Two Gigantic Personalities

For weeks now, Nickie has been pestering me to jump aboard this blog raft with him and DC. I'm reluctant to do it but he's plied me with flattery, Valomilk cups and low-cost prescriptions. So far, it's working. He wants to have me nearby. I'm a father-figure to him - compensating for all the wives, lawyers, clerics and parole officers who have let him down over the years. But most of all, he wants me to keep an eye on DC, who can suddenly go Cain on Goomba's Abel, completely without warning.

DC's spontaneous malicious battery on Nickie began years ago when they both worked for The Reader's Digest. Nickie was ghost-writing "Quotable Quotes" for famous dead people who couldn't sue, and DC was fabricating anecdotes for "Humor In Uniform". For a Christmas issue, Nickie conjured a nitwit exclamation for George Armstrong Custer.

"We're winning, lads! When I squint, there aren't as many of 'em!

Nickie didn't know that DC was a Custerphile (see DC's avatar), but it accounts for DC's violence and the debris field that followed, even down to today. Nickie still defends the authenticity of the Custer quote, insisting that it was reported in 1892 by a Harvard-educated Lakota warrior named Swings-Three-Ways, who was at the Little Big Horn as a young man. Nobody believes Nickie. I don't. And certainly not DC, who is an expert on Custer's Last Stand, an occasional blogger, and the top Gatling Gun detailer in Texas.

Anyway, when I'm not destroying the actionable, smutty illustrated notes they exchange, and their letters-cut from-magazines hate mail to each other, I might also lay some intellectual terrazzo on their intellectual cement.

As for me, the less you know the better. I'm nearing retirement age or Box City, depending on the public option or which doctor I believe. I was born into a feuding New England family, but spent many years in the old, de facto segregated South. It was the South of live oaks, swaying Spanish Moss, pecan treats and manners. I can never think of it as a sinkhole of racism, snobbery and ignorance, as many do.

The New England side of me was poisoned by the reformist virus, and I ended up with chronic liberalism, which flared up until the late 1960's. A dose of war and a journey to the ends of my personal galaxy finally cured me. Melancholy is the destroyer of fantasy. Every conservative knows it. Read David Mamet's Village Voice piece "Why I'm no longer a brain-dead liberal". You'll see yourself in it.

I"m also a conservative today because I usually side with the mutineers. If you aren't mocking and piercing the pretensions and charade of all authority, you're shirking the first obligation of a free-born. That doesn't mean you bend the proper rules; you just don't allow the improper rules to bend you or anyone else. Old liberalism used to advance the same creed, but new liberalism is a suffocating army of curtain-twitchers, making sure that life outside isn't happening without some dialectic approved by the authorities. And lots of new liberals are the authorities.

My first principles come from four lines by Blake - not Robert Blake, Goomba, but William Blake, mystic, hallucinatory artist and poet:

This life's five windows of the soul

Distort the heavens from pole to pole

And teach us to believe a lie

When we see with, not through, the eye

For now, though, I'll just be straddling the fault line between two gigantic personalities.