Chapter 5: War & Piece

Before rescuing Maria Bimbeaux from the maidenly distress he left her in on page 249 our author answers the $64 question concerning the paternity of her savior/son—Having been crowned as the Turnip Tournament Queen by her 3 judges she obliges them with the customary G***b**g—A soulsearching examination of the author's "ill fated" cloak & dagger(less) dealings with Adolf Hitler to end WWII in 1941 and thereby prevent the extermination of 8 million European Jews (not to mention all those gentiles whose slaughter was less systematic but equally devastating to what were the highest Humanitarian Ideals of Western Civilization).

IT IS ONLY WITH THE MOST PROFOUND reluctance (and her written consent¹⁹⁵) that I reveal the details of my "romantic relationship" with the Sainted Mother of the Massiah (whose First & Foremost Apostle I've become) to you dear reader, who—notwithstanding the intimate psychosexual nature of our "literary" loveaffair—must, alas, remain a (more or less) perfect stranger pillowtalkwise. But certain questions have been raised in the vicious smear campaign waged against me and my Massianic Mentor by the conspiracy to discredit his NeoEgalitarian Credo which must be answered before this Gospel of Born Again Klutzianity can indeed launch that Second (SocioCultural) American Revolution which will Reverse The Decline Of Western Civilization.  The most despicable and, unfortunately, the gravest of the slanders directed against me by Ballbraker and his fellow character assassins is—although I shudder to repeat it—this dastardly syllogism: (a) BECAUSE the last of Josef Klutz's many war wounds rendered him sexless, and; (b) SINCE his wife's claim that her savior/son was "immaculately" conceived is the one made by all Scarlet Women, and; (c) WHEREAS the author of Morons Awake! admits he and Mrs Klutz were "romantically involved" throughout her marriage, no reasonable person can fail to CONCLUDE THAT; (d) Jack F. Klutz was THE BASTARD OFFSPRING of said AUTHOR.

     I can't emphasize too strongly how seriously these allegations concerning my paternity of this novel's central "character"¹⁹⁶ must be taken. If I truly were his father—or putting it even more pregnantly: If Jack F. Klutz wasn't a dyedinthewool average Moron this SocioCultural Cathedral I've been erecting for you page by painstaking page would collapse like a house of fictitious cards! After all: The Doctrinal Rock on which Born Again Klutzianity stands—or falls!—is that FIRST ARTICLE OF NEOEGALITARIAN FAITH stating: "Ordinary Morons (and/or Americans) are congenitally capable of acquiring the most extraordinary appreciation for the Finer Things in their (otherwise) Lackluster Lives." As you know from having come this far with me, dear reader, I've never tried to conceal the implied fact that, during those 50 years when I fornicated my way through the entire female population of Moronia, I probably did sire scores—if not hundreds—of "bastards." Now why in the world, you must be asking yourself, would I want to conceal such an accomplishment when, like a "spunkier" version of Johnny Appleseed, I was adding my SuperHighBrow genes to a Moronic bloodstream so desperately in need of a (Jewish) American transfusion?

     And, even if by doing so I squandered humanity's last chance for SocioCultural Salvation, how could I not crow over having fathered the Prophet Of Prophets—that Massiah who was born to Awaken his fellow Morons (along with billions of other perfectly normal people) and lead them out of their IgnoranceIsBliss bondage into the Promised Land of Klutzian Happiness? But, thank God, you won't have to take my word for it when I tell you this, dear reader: Mordecai J. Goldberg, PhD. and former American Ambassador to Moronia had nothing whatsoever to do with the birth of this nonfiction novel's hero. No, my dear reader, the following facts speak for themselves on that most seminal of issues:

     In the first place; during the entire year before Josef George Thomas Harry Klutz Jr. (later rechristened Jack F.) was born his mother and I did not engage in what were our (more or less) ongoing acts of adultery for the very good reason that: She spent the first 6 of those 12 months in the Belgian Congo trying to repair the psychological damage her Soldier of Fortune husband sustained when a boobytrapped bedpan made mincemeat of his manhood! Having lost the last of his limbs —a right arm amputated by one of Fidel Castro's machetewielding sugarcanecuttersturnedCubanMinutemen (the left was frozen at Stalingrad; one leg was blown clean off in 1949 by an Israeli grenade and the other rotted away from the septic effects of a Vietcong punji stick while fighting with the French Foreign Legion at Dien ben Phu)—Klutz retired in 1959 from his life of soldiering to one spent being pushed by his wife (or some other "good Samaritan") through the streets and backalleys of Moronville in a wheelbarrowmounted wickerbasket as he made the rounds of his favorite turnipschnapps haunts. Less than a year later, however, despite his basketcase status the Union Miniere Katanga offered him a job he couldn't refuse as a military advisor to Moishe Tshombe and his Secessionist Forces in Elisabethville; where Klutz was able to perform his staff duties from a bed in the (partially) converted bordello serving as a combination HQ and R&R facility for the Belgianrecruited mercenaries fighting against Patrice Lumumba's Communist insurgents.

     What wounded Klutz far more than the loss of his smallest but most prized appendage was, that by boobytrapping his bedpan, the Congolese harlot in whose "tender hands and heart of gold" he placed all his trust (and what remained of his mutilated body) destroyed whatever faith he still had in "the basic goodness of the human race generally and the female sex in particular." And, while there will be those diehard feminists who fault Maria for debasing herself so abjectly on behalf of some loutish scumbag simply because she was married to him, I think most of you probably share my more charitable opinion that, like Lady Chatterly, she deserves a Victoria Cross or Congressional Medal of Honor for at least partially restoring her crippled warrior husband's will to live in a world where, for all practical purposes, he might as well be one of those women about whom he used to tell his drinking buddies, "In the final analysis Freud's right: It's simply their lack of our private parts which makes them so damned attractive to us—and vice versa."

     Oddly enough Klutz's boobytrapped bedpan story ended rather happily when he was given a hero's welcome on his return to Moronia and served as the Grand Marshal for that year's Turnip Tournament Parade. Following his death in 1976 (not surprisingly from liver cirrhosis) a bronze statue of his nude (except for a helmet) and completely appendageless body was erected in Moronville's Civic Center Plaza¹⁹⁷ with this legend inscribed on its granite base:

Never before in the Glorious Annals of Klutzkriegery [mercenary warfare] has one Moron
given so Much of himself on so Many foreign battlefields for so Little.

     Second, but most significantly, dear reader—DNA tests performed on Jack F. Klutz's foreskin¹⁹⁸ prove "beyond the shadow of any genetic doubt he was a dyedinthewool LMB (LowerMiddleBrow) Moron who couldn't have been fathered by an SHB (SuperHighBrow) JewishAmerican."

SINCE THESE FACTS ESTABLISH in no uncertain terms that Josef Klutz couldn't have—and I didn't —begat her son (and if one believes his mother when she swears our romantic liaisons comprised the full extent of her extra marital lovelife) we are left with Maria's Immaculate Conception "story" to explain how the Massiah who would one day forever alter the 10,000yearold course of human sociocultural history found his embryonic way into the womb of a Moroness who, for the year in question at least, was (according to her) "as virginal as the Mother Superior of Moronville's Lacrima Christi Convent." Which "story," my dear reader, you can accept on the basis that:

(a) Generally speaking Morons aren't bright enough to fabricate any falsehood, let alone one of such Jesuitical complexity, and female Morons are particularly (in)famous for the frankness with which they discuss the most selfincriminating¹⁹⁹ of their marital and/or extramarital affairs, or;

(b) Having demonstrated my credibility on every previous occasion when it has been severely challenged, I should be given the benefit of your doubts on this one, or;

(c) By now you are far more concerned about expediting the climactic consummation of our "literary loveaffair" than you are in exploring every single one of its (seemingly) interminable "fine points," or;

(d) All (or any combination) of the above.

Your prerogative^G as a reader to take advantage of any or all of these "escape clauses" notwithstanding, I think you will admit: Maria Bimbeaux's Immaculate Conception hypothesis seems a very slender thread indeed from which to dangle the weighty problem of validating the Doctrine of Born Again Klutzianity as a SocioCultural Credo Of, For and By the Most Average of Morons. Moreover, we must remember: Jack F. Klutz's mother wasn't just any Moroness; she was a dyedin thewool Bimbeaux. And, as such, there are several distinguished gynotheologians I could name (were it not for the conspiracy to assassinate the character of anyone associated with this exposé) who regard her virgin birth claims as being "well within the realm of gynotheological possibility, Bimbeauxwise."

     Accordingly, I urge—I beg!—all of you who can possibly do so: To stretch your already overstretched attention span to its outermost limits by continuing to follow my train of thought on this Most Vital Matter for just a few more pages. In the event you just can't wait any longer for the more storytellinglike part of this chapter to resume with my rescuing of young Maria from the maidenly distress I left her in on page 249 and her ensuing g***b**g at the hands (among other things) of the Turnip Tournament Queen Judges; I'm confining all the material you want to skip between 2 sets of those 3 daggers (or are they crucifixes?) I've occasionally been using for change of pace purposes.

† † †

     To explore this obscure²⁰⁰ (gynotheology has never been on the academic Hit Parade) but fascinating subject we must return a few centuries to that period when the French dominated—what little there was of—"downtown" Moronville's cultural life. But before that can be done it will be necessary for me to continue the story I was telling President Kennedy about how and why the Morons cling so obstinately to their facespiting antiIntellectualism before he interrupted me on page 210 with that (rhetorical) question: "For chrissake, Goldberg, is there some point to this goddam lecture you've been bending my bloody ear with for the last hour?"

     As you will no doubt remember, I was just about to finish explaining how the Hebrews—called "Highbrows" by the Morons—Lorenzo the Magnificent banished from Florence had turned their Moronville "Ghetto" into one of Europe's most illustrious centers of 17thcentury learning. What I was going to say next was this:

But by 1713 the Highbrow heydays were numbered when Moronia became a bone of contention in the ongoing geopolitical dogfight between the Bourbons and Hapsburgs over which of them would rule the European kennel. In a footnote to the treaty ending the War of Succession France and Austria settled their longstanding dispute concerning whose imperial sphere of influence Moronia rightfully fell under by arranging a marriage between Ambrose XIX (a Hapsburg puppet appropriately known as "the Spineless") and Louis XIV's bastard daughter,²⁰¹ Amelie. By so doing Louis hoped he might kill a pair of troublesome birds with the same stone. Amelie's outspoken ideas about the equal— if not the dominant—part Frenchwomen should play in their loveaffairs were so scandalous they sent shockwaves through even the most liberal members of a Parisian society whose rolereversing practices were on the cutting edge of 18thcentury sexual perversion. While in geographic terms Paris and Moronville were separated by only a month's coach journey (assuming any Parisian in his or her right mind would want to go there) for sociopolitical purposes they were light years apart.²⁰² And, by sending Amelie to Moronia Louis wouldn't only free his paternal(istic) neck from the albatross of her militant feminism he would also be flinging its foul carcass onto the very doorstep of his Hapsburg nemesis where, from Louis' Bourbon point of view, it was bound to raise "a most gratifying stink."²⁰³ Notwithstanding the architectural improvements made by the Highbrows to their Ghetto, upon her arrival in Moronville Amelie was horrified by the dismal sight of what was going to be the center of her social circle as Queen of the Morons. With the passage of time, however, she decided her banishment to such a wasteland was not without "certain advantages." For one thing she would be free of her father's parental control and a milieu in which, despite all the "enlightened" lip service to the contrary, her bastardy was an inescapable fact of life which curtailed any hopes she had for reigning over Paris' nightlife as the "moon" to Louis XIV's "sun." And for another; Moronia might be the smallest of royal ponds but, given the fecklessness of the king whose throne she shared, it was one in which she could swim with the Tsarinalike extravagance of a Catherine the Great if she chose to do so.

     Which she most certainly did.

SO IT WAS QUEEN AMELIE got the bright idea of "turning Moronville's Ghetto into a miniature²⁰⁴ Versailles which, all things being relative—and especially so when compared to the lifestyle of these wretched Morons—would at least seem like the real thing." Despite having inherited her father's dauntless determination, however, given Moronia's shortage of intellectual and natural resources such an ambitious project would never have gotten off the ground were it not for the help Amelie received from the pèlerins (pilgrims) who made their wellheeled way from Paris to Moronville bearing gifts of food, wine and other Gallic creature comforts "to alleviate the suffering of their martyred Promethea"—many of whom remained on a (more or less) permanent basis after falling under the spell of her "dream for creating a New Garden of Eden in this wasteland whose forbidden fruit we can eat to our mind's content without fearing the scorn of public opinion, the rage of a jealous king or the wrath of God Himself!"  Among this growing entourage of expatriates were some of France's most renowned artists, musicians, poets, philosophers and—more importantly for Amelie's immediate purposes—the architects who could translate her (rather sketchy²⁰⁵) blueprint for Edenizing Moronville into a concrete—or at least sandstone—reality. They began by demolishing the old Ghetto; most of whose Highbrow inhabitants had already read the handwriting on its crumbling walls and left for what were now the greener pastures of a Reformation Germany more concerned with liquidating the Holy Roman Empire than with persecuting Jews.²⁰⁶

     Rather than imitate the classical design Versailles expressed so perfectly (and whose monumental grandeur would have rendered its miniaturization ludicrous) these architectural swashbucklers chose the new rocaille (rococo) style for the design of their "ivorytowered citadel." So much gingerbread was used in decorating the sugarfrosted²⁰⁷ phoenix which arose from the gray rubble of the old Ghetto it quickly came to be known among its residents as "Le Gâteau." The English speaking Morons dubbed it "Caketown." Profiting from the Highbrow Utopians' failure to civilize them the Caketowners treated their Moronic neighbors with "the contempt they deserve."²⁰⁸  While Amelie and her retinue were enjoying the latest plays, operas and concerts performed for them by Europe's most famous touring companies and dining on the finest French cuisine within the walls of their elitist enclave, the Morons (when they weren't occupied with the daily struggle to stay alive on a diet of turnips) entertained themselves as they had always done by smalltalking, assgrabbing, brimsnapping, elbowrubbing and twiddling their thumbs over a jar or 2 of "liquid happiness" in one of Moronville's turnipschnappscellars. Despite its exclusivity the mere presence of such a cosmopolitan clique²⁰⁹ caused some native Moronvillers to question the blissfulness of their ignorance and Spartan lifestyle. Especially those who worked in Caketown as menials and couldn't help speculating about what went on behind the closed doors of the salons (parlors), sal á mange (diningrooms) and boudoirs (bedchambers) of these aristocrats as they changed their satin literie (sheets), washed their porcelaine (dishes), scrubbed their haute couture (glad rags) and cleaned up the dishabille (mess) left behind by their nightly soirées (shindigs). Nor were the Country Bumpkins (and especially the Bumpkinettes) who sold their turnips in Moronville's Produce Market unimpressed by the savory smells coming from Caketown's kitchen chimney. Or the sights of the lingerie, cosmétiques, bijouterie, objects d'art, pâtisserie and, above all, chapeaux to be seen in the gallerie of shop windows lining Cake town's Main Street façade.

AN EXCEPTION TO THE COLDSHOULDER Caketowners generally showed toward their Moronic neighbors were the efforts made by His Holy Eminence, Jean-Jacques Bimbeaux, SJ, the Archbishop of Moronville & Papal Envoy to Cretiny "to at least win the hearts of these pathetic creatures for Jesus if—as everyone seems to believe—the winning of their minds isn't possible for the simple reason they don't have them." Before coming to Moronia, as a selfstyled voyageur de commerce pour L'Fils du Dieu (traveling salesman for Christ) Bimbeaux had acquired a reputation among the French Hierarchy for being un prêtre détendu (a loose canon).  It wasn't just that his "soapbox sermons to the downtrodden masses" reeked more of revolutionary—albeit Christianlike—communism than they did of fire and brimstone, Bimbeaux's practice of inducing his wayward female parishioners to bare their souls and their bosoms for an audience who paid the 18thcentury equivalent of today's scalper's prices (as a "charitable donation to the church") for the privilege of witnessing them do it, would have been punished by excommunication had it not been for the generous share of illgotten gains from these protopentecostal peepshows Bimbeaux prudently distributed up the Chain of Papal Command. Hence the Vatican's emotions were decidedly mixed when France's Cardinal Fleury suggested disposing of "this popular and profitable but potentially counterproductive priest by 'promoting' him to the (longvacant) Archbishopric of Moronville where, from what little is known about their witlessness, the Morons should be quite oblivious to Bimbeaux's Tartuffian eccentricities." After some vigorous haggling Pope Benedict XIII consented to this proposal when Fleury agreed to make up for the revenues lost with Bimbeaux's exit from the lucrative cosmopolitan market for his sleazier sort of sacrilegious shenanigans.

     As with some American Presidents who acquire a statesmanlike attitude toward their high office after winning it in the brawl of a political gutter where the only dirty trick is the one that doesn't disable your opponent crotchwise, Bimbeaux surprised his harshest critics by approaching the responsibilities of Moronville's Archbishopric with a gravitas rivaling, if not exceeding, that of Christendom's most conscientious prelates. Although it must be said the turning of this new leaf was at least partially due to the fact that, because of their indifference to public soul- and/or bosombaring, the Morons weren't willing to pay for what they regarded as "the cheapest of thrills." And, while Bimbeaux's principal claim to saintly fame²¹⁰ was converting Moronville's allpurpose singlestorey woodframe House of Worship (in former times it served as an Animist Temple, Greek Naos, Roman Sacrarium, Gnostic Chapel, Zoroastrian Tabernacle, Hindu Dewal, Shinto Shrine, Turkish Mosque, Highbrow Synagogue, Masonic Lodge, and Main Street Methodist Church) into a National Cathedral²¹¹ what concerns us, dear reader, is what became his consuming unofficial passion, namely: Tracing the history of these meekest of all God's children to learn how they managed to survive for so long with their severely limited intellectual resources.²¹² Being a man of the cloth Bimbeaux presumed that: In His curious way God had selected the Morons and not the Jews as the Chosen People destined to eventually inherit the earth; but until that Historic Day their mettle was to be tested on the anvil of one Joblike calamity after another until it was beaten into that Terrible Swift Sword He would use to purge the world of all those who refused to blindly believe in Him as the Supreme Source Of All Truth.

     As a Jesuit, however, he reserved his final judgment on the matter until he gathered enough evidence of a credible nature to support a theory which might otherwise be construed as just a scheme to put Moronia on the Biblical map now that he was "condemned" to spend the rest of his life slaving away in the obscurity of what amounted to an ecclesiastical saltmine. Accordingly he read every book in the fields of archaeology and social anthropology he could beg, borrow or steal in those days when such scientific disciplines were in a prenatal state.  After which he began (more or less) systematically exploring Moronia's geological and human landscape looking for some tangible proof the Morons were indeed the Chosen People mentioned in the Old Testament and the meek Christ looked upon with such favor in the New. While he managed to make some not entirely insignificant²¹³ progress toward finding a scholarly hook on which to hang his hypothetical hat, in addition to the primitive state of the archaeological arts in those days, Bimbeaux was hindered by such seemingly insurmountable obstacles as:

(a) The complete absence of any writing done by the Morons prior to 1623, when they adopted "the King's English" as their official tongue—a circumstance which made it virtually impossible²¹⁴ to determine what (if any!) translatable language they spoke before that date;

(b) The stagnant nature of a Moronic "technology" which, in most respects,²¹⁵ hadn't changed since paleolithic times; with the result that the few ancientlooking artifacts he did manage to dig up—a wooden plowshare, a coonskin cap and several "throwing stones"²¹⁶—were so similar to those currently in use it was impossible to authenticate them as relics of the Morons' more primitive past;

(c) A complete lack of curiosity on the average Moron's part in learning whether he or she was or wasn't one of God's Chosen People—an attitude Bimbeaux found not just "profoundly discouraging" but one which prevented him getting the kind of "horse's mouth" data I've been able to collect from some of my Moronic acquaintances concerning their innermost thoughts about belonging to a race the rest of the world holds in universal such contempt.

DESPITE THESE OBSTACLES BIMBEAUX perservered and (by a twist of fate like that which made me a major player in the Klutz Affair) one December day while crossing the Purple Mountains in a blizzard to deliver the Pope's Annual Christmas Greetings To The Cretins, he (literally) stumbled into a longlost cave near the summit of Mt. Highandry where, according to their mythology, "the Morons of Olden Tymes remained for a Month of Sundays while The Supreme Being, Mä_*Mä, was doing Her damnedest to drown their Archest Enemies, the Cretins, with The Mother Of All Downpours." This accident not only saved Bimbeaux from freezing to death—the cave into which he had fallen turned out to be an archaeological bonanza whose revelations of the theology practiced by the early Morons would only be eclipsed by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the light they shed on the murky origins of our own JudeoChristian faith. At first the understandably befuddled Archbishop thought he had fallen into one of those hideaways where local scofflaws stored their moonshine to avoid paying the "sin taxes on storebought hootch" which kept Caketown's cellars stocked with the finest French wines. And indeed, the cave's walls were lined with rack upon rack of those earthenware jugs in which the modern Morons still keep their homebrewed turnipbeer—a potent concoction known as "Joyjuice."

     With little else to do until the blizzard abated, and thinking he might warm the icy cockles of his heart with a sip or 2 of the foultasting but medicinal fluid he removed the coonskin cover from a jug and lifted the vessel to his lips—only to find that instead of Joyjuice it contained what he discovered was a tightly rolled sheet of parchment! Which, after taking it to the mouth of the cave and uncoiling it, he could see was filled with the kind of calligraphy found on the manuscripts produced at the monasteries of St. Gall, Cluny and Monte Cassino he had seen displayed in the Papal Archives on one of his visits to the Holy See. Unlike those documents, however, the one Bimbeaux held in his hands wasn't written in Latin, Greek, Hebrew or any of the other "classical" languages with which he had become familiar during his Jesuitical training. Nevertheless, having noted its profusion of diacritical markings, extravagant punctuation, generous use of parentheses, number of multisyllable words (and even the occasional footnote)—all of which were signs of a literary heritage that must surely have left its distinguished mark on the pages of philological history—he was convinced that "anyone with even the slightest expertise in that field of scholarship should have little difficulty identifying and deciphering it." Based on what few words of the otherwise incomprehensible text did ring some of his own linguistic bells Bimbeaux hazarded an educated guess to himself that: "Like Yiddish, this mysterious writing probably shares a common ancestry with German."²¹⁷

     Having removed all the scrolls he could carry from the jugs—some of which contained the dregs of an exceedingly mature Joyjuice that did wonders for those halffrozen cockles of his—when the snowstorm subsided Bimbeaux returned to Moronville. Where, for the next month he carefully copied passages of the stillunreadable text that would later be sent to a list of scholars he obtained after making some discreet²¹⁸ inquiries to his fellow Jesuits through their not always holy grapevine. These efforts bore fruit when, in the Summer of 1753, Bimbeaux received a letter from Professor Heinrich von Stempel of Leipzig University informing him the sample he had been sent did indeed seem to be written in Gibberish. "But," von Stempel wrote, "before putting my seal of academic approval on what would be a discovery of such earthshaking linguistic significance I would need to examine the original documents in their entirety." Sensing the kind of invidious^G factors at work that would later compromise the objectivity of those who translated and parsed the Dead Sea Scrolls, Bimbeaux answered von Stempel's request by sending him only more copies of longer passages, with the explanation that: "If these Mt. Highandry scrolls do indeed turn out to confirm the Morons' Mother Of All Downpours Myth they will no doubt challenge my 'finders keepers losers weepers' custodial claim to them. Accordingly, my dear professor, until all the legal issues concerning the ownership of these documents have been resolved I think they should remain safely under lock & key in my Archbishop's Palace."

     Von Stempel's repeated offers to visit Moronia were all rejected by Bimbeaux with a variety of excuses he concocted about his failing health, the burdens of his high office, his own travel plans and "the risks to life & limb run by all who enter a country with such a long history of suffering at the hands of foreigners." Despite his best efforts—and those of the entire Leipzig University Geography Department—the poor professor couldn't locate Moronia on any map of Europe. Moreover, when he asked those who delivered Bimbeaux's letters to trace the route they had taken in doing so they all replied: "Sorry, sir, but I'm only the last in a very long line of couriers. And even if I did know where Moronia is—which I definitely don't— it's strictly against company policy to divulge such trade secrets."²¹⁹  For these reasons, and some others not worth my mentioning, von Stempel abandoned any plans he had for "dropping in" on the elusive Archbishop while he "just happened to be in the neighborhood."  This epistolary cat&mouse game continued for 6 years before von Stempel finally surrendered to his intransigent foe by sending him a copy²²⁰ of The Authorized Gibberish-to-Latin Dictionary he managed to compile without ever having seen the Mt. Highandry Scrolls. And it was with this lexicon Bimbeaux begant making his translation into Latin of what I subsequently translated into Everyday English as The Moronic Chronicles; excerpts of which now follow for your general edification²²¹ and the hard evidence they provide on the burning issue of Klutz's "immaculate" conception.

Book Two Chapter 6 Part 1   Return to Index

Footnotes

195 See Appendix S for letter from M. Bimbeaux-Klutz to author.

196 Which he is. Although strictly speaking this isn't a novel and (so far at least) it might seem as if his Central Character status is being upstaged by my supporting First & Foremost Apostle role. But, as I've explained repeatedly, because of the dubious nature of Klutz's birthplace (Moronia), his less than dazzling intellectual endowments (LowerMiddleBrow) and—to put it mildly—a name lacking the resonance typically associated with such historymaking figures as Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, Parsifal, Napoleon Bonaparte, Christopher Columbus, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, and Christ Jesus it has been necessary for me to spend an inordinate number of pages establishing my own credibility prior to what will be his miraculous appearance in the Climactic Section of Morons Awake!.
     This literary exercise in cartbeforethehorseism is by no means unique. The hero of S. I. Witkiewicz's Great Polish Novel—who happens to be Witkiewicz himself—doesn't show up until the final page of a book that is more than 2,000 pages long. According to Frank O'Connor, "the very last scene in James Joyce's The Dead is...the real story, and everything [preceding it is] an enormously expanded introduction; a series of themes all of which find their climax in the hotel bedroom." And, of course, playgoers wait in vain for Samuel Beckett's Godot or Eugene O'Neil's Iceman to cometh at all! There are, however, certain literary advantages—not unlike those associated with the Art of Foreplay—in delaying my hero's arrival on the scene for as long as possible. By doing so I hope to enhance the dramatic effect of what is too often an event of little or no consequence suspensewise. As, for example, when—in the very first sentence of Kafka's Metamorphosis—the reader is suddenly told: "Upon waking up one morning from some disturbing dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself changed into a horrible insect."  In his The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature Martin Greenberg correctly points out "that the kind of narrative based on the unfolding of a traditional plot didn't appeal to Kafka because it is the very absence of an unfolding plot that is his subject matter. Kafka's story is about death, but a death lacking in the usual melodrama. Gregor Samsa's death is merely an inconclusive petering out of his spirit."
     That may be fine for Kafka's whimpering antihero, Gregor Samsa, but a book about Jack F. Klutz's martyrdom for the Holiest of Holy Causes must end with nothing less than the BIGGEST OF BIG BANGS.

197 Alongside those of such other illustrious Morons as Senator Huey P. Lôngwÿndê (coiner of the phrase "One Moron One Vote!"), Åmös Dûngh (grower of the world's largest—124 kilos—turnip), Josef Sïkspåk (proud possessor of the lowest brow ever measured by Moronville's Institute For The Advanced Study Of Foreheadology) and Harâldë Haffpîntré, Moronia's most famous dramatist, none of whose 137 plays contain a sentence of more than 5 words—all of which (except "Moron," "Moronic" and "Moronia")—are monosyllabic.

198 For obvious reasons the name of the laboratory where these tests were done must remain a secret.^198s1  As for how that precious scrap of flesh found its way into my hands I can be more forthcoming—if you are really curious enough about such a small matter (no pun intended) to read what is a rather longish (ditto) story.

     Like the Egyptians, Hebrews and Hottentots, since ancient times Morons have practiced the (more or less) religious rites of circumcision; with this notable departure from the normal procedure: Male Morons are separated from their foreskins at the rather ripe old age of 21 during a manhood ceremony known in Gibberish as Lêzmør (literally "Lessmore," or less is more—from the Horticultural Axiom: "Pruning thy bush makes for bigger berries.")^198s2  More meaningful for us, dear reader, is this additional Moronic eccentricity, circumcisionwise: The freshly severed foreskin isn't cremated, fed to a crocodile, flung into the crater of a sacred volcano, used as fishbait or simply trashed! Instead, after being embalmed for several weeks in a jamjar filled with fermented turnipjuice, it is slipped onto a "mansized" broom- or mophandle and dried in the shape of a ring which is then suspended by a gold chain over the jewelencrusted sëkskïrkên (fertility shrines) found in even the humblest of Moronia's rural huts, hovels, and shacks. This køk-kåp, as the mummified foreskin is called, remains in its shrine until the Moron from whom it was originally excised marries. On which gala occasion it is temporarily placed on his bride's finger in lieu of the more orthodox wedding band she will later wear when her husband's køk-kåp is safely locked away with her other wedding souvenirs in a shmükshäktêl (family jewelbox). In Jack F. Klutz's case, since he died a bachelor, his køk-kåp was never removed from its sëkskïrkên; a critical fact Ballbraker overlooked in his otherwise successful efforts to completely conceal the evidence of Klutz's death and, more to the point nationalsecuritywise, the kind of antiEgalitarian—hence counterMoronic—lifestyle he lived prior to being (accidentally?) martyred for having done so.
     Only God knows how it really happened, dear reader, but after reading an article in a supermarket tabloid about (of all things) The Forensic Properties Of Deoxyrybonucleic Acid, Maria "Put 2 & 2 together" during one of the weekly calls I put through to her (at the public phone in the Moronville Beauty Boutique) and asked me whether I thought a DNA analysis of Jack's old køk-kåp might help persuade the future readers of my Great American WakeupCall that: "The Bliss of Born Again Klutzianity isn't the intellectual conceit of a JewishAmerican wolf in the sheep's clothing of a dyedinthewool Moron?" This stunning news about the existence of Klutz's foreskin was, of course, the answer to all my prayers for finding some way of proving to you, dear reader, that: (a) Jack F. Klutz is neither my biological offspring nor a figment of my imagination, and; (b) The actual hero of this nonfiction novel could—and did—live his brief life on this earth of ours as if he really had been created in the Godlike image of such Socio Cultural Supermen as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, William Shakespeare, Ludwig von Beethoven, Thornton Wilder, Karl Sternheim, Georg Büchner, Jorge Luis Borges, Hector Berlioz, Auguste Rodin, William Blake, Girolamo Savonarola, Charles Ives, Geoffrey Chaucer, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Wagner and Herman Melville.
     Immediately after that telephone conversation I contacted one of my most trusted Moronic "acquaintances" and arranged for the delivery of that precious køk-kåp to the Moronville Blood Bank; from whence it was routinely forwarded to the clinic in Country S for DNA analysis. And the rest of this foreskin "saga" is—as the Nobel Laureate Dr. Cary Mullis said after verifying the Country S clinical findings—"history."

199 For what it's worth; while the Morons have adopted our Constitution in most respects the 5th Amendment isn't one of them—for the simple (minded) reason it wouldn't occur to an average Moron that any nation could permit such a legal loophole without becoming a society run by and for the benefit of criminals. Similarly absent from Moronic trial practice is the taking of oaths by witnesses to "Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," when every Moronic schoolchild knows the history of civilized jurisprudence demonstrates no guilty defendant has ever taken such a "solemn" oath seriously.

200 As a result of my penetrating research into the deepest mysteries of Bimbeaux gynecology and several scholarly articles I wrote on that topic I've been made a Lay Member of the Vatican Council On Defending The Good Name Of The Virgin Mary.

201 By his morganatic marriage to Mme de Maintenon in 1684.

202 Not that Louis XIV knew anything about the speed of light. In the nonscientific nomenclature of the times Moronia was considered by the French to be the aesselle (armpit) of Europe.

203 As if her flagrant acts of amatory tableturning weren't sufficiently awkward for Louis to cope with, Amelie had the audacity to express her revolutionary ideas about the "sexual superiority" of women in writing! Under a variety of fashionably Anglicized pseudonyms—among them Lizzy Strata, Joan Dark and Alma Zon—she published a series of plaquettes fictifs (fictionalized pamphlets) which became the modern equivalents of runaway bestellers among France's intelligentsia. The most infamous (and "seminal") of her literary causes celebres was the Revolutionary Treatise she thinly disguised under the title of The Memoirs of a Female Gigolo, or, The Art of Turning a Man's Predatory Advances Into a Genuinely Sporting Proposition. With the publication of this satire on the fornicational exploits of a female Don Juan(ita) the women of France at last had a literary flag around which they could rally for the cause of sexual emancipation. A slightly altered version of their battle cry—"Liberté, Égalité, et Maternité"—would later resonate with disastrous consequences for the Bourbon monarchy. Louis wasn't unaware of the nightmarish political implications arising from his daughter's literary crusade against the patriarchy at whose head he himself stood. It was a cruel dilemma. He took a fatherly pride in her passionate idealism, her intellectual capacity and the (albeit impious) artistic contributions she made to the glories of his Age d'Or. But he also knew just how short a philosophical distance there was between the boudoir and the barricade when it came to the radical sexual ideas she was advocating. "She is the jewel in my crown," he confided to Mme de Sévigné, "but a diamond that is coated with the same poison into which she dips that damned pen of hers!" And so it was that, like King Lear, Louis XIV banished his pride and joy to (what he thought would be) her Moronic oblivion.

204 An idea whose seeds were sown in the Open Letter To All Frenchmen she published (under the pen name "Mademoiselle O") telling them their "preoccupation with size as the measure of a man's virility wasn't (necessarily) shared by most women; to whom a lover's technique was much more important than what might be the less than monumental proportions of the tool he used in doing the job."

205 Similar to those drawn by Mrs Blandings for her "Dream House."

206 A hard core of Diehard Utopians (the EruditionIsBlissniks) were forcibly swept across the border into Cretiny by Amelie's nouveau balai (new broom) policy; where, like Lenin did in Zurich, they waited in the wings for their chance to make history. Which, as we will see, they actually did; although their triumphant return to Moronville didn't come close to the kind of Richterscale reading registered by Lenin's earthshaking arrival at the Finland Station.

207 The stucco imported from Cretiny contained tiny silicon crystals which looked so much like cake icing no small number of Moronville's urchins fell to their deaths trying to make a fingerlicking meal of the thick coats applied to that appetizing structure's roofline.

208 While biting into one of her favorite pastries Amelie answered the concerns expressed by one of her dinner guests about the potential political consequences of the disparity between their diet and that of the Morons by saying, "Since they seem to have survived on nothing but turnips for thousands of years I see no reason why they shouldn't continue doing so ad infinitum!" A remark Marie Antoinette would later paraphrase rather more artfully and, of course, with far greater effect on a Parisian public who weren't amused by the "starvation" jokes of an Austrian plutocrat.

209 In general the Morons resisted "polluting" their King's English with foreign words—as the French do today when it comes to the Americanization of their "native" tongue. But gradually certain Caketownisms, such as têt-á-têt, mènage á trois, joie de vivre, femme fatale, toujours l'amour, savoir- faire and merde did creep into their vocabulary.

210 His canonization in 1843 as Saint Mediocritus—"Patron Of The Culturally Downtrodden"—has since been nullified as a result of Pope John XXIII's Hagiographic Housecleaning Decree.

211 While towering above what there is of Moronville's "skyline," its height of 67 feet, 8 inches doesn't measure up to conventional cathedral standards. Nevertheless it stands as a constant source of national pride for a people to whom any building taller than the huts, shacks and hovels in which they dwell is nothing less than an architectural marvel.

212 As—some 200 years later—I devoted most of my nonambassadorial time and energy trying to solve the same riddle.

213 He is credited in (most) socioanthropological circles as having pioneered the study of topics such as those reflected in the titles of the following papers he published: "The Mannalike Nutritional Properties Of The Common Moronic Turnip (Brassica Moronicus);" "The Figleaf Role Played By Hatwearing In The Morons' SocioCultural Scheme Of Things Original Sinwise," and; "A Statistical Basis For Explaining How, Despite Their Virtually Nonexistent Birth Rate, The Morons Have Managed To Remain Ethnically Viable."

214 To his dismay one of Bimbeaux's earliest "discoveries" was that practically none of what little there was in the Greek and Roman histories concerning their occupations of Moronia could be trusted. Nevertheless a consensus did exist among Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Xenophon, and Tacitus that: "Since time immemorial the Morons have been (more or less) communicating with each other in what they call 'Gibberish' and, upon listening to their attempts at making conversation, there would seem to be no better word for describing such an indecipherable babble."

215 Even the most rudimentary aspects of civilized behavior—such as wearing shoes, using cutlery and bathing—were all (gradually) adopted by the Morons from those more advanced races who "made the mistake of conquering them." As for Bimbeaux's claim the Morons may indeed have made a truly profound contribution to the welfare of all humanity with their Words of Wisdom attitude about "Making The Most Of What Little One Has," none of his contemporaries were impressed. The socalled "Noble Savage Living In A State Of Harmony With Nature" argument was one which made nonsense of everything civilization stood for. According to them: "Nature was just a euphemism for that guerrilla warfare death wages incessantly against us; and which we can only hope to lose later rather than sooner." The certitude of these mid18thcentury intellectuals notwithstanding, the argument over this particular variation on the Morons' Blissfulness Of Ignorance theme continues to rage in our own time between the EcoFascists and the TechnoFreaks.

216 As it is among the Hillbillies of Appalachia, for most rural Morons the coonskin cap is still the most popular form of headwear. Since at least Roman times the raccoon itself has, along with possum and squirrel, provided the Morons with their principal source of red meat. Raccoon hides are also used for making a kind of liederhosen worn on festive occasions and sealing the clay jugs of Joyjuice (rustic turnipbeer) stored in the secret rootcellars under every agrarian hovel, shack and hut.
     "Throwing stones" are snowballsized granite rocks washed down from the Purple Mountains and worn smooth in the Main Stream; where they accumulate at the bottom of its serpentine bayous. By counting the number of times one of these stones is thrown the Morons have, for example, established the distance between Moronville and Cretin City as (more or less) exactly 764 STs (StoneThrows) while that separating the Main Street Coffee Shop from the American Embassy is a mere 2 STs. These throwing stones have also served as the Morons' principal weapon of war in their heroic but vain (their defeat of the Cretins at Knucklehead Ridge being the only exception) attempts at defending themselves against their always betterarmed enemies. In 1940 they were (harmlessly) tossed at the convoy of Nazi panzers arriving to enforce the terms of Moronia's NonAggression Pact with Germany and, 3 years later, hurled against the Soviet tanks crossing the Main Stream to liberate the Morons from Hitler's fascist tyranny— an act of symbolic resistance the Czechs repeated in 1969 and was only surpassed by the unknown Chinaman who, with nothing but his body, brought that column of Tienamin Squarebound armor to a momentary but forever memorable halt.

217 What might seem like Bimbeaux's eccentric opinion in this regard was actually shared by some Aryan linguists for whom the "chicken and egg" debate about which came first, German or Yiddish, was far from settled in the obvious favor of the former over the latter. Several of these academic "traitors" went so far as to at least suggest that German evolved from the original Yiddish as a reaction by the native Huns, Saxons, Teutons, Vandals, Visigoths and Gerbs to the hated Jüdische Weisenheimeren whose "elitist" domination spoiled their once blissfully barbaric way of life. According to their radical hypothesis the Jüden—who were most likely Jutlanders, or "Jutes"—had been expelled not from the Holy Land to Europe but from Europe to what became the Holy Land by the aforementioned Germanic tribes who finally got their "Diaspora Act" together. All of this happened long before the Jews began writing their Bible in Hebrew; a "classical" language which, like Greek and Latin also evolved from the original Yiddish. This juxtapositioning of Yiddish and Deutsch as the German's native tongue was, of course, the political tinder from which Hitler would fashion his inflammatory answer to the "Jewish Question." In theological terms, however, the upsetting of this ethnocentric applecart produced a stunning irony by which: All of those Old Testament Hebrew Patriarchs like Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon became Germans, or at least Jutlanders; as did that New Testament übermensch—Jesus Christ!^217s1
     What Bimbeaux didn't learn until a few months later was that the parchment he found in that humble Joyjuice jug was the Holy Grail those dissident Aryan philologists were looking for—the first hard evidence of Gibberish in its written form. Although, to his credit, he did have some inklings along those lines because of the number of Yiddish and/or Yiddishlike expressions^217s2  used by the Morons—a hunch supported by the (more or less) common mid18thcentury knowledge that the word "Gibberish" was itself a corrupted version of Gerbrish or Grbrische; the term Roman historians coined to describe the combination of Gerb (the now defunct tribe responsible for Germany's Latinized name^217s3) and Judische which they believed might be the root stock from which grew both German and Yiddish.

218 The Holy See jealously guarded its hierarchical turf when it came to certifying the orthodoxy of any archaeological discovery whose "implications might prove to be embarrassing dogmawise."

219 Moronia wasn't the only location known exclusively by the postal monopolists in those days when the average Parisian or Berliner didn't have the foggiest idea where Bordeaux or Hamburg or London was. If this sounds hard to believe, dear reader, consider how little you and I know about the mysteries of our kitchen plumbing, our electronic devices and/or those under the hoods of the cars we drive.

220 Von Stemple's controversial manifesto, Linguisticallyspeaking All Germans Are Jews: An Examination Of The Preeminent Role Played By Yiddish In The Evolution Of Modern Deutsch From Ancient Gibberish wasn't published until 1953; only to be suppressed by a Kremlin Politburo which had more than enough trouble trying to socialize its East German satellite without adding a "Zionist conspiracy" dimension to its "Soviet imperialist" problems.

221 Even in Moronia copies of this longoutofprint book are scarcer than hen's teeth so it is no small bonus for the American readers of this novel to get a glimpse at such a rare literary jewel.

Subfootnotes

198s1 Suffice it to say that: For some years now a certain clinic in Country S has been compiling a genetic database for the Moronic race as a result of its clandestine "bloodbank" operations in Moronville. Once again; the reasons for the furtive nature of what would otherwise seem to be a perfectly legitimate enterprise (the banking of human blood) are themselves shrouded in a mystery related to that surrounding the surreptitious building of a Moronic DNA database, namely: The closely guarded medical secret concerning the rare blood type (M) found only in Morons and all those— including MoronAmericans—whose Moronic ancestry is less than 9 generations removed. Consequently the transfusion of Type M blood in the nonMoronic world is handled as a matter of such delicacy the patient is normally never told about the "awkward" state of his or her true serological status quo.

198s2 Aside from turnips, gooseberries have always been a staple of the Moronic diet. Applying this growing bigger berries advice to the enlargement of one's sex organs is (as I can testify from personal experience) an extremely dubious—and dangerous—proposition. Nevertheless it is a rare example of that rarest of all Moronic character traits; the belief that future events can—or at least might— be shaped by actions we take in the present. While this might not sound like an Intellectual Epiphany to most Americans it has been said of us, dear reader, that: As a nation we suffer from a collective case of Hindsightitis—that state of mind(lessness) by which a society sees only where it has been and not where it is going.

217s1 The chronology appearing on pages 1945-6 of The Standard Jewish Encyclopedia dates the onset of Initial Yiddish as A.D. 1000-1250; Old Yiddish 1250-1500, Mediaeval Yiddish 1500-1750 and Modern Yiddish from 1750 onward. But this must be viewed with the same skepticism caused by that publication's conservative approach to "trumpeting" the contributions made by such Jewish giants as Heine, Mendelssohn, Marx, Einstein, Freud and Mahler, to "Aryan" culture. Their reluctance to claim responsibility for having taught the earliest European how to read and write is understandable after 5,000 years of history in which the Jews have been "rewarded" for their intellectuality as the Morons have been for their lack of brainpower—with unrelenting scorn and persecution. As Freud said to his Semitic colleagues: "We shouldn't expect humanity to pin any medals on our chests for telling it life is a minefield filled with the most unpleasant psychological surprises that few, if any, of us can transit without being severely crippled in the process—assuming one is 'fortunate' enough to survive such a harrowing experience."

217s2  For example: "One can spit the distance between mazel (good luck) and tsuris (trouble) but getting from tsuris back to mazel many stones must be thrown," "A teivel zoll im choppen" (may a devil catch him), "Klopping der kop in der vant" (beating one's head against a wall), "Hok nit kain tchynick!" (stop talking my ear off).

217s3 See Julius Caesar's Commentaries for his first hand experiences with this "most ferocious of all Gerbmanic tribes."

Glossary

prerogative noun 1.) An exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially a hereditary or official right. See synonyms at RIGHT. 2.) The exclusive right and power to command, decide, rule, or judge: the principal's prerogative to suspend a student. 3.) A natural gift or advantage that confers superiority. 4.) Characteristic superiority; preeminence. adjective Of, arising from, or exercising a prerogative. [Middle English, from Old French, from Latin praerogativa, feminine of praerogativus, asked first, from praerogatus, past participle of praerogare, to ask before : prae-, pre- + rogare, to ask.] - prerogatived adjective
invidious adjective 1.) Tending to rouse ill will, animosity, or resentment: invidious accusations. 2.) Containing or implying a slight; discriminatory: invidious distinctions. 3.) Envious. [From Latin invidiosus, envious, hostile, from invidia, envy. See ENVY.] - invidiously adverb - invidiousness noun