actions; of the nature of or full of contumely; reproachful and tending to convey disgrace and humiliation; despiteful.
1483 CAXTON Gold. Leg. 427/3 He said noo wordes tumelous ne contumelious nor other disordynate wordes. 1526 Pilgr. Perf. (1531) 13 Contumelyous and opprobryous blasphemes of the jewes. 1531 ELYOT Gov. III xii Catallus...wrate agayne hym contumelyouse or reprocheable versis. 1591 SHAKS I Hen. VI I. iv. 39 With scoffes and scornes and contumelious taunts. 1701 SWIFT Contests Noble & Coms. Wks. (1735) II. I. 31 The people frequently proceeded to rude contemelious language. 1884 Manch. Exam. 29 Oct. 5/2 'Bonnet'...'jackal'... 'badger' are all contumelious terms.
Pleonastic Gram. Characterized by pleonasm; using more words than are necessary (as a sentence, a writer, or writer); constituting pleonasm, superfluous, redundant (as a word or phrase). 1778 BR. LOWTH Transl. Isaiah (ed. 12) Notes 390 A pleonastic pronoun. 1797 Monthly Mag. III 12 MayÉ...not; after verbs of contradicting, or denying, it is pleonastic. 1879 FARRAR St. Paul I. 519 note, a mere pleonastic phrase for 'in the direction of the sea.'
b. gen. of fig. Done to excess of superfluity.
1876 E. MELLOR Priesth. iv. 164 If...the priests who both eat the wafer and drink the cup have not two full and perfect sacraments...if they have and derive any benefit from such a pleonastic sacrament. 1894 A. BIRRELL Ess. xvi 177 His bona-fide character...has been roughly condemned as pleonastic.

I was unable to locate Tetrogenic but, if there is or was such a word, we can deduce from the Latin tetra- (four) plus -genic (producing) and the context in which Jayne used it that it probably has something to do with making grammatical mountains from what should be novelistic molehills.

222s27 The Historical Event occurred late one night several weeks before when we had turned to the very last page of Morons Awake! and—believe it or not—were fighting tooth and nail over whether it should culminate with a prosaic "The End" (her choice because "those two threeletter words add a whimsical note of Hemingwaylike trenchancy to what, in my final editorial analysis, is really one superlong ejaculatory stream of PostModernNeoBaroquePurpleProseism.") or a more refined "Finis" (mine because "it adds an unabashedly aristocratic touch to a book which makes no secret of its antiegalitarian intensions").

222s28 Even if, by what would be the most outrageous injustice since Dreyfus was convicted of treason, Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded into the electric chair or the premiere performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony was dismissed by his critics as "a crashing bore," "an elitist exercise in talmudic turgidity" and "the incoherent ravings of a musical madman," Morons Awake! is denied its rightful —indeed its divinely inspired—claim to bestselling fame: The trail I blazed with my 16 volume History of the Morons will one day be recognized (at least in Ivory Tower circles) as having led to that academic Nirvana where the Historical Principles Governing The Rise & Fall Of The World's Greatest Societies, Nations, Empires & Civilizations are all revealed by Goldberg's Law of Microcosmicity.222s28ss1

222s29 Or, as the average Moron is heard to ask his wife after a day spent "sweating my b**ls off in a turnippatch" when she complains about the lack of "zing" in their lovelife, "What's the point of going through all those precoital motions when the plain truth of the matter is I'm too pooped to pop?"

222s30 Moses probably wasn't the first—and certainly not the last—"visionary" to use the White Lie technique in calming his followers' fears they would never reach that "land of milk & honey, of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass." (Deut. 8:7-9)  Columbus had no qualms about keeping 2 sets of navigational books to keep his crew from learning how far they had come without sighting their Promised Land. Or spinning all sorts of get rich quick yarns about solid gold mountains; tropical beaches strewn with diamonds, pearls and emeralds; and barebreasted Amazons to whom, in accordance with their pagan beliefs, having sex with an Italian sailor was a sacred duty. And, while lacking Shakespeare's way with words,222s30ss1 George Washington rallied his troops at Valley Forge with a peptalk no less stirring—and misleading222s30ss2—than that delivered by Henry V on the eve of Agincourt when he predicted "Even the rawest recruit who proves his military manhood on this frigid wasteland will live in the mind of every American until hell itself freezes over!"222s30ss3

222s31 Not to mention the even more profoundly disturbing questions that could be raised concerning those assumptions about the average house wife's capacity to "endure the unendurable" on which my Theory of Superprotracted Foreplay is based—questions I previously chose to dismiss as "exceptions proving the rule" when some Moroness or -ette (but only after I pleaded with her to do so) confessed: "In the final thrillofalifetimewise analysis, that most magical of a woman's pre-, post- and/or extramarital moments toward which you have been maneuvering me so relentlessly, did leave just a little to be desired." Or that she "fudged just the teensiest bit" for my benefit what I had previously been fooled into thinking was her "unbridled display of Gold Medalwinning elation when we crossed the finishing line of our Olympic Lovemaking Marathon in unison, my darling." And while even the most dismal of these apres reveil (after awakening) debriefings always ended with expressions of "undying gratitude" from my Sleeping Beauties for the services I "so gallantly rendered" in reviving their dormant sex lives, they left me with the nagging doubt a fly had somehow found its flawing way into the magic ointment of my foreplay wizardry.

222s32 Leaving the manufacturing technicalities aside, according to our editoress: "There are certain physical limits to a book's bulk beyond which the average woman lacks the sheer musclepower needed to pick it up for browsing purposes; let alone lug such a dead weight all the way home should she impulsively join the buying panic triggered since its title was critically touted as "one that belonged at the top of every housewife's shoppinglist for novels that will add a dash of imaginary spice to her meat & potatoes lovelife."

222s33 Which, along with his Danae, Die Jungfrau, Wasserschlangen, The Beethoven Frieze Panels—I: "Longing for Happiness," II "Hostile Forces," III "The Longing for Happiness Finds Surcease in Poetry"—and some of Egon Schiele's most erotic drawings, Jayne displayed (at my suggestion!) on the walls of her office "as a constant reminder most of the great art produced by Dead White Male Europeans was inspired by—or created for— women." [Those who purchased the Collector's SpecialSuperDeluxeLimitedEdition of Morons Awake! can find plates of the aforementioned paintings in their "Bonus Portfolio of Erotic Art"—J. P.]

Subsubfootnotes
222s18ss1 As Kendall Hailey tells us in her The Day I Became An Autodidact (p.89) "I saw some of my school acquaintances tonight...and was questioned exhaustively about just what I am doing. I tried to answer as best I could, but as my two main areas of interest at the moment are Demosthenes and Preston Sturges, and they couldn't discuss the works of either, we didn't get very far."  Return to Main footnote

222s24ss1 In addition to such standard "instruments of torture" as the rubberized monkeywrench, the policeman's whistle, the Japanese paint brush, the velvet glove, the bicycle pump, the whispering of passages from the Kama Sutra, Decameron and Sappho's Invocation to Aphrodite, the center piece of all petting party paraphernalia was, of course, an exact replica of de Sade's Croix de l'amour. To which the "victim's" wrists and ankles were (loosely) tied with strands of silk so delicate (in accordance with the Marquis' dictum that: "Unless the object of one's sexual 'depravities' is willing—nay, eager!—to 'suffer' what is done unto her one might as well beat a dead horse.") they would break from even the slightest tug—if and when she wanted them to.

222s28ss1 The fact future historians will apply my Microcosmicity Theories in explaining why Morons Awake!—through no fault of its own—failed to launch the Second (NeoEgalitarian) American Revolution Which Arrested And Then Reversed The Decline Of Western Civilization is the coldest kind of comfort for someone who believed so passionately in the power of art to persuade ordinary housewives by the hundreds of millions that, according to the Gospel of Born Again Klutzianism: The only True & Lasting Happiness comes not from the false and temporary bliss of ignorance but through the Lifelong Pursuit Of SocioCultural Wisdom.  Return to Main footnote

222s30ss1 He that shall see this day, and live old age/Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours/And say "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian."/ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars/And say "These wounds I had on Crispin's Day."/Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot/But he'll remember with advantages/What feats he did that day. Then shall our names/Familiar in his mouth as household words/ Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter/ Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester/Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered./This story shall the good man teach his son;/And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by/From this day to the ending of the world/ But we in it shall be remembered;/We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/For he today that sheds his blood with me/ Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile/This day shall gentle his condition;/ And gentlemen in England now abed/Shall think themselves accursed they were not here/And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks/That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. Henry V, Act II, scene iii  [This stirring call to martial glory is just as—if not more—applicable to you, my brave little reader, for the courage you've displayed on this artistic battlefield!]

222s30ss2 Notwithstanding his limited knowledge of Thucydides' Treatise On The Futility Of Waging War Washington must have known that from the common footsoldier's point of view there has never been a revolution, conflict or crusade worth his dying for. This truth was confirmed by the answers given to the following multiplechoice question highschool students throughout America were asked in 1977 as part of the Valley Forge Bicentennial Celebration: "Valley Forge is—(a) A new brand of lofat salad dressings [chosen by 11%]; (b) The name of an English rock and roll band [15%]; (c) The location where Washington's Continental Army spent the winter of 1777 [2%]; (d) Slang for the most private of a young woman's anatomical parts [72%]."

222s30ss3 Unfortunately we will never know for certain the exact language Washington used to persuade his ragtag Continentals they should and, more importantly, could stand firm at Valley Forge—a feat of supersalesmanship without which we Americans might still be British subjects!). The foregoing quotation was taken from Maxwell Anderson's screenplay (based on his verse drama Valley Forge) for a 1942 film entitled A Cold Day In Hell and starring John Wayne as Washington. Although the script remains in the UCLA archives, the film itself was never shown and has since disappeared without a trace. In those dark days following Pearl Harbor John Ford believed "the Valley Forge story would remind the American people of their 'never say die' heritage." But the newlycreated NABURASS (National Advisory Board for Uncovering and/or Rectifying Artistic Subversion and/or Sabotage) thought differently. In its "Confidential Report To The Makers Of 'A Cold Day In Hell' Explaining Why The NABURASS Seal Of Approval Was Being (Temporarily) Withheld" the following reasons are given:

1. If the message of A Cold Day In Hell is that in a society where all forms of "book larnin'" are considered unAmerican the repetition of history is unavoidable, we frankly fail to see what the point of such a counterproductive exercise would be, since "message movies" fall into the same "antiIntellectual" category. Unless your real purpose is to punish the masses for having an alltoo human nature that, by definition, they are quite powerless to change?
2. As the memorandum from the Daughters of the American Revolution (Enclosure D) states in part: "The socalled 'supporting role' played by the German General, Baron von Steuben, in A Cold Day In H**l when he 'singlehandedly' turns Washington's 'undisciplined rabble' into a 'proper Prussian style' fighting machine raises the most disturbing innuendoes vis-a-vis the fitness of our twentieth century Minute Men to fight on the same battle field with Hitler's (so far) invincible Wehrmacht."
3. A similar complaint can be made with respect to the allegedly "indispensible" contribution to Washington's Valley Forge triumph made by that other aristocratic foreigner—and a Moron at that!—General Ignaz von Klütz when he (supposedly) taught some of Pennsylvania's smartest farmers how to grow turnips. Considering how the Nazis' SuperRace Theories are predicated on their Aryan purity it seems to us the very last thing an America at war needs now is for Hollywood to open that old can of worms about exactly who and what went into this genetic Melting Pot of ours!
4. Whether or not it was your intention to do so, given the fact both the Battle of Stalingrad and the Siege of Leningrad will probably relegate Valley Forge to a footnote in the Annals of Arctic Warfare, we must ask ourselves whether A Cold Day In Hell does more to glorify Stalin's atheistic communism than it does the heroic sacrifices our godfearing forefathers made when they froze to death establishing world's first government of the people, by the people and for the people?

The WWII threat of "cinematic, literary and/or theatrical treason" against which NABURASS was chartered by Congress to "defend our Home Front from its demoralizing influence" never did materialize. And even if some Hollywood/Park Avenue/ Broadway FifthColumn had tried to pull its defeatist wool over the eyes of wartime America's moviegoing, playwatching and/or novelreading public—given all that red accounting ink in which the history of American "art" films, "serious" drama and "literary" fiction is written—I doubt it could have come within a country mile of doing so. No, my dear reader; the inescapable evolutionary consequence of our refusal to take the arts (both fine and liberal) seriously is, I'm afraid, this: After thumbing our noses (no matter how metaphorically) at such "fancypantsed highbrowed smart alecks" as Randolph Bourne, Charles Ives, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Thorstein Veblen, Ayn Rand and Herman Melville (to name but a few) for (at least) the last 200 years we Homo sapiens americanus have lost the capacity for thinking in those abstract terms which previously distinguished us from our (now extinct) Neanderthal cousins. Nowhere is this depressing state of evolutionary affairs illustrated more starkly than by that most misbegotten222s30ss3sss1 of memorials with which we (supposedly) honor our Vietnam Veterans.222s30sss2 But, to paraphrase Field Marshal Montgomery's characteristically understated oneliner explaining his botched attempt to shorten WWII by outflanking the Germans at Arnhem —that might be one digression too many. Especially in the reading of what you've been "led to believe"—notwithstanding my repeated admonitions against doing so—is a "somewhat didactic but nevertheless thoroughly entertaining bestseller."  Return to Main footnote

Subsubsubfootnotes
222s30ss3sss1 Compared to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the lifesized and (disconcertingly) ponchodraped "average G. I. Joes" of the Korean Veterans' Memorial (one can't help thinking they might in fact have been produced by Mattel, Inc.) look like Rodin's Burghers of Calais—a judgment which, no matter how sarcastically I pronounce it, is bound to make that fiercest of French aesthetes turn over in his grave —along with the corpses of those once redblooded American boys who gave their All- to perpetuate the dictatorial (but anticommunist!) regimes of Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, Chun Dooh Hwan and Roh Tae Woo.

222s30sss2 "Veterans" is the diplomatic way of referring to those 57,939 (predominantly) young men who came home from Vietnam in plastic body bags—thereby avoiding the more descriptive but indiscreet ("If not downright fucking disrespectful, you goddammed draftdodging &probablypinko eggheadedasshole!")t-, d-, i- and v-words.  I'm assuming, of course, the singularly dubious "distinction" I've drawn in my criticism of the VVM was not intended by its young (Maya Lin was only 21 when she entered the contest "she never dreamed of winning") and—by her own admission [Time Magazine 6 November 1989 p.90]—"naive" designer. If, on the other hand, that pair of converging black marble walls inscribed with the 57,939 names of those who died (so vainly) in Vietnam was a deliberate attempt to "candycoat" this bitterest of didactic pills I make no apologies for—or bones about—my opinion concerning the criminality of her "medical" malpractice in doing so, which is: Rather than cure her patients "doctor" Lin leaves them with nothing but the sickeningly sweet aftertaste of all the sentimental sugar she used to sweeten what should have been an unadulterated dose of that fundamental truth every schoolboy knows (but only for "testpassing" purposes)—

THOSE WHO FORGET—OR NEVER LEARN—THE LESSONS HISTORY TEACHES US ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT THEM.

Before you state the obvious "fact" that: Since we had never lost a war this rule didn't apply to all those brave American boys who fought and died in Vietnam for a cause they had every right (if not reason) to believe would end no less victoriously than any of the previous Crusades we undertook against the enemies of democracy—stop and think, my dear reader! The same excuse could be—and was—made on behalf of those brave German boys in Adolf Hitler's once unstoppable Wehrmacht whose Deutschland über alles and thousandyear Third Reich plans were ended so abruptly by the "subhuman" defenders of Stalingrad (one can only speculate on what sort of memorial Miss Lin might have designed for Nazi Germany's unsung WWII "veterans" who—no less mindlessly than our troops did in Vietnam—believed they were saving the civilized world from the barbarian hordes of a bolshevism that made no secret of its own plans for "ruthlessly exterminating all who would block the path to a Proletarian Paradise On Earth").

     And to explain why the redcoated ranks of Britain's hitherto invincible army were decimated by our sharpshooting Minute Men at Concord and Lexington.

     Or—even more to the point Vietnamwarwise—why those 15,000 "indomitable" Légionnaires Étrangers found themselves (not unlike Custer's cavalry at Little Big Horn) surrounded in Dien Bien Phu by 4 times as many "hostile natives."

   Naturally as a member of the "fairer and gentler sex" you aren't expected to bother yourself with such strictly "masculine affairs." Unless, perchance, you happen to be one of those countless women whose sweethearts, husbands, fathers and/or sons have, since the very first war was fought, been (or still could be) turned into just so much cannonfodder by some megalomaniacal Chieftan, King, Kaiser, Tzar, Emperor, Mikado, Shah, Imam, Mogul, Negus, Hospodar, Sultan, Raja, Führer, Il Duce, Prime Minister or President. If you do fall into such an unfortunate category it should interest you to know that from the time the first history book was inscribed onto the clay tablets of some ancient "superpower" (probably Cathay or Mesopotamia) there has been no mystery about why, sooner or later, every "unbeatable" army meets its Salamis, Actium, Jericho, Thermopylae, Marathon, Leuctra, Chaeronea, Trebia, Cynoscephalae, Hastings, Lake Peipus, Sinope, Knucklehead Ridge, Yorktown, Waterloo, Balaklava, Stalingrad, Midway—

     Nevertheless, you will interrupt—how dare I speak so ill of these 57,939 when, among all the millions who died in America's winning wars, they deserve a greater measure of our compassion (if not our adulation) for having perished in a cause that was so hopelessly lost from its miserable outset? The answer to that question, dear reader, comes not from my lips but from those of the 57,939 ghosts whose voices haven't stopped haunting me from the day their "memorial" was dedicated. "What really pisses us off the most about that goddammed wall," they say, "is the way it—not the VC or NVA—makes our having died in Vietnam so frigging meaningless by perpetuating the myth we were "good soldiers fighting in a bad war" when the truth is we simply paid the price for failing to do our homework on the reasons (or lack thereof!) why America was asking us to sacrifice ourselves for a war it couldn't—and shouldn't—have won." [Regarding that reference to "homework" see Appendix T for a letter which, had it actually been written by any one of those 57,939 Killed In Action might have prevented the vast majority of their names from appearing on that wall they are not at all crazy about.]

     And, as Appendix U (Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations April 23, 1971) demonstrates, I'm not the only one who hears their ghostly voices—or "dares" to compare what they (on our behalf) did in the Vietnam war with what their German, Italian and Japanese "good soldier" counterparts did in WWII.