Light, Sweet, Crude

     [A short story for you today. This one is for all the men in overalls and hardhats. The ones with dirt under their fingernails. The guys who actually make things work. If they were ever to down tools and mean it, we prissy white-collar types wouldn’t survive a single winter.
     This short story first appeared at the “V2.0” site on September 11, 2024 – FWP]

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     I’m not a typical roughneck. I look the part—I’ve got the brawn, the bruises, and the broken fingernails—but the illusion dissolves the instant I open my mouth. I can’t help that. Working class origins and all, academia can do a number on you.
     Most of my colleagues on these rigs are high school graduates at best. Not that I think less of them for that. They’re competent, sturdy, and tough. If there’s one life lesson I’ve absorbed in its fullness, it’s Take what they have to give you, and ask for nothing more.
     These guys would give their lives for one another… and for me.
     Still, I get lonely, spending month after month here with no one to play chess with, or discuss physics or philosophy with. My breaks are precious to me; they allow me to go back east and immerse myself in what I’ve been missing. Yet I’m unsure that it’s a wise practice. The semiannual week I spend at McGill is time I could have spent bonding with the guys, learning from them, and figuring out how to be one of them. Not to mention that management gives me the stink-eye for demanding the travel vouchers I need, even though they’re part of my agreed-upon compensation.
     I was contemplating staying in Calgary for a change when Colin Atwood came by the dorm with a “request” that was really a command.
     “Mike?”
     I looked up from my Kindle. “What’s up, Colin?”
     “New hire. I need someone to walk her through the procedures, make sure she knows her stuff.”
     Her?
     “You committed to going back east next week?”
     I winced. “Actually, I hadn’t decided.”
     He grinned. “Two weeks at double time if you stay and keep her from getting herself killed.”
     “Well… okay.” I set my Kindle aside, stood, and stretched. “I can use the money. Where is she?”
     He looked back over his shoulder. “Janet!”
     And in she walked.
     I don’t think I could have been more surprised. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. She was a blue-eyed blonde, barely five feet tall. She couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds. She was dressed to the nines: white linen skirt suit, high-heeled pumps, a couple of tasteful bits of gold, and perfect makeup. She looked ready for an interview with a white-collar firm, not for what we do. She was way too pretty and delicate to be a roughneck.
     She stood there smiling as if the total incongruity of her presence was a dismissible detail, a trifle.
     “Janet Kaczmarek,” Colin said, “this is Mike Pryor. Mike, Janet. Get to know each other.” He turned and made to leave. It took a lot of self control to keep my mouth shut until he’d closed the door behind him.
     She stuck out a hand. “Good to meet you.”
     We shook. “Likewise.”
     She must have sensed my puzzlement. “You really want to say ‘what the fuck are you doing here,’ right?”
     The profanity made me start. “Well, yes. Did you really apply for a gig as a roughneck?”
     “It seemed like a good opportunity. The money’s good, anyway.”
     I grimaced. “You might not think so after you’ve done some shopping in town.”
     She cocked an eyebrow. “They bleed you?”
     “They know how much we make, and besides, we’re a captive audience.”
     She sniffed. “Well, shit.”
     “Uh, yeah. I assume you’re new to oil rigs and such?”
     “New like a newborn… Mike, was it?”
     “Yeah. Well,” I said, “it’s hard, dangerous work. Pardon my saying so, but you look like you belong in a… more refined environment.”
     She shook her head. “Not with the mouth I got.”
     “Oh.”
     “That gonna be a problem around here?”
     That made me chuckle. “Janet,” I said, “that way at least, you’ll fit in better than I do. Would you like to get some dinner, meet some of the guys? The cafeteria’s actually decent.”
     She straightened, made an exaggerated turn, and stuck out an arm. “Lead the way.”
     So I did.

#

     Janet knew her stuff, all right.
     Yes, she was short. But she was tough and strong. Yes, she needed a little help wrestling with some of the big assemblies and high-torque fittings. I helped her out a few times. Okay, more than a few, but then, Colin did ask me to be her rig-rabbi. But she was game for anything and everything. Sweat and dirt didn’t faze her in the least. And the guys loved her, especially after she demonstrated that she could and would banter, josh, and swear with the best of them.
     She had qualifications for roughnecking that I lacked.
     After I was sure she had the know-how and the skills she would need, I hung back. She charged ahead in ways I hadn’t as a new hand. Before her first week was over, she was “one of the boys” in all but sex.
     More so than I was, honestly. They didn’t shun me, mind you. They just treated me a little differently than they treated one another. As if I were someone from the corporate office whose presence was unexplained. Someone who couldn’t be trusted all the way. Someone to be kept at arm’s length.
     I envied her, a little. But I didn’t let that interfere with her as she bonded with the guys. Once it was clear that she needed nothing from me, I resolved to keep my distance.
     There was one episode in the cafeteria that was noteworthy. I’d finished my lunch and was checking some commodities brokerage sites through my Kindle. Janet and the other guys were bantering back and forth, all of them more comfortable with her than they’d ever been with me. There was enough profanity in the mix to make any Navy man feel right at home. At one point she stopped, turned to me, and said “Whatcha readin’, Mike?”
     I looked up. “Futures trading website. Call contracts for the third quarter.”
     “Huh?”
     “You know, bets on whether the prices of stuff will go up or down. Stuff like what we produce.”
     “Oh.” She squinted at me. “Oil seems to have a pretty good future.”
     “It better,” Al Dumont interjected, “or we’ll be out of work.”
     “Be out of work anyway,” Chaz Engram said, “if the new field don’t turn out.”
     “Yeah.” I peered at the quote for light sweet crude. “But if it does, the bonuses are going to be very substantial.”
     Dumont snorted. “Get him. ‘Very substantial.’ Couldn’t get him to say ‘fucking huge’ if you put a gun to his head.”
     “Come on, Al,” I droned, “leave off with that crap.”
     “Oh, crap!” Dumont said. “You’re ridin’ the edge now, Mike. What’ll it take to get you to say shit?”
     I shrugged. “Maybe if I get my hand caught in a gear. Anyway, light sweet crude is at a fifty-two-week high. Whatever we pull out of this field will sell fast.”
     “Good to know,” Engram said. “I like having my bills paid.”
     “What’s light sweet crude?” Janet said.
     I looked up. She was looking directly at me.
     I started to explain the various grades of oil, but the sight of the other guys rolling their eyes at my exposition made me shut down in mid-sentence. “Anyway,” I said, “it’s what we get from this field.”
     “Gotcha,” Janet said. “Light sweet crude. I like it.”
     “Hm?”
     She stood up and pushed her chair against the table. “Give me a good look, Mike,” she said. “I’m light, right? And I know I’m crude. Sounds like this gig was made for me.”
     “Well…” I hesitated. “What about sweet?”
     She shrugged. “Like the man said in the song, two out of three ain’t bad.”

#

     You don’t exactly see the process by which a new hand melds with the bunch. But if you watch with attention, the peripherals are pretty obvious. The morning welcomes. The invitations to the card games. The ribbings, the ripostes, and the tone they take. I could go on.
     Janet fitted in with the guys like a perfect puzzle piece. Most ways, anyway.
     There isn’t much serious conversation. What would a bunch of roughnecks have to talk about, anyway? While we’re here, the rest of the world ceases to matter. On breaks, the rigs are the furthest things from our minds. When we come back from a break, the one and only question anyone asks is “d’ja get laid?” Ours is a social camaraderie expressed almost exclusively in expletives and grunts.
     But Janet liked to talk. And the person she picked to talk to was me.
     Not while we were at work, mind you. That wouldn’t have gone over at all. It’s way too dangerous to have your attention split when you’re wrestling with a rig. Either they get your full attention, or pretty soon you’re wearing a sheet and a toe tag. No, she looked me up during our off-times. Usually after dinner, when most of the crew is playing cards or watching TV. And damn if she didn’t pretty herself up to do it.
     After I got over the surprise, I strove to reciprocate. Conversationally, that is. I didn’t have any nice clothing in the dorm; my suits and ties were all far away. But her obvious interest in me was as flattering as it was puzzling.
     The subjects of her chatter were a good distance from anything that had ever mattered to me. Fashion. Soap operas. Pop music. Prominent entertainers. I listened and responded as best I could. Mostly I listened. If she could tell that those things were alien to me, she never let on.
     She needed to talk. That was obvious. And she charmed me, potty mouth and all, with her attentions.
     There came a time when, dolled up as usual for her visits and talking a blue streak about some TV show, she stopped in mid-sentence and said, “You’re not into any of this shit, are you?”
     It set me back. I decided on candor.
     “Well, no. Not really.”
     Her expression shifted to something like resignation.
     “Okay, I’ll stop. Nice talking to you.”
     She rose and started toward the door. I practically shouted “Wait!”
     “Hm?”
     I was off my bunk and had my arms around her before I knew what I was doing.
     “Janet, I…” I shook my head, then did it again. I strove to marshal a few words.
     “I don’t know anything about your—your interests, no,” I said, “but I’m flattered all the same. I love having you come to chat with me. It’s… it’s too complimentary for words. Please don’t go!”
     She looked up at me, unspeaking, for what seemed an hour. Then she nodded.
     “Okay. But one thing.”
     “What?”
     She freed herself from my embrace, went to my door, closed and locked it, and returned to me.
     “Enough with the bullshit preliminaries. Let’s get to the main event.
     And her fingers found my belt buckle and unlatched it.

#

     That evening I learned more about Janet than I’d expected. For one thing, she wasn’t on the Pill.
     “Makes me feel like a bloated sack of shit,” she said.
     “Ah, okay. Should I head into town, pick up some condoms?”
     She nodded. “Gonna have to, if you want to do anything more than what we just did.”
     “Tomorrow, then.”
     She grinned. “Good. I was starting to think you weren’t into this shit, either.”
     I cringed. “Ah, no, I am ‘into this shit.’ Most definitely.”
     That goosed a laugh out of her. “You’re starting to sound like me.”
     I hugged her. “Just quoting you, dear.”
     “You know,” she said out of the blue, “you could fuck me in the ass if you want. I wouldn’t mind.”
     I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just hugged her again.
     After a few moments’ silence, she said “So what happens next?”
     I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
     “You mean tonight?”
     “Yeah. I wasn’t thinking about running into town and getting hitched.”
     “Well,” I said, “we get a night’s sleep. You can do that here or at your place. Might be better at your place.”
     “Hm? Why?”
     “Because,” I said, “there’s gonna be talk. Even from just these visits. And if we start spending our nights in the same bed, it’s gonna get worse.”
     She peered at me. “You’re worried about a little gossip?”
     “Janet,” I said, “you’re the only woman on the rigs. That’s already cause for talk. I’ve heard some of it, and it’s been pretty rough. It got rougher when you started coming to my bunk. Now you’ve picked a lover. The others will notice. They don’t miss much. And when they do, it’ll get a lot worse. I guarantee it.”
     “I don’t mind being talked about,” she said.
     I didn’t reply.
     “Anyway,” she said, “this is our private business, isn’t it? We have a God-damned right to do as we please in our off-time, don’t we?”
     What could I say to that? “Yeah.”
     She snorted. “Then let ‘em talk. You want to know what else they talk about?”
     The intonation got my attention. “What else?”
     She grinned. “You.”
     “Well, yeah,” I said. “I’m the crew oddball. The guy who doesn’t drink, or play cards, or watch TV. The intellectual who thinks about something other than booze and sex. And oil, of course.”
     She shook her head. “Not even close, Mike.”
     “Well, what then?”
     “You’re their idol.”
     My mouth dropped open. “What?”
     “You’re the go-to guy. The God-damned number one rigger on this field. Yeah, they tease you about the way you talk, but if they had to choose an indispensable man, it would be you. Whenever one of them doesn’t know what to do, or doesn’t think he’s up to it, he comes to you. You’re bigger, smarter, stronger, and tougher than they are, but you don’t swagger. You don’t strut like you think you’re king shit. You help out, and you never say anything about it. They love you.”
     I was speechless. But it was her addendum that floored me completely.
     “And so do I.”
     She got up, dressed herself, and made her exit.

#

     Yes, it was noticed. Yes, there was more talk. But that’s all there was, and it was a lot more respectful than I could have expected.
     The guys treated it as what they expected. A pretty-much anticipated development. And while we got a little more ribbing, I couldn’t detect any envy or resentment in it. Janet, God bless her, let it roll off her back.
     Management was a different story. After we’d been together for a couple of weeks, we got a company-wide bulletin. There was an all-hands meeting coming up. A mandatory training meeting. On Saturday, our off-time, when the field gets a skeleton crew whose only duty is to sound an alarm if one of the rigs ruptures or runs wild.
     About sexual harassment.
     I wasn’t the only one taken aback. The guys were uniformly gobsmacked. The prevailing comment on the announcement was “Can you believe this shit?” Unfortunately, I could. It was all too clear that Janet and I were the reason.
     Yeah, the guys knew it, too. But they didn’t say a word about it.
     I blew a lunch period to look up Colin and ask about it. He had nothing to say except “It’ll be in the cafeteria. You’ve got to be there. I do too.”
     So I was. We all were. Janet and I walked in hand in hand. I seated myself, and she sat in my lap. With her arms around me and her head on my shoulder. We figured we might as well be open about it, seeing as to how we were the reason for it.
     The “trainer” was, of course, a woman in a pantsuit. A podium and lectern had been erected for her. She strode onto it and stood before the podium, drawing herself up as if she were the prime minister. Her eyes went directly to Janet and me. She glared at us in a fashion designed to intimidate, to assert dominance.
     Janet wasn’t having it. She hopped off my lap, stood next to me, and returned glare for glare.
     It visibly shook the trainer. I saw her flinch, as plain as daylight. She resettled herself, and started her pitch.
     Janet wasn’t having any of that, either.
     “Stop right there,” she said. “This is bullshit. You know it, and so do we.”
     Outrage blossomed on the trainer’s features. She said “Do you have something relevant to say, Miss?”
     “You’re God-damned right I do,” Janet said. “This is because Mike and I are lovers, isn’t it? After all, I’m the only girl on the rigs! And before you rev up again, nobody’s said one fucking word about it. These guys are fucking princes. They’re all gonna be at the wedding.” She swept the cafeteria with a grin. “Open bar, boys.”
     Yes, that was the first I heard about her long-term plans. No, I wasn’t unhappy about it, not at all. Still, it did come as a surprise.
     That silenced the trainer. But the guys were something else. To a man, they stood and applauded. And applauded. And applauded some more. Every face in that crowd of two hundred plus roughnecks was split by a huge smile.
     It went on for a long time. Janet and I just stood there, stunned.
     The trainer fled.

#

     Colin was slightly miffed. Not because he disapproved of what Janet had done. Not at all. It was because, alone of all the men who worked on that field, he’d had no idea about Janet and me. But he did agree to come to the wedding. Open bar, remember?
     And today, on our silver anniversary, we’re surrounded by the men we’ve worked with since then. Princes, all. They threw us a huge surprise party. A lot of them go all the way back to the days when Janet was new to the rigs. She doesn’t roughneck anymore. I stayed at it, though. Why not, after all? I already had the brawn, the bruises, and the broken fingernails. So what if I can’t play chess or talk physics or philosophy with the guys? We talk about other stuff. Politics, football, hockey. Booze, sex, the rigs. The price of light sweet crude. You know, the sort of thing that interests roughnecks. So what if we swear a lot?
     Besides, the money’s really good.

==<O>==

Copyright © 2024 Francis W. Porretto. All rights reserved worldwide.

“The Winning Side”

     I’ve been having some exchanges with a brilliant fellow, Armond Boudreaux, about the different mindsets of materialists and theists. My contention is, in essence, that it’s about premises and ontological boundaries. The materialist bounds his ideas and his questions in the material realm; the theist goes beyond that. In neither case can anyone argue about the choice. Premises are like that.

     Boudreaux observed that there are villains whom material forces and social mechanisms don’t punish. Inarguable! Moreover, there always have been and always will be. Such persons choose to do evil. Those that escape their just deserts in this life are emulated by others.

     That’s the Siren song of evil: “You’re clever! You can get away with it!” It appeals to persons of malformed conscience and excessive self-regard. And yes: some of them do “get away with it.” Temporal mechanisms for correcting and deterring evil conduct are imperfect, as is everything else about Mankind.

     The great danger lies in the perception that the villains are “on the winning side.”

     We joke about that, sometimes: Come to the dark side! We have cookies! But it only stays funny so long as that perception fails to attain a critical mass. That ignites a positive-feedback cycle. Should the successes of the villains become irresistibly attractive to too many people, that society is doomed.

     Once again, I’m in mind of a passage from C.S. Lewis:

     “Hang it all—the preservation of the human race—it’s a pretty rock-bottom obligation.”
     “Well, personally,” said Feverstone, “I’m not indulging in any Busbyisms about that. It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too. Both can be explained psychoanalytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting—specially on the winning side.”

     Discerning the “winning side” involves a limited view of things – a choice of premises and ontological boundaries. Lewis tried to expand that from the purely material to the eldila, a quasi-angelic race of spirits, one of whom functions as evil’s chief agent on Earth. The materialist won’t go that far. But even theists make some assumptions about “the winning side.” James Blish demonstrated this in his novel Black Easter:

     ‘Impossible!’ Father Domenico cried, though choking with the dust of the exploded crucifix. ‘It is written that in that war you will at last be conquered and chained!’
     OF COURSE, BUT WHAT DOES THAT PROVE? EACH OF THE OPPOSING SIDES IN ANY WAR ALWAYS PREDICTS VICTORY. THEY CANNOT BOTH BE RIGHT. IT IS THE FINAL BATTLE THAT COUNTS, NOT THE PROPAGANDA. YOU MADE A MISTAKE – AND AH, HOW YOU WILL PAY!

     The speaker in capitals above is a Prince of Hell, the demon Put Satanachia, after the workings of a black magician have brought about Armageddon.

     Good and evil both make promises. Evil has an advantage: its promises can be fulfilled in this life. Good must work overtime to counter that lure.

     Should the villains ever seem to get the upper hand – think of that as “Cthulhu’s Return” – we’ll be in mortal trouble.

* * *

     Concerning that “limited view of things,” the C.S.O. and I saw an excellent movie just recently: The Witch, which stars the young Anya Taylor-Joy. The scripting and performances were both impressive, but the capper for me was the demonstration of how that limited view of things can function to corrupt a previously innocent soul. The central character, Thomasin, is the eldest child of a 17th Century New England family that has chosen to live apart from other society. That family is beset by a series of tragedies, which Thomasin’s mother and siblings put down to witchcraft. I won’t go any further than that, except to say that the movie demonstrates the ways in which seemingly unmerited suffering can make one see evil as “the winning side.”

     It is part of the moral duty of the good man to counter those influences that make evil, whatever form it may take, appear to be “the winning side.” Too many subconsciously equate might with right, and victory with moral or ideological superiority. When we speak of “the still, small voice” that tells us to avoid evil and to remain aligned with good, we are appealing to a standard that doesn’t always offer temporal rewards. It’s why we must be faithful to that standard. Unless admirable men, men of honor who are satisfied to live honorable lives, outnumber the villains, the perceptions of persons of weak, poorly formed conscience will be swayed.

     You wouldn’t want to hang around after that.

I Almost Missed It

     Glory be to God! Today, as I’ve only just discovered, celebrates my favorite ASCII character: one without which a great many important phrases – including a lot of company names – would be both longer and less memorable:

It’s World Ampersand Day!

     Yes, Gentle Reader, the mighty ampersand has been honored with a special day to be celebrated around the globe for its contributions to concision, calligraphy, conjunctionless conjunctions, and…and…

     Well, and!

     According to the National Day Calendar, here are the facts:

• The ampersand used to be the last letter of the alphabet.
• It is a ligature of “e” & “t”? That’s “et” in Latin, meaning “and”!
• The word “ampersand” is a slurring of “real words” run together over time.
• Even the plus sign is actually an ampersand!

     Why, there’s even a website devoted to Ampersand Art!

     So get out there and use it! It’s fun! It’s quick! And it’s international! The ampersand isn’t just an American thing; it’s celebrated around the world for its contributions to our written and printed text.

     Here’s a teaser for you: My novel Doors contains more ampersands than any of my previous novels! Yes, Gentle Reader: I’ve embraced the glory of this elegant and supremely useful character. And if I can, so can you!

A Study In Passion And "Cool"

     [This piece first appeared at the old Eternity Road website, on November 12, 2004. – FWP]

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     Your Curmudgeon had a strange experience this morning. His group is part of a larger, project-oriented software department which meets every Friday for general status review. Now and then, the department head will use that meeting to introduce some question or topic for general consideration and input from the troops. Today was such a day. The question was: "Do employee appreciation events (e.g., company parties and comparable special events) have a positive effect on employee morale?"

     As you might expect, most of the other engineers there mumbled something ambiguous and unengaged. Your Curmudgeon did not. Almost without intending to, he lit off on a grand tirade about how "employee appreciation events" missed the whole point of employee morale, that morale is not about time-delimited events intended to compensate for the travails of one's job, but rather about the time one spends actually doing it, and whether the holistic experience is interesting, exciting, and comfortable -- in short, whether the employee can be induced to love his work.

     The reactions were mind-expanding. The department head was stunned -- wide-eyed, open-mouthed, speechless, and unable to continue. The other engineers and group leaders were distributed across a spectrum that ranged from baffled to resentful.

     Probably the most piercing reaction came from one of your Curmudgeon's own group members, an older man about a year from retirement. He characterized the meeting as "a complete waste of time, pure bull****."

     In some ways, this seems consistent with what your Curmudgeon knows of himself and of most other working people. As a rule, engineers are embarrassed to admit their enthusiasm for their work. Most employees of any sort would be unwilling to tell their supervisors that they love their jobs and have committed to them voluntarily; it would seem a stick to beat them with at some unspecified future time. But there's more, apparently stemming from the societal worship of "cool."

     Passion of any sort is widely regarded as embarrassing. A raised voice is an unacceptable disordering of the social norm. A Juggernaut-like charge into difficulty, with the intent of smashing obstacles flat by sheer power of will, is considered disrespectful toward one's more restrained colleagues. It's "uncool."

     The "cool" phenomenon is a promotion of disengagement over enthusiasm. "Be cool, man." Don't commit yourself. Don't invest your emotions. Don't let anyone know that there's something that lights your boilers, charges your condensers, and gets you greased and ready to kick ass.

     Your Curmudgeon, despite his scholarly demeanor, is anything but detached, anything but "cool." He has much more animation and much less inhibition in him than the average guy. He's a fighter and a lover. He's most definitely "uncool," and always has been.

     But it's not "in" to be "uncool," to pledge one's life, fortune and sacred honor, to lead charges and build barricades, to declaim on subjects such as love, commitment, and passion for one's work. Such a recognition can leave a passionate person feeling very much alone.

     Do the "cool" folks have any idea how they're shortchanging themselves?

     Your Curmudgeon is an old man by the standards of the engineering trade. Most of his departmental colleagues are in their twenties and thirties. It feels massively incongruous to outmatch them so on the field of passion. But there's no denying the facts.

     Peer pressure might have had something to do with it. In sober retrospection, it almost certainly did. Large meetings are like that. Embarrassment at being lifeless and unexceptional when an oldster was an uninhibited firebrand probably had something to do with it, too.

     In one sense, it was saddening, but in another, it reminded your Curmudgeon how much he has to be thankful for.

     Our passionate moments are the times when we're most alive. The rejection of passion in favor of the slightly bored, can't-arouse-me demeanor known as "cool" that's held the favor of the youth culture for God knows how long now is a poorly disguised rejection of life itself. Its incongruity against the surging fire of life that burns in the body and brain of a young adult is an irony that defies capture in mere words.

     Your Curmudgeon will continue to engage himself. He'll continue to sing in the car. He'll charge up the hill with his torch and his pitchfork whenever the fit takes him. And he'll be glad that his is a personality unmarred by "cool."

     Let the Limbo people, the willfully disengaged and uncommitted ones, the gray souls who prefer a twilight world in which there's neither true life nor true death, have their "cool." They'll never know what they've missed. More's the pity.

Enforcers

     A great many people, most of them good and decent people, have fallen for the notion that if something is generally deemed “bad” by some widely held standard, then it “should” be illegal. Beneath that conviction lie two others:

1. Not to outlaw it is somehow to condone it;
2. Outlawing it will have net positive results.

     The second of those beliefs can be tested. The first is more difficult to cope with. That having been said, in combination they explain the great majority of all the laws that have been fastened on suffering Mankind throughout recorded history.

     Yet there is evidence that in the great majority of cases, outlawing some variety of conduct either has no measurable effect on its frequency, or correlates with an increase in it. Now, correlations are interesting, but we must not immediately conclude that they reveal causes. Still, they’re evidence that we should not assume a proposed law will have only the effects we expect from it.

     Take the matter of violence in defense of one’s home or other property. Until fairly recently, he who could honestly claim to be defending what is rightfully his was granted the presumption of legal and moral justification for what he does for that purpose. Under that presumption, the aggressor bore the responsibility for what flowed from his aggression. That is no longer the case in much of the United States.

     The change brought unintended consequences. Street assaults and home invasions increased in frequency and in the violence they occasioned. No one wanted those consequences, of course. But we’re not guaranteed to get what we want.

     Nonviolent conduct presents an even more perverse picture. Outlawing alcoholic beverages – i.e., the Prohibition era – caused an increase in drinking, moonshining, and bootlegging. Outlawing private gambling produced state-run and state-licensed gambling that rakes in many billions of dollars per year. Outlawing recreational use of drugs has brought about an explosion in organized crime and police corruption. Yet the laws involved were passed by well-meaning people, with malice toward none.

     In commenting on laws intended to reduce prostitution, H.L. Mencken delivered the verdict on well-meant legislation many years ago:

     There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who doesn’t know precisely how it ought to be dealt with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on man, who hasn’t a sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney, ambitious for higher office, who doesn’t offer to dispose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet, by the same token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing sound information to the business, and understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn’t believe and hasn’t stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble. For example, Havelock Ellis. His remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death. Man is inherently vile—but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps at such swine pipe.

     With regard to the general improvement of public morals, what has proved effective is the disapproval of others, and the consequences that follow. The evidence suggests that morals and ethics are best imposed through social mechanisms: customs, education, denunciation, ostracism, etc. Many a practice of times past was dedicated to exactly that sort of improvement. If the community has behavioral standards that its members are willing to uphold through public disapproval and ostracism, those things usually suffice to curb disapproved behavior – to hold it to an irreducible or “threshold” level.

     From a strictly practical standpoint, the social-improvement crusader “should” be persuaded by that argument. All too often, he reverts to the “But leaving it legal would condone it” position. That’s a tougher nut to crack. At present I have no suggestions for cracking it.

     Perhaps we might consider bringing back dueling under the Toth Convention:

• The challenged party gets the choice of weapons.
• The duel must be refereed by an impartial individual.
• It must take place in the pre-dawn hours, when there’s little light.
• Challenger and challenged must both bring seconds to act as witnesses.
• The deciding rule of the contest must be agreed upon: first blood or incapacity?

     Under that convention, the infliction of death, even if unintentional, is considered shameful and subjects the offender to ostracism.

     I know the idea will horrify many. After all, we’re civilized now. We abhor violence, especially when we’re its target. But the prospect of being challenged and compelled to stake one’s blood, if not his life, on his words or deeds would inhibit quite a lot of bad behavior. The question is whether we could tolerate that manner of enforcement.

     That question is troublesome. At present we don’t even tolerate police violence very well. But the correlation between the end of the “nightstick era” and the explosion of street violence suggests that that might have been a wrong turning. Upon which note I believe I shall leave the field to my Gentle Readers.

“They Say That I Am Mad, But I Am Not Mad…”

     I have a mountain of chores and obligations before me today, so this will be brief. I was thinking about bygone fads and trends: the sort of thing Charles Mackay wrote about in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In our time, characterized by mass communication technologies that didn’t exist when Mackay wrote, one of the more charming fads was the hallucinatory-nonsense lyric.

     The music of the Sixties occasionally brought us “novelty songs” that were intended – I hope — to be funny. Some of them were memorable, such as “Love Potion #9,” “The Witch Doctor,” and “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Haha!” But they’re largely gone now, except for fleeting manifestations such as the Dixie Chicks’ “White Trash Wedding.”

     But the novelty songs had companions that lurked behind the drapes: the hallucination songs. Some lyric writers specialized in them: Pete Brown, who wrote for Cream; Robert Hunter, who wrote for the Grateful Dead; and the incredible Keith Reid, the lyricist for Procol Harum.

     Where are their inheritors? Who writes such stuff today? My acquaintance with 21st Century pop music is slight, so I can’t say. But surely someone is still pursuing that art form! Or has the national supply of LSD dwindled too far to support such endeavors?

     Well, anyway. If you want a taste of the very best Sixties music has to offer, you can’t go wrong with Procol Harum’s first, eponymous album. It’s both lyrically and musically brilliant, one mesmerizing hallucination after another from beginning to end. Below is my favorite track from that album, with Keith Reid’s lyrics.

Outside the gates of Cerdes sits the two-pronged unicorn
Who plays at relaxation time a rhinestone flugelhorn
Whilst mermaids lace carnations into wreaths for ailing whales
And Neptune dances hornpipes while Salome sheds her veils

Phallus Phil tries peddling his pewter painted pot
But Sousa Sam can only hear the screams of Peep the sot
Who only sips his creme de menthe from terra cotta cups
And exhales menthol scented breath whilst spewing verbiage up

Down technical blind alleys live the wraiths of former dreams
And Greeps who often crossed them are no longer what they seem
And even Christian Scientists can but display marble plaques
Which only retell legends whilst my eyes reach out for facts
Yeah, my eyes reach out for facts

The Darkness At The End Of The Tunnel

     Starting in 2007, I wrote a series of essays collectively titled “The Mask Slips” at the late, lamented Eternity Road website. They concerned the steady erosion of an idea that decent Americans would have thought unassailable: a human being’s right to life. I argued that that idea was being attacked at its most vulnerable margins: abortion and euthanasia.

     Attacks on a moral-ethical idea at its tender margins should always be closely scrutinized. Often they’re harbingers of a larger campaign to invalidate the idea altogether – not in a logical sense, but as a premise from which ordinary people reach other conclusions and decisions. For the most important moral and ethical ideas are not logically provable. They can be undermined, worn away by gradual incursions until they’ve become historical curiosities, obiter dicta.

     Just yesterday, I received an email from a reader of one of my books:

     The premise of The Death Cults is difficult to overlook because you're not simply examining particular movements or ideas, you’re organizing them around a much larger question: what happens to a civilization when the value of human life itself becomes negotiable?
     I found that framing particularly interesting.
     What stood out to me is that the book seems less concerned with cataloguing individual threats than with identifying the common principle you believe connects them. That makes the argument much more ambitious than the title initially suggests.

     I was thrilled. Someone had actually grasped my point. That’s a rare thing these days. Yet it was exactly that point that motivated me – along with copious chivvying from my friend Pascal – to compile the essays that became The Death Cults into a separate publication.

     The common principle, of course, was hostility to the right to life. I saw each of the several “marginal attacks” as excrescences of that hostility. I believed that the attacks were converging, such that the human right to life would eventually be discarded as a moral premise. I still do believe it.

     But all that is prefatory. Attacks on the right to life are part of a bigger picture. How big? Pour yourself another cup of coffee and read on.

* * *

     There has hardly been a more valuable voice added to America’s national discourse than Constitutional scholar and law professor Jonathan Turley:

     Pennsylvania state representative and Democratic Socialist Chris Rabb is the latest Democrat to reaffirm his alliance with virulent antisemite Hasan Piker. What is most notable, however, is his attack on establishment Democrats as “institutionalists,” a new label reflecting the radical agenda for changing our constitutional system. It is a term that is now in vogue on the far left by those who want to tear down our institutions and scrap our Constitution.
     Across the country, attacks are growing on Democrats and independents who are viewed as insufficiently radical. Those of us who continue to celebrate the Madisonian democracy as creating the most successful and stable republic in history are now “cultists” and “institutionalists” who are trapped in “nostalgia.”
     The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have drawn support from many who want a literal revolution. DSA Steering Committee member Cliff Connolly declared on one podcast that they are “famous for” “Our hatred of the United States Constitution.”

     Please read it all. It put me in mind of an observation by one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century:

     The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. – Albert Einstein

     The Founding Fathers convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to define a national government. As I’ve said before, to define is to delimit: to say what the thing being defined is and is not. The Constitution was the Founders’ attempt to do exactly that. They had history, John Locke, and Adam Smith for guidance.

     History told the Founders what will follow when The State is unrestricted. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, codified men’s half-formed sense for right and wrong. John Locke united theory with practice in delineating the concept of a right and whence it originates. The Constitution, together with the original Bill of Rights, was the Founders’ attempt to reify those ideas. Those documents set out, in clear and specific terms, how the national government would be determined and what it must and must not do.

     The modern Left, through its political arm the Democrat Party, seeks to eliminate those documents as working principles. Of course! The Left aspires to be “the governing class.” Therefore they’re “hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty.” The incursions they’ve made so far have been grievous, such that another few decades of marginal chipping-away might just lead to a de facto “retirement” of the Constitution. But they’re impatient. They want the remaining limitations to fall now.

     Professor Turley says it plainly:

     The media eagerly publishes these radical views, such as the New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” in which Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale call for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
     Brown University’s Corey Brettschneider called the Constitution a “dangerous document” that is driving this “threat to democracy.”
     George Washington law professor Mary Anne Franks condemned the “cult of the Constitution” that has been defended to advance “white male supremacy.”
     Now, to support our constitutional system is to be an “institutionalist,” a pejorative term that is as bad as being an “oligarch” in the new revolutionary lexicon.

     If the Constitution should fall, whether de jure or de facto, all legal protections for Americans’ individual rights will fall with it.

* * *

     Just as we saw in compiling the attacks on the right to life, the marginal attacks on Constitutional constraints have been elements in a converging assault on constitutionalism itself: the thesis that there must be a Supreme Law that binds governments as clearly and absolutely as moral precepts bind men. It’s foolish to think that there could be any other terminus. It’s even more foolish to imagine that the men driving those attacks are innocent of that aim.

     “When a man shows you who he is, believe him,” said poet Maya Angelou. The men of the American Left have shown us who they are, and by implication where they’re headed. This is no time for decent Americans to say to one another that “They don’t really mean it.”