Thus we find "blame-America-first" post-moderns who repudiate the values of their own country while bending over backwards to find excuses for those of a violent, alien belief system who threaten their very society with extermination.

A "culture of repudiation" is one that eschews victory, right reason, and judgment while at the same time demanding abstract "natural rights" and equality without accepting any corresponding civic duty. Such a culture is already, in a sense, defeated. Each generation has its Cassandras who cry out to us in warning, but in every generation there are those who prefer the self-serving lie to the difficult truth. The fate of cultures and civilizations depends on whether the majority chooses to follow the moral and heroic Hector or the amoral and feckless Paris. It is incumbent on each generation to reject the "culture of repudiation" and renew the culture of victory, for as Churchill rightly said, "Without victory there is no survival."

NOTES:

1. Consistency as a Capitalist Trick: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment¹

back to Contents

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Mark Wegierski is a Canadian journalist (working out of Toronto) who has frequently contributed to Praesidium reviews of books on political subjects and thoughtful essays about the crisis of human freedom in a technopoly.

The Trap. By Sir James Goldsmith. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. Pp. 207 hardcover. ISBN . US $20.

One might well speculate upon what are some of the characteristics that the very wealthiest persons on the planet today have in common. One often reads descriptions in the media of incredibly crotchety, cheap, and competely unprofound old men. In this extremely small field of billionaires (in US dollars), Sir James (Jimmy) Goldsmith (1933-1997) was certainly one of the most reflective, intelligent, and decent-minded. In a hostile but informative article on the newly emerging communitarian tendency in The Economist (December 24th 1994-January 6th 1995, 33-36), "The Politics of Restoration", Goldsmith was described as a "plutopundit, Euro-politician", and identified as a leading communitarian. What is particularly noteworthy is that Sir James did not try to brazenly buy public favour, but rather presented his arguments in a way which asked for informed and thoughtful consent. He withdrew from active business activity as of 1990 in order to devote himself to public endeavors. He was, along with the French aristocrat Philippe de Villiers, the co-founder of a new political movement, L'Autre Europe (which campaigned in France under the banner, "Struggle for Values"), and was a Member of the European Parliament and leader of the new parliamentary group, L'Europe des Nations. In the last year of his life, he led the Referendum Party in Britain in protest

against integration with what he saw as a too-bureaucratic and anti-national Europe.

The Trap, although a highly profound work, is quite accessible to the average intelligent reader. It is, for example, printed up in a comparatively large-sized font. Although there are notes, they are rather unobtrusive endnotes which do not disrupt the flow and tempo of the text. The back cover has a photo of Sir James smiling slightly and looking relaxed in a turquoise sportshirt and white fedora—a figure it would seem impossible to hate. The reviewer believes that this look of accessiblity is quite appropriate for the expression of a philosophical outlook that stresses the importance of genuine popular sentiment. Sir James does not want to wrap his work up in a ponderous image, but hopes that as many people as possible (including the common citizens of the Western countries) can actually read it. The book did indeed become a runaway bestseller when it was originally published in France in 1993. (However, it has not, as far as the reviewer is aware, done anywhere near as well in North America.)

The book is presented in the format of a interview of Goldsmith by Yves Messarovitch, Economics Editor of Le Figaro. Many of these ideas were first publicly spoken by Goldsmith in October 1992, when he delivered a major lecture in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne University in Paris, speaking to over 2,000 people, most of whom were European graduate students—who will soon be taking their place in the European elites. What does Sir James Goldsmith actually say? The first section of the book, "Measuring or Understanding?" is a straightforward critique of looking at the world (and at the success of society) strictly in terms of the Gross National Product (or economics alone). Goldsmith points out, for example, that the very critical activity of a mother bringing up her own children is measured as worthless in terms of GNP. Although this certainly expresses a fuzzy, pro-family sentiment, some might argue that GNP is quite an accurate measure of the success of a given society. Some theorists contend that a high GNP cannot be maintained in the wake of massive family breakdown and social dysfunction. Some societies with the highest GNP growth ever measured have been manifestly socially-conservative, such as Singapore, South Korea, Spain in the later period of Franco’s rule, Japan, Taiwan, and now Mainland China. The economic performance of Chile in Pinochet’s later years has also been outstanding. So the disjunction between the upholding of more traditional family structures, which was presumably a feature of all these regimes, and strictly economic success may not be as great as Goldsmith thinks. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama has argued in his most recent book (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity [New York: Free Press, 1995]) that some kind of minimum of social conservatism is necessary for continuing economic growth. On the other hand, the idea of the corrosive effects of excessive wealth is a truism of traditionalism, as well as of some strains of social democratic thinking, which are today partially converging in the so-called communitarian tendency. The America of Clinton’s presidency, which certainly did not lack a plethora of negative social and family trends, nevertheless managed to deliver a strong economic performance, which might indeed confirm that GNP cannot be the sole measure of a society’s success.

The second section, "The New Utopia: GATT and Global Free Trade", is a powerful attack on these two latter-day liberal/capitalist dogmas. Goldsmith states pointedly, "... forty-seven Vietnamese or forty-seven Filipinos can be employed for the cost of one person in a developed country such as France" (26). The adoption of global free trade, Goldsmith argues, would therefore be utterly disastrous for the middle- and working-classes of the West, as the transnational corporations would simply move their production operations offshore. But the poor of the less-developed world would not benefit much, either: "one of the characteristics of developing countries is that a small handful of people controls the overwhelming majority of the nation’s resources. It is these people who own most of their nation’s industrial, commercial and financial enterprises and who assemble the cheap labour which is used to manufacture products for the developed world. Thus, it is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations" (37). The GATT's effect on agriculture in the Third World will be even more disastrous, according to Goldsmith: "It is estimated that there are still 3.1 billion people in the world who live from the land. If GATT manages to impose worldwide the sort of productivity achieved by the intensive agriculture of nations such as Australia, then it is easy to calculate that about 2 billion of these people will become redundant. Some of these GATT refugees will move to urban slums. But a large number of them will be forced into mass migration. Today, as we discuss these issues, there is great concern about the 2 million refugees who have been forced to flee the tragic events in Rwanda. GATT, if it ‘succeeds’, will create mass migrations of refugees on a scale a thousand times greater. We will have tragically destabilized the world’s population" (39)

The alternative Goldsmith proposes is regional free trade blocs between countries that are roughly equivalent in development. He also endorses a variant of the free movement of capital (but not of products), e.g. that Japanese firms that want to sell products to Europe would be required to establish their businesses in Europe, thus benefiting European workers. However, he also warns about the dangers of countries having excessive foreign debt-obligations, citing The Economist and a Washington Post editorial: "Now the American economy has begun to pay out more in earnings on foreign investments at home, and on the country’s huge accumulation of foreign debt, than it is earning on American investments abroad. It’s the cost of running those big trade deficits year after year. They are being financed by foreign capital, and like any debtor country, the United States has to pay for the use of the money…. Note that the American economy is now borrowing abroad to pay interest on its earlier foreign borrowings. That is no healthier for a country than it is for a business or a household. And how long can it go on? As long as foreigners are willing to lend. If and when their willingness diminishes, you will see it in higher interest rates. Should that happen, Americans would, as the economists say, have to adjust. That, as the Latin American debtor countries can testify, means a lower standard of living. The longer the foreign deficits pile up, the harder that adjustment will be" (48-49).

Goldsmith’s positions on global free trade could easily be subjected to criticism. Some might argue that we are already effectively living in an interlocked world of global trade and exchange. The "conventional development" schools argue that the development of the Third World can only occur through its assumption of the labour-intensive industries that are simply economically impossible to maintain in the West. The argument is basically that a rising tide raises all boats. Even if narrow native elites will control much of wealth, at some point, the society in general will become more affluent, and eventually more and more persons in those societies will benefit. The idea of less-developed countries—who have precious little to exchange between each other—forming regional trade blocs, to the exclusion of trade with other parts of the world, could be criticized as unviable. One also wonders if the predicted mass planetary migration will be caused by the GATT, or simply by the burgeoning overpopulation of many less-developed countries. Some might argue that it is precisely by increasing the over-all prosperity in Third World countries that such cataclysmic mass-migrations can be avoided.

One suspects that Goldsmith, in making his arguments, was seeking a more tactful phrasing of his desire to create a kind of protectionist Fortress Europe or Fortress North America or (now) Fortress East Asia, against LDC encroachments. While the reviewer sees these as legitimate positions to take, it is difficult to pretend (as Goldsmith does) that they will also be helpful to the vast masses of the lesser-developed countries of the Third World. The fastest route to rising prosperity in Third World countries appears to be their assumption of labour-intensive industries from more developed countries. This has certainly been the experience in Eastern Asia, where industries requiring cheap labour have progressively shifted from Japan to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, and thence to Mainland China, Malaysia and Indonesia. Now the shift is reaching into Vietnam and Bangladesh, all the while improving the living standards in those countries. Unfortunately, some less-developed countries, notably in sub-Saharan Africa, seem to have greater difficulties than others.

In section 3, "Nations, Artificial States and Populated Spaces", Goldsmith discusses the worldwide issue of nationalism. He restates the often-made point that the nineteenth-century European partition of Africa along arbitrary geopolitical lines, unreflective of ethnic realities, has resulted in incredible post-colonial dislocations. Goldsmith defines a nation as "a land whose citizens, in their overwhelming majority, share a common culture, sense of identity, heritage and traditional roots" (55). He thus defines the issue more in terms of culture than ethnicity, but his definition of "nation" is probably still far too robust for many Left-liberals. Asked whether a nation can accept immigration, Goldsmith boldly answers that

nations need new blood and new ideas. But they can only absorb a limited amount at a time. They cannot allow themselves to be overwhelmed by immigration: otherwise they will lose their identity and cease to be nations. Newcomers who are welcomed into a nation should want to honour and respect the customs of their new home. They must not step on shore or over the border and reject the national culture. If they do, the inevitable results are hostility, intolerance and conflict. (59)

These views, though apparently moderate and reasonable, will doubtless be unpopular among the many professional multiculturalists in both the Western European and North American political, social, and cultural elites. Honouring and respecting the customs of the host-nation is in fact furthest from the minds of many newly-arriving immigrants today, and of their multiculturalist mentors. In fact, it is the host-nation that is required to adapt itself to the customs of the newcomers. Thus, Goldsmith is tactfully expressing here what must be seen in the current-day context as a desire for near-zero immigration, and a curtailment of aggressive multiculturalism, in all Western societies.

He does, however, perspicaciously turn the argument of "diversity" against Western liberals, in terms of arguing for the preservation and enhancement of the rooted ways of life of non-Western societies:

The West cannot understand a democratic rejection of its ideas. For the West such a rejection is a sign of either dementia or evil…. The West believes that its destiny is to guide or coerce diverse human cultures into a single global civilization. It cannot tolerate the cooexistence in the world of different cultures…. This acute form of cultural imperialism is reinforced by international business, which considers that it would benefit from the destruction of social diversity and its replacement by a global monoculture hungry for western-type products. (61-62)

This is a straightforward argument for the cherishing of all rooted particularities, amongst which, of course, the nations of Europe, as traditionally conceived, are also implicitly numbered. "Multiculturalism" (many cultures) at the international level is seen as natural; aggressive multiculturalism within a given national society is seen as an aberration.

Goldsmith expresses profound scepticism about latter-day America. First, he discusses James Madison’s surprisingly prophetic views of black-white relations. Madison had understood that such relations would invariably be very difficult. The attempted solution of re-migration to Africa (suggested by Madison) turned out be unrealistic. (The establishment of Liberia, Goldsmith points out, also coincidentally resulted in the displacement of the native population by a tiny immigrant elite, which although itself black, behaved in a colonial fashion.) The central problem was not only the physical abuse of slavery, but also the fact that blacks had been robbed of their preexistent cultural identities and histories—a point which Malcolm X himself made in the adoption of his famous name. At the same time, Goldsmith sees it as doubtful that African-Americans will ever want to identify with mainstream America, given their tortured experience. However, he also sees that recent Hispanic and Asian immigration has only exacerbated such problems. Goldsmith honestly

identifies 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments were passed, as a critical turning point. "They abolished the policy which, previously, had organized immigration in a manner that reflected the pattern of cultural origin already established in America" (64). The new immigration wave hit the country just as new civil rights initiatives were being enacted, as black militancy was on the rise, and as welfare-exacerbated social pathologies were beginning to devour the community. The fact that newly arriving non-European immigrants can now benefit from the affirmative action once designed to help exclusively African-Americans is certainly problematic. Goldsmith points to a Time magazine story that Americans of European descent will be in a minority shortly after 2020, and comments, "it will be impossible to avoid social torment. The destabilization and in some cases social breakdown of the cities, the multi-ethnic, multi-tongued population, the rapid geographic mobility which has resulted in uprooted nuclear or broken families, have all contributed to widespread disorientation" (66)

This is again a tactful call for near-zero immigration into America. The two main contrasting responses to this crisis are separatism—a search for historic routes outside America—and homogenization:

[Some] have sought to eliminate diversity and to build a homogenized society by denying the existence of cultural, ethnic and even gender differences. Homogenization has brought into question the differences between men and women…. Replacing the natural complementarity of men and women by competition between them will change society—particularly in a culture in which it is fashionable to emphasize the individual. Modern individualism regards all social structures and obligations, even those created by the family, as impediments to self-realization, and therefore as forms of oppression…. These social phenomena, homogenization of the genders and modern individualism, will further threaten the stability of the

Family. (67)

This passage is almost breathtaking in its social traditionalism, although somewhat softened by its anti-individualist, communitarian language. It is rather clear that Goldsmith believes in the traditional family and gender roles, but it would be inaccurate to think that certain strands of social democracy do not find that kind of stance relatively acceptable.

Turning to Europe, Goldsmith calls for a decentralization of the European Union structures and a greater emphasis on the nations and natural regions of Europe, as opposed to the centralized bureaucracy in Brussels. He is particularly against the single-currency model. This is entirely in accord with his stance in favour of rooted particularity, though some might wonder if he is more of a nationalist or a regionalist, if they see these tendencies as in some ways contradictory.

In section 4, "Rethinking the Welfare State", Goldsmith embraces the principle of "subsidiarity".

It should mean leaving to the family everything that can be done at family level; leaving to local, social or religious communities everything that can be done at the local level; leaving to the region everything that can be done regionally; and only putting into the hands of the state bureaucracy those responsibilities which cannot be decentralized…. The idea that society consists of a multitude of individuals is wrong. In reality a robust society consists of families and local communities. These are the true building blocks…. (89-90)

This positive-sounding communitarianism may have a sharper exclusivist edge than Goldsmith would be willing to admit. It is also fairly open-ended as to what functions can actually be transferred to families and local associations. While Goldsmith’s intent appears to be maximum devolution, state bureaucrats

would doubtless find arguments that hardly anything could, in practice, be decentralized, for fear of "abuses" of one sort or another, and could also contrive any number of legal and fiscal mechanisms for circumventing local authority. He goes on to make a number of proposals that would put his vision into practice—e.g., for education vouchers—some of which sound a little too rosy and unrealistic (presumably to display his "moderation").

Section 5, "Modern Agriculture and the Destruction of Society", is a relatively brief yet extremely cogent indictment of agribusiness. Goldsmith offers us a series of horrific images from the intensive farming industry. "In chicken, it has been demonstrated that since the end of the last century the carcass fat content has risen by nearly 1,000 per cent" (108). Even leaving aside the profound social dislocations engendered by agribusiness, industrialized food production has made many food products increasingly unhealthy for human consumption (meat is filled with increasing levels of saturated fat and artificial chemicals: fruits, vegetables, and grains are full of artificial chemicals and/or grossly over-processed). The same products, furthermore, are more prone to disease or blight (because of the lack of genetic diversity) and to new plagues of the worst possible type, which could easily be passed on to humans. (Fearsome new diseases such as "Mad Cow Disease" arise especially because of the common practice of feeding industrially produced animals on ground-up remains of their own species.) Goldsmith especially inveighs against biotechnology, though he perhaps even understates the horror of such developments as "transgenic pigs": i.e., pigs which are bio-engineered to be genetically similar to humans. (The "humanitarian" rationale for such developments is for organ transplants for humans.) The fact that genes of mice have been spliced into carrots, or that there are genetically engineered mice that have human-like blood coursing through their little bodies, is, to some persons, an abomination. There were also reports in the media recently about the creation in a Basel, Switzerland, laboratory of flies with fly eyes in fourteen places of their bodies where they never naturally occur. Finally, one reads about the "robo-roaches" and the cloning of a sheep. Goldsmith also rightly points out the dangers of proprietary ownership of entire, newly created life-forms.

In this section, Goldsmith has combined a defence of the traditional life in the countryside (especially as represented by Europe’s peasant cultures) with the seemingly cutting-edge insights of ecology, holistic medicine and nutrition, etc. Goldsmith is not the first to notice that peasant life often intuitively and viscerally embraces ecological precepts that city-dwellers and urban ecological theorists can only understand and practice with great intellectual and personal effort. The arguments about the unhealthiness of excessively processed food seem incontrovertible, but some might argue that there is perhaps no real alternative to agribusiness except mass-starvation, or at least a far, far skimpier diet for the vast majority of persons. Maybe it would be a healthier diet, but many persons would consider the satisfaction of their craving for large amounts of meat, milk, sugar, etc., as their democratic right. Some have also argued, for example, that the real threat of "Mad Cow Disease" is enormously overplayed in the media. As for biotechnology, a common argument is that all these trends are in fact greatly improving human life.

Section 6, "Nuclear Energy: The Big Lie", is an excoriation of the nuclear industry, ferociously attacking "the nucleocrats". What particularly frightens Goldsmith is that there has not yet been one

commercial nuclear plant that has been completely decommissioned—a process which Goldsmith believes will cost billions of dollars per facility (if it can even actually be done!) and which should be factored into the calculations of the actual cost of nuclear energy. He also points out that there are now about a 1,000 tonnes of plutonium in the world which simply did not exist forty-five years ago. Goldsmith’s views in this matter contrast sharply with those of James Lovelock, a very hard-headed ecologist, who thinks that deriving electric power from coal or oil might not be any better for the ecology than from nuclear sources. Indeed, Lovelock calls for a re-examination of "the nuclear taboo" common among Greens. (See James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995], 161-166.) The reviewer also believes that Goldsmith allows his enthusiasm to represent an "ultralight hybrid-electric supercar", over-optimistically, as something immediately possible. Unfortunately, even if a relatively functional electric car were possible, there would be incredible resistance to it because of the North American obsession with powerfully motored cars. Many North American males would equate driving an electric car with castration!

Again, the ecological argument against nuclear energy and massive petrochem consumption seems incontrovertible. What might surprise Goldsmith is that in the case of some countries, such as France, the massive nuclear industry is a mark of national pride; while the gas-guzzling car, and the concomitant belief in "the freedom of the road", is a virtual symbol of self-reliant American independence from "socialist" mass-transit and meddlesome government. Some might argue that Goldsmith is perhaps a little too sanguine about the environmental lobby-groups, who themselves are also interested power-seekers.

Section 7, "Why?" is the most theoretically dense part of the book. Goldsmith points to the looming apocalypse before us and seeks to explain its intellectual sources. Among these, according to Goldsmith, are the Judeo-Christian tradition (which called on man "to subdue the earth", placing him apart from nature and all the other animals), Enlightenment philosophy (which deified science and reason), and Marxism-Leninism (which Goldsmith simply sees as the Enlightenment philosophy in a particularly virulent form). "The principal beliefs of the Enlightenment were that human reason, freed from the impediments of tradition and prejudice, can and should emancipate man from the constraints of religion, history and the natural world" (170). Goldsmith reacts against the scientism, out-of-control

technological development, anthropocentrism, and universalism of the Enlightenment complex. He would perhaps like to reinterpret the Judeo-Christian outlook, rather than throw it out entirely:

One of the most promising strands of Judeo-Christian thought was that of Saint Francis of Assisi, who considered all nature, not merely man, as the mirror of God and called all creatures his "brothers" and "sisters". In the Canticle of the Creatures he speaks of "brother" sun, wind and fire; "sister" moon and water; and "mother" earth. But his views were quickly forgotten, even by the Franciscan movement itself, because at the time the Church was struggling to suppress the indigenous European religions which believed in man’s duty to revere nature." (181)

Various non-Western religious traditions are also countervalent to Western anthropocentrism. Goldsmith cites, for example, the Buddhist story where a prince, an earlier incarnation of the Buddha, during a severe drought, sacrifices himself as a meal to save the life of a magnificent tigress and her cubs. Goldsmith does admit the story appears incredible to most Western persons (though perhaps less so today, when many persons lean toward radical ecology).

Goldsmith’s attempt to search out the root cause of the current world-crisis in the history of ideas is highly commendable in its ambition. His outlook is strongly naturalist, and some would characterize it as a moderate neopaganism. It does not have, of course, the fanatical, murderous, and very artificial/contrived nature of Nazi neopaganism, but rather is highly restrained, reflective, and respectful of all rooted particularities. Goldsmith essentially interprets Christianity as a rival universalism to that of liberalism or Marxism, which would at best poorly serve as the basis for the reconstruction of a saner, greener, less-hurried world. Many Western traditionalists would find his semi-rejection of Christianity (and of the unique nature of the human being) troubling. Some would argue that traditional Christendom was virtually the tribal religion of Europe. And there was, until very recently, such a multiplicity of positions both Christian and traditionalist (expressed, for example, in the ideas of G. K. Chesterton, Charles Péguy, and many, many others) that this attack on Christianity might be seen as too outré for a professed traditionalist.

However, Goldsmith's "neopaganism" might seem more scientifically viable, as it has a degree of convergence with scientific ecology, resource-management and conservation ideas, as well as with "realist", modern theories for explaining the roles of ethnicity, family, and group-identities in a scientific manner, without reference to revealed religion—as, for example, in the thought of Konrad Lorenz.. Political theorist John Gray (formerly at Oxford, now at LSE), a close associate of Goldsmith’s, has expressed hopes for a convergence of paleo-conservatism, genuine social democracy, and Green ideas, in his "Agenda for Green Conservatism" essay (124-177) in Beyond the New Right (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). In America, this tendency is probably most typically represented by the so-called "right-wing Greens" grouping around the Michigan-based journal, The Social Contract. Goldsmith’s ideas also have a discernible congruity with those of the Nouvelle École phenomenon in Continental Europe, and his brother Édouard Goldsmith is himself a leading ecological theorist.

Sir James Goldsmith’s political activities—which have had the greatest success in France—were often seen as an attempt to promote a more moderate, more respectable version of Le Pen’s nationalist program. Some might indeed wonder about whether Goldsmith’s political activities did not objectively serve the French political establishment, as they were essentially drawing votes away from the more radical Le Pen. It would seem, however, that Goldsmith’s intellectual acuity significantly outweighed that of Le Pen; while Le Pen’s political skills gave him a more visceral appeal to the French than that made by Goldsmith’s party. In the British elections of May 1, 1997, any support given to Goldsmith only weakened the Tories, and the Referendum Party failed to win even a single seat. However, the newly elected Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair had endorsed the concept of a referendum on the various stages of Britain’s fuller integration into the European structures, so Goldsmith may have won a victory of sorts.

On the high-theoretical plane, Sir James Goldsmith endeavors to move from the stewardship model of nature (which can fairly easily be read into Judeo-Christian tradition) to a wholly naturalistic vision, ending with the letter attributed to the American Indian Chief Seattle. This is a call for re-integrating the human and the natural. As far as Goldsmith is concerned, the final worldwide fight for Nature (for humankind to live attuned to her cycles, rhythms and imperatives) and for history (for the sense of genuine community and identity) is just beginning.

It should be finally noted that the concluding part of Goldsmith’s work in the original French edition has actually been excised from the American, English-language edition. Goldsmith apparently made some tough recommendations on immigration and other controversial areas in this section which the American editors saw fit to remove. (Labour MP Denis MacShane pointed out some of the discrepancies between the British, English-language edition and the French edition in The Guardian, July 4, 1996, as a way of attacking Goldsmith’s ideas.) What probably terrified the American editors was that Goldsmith had made more explicit the neo-traditionalist cutting-edge of his ideas. The question of whether there can be any society based on the communitarian sense of belonging (i.e., on what certain theorists would call "the Erotic") without some form of cultural, religious, or ethnic exclusion is a critical question which many so-called soft communitarians are afraid to discuss openly. If the "politics of meaning"—i.e., of something, ideally speaking, like a caring, sharing welfare-state—can only be effectively exercised in a society in which citizens have something manifestly in common—at least a minimum of civilized cultural norms, and perhaps of ethnic kindredness as well (implying today, among other things, near-zero immigration)—then the convergence between traditionalism and communitarianism can be seen as near-total. To attempt to build community on the basis of juridicalism, infinitely extended rights-doctrines, and aggressive multiculturalism, can only be seen as a chimerical exercise.

More precise definitions of community, more descriptions of the process of interaction of different types of community-identities in the society and the self, and forthright arguments for a rank-ordering of different types of communities (e.g., from the rooted nation approximating the Gemeinschaft to the hobby-group characterized by a rapport ludique) would make clearer the aims and goals of what might be termed hard communitarianism. Goldsmith is edging towards this.

Margaret Turnbull (if we may reproduce her delightful self-description) is a teacher by background—she has now taught every age from 5 to adult—who imprudently took herself back to university in midlife. She has found that the University Medal and a doctorate (from the University of Sydney [Australia]) have made her less employable than before, but does not regret the journey. Her thesis was irrelevant in triplicate, being literary, seventeenth-century, and theological. She has three bright and delightful children who are accepting of her non-provision of status symbols. She is now working on articles for learned journals, and occasionally as a casual tutor.

In this timely book Don Watson attacks the "witless and unfathomable dreck" (47) that passes for public communication. Public language of all types, from political rhetoric to institutional communications to corporate training ("achieve a user centric portal framework"), is criticized by analysis and by contrast. Watson’s own writing is lucid, humorous, and pungent, exemplifying all that today’s public language is not. Occasionally he quietly uses the language he despises in order to demolish it: "Relative to the potential of language, the new form approximates a parrot’s usage" (12). Wordsworth may be right that "we murder to dissect," but while Watson does plenty of dissecting, it is the speakers of "death sentences", the purveyors of "value-added", who are murdering the language.

His message is accessible, and appropriate, wherever English is spoken. The Australian context, even the short chapter on Australia’s "stubborn refusal to be articulate" (70), does not make it parochial. There are a few allusions which might be missed by non-Australian readers, such as the much-satirised Prime Ministerial "be alert but not alarmed," but on the whole, this book can be enjoyably useful anywhere.

This work is not an ivory-tower tut-tutting about the degradation of the English language, or a theoretical discussion of changes in "usage". Don Watson is mourning an illness, if not quite a death, which has a moral cause. "‘Non core scenario’, ‘systems implementations’, ‘enhanced prices oversight’—who writes this muck?" Watson’s implicit message is that we do, if not in fact, then by sitting on our hands while the language of management or of political manipulation is allowed to corrupt the writing and speaking of academia, government, the media, and even the churches. A corrupt language may imply corrupt systems. A language breaks down when a nation’s understanding of what constitutes the true dignity of its people breaks down. To my delight, Watson has seen the prophetic greatness of Orwell’s 1947 essay "Politics and the English Language": "The fight against bad language is not frivolous.… [Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" (15).

The new English is growing, "and yet… it is depleting. It struggles to express the human. Buzz words abound in it. Platitudes iron it flat. The language is hostile to communion.… It stifles reason, imagination, and the promise of truth" (12). It is the language of fog, of no agency, and sometimes of lies. Someone will close a bank branch, a school, a hospital, a library, a rural railway line, or raise fees, and will call it a "key strategic initiative", taken because "we" must "validate logical models for assigning accountabilities". It is the language of bread and circuses thrown to the deceived. Rhetoric has always had its dark side; the last hundred years have produced "grotesque euphemisms for outrageous death and mutilation… planted in perfectly constructed sentences" (88). But eloquence, if it does not speak truth, at least "gives truth a chance". Meaningless words do not allow argument.

Even the language of management is not morally neutral. Corporations "don’t have words like ‘generous’, ‘charitable’, ‘kind’, and ‘share’.… They would no more use words like these than they would use a word like ‘greed’.… They come up with terms that are all at once unctuous and pompous, impenetrable and threatening.… Meeting this kind of vaporing is like meeting… a psycho who sits on the end of your bed and says he is ‘committed’ to you and your family and your community and your country and to the whole world, but you wonder if he might soon go out and kill someone—or you, should you fall asleep" (49). Politicians have adopted this way of speaking. "This rose-coloured boasting", Watson says of a recent speech by the Prime Minister, "smells of some nightmare Ministry of Information" (103).

"Achieving implementation success", or "structural envisioning", that is, to "select a model to explore/develop process/output combination [and] develop notional hooks for key processes and outputs" (126), sounds like a good idea, if only we knew what it meant. Perhaps we like this stuff. Perhaps we no longer want the depth of meaning in the simple elegance of "we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." Watson uses the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, classical orations, and more recent words of inspiration, to make our present maltreatment of language inexcusable. "These enhanced systems are designed to deliver on that commitment" (38) sits close to: "As the sun sprang up, leaving the brilliant waters in its wake, climbing the bronze sky…" (41). It may be unfair to compare Telstra with Homer. But perhaps the chiaroscuro is necessary, to shock us into asking which set of words more "enhances" human happiness. Of course there is a difference of purpose and "genre", that dubious and politically correct word newly beloved of schoolteachers in Australia (my observation, not Watson’s). But the true purpose of the recent parrot-talk may be not "commitment", but obfuscation. "Commitment", incidentally, provokes one of his moral analyses: "why don’t they say, we will do the right thing… ‘I am committed to the future of Africa’: why don’t I just look in the general direction of Nairobi and wave? It would mean as much" (51). More amusingly, we now have football coaches whose teams are "committed" to the ball.

Watson possesses the sure-footedness, the impeccable balance, of the accomplished satirist. He denies that his interest in language is a "passion" or ("except in one or two points") an obsession. Yet he is serious enough to say that "every day we vandalise the language, which is the foundation… of the culture, if not its greatest glory," and that while there are severe penalties for damage to monuments or to the environment, there are none for damage to the language (8). He never sourly carps, but on the other hand, he never simply entertains. "All elegance and gravity has gone from public language, and all its light-footed potential to intrigue, delight and stimulate our hearts and minds.… This language is not capable of serious deliberation. It could no more carry a complex argument than it could describe the sound of a nightingale.… Great lumps of the new language are unrelated to anything ever spoken. It’s a kind of self-sealing grout that keeps its speakers—and meaning—unconnected and unexposed to ordinary thought and feeling… [but it has] ‘the vision to enable customers to transact low face value commoditised financial market instruments electronically and seamlessly’" (28-30).

It’s hard to find anything negative to say about this book. There is not a boring page. There is diagnosis, but it is subtle. My only criticism is small, and it is that at times the language is described as an agent in itself. For example, Watson gives language some of the blame for politicians’ "loss of moral judgment" (54), suggesting that the terms of big business are all they know; but many readers will suspect that language is only a secondary cause, or even a result.

But Watson more often puts the blame where it should be, on the humans who produce the language. He agrees with Primo Levi: people who speak like this cannot be happy (57). Reaching for happiness in the wrong place gives us the language of "you deserve it—now," rather than of gratitude, selfless kindness or generosity. "The universal narcissicism that is an inevitable by-product of a market-driven society and necessary to keep it running" (125) must infect the language with solipsism. A brochure from a bank, information from a public institution, a political speech, will refer constantly to the gratification of desire; action is justified "in terms of" my, or your, wish for power. At the same time these people pretend they are not appealing to such base motives. This conflict results in non-language like "enhancements of product, service and management nodes in a framework based upon pragmatic real world systems implementations", because the word "greed" would sell nothing and get no votes. The language of honour, of duty, of other-centredness is not used any more, because "people living in affluent free market economies have no need or desire for visionary or charismatic leaders, or for… ennobling, inspiring, binding rhetoric.… Who will respect power when everyone’s ‘empowered’? [In a world in which a speech can be turned off with the flick of a remote control] which ambitious leader is going to pass up style for substance, a cliché for a complex sentence, an image for an argument?" (136).

The book ends (apart from an amusing "Glossary" with "Exercises") with Czeslaw Milosz’s description of everyone’s "unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form". Watson appeals to writers and readers to "take some responsibility for the language" (179), just as he began by saying "we should resist" the language vandals (8). Reading this book provides weapons to do so.

On the trail from the

canyon rim down to the crash

and spray of river,

 

daughter scrambles two

switchbacks ahead, leaping rocks

at speed that Mother—

 

were she here to watch—

would find cardiac arrest.

Father calls, but his

 

"Careful!" and "Slow down!"

wander into canyon zags

and elbows, sandwiched

 

between rim road wheel

whines and water arguing

tango or conga.

 

Canyon air currents

braid themselves broad enough

to lure human ears

 

to seeming silence

compressed between two streams

of mechanic speech.

 

The older boot takes

gravel more soberly than

young sandals anxious

 

to wade shallows, —froth

at the ankles, crawling shins—

till the skin shakes blue.

 

The mid-life hand finds

ledges bevelled for slow grasp;

the teen fist skips rocks,

 

overdone wafers,

across blue-green turbulence—

all for action’s sake.

 

Can the mixed quartzite

flutter all the way to shore

opposite? Let fly!

 

Would the next grey shale

outcrop serve diving board if

river slowed to lake?

 

She sings to herself

in the river noise. He sees

the arms, the mouth move,

 

sees river throating

itself channel, grain by ton,

by million-acre-

 

feet-per-minute: stone

versus flow: unlikenesses

opposed at her toes;

 

sand to stay, and sand

to browse downstream; soil parted

by stones, for sage roots….

 

From a dry ledge just

above the canyon floor, he

waves. She sees his mouth

 

moving. He sees hers

move, too, before she turns to

wade her next shallows.

 

He wonders who walked

these ledges last century,

last millennium.

 

He wonders what she

sings among the river’s ten

thousand contraltos.

 

He waits with boots on.

He watches his child turn stones.

He watches sunlight

 

stalk shadows while both

crawl canyon strata down steps

too thin for sparrows

or cliff swallows, where river,

stone, child wear one another.

 

the length of the polyester pile in the carpet

        a new unifying theory

the reflection of the pedestrians passing the window

        a new new atomizing theory

the lava flaring steam out of salt water

        a recent relativizing theory

the cathedral arch breaking

        a recycled personalizing theory

the cat sprawled asleep in the heat

        a reconstructed rationalizing theory

the street guy boozing through war stories

        an old romanticizing theory

the gardenias draping the air in the funeral parlor

        a new old structuralist theory

neutrinos chasing quarks through subatomic particle physics

        an amended phenomenological theory

the lipstick smudge on the crumpled napkin

        a better redacted mythological theory

the dog on the back porch whimpering in the drizzle

        an energized ethnicist/genderist theory

the grey-haired woman reading the paperback on the bus

        a refined personalist/symbolist theory

O no, no, that’s all wrong—it’s not the truth of anything, really,

               But now if you really want to know the way a word… well…

the art of it is….

While the twenties-something father

     bucks the stroller to negotiate the curb,

and the nursing mother pulls the canvas sling

     so as not to pinch or ride up,

and the big sister calls the toddlers to stay within reach

     and not lean so far into the alligator’s moat,

tourist photographers breathe relief in the shade,

     yet worry the resting gorilla is too dark for details to show

in the blessing they share from the high canopy trees,

     and the panther sleeps too far back in its tall grass

to offer more than a dim mound in the fronds

     despite the fastest film speed.

The elephant pads for more wet straw at the edge of his pool,

     trunk-pinching a few stalks to swipe in mud.

Heat-weary, it slogs its home-made sun-block onto its back,

     then dangles the trunk-tip into the water again,

drawing up a tepid liter

     to flush back into its throat.

Mothers cluster with their pre-schoolers

     at the flamingo pond, Spanish and Mandarin

and Tagalog and Bengali admirations

     pluming with extended arms toward the vivid pinks

and oranges that attract so many camera lenses

     among the blockade of hats and braids and shoulder bags.

An amateur photographer puzzles the exposures

     Of peach tones and sheer whites in full sunlight.

A grandmother calls a granddaughter

     out of the field of view while the photographer

points the lens time and again at the peach-streaked birds

     dipping curved beaks into the pool,

and, watching the thin, scaled legs bending

          back instead of forward for each step—

     so unlike their own—

          as the flamingoes peck for pond life,

     the seminarian and the theologian

forage for parables.

back to Contents

************************************

As befitted her faintly more advanced years and clearly more exalted social status (clearly because… because, though you can’t take it with you, everyone clearly knew that she had had more money—everyone who was anyone, even in this place: even in the afterlife, people were not leveled like housetops under a high wind, as she had known they would not be [for she had known that the afterlife simply must be orderly—what, otherwise, could be its point?])… but as clearly, thoroughly befitted her credentials, Sugar Smack was installed in the Office of the President. She closed her door at first, though she need hardly have done so. The hustle and bustle of Registration and Admission was almost inaudible up here, at the far end of the second story. Yet it was important, she felt, that the title on her door be visible to all who passed. The right kind of person, naturally, would know without priming… but even the wrong kind of person must know. Everyone must know. She was, after all, a charitable soul. It would not very much harm the order of things if she chose to prime the wrong kind of person. After all, wrongs could be made right. Souls could be redeemed. That was what the Grand Order was all about. And she was here to serve that order: though President, she did not view herself as the end of all things. She was, after all, a humble soul.

With these thoughts (and others less clear—perhaps too unclear to be called thoughts, but pleasantly similar in their buzz and hum to the clearer ones, like bees and birdsong on a warm spring day), Sugar Smack settled herself in behind her bare steel desk and gazed out a great window upon what might have been a rising sun, or the center of the Milky Way. She decided that, perhaps, it was a Golden Arch or Throne. (She knew gold when she saw it.) "They must knock, too," she smiled to herself—and then looked around uncomfortably as she realized that someone had spoken. But no, it was just herself. And it had been a good comment, too—a commendable comment. A comment in defense of order. It was befitting of the President’s rank that those who wished to see her should knock. After all, she was God’s chosen lieutenant here on… here in this marvelous building.

At a right angle to the President’s Office—a sharp left turn along the steel catwalk, emphasized by the steel guard rail—the Office of the Vice-President balanced its door at an exact 45° from the steel frame. Baby Ruth had determined that the Vice-President must appear neither too remote nor too accessible. The door-ajar invited entrance yet required a respectful tap. Having satisfied herself of the angle’s perfection, Baby Ruth turned her concentration to the angle of the steel desk (which her hefty shape allowed her to winch about with mere nudges of the hip: a nagging disappointment, to be sure, to find that her newly spiritual state had not righted the wrongs done to her at birth by Mother Nature… that, perhaps, would come later). The desk of a Vice-President, she decided, must lie just so, neither too confrontational nor too informal. It wouldn’t do to have someone walk in (someone needing a command decision to settle urgent issues) upon the vice-presidential elbow. She therefore nudged the desk into a perfect (she decided) 45° angle with the front wall, so that the lines of both desk and door ran parallel. That way the entrant would have a clear view of the glorious golden landscape beyond the vice-presidential window—but would also, and immediately, be struck by the Vice-President’s profile against the golden shimmer, her head perhaps bent over an urgent document or lifted, perhaps, to pursue an abstract idea in thin air.

Baby Ruth eased herself into her steel chair (somewhat cold to her thick, bare thighs) and experimented with the two head postures, chin up, chin down. She compressed her golden curls gingerly, encouraging them to spring back out so that the regal glow from beyond would filter through them in a kind of halo. Those curls were the real thing (as to their color). She was amazed that the President’s false hue had been allowed to make the transit without correction. Or perhaps all hair was gilded when the soul was exalted—though that would be quite unfair, inasmuch as no reapportioning of body mass (even so slight a one as she would have required) had been granted in equal charity. Yet her eyes were sky blue, quite sky blue. No fakery could rival a real heavenly blue. She thought she could feel their blueness as she gazed in abstraction at the steel ceiling.

Baby Ruth would have been appeased that no general transformation of hair colors had washed over newly arrived souls if only she had visited Little Debbie downstairs. The freshly appointed Dean of Services shone blacker at her brows than at her scalp only because the latter had been reduced (long reduced, even in life) to the depth of a mouse’s fur. Little Debbie fully occupied the doorway of her office, content to be associated with its physical position rather than to interrupt her surveillance by going inside. With her bare arms crossed under her bare breasts, she resembled a tall sumo wrestler without his loin cloth. (For there was nothing exiguous about the new Dean except the space between her eyebrows: if the need arose, she could have seized the new Vice-President and transferred her natural cushioning to a steel filing cabinet.) Despite the furrowed brow (which, indeed, was largely an optical illusion of intense capillation about the eyes), Little Debbie was satisfied, well satisfied. This was the sort of role for which God had made her (to use her favorite kind of expression): a position of some authority, but not loftily removed from the trenches. She was effective in crowds, and she knew it. As the interminable queue of nondescript males filed in one great door of the building and out the other, a single shift of her barrel-like torso to set it resting over the left haunch rather than the right—a single lift of her chin, even, without any further glower from the unadjustable brow—was sufficient to send tremors up and down the line. When her impish nose rose just enough so that her button eyes both seemed to take aim over its roundly upturned point, no man in this new world could stand his ground any better than his forerunners had done in the other.

Little Debbie dealt out these wordless, terrifying rebukes with a virtually unconscious rhythm, and seldom even in response to any particular infraction. The heart within her ample bosom was indeed aglow, and not primarily from the joy of a job well done. Her black eyes were perhaps too small behind their vast cheeks for anyone who dared study them to have noticed where they most often alighted—but the magnetic point of focus was Red Hot. An agile, lanky, freckled hive of activity, was Red Hot’s shapely frame. Promoted by Little Debbie (in violation of the initial decree) to fulfill the offices both of Registration and Admission, she would direct each arrival (with a long, lean index) to sign in, then take her stamp and impress a number upon a forehead farther up the line after it had leaned into a padded forehead-rest. (The stamp was intended to be advanced a notch after every usage, but Red Hot had not quite got the knack of this. At one point, five 52,827’s in a row exited the building.) A pleasant embonpoint, far from stealing away her waist and figure, had nicely sculpted Red Hot’s thighs and shoulders; and when she would place her left palm behind an applicant’s head and apply the stamp with her right fist, a rather spectacular nipple would often tremble under the tormented man’s nose. Such occasions as these precipitated the only really unequivocal gestures of hostility from Little Debbie, who once went so far as to rear up from the doorway and take two steps forward.

Red Hot, too, savored her employment. She could not imagine a better (in the little bit that she could imagine). She was made for activity—a thoroughly hands-on person. No stuffed shirt locked away in an office, she! The picture of herself which had always sat lovingly framed before her watery mind’s eye showed a creative, dynamic, risk-taking individual who shattered old parameters (as she called paradigms) and defined new perimeters (as she called parameters). Upon the portrait, of course, was spread frozen in perpetual winsome cuteness that girlish smile of hers which bared a little gum over her broad front teeth, sent a little wrinkle into her freckled nose, and pinched her green eyes into an especially nymphish slant. More than one male supervisor who had called her to a private conference with every intention of upbraiding her slovenly planning, her indifference to protocol, her factual blunders, her technical incompetence, her insensitivity to other views, her imperviousness to criticism, her resistance to learning, and her general—apparently invincible—immunity to every form of astuteness or finesse or tact had been quite disarmed by that smile. And since the conferences seldom took place as intended, Red Hot, though dimly aware that smiling became her, was not remotely aware of how often it had saved her bacon. She was convinced that she smiled because of her brilliant, highly creative style: never had she suspected that her style would be a quick ticket to the dumpster without her smile. Thanks to this miscalculation, she often—very often—had not smiled when she should have, but had vituperated her opposition, instead (behind the back or to the face, depending less upon discretion than upon impulse), in the bluntest terms, with the most whimsical of charges, and using a voice whose very whispers were husky and hard as brass when moved to displeasure. But for the constant intercession of Little Debbie (whom her smiles had instantly melted into one huge buttery lump at a job interview), Red Hot’s terrestrial existence would surely have ended in Queer Street.

Indeed, it was at the great national conference to which Little Debbie had whisked her away (partially to avoid leaving her to savage her enemies suicidally, partially to import to her curriculum vitae some trace of intellectual pursuit) that Red Hot and six others had been blown to smithereens by the suitcase bomb of a lonely neurotic chased from his career by Baby Ruth’s slanders. (The sad man had been much encouraged—including some quick tutelage in bomb-making—by a detective in the employ of Sugar Smack’s husband. This enterprising private dick, who came highly recommended in such cases, had undertaken months in advance to research the upcoming event’s list of conferees for evidence of stars ascending with obnoxious rapidity—since, as he put it, "they always come trailing perfect patsies behind them." No such compromising details, of course, appeared in the police report of the tragedy. The neurotic was too proud of his life’s one great success to admit that he had received coaching; and the name by which he knew his coach, in any case, was entirely apocryphal.)

There were no crises of any proportion in the great bright building perched on the sunrise or throne or mountain of bullion until Red Hot’s stamp turned over 100,000. This, she reflected, could not be quite right: to go from so many nines to a row of zeroes must surely indicate a mechanical malfunction. As she stared at the stamp and then (unable to decipher its inverted numbering) proceeded to impress her own plump forearm again and again, the forward part of the queue vanished through the exit to leave a great empty space, while the latter part was squeezed until its yet numberless members began to fidget visibly. Little Debbie was compelled to saunter from her doorway so that her glower might be known far and wide. When the two fell into close colloquy, Red Hot displaying her forearm in evidence and Little Debbie peering over the rounded shoulder until her beady eyes swam intoxicated, the restless bustle, no longer chastened, grew and grew. Baby Ruth noticed it from behind her steel desk. She lovingly plumped her golden curls once more, anticipating that the Dean’s arrival from below for urgent consultation was imminent. She thought her most abstract thoughts for a while, studying every hue of the ceiling’s aureole except in the quadrant where the door lay somewhat ajar.

As the minutes succeeded each other and no respectful subordinate tap intruded above the indefinable rustle beyond, Baby Ruth found herself in the throes of an administrative crisis. Bestowing her attention downstairs unsought was quite out of the question. Yet there was clearly some evolving tension of which she should have been apprised. There was clearly some need of a command decision, and none had been sought. The chain of authority had not functioned properly.

Baby Ruth decided (with a firm decisiveness) that the President must be informed. It was an unpleasant duty, but it was her duty.

At about that very moment, Sugar Smack had arisen from her steel chair without quite knowing why. She didn’t like to meddle in affairs which were, after all, the concern of subordinates... but the afterlife was becoming, of all things, rather boring. She had once imagined that she would never tire of the color gold (whose most glorious tincture she had borrowed for her hair—just a touch-up, really). As it dawned upon her, therefore, that this golden dawn was a prospect of somniferous monotony, she felt vaguely disillusioned: vaguely, but cruelly. Not at all the sort of thing she had expected of this place, the sort of thing due her after so many years of... of.… With a puckering of her withered lips (the very expression her husband had held in his mind as he finalized arrangements with the private dick), she presented her somewhat less-than-straight spine and sagging buttocks to the haloed window. If this office were as tedious as her tanning bed, it might as well perform the same services.

At the sound of Baby Ruth’s knock, Sugar Smack hurled herself back into her chair. She groped feverishly after just the right register of distinguished désoeuvrement—feverishly, and a bit clumsily, for she ended up saying, "Come enter!"

"Good morning, Mme. President!"

"Good morning, Mme. Vice-President!" Poor girl, thought Sugar Smack, what a toothy grin she possessed, and what a whiney voice to go with it.

"I hope I find you well."

"Quite well, thank you."

"I hope I do not intrude. I could come back, if…"

"Not at all, not at all. Come right in, do. Please have a…."

It was at this moment that Sugar Smack noticed, for the very first time, that her office contained only one chair. A strange oversight. Baby Ruth noticed it, too, in the same instant. Together, they pondered, briefly and silently, the inexplicable space beyond Sugar Smack’s desk as if they had found a fresh rhino dropping.

"Er… how is your job… how is it coming? How do you find it here with us?"

"Very… very…." Baby Ruth struggled to recover from the blow to her dignity, her toothy grin lapsing into the wan. Though she blinked and blinked, nothing would come from her mouth but more grin.

"Excellent! Excellent. And I must tell you, you are doing a capital job. Capital."

"Thank you. Thank you, Mme. President."

"Yes, capital. And if ever there is anything I can do… you know, Mme. Vice-President, it occurs to me that our new quarters are the least bit… well, no doubt they are new. No doubt there are still certain items in certain storage facilities. One would not have expected such oversights in such a place as this, but… perhaps it is to test us, Mme. Vice-President!"

"Test us, Mme. President?"

"Yes! Yes, indeed! To test our initiative, our… our fervor. Perhaps we are to show our worthiness to be here by… by arranging things that need arranging. One would have thought that we had already demonstrated our worthiness. Indeed, one was always told so before—that one would not be admitted, I mean, without having first demonstrated one’s worthiness. But… well, ours not to reason why!"

Baby Ruth’s face had distinctly brightened. Her toothy grin was now distinctly toothier. "No, Mme. President!"

"So… let’s say that you hustle along now and look into the matter. That is, have the Dean look into the matter and report back to you. Then you can report back to me."

Baby Ruth’s grin was no less merrily skeletal, but a flurry of eye-blinking revived, and her whiney voice sounded positively juvenile. "The… the matter, Mme. President?"

"Yes, of course. The… the furniture situation. And the general decoration situation, as well. One doesn’t like to criticize—especially in such a place as this!—and the golden horizons are all very nice. But honestly! Just look at the walls! Everything is quite bare. We shall have to show some initiative. To be sure, that may be a matter for a committee to address, a matter requiring a certain degree of deliberation. The chair matter should come first, as being more fundamental."

"A committee on chairs!" nodded Baby Ruth eagerly. "Yes, I could chair it… that is, unless you…"

"You misunderstand me, my dear. The chair matter should be quite direct, really. Just one chair. I don’t imagine I should need another, do you?"

"I… no, Mme. President."

"If our Dean should come calling, she would be quite comfortable standing, don’t you think?"

"Oh… oh, yes, Mme. President!" Baby Ruth was entirely captivated by this image.

"Indeed, I should imagine it would require at least two chairs to seat the Dean—and I shouldn’t imagine that the result would be very comfortable at all! What do you think?"

"No, Mme. President!"

And Baby Ruth and Sugar Smack laughed and laughed, as perhaps they had never laughed before while on earth.

"Well, goodbye now, my dear!"

"Goodbye, Mme. President!"

Baby Ruth was still giggling as she bowed her way back out the door. Then she realized, even as the golden knob began to slip through her fingers, that she had failed to declare the initial purpose of her visit. She tapped again, and eased her plump curls back through the crack.

"Yes, dear."

"Mme. President, I’m sorry to intrude again, but I almost forgot my… the reason why I…"

"You don’t need a reason to come calling, my dear. But speak on."

Baby Ruth slipped the rest of the way through the door and leaned against it with such consummate discretion that she almost pinched her ample, unprotected gluteus maximus.

"It’s about the Dean, Mme. President."

"The Dean?"

"Yes, Mme. President. There’s rather a ruckus going on downstairs, and—"

"A ruckus, did you say?"

"Yes, Mme. President. There is clearly something amiss in either the Registration or the Admission process. Perhaps both. It is quite a loud murmur. I could hear it through my door, which is opened just a crack. The Dean is clearly not handling the problem, and yet she has said not a word to me about it. I felt it my duty to inform you—"

"As well you should."

"At the very least, I believe the matter should be reviewed to ascertain if the Registration and Admission process—or processees, for they are two—may be handled more effectively, and if so, how, and if not, why not, and… and in any case, why the obvious complications which took place this morning in the processees were not reported through proper channels to the proper authority so that they could be addressed with… with full and effective authority. Because as things stand now, we are completely in the dark as to… as to why we are in the dark."

"I am in complete agreement, Mme. Vice-President. The present state of affairs is wholly unsatisfactory. And I may tell you, just between the two of us, that I was not wholly satisfied by the appointment of the new Dean. The decision was for some reason taken out of my hands, and one does not wish to complain , especially in a place like this…"

"Oh, no, Mme. President."

"But we owe it to… well. Quite simply, to him who… to he who… to the one who appointed us."

"Absolutely, Mme. President. It is our duty. Millions could suffer. If the Admission process were to derail…"

"Proceed in the matter at once, Mme. Vice-President. You have my full administrative authority behind you. I delegate you to pursue this matter wherever it may take you."

"Yes, Mme. President!"

Baby Ruth departed the presidential office in such a lather of dedication that the door banged loudly behind her. "Oh!" she squealed, and made as if to caress its afflicted structure. But her fingers merely harped thin air before recoiling to her large, now relatively dormant mouth, and she backed away in comparative silence until her buttocks bonged the catwalk’s steel rail.

Little Debbie had no inkling of Baby Ruth’s approach. The queue of would-be registrants, which had swollen into a mutinous S verging upon the amorphous, somewhat quietened at the sound of Baby Ruth’s not insubstantial mass upon the steel stairs, accompanied by her golden fleece’s descending mop. Little Debbie’s daydream, however, was immersed in chevelure of quite another cast. Her small eyes grazed and feasted upon the spiraling carrot-red locks which poured over Red Hot’s dappled shoulders, there to twain at a perfectly straight clavicle before continuing their cascade either into the freckled back’s smooth hollow or to the first firm risings of her breasts. In the Dean’s defense, as well, it must be said that her ears occupied much too great a propinquity to Red Hot’s tireless, hearty vocal chords to have distinguished a mere groan of stairs (however loud a groan) from a distance exceeding that over which she could have hurled Red Hot’s ex-boyfriend.

"This number dohickey is so stupid, I mean… who would ever design this to go this way? I noticed it right off. And if you just did the handle like that, you could get through the line twice as fast. It would be like doubling your output, almost. Or even if you did it while they registered… yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. You could put it in the headset, and they could lean forward while they signed in. You’d have to give ’em a little smack on the back of the head to make sure it took, like… boink! Ha-ha-ha! Boink! Next! Boink! Next! Hey, let’s try it! You want to try it? Why not? I’ll just put this doflunkey there, and…."

Little Debbie had not so much joined in Red Hot’s mirthful peal as allowed her puffy jaw to fall open. The tones that musically played through those bright teeth, those pink gums, those sparkling lips… she visibly wavered, as if about to fall on her knees.

"May I ask just exactly whaaaat is going on here?"

Baby Ruth’s namby-pamby trill sounded truly pitiable, in comparison, but her dramatic emphasis of a key word sufficed to command in nagging plangency an attention which it never could have claimed with sheer volume.

"I was just showing the Dean how we could save lots of time—"

"There was a problem—a temporary problem, Vice-President—with the functioning of the Admission stamp."

"And is it all sorted out now?"

"Yes, Vice-President. We’re ready to return to work, Vice-President."

"Then may I ask why you are not doing so? The line, as you can see—"

"Oh, don’t worry about the line, Vip! It’s just a bunch of men! Look at ’em all, they’re too busy covering their pathetic dead thingees with their hands to make any trouble. I’ll bet the things can’t even do anything, now that they’re dead. I mean, in a place like this, it wouldn’t even be allowed, would it? Evil men! How did they ever make it here? Makes you wonder just where we’re stamping them for. I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I’ll bet I know where they go after they go out that door! I’ll bet there’s an elevator going down. Why should we even stamp them? I’ve been wondering about that, too. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense. Hey, why don’t we just herd them all out the door, all at once? You know, to the elevator? You want to? Let’s do it!"

"Um… we’ll just be starting the line back up now, Vice-President. I apologize for the delay. I take full responsibility."

"As well you should," murmured Baby Ruth, her many teeth strangely veiled during the utterance.

"There was no need to say that that way!" protested Red Hot. "This is the best boss I ever had, and she doesn’t deserve a tone of voice."

"Next!" bellowed Little Debbie with such force that the results of stumped toes and burned shins could be heard to the far wall in a reminiscence of falling dominoes.

"Hey, no, I’ll do that! That’s my job. You’ve got enough to do. Next! Just sign your John Handcock right there, you man."

"Did you say that was your job?" whined Baby Ruth at the other freckled shoulder. "What are you doing with the stamp?"

"That’s my job, too!" sang Red Hot proudly. "I’m Registration and Admission—R and A. I’m the Registror and the Admittor. And, you know, I can tell you as someone who has done this job for thousands of registorees and admittorees that there would be a really good way to improve it. Why don’t we admit them first and then register them? Then they wouldn’t have to stand around in line shaking all over and covering their derringers and wondering of they were going to be admitted. Because if you’re not going to admit them, why register them? It just doesn’t make any sense."

"Mme. Dean," proclaimed Baby Ruth, whose teeth now betrayed their existence only by the length of time her words consumed in finding a way through them, "I hold you personally responsible for this… this fiasco! You will assume the duties of Registrar yourself and report to me immediately once you have… have devised a tentative plan for seeing that such fiascoes do not occur in the future."

As Baby Ruth turned her unmistakable back, Red Hot spun toward the Dean in a flurry of russet locks which left her eyes partially curtained. "What the? Was she saying that you did a bad job? Because I don’t want a promotion if it means that you get hurt!"

"No… no, love, you didn’t just get promoted."

"Oh. Well that’s okay, then. But her tone of voice sure did sound bitchy." And Red Hot lifted her own voice along with her chin, causing the plump loins on the staircase to quiver a moment as if skewered on a great olive fork.

"Never you mind, darling. Just keep doing the fine job you do. I’ll take care of Mme. Vice-President!"

"So I’m still Registror? I did get promoted, then! I’m going to try some of my new ideas, too. Have you not signed your name yet, you stupid man? Are you too stupid to have a name?"

As Red Hot joyously flung herself back into her vocation, Little Debbie padded toward her office in a brown, brown study. She could easily see the Vice-President’s haunches waddling along the guard rail on a bee-line (a laboriously gyrating bee-line) to the President’s sequestered nook. The plump blonde curls offered not the least flinch of hesitation or curiosity in the direction of ground-floor affairs, and Little Debbie silently shook her fists at their confident retreat. Then she smacked one great set of knuckles into a counterpoised hammy palm. "I’ll just take some notes," she murmured, and dashed in and out of her doorway with a wondrous fluidity of large object through small opening which recalled the birth of a cow.

Upon exiting, Little Debbie held in one hand a steel fountain pen of a highly professional look (made of the same steel as her unused desk and chair) and, in the other hand, a rather hapless doorknob. For upon this knob was applied the full weight—plus the momentum accruing to a lusty lunge—of her corporeal tonnage. The vast hall echoed her thunder as if she had been delegated to sound the Last Trump. Men who had only recently rubbed the tingle from their bruised toes and shins now leapt into each other’s arms—which acrobatic response, inasmuch as it overestimated the availability of secured feet, caused a great deal more bruising. Red Hot slapped an unsuspecting face with her succulent forearm as she wheeled about and screamed, "What the!" from her rufous tresses.

"Ah, silly me!" sighed the Dean aloud. "Now where did I leave my note pad?"

And she distractedly deposited the steel pen upon a steel stair as she proceeded to grope with both hands through the myriad ample folds of flesh up and down her torso. Only when the angry thumping of Baby Ruth’s pink feet was almost literally treading upon her close-cropped head did she think to recollect the pen so heedlessly, perilously cast aside; and only when she observed that a particular pink heel had thumped down just shy of the pen did she think to reach for the slender menace. Such was her zeal to retrieve the article, however, that her unpracticed hand overshot the mark and grabbed, instead, upon a bouquet of retreating pink toes.

"Oh! Watch out for the pen!" she called in high alarm. "Don’t trip! Oh, my goodness!"

Baby Ruth’s round white figure (with its golden topping) came lumping down the staircase like a wedding cake escaping through the church’s back door. The pile which she finally composed, as well, upon the ground floor was suggestive of some rich confectionery—sugary white, gelatinous, and in immobile expectation of a carving knife.

"This is just awful!" announced Red Hot volubly. "She’s dead! She has to be dead after a fall like that! Dead twice in one day—what are the odds?"

"Go up and tell the President what happened," ordered the Dean soberly. "Be sure to knock on her door, and wait for her to answer before you go in. Now, what are you going to say?"

"I knock on the door."

"Right."

"Come in! Turn knob. Open door."

"Okay."

"Mizz President, the Vip is dead! She fell down the stairs over her fat feet—which the Dean tried to protect her, but she was already dead. Or good as."

It would have taken a keen eye to make out the small lips in Little Debbie’s enormous cheeks under any circumstances. Now no telescope would have found more than a pale slit in that location.

"Tell her… just tell her that the Vice-President has had an accident and must be excused indefinitely from her duties."

"In… in…"

"Indefinitely."

"Indefinantly. Got it."

And, with a graceful hop over the motionless mass that would have inspired Botticelli, Red Hot was off at once on her mission. The stairs which had so pitiably groaned and strained of late kissed the balls of her feet with happy smacks.

After a pause, Little Debbie sighed deeply, turned her glower upon the fleshy wreckage at the base of the stairs, and sauntered toward it until her broad toes almost touched its salamander-like transparency. With the biggest toe, she gave the mass a nudge. There was no perceptible response. She decided to use her heel for the next prod, and she applied it briskly in the ample tissue below where one would have supposed the lowest rib to lie hidden.

"Ooooh!"

"Get up."

Answered only by inaction, Little Debbie repeated both the talonary thrust and the command, adding a new measure of vigor to both.

"Get up!"

"I… I can’t!"

"Don’t be stupid, and don’t play me for stupid. We both know that you can’t break bones in this place. But I can sure make you feel pain."

"Don’t—please! What are you going to do with me?"

Little Debbie sighed yet again (for many of her arduous inhalations necessarily resembled sighs), looking over the shoulder which splayed at some indeterminable point from her stumpy neck. When she released her breath this time, she might have been the model for the north wind’s blustering cherub on some ancient Mercador map.

"Get up and go to my office. Now!"

"Okay, okay! But… what are you going to do?"

"I’m going to lie you back down and put my desk on top of you. It’s too heavy for you to lift."

"Please don’t do that! Oh, please!"

Instead of actually peditating her prisoner this time, Little Debbie simply stepped on her, heel first, the way one might crush a roach. Her bull’s eye was the same delectably flabby midriff.

The response which she elicited would be indescribable within quotation marks. Though huskily vocalized, it also possessed something of the punctured tire, and perhaps more of the mud slick receiving a runaway boulder.

"I’ll drag you if I have to. Or you can crawl. But one way or another…"

"Just listen to me, please! Just hear me out!" pleaded the Vice-President’s writhing mass in a rasp whose words were nearly unintelligible.

Little Debbie lifted her dreadful heel one more time.

"Please!" shrieked Baby Ruth, miraculously audible once more (and with a whining tinge of righteous indignation in her whining terror). "I’ll make it worth your while! And her, too! I’ll make it worth both your whiles."

The circus elephant with its foot raised over a beach ball would not be more admirably nimble than the Dean was at this moment, heel poised in mid-air.

"Keep talking."

"I… I… I can get you the presidency!"

"Don’t want it. God spared me an ambitious heart." The mighty heel loomed infinitesimally lower.

"Then I can get you my job!"

"By my calculations, I’m just about to get it, anyway." And the heel loomed significantly lower.

"But no, but… but then you’ll be up there. And your friend will be down here. The President would never hear of the Vice-President remaining downstairs. Besides, she doesn’t like you. The things she said about you just moments ago in her office… so unkind. So brutal. And there will be an investigation into my… my accident."

"I can control that," muttered Little Debbie—but her perpetual frown grew a shade blacker.

"Are you prepared to risk your future on that… and hers? After all, if you go down, what happens to her?"

"So what are you offering?"

"You and her together, down here as before. But both with promotions. We can discuss the titles later."

"She likes promotions."

"Of course she does! And you… you…." Baby Ruth had recovered her wind to the point that she now timidly perched on an elbow to give her ineffectually puling whine a touch of drama. "If you were promoted to… to Acting Vice-President, or… or to Vice-President of Registration and Admissions, she would look up to you more than ever."

Little Debbie’s eyes had lifted their black buttons to the misty distances of the great hall. A strange trembling seemed to overtake the middle of her face, but no words emerged.

"Obviously, someone would have to attend to the actual work of registration and admission. And obviously, that could no longer be her, because… because she would be sharing an office with you."

"Sharing… sharing an office…"

"Yes! And obviously, the one person left over would be the one best suited to slaving away all day long at some low-level, no-talent job. She gives herself such airs up there! You should see her! You should have heard those things she said about you! So unkind… so unfair! Why, beneath her fake hair and her fake tan and her fake accent and her fake manner, she’s nothing but a… a cleaning woman. A secretary—an old worn-out secretary. Or a beautician, maybe… or worse. After all, how do you suppose women like her meet wealthy businessmen and sucker them into marriage? Yet there she sits right now, way up there, saying those awful things. Your friend has just gone through her door—you could hear the knock from here. What do you suppose she’s going to tell your friend about you?"

Throughout this appeal, Baby Ruth’s crumpled form had resuscitated itself limb by limb. Raised on one elbow, then two, then on her knees (a long time on her knees), she now covered the last inches to Little Debbie’s shoulder. Together they peered round into the high, hazy depth of the great room’s nave, one face quivering with moist inspiration, the other hardening into something like a dark, dark brick.

Red Hot had indeed just been admitted to the President’s august presence, though with some small violation of standard procedure. (Irritated by the strength of the knock, which caused her to break a nail [not a real nail, fortunately… but still]), the President had granted entrance in too small a voice, only to see the door begin to rattle its hinges until she could make her shout heard above the din.)

Red Hot marched up to the desk (leaving the door wide open behind her) and thrust out her bosom over the presidential desk.

"Mizz President, sir! The Dean says to say that the Vip has definantly not died but has had an undefinable accident and left her duties unexcused."

In the moments that followed, it is possible that the President considered requesting a repetition of this embassy, for her withered mouth eventually made as if to speak. If so, however, she must have reconsidered. The protracted silence was interpreted by Red Hot as an open invitation.

"If you ask me, the Vip brought it all on herself. I mean, there we were, signing in those weirdo men one after another and stamping them like cans of tomatoes with their due dates, and… there was a little snag, but I got it all worked out. We were about to crank it all up again, when up walks this very bitchy person from the blue, Mr. President, and really begins to hurt our two feelings. We didn’t deserve getting spitted all over like that. I mean, we’d worked our two butts off. I’m sorry she’s dead, and all that… I mean, I’m sorry she’s in some undefinable state between death and death, or whatever… but it was her own bitchy ways that brought her face to face with her sad fate."

Without having taken her eyes from the spectacular arrival for a single instant, Sugar Smack had slowly begun to nod—slowly, but with gradually increasing sympathy.

"And… so the Vice-President is hors de commisson?"

"I just said she was a bitch, which I can prove. I never say anything I can’t prove. That’s just how I am. But I’ll bet she’s kind of trashy, too, like you said. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit."

"Ah… and she and the Dean are currently both downstairs—is that correct?"

"You want me to go check?" Red Hot’s eager query was stirred by her having noticed the fifth or sixth cut of the President’s eyes toward the yawning door.

"No, my dear. Just you close the door, is all—quietly, now. There, very good. I’m sorry I can’t offer you a chair. It was my initial request of the Vice-President that she look into the furniture situation, but she seems to have reshuffled my priorities to suit her own."

"I’ll bet she does that a lot. Based on my terminal acquaintance with her."

"Um… yes. Yes, she does that quite a lot. An annoyingly lot!"

"Annoyingly lot! That’s good, Missus President!"

Red Hot uncorked a hearty laugh which Sugar Smack very willingly, even luxuriously shared as she nestled less uncomfortably into her steel chair.

"Yes, indeed, my dear. I send her out to find a chair—the merest of simple errands—and she charges off and stirs up a hornet’s nest where all was peaceful before. And I still don’t have my chair. Now it looks as though I won’t be getting one any time soon, furthermore."

"Oh, don’t say that! I’ll get you one right now. The first chair I see, it’s yours—and to hell with Blondie!"

"Blondie! Oh, dear me, what a tease you are, my sweet! Blondie—oh, that’s good, as you say! But no, wait! Don’t go! You don’t quite have my drift. The chair is but a specific instance of a general problem. The problem is that we are top-heavy with… that is, what I need is a can-do, hands-on sort of person next to me, not another pass-the-buck bureaucrat who just fouls the lines."

"I’m very hands-on, Mr. President. Everyone says so. I always learn with my hands."

"Yes, I can tell that about you—and what lovely hands you have!"

"I see you got a broken nail there. I can fix that for you so it won’t happen all the time. Have you ever tried milk?"

"Er… no. Now listen, my dear. What I really have in mind by way of solving the general problem is a complete inversion of the subordinate chain of command."

"Oh." Red Hot thought very hard behind her rusty ringlets. "That sounds like something men would do."

"M… men?"

"You know, like… like…." Red Hot’s lithe wrist bent to mimic the handle of some Grecian urn until the elegant fingers almost touched her forearm, while her opposite hip thrust out in a stunningly complementary fashion—the belly of a divine urn which could only have held ambrosia. "Like… inversion? Like, ‘Hi there, sailor boy!’"

Sugar Smack gaped at the display as if a rare Doric wonder of mottled marble had in fact just been unveiled before her. A slight drain of saliva caused her to cough.

"Uh… excuse me! Um, no. What I mean is… what I mean is just this. You up here with me, the other two down there. Let the Vice-President do something useful for once. Let her get her own hands dirty for a change."

"Yeah, instead of her mouth."

"Precisely."

"And I’ll get her office?"

"Well… well, of course, if you should want an office, hers would be vacant. But a people-person like you would be wasted in an office. I see you in a far more active capacity. I see you as… as… as my little Ariel, running hither and yon for me and doing a thousand useful things to help which the Vice-President would only have buried in paperwork."

"So I’ll be hands-on still? Because I don’t want to get stuck in some dusty office—a people-person like me, like you say."

"I’ll have plenty for you to do, never fear."

For the first time, Red Hot’s sculpted hips could not seem to find poise, shifting restlessly from side to side. The gum began to show above her upper teeth, and her green eyes pinched into an enchanting slant.

"Gee! Wow, that sounds so… so me! This place just gets better and better! And will this be a… you know, like a… a promotion? What will be my new name? You know, my title?"

"Your title?" Sugar Smack suddenly launched herself forward over her great steel desk as if the document bearing Red Hot’s new title were right in front of her (though, in fact, there was not a shred of paper in her whole great golden office). "You will, of course, view this as a promotion. A major promotion. After all, you will constantly be standing at the right hand of the President—or sitting, once we get this business of the chair settled. Ha-ha! That was good, wasn’t it? Now, as for your title…"

"Presidential Right Hand! Presidential… Trouble-Shooter! No, no, I’ve got it: Presidential Top Gun!"

"Ah… um, yes, well, it means the same thing, really. But your formal job title will be… Presidential Ombudsman."

"Om… om…"

"Ombudsman. Repeat."

"Ombudsman."

"Capital! And now, Presidential Ombudsman, please proceed to acquire a new chair—preferably from the Vice-President’s office—and join me with it so that we may discuss future plans."

"Aye-aye, sir!"

And as Red Hot winsomely spun an about-face and marched for the door, she happily mused aloud, "I’m the new P.O.! The new P.O.! Omni… omnibudsman." Her fingers froze upon the door knob. "Mr. President?"

"Yes, child?"

"Shouldn’t that be ‘omnibudsperson’?"

Sugar Smack smiled serenely and raised her hand in benediction. "Charming girl!" she murmured.

Little Debbie and Baby Ruth had meanwhile assumed a strategic position just within the Vice-President’s doorway, from which vantage they could occasionally hear laughter from the President’s office (but only a word or two of conversation launched by Red Hot’s lusty voice). Little Debbie had often very nearly crept out of their lair, especially at the moments of strangely enduring silence; but Baby Ruth had always succeeded in holding her back—just barely—by reiterating that surrender to impulse would spoil their long-range designs. Finally Red Hot had reappeared, tripping along the catwalk with a fingertip to her lips and repeating a word that sounded curiously like "cinnamon". Little Debbie’s beady eyes widened to their maximum possible orbit, and she clenched the steel door frame until it cracked. Baby Ruth held onto the massive shoulder for dear life with both hands. By the time Red Hot was within six feet of them, however (still wholly unaware of anyone else’s existence in the universe at just this instant, such was the joy of her promotion), the Dean could no longer be restrained.

"My darling, my poor baby! What has she done to you? What has she been saying to you?"

Baby Ruth was carried out of the doorway by the forward surge so quickly that she very nearly sailed over the guard rail. Oblivious to her blonde trajectory, Little Debbie had grabbed Red Hot by the elbows and shaken corkscrew locks all across her astonished face in a show of passionate solicitude that might have ended in mayhem. Yet Baby Ruth was able to retrieve herself from beyond the rail (thanks largely to two bloated thighs essential in lowering her center of gravity) and to resume her grip upon the Dean’s well-muscled left shoulder.

"Stop it! Keep it down! You’ll ruin everything!" (Even Baby Ruth’s whispers had an unaccountably whiney quality.) "Revenge is near! Vengeance is in sight! Don’t ruin it all now!"

"No. No, of course you’re right—My darling, are you sure you’re okay?—No, don’t ruin it. We’ve got her now—What did that evil woman say to you, my pet?"

Red Hot was only beginning to recover from the shock of ambush. "Oh, nothing all that bad. I’m okay. She’s pretty nice, really."

"Don’t say that! You’re so naïve! There are things about life you just don’t understand."

"Would you not hold my arms so tight, please? You’re hurting me."

"I’m sorry, I’m sorry, dear. It’s just that… I was so worried about you!"

"Well, she never hurt me the way you just did. Or frightened me, either. Jeez, you almost made me pee on the floor."

"I’m sorry, I’m sorry, darling, please forgive me, I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, I just…."

Baby Ruth had by now entirely relinquished her hold upon Little Debbie, and had even withdrawn far enough that the sobbing, writhing mass of corpulence might not some in incidental contact with her. She sighed so heavily that her large lips ballooned outward in an impressive inflation. Then, in a shift of deportment whose instantaneous genius must surely have been intuitive, she addressed the Dean imperatively from her full hauteur.

"Get below now and await further developments. Take up your station and remain ready. You know what to do. And for God’s sake, stop blubbering!"

The soot-capped, cannonball head continued to cringe before Red Hot, and the huge fingers, now quite empty, continued to feel the air before her charming bust. "I… we… we have a… a plan, darling…."

"Stop sniveling!" Baby Ruth backhanded the cannonball (and struggled to conceal a wince as she retrieved her red knuckles). "I’ll explain the plan. Just get below!"

As Little Debbie descended behind them like a full moon setting on Walpurgisnacht, Baby Ruth turned her complete attention to Red Hot. It was the first time they had ever been alone, and for once the freckled chit was not babbling like a hung toilet. Though her moist, shapely mouth was the opposite of shut, not a muscle about it betrayed any inclination to toy with a word. Baby Ruth would have liked to smack that mouth with her yet red backhand, over and over and over. She would have liked to pull the twists out of that hair, to kick and slap and punch up and down that curving body until it was a great pustule of welts and bruises. She doubted that she had ever despised anyone as much in her life (well, while she was still in her life), and she remained optimistic about the prospects of one day pinioning those dimpled elbows to the hall’s most steely of steel structures and beating the crap out of everything that faced her. First the Dean… but no, first things first. First she had to make herself President.

"Now listen to me. Listen carefully to everything I say." Baby Ruth’s eyes transfixed Red Hot’s like a hypnotist’s, and her namby-pamby whine made an incredibly close approach to intensity. "You will go back to the President’s office. You will tell her that something terrible has happened at the Registration desk."

Red Hot’s eyes and mouth rounded at the same rate. Baby Ruth was too late to cut her off, though she saw the signs. "Terrible? You mean besides you dying on the—"

"Shut up! Just shut up!" Oh, to be able to sock her just once… but Baby Ruth’s clenched teeth and clenched fists were relaxed by the dark subconscious afterglow of Little Debbie towering over her. "Just listen. Tell the President that something terrible has happened, and that she must come down at once. At once!"

"At once!"

"Right. At once. Go on, now."

"Okay, I’m gone. But… but what do I say if she asks me what? I mean, do I say that someone died, or something?"

This time Baby Ruth felt her open palm begin to itch—with an itch that could only be scratched upon Red Hot’s freckled cheek. Again she checked herself, however… and the question, after all, was not unjustified. It would be just like the President to solicit details, even from this moron.

At that instant, Baby Ruth had one of the famous inspirations so instrumental to her meteoric professional advance (an advance equally spectacular for the absence of talent or ability in its propellant).

"Gore. Blood and gore everywhere."

"What?"

"Everywhere, I tell you! Everywhere! One of the men smuggled in a knife—"

"The men! God, I knew it when you said ‘knife’! Men and their knives that they’re always playing with! And in a place like this! We ought to have a metal detector—"

Baby Ruth could repress herself no longer, but at least she raised no loud smack from the ruddy flesh. Instead, she caught a fistful of red hair.

"Blood and guts! Everywhere!"

"Guts! Oh God! And they’re bloody, too, I’ll bet!"

"Yes! Everywhere! Great bloody gobs of entrails!"

"En… en…"

"Intestines, kidneys… guts!"

"Guts!"

"Get going!"

"Oh! Oh God! I’m going! I’m going! This is an important assignment, isn’t it? I mean, with all those guts!"

And Red Hot did indeed go for about half a dozen steps, repeating dreadful words to herself all the way (and rehearsing dreadful registers). Then the energy suddenly drained from her comely stride, and she looked back around at Baby Ruth, her brow clearing ominously.

"Can I get your chair, too? I was supposed to get your chair."

The word "guts", though not verbally reiterated, acquired new meaning in Baby Ruth’s body language. She turned red (not a freckled ruddy-red, but deep pink) from the roots of her naturally blonde hair to the tips of her pudgy toes (which included substantial terrain) at the mention of her chair. She seemed to swell to twice her size.

"Okay, okay, don’t get all huffy," soothed Red Hot in retreat. "We’ll deal with the gut thing first."

Baby Ruth’s breaths were coming very heavily to her now, and making even more noise than the pulse which throbbed in her ears (for, as usual, her slightly bulbous nose was somewhat congested—another disappointing failure of The Transition). Nevertheless, she could easily hear every word that Red Hot hurled into the President’s office (though the first of them competed with the idiot’s resounding knocks after she had flung the door open). Not a syllable was anything less than resonant.

"The Vip says to come quick, Mr. President. She’s not really dead at all—which I appraised you of previously, if you may recall—and she says to come quick while the men are killing each other with knives and a great deal of gore that they smuggled past the metal detector. Or, no—the metal detector, that was my idea, at which she turned up her snooty schnozola at, big surprise. We really need one now after this major incident, as who would now dispute it? That’s something the Vip should have foreseen, if you ask me. But like you said, she has no foresight for someone of that position, considering her rank. And still bitchier than ever. She pulled my hair, which I don’t allow anyone to do, I mean anyone! But I guess guts will do that to you. She must be all shook up. She says there are a lot of ’em. Guts, I mean. She says they’re everywhere. If she said ‘everywhere’ once, she said it ten times, like… like, you know, the Titanic, or something. So I guess we’d better go see who’s still alive down there. Oh, and Mr. President? It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t bring the chair. I just want you to know that that’s all on the Vip. She completely inhabited me from getting it."

The range of conflicting emotions through which these few simple words sent Baby Ruth almost turned her hypnotic efforts right back upon her. She stood staring at blank space as the President and the Presidential Ombudsman emerged from the far doorway. Fortunately, they were immersed in confidential exchange, and she succeeded in rousing herself just in time to slither bulkily into her own office—whose door she shut almost all the way, but not quite. With one clammy palm pressed over the doorknob and the other over her racing heart, she listened intently to the vigorous, interlaced thump-thump of two pairs of feet. Her head faintly nodded with each footfall, as if she were tallying them all toward some fateful number. Just when the hollow plang of the staircase’s first step should have chimed in, however, her pricked pink ears harvested through the door’s crack… nothing. Her head froze upon an upward beat whose next tally refused to come, and her large mouth fell wide open.

"But… but I don’t see any blood!" protested the President’s voice intelligently, a mere arm’s length or two away. "I see no fighting among the registrants, though their line has grown sadly bedraggled. And I certainly don’t see the Vice-President or the Dean."

"Bummer! She was just lying to me the whole time! And in a place like this—can you believe that? I mean, can you believe that? I just don’t know what to say, Mr. President. This whole… bedraggled thing makes me feel like I’ve been struck dumb with shock and awe. Of all the… that lying bitch!"

"Will you go down and see if you can turn up either one of them, my dear? Send them straight up to my office. Immediately!"

"Aye-aye, Madam President, sir! Straight up! Er…"

"Yes, dear?"

"I’m not really afraid, you understand… but that dippy Vip of yours, you should have seen her eyes when she was going on about ‘guts here’ and ‘guts there’. Just like two coiled-up springs. Weird. I mean, we’re talking heavy-duty psycho."

"Quite right, my dear. I’ll come with you. She won’t dare resist my authority! Just wait till I find her!"

At last the steel staircase began to reverberate under a pair of descending feet. Yet Baby Ruth had scarcely released a long-held breath when she was once more placed on high alert by a shrill scream—a scream that came far too early, after only a couple of steps in the descent.

"Look out, look out, Mr. President! It’s the Dean—she’s under the stairs—I see her! She’ll trip you and kill you like she did the other one!"

In the command decision of a lifetime, Baby Ruth slipped out the door and lunged low for the guard rail. With wondrous agility, and hardly a thought for her personal safety, she caught the rail in one hand while planting the other square in the President’s excessively tanned and wrinkled buttock. She could barely restrain herself from trundling ruinously down the staircase after her target—she came to rest heavily against Red Hot, her blonde curls butting the speckled abdomen low and pinning it against the hand rail; but she smiled through her panting in the satisfaction of knowing that she had not been detected by her whom she had just dethroned.

Indeed, Sugar Smack lay quite low at the base of the staircase—and quite inert, an excessively tanned and withered sack of bones. Clinging to the rail, Baby Ruth panted a little less and giggled a little more with each passing instant. Slumped unresistingly over Baby Ruth, Red Hot moaned and lowed like a cow in need of milking. And finally, emerging as if from the very floor, the titanic frame of Little Debbie reeled briefly over the President’s mortal remains, then began the long, deliberate process of crushing the staircase under foot, step by step

"We… we did it!" gasped Baby Ruth with a wan smile as the gargantuan shadow started to cloud over the hall’s gilded light.

"We…"

"Out of my way."

At the sound of the surly monotone, Red Hot showed signs of surmounting her anguish. Yet as she was placing a hand on Baby Ruth’s pallid curls to haul herself upright, her prop was stripped away. Baby Ruth was sent sprawling—without great energy, malice, or interest—back up on the catwalk, from which she contemplated the evolving scene from her well-padded rump; and Little Debbie, her swollen might now fully coalesced on the staircase’s highest rungs, stood riveted over the mop of red hair.

A pair of slanting green eyes charmingly peeked out from behind the hair—a winsome nymph behind a rustic waterfall—and smiled all the way to the gum.

"I’ll… I’ll be okay in a minute, Big D. Wow, did you see where that bitch hit me? Talk about below the belt! And look at what she did to the Pres! In a place like this, too! Man, she’s going down for this. There are bigger big-shots in this place than her!"

If Red Hot had further summary thoughts on the devastation which lay before them all, she had no leisure to utter them between the inarticulate screams and pleading "no’s" which quickly occupied her lungs. Taking her by her shapely ankles, Little Debbie proceeded to upend her over the railing, in which position she dangled her like a choice cut of meat before the proverbial slavering dogs.

"Judas!" murmured Little Debbie over and over through the screams in a gravel-rough death sentence. "Judas! You betrayed me!"

"No!"

"After all I’ve done for you!"

"No!"

"After all I’ve… I’ve loved you!"

"No! No! You’re hurting me! You’re scaring me!"

"I’m going to execute you!"

"No! No!"

"First I’m going to pull you apart, right down the middle…"

"No! No!"

"Then I’m going to…"

"No! No1"

But Little Debbie abruptly fell mute. Her eyes that had once glowed like tiny coals began to glaze over. Her appallingly spherical tongue began to show in her round mouth like a slick pink ball. Her breathing began to grow labored, and her shoulders to slump with an effort which seemed unrelated to the writhing burden they suspended. All at once, she was hugging the slender shins tightly to her as she gaped at the paradisaic landscape beyond them.

"Forgive me, darling! Oh, forgive me! Forgive me!"

And as this went on, Baby Ruth, now balanced unsteadily on her hands and knees, discovered that she was unequal to yet another command decision—a still greater one, cruelly greater. For every time she approached Little Debbie’s voluminous buttocks and mentally measured their magnitude against her strongest thrust, she recoiled in brooding defeat.

***

My guide had long ago turned away. As I sought him on the far side of the parapet, I felt my face flush with shame for having thus spent so many precious moments.

"Maestro mio, how long will they go on that way?" I asked—and was instantly embarrassed still further by my folly.

"Long, you say? Why, not long at all, unless your measure is sublunary eons."

I hung my head. "But there will be, then, a point in time’s eternal march when buffoonery has an end?"

"It is the nature of mad spirits not to know their nature—yet madness is not natural. Even such as these must one day know themselves."

"They must know, you mean, that… that they are deep down here and not high up there?"

"Give it some few eons, I should say."

"And what happens then?"

My master puffed out his lips until they popped.

"Nothing back to nothing," he said. "Just like a bomb."

In a short story published in your last issue, "El Día de Hoy", the implication was made that this very phrase was somewhat anomalous in Spanish. May I point out that the familiar aujourd’hui in French is precisely the same phrase—i.e., "on the day of today"? It strikes me as highly unlikely that the Spanish phrase originated on TV newscasts, while the French phrase has been around for hundreds of years.

The short story in question only affirmed that the usage of this phrase has grown much more common through the zealous assistance of newscasters. The four little words clearly have a cadence which the monosyllabic hoy lacks. All the same, in Spanish literature of any period, the word hoy is vastly more common than el día de hoy. Do your own survey and get back to us.

The argument based upon French analogy proves little more than that French is not Spanish. You might as well have noted that the French word for "tomorrow", demain, is a contraction of de matin, whereas the Spaniards have entirely eschewed the former part of the expression "[the day] of the morning" and simply preserved "morning" to mean "tomorrow": mañana. (By the way, this can create a certain confusion when listening to Spanish weather-casters: is mañana "tomorrow morning" or only "tomorrow"—or perhaps a morning which is not tomorrow’s?) And lest we forget about your sire, "yesterday" occurs in both languages without any hint of an epexegetic genetive: ayer and hier are direct adaptations of the Latin heri.

Please help me understand the difference between "each other" and "one another". I am told that one is to be used only of two people or things, while the other is to be used only of more than two people or things. Which is which?

Good question. Ancient wisdom (as in "ancient school marm") has it that "one another" should be used of two parties and "each other" of more than two. I have always found it impossible to sign off on this distinction, retrograde atavist though I may be. In cases where custom is not so fixed as to preclude choice, surely logic should be allowed to arbitrate. The expression "one another", when used of two parties, strikes me as patently illogical. The word "another" indicates that there is more than a single "other" left after we set aside the original "one": otherwise, we ought to write "one the other". (Compare l’un l’autre in French.) The problem is not removed by substituting "each other", unfortunately, for "each" also implies the presence of more than two relevant parties. The proper word to refer to a mere pair of alternatives is "either". Alas, English does not possess the expression "either other" any more than it does "one the other". Both of our existing expressions should logically be used of groups containing more than two, while no accepted expression is logically equipped to handle sets of only two.

What to do? Declare one phrase fit for the pair and the other (not "another") fit for the mob? I can’t suffer the high-handedness of it, personally. Those who wish to honor the tradition for no better reason than that it exists shall not be condemned by me for doing so, but I decline to help them carry the banner.

I have seen the expression "tow the line" in your journal at least once, but I have also seen "toe the line". Could you research the history of this image and tell me which spelling of the first word is the more authentic?

I don’t know what phrase you may have seen in these pages, but I know that I myself have been guilty of writing "tow the line" in the past. My reasoning (in the absence of solid evidence) ran thus: "toe the line" seems the more modern image. It evokes a sprinter crouching in the blocks just before the gun. The expression we use today is actually quite old. Therefore the more modern image must be incorrect, and the genuine image must hearken back to the days when barges were towed along inland canals with the help of strong cables (or lines) and draft horses. To "tow the line" means, surely, to bend oneself to an arduous task without complaint or remission.

The problem is that my assumptions about the more modern image were entirely incorrect. Behind the phrase "toe the line" lies a historical curiosity perhaps not quite as old as barge and canal, but every bit as nautical. When common sailors were summoned for formal review in the Royal Navy during the gilded days of wooden ships, they were expected, naturally, to form a neat, straight row. A ship of war does not possess much free space, however—then or now—and officers were understandably reluctant to have the sailors peering to left and right in an effort to align themselves perfectly amid a labyrinth of ropes and blocks and lockers. The solution was simply to designate a certain seam in the deck’s planks and have the seamen place their toes squarely upon this. The "line" in question would run as straight and true as expert craftsmanship could make it, and the human line oriented to it would have the same pleasing geometrical rigor.

To "toe the line" is hence to stand at attention, to be meticulously conscious of one’s duties. The metaphor is probably of late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century provenance, when the great navies of Europe first became something significantly more systematic than a collection of daring seadogs. I can think of at least two other expressions which also hail from the lively decks of frigates and man-o-wars. To "go by the board" means to be jettisoned in very hasty fashion. The metaphor refers to cumbersome matter—usually spars, masts, and rigging—which trails from the ship due to damage incurred in combat or during a storm, and which threatens the ship’s maneuverability at a time when survival depends upon speed and buoyancy. The encumbering matter would be cut loose as quickly as possible and allowed to drift away irrecoverably to the lee.

I am less secure about "son of a gun", but I have seen at least one published account which insists that the phrase originates in the practice of having common seamen sling their hammocks between cannons in the man-o-war’s crowded lower decks. This, of course, was the least privileged berth afloat: the person who had a brass twenty-four-pounder for a pillow could not boast of any great status in life. Hence the sun of a gun is, in our parlance today, no better off than sons of other mothers whom we uncharitably designate.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Thank you for challenging us, and please do not hesitate to call us on the carpet (whatever that means) another time.

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