Footnotes
222 While I sympathize with these ancient authors for their reluctance to dig any deeper into such a disagreeable matter than their truthtelling oath compels them to do, this is one long dead scatological horse (I can hear you saying an emphatic "Amen!") which, alas, must be kicked a few more times before it is finally laid to rest. Why do I insist on rubbing my readers' noses in a matter whose "highly offensive character," according to our everwatchful editoress, "has already crossed that line separating the most unmentionable of our bodily functions from those which, in the natural course of one's amatory affairs, must be handled with the utmost delicacy even when writing the trashiest of bestsellers —let alone what purports to be not only the Greatest Of All Great American Novels, a Worldclass Artistic Masterpiece, An Utopian Manifesto and Historymaking WakeupCall, but a Bedside Book of Biblical proportions!"? My response to this (no doubt wellintentioned) editorial broadside was—and still is—this:
"My dear Miss Playne, the line you draw between what is and what is not considered good taste bestsellingnovelwise is only one of the (God knows how many!) uncrossable lines I have crossed since embarking on the most dubious enterprise since Christopher Columbus set sail on what became his Epic Voyage of Discovery but should have ended at the bottom of an Atlantic Ocean whose width was accurately computed by the cartographers of the time as in the unsailable range of 11 or 12 thousand nautical miles rather than the 2 it fortuitously turned out to be. And—since we're talking about lines—the one between greatness and absurdity is more often than not the thinnest of all boundaries. Not that I ever hungered for the kind of monumentality being thrust upon me by the writing of a book which, for reasons that have little (and more likely nothing) to do with my literary talents, no one else seems willing or able to write.
"No, Miss Playne. Like Galileo, George Washington, Napoleon, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, Sigmund Freud, Winston Churchill—or more to the evangelical point—Mark, Matthew, Luke, Peter, Paul, Abu Bakr, Siddhartha Gautama, Brigham Young, Martin Luther, William Blake, John Milton and Mary Baker Eddy; Mordecai Goldberg just happened to be the right man (of only marginally higher than average intelligence) at the appropriate place (Moronia?!) in the veriest nick of time to catch that tantalizing glimpse of the Klutz Affair Jedgar Ballbraker so negligently gave me before he slammed shut what has since become its airtight lid.
"Confronted by that kind of antihubristic deus ex machina scenario there was no way I could shrink from authoring what God Himself specified 'must be a book that will forever change the course of human history' by rectifying the mistakes He made when (ghost)writing those chapters & verses (most notably 2:16-3:24) of Genesis that punished mankind for what was, He now realized, not only Eve's sinless but her commendable curiosity in eating the fruit of a tree which (in His own words) was: '[so] pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise.' [Genesis 3:6]
"Moreover, Miss Playne; GreatestOfAllGreatAmericanNovelsWorldclassArtisticMasterpieceUtopianManifestoHistory makingWakeupCallandBedsideBookofBiblicalproportionswise, how else can one hope to alter the course of human history (for the better) except by breaking a few of your editorial rules, upsetting America's antiIntellectual applecart and rocking this boat of mediocrity in which Western Civilization is slowly sinking? Even so—with your guidance, of course—on the whole I think I've been rather restrained in not writing the kind of pompous (and unreadable) 'Diatribe Against The Evils Of Democratic Egalitarianism' others (including myself when younger) have scribbled with a poisoned pen in exasperation over the 'blissful' ignorance of their fellow Homo sapiens. No. Despite its warts—and there are more of them than even you've dreamt of in your worst editorial nightmares of a publishing fiasco, my dearest Jayne—Morons Awake! is, above and beyond its religious, didactic and sociocultural profundities, a novel. And, if I must say so myself (which by your silence I suppose is the case)—a damned enjoyable read; once the average American (or Moronic) housewife grows accustomed to its 'literary' eccentricities!"
Speaking of which, dear reader, there
is this for you to consider before I 'rush' my way into a fictional noman's
land where the most angelic of bestselling authors fear to tread: WakeupCalls
of the kind required to rouse an entire civilization from its cataleptic
stupor aren't found on the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The
New Yorker or a John Updike novel (while I take my hat off to him for
his masterly way with words, once ferocious Literary Lions like Updike, Styron,
Berger and Bellow—or even Mailer—have become just so many more
Fangless Fat cats who, if they still could, wouldn't dream of biting the
hands that fed them so lovingly while America's ship of state is notso slowly
sinking in a sea of sociocultural troubles). Given the dire state of
our civilization as we find it at the end of the 20thcentury it will take
considerably more than just another Torah, Talmud, Sermon on the Mount,
Koran, Aranyakas, Brahmanas, Upanishads, Koran, Edda, Magna Carta, Utopia,
95 Theses, Common Sense, Declaration of Independence, Book of Mormon, Das
Kapital, Gettysburg Address, or even Also Spracht Zarathustra
to launch that Second American Revolution based on the NeoEgalitarian Principles
Revealed (to me) in the Gospel of Born Again Klutzianity.
Believe me, ladies, no one wishes more fervently than
I that this awesome responsibility for saving the civilized world hadn't
been placed on my septuagenarian's shoulders! After spending the last 50
of my 70plus years with only "mindless" Morons for company I was the last
man on earth to write a book millions of middle("and proud of it!")brow Americans
such as yourself would find not only amusing but might alter their attitudes
about the Egalitarian Virtues of Mediocrity and/or the JudeoChristianMoronic
Bliss of Ignorance. No, my dear reader. Rather than martyr myself like
a Latterday Moses, Socrates, John the Baptist, Christ, Savonarola, Joan of
Arc, Trotsky, Martin Luther King, Jr., Seymour Glass or Holden Caulfield
by playing some kind of "Messianic Prince Charming" or "Global Catcher In
The Rye" for the entire human race, Mordecai Goldberg would have been quite
content to simply enjoy what little life he has left making up for those
5 decades he
wasted222s1 as your Ambassador to Moronia. Nevertheless, after
the most reluctant—and seemingly futile!—of beginnings, I was
pleasantly surprised to find that: Wordbyoverwroughtword,
sentencebyserpentinesentence and pagebypainstakingpage The Book of Books
God promised me "would write itself" during my Mt. Olympus Epiphany actually
began doing just that! But I think John Bunyon's description of how he came
to write his magnum opus, Pilgrim's Progress, says it better than
any words of mine:
The Author's Apology For His Book
When at the first I took my pen in hand/Thus for to write, I did not understand/That I at all should make a little book/In such a mode; nay, I had undertook/To make another; which, when almost done,/Before I was aware, I this begun./And thus it was: I, writing of the way/And race of saints, in this our gospel day,/Fell suddenly into an allegory/About their journey, and the way to glory,/In more than twenty things which I set down./This done, I twenty more had in my crown;/And they again began to multiply,/Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly/Nay, then, thought I, if that you breed so fast,/I'll put you by yourselves, lest you at last/Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out/The book that I already am about./Well, so I did; but yet I did not think/To shew to all the world my pen and ink/In such a mode; I only thought to make/I knew not what; nor did I undertake/ Thereby to please my neighbour: no, not I;/I did it my own self to gratify.222s2/Thus, I set pen to paper with delight,/And quickly had my thoughts in black and white./For, having now my method by the end,/Still as I pulled, it came; and so I penned/It down: until it came at last to be,/For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.
And that, dear reader, brings us to the most crucial
of all the questions you should be asking yourself about the quintessentially
paradoxical nature of this "literary masterpiece" I've seduced you into reading,
namely: Does it take a genius to write a Revolutionary Manifesto (in the
form of a best selling novel) whose Major Message is—Genius itself
is a myth popularized not by those to whom such a "compliment"' is paid,
but by average Americans who, like their opposite Moronic numbers, (want
to) believe that, since they are by definition incapable of rising above
their congenital mediocrity, they can't be held responsible for failing to
write a Moby Dick, composing a Magic Flute or painting a Les
Demoiselles d' Avignon?
My answer to which is: If, as a result of writing a first
(and last!) "novel" that does indeed launch a Second American Revolution
(and thereby reverse the decline of Western Civilization), I am hailed as
a "Latterday Paul Revere," "American Prometheus," "Timeless Artistic Talent,"
"Literary Prince Charming" and/or "Visionary SocioCultural Mastermind"—I
can only confess to you (with whom I've shared so many of my most intimate
secrets) that Mordecai Goldberg wasn't born with a silver pen in his
hand or, for that matter (and contrary to another egalitarian shibboleth),
a larger than average brain in his Jewish(American) head. No,
my dear reader; it isn't what I was born with, but where that
blessed event took place which matters! Like most of you I had the supreme
good fortune (at least for the first 21 of my 70plus years) to enjoy all
those benefits that flow from the simple fact of being a
citizen
of a nation that just happened to be at
(or very near) the
crest222s3 of a civilizational tide that began more than 5,000 years
ago in the valleys of the Nile and TigrisEuphrates. Not that I ever came
close to exploiting a fraction of those boundless opportunities attached
to an average American's
birthcertificate.222s4 Nevertheless, stung by a WASP work ethic that, no matter how
patriarchal, racist and antiIntellectual (especially towards the "smart Jewboy"
type), was far better than today's moral vacuum characterbuildingwise, I
managed to acquire at least a glimmer of my personal responsibilities for
helping carry that Torch of Human Enlightenment passed to my
"rendezvouswithdestiny" generation by all the countless hands who kept it
burning (more or less) brightly since it was first set ablaze in the caves
of Altamira, Lascaux and Mount Highandry.
Yet, when the time (finally!) came for me to enter the
stage and tell my "Idiots Tale" I found myself standing in the limelight
before a packed house with absolutely nothing to say! Which is why, dear
reader, I can confess to you (with a humility that couldn't be more genuine)
that: Of the many wonders that make Morons Awake! such a magical book
the most marvelous of all isn't the Starknaked Blonde In The Cadillac
Convertible At The Corner Of Hollywood & Vine Miracle, or my Mt. Olympus
Epiphany, or even that its hero—a Moron named Klutz—turns out to
be the Massiah who reverses the decline of Western Civilization; but rather
how it records my own metamorphosis from the rankest of amateur authors
to the Greatest of Great American novelists.
If that statement sounds like one made by a madman afflicted
with those delusions of quixotic (or Nietzchean) grandeur suffered by all
wouldbe KnightsInShiningArmor (or NeoEgalitarian Supermen), consider this:
Since you began reading my "Magnum Opus" haven't you yourself also
undergone a transformation no less amazing in the way it changed you
from an Ugly Intellectual Duckling (metaphorically speaking) into a swanlike
creature who will spread her newlyfledged wings and fly off to artistic
worlds far braver than those we have explored in this first of your literary
lovenests? While you will go on to read better (if not bigger!) books than
mine, none of their authors can ever evoke the kind of adoration you felt
for me as the first Intellectual Prince Charming who treated a woman
in your comatose romantic state as his equal. And, like O's first lover,
René—who's only raison d'être was to pimp for Sir
Stephen's sadistic designs on her—my "didactic" intentions toward you
were always to deliver you into the dastardly clutches of some other (and
perhaps even more "lecherous") novelist.
But you must have known from the very start of a
relationship, about which I never made any secret my motives weren't "entirely"
honorable, your fate would not be unlike that of Pauline Réage's
"heroine." Nevertheless if you were misled into thinking we might actually
live happily ever after as man and wife, prince and princess or master and
mistress, I can only hope you're wise enough now to forgive me for leading
you down a path at whose end there really was a garden of infinite delights.
Yes, my darling, as René says to O during their last meeting—before
she enslaves herself completely to Sir Stephen's sexual depravities behind
the walls of his chateau at Roissy: "But I love you. I do love you. Don't
forget me."
So, while my writing of this book was an
artistic act of the most monumental proportions your reading
of it is an event of equal—if not greater!— historical
significance in helping to launch that Second American Revolution which will
indeed reverse the decline of Western Civilization! As the dustjacket blurb
(which makes some bookpublishing history of its own by actually delivering
on the promise it makes) states: "What establishes this novel claim to
everlasting fame is that not only was it written by a hitherto completely
unheralded American author—but that it will be read from cover-to-cover
(if not from the top to the bottom of every single page) by millions of average
American housewives."
And yet—alas!—such is the nature of literature that, for better (which I believe it to be) or worse (depending on the present state—if any—of your "flesh and blood" amatory affairs), our relationship must remain an ethereal one. But before you throw your up hands in despair, my sweet, let me console you with this good news about the (notso) Brief Interlude we are having between the covers of my Magnum Opus: By its nature literature is also the most promiscuous of all art forms. Which means, of course, that: While as a bestselling novelist I must by definition share my "literary" talents with millions of "lovelorn housewives," like all readers you can (and no doubt will) have a succession of infidelities with all those other authors who wait so patiently on the shelves of every bookstore and lending library in the land to whisper "sweet nothings in your maidenly ear" (as they plot your "dastardly undoing" with their mightierthanswords—and/or phalli?— pens).222s5
† † †
But, my sweet, we can't waste any more of our precious time together speculating on what fate may or may not have in store for us at the end of a book whose best pages have yet to be written and/or read. Let's return, then, to what led us both to become so thoroughly snarled in this latest "tangled web of words" I've been weaving—which, remember, is: Unlike the multitude of memorable events filling the childhood chapters in the biographies of such swashbuckling historymakers as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara; there were only 2 "defining" moments222s6 in Jack F. Klutz's youth222s7 (neither of which would usually be described as "earthshaking") that shaped what would become his Unrivaled Claim to NeoEgalitarian Fame as The One & Only Massiah (which is what all Truly Born Again Klutzians call Him). The most important of these 2 juvenile turning points must remain a secret222s8 until it is revealed to you in the Climactic Chapter of this book when, believe me dear reader, your continued faith in my mastery of "novelized" Superprotracted Foreplay techniques will be rewarded handsomely. The lesser defining moment is linked directly to that portion of the Moronic Chronicles which, if you need reminding, was the original reason222s9 we now find ourselves "hopelessly lost"222s10 in what must seem to you like this "Blackest of Black Holes," footnotewise.
As I mentioned some (few hundred?) pages ago: In a singular departure from their otherwise indiscriminate emulation of our American Way Of Life, the Morons don't begin their "formal" schooling until the onset of puberty. At which time, by having simply survived on their own in "the cold & cruel world" for 12 or 13 years, they are deemed fully qualified to forego what would be our grades K-8 and enroll as freshmen in Moronville's Central Highschool.222s11 Not surprisingly, most of the curriculum at CHS is devoted to the Moronic Chronicles— which every pupil must learn by heart in what the Morons (mistakenly) refer to as its "original" Latin.222s12 So it was that, at exactly222s13 9:23 am on the 14th of October 1975—when one of his classmates was in the midst of reciting the same Chapter and Verse of that Holiest of Documents where we began this most wayward yet of our "extracurricular meanderings,"—young Klutz raised his hand! Quite naturally Lady X presumed Jack was seeking her permission to visit the lavatory. "All right, Jack," she snapped, but make it quick! I'll be keeping one eye on the clock and if you're not back in that seat by 9:25 sharp222s14 you might just as well head straight for the Principal's office!"222s15 But instead of leaving the room Jack shook his head and uttered the words that left his teacher and classmates thunderstruck. "I didn't raise my hand for that reason, Miss," he said. "I wanted to ask you why Dä•Dä didn't deserve being defiled by the Cretins since he punished them— and us—so unjustly for eating that crummy old piece of forbidden fruit?"
"Don't be impertinent, Jack!" Lady X scolded him. "As these Words Of All The Wisdom You Need To Know signs adorning our classroom walls222s16 say, in one way or another: You're not here to ask questions; but to sit there like good little Morons with your eyes and ears open; and those big adolescent mouths of yours closed tighter than a proverbial clam's!" Whereupon she replaced Jack's CHS beanie with a dunce cap and ordered him to stand in the corner until he "came to his senses." Once again, however, Jack remained standing steadfastly at his desk. "That's something else I don't understand, Miss," he said with such saintly innocence that, for a splitsecond, Lady X saw herself playing Captain Vere—or, God forbid, Mister Claggart—to Jack's Billy Budd. "If," Jack continued, "all of us Morons are supposed to be braindead why is standing in the corner and wearing a duncecap such a big deal disgracewise?"
Rather than try to answer Jack's naive question (which was no piece of disputational cake even by Cambridge University standards) and sensing this might be just the kind of "chain reaction" the School Board warned her about at every one of the Monday morning conferences she had been required to attend since "the fate of Moronia's next generation of solid citizens had been placed in her hands," Lady X pushed the Special Panic Button on her desk provided for that purpose. And, in less time than it takes to peel a turnip, a Department Of Education Special Flying Squad burst into the room with tazer guns drawn while they gagged and straightjacketed poor Jack before hustling him across the schoolyard to their DOE headquarters while Lady X and the entire student body of CHS pressed their noses against every one of its 4 windowpanes. Thus ended what the Secretary For Education later described as "The closest Moronia has ever come to a sociocultural meltdown" in her testimony before a closed hearing of the Joint Congressional Committee on State Security.222s17 Once inside the DOE, Jack was taken not to the President's office but to a conference room in the basement where an Emergency Panel of Damage Control Experts was already waiting to interrogate him. Which, to Jack's surprise and relief, they did in a manner that was not at all hostile. As a matter of fact they seemed to relish the chance he had given them for actually using the damage control expertise they spent so much of their bureaucratic lives acquiring in a country where student curiosity was, as the Morons say, "rarer than tits on a turnip." After a lengthy discussion on how they should proceed (which allowed Lady X the time to dismiss her class and be present for what follows) Jack was given a brief lecture by the Chief Damage Controller on the Futility of Asking Questions. At the end of which the CDC told him: "Now Jack, we are going to play a little game that will demonstrate the abstract point I've been trying to make in the downtoearth terms a lad like you should have no trouble comprehending. The rules of this game—which we call Q&Q—are very simple. Your role is to ask us any questions that pop into that busy little brain of yours. Our task will be to answer each of your questions with another question. For example: If you ask us why the ocean is blue when water is colorless we might respond by asking you what difference does it make since Moronia is completely landlocked? The object of our exercise being to prove that: Since the world's greatest philosophers have never answered any question definitively it is pointless to burden what little brains you have thinking new ones up. Well, Jack, are you ready to play Q&Q?"
Continuation
of
footnote 222
Return to
Index
Subfootnotes
222s1 As it turned out, of course, the skills I acquired in the Art of Foreplay (and, to a lesser extent, those gained in the writing of my History of the Morons) have proven indispensable for authoring a "bestselling novel" with such deceptively didactic designs on its readers.
222s2 This is at odds with my own more stridently evangelical Mission as ordained by God Almighty in that Historic Conversation I had with Him following the Mt. Olympus Epiphany He set in motion at the corner of Hollywood & Vine. Unless, of course, you still refuse to believe Morons Awake! isn't the "nonfiction" novel I've spent so much time and energy trying to convince you it is.
222s3 For most of you this crest (which is generally dated as having been reached in 1959) had already passed by the time you were born—or fully conscious of your nationality. But for my generation (despite the Great Depression, WWII and the onset of the Cold War) the period 1920-1960 marked the fullest flowering of America's Manifest Destiny. And in my case this was an especially fortuitous time because, if my Polish and Ukrainian grandfathers hadn't decided to dodge the Tzar's draft and/or the perennial Cossack pogroms, most likely your author would have ended up in the ovens at Auschwitz or as just another emaciated corpse on those heaps of "Jüdisch untermenschen" found by the Allies who liberated Hitler's death camps in 1945. But more about the Holocaust—and my "responsibility" for not preventing this most monstrous of all manmade calamities— when we resume our story of how I got to know the (future) mother of Jack F. Klutz.
222s4
If my endofthe20thcentury reportcard for America's sociocultural progress
(or lack thereof) seems harsher than those I make out for the Europeans (who
gave the world 1 cold and 2 hot wars!) in general and particularly for the
Morons—whose fanatical pursuit of Ignorant Bliss puts ours to shame—it
is for this reason, dear reader: Unlike those Old World nations who are
encumbered by the baggage of feudalism; racial, linguistic and religious
conflicts; an acute bourgeois mentality, and; a chronic shortage of
lebensraum—given our superabundance of natural resources, luxurious
geography, GraecoRoman/JudeoChristian/AngloSaxon heritage, rampant bootstrapism
and, yes, all those Yankee ("can do") energies unleashed by putting the abstract
principals of egalitarian democracy into practice, we Americans have no excuse
for not having turned this "splendid wilderness" our (for the most part adopted)
Puritan forefathers first set their pioneering feet upon some 400 years ago
into the Earthly Paradise it was so manifestly meant to become.
Still, the picture I'm painting isn't as bleak as it
might seem at first glance. Just as in Marx's paradigm "the Capitalist Phoenix
must burn itself out before a Socialist Utopia can rise from its materialistic
ashes;" according to the Klutzian Grand Historical Design: "A society must
sink to a level of mediocrity so mindless there is only one way for it to
go. WHICH IS EVER UPWARD to that Supreme State of SocioCultural Grace in
which the lives of ordinary people are no longer a daily struggle for survival
but a sublime adventure whose (albeit unattainable) purpose is to make every
moment of one's being human an aesthetic
experience."
Or, as Thornton Wilder put it with such
brilliant bitter sweetness in Our Town when Emily Webb returns from
the grave for one last (and profoundly sad-but-wiser) retrospective visit
to her childhood home:
EMILY [In a loud voice to the Stage Manager.]
I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. [She breaks down sobbing. Lights dim on left of stage. MRS. WEBB disappears.] I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Goodbye, Goodbye, World. Goodbye Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses, and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to [fully appreciate] you. [She looks toward the Stage Manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:] Do any human beings ever [fully appreciate] life while they live it?—every, every minute?
STAGE MANAGER
No. [Pause] [Well, maybe] the saints and poets. [Yes, now and then I'm sure they must.]
NOTE: The bracketed portions in this dialogue are mine, not those of Thornton Wilder. In the original text Emily says "realize" rather than "fully appreciate." And, while I believe Our Town is unquestionably the Greatest Of All American Plays and its author the most saintly of our poets, I think he could be talked into approving these "minor" alterations I've made to his Immortal Masterpiece. As for the slight additions and changes to the Stage Manager's final remarks I believe these are also justified on the grounds that such a climactic moment shouldn't (in my opinion) be quite as brief as it is in the original. I also believe if Wilder could be brought back from his grave he would also ratify them as expressing with the militancy they deserve our shared conviction about the saintliness of poets, playwrights and novelists—especially in times like these when we can use all the (self)help we can get in making the Klutzian case for The Efficacy Of Art In The Successful Pursuit Of NeoEgalitarian Happiness.
222s5 The list of which (and it's a fabulously long one) includes such notable Literary HeMen (and -Women) as Jacques Casanova, Anaï s Nin, the Marquis de Sade, François Rabelais, Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, the Baroness Dudevant, Sapho, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac. Not to mention those other new (and far fresherfaced than me) postmodern (if not quite neoBaroque) foreplayists and footnoters on the bestselling block, David Wallace (Infinite Jest) and Nicholson Baker (Mezzanine).
222s6 If we exclude his "virgin birth" as an event whose epiphanal implications he couldn't possibly have appreciated at the time it happened.
222s7 Which is 2 more than normal for the average Moron, whose "humdrum" existence is deliberately lacking in those ups and downs of our more exciting and "civilized" life style.
222s8 In accordance with Klutz's own Admonitions On Subordinating One's Didactic Designs—No Matter How Noble—To The Timetested Rules Of Plain & Simple Storytelling.222s8ss1
222s9 After being interrupted (some might say "highjacked") by what will go down in the Annals of NeoBaroque Literature as The Father Of All Footnotes for the way it spontaneously erupted into a Vesuvian Outpouring of Seminal Ruminations on the author's reasons for writing this Most Revolutionary of Manifestos, we now resume our cursory examination of The Moronic Chronicles to determine if, as his mother claims, Jack F. Klutz was indeed conceived immaculately. A question you will recall, which, if it is answered in the affirmative, wouldn't merely invalidate The Most Fundamental Principle of NeoEgalitarianism (ie., that all average Morons and/or Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, etc. are born equally capable of raising their Klutzian IQs to a perfect 100) but make the writing—and the reading—of this "WakeupCall" a colossal Exercise in Futility.
222s10 Navigating through this maze of sub-, subsub- and even subsubsubfootnotes won't be easy. But, like the finest of life's fineprint, the rewards of doing so—or at least trying to do so—will be well worth the effort. In any event, dear reader, I believe that at this stage in our "game" I needn't make any apologies for putting your intellectual fortitude to such an acid test.
222s11 For all the grandeur of its name, Central High (a oneroom structure where—in a "bumper" year!—the freshman "class" seldom occupies more than 1 or 2 of its 20 desks) is Moronia's only public school.
222s12 This practice persists to the present time despite my retranslation (into an Everyday English the Morons have no more difficulty using than most Americans do) of Archbishop Bimbeaux's Latin translation from the original Gibberish. In my (unpublished) Treatise On Some Apparent Contradictions In The Morons' IgnoranceIsBliss Ethos I offered several explanations for this otherwise paradoxical policy. For one thing the Morons are famous for playing practical jokes not just on themselves but on tourists—who are (understandably) astonished to hear a group of turnipfarmers reciting, in addition to their Sacred Chronicles, Cicero's First and Second Philippics, Pliny's Natural History and/or Virgil's Georgics in flawless Latin. As with most of what we hear, however; there is more to these "practical jokes" than meets the ear. While the average Moron is no more conversant with the meaning of the words he's been forced to memorize than the ordinary American is with the Pledge of Allegiance, 23rd Psalm, Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence and lyrics of our National Anthem, there is this significant difference: Whether they know it or not (and in my opinion they do), by ridiculing their fluency in what for us is a ("thankfully") dead language the Morons are making no secret of their fundamental belief in the uselessness of all erudition; whereas we Americans lack the courage to express our own AntiIntellectual convictions with such a fully frontalized display of doctrinaire lowbrowism.
222s13 This chronological exactitude is only possible because the facts regarding this Handraising Milestone in Jack F. Klutz's Moseslike Rise From Congenital Mediocrity To The Mountain Top Of NeoEgalitarian Massiahhood were provided to me by his teacher, an exceedingly attractive young (at the time) Englishwoman who, for several reasons—the foremost being my old "friend" Jedgar Ballbraker's vow to give the "Salmon (sic) Rushdie Treatment" to anyone helping me delidify the Klutz Affair—we must refer to as Lady X. Not that Lady X was eager to get involed with what she described as "this latest of your AK schemes for intellectualizing the knickers off every nubile shiksa west of Tel Aviv"222s13ss1 by supplying me with the details of an episode in Klutz's childhood about which I—his ArchApostle—was completely in the dark. It was only after telling her I had saved every last one of those "incriminating mash notes" she wrote to me throughout our redhot loveaffair during the year she spent in Moronia (as part of her teachertraining) that she agreed to "spill the First Klutz Affair beans." Return to Main footnote
222s14 Hence the accuracy of Lady X's recollection of the time this historic event occurred.
222s15 Consisting of only 1 room (the lavatory was of the outhouse type) Central High's Principal had his office across the street in the Department of Education; a building 10 times larger than Moronia's only school and staffed by no less than 63% of the country's entire Civil Service. The rationale for this bureaucratic extravagance was, according to the Superintendent of Schools (sic), that: In a society where being unlearned is a virtue we Morons monitor our education system as closely as you Americans do your nuclear power stations to detect the first sign of some runaway chain of pedagogical reactions that could develop into a meltdown of Moronia's AntiElitist ethos."
222s16 Not only are Central High's walls still hung with embroidered homilies proclaiming: "The Road To Ostracism Is Paved With Foolish Questions," "Students Who Expect To Avoid Detention And/Or Graduate With Their Class Should Be Seen And Not Heard," "Stupidity Is Golden," "If Dä•Dä (or God) Wanted The Morons To Be Rocket Scientists He Would Have Made Us In The Image Of Werner von Braun,"— inscribed on all the facades of Moronville's public (and most private) buildings one can read such "postgraduate" variations on the IgnoranceIsBliss motif as: "Your Faith In The Blissfulness Of Ignorance Must Not Only Be Blind But Deaf & Dumb," "The Mediocre Are Already Inheriting The Earth!" "Curiosity Killed The Cat" and "A Little Knowledge Is Like A Small Case Of Bubonic Plague."
222s17 This otherwise Top Secret information was provided by Lady X, who was called as a witness in what became known as Questiongate. The committee members weren't swayed by the Secretary's "Meltdown Scenario," which some of them saw as just one more attempt to extort increased funding for another government agency in search of a reason for its existence. Senator Høtåyre called "the whole damned kit and caboodle nothing but a damned tornado in a coffeecup." Representative Slÿkwÿlêe inquired of his fellow congressmen: "I ask you, gentlemen —Who among us didn't try to get his teacher's goat by doing exactly what this redblooded AllMoronic lad, Klutz, did?" Lady X was also present during the in camera events about to unfold at the DOE because, as his teacher, technically she was still responsible for Jack's welfare. "Moreover," the Chief Damage Controller explained to her, "You might find the methods we use in disposing of this case helpful when facing a classroom full of young Englishmen who, if we can believe what the London press says about their 'Dickensian proclivities' will make this National Emergency of ours seem like the falsest of scholastic firealarms."
subsubfootnotes
222s8ss1 If, ladies, your humble Editoress, can be excused for adding a few lines of her own microprint to the author's "Footnotefest," they would read as follows: Whether Jack F. Klutz is or isn't the answer to all of the world's sociocultural problems, his pontification on this most pregnant point is sufficient to make me—if not a cardcarrying Born Again Klutzian (which I happen to be)—one of his most ardent admirers. back to Main footnote
222s13ss1
A.K. is not a reversed abbreviation for the Klutz Affair. It stands for the
Yiddish alter kocker—which translates into Everyday English as
"old fart," or, in this case, "dirty old
fart."
While knickers is how the British refer
to that most unmentionable of a woman's lingerie we Americans have no
reservations about calling her "panties." The reference to shiksas (nonJewesses,
normally of the blueeyed blonde "Sexgoddess" type) makes it plain Lady X
was really speaking on behalf of her husband, who construed his future wife's
"harmless little foreplay fling" with the (Jewish)American ambassador to
Moronia as a validation of everything Dr. Goebbels said about The Protocols
of the Elders of
Zion,222s13ss1sss1
namely:"It is a blue print for systematically enticing the cream
of Aryan womanhood onto the priapic altar of a Zionist Masterplan for
mongrolizing the Germanic races out of existence by converting Europe into
the kind of socalled 'melting pot' that makes the Americans such propganda
pushovers for the kike (con) artists and pied entrepreneurial pipers who
dominate the New York/ Hollywood intelligentsia."
If your eyebrows were raised by that capital"L" in Lady
X—it's not a typographical error. But beyond giving you that
clue—which for anyone who isn't familiar with Who's Whom (and how they
got to be so) among Britain's titled aristocracy won't mean very much—I'm
precluded by the terms of a "gentlemen's Agreement" I made with Lady X's
husband (we'll call him Lord Y) from providing any hints concerning his wife's
true identity to the readers of my (what he calls) "shabby excuse for polluting
the minds of America's normally sensible housewives with all this pornographic
claptrap about finding a pot of pyschosexual gold at the end of some bloody
neoegalitarian rainbow." As for the "X"—there is little I can do to
stop you from speculating on its possibly hidden meaning along the following
lines: (a) It's the mark she made (in triplicate) when "signing" her half
of the passionate (some might say pornographically so) loveletters we exchanged
during the year she spent in Moronia earning her Doctorate in Special Education
from Cambridge University; (b) It represents the Xrated content of said "lewd
& lascivious" correspondence; (c) In foreplay parlance X marks that most
sensitive of spots which, when properly fondled, caressed, stroked, rubbed,
manipulated, tweaked, palpated, pinched and kissed, makes even the toughest
of one's "customers" feel as if her innermost cravings for copulational bliss
have been fully satisfied without the conventional (and more often than not
hitormiss orgasmwise) methods of actually fornicating; (d) X denotes the
intersecting of those 2 roads traveled by perfect strangers who continue
going their separate ways only to realize, in retrospect, their "casual fling"
was in fact the stuff from which a truly great loveaffair might have been
made; (e) As used in terms like Xfactor, Brand X, Xray and
Xmas,222s13ss1sss2
this 24th letter in our alphabet has always been the most mysterious,
or; (f) All of the above.
Although Lord Y recanted his preWWII proNazi sentiments
as "having been prompted by what I believed at the time were the purest of
fascist principles (ie., subordinating one's pursuit of personal happiness
for the common sociocultural good) in a world where the worst sort of philistine
egalitarianism was threatening the survival of Western Civilization," he
has yet to disavow his antiSemitic views which, as England's Chief Cold
Warrior,222s13ss1sss3
he
retained on the grounds that: "Only a traitor or a fool could fail to see
that Marxism and Zionism were both cut from the same JudeoChristian (sack)cloth
we AngloSaxons have been swindled into wearing since that brightest of all
Jewboys got himself crucified to save our (once blissfully!) heathen souls."
As Sigmund Freud (and Woody Allen) observed: This is the standard argument
every Jewhating bully uses to rationalize his secret adulation for the
psychosexual power exercised over the female object of his own lecherous
intentions by the "97pound weakling" in whose (ugly Yid) face he kicks sand.
The hate/love relationship between these musclebound goyim and Jewish
artist/intellectuals generally, and their pen(is) envy of "Semite novelists"
in particular—explains why all Moronic—and most
American—men regard anything of a remotely "cultural nature" as
a threat to their masculinity. Hence the temper tantrums they throw when
a woman suggests that, "Rather than our usual Saturday night visit to the
local bowling alley, baseball stadium or ginmill, why don't we get out of
this Mudville rut, head for the nearest metropolis and check out the art
museum/gallery scene, see the latest Bergman flick, catch some
Shakespeare-in-the-park or
sit through a nonstop performance of Wagner's
Ring
Cycle?"222s13ss1sss4
Whether or not, dear reader, this has ever happened to you as a result
of simply expressing your "natural feminine desire for a little mental
stimulation" it would be prudent to keep our "purely platonic" affair a secret
from the man (or men) in your nonliterary lovelife. While for you and I these
furtive meetings of our minds couldn't be more harmless, believe me my
sweet—to the Dr. Goebbels and Lord Ys of this world your reading of
Morons Awake! constitutes an act of sexual treachery exceeding that of Ophelia,
Hester Pryne, Helen of Troy, Marie Woyzeck, Madame Bovary, Mrs. Simpson and/or
Constance Chatterley. Return to
subfootnote
13
subsubsubfootnotes
222s13ss1sss1 The title of a bogus document containing the "battle plans" of a 19thcentury "Council of Jews" to subvert Christianity and gain control of the world. Return to subsubfootnote 1
222s13ss1sss2 For our purposes the X in Xmas raises some intriguing questions
about its unorthodox (45degree) orientation of what should,
crucifixionwise, be the truest possible perpendicularity. This tilting
of Christ's cross is, of course, most notoriously illustrated by the Nazi
swastika (hakenkreuz) Hitler ran up the flagpole of his Third Reich
in 1933; whereupon, in a serious setback for the cause of preKlutzian
neoEgalitarianism, it was duly saluted by millions of Europe's most "culturally
advanced" citizens—not all of whom were German. Less well known but
equally infamous was an Xshaped contraption built by the Marquis de Sade
he impishly called "Le Croix de l'amour" and on which his "sexual
cannonfodder" were spreadeagled in such a way (the axis of their torsos being
North/South while that of their limbs was NE/SW and NW/SE ala Leonardo Davinci's
Vitruvian Man drawing) that, unlike the conventional "fourposter method,"
all of their orifices were readily available for defiling by the fiendish
Frenchman and his fellow (of both genders) libertines.
Modern versions of this 18thcentury innovation have,
regrettably, become popular not only among hardcore S&M and bondage/
domination freaks but with those quack "lovedoctors" who advertise themselves
as "Experts in the Art of Foreplay" on matchbook covers and the back pages
of the sleazier supermarket tabloids. These "SpaceAge" variations on the
old Marquis' handcrafted original are fabricated from the such exotic materials
as Titanium, Herculaneum and carbonfiber whose strength-to-weight ratios
and folding/telescopic design make them small enough to fit inside a briefcase,
the coat or pants' leg of a Brooks Brothers' business suit (when used with
a calf- or shoulder holster) and even a rolledup copy of the New York
Times, Atlantic Monthly or any other publication whose intellectual
respectability discourages a curious female from asking what might turn out
to be her foolish questions concerning why a man who reads such erudite
periodicals is using one to so obviously conceal something he doesn't want
her to know he's hiding.
On the other hand; this is precisely the kind of "foolish"
question the more astute of these fake foreplayists want to be asked and
seldom are by the objects of their predatory desires. Which is why they prefer
to make no bones about what they're up to. "Is there any better way," they
boast, "for striking up a conversation with some prurientminded female than
by laying one of these tantalizing devices on a bar, desk, lunchroom counter
or coffeetable with its provocative brand
name
(NIRVANA, Shangri-La, El Dorado, Come-A-Lot)
and descriptive legend ('The Answer To A Maiden's Prayer,' 'A Lovelorn
Housewife's Ticket To Extramarital Bliss,' 'The Freelance Foreplayer's Swiss
Army Knife For The Ad Hoc Pursuit Of A Distressed Damsel's Sexual Happiness')
displayed in fullest kind of enticing frontality?"
As a purist in practicing what is for me the test of
a foreplay artist's imaginative mettle I've always avoided the use of such
"technological" gadgets. Accordingly my efforts at setting the stage for
mymarathon lovemaking performances have always been limited to the
classical— some might say "corny"—devices used for establishing
a "romantic" ambiance, namely: candlelight (on a really warm night plain
moon- and/or starlight is preferable); mood music (Rachmaninov's Second
Piano Concerto, Wagner's Liebestod, Debussy's Prélude
à l'aprés-midi d'un faune); "tastefully" erotic paintings
(Benton's Susannah and the Elders, Grosz's Beauty, I Cherish Thee,
Modigliani's Seated Nude, Goya's Naked Maja, Courbet's
Artist In His Studio, Manet's Dejeuner sur L'herbe) and etchings
(any of Picasso's Vollard Suite will do); African fertility carvings;
Greek pottery adorned with candid portrayals of pagan sexuality; my private
collection of Banned Books (whose scandalous titles include unexpurgated
first editions of Lady Chatterly's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Delta of Venus,
Histoire d'O, Richard Burton's nobloodyfairytalenonsense translation
of Arabian Nights and Beardsley's (porno)graphically illustrated
Lysistrata—copies of which I leave conveniently strewn about
for my clients to "browse" while I'm in the kitchenette preparing a light
"preplunge" snack consisting of a truffle omelet or cucumber sandwiches)
and, finally, that most efficacious of all aphrodisiacs—an hour or 2
of intelligent conversation (whose topics, depending on my coconversationalist's
level of sophistication include: The Pursuit of happiness as a fundamentally
psychosexual proposition; The role artists play in glorifying the details
of a daily life the average housewife is so busy coping with she can't enjoy
its finer points; The bankruptcy of Jeffersonian egalitarianism as evidenced
every night on millions of American—and a few dozen Moronic—TV
screens; The virtue of failure in enhancing that truly epiphanal climax which
only come at the tail end of a long and loveless marriage—or, for that
matter, an "unproductive" literary career,
etc.).
Return to subsubfootnote
1
222s13ss1sss3 Contrary to what John Le Carre and other "Cloak & Dagger" novelists have written, it was Lord Y who first organized the Circus (MI-6) and ran it from the day Britain declared war on Germany until his (forced) retirement in 1979 with a fanatical ruthlessness surpassing that of Feliks Dzerzhinsky in building the Cheka (AllRussian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution & Sabotage), or even Sir John Reith's during his legendary "Reign of Holy Terror" at the BBC. Return to susubfootnote 1
222s13ss1sss4 The fact that Bergman, Shakespeare and Wagner weren't Jewish makes no difference to these rednecked Kontra Kultur Klansmen who see a Franz Kafka, Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, Heinrich Heine, Lenny Bernstein, Hugo Hoffmanstahl, Norman Mailer, Steve Sondheim, Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller lurking under every Godfearing whiteman's bed. Not that Gentile artists are the only targets of such misplaced bigotry. As the following true story—told to me by one of Moronia's "closet" UMBs (UpperMiddleBrows)—demonstrates:
Early one New Year's Eve day, seeking to escape from what he described as "the mindless festivities surrounding this Annual Turnip Tournament torture we inflict on ourselves," a certain Moron who, to preserve his closet UMB status, we'll call "Mr Brown," packed his wife, 2 children, housekeeper/mistress (an arrangement inspired by that between the Antrobuses and their "parlormaid," Sabina Somerset, in The Skin Of Our Teeth—a play much admired among Moronia's UMBs) and pet Cocker Spaniel into the family's Volvo stationwagon and headed for Country A to do some sightseeing. Before leaving their Moronville townhouse, Mrs. Brown had pleaded with her husband to make some hotel reservations so they wouldn't all end up "stranded in the middle of nowhere" like the last time he took them on one of his "madcap adventures" to Country B.
"My dear woman," Brown assured her, "there is no need for taking such a precaution because most of the idiots who live in Country A will be in Moronia attending the Turnip Tournament Parade and Big Game since this year their team, the A****** City A*skickers, are playing the Country C N*tcrackers for that ridiculous Wÿncê Memorial Cup." And, when Brown's "critique of the situation" was confirmed by all the traffic they saw leaving Country A and headed toward Moronville, there was nothing Mrs. Brown could do but accept her defeat (as) gracefully (as she humanly could) by telling him: "Well, darling, all I can say is I certainly hope you're right—this time."
As the sun was just beginning to set Brown parked Volvo at the curb of a ThreeStar Inn (even by American standards, socioeconomically the Browns were considered UpperMiddle—or even LowerUpper Class) in the suburbs of Country A's capital city which, he pointed out jubilantly to his wife, was displaying a large VACANCY sign. Although Country A is known for having Europe's toughest antidiscrimination laws because of its own history of persecution by countries D, E, F and G, Brown decided it would be wiser if he alone made their lodging arrangements because of his "Nordic appearance" (even when hatless) and fluency in German—the "native" language of Country A—with words of more than 1 syllable. As he explained it to his wife and their housekeeper/mistress: "My reason for doing so isn't that you lovely ladies couldn't pass yourselves off as Italian Fiancullas, Swiss Fräuleins or Spanish Señoritas. It's the kids, God bless 'em, who are most likely to give us all away by simply behaving like the normal little Morons they are!"
"Just be quick about it," was Mrs. Brown's response to this latest example of her husband's talent for smoothtalk. The housekeeper/ mistress' reaction was to shed a single tear of ethnic mortification which then slowly slid its miserable way down her reddening cheek.
When Brown entered the Inn its keeper greeted him with what seemed like the most amiable of smiles. And, when asked if his vacancy sign meant what it said, he admitted jovially that: "With everyone in Moronville for the Turnip Tournament and Big Game festivities it's not surprising we Innkeepers of Country A have more empty rooms than Carter has pills! So," the Innkeeper said before Brown could finish his (rather too obsequious) laughter over this lame attempt at hotelier's hilarity, "how can I help you, sir?"
"I need some lodging for the night—" Brown started to say.
"Considering it's a buyer's market," the Innkeeper interrupted, "I can let you have our Deluxe Bachelor's Pad for a mere 2,500 Amarks (a sum equal to M$700, or 14% of Moronia's GDP)."
"That sounds reasonable," said Smith without batting an eye, "but I'm not alone."
"Oh?"
"No. I'm traveling with my wife—"
"Putting a double bed into the Bachelor's Pad will, I'm afraid, cost you an extra 3 grand—unless you would prefer the Bridal Suite. In which case the rent is 5,000. That's a saving of 500."
"I think the Bridal Suite would be preferable," said Brown, "so my wife and I can keep our eyes on the children—"
"How many kids have you got?" asked the innkeeper with that fraternal curiosity one proud father expresses toward another.
"2," Brown answered nonchalantly, although for a Moron 2 offspring was 5 times the national average of 0.4 per household. "A boy and a girl."
"That's nice," commented the Innkeeper, "Unfortunately, even the most wellbehaved youngsters can turn out to be an Innkeeper's worst nightmare propertydamagewise. I'm afraid I'll have to charge you 5,000 Amarks for each of them."
"As a collector of some rather rare objects d'art I can certainly appreciate your concerns," Brown stated. [This wasn't entirely accurate. While its exact nature can't be divulged, suffice it to say the "objects" comprising Brown's "art" collection were—and probably still are—of a kind no Moronic juvenile (and most adults) would target for destruction as representing some elitist plot to sabotage the blissful ignorance of Moronia's egalitarian ethos.]
"Good!" said the Innkeeper.
"As far as the children's governess (which is how the Browns "diplomatically" described their housekeeper/mistress when telling the truth might raise an eyebrow or 2 among those unaware the great Thornton Wilder had placed his Pulitzerprizewinning seal of approval on just such a domestic relationship) is concerned—" Brown tried to explain.
"Being devout Roman Catholics," the Innkeeper cut him off, "we have a strict policy against any man sharing a room—or suite of rooms— with more than 1 female of the opposite sex over the age of 12. Which I assume this 'governess' of yours is?"
"That's damned decent of you," said Brown. "Which leaves only the matter of making some arrangements for my pet Cocker Spaniel. We could, of course, leave him to spend the night in our Volvo; but that seems like an unnecessarily cruel thing to do—"
"As the owner of 3 Alsatians—and a firm believer that dogs truly are a man's best friend—I couldn't agree with you more!" waxed the Innkeeper. "I take it this Cocker of yours is housebroken?"
"To such an extent, my dear fellow, that—believe it or not—no matter how sorely tempted he will only relieve himself in the municipal sandboxes and those trees and hydrants officially designated for such canine purposes."
"Well, then, I see no reason why he can't stay with you and your Mrs in the Bridal Suite; unless you object to paying an extra 500 Amarks for that favor in case there is an accident?"
"I most definitely do object!" Brown thundered.
"You do?"
"You're goddammed right I do!"
"But why make a fuss over a lousy 500 A-marks for that dog of yours when—by my calculations—you seemed perfectly willing to pay a grand total of 19,500 for yourself, your wife, your 2 children and their 'governess'?" asked the dumbfounded Innkeeper.
"Because," answered Brown—relishing every word as if he were delivering a punchline of Churchillian proportions ("Some neck, some chicken!") "you narrowminded, beetlebrowed, krauteating, subhuman tub of brainless lard—the dog isn't a Moron!"While the Innkeeper didn't think much of the "punchline" to The Dog Isn't A Moron Joke (or "Tail" as Brown "waggishly" describes it) in an Appendix to a report issued by the Oslo Conference On The Evils Of Intolerance (organized by such illustrious antihate groups as Serge and Beate Klarsfeld's UnterHundBund, Art Spiegelman's Mausketeers, Lena Stolze's Nasty Girls Who Persist In Refreshing The Memories Of Nazi Amnesiacs and Elie Wiesel's One Man Crusade To Save The Human Race From Another Holocaust) the following information appears:
TABLE XXXV
Variations On The Original Punchline To The Dog Isn't A Moron Joke Ranked By Multiplying The Volume & Duration Of The Laughs They Received From An Audience Of Average Norwegians When Told That: "The Dog Isn't—"1. Norwegian
2. a lawyer
3. a Mondaynight football commentator
4. a lesbian
5. a lover of classical music
6. a used car salesman
7. a nonfiction novelist
8. a TV network executive
9. a bibliomaniac
10. Polish
11. gay
12. a native American
13. an ex con
14. a Mormon
15. blind
16. suffering from leprosy
17. obese
18. from Texas
19. a Shiite Muslim
20. a Scientologist
21. a cigar smoker
22. Jewish