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Page April
Fools Part 3
Gentle Reader,
I’m sorry that the pace of my book has become so frenzied, and I expect that you’ll have forgotten that in April, I was riding my bicycle, sleeping in the woods like a natural man. I preferred those past perils of the road to my current confinement in a blacked-out house. Welcome to my underground, and call me Dostoevsky, who was once labeled a traitor; or Tolstoy, who was excommunicated; or Hamilton who did the best thinking for the First American Revolution and ended up shot; Caesar beat the world and got stabbed in the back by the senators he spared.
So am I one of these? Beats me. I just cut and paste the examples I received from a good education in the humanities, and if you’ll pardon me, I’d like to put in a tender word for the Classics, the soul of the humanities…
[Hadrian’s last poem; I’ll include – with poetic translation, of course.]
I’ve spent my life hero-worshipping brave men, hoping in my heart that I could prove myself one of them. Am I doing it? You see, I don’t know myself, I really don’t. I just know that I can’t not do it. (That ain’t original either, I stole it from Martin Luther.) I’ve got to see it through, and I knew that from the moment the 3/7 Cavalry…
Could it be that being a hero isn’t all that great a feat? I heard that Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg got together and discussed it all, and decided that if they had it to do over again, they’d have stayed unknowns. But no one cares what they think of themselves. It’s what we think of them that matters to us, and we see them as icons, not iconoclasts. I think we overrate them. They’re just the guys who couldn’t back down when something, a muse or Mars, called them out to show themselves. They’re the floor show for history, the high-end bread and circuses. Enjoy the show, for we all do, but have some compassion for heroic fools. It’s not easy being one. I try my best, but there isn’t a day that I don’t feel dread in my heart. Yes, for my nation, and yes, for myself. I’ll do the dying if it comes to it, but I’d prefer to see the sad ghosts home, and lead you in their sad rites. If I can’t be there to see it, just take what’s left of me to them. I think the nation should create a special tomb for that one unit. The desecration of the 3/7 Cavalry is a shame for which our generation can never atone.
My heart is heavy now, and it’s most peculiar. You see, I think my rout is in full swing. My brothers and sisters are riding beside me. We are a combined command of living and dead. We are water, we are wind, we are fire. We are the purification that the Founders envisioned, and I pray God that our revolution will be bloodless.
I’ve realized through peering into men’s souls that
the founding fathers weren’t the geniuses we make them out to be. They were just real smart people who gained
the inestimable experience of seeing what civil discord and revolution do to
the folks. War shows us for what we are,
and once you’ve seen that, you never trust us again. The Founders knew not to trust in any of the
flag-waving bullshit like we see in every goddamn photo op the bosses put out
there to keep us dumb. Shit, understand this book: How many people in it really give a damn
about the
Captain May