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Coreboys & Ingrates -- Penfold Gwynne We came westward like a gang of bespectacled Visigoths, blown straight as a tangent by the wind of change-suppression and continuity, an earth-trenching cloud of persistent enlightenment, revvin' and a-roarin' across the vast emptiness of America, hootin' and a-faxin' till we had spent all our phone card minutes. It was a long and thoughtful trek. At night we kept ourselves warm through the singing of songs and syllabi, ululating Heine's Am Nachtigall while the coyotes' eyes stung in the darkness, their plaintive plain homilies catchin' in their mangy throats. 'Otto' Berman kept things percolatin' across the continent with his espresso machine whistling its anti-lullaby. Our cache of Penguin Classics bumped along in the back of the wagon like nitroglycerin, a precious cargo. We were an awe- inspirin' sight, I can tell ya. There was Lucky Pierre, always waxin' nostalgic-like about the way he had manned the barricades at the Sorbonne, displayin' the white lines of scars where he had been hit by a bottle of Perrier by an Anarcho-Syndicalist film student. 'Giaoco Uomo' Vico, the Graeco-Roman wrastler from the Uffizi, was there too, with pink granite for skin, marble for a chin. Whereas some could track the passage of bison by the reading of hoofprints, he could find the affinity the Mississippi had with the Tiber, the inferiority of Kansas nimbi to those of Turner, and the great debt that adobe housing owed Minoan architecture. And then there was Lieutenant Caffrey, Roman historian, who insisted we 'Sir' him all the time. He was a hard ass, he'd napalmed his share in places that we'd only seen in LIFE magazine in black and white. And there was me, Lou 'Dicker' Blumen, the most literal and least ironic member of the posse. I had with me the orders from homebase. I was the one who knew the full extent of our mission statement. We had to provide aid for the besieged Fort Berkeley, out in California, that was being attacked by tribes of Lesbos, Hispanos and other savages. It had been going on for three weeks now and there was no sign of them critters lettin' up. Nah, we would have to do some major blowin' up of shit; this called for the crack unit that wasn't. We had all been immobilized for years, having hung up our spurs to settle in, tenured and published, soaking in the cat-belly effulgence of our golden years. But this call from the Centre was our reveille, our clarion call to revive the flagging Camelot of our purpose. I was in charge of munitions and European Thought. My organisational skills were nothing compared to Lieutenant Caffrey's, but he was thought too intransigent and doggone dogmatic to entrust with a project of such magnitude. With my scant understanding of psychological warfare -- I had brought some Bartok CDs that would be used over loud speakers -- we entered California. The severity of the situation was apparent from the moment we got to the Fort. There were thousands of the heathens shoutin' and kvetchin' 'bout this and that, makin' a spectacle of themselves. They were slingin' mud, castin' aspersions, cursin' curriculi, drawin' conclusions, j'accusin' like nobody's beeswax. I tried to get past some of them and smelt the patchouli on them. I noticed that many of them there placards were scattershot through and through with misspellings. -It's come to this, sighed Lucky Pierre, slapping his palm, all Buford T. Pusser-like, with his lucky 'baguette des barricades.' We flashed our IDs and were let in through the delivery entrance. After dealing with some unhinged secretarial effeminates, we were escorted to the Dean's office. The man looked like Caliban with hemiplegia, if you can imagine that. -They're demanding Women's Studies and African American Studies and Native American Studies and, and.... I told him to calm himself down and made him a Manhattan to make myself useful. -Ah, merci, he said, knowing me to be a Middle French nutter. -€a va? -€a va. Our moment of paix Francaise lasted about as long as the Kerensky Provisional Government, for no sooner had we given each other the not-so-secret Masonic handshake than a Molotov cocktail came sailin' in through the already broken window, setting his Encyclopedia Britannica on fire. That was it, the Lieutenant went ballistic. He started to refer to us as the Praetorian Guard. We had to restrain him. Indeed, we had to tie him up with tefillim that I always carry for moments of spiritual weakness. The irony of a Roman historian being tied up by a Hebrew strip of leather was not lost on the Dean, who started davening with glee. We left to do lunch, thinking that a good reuben sandwich would bring a certain focus to our endeavors, to our mission. The uncouth had been successful in derailing us from our perennial duties: namely, the dissemination of one culture, that would be the lingua franca of ethics and art from which this barely pubescent republic could build its culture. Yep, the reuben would be essential, invaluable in getting this off the ground, again. Raise the song again, o Muse! We prayed for Homer's muse to come round again and give us a good kick in the you-know-where, and get us over the hump. There was no time to lose. The centre, the anchor, had been lost. Everyone had an invested interest. Everyone wanted their pet passions to be adequately addressed. The university had to come to them and not the other way around. They had enrolled and now wanted things to change to accommodate their vain, lazy, capricious intellectual interests. But when we found a booth, and finally let out a breath of relief, we were ambushed. The waiting staff, it turned out, was composed almost entirely of savages. Their face paint was altered so as to look like a respectable citoyen, but their treachery was evident the moment they recognised the Dean behind his wraparound shades. -Intellectual Imperialist! the would-be waitress shouted, as she poured hot coffee onto Vico's lap, driving him to use language ill-suited to a Professor of Renaissance Art. The rest of the staff came over, waiters, busboys, cashiers, cooks, even the manager. They were all in on it. Other customers were enlisted in their unholy crusade for relativism. Being the Praetorian Guard, we sprung into action. Utilising cutlery, serving trays, syllogistic reasoning, ice-cubes, subterfuge, straw-conveyed spitballs, gainsaying and a number of ageist remarks, we repelled their attacks. Their numbers and youth were hard to combat, but our experience and unity won the battle. But that was all we would win. We fled to the hills, taking our Diderot and Goethe, our Lucretius and Thucydides with us, to bury under a rock. -If the ingrates want 'em, said Lucky Pierre, they can bloody well come up here and deeg zem up zemselves. That said, he rolled himself a twistup, looking sadly over the fallen fort, humming La Marseillaise. Back to Bovine Technicians and Indigenous Native Peoples, please! |