Bradley sought the ministrations of Mistress Angela much as Christians seek the sacred office of priests who broker atonement with God. In a true sense, like the Mass, it was existential theater. All the roles directly played to the audience and the audience was comprised exclusively of the players who were also the authors of what took place.
“How are you,” said the ebullient proprietress, who walked around her desk and stepped down to greet Bradley. Mistress Angela was a diminutive woman of mannered effusions with that histrionic whiff of the impresario. Her mercenary sincerity welcomed you to her dungeon (on the sixteenth floor of an office building!), a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth, where an army of attentive specialists were ready to act on programs of abuse written by her clients. And Bradley had seen many empowered by means of submission and servile humiliation. These clients were money brokers and lawyers, judges, corporate executives, politicians, clerics and venturing souls in pursuit of compulsive pleasures they could not understand. These luminaries seemed not so exalted, however, when hog-tied, ball-gagged and put into cages by young women issuing stern commands. There were other inferences, of course. Christ had been flogged unmercifully and nailed to a cross to save mankind so that, by extension, all mortifications had redemptive value in the Christian imagination. That is why Bradley went to this place, and why the others went, not only for freedom to experience the whole mosaic of pain as intensely felt pleasure, but also for religious satisfactions of worship and abuse, expiation. In this theater of the absurd, Bradley experienced masochism’s liberating mechanisms of punishment and the euphoria of exoneration. That first magic of his mother’s underwear years ago had opened Bradley to other fixations. His emotional interests were radial, with a locus at some distance from average. The formalized programs of self-abnegation and condign punishment had great appeal for reasons he did not clearly understand.
The outer office, despite the eccentric reception platform, looked like any place of business with a waiting room. Mistress Angela’s desk was elevated behind a low barrier with a chair resembling something like a witness stand. In her forties, she no longer participated in what she called “The Show.” She was primarily a businesswoman but with a liberal arts degree from Bennington College. Recently featured on a downtown cable broadcast on her enterprise, not without wry humor, she quoted La Rochefoucauld: “We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”
Bradley sat thumbing through People until a woman of about 25, dressed in black spandex, came into the waiting room and told him that his session was now ready. He stood obediently and followed her through the unassuming inner door which opened to an unlikely mélange of rooms and devices.
“Enjoy!” the ever ironic Mistress Angela called after him.
The larger main area was visible through a Plexiglas window along the hallway. It resembled a high school gymnasium, but in place of parallel bars, gymnastic beam and climbing rope were meat hooks, a whipping post and wire cages. Presently, a thin young bearded investment banker, chained to the post and caned by a sham nun, cried out with each painful assault. Farther down the hall on the right were small cells with windows that allowed a view of those who consented to being watched in their duress. Through one Bradley saw a naked man tied to a chair while a young woman holding a flog circled him, asking questions he couldn’t answer, scourging him with each failure to come forth with information. In another room, set up to resemble a grammar school classroom, a superior court judge sat at a second grade desk and wrote his ABCs while a “teacher” standing in front of him looked on. She held a heavy wooden yardstick, and when he got to the “W” something went wrong to trigger her wrath. She expressed her dismay tersely, with incredulous angry reproofs. “You never get it right,” she said. Then she swatted him with great violence, and ordered him to begin again, which he did, reciting each letter audibly as he traced it on paper like a schoolboy until failing at the “W” once more with precise recapitulation. Again he suffered her castigation and the process resumed with blows as he cowered again and again until his orgasm, after which he whimpered like a boy who has wet his pants in class. “Here’s a note,” she said at last in accordance with his script, and handed it to him in a tone of disgusted resignation. “Give it to the school nurse.” The judge proceeded to the showers with this bit of paper, which he saved with other souvenirs and remnants of exoneration he kept in a special box.
Bradley’s escort ushered him into the make-up room at the end of the hall and settled him in front of a large rectangular mirror. “Put this on,” she said. “And these.” She handed him a green cotton shift and red pumps. Bradley did as he was told, and then he took his seat in the chair at the vanity. “Now Relax. I’m going to apply your makeup.” She then worked for long minutes with brushes, powders and blush, bringing out his features. She drew lines on his eyelids and applied mascara. She attached false eyelashes. “Red or white?” she asked, holding lipstick cylinders.
“Red.”
“Put your head back.”
She darkened his eyes and deepened his profile with the ease and artfulness of a theatrical veteran, and remarkably, through the magic of makeup, his unenhanced bland looks were transformed into the face of a starlet, but with protruding ears.
“Do you have the blonde wig?” he asked.
“Of course.”
She brought out a box with his name on it and withdrew a long-haired blonde wig. She placed it on his head gently, almost formally, a royal investiture, making Bradley feel a tinge of keen excitement. “I think I look stunning,” he said, with uncharacteristic self-assertion. “What do you think?”
“You look like a dream.”
Bradley could hardly contain himself. “What’s next?” he asked, though with too much eagerness, perhaps impertinently, and without permission. His mistress turned cold and rude.
“Brenda! How dare you! You cunt!” She reached for a leather flog, black, with many tentacles. “Get down on your knees!” she commanded. Bradley/Brenda slipped off the stool and on to the floor, eyes radiant with thrall.
And so it began.
For the next three hours he was manacled, scourged, forced to crawl on all fours and lick the boots of his mistress. He was caged in one of the smaller cells along the far wall where other clients were also imprisoned while their respective mistresses joked and gossiped, periodically insulting them, finally releasing them for the next round of mistreatment, rotating through the various rooms and implimenta in a loosely improvisational cavalcade of abuse. He heard one man screaming for mercy, his cries serving only as an occasion for amused derision among the dominants who were chatting and laughing at private jokes. Only the safe word would end the role play; all other expostulations were ignored as part of the eroticized general atmosphere of physical torture and psychological oppression.
In his final hour, Bradley/Brenda was led on a leash to have his snack, meat loaf in a dog dish thoughtfully cut into bite sized bits by his mistress. She filled his water bowl with white wine as a reward for obedient behavior. Then like a spaniel, Bradley/Brenda put his face into the dish and ate until it was licked clean, partaking also of wine. The template was orthodox, food at the end of his ordeal signifying consummation, a burnt offering meant to appease the wrath of inner demons and cleanse the soul. Communicants here were no less troubled by primitive impulses then sinning Christians and, like most Christians, few understood the psychological underpinnings of their blood liturgies. Bradley/Brenda, unworthy penitent in search of expiation, sinner seeking redemption, flagellant, apostle of mortification, author of bleating petitions for mercy from young women he would never know was a lamb among lost sheep of the biblical adage.
“Alright, Brenda. You are released.”
“Thank you, mistress.” Bradley/Brenda sighed.
“Go now.”
“Yes mistress.”
Bradley stood diffidently. With head bowed, lightheaded, lighthearted and weak kneed, he walked out of the main cell block to the showers. There, un-bewigged, mascara running in black streams from his eyes, gripped by an almost paralyzing euphoria, he raised his head in ecstasy. The showerhead rained on him like cleansing falls of holy water in Eden. He had learned the secret of saints and soldiers, that when the sacred and profane occupy the same spaces in spirit every emotion carries equally its opposite attribute. In the moment of pure feeling pain is indistinguishable from pleasure, love indistinguishable from hate, certitude defined by vertigoes of doubt, and redemption discovered in darker reaches of self-abnegation.
He took the elevator down to ground floor. He walked through the lobby door that opened automatically and emerged once again into the living world, where now everything seemed unreal in an atmosphere of tranquil joy. The faces of people in the street were filled with goodness and purpose inspired by benevolent intention. Automobiles and busses appeared free from gridlock and part of a great happy ongoing carnival. A stranger’s smile signified acceptance and love; the purposeful gait of pedestrians portended not frantic self-interest but resolute pursuit of public good. A powerful sense of new freedom felt very like end of war where everything is joyful.
Bradley checked his watch. A roll call would be taken in an hour for a vote on gay marriage that his constituents at home had elected him to defeat. The second amendment was under assault again and his caucus was meeting to thwart gun control. Yet another bill to rescind affordable health care was in the works and he would have to answer critics for his earlier vote against equal pay for women. Bradley hailed a taxi. A yellow cab squealed to a stop and he got in. “The Capitol, please,” he said to the driver, who recognized him.
“Good morning, Congressman.”

From PERSONAL EFFECTS
A novel
By
Tom Casey

The unexpected deaths of David and Kathryn Tobin in a mountaineering accident made it necessary to dispose of their personal effects. There were no immediate relatives competent to do it; Kathryn’s parents were deceased; she had a sister in Alaska, but they weren’t close. David’s mother was a resident in a nursing home and his father was a patient in an asylum; he had a brother in Texas with drug problems who was out of touch with the family. Therefore the task fell to Jeffrey Stevens, the closest friend of the couple. He had been asked by David’s attorney, who was also his attorney, to go to their home and sort through their belongings.
“We’ll make arrangements with a moving company in a few days,” the attorney had told him.
“What will happen to their possessions?”
“Eventually they’ll be sold at auction.”
“Sold at auction?”
“Any items not specifically designated to beneficiaries in their wills.”
“Have you seen their wills?”
“I haven’t reviewed them yet, but I drew them up a few years ago.”
“Do you remember anything exceptional in them?”
“When they moved from New York they revised their previous testament. There were changes in beneficiaries; Kathryn’s father died that year and David’s mother was moved to a full care facility. As I recall there were trusts to secure their future.” The attorney shrugged. “The house will be sold and assets liquidated. In the meantime, it’s a good idea, as a friend, to gather up items that would be of no interest in an estate sale. The need for discretion makes it essential to have someone like you, a close friend, protect their trust.” He paused, adding, “It’s a delicate duty; I think you understand.”
Jeffrey understood.
After leaving the attorney, Jeffrey went back to his boat, a sloop, Moonstruck, moored in the Five Mile River at Rowayton, where in summer he lived aboard. A writer of novels and a minor celebrity in the village, he sat with a glass of wine, watching the movement of sailing vessels in the harbor channel. He tried unsuccessfully to comprehend the enormity of this sudden loss of his best friends, coming less than a year after the death of his fiancé. David was a seasoned climber; it was his passion. Kathryn was less enthusiastic about it, but, naturally athletic, she accompanied him happily enough when time and opportunity allowed.
A butterfly landed on the boom. It rested nervously for a moment and then resumed its flight, circling above the cockpit in a hullabaloo of whirls, and then shooting a straight course for the garden basket on Mrs. Murphy’s kitchen window. He had read that some butterflies migrated thousands of miles each year. Thousands of miles! Jeffrey sipped his wine, wondering what perils a butterfly might expect to meet on a journey like that.

**

The sun was bright in late morning on the first Saturday of May when Jeffrey Stevens turned on to the street where the Tobins had happily lived for many years. As their home came into view, an unexpected discomfort came over him. The neighborhood had that cheerful aspect of spring’s sudden fecundity, one of those quiet and peaceful suburban precincts that feels like happy memories of childhood. Their house, a New England white clapboard cottage with gabled windows and an attached garage, stood as though awaiting their return, but it was Jeffrey who turned into the driveway, parked, switched off the motor and sat silently for a moment with a growing sense of foreboding. Nothing felt right about any of it. When he got out of his car he walked up the flagstone path to the main entrance. He found the false rock by the front door, picked it up and turned it over. His thumb slid the plate back and a hidden key fell into the palm of his hand. He fit the key into the brass keyhole, turned it, and the lock tumbled. He paused for a moment then pushed the door open but lingered outside, an irrational resistance keeping him standing there. The sun disappeared behind a cloud and then reappeared, reconstituting bright colors and defining shadows into the neighborhood’s mosaic of security and optimism.

They had seemed to everyone the perfect couple, and in many ways they were: a psychiatrist and an artist of recognized talent; if you knew them it felt right: a speculative scientist and an abstract impressionist, each deeply involved in the secular spirit of the human experience. Jeffrey had often noted how well they communicated on that non-verbal level possible only when sympathies are intertwined so that the voice of one speaks for the spirit of the other.
They had moved to the suburbs five years earlier. Until then, they had lived happily in New York’s Greenwich Village, on Barrow Street. The move to Darien was a natural progression; this old line Sound shore town forty miles from midtown had a peaceful settled atmosphere. David moved his practice and Kathryn had ample space to establish a studio in the back yard, where she spent her days painting and sculpting.

Still standing at the front door as though waiting for an invitation to enter, Jeffrey could see inside where sunlight falling brightly in the room enhanced a sense of life ongoing. Jeffrey at last entered into their home; dread shaded his mood as the door closed behind him.
Off to the left of the small foyer was the living room; beyond it, to the rear, was the kitchen and dining area. On the right, down a hall that went past the stairs, was David’s study. David’s taste coincided with his own; their furniture was comfortable, unpretentious, and arranged to give a welcoming impression of warmth. These spaces were familiar to Jeffrey; these rooms knew him; as he moved through them he had a sense that the rooms were alive to his presence.
The glassed door to the study was open; Jeffrey went in. It wasn’t a big space, but it had a wide greenhouse window that curved out at the top and overlooked the garden. The garden was well tended and defined with a fieldstone border. Flowers had begun to blossom, and in sunlight their colors seemed to deepen the richness of the green lawn. Beyond the garden to the right was Kathryn’s studio. Old growth elm and sycamore trees gave the yard a woodsy character, and on the far side, in contrast to these, a large weeping willow spread its limbs over a frog pond completing a composition of great natural beauty. On the lawn birds strutted, squirrels gamboled, butterflies tinkerbelled, and in the tweet and twitter of it all, bumble bees hovered over buttercups in the sun. Jeffrey studied the view: freezing to death had nothing to do with this.
He sat down at the desk of his lost friend. From his pocket he withdrew a notebook he habitually carried and began to write: “He died of misjudgment, of hubris. He died stupidly and unnecessarily. He died of a mistaken belief that certain gifts of mind made him immune to nature’s indifference. He was ultimately unwise.”
Jeffrey paused, put down his pen, and stared out the window in abstraction. These were not words he’d intended to write. He’d meant to write something affectionate, a note to himself in a way to express his fondness for both of them. Instead, his hand wrote an angry remonstrance. Well, wasn’t anger a form of regret? Quite without warning tears welled in Jeffrey’s eyes; his friends were gone, this was a fact, but part of him had been lost also.
He stood up suddenly, put away his pen and notebook, and went through old fashioned pocket doors to the adjacent family room, where photos on the wall revealed David’s lean handsome face smiling with its hint of boyish misdemeanor; Kathryn’s dark good looks and the circumspect, somewhat skeptical seriousness of her natural expression. A cluster of framed pictures stood on a table behind the couch: David and Kathryn skiing; David and Kathryn sailing; David and Kathryn at the beach, and in the Rocky Mountains on their first climb. Jeffrey’s thoughts drifted: David and Kathryn dead. This was a notion at odds with evidence everywhere of vigorous life.
Two large oil paintings by Kathryn dominated the wall opposite the fireplace. Jeff had thought the paintings colorful but indecipherable; Kathryn had a more coherent style; but these were favorites of her husband. Jeff speculated that David’s enthusiasm for such art could be correlated to the scattershot verbal effusions of his troubled patients.
Book shelves from floor to ceiling on both sides of the fireplace gave the room particular warmth. These suited Jeffrey’s taste admirably. Here were Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Huysman, Proust, the Brontes, Wilde, Lowry, Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Conrad, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and other writers of fiction arranged on one side roughly according to country and chronology. Then biographies: all of the same writers in several treatments, and others; Boswell’s Johnson; Freud, his complete works; the complete works of Harry Stack Sullivan; the works of Churchill including a shelf devoted to twentieth century history, and many books of Kathryn’s on art and artists. It was a room of erudition, an impressive collection of volumes that had been read and annotated and re-read.
In addition to photographs on the table, black and white photos in black frames covered the best part of one wall. These photographs continued a pictorial story of their life, and Jeffrey and his late fiancé were featured in many of them. A large red and green vegetable dye Persian carpet finished the room with a richness of soft natural tones.
This is clearly a home, Jeffrey thought, turning his head slowly, surveying the room and the good feeling it resonated. The house itself was not large, which was part of its charm. The furnishings and art and objects within were tasteful but not excessive. They had lived, thought Jeffrey, with what Virginia Woolf insisted was all anyone needed: enough space and a few good things.

**

Minutes passed. Jeffrey Stevens contemplated death. His thoughts were indecisive, insistent but unresolved, running in circles the way they hover when you’re half-asleep. The neat composition of the family room, the photographs, paintings and books made a still life of spirit alive with verve. What does it signify when life ends so quickly and with such finality? Jeffrey’s mind reached for elusive meaning. This matter of personal effects implied something, a means to penetrate larger understanding. He and David had endlessly sought larger understanding.
“If you stand back from our culture,” David said one night when they were talking about America, “and view Hollywood as our collective fantasy life, with product advertising as an indicator of our insecurities, we are a nation of sexually and intellectually repressed imbeciles who, when not sedated, seek themselves through automobiles, professional sports, and pornography. Is there anything more ludicrous than a football fan? And pornography amounts to the same thing: you’re not in the game; you’re standing by, peering through a keyhole. Americans are infantile, mired in fantasy.”
Jeffrey recalled David’s speaking manner at these times which, when inspired, was reminiscent of those films of clouds forming over landscapes in fast motion. David was not from the intellectual mainstream, yet it was hard to take issue with him. He was a keen observer, quick to spot a phony argument or a lie: he didn’t suffer fools gladly or otherwise. He was the brightest individual Jeffrey knew, yet, as he now reflected ruefully, he had died unwise. That was a judgment Jeffrey would not want pronounced on himself. The sun came out from behind a cloud and the room brightened suddenly; Jeffrey went back into the study.
The greenhouse window was a nice touch, he thought, peering into the garden. Yellow forsythia, lilacs, violets, daisies, and a host of other early flowers flourished magnificently in the strong sun outside. It was well known that Kathryn had a green thumb. A green thumb, yet she was barren; a barren woman gifted with alternative fecundity: in ironies of life exist a queer balance, abundance in one sphere almost certainly indicating deficit in another. But if Kathryn couldn’t have children, David didn’t want them anyway.
“You’ve never wanted a child of your own?” Jeffrey had asked him once.
“I’ve never felt the parental instinct.” His eyes were honest but Jeffrey was skeptical; he supposed there was more to it than that, but David was content in his childless world with Kathryn. They had been a couple for so long it was impossible to imagine one without the other; the loss of one would have left the other inconsolable, so perhaps it was better that they had perished together.
Coming out of abstraction, Jeffrey Stevens left the study and went back once again into the family room. He stood at the fireplace around which they had passed many fond hours in happy years. How to live? From the window Jeffrey could see down the street where driveways were delineated by mailboxes with signs announcing the names of the inhabitants: the Bradley’s; the Carmichaels, a conceit that struck him in vague ways as ludicrous. What went on behind the closed doors of those homes? The truth of America was its endless pursuit of a dream of perfection embodied in the false enchantments of desire. Happiness was always just out of reach, a newer car away, a bigger home, a second wife or absent that, a pill. A man appeared holding a leaf blower. Jeffrey mused: if you should visit them, their nameplate declared not that you’ve arrived, but that the Bradley’s have. These citadels, he thought, these monuments to unsatisfied needs: America: What did it mean when loneliness was expressed as a three car garage and despair as the evolution of the weed-whacker?

**

Jeffrey had been in the house less than thirty minutes. Clouds were making the sunlight appear and disappear, changing the mood of the rooms suddenly and unpredictably. He noticed the hall light on and turned it off. Something bothered him. With his attention returning to the task at hand, it seemed suddenly an extraordinary responsibility. It was a duty of discretion, as the attorney had implied, but his emotions were brimming. It was inconceivable that David and Kathryn were dead. In the kitchen he noticed two coffee cups in the sink; one of them had a faint lipstick mark on it. They had left this place nine days ago and they would never return to it. Everything he saw was electric with that part of them not yet dead; everything he touched therefore, or rearranged, instantly corrupted their imprimatur with his own, subtracting from the evidence of their having existed at all. The truth was he had been asked to further annihilate them.

In the days when they both lived in New York, Jeffrey and David frequently met to walk in Central Park to keep off cabin fever. At the zoo red pandas in trees stared at them like intelligent life from a different planet.
“Do you suppose they know where they are?” Jeffrey mused.
“Do we?”
They continued slowly down from the pandas toward the arctic cage where the polar bear, unmighty on his rock, regarded them with the bored contempt of a seasoned captive. From there they went to the sea lions and watched them swim in circles, doing rolls under water and leaping over rocks with astonishing grace.
The two men exited the zoo and walked along a path that circled north toward the center of the park. The air was saturated and chill: winter muted the furious energy of the city; Jeffrey shivered. “It’s getting colder.” He pulled up his collar.
“It’s the mist. But it’s good to get out of the apartment. I don’t walk enough in winter. Inactivity invites depression.” David turned to Jeffrey with a scrutinizing expression. “You seem a little down.”
Jeff’s eyebrows rose with resignation to the query, and then he gave David a confiding smile. “I’m in one of those funks where time passes quickly but I’m living in slow motion,” He relished his friend’s perception. “I’m in between projects. I should probably take a vacation, but I don’t like to leave Fiona.”
“I’m sorry for her and for you. What’s happening is wrong, Jeff.”
“It’s been six months since the accident. Six months of life support — supporting what?” Jeffrey’s face darkened with incredulity, anger and grief. Fiona loved the outdoors; she loved to walk; she loved to drive her car. Jeffrey remembered a day they spent together hiking in the Appalachians just before her accident. They had driven from New York to the Delaware Water Gap, where paths into the woods led up the mountain high above the river. There was a map at the start of the walk. Four miles in was a glacial lake called Sunfish Pond. They hiked all morning, following the trail through forest canopy and rock formations, past camp sites and along cliffs that looked out across the lower lands. Jeffrey vividly recalled Fiona’s strong legs, her muscles, the sinuous lines of her body as she took steps on uneven ground like a fine animal. The sun was blocked by canopy, and that gave the woods a cathedral effect; the enfolding path led them up into hidden worlds where birds made music that echoed in the rocks. The surroundings were poetic; walking had an erotic charge, and when they reached Sunfish Pond, emerging from the woods into the sun shining brightly on its green waters, they stood together in silent accord.
They swam naked in the chill waters; submersion had that sacramental effect on spirit, cooling them, cleansing them, sealing the bond between them. And they kissed in the sunshine, standing in the shallows; this private ritual of union adumbrating marriage, witnessed by squirrels, by birds, by chipmunks, bees and serpents. In a week’s time this dream was over; a drunken driver made her a living corpse.
“She could be on life support forever, and precisely what moral principle does this serve?”
“None. Technology has outdistanced the ethical dialogue, religious at its base. This is America.”
“The stupid cruelty of it leaves me breathless,” Jeffrey said. The subject had no answer. David let silence intervene to calm Jeffrey. They continued walking.
Two mounted policeman appeared in the fog, their equestrian dignity in great contrast to the cop in a squad car. David mused: “A hundred years ago human beings were, for the most part, riding on the backs of beasts.”
“We’ve seen big changes in a hundred years.”
“Where is it taking us?”
The two friends walked silently for a while, comfortable in their thoughts. Fog made observable advances through the trees and along the paths; a veil of mist lowered and raised up; objects appeared and disappeared giving the park an aspect of mystery oddly comforting for that immunity from harm one feels in close familiar places.
David’s aspect changed slightly as a thought occurred to him; he turned to Jeff and spoke through a faint grin. “I notice you don’t wear a watch anymore.”
Jeffrey shrugged, “Every cell phone is a pocket watch.”
“Some men like the heft of a Rolex Presidential.”
Jeff smiled through pursed lips.
“How old were you when you became aware of time?” David asked.
“Five or six, I guess. Why?”
“There are two large epiphanies in childhood: becoming aware of time is one of them.”
“What’s the other?”
“Telling your first successful lie.”
Jeffrey laughed. “I don’t remember my first lie, but I do remember very clearly asking God, in a prayer, not to let me get older than five years old.”
“What frightened you so?”
“I had become aware suddenly that I was part of a process much larger than I had supposed, and that it had something to do with time.” Jeffrey noticed that the tops of buildings across the park had disappeared into the fog.
David said, “What did you fear?” He turned his head to look directly at Jeffrey as they walked, a signal that he was listening closely.
“I didn’t want to start kindergarten. I feared change.”
“Tell me what you remember about the thoughts you had.”
“You sound like a psychiatrist.”
David smiled. “Should that surprise you?”
Jeffrey’s expression grew reflective. “It was the first instance I can recall of thinking abstractly. Time was invisible and everywhere at once; it could be measured but not touched; it was involved in the cause and result of everything, but was not a material part of anything. It was something you were in: in time I would start school; in time I would learn to read; in time I would grow up; in time I would have to establish a family of my own; in time I would learn how these formidable tasks were accomplished. But the sudden certainty that time would put me up against all this overwhelmed my belief that I could meet any of these challenges.”
“It’s a lot for five year old to absorb.”
“So I prayed to God to stop time,” Jeffrey laughed.
“He didn’t hear your prayer?”
“Even as I prayed I knew my prayers were certain to go unanswered. I didn’t believe in God.”
“Not then?”
“Not then, not now, not ever. And yet suddenly, in this abstract frame of mind, I began to wonder about this concept of an unseen power so many seemed to embrace: maybe Time was God because they shared so many similarities; both were invisible and ubiquitous, causal, and so on. It got very confusing and frightening because I was alone in a new world given to me by my own original thoughts. And I became sure of something: time would have it that one day I would grow apart from my parents and be forced to live among strangers. The next day I thought about how I’d better begin to find a wife.”
“At five years old?”
“I felt I had to make a beginning. I put on a red cowboy hat and walked up and down the street looking for a suitable girl.”
David’s amused aspect became contemplative. “If you could sum up that boy in one word,” he said, “what would it be?”
“Ambitious.”
“Yes! Exactly! And so you see the burden insight brings even to a five year old.” Consternation passed through David’s features like a brief breeze; he was threading thoughts. “But I’m curious. What is behind your disinclination to wear a watch?”
“It’s my rebellion against the sway of time; a willful denial; a way of giving the finger to death I think.”
“And God, too?”
Jeffrey shrugged and laughed. “Very good, doctor.”
The two friends strolled in the direction of the poet’s walk. A statue of William Shakespeare stood at the head of the tree-lined promenade. They paused to look down the line of tall leafless American elm trees shrouded in fog that gave the promenade a proscenium aspect, life as a play within a dream.
They walked on in silence, and then David said, “I’m curious. Do you find it easier to write as you get older?”
Jeffrey, aware of David’s thwarted efforts, found it hard to explain the act of writing. The difficulties answered to no formula or devise that would explain how obstacles to inspiration were overcome, mysteries that only the artist himself could solve as he met each one separately during the effort. But there were analogies he could offer.
“Writing a novel is like having a love affair, one that will fail after truths you are obliged to face exert their force. The further along you go the more pain you feel: the pleasures are keen and intense, however; it’s a rocket ride. The price of success is the degree of truth you can identify and the amount of pain you’re willing to endure for the pleasures of the game. It’s quite exhausting on every level.”
“Talent is a fragile gift,” David said.
“Or curse. I haven’t decided which yet.”
“Is that how you experience the process?”
“I might tell you something different on another day, but the Muse is a fickle mistress; you will be given exquisite moments, and then be abandoned suddenly in a crisis. A muse unlocks emotions.” And he might have continued and said they were often painful emotions; often the muse was a bitch of accusation and complaint, a mistreater; unavailable when needed, appearing at inconvenient times, conniving, sometimes rather stupid, often unreasoning and critical, yet always compelling, sublimely erotic and in conference with death. The writer compensated for these glaring inconsistencies with his imagination: all writers are revisionists. Sometimes, rashly, the writer found a woman who embodied his insufficiencies and made her a part of his life. He did this in order to hold on to an ideal, much as the mechanic who has broken machines in his yard sees materials as perfectible. Life must be perfectible: writers, like gamblers, are optimists.
“Do you grieve when you’re finished a book, when the affair ends, so to speak?” David was speaking in earnest.
“Yes, I suppose,” Jeffrey smiled, “But one also wants to get on to the next thing. It’s not so different from your relationship with patients, I imagine; in the end, you have to let them go, but by working through problems together you have grown in understanding.”
“You’re a Freudian,” David teased, “You just don’t acknowledge it.”
“I’m nothing of the kind,” Jeffrey objected, “I resist orthodoxies.”
“You think like a Freudian.”
Jeffrey waved the comment away, “But I’ll agree that truth hides in what we fear. I write about what frightens me. I write to know what my fears are.”
David said, “I think it was Aniis Nin who wrote, ‘Psychology tries to reestablish the basis of life not on ideals, but on sincerity with one’s self.’ We’re always feeling for our contours. Fears loom large.”
Jeffrey scratched his temple as he thought about that. Then he said, “You are what you think about doing, what you do, and how you feel about having done it.”
“Or what you are unable to do, and how you feel about that.”
David’s gaze fell on a pigeon; he watched the pigeon peck at the pavement and his mind picked up a new train of thought; he paused; a half-smile appeared on his face. “You and I are not so different in one aspect of our professions,” he said. “I spend long hours with patients who come to therapy with warped notions about themselves and the world; I give them guidance to a brighter view of both. Your course is just opposite: You invent characters with a brighter view, put them in a warped world of your own devising and watch them disintegrate in disillusionment.”
“Or grow through the challenges they survive.”
They were approaching the balustrades of the Bethesda Terrace and the Moorish design surrounding the fountain that magically integrates the pastoral view of the lake into its effect. David seemed about to say something, but he had a second thought and waved off the first.
“You have an artistic sentiment that can bring significance to living acts that otherwise have no meaning; you’re able to articulate emotions, create characters and explore the human condition with a pen. It’s an ultimate way of playing.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing enough with my life.”
David paused, leaned against the balustrade to look at the lake, and then turned to Jeff. “Trust me, you’re doing fine.”
David was musing; his expression registered traces of irony and humor. “I started out as a person who wanted to change the world and ended up as someone who helps people who want to change their lives.”
Jeffrey turned to his friend and laughed, “Which changes the world.”
“In small and inglorious ways.”
“Small inglorious acts have a large reverberation. And who needs glory anyway?”
“I guess that’s my point. As a therapist, I have a modest influence on the few. As a writer you have a greater influence on the many. We’re both helping to create better lives, more truthful lives.”
“On good days I like to think so.”
David put his hand on Jeffrey’s shoulder, “Nobody’s going to name a building after us, but maybe we represent a quiet revolution.”
They began to walk again, down the steps from the terrace to the fountain and then to the right, following a path up to the Boathouse for a glass of wine. The restaurant was at a lull but the bar inside had a number of patrons drinking and talking. After the wintry landscape a roaring fire was particularly cheerful. The two men sat together silently.

DYNASTY
A SHORT STORY
By
Tom Casey

Po Chin lived for twenty years on the edge of a rainforest in a village one hundred miles north of the city of Makassar. His grandfather was an intimate of Sun Yat-sen, and had amassed a fortune in the early part of the century. His father, a Christian, had an austere temperament and stood fast against expropriation of family holdings during the thirties and forties. Then Po Chin assumed the mantel. When the Kuomintang government was turned out in l949, and Mao Zedong launched the Three and Five Antis Movement against industrialists, Po Chin was forced to leave Shanghai or face incarceration.
As a young man Po Chin tended toward extravagance and he was prone to indulgent western notions. He was not without the intelligence, guile, and industry of his forebears, it was only that he put these gifts to unexalted ends. In a word, he was a sensualist. Educated in England, he migrated to Hong Kong and thrived as a trader until he fled the city under duress. An enraged parent had given testimony to the Prefect of Police that his underage daughter had been seduced by Po Chin. These facts of his life were generally known to the villagers.
Even into old age Po Chin had a taste for very young women. The life he led within the walls of his home was a source of mystery and speculation. Always there were many women. Legend allows that they were well cared for while they remained in his compound, and he sent them away to privileged schools in Europe when they were of an age for secondary education or the university. He was an educated man, and believed in education, and any kindness was within his means. Altogether he had established, in exile, paradise of a sort.
But what were his thoughts when, one evening, kidnappers appeared from out of the darkness. A private man of independent spirit, surely he was shocked by the rabble at his door, some forty strong, insolently chanting and reviling his name. Who were they? What did they want? At first he felt no fear. Perhaps the onset of fear came when it dawned on him, as they mounted his steps, that the age of the oldest attacker could be reckoned at not over twelve. Yes, it must have been then. But by that time he was engulfed, dragged down from the portico, his world a crashing confusion of legs and fists and blows as they pulled him along the macadam drive, and then over rocks and sticks, and through the mud, to a place where they beat him fiercely. He struggled fanatically, screaming obscenities in Chinese; but his screaming and struggling only excited a brute response from his captors, who hovered and huddled over him in the darkness, their voices harsh and strident as they vied for a turn to strike at him. Soon he was limp from the beating they gave him, and a chorus of hoorays! erupted, and after a short discussion among the leaders, he was carried quietly away. The eternal moon shone through the trees.
He fell asleep in the peaceful embrace of a woman, darkness enfolding, and a dream at first sublime inverted suddenly; Po Chin awakened slowly from sunny landscapes of his childhood in Shanghai to sensations of pain, to consciousness once again, to awareness of outrage and terror. His eyes opened to inimical eyes in darkness, and shouts of wild hatred. His arms were spread and he was aware of being restrained. The gravity of his situation dawned in panic. He was being held in a lumber shed, and…they had nailed him to the wall.
A young boy slapped his face. A cheer resounded. Made bold, others had their turn. A young girl of eleven or twelve spit at him like a cat; another kicked him in the shin; yet another punched him hard in his genitals. These events were unfolding too rapidly to have credibility. Only an hour before he was resting in his library, a night like others, with less excitement than most.
Torches had been planted, and the pungent odor of oil and creosote seemed to sweat out of the malignant spirit in the room—jagged bouncing shadows mocked him.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Those were his last incredulous words, whimpered, according to rumors. An autopsy reported that death came from a knife wound in the heart, but he suffered a thousand cuts before his last breath. His body was reported still unpried when they found him, and various epithets–seducer, devil, running dog demon–were written on the floor, a crude calligraphy in blood.
“May his soul never rest in peace,” said a young woman, Mei Ling, to her friend Ping Si. Their children played nearby under a leafy tree. Antic laughter filled the air in contrast to the swift grim movements of authorities beyond the cordon.
Occasionally, the leader of the removal squad turned and met their eyes, but he remained of a somber aspect. Mei Ling and Ping Si watched from curiosity, and from an unspoken desire to bear witness. At last, the body was carried out. Four uniformed officials labored down a short flight of wooden stairs. They stepped gingerly, muttering and cautious. The corpse was prone on a stretcher, covered. The door to the ambulance slammed shut. It drove away without urgency or clamor. Then the shed was sealed and a notice of no entry affixed to the door. The leader made a final inspection of the shed, and, satisfied that it was secure, turned to Mei Ling and Ping Si. By way of acknowledging their vigil, his glance moved to their children, and then back to the two mothers once again.
“He was a blight,” said Mei Ling with a bitterness that Ping Si did not share.
“Mamma, I want to go home,” said Ping Si’s daughter, sensing that her mother could be drawn away.
“We will go home,” she said. “Come.”
The two mothers gathered their children and walked along a wide path toward the village. Their village was a Chinese enclave on the island of Celebes. The Great Leap Forward Campaign had resulted in catastrophic economic collapse, and many families fled Shanghai at that time to avoid starvation.
“Many changes are happening at home,” said Mei Ling, “There is news of a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Their will be no wealthy class.”
Ping Si was silent. She, too, had heard news from China.
For Ping Si there was nothing intrinsically good or bad, virtuous or ignoble, nourishing to the spirit or contemptible about wealth; hadn’t he always said it was only one means of class distinction, and surely the among the crudest? Yet, where poverty exists, she had seen that wealth imparts an imperishable mystique onto those few who are believed to have riches. And she saw that propaganda sought to ignite class hatreds, not for virtue’s sake, but for political expediency, just as he’d said.
“But why applaud or dishonor according to who is thought to have wealth?” said Ping Si. “I find that degrading.”
“Is it not degrading to be victimized by the wealthy class?” said Mei Ling with surprising vituperation. Her son ran ahead with Ping Si’s daughter and she called after him to remain within sight. Then, alluding to the events they had just witnessed, Mei Ling said, “Did not Po Chin die justly?”
Later, it was alleged that for years the police had been in his employ, and that they turned their head at his convenience. That may be true. And he was an unabashed capitalist, conspicuously successful in a village of red refugees. He had stopped paying attention to politics. It may be true—there was some speculation—that his murder was instigated by some of the parents of his courtesans, for they were always very young, and he was very old. Perhaps a bargain they struck too readily haunted their pride with remorse, and they came to blame him for corrupting them also. It would be hard to say. In any case, not a single participant in the episode was prosecuted. Indeed, the investigation was swift and inconclusive, the case rapidly closed, and the properties of Po Chin remaindered to the state.
Ping Si sat on the porch of her small bamboo home and watched her daughter play in the yard. The most curious aspect to Po Chin’s horrible manner of death was not only that he was murdered by children, but that, if whispers can be taken for truth, many of the children were his own.

“We’re losing power.”
John Gasho, Sr. was flying in the left seat. Silvia Erskine was sitting behind him. I was in the right seat on the radio to Columbus Approach Control and had just announced our position and altitude, 25 miles north of Dayton, Ohio, eastbound at 5,500 feet. This was the third day and fourth leg of a trip from Tucson, Arizona to Danbury, Connecticut. N7026C, a rare twin engine Grumman HU-16A Albatross amphibious flying boat, had seen the completion of a three year restoration, some 12,000 hours of painstaking work on its airframe, props and engines. The flight from Tucson to Perryton, Texas had been flawless. From Perryton we intended to fly to St. Louis, but a line of thunderstorms cut through Springfield, Missouri on our flight path and we landed at Joplin instead.
“The left engine is quitting,” John said, looking outside to check the cowling for leaks. I glanced at the instruments. The engine was still running but the RPM had decayed. The turn and bank indicator showed a skid. John engaged the rudder boost, bringing hydraulic pressure to the operation of the rudder necessary to remain in coordinated flight against asymmetry. It is not uncommon to experience discrepancies after a major restoration. The number 1 RPM indicator had failed en route during the leg from Texas to Missouri, but in Joplin good fortune: a cross-reference of part numbers allowed the installation of a new RPM transmitter. We continued to Indianapolis in the morning. This, however, was something more serious.
John turned to me. “I think we should feather it.” That meant shutting it down. I nodded assent.
“I’ve got the airplane,” I said, and as owner I took the control wheel in hand to assume command. John then accomplished the engine failure checklist while I flew. He moved the throttle to idle and the fuel mixture to cutoff. Pressing the feather button made the left propeller blades rapidly angle into the wind and the engine stopped turning immediately. I advanced power on the right throttle to compensate for the lost thrust and trimmed the airplane for coordinated level flight. Stabilized, we looked for an airport suitable for landing.
Any pilot who flies it will tell you the Albatross has exceptional virtues, palpable in the feel of the ship in your hands. It is the feel of aviation history; you are responding to sights and sounds no longer seen or heard, sensations no longer felt. There is high romance in the idea of a ship that can fly off the water and into the air to course among clouds above the land and oceans. This was the first dream of air travel. Pan American flying boats were the Clipper Ships of the air age. Captains of Clippers were pioneer pilots. Passengers too were pioneers, traveling through days and nights aloft, sometimes through storms, landing in lagoons and yet finding first class accommodations waiting for them two thousand miles from anywhere. The Clipper stood for unfathomed possibilities, travel to faraway places and exotic adventure with a certain amount of risk as part of the thrill.

Pan Am American Clipper

Postscript: In my three decades as a pilot with American Airlines I spent over 16 years as a flight instructor in my off time specializing in teaching the intricacies of operating the Albatross Flying Boat in the air and on the water. My long association with the Albatross began in the 1980s when I saw one land in the harbor and come up the ramp at Paradise Island in the Bahamas. In my novel, STRANGERS’ GATE, I wrote about its mystique: “I knew the Albatross and respected its beauty and function. There are some objects made by human hands that combine art and utility in near perfect balance, where competing considerations of design intersect at the object’s truth, so to speak. The Albatross was an airplane but it was also a sixty-foot yacht, with a seven-plus foot beam and a ninety-six foot wingspan impressive to behold. It had truth; anyone could see that right away; it had the high dignity of a schooner under full sail, and something of the majesty of, say, the Queen Mary.”
Love at first sight.
–Tom Casey

David Lynch stimulates creative inquiry. Watch this youtube posting and then enjoy the essay, which I invite any writer, lover of films or fan of David Lynch to expand on.

AN ESSAY
By
Tom Casey

Oscar Wilde said, “When the critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.” This is particularly true for David Lynch. He remains vague about his work, and most of his fans can’t articulate why they are moved by it. Film critics won’t say they understand him, using broad terms like “post-Freudian” or “impressionistic”, avoiding in most cases any attempt at exegesis. Something is happening but nobody seems to know what it is.

Lynch is difficult because he is original; his work escapes easy understanding because he makes demands on his audience. To enter his world and keep it legible requires knowledge of the American experience and psychology. He takes meticulous care to fabricate an atmosphere that is, culturally speaking, a collation. At times the music is not our music, the clothes are none we wear, the behavioral idiom is out of pace, yet we see ourselves. Strange at the beginning, by turns exaggerated and contrived, and by the end stranger than anything we could have imagined, his world is finally recognizable as our own. If genius is the ability to make connections, David Lynch is a genius of film who connects the process of inner experience to the objects and individuals from without that mold and influence it.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a film preoccupied with identity. On its surface, it is the story of a young woman who won a dance contest and a chance to have a Hollywood audition. Though by no means clear until much later in the film, she has mediocre talent and falls prey to destructive seductions that turn her dream into a nightmare and destroy her. But what Lynch has done with this Hollywood cliché is magical. It’s all in the telling: his trick is to hide his story by cryptically putting it right in front of you. He tells you what he’s doing while he’s doing it, knowing that, time after time, the viewer’s conventional expectations will lead to wrong conclusions, raising the level of confusion and suspense.

Like BLUE VELVET, MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a mystery. Each of Lynch’s characters is in pursuit of something—Betty of her dream, Rita of her identity, Adam of his autonomy. Each story is compelling as Lynch makes it unfold, but it is from an emotional rather than a rational language of meaning that these characters are depicted. This is important to realize; it’s why Lynch is unintelligible to so many. Without Freudian understanding, the depth of his insight and the richness of his art cannot be comprehended consciously. The meticulous clues that he puts before you—sometimes literally in your face—will be misread or overlooked.

Not that that matters to David Lynch. His films leave audiences reeling because he specifically addresses himself to the unconscious. When he misses, Lynch still conveys a vision of rich texture. DUNE, WILD AT HEART, and LOST HIGHWAY are lesser achievements. He walks a fine line. These films can seem like the rant of a madman, eerie for a truth hidden in voluble nonsense, but they are unmistakably the product of David Lynch.

When he hits, the result is stellar. BLUE VELVET is his brilliant success; MULHOLLAND DRIVE is his masterpiece. These films work because at their core is an essence about us as human beings. BLUE VELVET, an Oedipal allegory, takes a tour through the mindscapes of sex and guilt in a young man processing the shock of his father’s heart attack. MULHOLLAND DRIVE similarly works from the inside out, but it’s canvass is much larger, challenging the validity of American optimism. By using the metaphor of dreams, he exults in the conflict between the ideal of Hollywood as a dream machine, and the corrosive realities of life.

Dreams, their compressed images, elaborate distortions, and inherent psychopathology are grist for Lynch. Dreams can be beautiful and turn terrifying. Dreams always express a wish, often reversing facts of the waking world. More importantly, as Freud insisted, the dream is the dreamer. Hollywood creates the dreams of our culture, projecting the sex and violence of our collective Id. Id is very much the springboard for David Lynch.

For most of the entire film, MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a dream being dreamt by a young aspiring actress named Betty. This is not explicit, though in typical fashion Lynch has put it subtly in front of us: in the opening scene the camera plays on a pillow and we hear the sound of a person sleeping out of range. In a subsequent scene Betty says, “This is the place of dreams.”

Then the camera follows a limousine traveling at night on Mulholland Drive. It soon becomes a hearse of sorts, and that subliminal impression, once planted, remains. Throughout the film/Betty’s dream, the characters and their actions must often be inverted to understand their interplay as continuous to the fabric of the story. By this calculus it is Betty, not Rita, who is searching for her identity, and the story of Betty’s triumphant audition is her wish that she had not, in reality, failed. When Adam, the director, meets her eyes and seems to fall in love with her, we should suspect the truth is his indifference. When Rita begins to sense that she is responsible for a murder, Freud’s delineation of dreamwork points to Betty. In dreams, manifest content masks latent meaning; there are layers and layers.

Dreams are constructed from images of waking life: we later discover the sources of Betty’s dream material: the dark angular man in the diner, the waitress’s name tag, a blue key, are reproduced in Betty’s dream with a significance they did not have when she casually encountered them. But we don’t know that to begin with. We do know that walls, doors, windows, boxes, and bed are the symbols of Betty’s entrapment. Violence, tempered in her dream as cartoon gangsters shorn of their menace through slapstick, should be viewed with foreboding, for everything is its opposite. Gangsters are Hollywood; the Cowboy is also Hollywood, but here too, his mythic strength is denatured. He is cast as a betrayer who speaks for the mob’s insistence on Camilla for a starring role (against the dream’s Betty/Rita). Ridiculed relentlessly by Adam and so stripped of his status as icon, the Cowboy is not a benign protector, rather he seems more a genderless demon who awakens Betty/Diane to what we shortly learn is Diane’s horrible reality.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE is consistently true to its vision, and so honest in its manner of expression that Lynch can have his characters do anything that human beings are capable of doing and never seem gratuitous. The lesbian affair between Betty and Rita is as credible in the dream as it seems in reality between Diane and Camilla. There are no ideal overtones in the real relationship, which is in fact a destructive union riven with ungovernable passions. In one of the last scenes Diane masturbates furiously, missing her orgasm repeatedly as a final frustration before the barrier to guilt gives way and parental homunculi creep under the doorway, exploding into the room as an Id-fueled horror of accusation.

There are many scenes that bring this film up. Silencio, the Satanic theater where Betty and Rita are introduced to the end of illusions, is a hall of grief, where truth and the immanence of death are presented as the seductive lie of prerecording. Rebekah Del Rio sings Roy Orbison’s “Crying” a capela in Spanish, a lament of lost love and lost dreams. Death, as the end of relationships, as willful insistence on delusion, as the vagrant visage in his dark squalor, finally takes possession of all secrets.

The actors are superb. Naomi Watts (Betty) takes your breath away as Lynch gives her talent full range. Justin Theroux as Adam and Laura Elena Harring as Rita give Hollywood its full twinkle of hollow glamour. Proust wrote that there is no access to something original because, by virtue of its originality, it defies analysis, it can only stand apart with a life of its own as a reference to subsequent works that may evolve under its influence. “In short, this art which is so complicated is in fact the only living art. It alone expresses for others and renders visible to ourselves that life of ours that cannot effectually observe itself and of which the observable manifestations need to be translated and, often, to be read backwards and laboriously deciphered.”

David Lynch is such an artist, and MULHOLLAND DRIVE is such a film. Any attempt to force his meaning will fail; he will not be understood too quickly, and perhaps never in the same way by different viewers. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare, all we can hope for in time is to be wrong about him in a new way.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air however slight lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
William O. Douglas, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

A Meditation

By Tom Casey

EAA has lost its soul. Or maybe it’s America.

The Experimental Aircraft Association holds its annual fly-in at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh Wisconsin each year toward the end of July. It is the largest event of its kind in the world, and was originally intended as an occasion for home-built aircraft makers to meet and share the successes, failures and difficulties encountered in their ambitious and fascinating avocation. The air show was meant to be a showcase for the efforts of member homebuilders, and also a celebration of the history of aviation. The weeklong event attracts pilots and their families from all parts of the country and from many parts of the world.

Attendees arrive with happy expectations; they camp under the wings of their airplanes and renew friendships and acquaintanceships of long standing. There are static displays of celebrated aircraft, many home built, and this year aviation’s greatest designer, Burt Rutan, brought his history making creations for the general population to see: the GlobalFlyer, the first aircraft to carry a person solo around the world without refueling, and SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded and manned vehicle to leave earth’s atmosphere.

The crowd ambles through these impressive examples of aviation genius, and through the pavilions where home built kits and parts and other aviation-related technologies are available to see and purchase. The grounds are spotless; the showers and sanitary facilities are abundant and meticulously kept. There are food cafés and tents for lectures that take place throughout the week, and something called Theater in the Woods, where the week began with Scott Crossfield of X-15 fame and Mike Melvill, astronaut on SpaceShipOne, sharing their experiences; there is the Young Eagles program for teenagers, “KidVenture”, where younger children are taught to build models of airplanes and rockets, and even a program to promote aviation among the disabled. These activities and programs are the natural spawn of dynamic, thoughtful and proactive individuals dedicated to safety and excellence in their field. If all of this is good about EAA, what is bad?

I arrived on the first day of AirVenture as a crewmember in a Grumman Albatross amphibious flying boat. This is a large antique airplane comparable in size and vintage to a DC-3. Small private planes, experimental home-builts, ultralights, and other flying machines arrived throughout the week, each type directed to a parking place, usually with others of the same or similar models: for example, biplanes are parked with other biplanes. We were listed among so called “warbirds,” because the Albatross served as a search and rescue aircraft during its tenure in the military inventory, mostly during the 1950’s and 60’s. Warbirds is a general designation, but usually meant to refer to American bombers and fighter planes of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. These often stunning restorations are the work of groups or individuals with varying motivations. One stand-out at AirVenture this year was Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning exhumed from a two-hundred-fifty-foot depth of ice. A restored and updated Dornier tri-motor turboprop flying boat was another rare bird parked next to a recreated Sikorsky twin S-39. The owners of these rare aircraft fly them to AirVenture so that pilots and enthusiasts may see them at close range and share stories.

It is worth noting that the EAA and AirVenture operates as a non-profit organization by the Pobereznys, founder Paul, who is retired, and son Tom, who is currently its president. It is also worth noting that nearly the entire fly-in is manned by volunteers, and that except for professional aerobatic show pilots and their planes, all the restorations invited to participate in various show events are unremunerated. Maintenance is provided by volunteers. Fuel is not provided to participants, though it is available for $3.00 per gallon by local vendors.

And so almost everybody is volunteering time, money, airplanes, piloting and maintenance skills for the benefit of the many fine programs sponsored by the EAA, for the AirVenture event itself, and not insignificantly, for the Pobereznys.

The cost value of this volunteer contribution is incalculable; indeed, the event would not exist without it. For those who understand the tax benefit that obtains for non-profit entities, the advantage of volunteerism at AirVenture can legitimately be compared to the gains of tithing to the church or slavery to the plantation. Volunteers are not slaves, of course; their efforts come as willingly as that portion of their paycheck put into the donation basket each Sunday. These are, for the most, part good people brought to a good cause they feel is worth their time and generosity.

There is, however, a dark, if not cynical implication to AirVenture perhaps more evident in these times. History celebrated here through the lens of aviation might be considered at best rose colored, at worst negligent of larger truth. Behind the meticulous crowd control and sunny summer glimmer of families whiling away a vacation week is something that infuses the mood from without, something insidious from attitudes past and present in American history that reflects the larger America not in attendance.

If the original intent of the Experimental Aircraft Association was to form an association of experimental aircraft builders and their aircraft, curiously and conspicuously none were seen in formal flying displays. Unseen at AirVenture during the flying portion of the daily air shows were examples seen on the ground in static displays: Acrosport, Glasair, RV, Velocity, Harmon Rocket, Legend, Wichawk, Aerocomp, and many others. Instead of celebrating the genius in these modest designs, the air show, day after day, featured instead a panoply of bombers, fighters, and World War II trainers, an F-4 Phantom from the Vietnam era, and an F-16 of recent times. This is not new at Oshkosh, and most people in the crowd are happy to see these restorations and hear their motors rumbling in impressive formations. It is commonly seen as a tribute to those who lost their lives defending our country, and a celebration of the glory of victory. These fly-bys are followed by competition aerobatics, where restored and experimental aircraft are flown in competition by the best aerial athletes in the world. Why should any of this highly entertaining display bring pause?

As I wondered why I was not seeing home-built aircraft featured in the flying portion of the air show, I wandered beyond a no-pass line. The line, defined for safety reasons by the FAA during the air show, was manned by Civil Air Patrol volunteers. Except for their youth and that they were unarmed, these volunteers were dressed in full military field camouflage, replete with utility belt, flashlight and canteen, and were indistinguishable from army infantry.

“Sir! Excuse me, Sir!” A military figure sprung up suddenly from a kneeling position began walking toward me with alarming zeal. “You can’t go beyond this line, sir.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I was looking up.”

“That’s alright, sir.” When I stepped back without further comment he relaxed: he saw I meant him no disobedience.

The presence of these uniformed Civil Air Patrol volunteers gave me a chill. The “sir” he used was the politesse of authoritarianism. I thought of myself at seventeen and made comparisons; I could find few.

The missing man formation passed overhead, the very formation that, in cruel irony, found one of its participants missing. Waiting to fly in the segment, Dick James, who had suffered an apparent incapacity, crashed and had been killed.

I did not know at the time that the missing man formation was in truth missing a man, something that transcended symbolism and touched at truth poignantly, I only reflected on the solemn exhibition which was the airshow’s most honest as a meaningful salute to honored dead.

Is there a greater tragedy than war? This week the first citizen of Oshkosh was killed in Iraq, a twenty-eight year old husband and father. 405,399 Americans lost their lives in World War II. That war, chaotic and destructive as it was, is considered by history to have been necessary. But tens of thousands of Americans have lost their lives in wars since, wars fed by policies later abandoned as barren. Korea was not a war, but a “police action” though the soldiers who fought in it didn’t know the difference. Robert MacNamara, Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, acknowledges today that America’s waging of war against the North Vietnamese was, in retrospect, ill-considered. As an F-4 fighter thundered overhead at AirVenture, I thought of the dead, dismembered and dispossessed Americans and Vietnamese on both sides that were annihilated. I wondered what the honored dead would think of the narrations of the glory of firepower that accompanied the fly-by of warbirds at AirVenture this year; I wondered what they might look like if we could see them reflected in the mirror bright finish of the warplanes they knew, now owned by privileged citizens, many of whom are not veterans, most of whom have never seen combat: in their heavenly omniscience, deprived of lives they might have lived, what would they think of the spectacle before them?

There is a deep strain of patriotism at AirVenture, but it takes a narrow view. Remembering the dead of war must include the loss of innocent victims as well; brave soldiers who died for the cause of freedom should be honored, but war should never be celebrated; war should be lamented as a failure of civilized man to overcome his animal nature. After Germany, no nation is immune to travesty. But we don’t believe it.

What hold has history on lessons learned from horrors? The spectacle of war reenactment enthusiasts dressed up in Nazi uniforms of the Waffen SS standing in front of a Junkers Tri-motor with a swastika on the tail made me think that even World War II, for all its bloodshed and evil, has been slowly transformed by bland nostalgia into a circus. With that thought, I began to look more closely at the atmosphere at AirVenture, and why I was feeling unsettled in the midst of it.

I began to notice jeeps with machine guns mounted on the hoods; these were the war reenactment group bringing verisimilitude of battle to the grounds of AirVenture. I spoke individually with Civil Air Patrol partisans, who told me you could join ranks in the sixth grade. They marched to breakfast in formations each morning singing military chants. How wholesome is this sort of inculcation? Why has the cult of war seized the imagination of these people so profoundly?

The day after Dick James was killed in his P-51 there was no mention of it in the EAA News, the daily publication of AirVenture that reports on the previous day’s activities, an observation that made me reflect that there is no bad news in a fascist state. In fact, the more I thought about it, AirVenture was a microcosm run on fascist principles of cleanliness and order. Were my gathering impressions subversive? Was it appropriate to argue against order and cleanliness, sobriety and obedience? Where is the line to be drawn?

Well, that is precisely the question, and the answer to it defines our notions of freedom. Freedom comes at a price that must resist fear…of freedom. There are analogies: safety, for example, can be argued into agoraphobia; there must be a point where individual freedom acknowledges responsibility without the intervention of authority. But here fear, dressed in military fatigues, touched patriotism with a nailed on smile, and there was religion in it just below the surface.

What can it mean that AirVenture’s celebration of freedom runs on principles of proto-fascism? The tight authoritarian atmosphere and quasi-militarism on the grounds is creepy to any discerning sensibility. I was put in mind of Disney’s Celebration, a zoning utopia of psychopathic proportions, where uneven aspects of human interface have been erased by corporate municipal planning doctrines. AirVenture is a festival administered with a skinflint’s thrift and a despot’s greed: an unpaid staff of hundreds do grunt work worth millions and ice cream bars sell for $4.00. It is rumored that the food concessions belong to the Pobereznys. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but what, finally, as warbirds thunder overhead in military formations, does AirVenture stand for?

At last the obvious must be said: the AirVenture festival overall is as close to a celebration of war as exists in America. For all the weird lionization of firepower past and present there is no meaningful acknowledgement of carnage wrought in the wake of these warplanes, or that history has ruled on the wrongness of our engagement in, for example, Vietnam; viewers stare in slack-jawed amazement as war jets zoom past while the devastation they brought to the enemy is recalled in general terms with nostalgia one might use when remembering Mickey Mantle and his baseball bat. There is no mention of napalm. Significantly, I thought, show pilots following the warbirds’ segment torture their planes in an aerial impression of nervous breakdown, an unintended acknowledgement of the spiritual and moral devastation of war in this unconscious mosaic. This is lost on most. The show goes on; the Poberezny’s are seasoned crowd pleasers and they are certainly canny entrepreneurs.

It seems clear that Americans have come to live in a culture of denial where distractions and prescription drugs sedate our senses: therefore, we have become senseless. Blood shed under this Bush administration has been obfuscated from citizen consciousness by dissimulation aided by our favorite pastimes: blasting music, endless pointless television, pointless sports, and pointless endless pornography; individuals in this country exist in bubbles willfully disconnected from meaning and consequence.

If you want a quick take, obesity is the morbid symptom of this disconnect. The obese were legion at AirVenture. Any person who is fifty to a hundred and fifty pounds or more overweight knows that something toxic is taking place, yet they willfully ignore the obvious repeatedly, compulsively succumbing to instant gratification. This is the essence of Bushism: it’s not that Americans can’t pay attention to what’s happening to them, they just don’t want to. There are ramifications to this. The evangelical movement responds to this manifest intellectual paralysis by providing assurance that handing over responsibility for your life to Jesus Christ is not evidence of moral lassitude, but rather spiritual enlightenment. But a prayer never brought back a mother’s fallen son or grew back an amputated arm. The sales pitch of politics stands on the shoulders of the pulpit’s mad promise of eternal life. Tell it to the marines: the truth about war is death, and there is no coming back from that.

I listened to “Amazing Grace” being sung in the Theater in the Woods on Sunday as I prepared to leave for New York, and I thought how all the pious patriots in armchairs around the nation have ignored our historical tendency to eat our young and have voted to feed another generation into the meatgrinder. As I write this I learn that seventeen American soldiers were blown up this morning in a war begun with Iraq on a pretext found to be in error but justified by instincts of anger and fear following the 9/11 attacks.

This is the first American tragedy of the 21st century. There will be more and greater sorrows for families of the fallen. Terrorism exists, to be sure, but sometimes it’s closer to home than some imagine; sometimes the enemy is hard to see without a mirror. Maybe we should all pay more attention to truths about life and death, war and freedom, and whether we are paying lip service to our ideals as we shred them by our actions. But our shoes are spit-shined and our lawns are spotless and orderly, this must be admitted. And now stand for the Star-Spangled Banner, followed by today’s events.

Tom Casey

Copyright 2005 by Tom Casey