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Show TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT... BY JIM STILES ee redux. "Stiles. "ZZZLZZZZ." "Stiles!" just out of step with those so-called small already a thing of the all. Maybe they’re an “Zzzz7227." all try TOTILES!” "Hrmmmmim....Veronica?” "Willie Flocko. Wake up." "...Go away.” "You've got to wake up.” "What for?” "You have to do another issue of The Zephyr." "What do you mean? | thought I was done." "Nope. Remember? You still have one more issue to do this year. The.Retro Issue." : "That can‘t be right. The last issue was retro, wasn’t it? After all, I've been ‘clinging to the past since 1989." "The last issue was-a retro issue, but it wasn’t the Retro Issue." "What's the difference?” "You publish six BS a year; you’ ve done five. You owe the readers one more issue.” "My god, do you think they’re counting? Surely ‘they've forgotten.” "Most have but a few haven't. You owe it to the few. Get up.” "No." "GET UP!" "Unh unh." "What seems to be the problem, little buddy? You're not depressed again are yom We're all getting pretty tired of your whiny holiday mood swings." "I’m not depressed. !’m...reflective. And Pai not whining. I’m lamenting." "Well, reflect on this. If you don’t put out another issue, you'll alienate the small fraction of the town that isn’t already mad at you.” "Is it that bad?" : "It’s that bad.” "OK. What if I did this. What if we just re-printed last year’s Retro Issue. Who’s going to remember?” "Someone will.” "Then yon write it, Flocko. Just write the damn thing and put my name on it.” "Would that make me a ghostwriter or you a plagiarist?" "Both, I think." Get oP. Stiles.” nope .Who do you think you are, Ivan Oblomov?" "7 been all blown off?’ What does that mean?" "Not ‘all blown off,’ you idiot. ‘Ivan Oblomov.” "Who was-she?” 5 "Oblomov is a he...a character from one of Goncharov’s Russian novels. Oblomov suffered from severe ennui. He took ennui to an entirely new level of misery. He was so incapacitated by ennui that he refused to get out of bed. He said there was no point. And today this is called ‘Oblomovism.” "Yeah...that’s IT! I have terminal ennui. Just tell evevieue that the next Zephyr has been canceled due to Oblomovism.” "It won't work. Get up.” To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart. The world is a holy vision, had we clarity to see it--a clarity that men depend on men to make. Wendell Berry "..You know, Willie. It just occurred to me. This sounds like something I’ve written before...many years ago when the world was young. When hope wasn’t a four-letter-word. When apathy wasn’t an attitude to brag about. When...” "Hey...shut up. Nobody cares.” "Precisely. But it is weird, isn’t it. You know...deja vu.” "Yes, Jimmie. It’s very sae I'm getting goose pimples just thinking about it.” "Don’t call me Jimmie. | hate that.” "But you just look like a Jimmie.” You’re no ‘James,’ I'll tell you that." "That hurts.” "The truth always hurts, buckaroo. But the truth will free.” "What does that mean?” “1 conte t tell you.” . "Flocko? "Yes?" "What does it all mean? "Please, Stiles. Not again.” "Well, I just have to wonder...is ‘Here a point to madness that we see occurring around us? Are trams Kings and Microtels and Cloudsnots the Destiny of this also set you to create the vast majority of the community? Maybe town values that I cherish and cling to are past. Hell, maybe they never really existed at illusion that I’ve created in my own mind. We a world for ourselves that we can be comfortable with. Maybe it’s the myth that’s crumbling before my very eyes, not the town. And yet, there’s no mistaking the fact that Moab is hardly the town it was ten years ago. But then again, is that memory an illusion as well? Do you think my problem is that I’m just not flexible enough?” "Flocko?" "Flocko!" ELELLZLZ, "I'll be damned...it really is deja vu." THE "FABULOUS" 50s I've always had a love/hate Felatonahip with the Fifties. If you were a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male, it was a very good time to be alive. If you were anything but, times could be tough. Racism and bigotry were not only acceptable forms of behavior, in some parts of the country they were required. In the South, Blacks endured hardships and disadvantages not all that different from a century before. Living conditions for millions of Americans were an abomination. : While Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s called for an end to Jim Crow and racial discrimination, the federal government was slow to enforce those rulings. The great social upheavals of the 60s were still years away and now it almost seems as if the decade of the 50s was a time for the country to catch its breath in the wake of a decade of war. The nation slumbered. The BEANE SEES and the CIA waged a series of secret tic to Communist principles, and overthrew democratically elected governments in countries like Guatemala and Iran. Very few Americans questioned its government's foreign policy; for most, the ends justified the means. You know...sort of like today. Within the government, beginning in the late 1940s, politicians like Joe McCarthy waged a psychological war against fellow Americans. Those citizens not willing to tow the anti-Communist line risked terrible consequences. Careers were destroyed, families were torn apart, and friendships were severed, just for being called "soft on Communism.” Never in recent history has this country been gripped by such national paranoia. And everyone lived under the umbrella of nuclear fear. The end of World War II brought us the atomic bomb, the Russians matched our technology by 1949 and, just a few years into the new decade, both super power nations possessed an arsenal of hydrogen bombs - capable of obliterating all human life on earth. Grade school children really did participate in, what my school called, "disaster drills." "Duck and cover." Or kiss your ass goodbye. And yet many Americans believed technology would save humanity and enrich us beyond our ability to comprehend it. In the wake of World War II, anything was supposed to be possible. Nuclear technology for peacetime purposes inspired some farmers to write the Atomic Energy Commission. They .wanted some small bombs to remove stumps from their wheat fields. Every American would not only keep two cars in the garage but a private plane as well. Nature was here to be manipulated and controlled ey technology, for the benefit of the masses. The Bureau of Reclamation planned a series of massive dams on the Colorado and Green Rivers that would have eliminated every free-flowing mile. The most spectacular canyon system on earth, Glen Canyon, was condemned to death in 1956. And yet, what now seems so obviously wrong, was only vaguely unsettling to Americans as they lived through the 50s. In fact, for most of Middle-class America, it was a time of extraordinary wealth and success. The GI Bill gave an entire generation of young veterans a college education and unlimited opportunities. The war had the effect of shrinking the country--the two coasts no longer seemed so far away. Even remote desert towns like Moab would gain national prominence as men seeking wealth longstanding roots and hit the road. and a new life pulled : up I remember the 50s, or at least a part of them: For all its faults, it was a quiet time, especially when compared to 2002. America’s population was barely half what it is today, if you can imagine that. Big changes were coming but they were just beginning to come... When I was barely four, my family moved to a new home in any of this and Burger what would become the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky.. But we town? AmI _ were at the vanguard of a mass exodus out of the city. Glen Meade |