Where Vultures Circle, a Corpse Lies Near

I am less than twenty-four hours back from a week’s visit with my wife’s relatives in Rome, Georgia. The excursion has always been something of a journey into the past for me. Eastern towns, of course, always cling to an air of antiquity before the rude eyes of us wandering Westerners. Rome is more “backwards” than my Texas town of comparable size—meaning, in translation, that people move more slowly, build less rashly, and preserve architectural relics and scenery more meticulously. To my son’s delight (and mine, I must confess), Rome is also more baseball-friendly—for baseball remains a distant descendant of cricket, that leisurely paean to sunlight and greenswards, while football-mad Texas values only dumb force without finesse. (It is no accident that the two Major League baseball teams in Texas cannot master the intricacies of “small ball”, and that only one of them therefore has been to a World Series—which it promptly lost—in a combined century of futility.)

Yet Rome is also painful for me. It was my introduction to academe as a professional—and the experience was deeply humiliating. I was hired at Berry College, not because of my credentials, but because both factions of a feuding department decided that an ingénue like me could be readily manipulated (a fact which years of retrospect were required to divulge to me). When I showed signs of having a mind of my own, I was ambushed by a series of carefully engineered slanders which might have led me straight to a lawyer had I been the sort of pugnacious spoiled brat who does well in this calling. It isn’t of those times that I wish to write. So much water has now passed under the bridge and washed far out to sea that I might almost have stolen my blue Rome memories from a bad dream. The reflection that struck me last week full-force, rather, was how very poorly my society—my parents, my relatives, my teachers in high school, my professors in college—prepared me for life. Like so many, I blundered into teaching because I could do nothing else with my many degrees in literary studies and ancient languages: I was inetto a vivere (“unfit for living”), as the Italians say. At another time, I would have enjoyed teaching at any level. Students would have been brought up to respect their elders and to venerate the past, while supervisors would have been more concerned with transmitting an ethos than with building a career. At another time, I might simply have scribbled for a public which valued reading. No one in my youth had foreseen the slaughterhouse for which I was destined, so no parent or instructor knew to warn me—to advise me, say, to buy property and rent it, saving the poets for my free time.

These ruminations led me infallibly to others of an even more acid taste which will torment me till the day I die. I had thought, ingénue that I was, that the right sort of woman would be attracted to a decent man with manners and principles. Eventually, that woman and I found each other—but so late in our youth’s day that we were unable to have the kind of family which we had always longed for. I was brought up to believe (by two parents who couldn’t have filled a thimble with what they knew of the world) that, like the perfect job, the perfect mate would happen along by the time I was twenty-five or so, with due preparation and diligence. My ingenuous folly ran head-on into the sexual revolution. Surrounded by the ambitious and the highly educated, I found my efforts at selflessness and noblesse repeatedly minced and dumped at my feet like the results of a samurai’s warm-up on a dummy. Women who refused to see me again after a date or two because I honored a Christian standard of pre-marital abstinence: M___, K___, A___, C___, C___, J___, B___, D___, F___, J___, L___, C___, A___ ... and those are right off the top of my head. Women who quickly lost interest because I was merely a teacher (later college professor) and hence not raking in big bucks: B___, C___, M___, T___, K___, C___ … practically all of them, as I recall, met in conjunction with some sort of church activity. A hazy boundary had been crossed, I should explain, between the first group and the second. I had speculated, as I aged and grew profoundly lonely, that the New Woman was a god unto herself, dedicated to her own material and egotistical advancement and wholly averse to any sort of personal sacrifice—hence incapable of sustained relationships, let alone marriage. I do not think I was wrong in this speculation. What truly shocked me, however, was the ensuing revelation that “believing” women were so often simply dedicated to self-aggrandizement through other avenues. Whether or not they practiced recreational sex (and the appearance of not doing so often seemed no more than an enticement to whet the appetite), they expected eventually to see a highly lucrative payday. They regarded marriage, not as a burden of duties and sacrifices which they would assume equally and heartily with a devoted partner, but as a lifelong ticket to the easy life. They may not have wanted a career—many of them wanted to kiss their career goodbye; but most of them wanted to be Number One every bit as much as the self-actualizing academic feminist.

Do people crave sex in a decadent society as a means to money, or do they crave money as a means to sex? Or are both merely the most convenient currency for liquidating an insatiable narcissism?

My son pointed out to me, having stood through several renditions of the National Anthem, that American ballplayers preserve a posture of respect until “the home of the brave” is sung” but that Latin ballplayers slouch and nudge their neighbors. What does the Star-Spangled Banner mean to me? Not much, I’m afraid: not any more. We Americans like to cling to the illusion that we still possess a nation and a coherent, healthy society. Those who see us from the outside know better. What neither they nor we seem to know is that the sickness that rots us has been eating away for decades—throughout most of my own lifetime. I have seen it: I have lived it. We are perhaps a society without values, perhaps one which wears its values on its sleeve, perhaps one which holds very strongly to values whose true name we dare not speak. I saw it in the professional slaughterhouse to which I was surrendered as a callow young man; I saw it in the women who griped and whined incessantly about the male incapacity for commitment, yet who wanted ME off their doorstep because I wasn’t salivating to undress them or didn’t drive the kind of car which God would have bestowed upon His chosen; and I saw it in the pampered millionaire athletes who sat on an air-conditioned, stationary bus for forty minutes as half a dozen kids waited on the other side of an iron grill hoping—in vain—for just one of them to climb down and sign a baseball.

The stench is all about us, and Al Qaeda didn’t put it there. Neither did Bill Clinton, or George Bush, or Barack Obama. Vultures do not kill: they only clean up where death has already passed.