Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand

I probably picked this up at the same library book sale where I acquired Atlas Shrugged. It is a collection of essays, most by Rand but not all, that Rand herself describes not as a treatise on economics but as a collection of essays on the moral aspects of capitalism.

That, like the collection’s subtitle, The Unknown Ideal, strikes me as important in any consideration of the essays’s contents. First up, the moral aspect. It is clear throughout that Rand believes capitalism not just to be an economic system, but also a moral philosophy. There are pieces to that puzzle that I’d argue with, but it is clear from the beginning that Rand is arguing not just for what she believes is good, but also for what she believes is right. Unfortunately, this is most manifest in her frequent contempt for those who would hold another perspective. They, by dint of her moral conviction, are not just opposing an economic system, they are opposing her moral position. And that, above almost everything else, makes her text somewhat difficult to approach.

But in her defense, she does call capitalism the unknown ideal, and that is clearly what she believes capitalism to be -- an ideal that is unlikely (or impossible) to achieve in the real world. She even structures the series of essays first into a grouping that deals with the “Theory and History” of her ideas, and then into a second grouping that seeks to apply those ideas to the “Current State.” Although I can’t help but notice that her opening essay in that second grouping, the deceptively titled “The Anatomy of Compromise,” seeks no such compromise between her moral position and the unfortunate realities of the world around her. Indeed, much like her alter ego John Galt, Rand metaphorically concludes that “in any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.” So much for compromise.

Having said all that, I did find myself dog-earing and scribbling in the margins of this work a lot -- the hallmarks of both a frustrating and a mentally-engaging read. On balance, I found myself disputing more than agreeing, somewhat surprised to find Rand and the other authors falling back on the same lazy tropes again and again.

False Dichotomies

Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products -- or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products? Does man have the right to exist for his own sake -- or is he born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear?

Rand’s writing is littered with false dichotomies like this -- setting up two absurdities in opposition to each other, and assuming that the reader will accept the idea that you can only have all of one and none of the other.

Well, this reader isn’t buying it. The above example is, to my way of thinking, an especially egregious case of this technique. Even if reduced down to its barest essence (i.e., is man a sovereign individual or the property of the tribe?), it is easy to see that neither and both of these propositions are true. But when you add in all of Rand’s qualifiers (i.e., a sovereign individual is someone who owns his person AND owns his mind AND owns his life AND owns his work and its products; and being the property of the tribe means it can dictate your convictions AND prescribe the course of your life AND control your work AND expropriate your products) you actually get a dizzying array of possible combinations that may or may not be true at the same time. For the sake of the exercise, drop the labels, and contemplate a situation in which man both “owns his mind” and in which his society can “expropriate his products.” That could be true, couldn’t it?

But maybe an even clearer example of a false dichotomy comes when one of the essays quotes Ludwig von Mises:

“Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in the indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its “bourgeois” pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the “progressives” blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly out-dated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether.”

Observations like these only seem contradictory when you force them into an either/or paradigm. But there’s another paradigm called “both/and” and it actually does a better job explaining what’s going on here. In this view, capitalism is capable of causing both poverty and prosperity. There is, after all, only one lottery winner.

Simple Strawmen

Another common conceit is the use of strawmen to support arguments that would otherwise have a difficult time surmounting the actual complexities that the strawmen have been constructed purposely to obscure. And sometimes the author doesn’t even try to cover his or her tracks -- transparently reducing the item to be railed against in front of the reader’s very eyes. Here’s one the collection’s other authors, Nathaniel Brandon, in his essay about the common fallacies about capitalism:

Should education be compulsory and tax-supported, as it is today? The answer to this question becomes evident if one makes the question more concrete and specific, as follows: Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents’ consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve? Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principle of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No.

Makes the question more concrete and specific, huh? Yeah, I guess that’s one way to describe what you just did. But I’d rather you call it what it is -- creating a strawman that is much easier to tear down than the actual reality that gives you such heartburn. Go ahead. Show me the children who are forcibly being removed from their homes.

I would caution any reader to look for these tropes before dissecting any of the serious arguments offered by Rand and her collected authors. So armed, we can more confidently stride into the philosophical battleground.

Gold

I’m not sure I will ever understand the Randian obsession with a gold-backed currency. The essay addressing this topic in this collection was written by no less an expert than Alan Greenspan, and it is filled with several shocking (to me) revelations.

A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security for his deposits).

I just about fell out of my chair when I read this. I thought THE WHOLE POINT of a gold-backed currency was tying it to a hard, actual asset that exists in a finite amount. This supposedly prevents the creation of money “out of thin air,” but, according to Greenspan, you evidently can create new money (that isn’t backed by gold) as long as you’re a banker and you have some gold in your vault. And who is to say how much of this “claim-to-gold-backed currency” can be created? You guessed it. The market.

But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.

When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for future expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy’s stability and balanced growth.

I’m no banker, and have certainly never served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, but doesn’t this line of argument only make sense if there truly is some kind of inviolate gold standard? You know, like you can’t lend more money than the amount of gold you have in your vaults. The minute you allow the lending of “claim-to-gold-backed currency,” aren’t you basically throwing that standard out the window? Unless there is an inviolate fraction (i.e., you cannot lend more money than ten times the amount of gold you have in your vaults), there is nothing (except the minds of men) to stop profligate lending. In this situation, I really don’t understand what magic the gold in the banker’s vault is able to exert that a fiat currency can’t.

And there’s more. In this essay, Greenspan waxes eloquent about the opposition to the gold standard, painting a grim and despotic picture of this enemy.

But opposition to the gold standard in any form -- from a growing number of welfare-state advocates -- was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

Sorry. Both things cannot be true. It is true, with apologies for adopting the same unfortunate rhetoric, that under a gold standard, taxation “confiscates the wealth of the productive members of society.” They are the ones with the gold-backed money, after all, and gold-backed money is in limited supply. If you’re a “welfare statist” and you want money for your “welfare schemes,” there is only one place to get it.

But without the gold standard and with the subsequent onset of deficit spending, exactly how are governments confiscating the wealth of the productive members of society? Greenspan admits they’re not being taxed. Whether it’s the now-somewhat-archaic practice of selling government bonds, or the now-seemingly-ubitquitous practice of just spending more money than it has, governments aren’t really taking money from anyone are they?

But Greenspan is trying to thread an even narrower needle than this.

Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government’s promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited.

Here’s the key, and the thing I will never understand about the gold standard. Greenspan hooks his whole argument on this idea of “tangible wealth,” without ever acknowledging that the gold in his gold standard only acts like the guarantor of tangible wealth because we all agree that it can -- just like we’ve all now agree that the government itself (the Leviathan, if you choose) can serve as the guarantor of that tangible wealth. There is nothing magical about gold. Once you realize that you begin to understand that any other commodity could be substituted (silver, toothpicks, paper currency) and, as long as we all agree that that is the thing that has value, then the system will work generally the same way.

WTF?

As the above example shows, the importance of correctly parsing the right words is an extremely important tactic in understanding (and sometimes refuting) the Randian arguments in this book. It’s a tool I had to employ frequently, but sometimes it felt like a tool unequal to the task I had assigned to it. Literally, I sometimes had no idea what the authors were even talking about.

“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing the invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but received the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong.”

Rand is quoting Atlas Shrugged here (as she does a lot in these essays), so some pardon can be given, I suppose, for the rhetorical flourishes, but in substance, really, what the f*** is Rand talking about here?

Mental energy -- Definition, please? What exactly is “mental energy,” and how do you know who has it and who doesn’t? The janitor reference is a curious one, since I can suppose that Rand never saw Good Will Hunting.

No matter what millions he earns -- Millions? Meaning more than one and likely many multiples? Compared to the salary of a janitor? Which is what, in 1957 dollars? $4,000 a year? This is a “small percentage of his value” compared to that of the “mental effort” required of the janitor?

Receiving no intellectual bonus -- Again, definition, please? What kind of “intellectual bonus” is the janitor receiving from the “man at the top of the intellectual pyramid”? And, in Rand’s opinion, what kind of “intellectual bonus” (apart from the multiple millions) should that man be receiving from the janitor? What, scrubbing his toilets isn’t enough?

Starve in his hopeless ineptitude -- I suppose there are people so mentally deficient that, without some helping hand, they would be unable to feed themselves. But is this trait typical of the janitorial class? Rand evidently thinks so, which should tip the reader off as to the kind of class-based patterns of thought that permeate her writing. In her estimation, there are Men (those who use their brains and deserve intellectual bonuses) and there are Animals (those who would starve in their hopeless ineptitude).

Primordial Savages

Let’s dwell on this theme a little longer. I covered it in my reaction to Atlas Shrugged, but it is even more apparent here.

It is obvious that the ideological root of statism (or collectivism) is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases to whatever it deems to be its own “good.” Unable to conceive of any social principles, save the rule of brute force, they believed that the tribe’s wishes are limited only by its physical power and that other tribes are its natural prey, to be conquered, looted, enslaved, or annihilated. The history of all primitive people is a succession of tribal wars and intertribal slaughter. That this savage ideology now rules nations armed with nuclear weapons should give pause to anyone concerned with mankind’s survival.

Rand tips dangerously close to outright racism here, perhaps only salvaging an intellectual position by the closing observation that modern nations conduct themselves in similar ways. But it is still agonizing to listen as she drones on about the inferiority and savagery of “primitive people.” It’s obvious, she says, but the only thing that is obvious to me is how blinkered she is being. Hmmm. Let me think. Is there any other reason to believe in the supremacy of the tribe other than an INABILITY to “conceive of individual rights” or “social principles”? It’s those Animals again -- those “people,” so far below the top of the intellectual pyramid that it’s best not to even think of them as Men. They’re primordial savages. Seriously, when she says things like this, I can’t help but dismiss them as the rantings of a Nietzschean superman.

Here’s another example I just can’t resist including. Rand, famously, is opposed to altruism, believing it to be either a cynically conscious tool to rob people of their wealth or an insidious systemic evil that corrupts the very foundations of our society (it’s sometimes hard to tell who the real devil is in Rand’s arguments).

When one grasps this, one knows that it is no use arguing over political trivia, or wondering about the nature of altruism and why the reign of the altruists is leading the world to an ever widening spread of horror. This is the nature of altruism, this -- not any sort of benevolence, good will, or concern for human misfortune. Hatred of man, not the desire to help him -- hatred of life, not the desire to further it -- hatred of the successful state of life -- and that ultimate, apocalyptic evil: hatred of the good for being the good.

Wow. Okay, first, notice what Rand did there, equating “life” with the “successful state of life.” What is the “successful state of life”? Well, of course, that’s life as Rand wants to define it. Man, the sovereign individual, unfettered from any obligations to or dictates from his tribe. That, in Rand’s argument, is “life,” and those opposed to it (or perhaps just disagreeing with its simplistic formulation) “hate” it. They hate Man. What else can possibly explain their opposition to him?

What every successful man (successful at any human value, spiritual or material) has encountered, has sensed, has been bewildered by, but has seldom identified, can now be seen in the open, with nations, instead of individual men, re-enacting the same unspeakable evil on a world scale where it cannot be hidden any longer. It is not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues -- not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements -- not for her failures, but for her success -- her magnificent, shining, life-giving success.

“It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind which means: against life and man. It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever perched the superiority of the “heart” over the mind.”

Now, remind me. Who hates who? Rand is quoting Atlas Shrugged again, but, of course, quoting Atlas Shrugged is essentially quoting herself. But whether it’s a character in Atlas Shrugged or her direct voice, the vitriol, the contempt, the hatred for those who are part of this “conspiracy without leader or direction” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) borders on the unhinged.

And this, I think, is what makes it the most difficult for me to approach Rand seriously. In another essay on the property status of the airwaves, she says this:

If you want to gauge a collectivist theory’s distance from reality, ask yourself; by what inconceivable standard can it be claimed that the broadcasting airways are the property of some illiterate sharecropper who will never be able to grasp the concept of electronics, or of some hillbilly whose engineering capacity is not quite sufficient to cope with a core-liquor still -- and that broadcasting, the product of an incalculable amount of scientific genius, is to be ruled by the will of such owners?

Seriously. It’s the condescension that turns me off the most. I’m not talking about whether the airwaves should or should not be owned by the government. I’m talking about the intellectual laziness in thinking that calling people names constitutes a reasoned argument. It makes me wonder if Rand can even make her arguments without insulting anyone.

And then, in the same essay, back to the idea of savages.

I say “atavistic,” because it took many centuries before primitive, nomadic tribes of savages reached the concept of private property -- specifically, land property, which marked the beginning of civilization. It is a tragic irony that in the presence of a new realm opened by a gigantic achievement of science, our political and intellectual leaders reverted to the mentality of primitive nomads and, unable to conceive of property rights, declared the new realm to be a tribal hunting ground.

It’s almost as if the thing that makes them “savages” is that they never read Atlas Shrugged. I mean, by what other standard could we possibly measure “civilization”?

The Market Is Perfect, Except When the Government Meddles In It

A lot of the essays in this book can be classified as supporting this essential premise: the free market is the best and most efficient economic (or moral) system we have, and whenever anything appears to go wrong with it, it is not the fault of the free market, it is the fault of the government meddling with it and not allowing it to function.

The problem with this argument is that there is no way to prove it -- as there has never been a free market whose outcomes we can observe, as Rand herself admits.

A system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. What did exist were only so-called mixed economies, which means: a mixture, in varying degrees of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government coercion, of capitalism and statism. America was the freest country on earth, but elements of statism were present in her economy from the start. These elements kept growing, under the influence of her intellectuals who were predominantly committed to the philosophy of statism. The intellectuals -- the ideologists, the interpreters, the assessors of public events -- were tempted by the opportunity to seize political power, relinquished by all other social groups, and to establish their own versions of a “good” society at the point of a gun, i.e., by means of legalized physical coercion. They denounced the free businessmen as exponents of “selfish greed” and glorified the bureaucrats as “public servants.” In evaluating social problems, they kept damning “economic power” and expropriating political power, thus switching the burden of guilt from the politicians to the businessmen.

All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.

This is a pure self-fulfilling prophecy. With this card in hand, the objectivist can claim that anything good that happens is because of the free market, and anything bad that happens is because of government intervention into it.

And the authors of these essays do this a lot -- sometimes to the point of contradicting each other. Rand will describe the giants of American industry -- men such as “James Jerome Hill or Commodore Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie or J. P. Morgan” -- as “self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market.” 

Huh. I thought there was no such thing as the free market. Oh well.

These are all railroad men, and Rand clearly has a special place in her heart for railroad men. Alan Greenspan, a few essays later, adds some more color to this story.

The railroads developed in the East, prior to the Civil War, in stiff competition with one another as well as with the older forms of transportation -- barges, riverboats, and wagons. By the 1860’s there arose a political clamor demanding that the railroads move west and tie California to the nation: national prestige was held to be at stake. But the traffic volume outside of the populous East was insufficient to draw commercial transportation westward. The potential profit did not warrant the heavy cost of investment in transportation facilities. In the name of “public policy” it was, therefore, decided to subsidize the railroads in their move to the West.

Between 1863 and 1867, close to one hundred million acres of public lands were granted to the railroads. Since these grants were made to individual roads, no competing railroads could vie for traffic in the same area of the West. Meanwhile, the alternative forms of competition (wagons, riverboats, etc.) could not afford to challenge the railroads in the West. Thus, with the aid of the federal government, a segment of the railroad industry was able to “break free” from the competitive bounds which had prevailed in the East.

This, of course, is a bad thing.

As might be expected, the subsidies attracted the kind of promoters who always exist on the fringe of the business community and who are constantly seeking an “easy deal.” Many of the new western railroads were shabbily built: they were not constructed to carry traffic, but to acquire land grants.

The western railroads were true monopolies in the textbook sense of the word. They could, and did, behave with an aura of arbitrary power. But that power was not derived from a free market. It stemmed from governmental subsidies and governmental restrictions.

When, ultimately, western traffic increased to levels which could support other profit-making transportation carriers, the railroads’ monopolistic power was soon undercut. In spite of their initial privileges, they were unable to withstand the pressure of free competition.

And Rand, of course, agrees, diagnosing the problem like this:

But there existed another kind of businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government, such as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was the political power behind their activities -- the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges -- that caused dislocations in the country’s economy, hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free market and the free businessmen that took the blame. Every calamitous consequence of government controls was used as a justification for the extension of the controls and of the government’s power over the economy.

You see. Free market = good. Mixed economy = bad.

And this really becomes an essential point. On the surface one may think that Rand advocates for the free market because she believes it is the best way to provide prosperity to all -- but that’s not really it. Her advocacy for the free market isn’t grounded in Reaganesque views of shining cities and lifting all boats. Her free market views are based entirely on rewarding those who deserve rewards.

Here’s the hook. It all depends on what you think is “good” and what you think is “bad.” One way to look at the railroad story is as Rand and Greenspan tell it. The government created all this dysfunction and hardship by meddling in the free market. But another way to look at it is that the free market, as Greenspan admits, wasn’t going to build railroads to the West coast because, initially, there wasn’t any profit in it. And that, when profit was possible, the government got out of the way and the free market took over. Deciding that it was bad for the government to help build the railroads means that you are deciding that not allowing the profit-seeking forces of the market decide what gets built and what doesn’t is “bad.”

And what, praytell, is “good” from that point of view?

Loading the Vernacular Dice

As I've said, so much of Rand’s argument absolutely depends on the definition of the terms she uses -- definitions that are never quite explicitly stated. In another example, while she rails against the evil that is government control she is sometimes forced to admit that some “businessmen” do profit under such systems. But…

It is not a matter of accidental personalities, of “dishonest businessmen” or “dishonest legislators.” The dishonesty is inherent in and created by the system. So long as a government holds the power of economic control, it will necessarily create a special “elite,” an “aristocracy of pull,” it will attract the corrupt type of politician into the legislature, it will work to the advantage of the dishonest businessman, and will penalize and, eventually, destroy the honest and able.

This utterly confuses me. Other than the assertion that one system (government control) is evil and another system (free market) is good, what evidence is there that either proposition is true? Don’t people suffer and succeed under both systems? And why is the businessman who plays by the rules of the free market “honest and able,” while the one who plays by the rules of government control “dishonest” and “corrupt”? Isn’t the businessman who succeeds under government control using his mind to out-compete his rivals? It’s almost as if Rand wants to write her own rules so that she always wins the argument.

To further extend this point, let’s look at another essay written by Nathaniel Brandon, where he cites more history that he thinks makes the same essential point about government meddling. Now, the subject isn’t railroads, but banking.

Throughout most of the 1920’s, the government compelled banks to keep interest rates artificially and uneconomically low. As a consequence, money was poured into every sort of speculative venture. By 1928, the warning signals of danger were clearly apparent: unjustified investment was rampant and stocks were increasingly overvalued. The government chose to ignore these danger signals.

Beware the passive voice in that paragraph! “Money was poured into every sort of speculative venture.” How do you put that sentence into the active voice? Who poured the money into the speculative ventures? The government? The market? Or the minds of men?

A free banking system would have been compelled, by economic necessity, to put the brakes on this process of runaway speculation. Credit and investment, in such a case, would be drastically curtailed; the banks which made unprofitable investments, the enterprises which proved unproductive, and those who dealt with them, would suffer -- but that would be all; the country as a whole would not be dragged down. However, the “anarchy” of a free banking system had been abandoned -- in favor of “enlightened” government planning.

A Quick Aside

Okay. Quick aside. The authors of these essays LOVE putting things in quotation marks. They do it, I assume, as I have done, in order to show the irony of these words, which, from their point of view, are publicly used in a manner exactly opposite to the actual situations. A free banking system is called “anarchy” but is actually enlightened; government planning is called “enlightened” but is actually anarchy. Get it?

But this technique is so overused that it more often comes across as either unintelligible, or just vindictive. Here’s a particularly egregious example from Rand’s essay on how big business is actually America’s persecuted minority.

Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts. Today’s “liberals” consider a businessman guilty in any conflict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line “right or wrong.” Consider the evil of judging people by a double standard and of denying to some the rights granted to others. Today’s “liberals” recognize the workers’ (the majority’s) right to their livelihood (their wages), but deny the businessmen’s (the minority’s) right to their livelihood (their profits). If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”; if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed.” if the workers’ standard of living is low, the “liberals” blame it on the businessmen; but if the businessmen attempt to improve their economic efficacy, to expand their markets, and to enlarge the financial returns of their enterprises, thus making higher wages and lower prices possible, the same “liberals” denounce it as “commercialism.” If a non-commercial foundation -- i.e., a group which did not have to earn its funds -- sponsors a television show, advocating its particular views, the “liberals” hail it as “enlightenment,” “education,” “art,” and “public service”; if a businessman sponsors a television show and wants it to reflect his views, the “liberals” scream, calling it “censorship,” “pressure,” and “dictatorial rule.” When three locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters deprived New York City of its milk supply for fifteen days -- no moral indignation or condemnation was heard from the “liberal” quarters; but just imagine what would happen if businessmen stopped that milk supply for one hour -- and how swiftly they would be struck down by that legalized lynching or pogrom known as “trust-busting.”

Okay. There’s a whole lot I can criticize in that paragraph, but let’s just focus on her use of the quotation marks. I understand their use for words like “social gains” and “selfish greed.” As described above, Rand puts those in quotation marks to show that she would prefer a different usage of these terms from that of her philosophical rivals. But why is “liberals” placed in those irony-inducing quotation marks? She wants to re-appropriate that word, too? Yes, I know about classical liberalism, and maybe that’s her angle, but frankly, putting it in quotes EVERY TIME she mentions it comes across as more vindictive than intellectual. 

Back To The Main Point

But let’s get back to my larger point. Even in a mixed economy, even in situations controlled by government action, men are still men and can still make up their own minds about what they will and will not do. Right? Rand, et. al., wants to preach that government regulation turns Men into Animals, but not, evidently, the free market. There, Men are always Men, free to exercise their minds in any way they see fit.

Sorry. I’m not sure you can have it both ways. And this, I think, is where the essential flaw of Rand’s entire philosophy comes most into stark relief. She wants you to choose between Man being either a “sovereign individual” or the “property of the tribe,” which, in fact, puts Man on the wrong linear axis. Man does not lose his freedom when he is a member of his tribe, and is still free to act under whatever dictates the tribe places upon him. I know. I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and I’ve seen how John Galt reacts when literally tortured by the statists. The real question lies along the perpendicular axis. Choose not if Man is sovereign or property, choose if the forces acting upon his sovereignty are market-based or state-based.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 87 (DRAFT)

We were up to nearly four in the morning -- me getting sick and Jenny cleaning it up multiple times -- before the room would stop spinning and things were calm enough that I could contemplate going back to bed. It was a bad reaction to the medicine Blair had given me. I couldn’t really know that for sure, but in the moment that’s what I decided had happened and no one was going to talk me out of it.

“Throw them away,” I told Jenny, never wanting to see the offensive little pills again.

She tried to reason with me, asked me not to act rashly, to give the medicine a chance to work.

“Fuck the medicine,” I told her, climbing back into bed and pulling the covers up over my head. “It’s poison. I’m not taking any more.”

She must’ve stopped arguing with me, and I must’ve fallen back to sleep, because the next thing I remember was the alarm clock going off. The covers were still over my head and I had to fight against them to free myself from their cocoon before I could stumble across the room and extinguish the offending noise.

“Are you okay?”

I looked back at the bed. Jenny was an enormous shape under the blankets, her face framed in the dim light by the glowing cream-colored pillowcase, Jacob’s tousled mop of hair just visible below her left cheek. The alarm may have woken her up, or she may have been laying like that awake through the passing few hours of the early morning. There was no way to tell.

I considered her question for a moment. Without even thinking about it, I realized, I had bounded out of bed in my usual manner and there I stood, upright, on both feet, without a trace of dizziness or disorientation fogging up my brain.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Are you going to work?”

Work. The word was like an incantation, conjuring up a thousand thoughts that had lain dormant and more or less forgotten. There was something on my calendar today, I knew, something important, but I had a hard time pinpointing it. It wasn’t the leadership meeting, was it? The terror of that thought almost giving me a heart attack. No, that was next week. I was leaving on Monday. What was it?

“Don’t you have that call with Steve Anderson today?”

That was it. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Why don’t you stay home and take it here?”

The thought of that seemed to terrify me even more. No, no, I should take it in the office. I’ve got a lot of things that still need to get done before next week’s leadership meeting. I can’t afford another day out of the office. When it’s time for the call with Steve, I can close my office door and minimize the distractions. It’ll be all right. It’ll be fine.

“Alan?”

It was only then that I realized that I hadn’t said any of my inner monologue out loud.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m going to the office.”

“Okay,” Jenny said, in one of her rare moments of acquiescence. “But do me a favor. Get dressed in Jacob’s room. I need to sleep in today.”

I knew better than to argue with that. I quickly gathered the items I would need and then quietly left the bedroom, shutting the door behind me. A shower, a quick breakfast, packing a bag lunch, and a short drive later I found myself at the office, riding the elevator up from the parking garage and walking down the long, interior wall of the building to my office. It was not lost on me that less than twenty-four hours ago I had been practically crawling along that same wall, using its planar geometry like a blind man desperate to find some small safe haven. Whatever had afflicted me, migraine or something else, was now equally a memory. I was tired, but no more so than any other day. And my throat was a little sore. But otherwise I felt ready to tackle whatever the day was planning to throw at me.

The call with Steve was not until 1 PM that afternoon -- 1 PM Central, that is. Steve’s assistant had confirmed it for 2 PM Eastern and that was 1 PM Central. I felt confident that I was not going to make that mistake again. I would also make sure that I had a completely empty bladder.

I kept to myself as much as I possibly could that morning, working for most of it with my office door closed. Part of me hoped that it looked natural -- I had a lot of phone calls to make, following up on all the volunteer committee changes that Wes Howard had demanded, and office protocol often looked favorably on those who closed their doors during long phone calls so as not to disturb all the other drones busily going about their tasks -- but another part of me didn’t really care. I just wasn’t up to interacting with people that morning. The phone calls alone were likely to exhaust me.

Hello? Yes, Mr. Richards? Neil Richards? It’s Alan Larson calling. Yes, that Alan Larson. Yes. Yes, I am looking forward to the leadership retreat next week, and that’s actually why I’m calling. Our incoming chair Wes Howard has taken another look at the pending committee rosters and has decided to bring some fresh faces onto some of the key committees. He asked me to call and thank you for your service on the Bylaws Committee, and also to inform you that he will be asking Kathleen Meyer to chair the committee next year. Yes. Yes, sir, I understand that Eleanor had previously asked you to serve as chair, and Wes would very much like you to continue serving on the committee, but he has decided to tap Kathleen for the role of chair. Yes. Yes, it is his decision as incoming chair. I’m glad you understand. No. No, please. We very much wish you will still attend next week’s leadership meeting. Wes is hoping to speak with you personally there, and your contributions there will be an important part of setting our plans for the future. Yes. Yes, thank you. We’ll see you. Thank you. Good-bye.

That was a good one and most of them were not good ones. Everything I said about Wes was a lie. Wes Howard didn’t care if people like Neil Richards stayed on their committees or if they came to the leadership retreat. He wasn’t going to speak to them personally and he would probably laugh at any contributions they would try to make. All of that was lies, but they had to be told. What else was I supposed to tell the people that Wes had rejected? The truth? That Wes Howard didn’t give a shit about anyone except Wes Howard?

I did that until quarter to twelve and then darted down to the breakroom to retrieve my bag lunch so I could eat it at my desk. There were a few people milling about in there, some of them waiting for the long line of microwaves to warm up their frozen meals, but no one stopped me or even tried to speak to me. In a flash I was behind my closed office door again, spreading a few napkins down on my desk surface to catch the crumbs.

I had planned to spend the last hour before my call with Steve preparing for that discussion, and only at that moment realized that Steve really hadn’t given me anything in particular to prepare. I tried to remember what it was that he had said to me in the Emerald Club at Logan Airport -- something about their plans for the future of the organization and wanting to hear my ideas.

And then my heart stopped. He wanted to hear my ideas. Not about the stupid standardized test they had given me, but about the future of their organization. That’s what Steve was going to be calling me about in… in sixty-three minutes, and I hadn’t prepared a goddamn thing.

I pushed my lunch aside and turned to my computer, calling up the organization’s website and reading as much as I could as quickly as I could. There. Their mission and strategic objectives. And there. Their Board of Directors, Steve’s smiling face staring back at me from the computer screen. And there. Their list of committees and each of their purposes. The site was organized like almost any similar organization, full of facts, but absent any kind of larger context. Where were the challenges they were facing? The dysfunction that probably existed around their Board table? The programs that failed to achieve their intended purposes from lack of funding? I wasn’t going to find any of that on their website, and that’s really what I needed if I was going to invent something plausible for my ideas on how to move the organization forward.

Suddenly there was a knock at my door. I looked up, my eye catching the time on its journey to the door (12:21 PM), and saw Bethany’s form practically pressed against my door’s glass, still cracked from the punch Gerald had given it.

She was probably the last person I wanted to talk to, especially with only thirty-nine minutes to go before my phone interview, so I gave her a stern look, pointing first to my watch and then to my phone. I’m busy! I’m making calls! But she met my pantomime with her own worried look, holding up two fingers and then pointing to her own watch. Reluctantly, I waved her in. She shut the door quietly behind her and stood with her back to it.

“No time for lunch, eh?”

I spread my hands over my half-eaten sandwich and carrot sticks. “I’ve got too many calls to make,” I said. “Wes practically re-wrote the entire committee roster and I have to reach everyone before they start getting on airplanes.”

“You’ve been holed up in here all morning,” she said, her voice laden with emotional overtones. “I was hoping you’d have a few minutes for me today.”

“Maybe later,” I said, roughly. “Can I come find you at the end of the day?”

She hitched her breath, somewhat painfully, and sighed. “I suppose. It’s kind of important. I’m quitting.”

“You’re what?”

“I wanted to do it first thing this morning, but I didn’t have the nerve to interrupt you.”

“Bethany, did you say you were quitting?”

She seemed to steel herself, choking back tears that had suddenly come into her eyes. “Yes, Alan. I am. I just can’t take it here any more. But I wanted to tell you before I made it official. I’m meeting with Mary at one.”

This was way too much information for me to assimilate. I just stared slack-jawed back at her, a single thought echoing again and again in my mind. She’s quitting. She’s quitting. She’s quitting.

“Alan,” she pleaded. “Say something.”

I shook my head mindlessly. “What is there to say? Is it because of me?”

The question appeared to make her uncomfortable. She started to answer it multiple times, but never seemed able to let more than half a syllable escape her lips.

It enraged me. I guess there’s no other word for it. Standing there, in her bargain basement business suit, with her mousy face and thick calves, looking to me, TO ME, to save her from the embarrassment of having to tell me that I was the cause of her problems, that I was the reason she was leaving the company. It was too much for me to take. In that moment, I hated her. I hated her and anything I might have ever felt for her.

“Get out,” I told her, struggling to keep myself from shouting.

“Alan, please.”

“Just get out of my office, Bethany. Go tell Mary what a monster I am. Tell her how I wasn’t able to protect you from all the stalking predators that surround you -- the real ones and the ones you conjure up from your own fear and inadequacy. Get, the, fuck, out, and never talk to me again.”

Now she was crying, thick, milky tears coming down her heavily made-up face, and that enraged me even more. She’s a clown. A fucking clown! It felt like bombs were constantly going off in my head, and I stood up, shooting up like a jackrabbit, not with any clear intention, but just needing to flee, or to fight.

Bethany must have thought the latter, because I saw the fear in her eyes as she turned, fumbling first with the door knob and then stumbling her way out of my office. I soon followed her, pure instinct taking over, pausing only to scoop up the remains of my lunch and to make sure that my cell phone was in my pocket. I had a call, you see, maybe the most important call of my life, now in thirty-two minutes, and if I was going to take it, I would have to be far away from the scene of this crime. 

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Modern Medea by Steven Weisenburger

This is a dark and terrible tale. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the author decided to look into the historical event on which that novel was based.

In the middle of a frigid Sunday night in January 1856, a twenty-two-year-old Kentucky slave named Margaret Garner gathered up her family and raced north, toward Cincinnati and freedom. But Margaret’s master followed just hours behind and soon had the fugitives’ sanctuary surrounded. Thinking all was lost, Margaret seized a butcher knife and nearly decapitated her two-year-old daughter, crying out that she would rather see her children dead than returned to slavery. She was turning on her other three children when slave-catchers burst in and subdued her.

That’s from the book’s front flap, and is a tight summary of the facts. But this book is about much more than facts.

Margaret Garner’s child murder electrified the United States, inspiring the longest, most spectacular fugitive-slave trial in history. Abolitionists and slaveholders fought over the meaning of the murder, and the case came to symbolize the ills of the Union in those last dark decades before the Civil War. Newspaper columnists, poets, and dramatists raced to interpret Margaret’s deeds, but by century’s end they were all but forgotten.

Let’s talk about some of those symbols -- and the way they were used by abolitionists and slaveholders alike. First up, the symbol that gives the book its title.

Kentucky artist Thomas Noble painted Margaret Garner as a heroic, defiant mother confronting slave catchers over the outstretched bodies of her children, and the renowned Mathew Brady produced a lithograph of Noble’s infanticidal tableau, an image published in popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly.

Noble called his painting “The Modern Medea,” a title with deeply troubling inferences. In Euripides’ drama, a Medea already suspected of practicing the “black arts” of witchcraft kills her two children to spite their father, Jason. Jason had cut Medea to the heart by rejecting her for a racially “purer” wife; she countered by cutting off his royal lineage. Noble’s title therefore implies that Margaret Garner destroyed  Archibald Gaines’s property -- and the child of their illicit union -- out of jealous rage. “The Modern Medea” thus plays on themes of miscegenation, sexual bondage, and the black woman as alluring and dangerous Other, themes nineteenth-century Americans typically spoke about in code.

That’s right. The child that Margaret kills is not just hers -- it is also the offspring of her master, Archibald Gaines. It’s a fact that our author has to piece together from the original sources available to him because, of course, it was not a fact that could be publicly discussed at the time.

A Journey Into the Past

In order to tell this tale, the author has to take the reader on a journey into the past but, surprisingly (to this reader, at least), in many ways it is not a very long journey at all.

Today travelers driving south from Cincinnati on Interstate 75 speed past the Richwood Flea Market’s tan warehouse. To the right, one mile farther west, beyond the green-and-yellow BP station at Exit 176, down State Route 338 and past the recently subdivided, gated country club community named Triple Crown, stands the same quaintly spired Presbyterian church where Margaret Garner’s owners, their neighbors, and many neighborhood slaves (included Margaret) attended Sunday services.

As one turns right at the stop sign and bears west at Richwood Presbyterian Church, the America of interstates and eighteen-wheelers seems to tumble away. Here on the road’s north side stretches the same estate Margaret’s masters once farmed in gentlemanly style. There on the road’s south side stretches the same estate of the Gaines family’s best friend, Benjamin Franklin Bedinger. There, back down the road by the church, is where Margaret’s husband and in-laws toiled for planter James Marshall. Subdivisions encroach on these lands from all sides but these old estates are still intact, still in the hands of Gaines and Bedinger and Marshall descendents. Mud Lick Creek still runs through this beautiful landscape as it did in Margaret’s time, but now it is partly banked with expensive-looking stone masonry. A magnificent new mansion with high Palladian windows graces an eastern corner of the Bedinger place, Forest Home, though Maplewood has changed remarkably little in a century and a half.

Atop a knoll sits the same house that Archibald Gaines built after a November 1850 fire leveled the original dwelling. From the road one can see the rooms where Margaret Garner and her children did domestic labor and suffered whatever indignities or threats or assaults finally compelled her to run.

In Beloved, Toni Morrison calls this place “Sweet Home.” Uncannily, here is the same land described in her novel as “rolling, rolling, rolling out before [one’s] eyes … in shameless beauty,” with its “lacy groves” of the most beautiful sycamores in the world.” The sycamores still stand with clumps of tall oaks and squatting locusts. Outside Maplewood’s front gate the Commonwealth of Kentucky has placed a historical marker commemorating it as the former residence of Major John Pollard Gaines, hero of the Mexican War and second territorial governor of Oregon.

Headstones of Gaines and Marshall family members dot Richwood Station graveyards, and their descendants still people this landscape because social and legal institutions privileged and protected their property. As for the Garners, who attempted to steal their selves in a daring resistance to antebellum slave law, there whereabouts of their graves or of any who descended from them were lost in the great diaspora of American slavery and Reconstruction. No markers or headstones for their kind in this place.

I read a lot of history. And the Civil War-era is one of my amateur specialties. I’ve even walked the ground on several Civil War battlefields, climbing the battle face of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, and following the undulating hills at Vicksburg, the tree-lined clearings and grottoes at Shiloh. And it was this passage, more than anything, that made me understand how recent this history actually is, about how the imprint of its passing is still indelibly stamped not just on our national landscape but, because of those “social and legal institutions,” on our national character and understanding. And about how all of that is only part of our national story -- some of it as lost as the whereabouts and graves of the Garner descendants.

Faces of the Past

Want to see what I mean? Want to stare at the very faces of this painful reality? Look at this.

This is the John Pollard Gaines family, ca. 1850, probably just before they departed for Oregon. The confident patriarch sits in the very center, and the careworn woman seated to his left is Elizabeth Kinkead Gaines, his wife, and the mother of his eleven children, only eight of which are present in this photo. Her husband was often away from their Kentucky home -- leaving her alone with his children and his slaves for long periods of time.

Lonely she doubtless was for the company of white adults, and careworn from work, but surely this forty-six-year-old woman was also exhausted from childbearing. In fact she illustrates most poignantly a key aspect of nineteenth-century womanhood: a wife’s lack of control over her own reproductive life, a lack profoundly analogous to what slave women experienced.

“Do you get as many children as ever?” one of the Major’s business cronies once inquired. In the Gaines tradition he did, but fell one short of his forebears’ patriarchal twelve. After her 1824 marriage Elizabeth Gaines gave birth about every eighteen months, beginning with Abner (named after the child’s grandfather). Toward the end, her births were sandwiched between John Gaines’s sojourns away from Maplewood. After she delivered her second-youngest, Matilda [second from the left in the photo], he left on a lengthy business tour to New York and Boston, and their youngest, Elizabeth (“Libby”), was born just months before he rode off with the 1st Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry on 4 July 1846.

John Gaines was an extroverted, restless man, one hungry for success and public honors, but also a man who, from our late-twentieth-century perspective, epitomizes the male chauvinism of Victorian culture. During most of the 1840s Gaines nested at Maplewood only long enough to “get” more children. By early 1849, childbearing had left his wife frequently ill, with failing eyesight and teeth. In 1848 the children rejoiced when “mother had her teeth supplied, being eight in number, which greatly improves her looks.” How did Elizabeth view her life at Maplewood? We don’t know, because none of her letters survive. She may have considered herself too unlettered to write the worldly Major, or she may simply have been too busy, like other plantation mistresses: “Challenged daily by the limitless demands of her children, a husband who believed in firm obedience from all his dependents, and the elusive wall of resistance that her house slaves formed.”

Go back and look at the faces in that photograph of the married Gaines couple and their children. His face and hers. That will tell you everything you need to know about the world that they lived in, the world of our most recent ancestors, and the world that still provides the underlying scaffolding for whatever it is that we might try to build in our modern world.

And, of course, remember that dark secret that still tries to remain hidden -- the secret that not all of John Gaines’s children were likely birthed by his careworn wife Elizabeth. Despite the difficulty of turning up direct evidence of the kind that survives to support the white lineages, Margaret’s own mulatto status is testament to this secret undercurrent of their society. The fact that white landowners fathered children with their female slaves is the widely acknowledged but never discussed undercurrent of Gaines’s world and this story. The surviving correspondence never testifies directly to this truth, but often contains slanted references, acknowledging not just the facts but the human feelings that must have existed 

Trial and Treason

A large portion of Weisenburger’s book is about the subsequent trial that Margaret received after her apprehension -- and the many instances of injustice that it revealed not just because of her enslavement, but also because of the slow machinations of the process and rhetoric of the day. Her case captured the attention of the nation, and many famous abolitionists of the day came to Margaret’s defense -- some with more than just humane motivations. Here’s an excerpt from a letter John Gaines wrote at the time, complaining about their interventions and their motivations.

“I am morally sure that the Abolitionists care nothing for [Margaret], either through regard for the offended majesty of the laws of Ohio or for any sympathy with her as an oppressed, down-trodden, persecuted, heart-broken, desperate woman; and I am equally sure that the atrocious scoundrels have a wider and meaner object in view -- that they care nothing for negroes or their owners, and only wish to use both a material for the promotion of political ends, for the furtherance of objects of treason to the Constitution and the laws of the Union.”

It’s a remarkable paragraph, seeing as how it encompasses their entire world. From Gaines’s point of view, he is clearly the one acting morally, and he is outraged by the idea that the abolitionists would seek to commit treason against the Constitution and the laws of the Union. It’s a view with which the judicial process of the day will concur, but of course, with the view of history it is the abolitionists who are acting morally and it is Gaines and the judicial system that supports his view which is committing treason against the rights of man.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 86 (DRAFT)

Jenny wanted to know everything. She was reserved at first -- looking up like an expectant father when I came back into the waiting area -- and only asking me about how I was feeling and how things “had gone” as she walked me down the long hallways and out of the clinic. By the time we were back in the car, however, her intense need to know and control could be held back no longer. Even as she was backing our vehicle out of its parking space, the interrogation began.

Which doctor did I see? What did he say? What did I tell him? What did he think was wrong? Did he prescribe me anything? What was it? How often and how long was I to take it? What did it do and how did it work? When was I supposed to go back? How was I feeling? What did I think? 

I only answered a handful of her questions and none of them to her satisfaction. I told her about the two medications Blair had prescribed -- one for the migraines and one for anxiety -- and as soon as the word anxiety slipped out of my mouth I immediately regretted it.

“Anxiety?” Jenny said, sounding legitimately surprised. “Why did he prescribe you something for anxiety?”

Yeah. What did I have to be anxious about? I closed my eyes and rested my head on the car window. “I don’t know, Jenny. I guess he thought it would help with the migraines.”

She continued to needle me but I did my best to tune her out after that. If this was how she was going to react to the anxiety medication there was no way I was going to tell her about the counseling referral. I had already made sure to stash that piece of paper in a separate pocket from the other two so there’d be no chance of some accidental mixup. We went to the pharmacy and I waited in the car while she filled the prescriptions. The business day was over and the office was closed so I decided not to check my messages, knowing that as soon as we got home I was going to pop my two pills and then go back to bed. In all the universe, there wasn’t anything I wanted more.

It was full dark when I awoke again, and at first I didn’t even know where I was. And I felt strange -- nauseous but not nauseous, dizzy but not dizzy, sick but not sick. In a way I felt like I was floating, but not peacefully on air. If this was floating, then I was floating in a vat of pudding full of needles.

I looked over at the clock, and could just make out the time through the two pill bottles that had been left on the dresser in front of it. 2:17 AM. Jenny was asleep next to me and our ceiling fan swirled on its lowest setting above me.

Dear, Christ. What had I done?

That question seemed to comprise my entire painful universe. It was unfocused and overwhelming; not just one fear but thousands, all crowding in on me like gleeful demons, eager to drag their latest foolish supplicant to hell. 

I fumbled with the wet sheet covering me and fell out of bed. I had tried to stand, but neither my legs nor my inner ears were along for that ride and I found myself quickly sprawled out on the area rug that dominated the open floor space of our small bedroom. I remember smelling the carpet fibers -- a strange combination of mothballs and long-forgotten grime -- and believing for a moment that I was paralyzed, that the toxic cocktail Blair had given me had short-circuited my nervous system. I tried to swallow and started coughing, dry-in-the-chest but wet-in-the-mouth spasms that momentarily replaced my consciousness.

“Alan?”

It was Jenny, dragged out of sleep by the sounds of my nocturnal terror.

“Oh, my God! Alan!”

In a moment she was over me, her face hovering down near mine, cooing at me, hushing me, telling me everything was going to be all right.

I tried to get up, but couldn’t, collapsing back down into the useless pile I had become. “I’m going to be sick,” I managed to say between coughs. My head was pounding -- like the migraine I had experienced earlier had been but a prelude.

“Not here!” Jenny practically shouted. “Oh, God, Alan! Not here!”

There was nothing worse in Jenny’s universe than vomit deposited anywhere other than a toilet. The stinking rug offending my nostrils, I knew, could be easily replaced. We had picked it up on sale at a home goods store for $39.99, and even when I wasn’t face down on it, I hated it. It would have been a pleasure to vomit on it, to show it who was boss, but Jenny, I knew, would absolutely lose her damn mind.

With great effort, I pushed myself up and shakily started crawling towards the bathroom. A wave of dizziness almost overwhelmed me, but it lessened when I closed my eyes.

“Alan! What are you doing! Are you all right?”

I had no ability to answer her, single-mindedly focused as I was on my movements and destination. The needle-laden pudding was still there, and I was pushing my way through it, my extremities stinging and tingling as if they had all fallen asleep and were coming back to life at the same time. Shakily, unsteadily, I started making slow progress.

“Mommy?”

It was Jacob. We had evidently woken him up, and he was standing in our bedroom doorway. From my position I could only see his stocky legs, his bare feet, and the tail end of the blanket he must’ve been holding. He was effectively blocking my path.

“Move!” I said, my voice begging more than ordering.

“Jacob!” Jenny shouted, much more sternly. “Let your father through!”

A kind of impasse followed, one I didn’t have the energy to sustain. In the small confines of our bedroom, Jenny was behind me and had no way of getting to Jacob, and Jacob, evidently, was either too frightened or too stubborn to move. In short order, my arms gave out on me, and I was back down on the floor, my face, fortunately, past the limits of the rug and now resting against the section of dusty hardwood floor right before the entryway.

“Fuck it,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else. “I’ll just die here.”

In the roaring silence that followed, nothing else seemed to matter. When I started vomiting, I barely heard the screaming commotion that surrounded me.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley

Above all, Aldous Huxley is a writer, and his books are always filled with a writer’s insights. Here’s how this particular novel begins.

“The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

“Never?” I questioned.

“Maybe from God’s point of view,” he conceded. “Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Maxwell and Thomas a Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance.” And when I asked, “To what?” he waved a square brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves. “To the Best that has been Thought and Said,” he declaimed with mock portentousness. And then, “Oddly enough, the closest to reality are always the fictions that are supposed to be the least true.” He leaned over and touched the back of a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov. “It makes so little sense that it’s almost real.”

There are a lot of paradoxes inherent to fiction writing, and this is definitely one of them. Any novel that tries to mimic reality -- and there are a few of them out there -- tends to bog down in trivia that doesn’t lead anywhere. Because that’s what real life is like. Novels in which important things lead to important conclusions are generally more satisfying to read, but are definitely more unlike the world most of us find ourselves in.

Here’s another writer’s insight that jumped off the page at me.

“How impossibly crude our language is! If you don’t mention the physiological correlates of emotion, you’re being false to the given facts. But if you do mention them, it sounds as though you were trying to be gross and cynical. Whether it’s passion or the desire of the moth for the star, whether it’s tenderness or adortion or romantic yearning -- love is always accompanied by events in the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes, the glandular and erectile tissues. Those who don’t say so are liars. Those who do are labeled as pornographers.”

I’ve struggled with this one myself. I once tried to write a love scene in which the characters actually made love -- frustrated, I think, by years of reading novels in which that act was always obscured, sometimes to the degree that the reader was unsure if it had, in fact, occurred. It was an experiment, and I have no fear in admitting that it failed. Yes, those are the “damned things” that happened, but writing about them so explicitly, I think, gives them an importance that they don’t really have. There are reasons for not explicitly describing the sex act in fiction, and not all of them are prudishness.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a good deal of The Genius and the Goddess is about sex -- and the ways that its various characters exercise their power in a sexualized environment.

The Genius

First up is The Genius -- a Nobel prize winning physicist named Henry Maartens. The John Rivers we are introduced to in the opening pages is Maartens’s lab assistant, who lives with Maartens, his wife Katy, and his two children, Ruth and Timmy. In the thick of the novel’s drama, Maartens comes to suspect his wife of having an affair -- who is away in Chicago tending to her sick and dying mother -- and it mortifies him. In the scene where he shares his suspicions and his fears with his lab assistant, Rivers analyzes Maartens and his attitude toward sex in a way that is clearly more Huxley than the relatively inexperienced Rivers.

“Henry, as I’ve said, was a broken reed, and broken reeds, as you must have had innumerable occasions to observe, are apt to be ardent. Ardent, indeed, to the point of frenzy. No, that’s the wrong word. Frenzy is blind. Whereas lovers like Henry never lose their head. They take it with them, however far they go -- take it with them so that they can be fully, gloatingly conscious of their own and their partners’ alienation. Actually, this was about the only thing, outside his laboratory and his library, that Henry cared to be conscious of. Most people inhabit a universe that is like French cafe au lait -- fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage. Henry’s universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual.”

Rivers is here speaking to an unnamed narrator -- as he does throughout the novel, the work actually being one long discussion between an older Rivers, reflecting back on these events, and the narrator who, being unnamed, is presumed to be none other than Huxley himself. It’s a device often used in older fiction -- the need to give the words a reason for existing on the page rather than just letting them represent the story abstractly -- but here it provides an added dimension, since there is clearly more than a little Huxley in Henry Maartens -- the intellectual who, nonetheless, exists as a sexual creature, and who can’t help but bring his brain into the bedroom.

Maartens is so disassembled by the idea that his wife may be unfaithful to him that Rivers suggests that he go to bed, and Rivers goes to prepare a warm milk toddy to help him relax.

“I poured it into a thermos and went upstairs. For a moment, as I entered the bedroom, I thought Henry had given me the slip. Then, from behind the catafalque, came a sound of movement. In the recess between the draped chintz of the four-poster and the window, Henry was standing before the open door of a small safe, let into the wall and ordinarily concealed from view by the half-length portrait of Katy in her wedding dress. ‘Here’s your milk.’ I began in a tone of hypocritical cheerfulness. But then I noticed that the thing he had taken out of the recesses of the strongbox was a revolver; my heart missed a beat. I remembered suddenly that there was a midnight train for Chicago. Vision of the day after tomorrow’s headlines crowded in on me. FAMOUS SCIENTIST SHOOTS WIFE, SELF. Or, alternately, NOBEL PRIZE MAN HELD IN DOUBLE SLAYING. Or even MOTHER OF TWO DIES IN FLAMING LOVE NEST. I put down the thermos and, bracing myself to knock him out, if necessary, with a left to the jaw, or a short sharp jab in the solar plexus, I walked over to him. ‘If you don’t mind, Dr. Maartens,’ I said respectfully. There was no struggle, hardly so much as a conscious effort on his part to keep the revolver. Five seconds later the thing was safely in my pocket. ‘I was just looking at it,’ he said in a small flat voice.”

As we read on, remember that the safe from which Maartens retrieved the revolver is behind a picture of his wife in her wedding dress.

“‘Can we shut this up again?’ I asked. He nodded. On a little table beside the bed lay the objects he had taken out of the safe while looking for the revolver. These I now replaced -- Katy’s jewel box, half a dozen cases containing the gold medals presented to the great man by various learned societies, several Manila envelopes bulging with papers. And finally there were those books -- all six volumes of the Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a copy of Felicia by Andrea de Nerciat and, published in Brussels, an anonymous work with illustrations, entitled Miss Floggy’s Finishing School. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said in my jolliest bedside manner as I locked the safe door and returned him the key. Picking up the portrait I hung it again on its appointed hook. Behind the white satin and the orange blossom, behind the Madonna lilies and a face whose radiance even the ineptitude of a fifth-rate painter could not obscure, who could have divined the presence of that strangely assorted treasure -- Felicia and the stock certificates, Miss Floggy and the golden symbols with which a not very grateful society rewards its men of genius?”

It contains the trinkets of both his intellectual and his sexual mind. Even I don’t need to be hit over the head to understand the symbolic significance of the safe and its contents.

The Goddess

So that’s the Genius. Now, the Goddess -- Maartens’s wife Katy who, during the scene described above, is, as I said, away, tending to her sick and dying mother. But Maartens himself is also in diminishing health, and Katy eventually must return to provide him with her restorative presence. Except Katy herself is nearing her limit, exhaustion and worry combining to their most negative effects. Until...

“In the hall, on my way to the dining room, I ran into [the Maartens’s housekeeper] Beulah. She was carrying a tray with the eggs and bacon, and humming the tune of ‘All creatures that on earth do dwell’; catching sight of me, she gave me a radiant smile and said, “Praise the Lord!’ I had never felt less inclined to praise Him. ‘We’re going to have a miracle,’ she went on. ‘And when I asked her how she knew we were going to have a miracle, she told me that she had just seen Mrs. Maartens in the sickroom, and Mrs. Maartens was herself again. Not a ghost any more, but her old self. The virtue had come back, and that meant that Dr. Maartens would start getting well again. ‘It’s Grace,’ she said. ‘I’ve been praying for it night and day. “Dear Lord, give Mrs. Maartens some of that Grace of Yours. Let her have the virtue back, so Dr. Maartens can get well.” And now it’s happened, it’s happened!’”

It’s happened, all right. But it isn’t the Grace of God that has restored Katy. Upon hearing of the death of her mother, and in her moment of need, she and Rivers have begun a love affair, and it is the tenderness and the physicality of their relationship that has refreshed Katy.

“And, as though to confirm what she had said, there was a rustling on the stairs behind us. We turned. It was Katy. She was dressed in black. Love and sleep had smoothed her face, and the body which yesterday had moved so wearily, at the cost of so much painful effort, was now as softly strong, as rich with life as it had been before her mother's illness. She was a goddess once again -- in mourning but uneclipsed, luminous even in her grief and resignation.”

And Rivers isn’t kidding about this goddess business. In this novel, Huxley is examining the deep connection between sex and grace, between the primal restorative power of the procreative act and the heights of intelligence and achievement that man is otherwise always attempting to reach.

“Katy wasn’t the praying kind. For her, the supernatural was Nature; the divine was neither spiritual nor specifically human; it was in landscapes and sunshine and animals; it was in flowers, in the sour smell of little babies, in the warmth and softness of snuggling children; it was in kisses, of course, in the nocturnal apocalypses of love, in the more diffuse but no less ineffable bliss of just feeling well. She was a kind of feminine Antaeus -- invincible while her feet were on the ground, a goddess so long as she was in contact with the greater goddess within her, the universal Mother without. Three weeks of attendance on a dying woman had broken that contact. Grace came when it was restored, and that happened on the night of April the twenty-third. An hour of love, five or six hours of the deeper otherness of sleep, and the emptiness was filled, the ghost reincarnated. She lived again -- yet not she, of course, but the Unknown Quantity lived in her.”

This Unknown Quantity is vitally important to understanding the theme of this novel -- because, as will eventually become apparent, it is not actually Katy that is the goddess. Rather, if anything, it is the goddess that lives within her.

“The Unknown Quantity,” he repeated. “At one end of the spectrum it’s pure spirit, it’s the Clear Light of the Void; and at the other end it’s instinct, it’s health, it’s the perfect functioning of an organism that’s infallible so long as we don’t interfere with it; and somewhere between the two extremes is what St. Paul called ‘Christ’ -- the divine made human. Spiritual grace, animal grace, human grace -- these aspects of the same underlying mystery, ideally, all of us should be open to all of them. In practice most of us either barricade ourselves against every form of grace or, if we open the door, open it to only one of the forms. Which isn’t, of course, enough. And yet a third of a loaf is better than no bread. How much better was manifest that morning of April twenty-fourth. Cut off from animal grace, Katy had been an impotent phantom. Restored to it, she was Hera and Demeter and Aphrodite gloriously rolled into one, with Aesculapius and the Grotto of Lourdes thrown in as a bonus -- for the miracle was definitely under way. After three days at death’s door, Henry had felt the presence of the virtue in her and was responding. Lazarus was in process of being raised.”

Rivers at once does and does not understand this Unknown Quantity. In his intellectualism, he is unable to grasp it firmly, and to understand that although Katy possesses it, it is not Katy, and that Katy is, therefore, not a goddess, but just a woman. Every time he tries to talk to Katy about it -- either at the esoteric level of its power or at the practical level of his emotion -- she rebuffs him.

“Whenever I tried to tell her something of what was going on in my heart and mind, she either changed the subject or else, with a little laugh, with a little indulgent pat on the back of the hand, gently but very decidedly shut me up. Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entrails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep. One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things -- in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses -- a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously. Katy kept our traps firmly shut.”

The Hamlet reference is probably appropriate -- as Rivers is not wholly unlike the Prince of Denmark: vacillating, examining, obsessing, but rarely acting. But Katy? She has a different reason for acting the way she does. And she is certainly no Ophelia.

“She had the instinctive wisdom that taboos the four-letter words (and a fortiori the scientific polysyllables), while tacitly taking for granted the daily and nightly four-letter acts to which they refer. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem, a casus belli, the source of a neurosis. If Katy had talked, where, I ask you, should we have been? In a labyrinth of intercommunicating guilts and anguishes. Some people, of course, enjoy that sort of thing. Others detest it, but feel, remorsefully, that they deserve to suffer. Katy (God bless her!) was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian’s trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there’s really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There’s no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.” 

Rivers goes on flagellating like this for another page or two, and what he is eventually driving at is the seeming incongruity of it all -- about how something vile and create something wholesome.

“What I needed most at that time was a dose of justificatory good language to counteract the effect of all that vile-base-foul. But Katy wouldn’t give it me. Good or bad, language was entirely beside the point. The point, so far as she was concerned, was her experience of the creative otherness of love and sleep. The point was finding herself once again in a state of grace. The point, finally, was her renewed ability to do something for Henry. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the cookbook. Pleasure received and given, virtue restored, Lazarus raised from the dead -- the eating in this case was self-evidently good. So help yourself to the pudding and don’t talk with your mouth full -- it’s bad manners and it prevents you from appreciating the ambrosial flavor. It was a piece of advice too good for me to be able to take. True, I didn’t talk to her; she wouldn’t let me. But I went on talking to myself -- talking and talking till the ambrosia turned into wormwood or was contaminated by the horrible gamy taste of forbidden pleasure, of sin recognized and knowingly indulged in. And meanwhile the miracle was duly proceeding. Steadily, rapidly, without a single setback, Henry was getting better.”

These are deep issues that Huxley is examining here. And it is a little surprising -- at least to me -- that Rivers is so prudish about them.

“Didn’t that make you feel happier about things?” I asked.

Rivers nodded his head.

“In one way, yes. Because, of course, I realized even then, even in my state of imbecile innocence, that I was indirectly responsible for the miracle. I had betrayed my master; but if I hadn’t, my master would probably be dead. Evil had been done; but good, an enormous good, had come of it. It was a kind of justification. On the other hand how horrible it seemed that grace for Katy and life for her husband should be dependent on something so intrinsically low, so utterly vile-base-foul, as bodies and their sexual satisfaction. All my idealism revolted against the notion. And yet it was obviously true.”

Here it is, spelled out so clearly that it almost seems likely to be the kernel that Huxley has built his entire narrative around. It is, after all, sex that creates life, not just in the thematic sense that Huxley’s novel embraces, but in the literal sense of biology. And the fact that Rivers considers one to be foul and the other to be pure, and has such trouble harmonizing the two, is a commentary on societies that take the same Victorian view.

But Katy is different. It’s not lost on me that because of Huxley’s narrative choice of telling the story not just from Rivers’s point of view but largely in his words that we seldom see Katy directly, and are stuck too frequently with Rivers’s perception of her as the goddess. But Katy is no goddess and, more importantly, she knows that she isn’t.

Eventually, Rivers will be able to speak with Katy about his perceptions and fears.

“That evening I managed to say a little of what was on my mind. At first she tried to stop my mouth with kisses. Then, when I pushed her away, she grew angry and threatened to go back to her room. I had the sacrilegious courage to restrain her by brute force. ‘You’ve got to listen,’ I said as she struggled to free herself. And holding her at arm’s length, as one holds a dangerous animal, I poured out my tale of moral anguish. Katy heard me out: then, when it was all over, she laughed. Not sarcastically, not with the intention of wounding me, but from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement. ‘You can’t bear it,’ she teased. ‘You’re too noble to be a party to a deception! Can’t you ever think of anything but your own precious self? Think of me, for a chance, think of Henry! A sick genius and the poor woman whose job it’s been to keep the sick genius alive and tolerably sane. His huge crazy intellect against my instincts, his inhuman denial of life against the flow of life in me. It wasn’t easy, I’ve had to fight with every weapon that came to hand. And now here I have to listen to you -- talking the most nauseous kind of Sunday School twaddle, daring to tell me -- me! -- you cannot live a lie -- like George Washington and the cherry tree. You make me tired, I’m going to sleep.’ She yawned and, rolling over on her side, turned her back on me -- the back,” Rivers added with a little snort of laughter, “the infinitely eloquent back (if you perused it in the dark, like Braille, with your finger tips) of Aphrodite Callipygos.”

It is passages like these that make me conclude that Rivers is an unreliable narrator -- for how can anyone view these words of Katy’s as coming “from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement” or, once they’ve been spoken, go back to marveling at the woman’s shapely backside? No, sorry, Rivers, I ain’t buying it. You are so lost in your own misperceptions of reality, that you will never understand who and what Katy actually is.

She is a woman, prescribed by her society to play a certain role, which that society has inculcated to treat as the very well-spring of not just life, but achievement as well. In that way, and in no other, she is a goddess.

And after all of that, I have to wonder. Does Huxley know this? Has Huxley written a subversively feminist novel, or is he oblivious like Rivers, and simply written another male masturbatory one?

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 85 (DRAFT)

Okay. Now I want you to stop asking me that. I’m telling you this now and it will be my answer forever: I was not sleeping with Bethany Bishop. There might be a lot of things wrong with my marriage, but that is one line I have never crossed. No! Never! For fuck sake, why do you keep asking me?

Look, just drop it already. We’re coming up on the end of this long and sorry tale, and if you keep asking me that, I don’t think I’m going to have the momentum to push through to the end. Is that what you want?

No, I didn’t think so. You’ve come this far, you might as well hear the rest of it. 

So, my wife, Jenny -- who I was NOT cheating on -- drove me to the doctor’s office late that terrible afternoon. She must’ve left Jacob with a neighbor or something, because I don’t remember him being along for the ride, but I do remember pulling up to that same gulag-like clinic that we had recently taken him to. Jenny actually had to help me out of the car. I was that unsteady on my feet. Even with my eyes closed behind a thick pair of sunglasses it was still too bright outside, and she carefully led me like a blind person into the central processing nexus and then down one of the spoke-like arteries to sit in one of the waiting room chairs.

I remember sitting there with my eyes closed, feeling Jenny’s presence next to me, listening to the soft ambient noises of the clinic, and trying not to think about anything. There was so much, and it was all so overwhelming, that the allure of wiping my mind absolutely clean seemed the most inviting of all. The muffled voices from the nurses station, the persistent cough of the transient patients, the staccato opening and closing of doors, and the rhythmic pulsing of air through the air handling system -- they all merged together into a kind of lullaby, and I felt myself drifting off, not to sleep, but to some other welcome form of mindless oblivion.

“Alan Larson?”

“Over here,” I heard Jenny say after a short pause, and then turning towards me, “Alan, honey, they’re ready for you.”

I opened my eyes and slowly nodded my head.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

“No,” I said, rising from my chair, leaning heavily on Jenny’s arm to regain my feet. “No, I’ll be all right. You wait here.”

The light seemed tolerable and I could clearly see the nurse -- a man with the build of a linebacker -- waiting for me at the door that led to the examination rooms. I began walking confidently towards him and he stood aside so that I would have uncontested access to the passage.

“Okay,” I heard Jenny say behind me. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Inside the nurse -- his nametag said “Ray” -- led me back to one of the examination rooms, where he weighed me, took my temperature and my blood pressure. When he asked me why I was seeing the doctor today I told him that I was having my first migraine attack, and he gave me a sympathetic look.

“Migraines are awful,” he said. “My mother gets them, and they usually put her down for an entire day.”

I nodded my head knowingly. “They’re no fun,” I said.

“Okay,” Ray said, standing up and getting ready to leave the room. “The doctor will be with you in a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

I don’t know how long I was in that small examination room by myself, but, contrary to what Ray had predicted, it was a whole lot longer than a few minutes. For a little while I just sat there, my eyes barely open, my mind trying to bring back the emptiness that I had momentarily achieved in the waiting room. But that proved elusive, the change and the near absence of any ambient sounds having the opposite effect on my disposition. Are these little rooms soundproof? I wondered suddenly, remembering the times we had brought Jacob here and the way I had to hold him down in order for the nurse to administer those endless childhood vaccinations, his shrill, plaintive voice screaming in absolute terror and frenzy. I strained my ears to see if I could pick up the noise of any similar human suffering going on around me. Sadly -- or not, depending on your point of view -- there was nothing. No sounds at all. Just the steady and untrammeled rush of blood in my own vessels shushing and rushing in my ears.

I stood up and went over to look at the poster on the wall. Each of the examination rooms here had one, dedicated to a variety of medical conditions or anatomical systems. They could be used, I supposed, as educational tools by the doctors, pointing out the inner workings of a patient’s condition in colorful medical illustrations -- although I couldn’t remember any doctor I had seen here ever even referring to one. The room I was in must’ve been used to see pregnant women, because its poster was headlined PREGNANCY AND BIRTH. It was dominated by the figure of a nude woman, her belly swollen with a full-term fetus, fully visible in a kind of cut away view, its head already in its fateful position against her cervix, and its little face both wrinkled and wisened. The woman herself -- her dark hair framing a face that was neither caucaisian, asiatic nor hispanic, but some hybrid of the three -- looked at me with a serene wisdom of her own, knowing fully the role she and all like here were to play, and accepting it as both inevitable and foreordained. All around her was a series of smaller illustrations, each related to her and her condition, the largest of which was an exploded view of her own reproductive organs, showing the emergence of her ovum from her ovary, its pursuit and fertilization by a cloud of wriggling spermatozoa, its long journey down her Fallopian tube, and its eventual implantation in the wall of her uterus.

I worked my way around the examination table -- sure enough, equipped with stirrups for gynecological exams -- and wandered over to the small counter and set of cabinets that sat in the far corner. Here was the sink where doctors washed their hands, and on the counter sat an array of glass jars, each stuffed to overfilling with a series of examination tools -- tongue depressors, cotton swabs, rubber gloves and so on. Without embarrassment I began opening the cabinet doors, and was surprised to find the cupboards largely bare. Several extra boxes of rubber gloves, a few folded examination gowns, and some bottles of antiseptic hand soap.

I didn’t know what kind of surprise I was expecting -- is this where the doctors kept their medical experiments gone wrong: malformed fetuses kept in formaldehyde jars, just like the ones that sat on the countertop -- but the surprise came not from the contents of their cupboards but from the sudden opening of the examination room door and the swift and unexpected entry of the physician that would decide my fate.

“Well, now, what seems to be--” the doctor began, an older man with a bald pate and a white coat, stopping suddenly at the sight of his patient, not waiting patiently in the chair like he had been expecting but, evidently, rifling through their cabinets in search of something. My hands, in fact, at that moment were in the process of stuffing an examination gown back into a cupboard that had already twice proved of insufficient dimensions to contain its disrupted fabric and that of its brethren.

The doctor looked at me suspiciously for a moment and then seemed to collect himself. “Were you told to put on one of those gowns?” 

My first instinct was to run, and I believe if he hadn’t been standing in the doorway I might have done just that. The irrationality of the impulse surprised even me, but there it was, an intense need to flee, to get out of the tiny, suffocating, controlled space and back out into the wide unknown, futilely tamping down the chaos that otherwise threatened to overwhelm me.

“Yes, I said, welcoming the lie as far easier than explaining what I was doing looking through their cabinets. “Yes,” I said again. “But one wasn’t put out for me. I didn’t know where else to look.”

The doctor shook his head, and carefully shut the door behind him without, I noticed, turning his back on me. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “Why don’t you come and have a seat?” He gestured to the patient chair I had previously vacated.

I did so obediently, and I watched him as he rolled a stool out from under a small table affixed to the wall in the very corner of the room and settled himself down upon it. Under his white coat he wore a dress shirt, tie, and what looked like an uncomfortable pair of slacks. He hooked his loafered feet on the chrome rim of the stool and dropped the file he had brought in with him on the table.

“So,” he said. “What brought you in here today?”

I looked absently at the file he had seemed to discard. It was manilla and only contained a few loose pieces of paper, one of which was poking its goldenrod hue out from behind the folder’s cover. On the folder’s exposed tab was a large white sticker emblazoned with a capital letter L, and a smaller companion in which someone had typed -- evidently on an old-fashioned typewriter -- my last name comma first name.

“My wife thinks I’m having a migraine.”

“She does? What do you think?”

That drew my attention away from the folder. Given the look on the doctor’s face, I got the distinct impression that was how he intended it. I looked down at the tag pinned to the breast pocket of his coat: a medical ID, with an outdated picture of the same man, and a name laserprinted in clear bold type. BLAIR comma Leland. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had a migraine before.”

“Are the lights in here bothering you?”

“A little.”

The doctor reached behind him and flipped off the light switch. For a moment we were plunged into absolute darkness, but then he pulled the door open a crack, allowing enough light from the hallway to spill into the room so that we could still see each other.

“Is that better?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

In the partial darkness, the doctor sat and studied me for a few moments. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Your name is Alan, right? Alan Larson?”

“Yes.”

“Alan, I’m Dr. Blair.”

He extended a hand and I shook it. I struggled to place him. Now in the dim light it was even harder to be sure, but I don’t think I had ever seen him before.

“Your badge says Leland.”

He looked at me quizzically. Not offended. At least I didn’t think so.

“I hate that ‘i’m the doctor and you’re the patient shit’. Always makes me feel like a child.”

I think he actually smiled. “My friends call me Lee.”

I looked at him skeptically. He definitely wasn’t my friend, but I decided not to push it. I had already done far more than I had ever dared do before and my heart was thumping in my chest like it was ready to leave without me.

“Okay, Lee.”

His smile softened a little, probably recognizing that it could never completely remove the wall that stood between us. 

“Can you tell me what happened to you today?”

What happened to me today. I knew he was asking about my symptoms, but a lot had happened to me today, and his question caused the fear and the shame that I worked so hard to keep at bay to well up within me. I choked back a sob, terrified that so much seemed so close to the surface, and that such an innocent inquiry could tap into it so quickly.

“Well,” I said, struggling to compose myself. “It started at my desk at work this morning. I started having trouble seeing my computer screen.”

“What do you do?”

“There was-- Wait. What?”

“For a living. What do you do for a living?”

What did I do for a living. Oh fuck, buddy, if only I could tell you in a way you would understand. In a way anyone would understand.

“I work in an office,” I said.

“...okay,” he said, obviously expecting more. I was loathe to give it to him, but he seemed insistent.

“I sit at my desk. I type things into my computer. I have meetings with people. I send emails. I talk to people on the phone. Sometimes I get on airplanes and stay in hotels.”

“All right,” he said. “And today you started having trouble seeing your computer screen?”

So then I told him the story. About how I first thought something was wrong with my screen, but then realized the occlusion was in my vision, about the shimmering waves and the dizziness, about the dry heaves and the floor of the public bathroom, about the painful light and the pounding in my temples, about the dark room and the disorientation, about the sickening smell of food and the unsteadiness on my feet. And while I told him all of these things, beneath them all, running in the same current but at a lower and more dangerous amperage, were all the unspoken things that were likely the true cause of my affliction. The extra work that had been piled on my shoulders, the lack of confidence that Mary put very much on display, the hopeless expectations that Eleanor Rumford measured me by, the dangerous game that Wes Howard had sucked me into, the lack of confidence I had in my ability to retain and lead my team, the lingering and diminishing connection with Bethany Bishop, the uncertainty about the new position I was interviewing for and the fear of being found out, the burden that I was increasingly becoming on my wife, her own hidden inadequacies papered over with bravado and emotional distance, and my aching inability to understand or accept the son who loved me in ways that both frightened and angered me. If I’d had my wits about me, these are the “symptoms” that I would have described to Dr. Leland Blair, but he wasn’t that kind of doctor and I wasn’t that kind of patient.

But it overwhelmed me nonetheless, my emotions seizing up as if they had grasped the live wire of my dysfunction and uncertainty, and before I could finish my litany I was crying, the tears coming unwillingly and uncontrollably. Then I began to blubber, my entire face melting with what felt like syrupy bile coming out of my nose and eyes.

The doctor placed a reassuring hand on my knee and handed me some tissues. “There, there,” he said, exactly like he was comforting a small child. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

It was madness. I looked down into the abyss and let myself fall in.

“I’m sorry,” I said, blowing my nose into the tissues he had handed me and then absently using them to wipe away some of my tears. “I don’t know why I’m here. I know I’m broken, broken inside, but I don’t know what you or anyone else can do to fix me. I can’t feel anything soft or warm without realizing how empty and hollow it is. My son, my wife, my friends, my co-workers, my clients—they’re nothing to me. They’re forever separate. I can’t see them. It’s as if they don’t even exist. I’m alone. No matter how many people are around me, it’s as if I’m alone and always will be. I don’t know how to go on living like this.”

I dropped my face into my hands and let a fresh wave of sobs overtake me. If it weren’t for the reassuring pats he continued to place on my knee, I wouldn’t have known that anyone else was there with me. I was at the bottom of a well and there wasn’t anyway that I could see to climb back out.

“Are you here alone, today?”

“What?”

“Are you here alone today? Is there someone waiting for you? To take you home?”

It took me longer than usual to put the necessary thoughts together, first to understand, and then to respond. “My wife is here. She’s out in the waiting room. She’s eight months pregnant.”

He nodded reassuringly and then spoke in his best doctor voice. He told me he was going to write me two prescriptions -- one for the migraines and the other for anxiety. He gave me the short set of instructions for how and when to take each. But then he said he was also going to give me a referral to a counselor -- someone I could speak to privately and confidentially, and who could help me sort through some of the challenges I was facing. The counselors were here at this clinic, and he strongly encouraged me to give them a try.  

“All right?”

I looked at him blankly, not really understanding anything he had said.

“All right,” I said.

He wrote out the scripts and handed them to me. Sniffling, I took the pieces of paper from him and began shuffling them and scanning each one with incomprehension.

“Do you want me to ask someone to bring your wife back here?”

“What?” I asked, looking up at him.

“Do you want your wife to come get you? Or can you make it back to her by yourself?”

“No,” I said, the intensity of my shame overcoming me, almost bringing the acrid tears back. “No, I can find my way. Just give me a few moments to collect myself.”

He tapped me on the knee again before rising from his chair. “Take all the time you need.” Then, seemingly without my observation, he was gone and the door had been closed behind him. 

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/