DID THIS MEAN GOD HAD CAST A lowly coffeeshop waitress as the Femme Fatale in His Grand Design by which I would be enticed into the "Wild Goosechase" that took me from Hollywood & Vine to the summit of Mt. Olympus for what became my Morons Awake! Epiphany when He and I had that Historymaking Meeting Of Our Minds in the parking lot of Inspiration Point; the result of which was that Sacred Covenant whereby—with His help—I would rewrite those Original Sin portions of Genesis as: A Bestselling Nonfiction Novel In The Form Of A Revolutionary Manifesto Proclaiming The Superiority Of Erudition Over Ignorance Blissfulnesswise In Accordance With The NeoEgalitarian & SocioCultural Principles Revealed By The Gospel Of Born Again Klutzianity?
Of course it did!
Especially, dear reader, when you consider these hitherto undisclosed (only because until now I saw no need to burden you with them) details concerning the best kept secrets of a relationship I carried on so furtively none of those familiar with my private affairs—including Icky Vanderphd, Jedgar Ballbraker, Maria Bimbeaux, Vicky Truelove and even Jayne Playne (not to mention the 2 or 3 thousand Moronettes and -esses whose prayers "For spending just 1 night in bed with a man who can not only fill the void between a woman's thighs but the more important vacuum between her ears" I answered so gallantly)—ever imagined "the bleached blonde blabbermouth with a bra size larger than her IQ" (as Doris was known by her detractors—most of whom were married to men who couldn't care less about a waitress' mental shortcomings) was in fact the most intimate of those few and far between "acquaintances" I made among the people of Moronia since becoming their American ambassador in 1939, to wit:
(1) On an almost daily basis45 during the 50 years I knew her, along with—and, despite my "Talmudic" propensity for discerning the slightest metaphysical nuances of everyday events, to a large extent eclipsed by—the dazzling attributes of Doris' anatomical charms, she exhibited several character traits whose angelic (or, shades of Oedipus Rex, Fairy Godmotherly!) qualities could only be construed as those belonging to no ordinary coffeeshop waitress (or woman for that matter) but one whose ethereal mystique cast its enchanting spell on the loftiest of a man's aspirations in addition to those baser ones arising from his loins. Hence;
(2) On those (alltoo frequent) evenings when she found me wallowing in a funk of selfpity over the absurdly small pond in which I was forced to do my diplomatic and sociocultural swimming, it was Doris who lifted the dead (metaphoricallyspeaking, but nevertheless in those days not unwhalelikegestaltwise) weight of my being from the deepest depths of its despair by repeating the advice I gave to her on those rare occasions when, after breaking in a new pair of shoes on the job or midway through one of my overly ambitious attempts to elevate the content of our aprèsforeplay "pillowtalks," her normally skyhigh morale needed a boost: "As the Kama Sutra states—In the Art of Lovemaking and Life; That virtue for which a woman is more generously rewarded than any other is her unbounded willingness to patiently endure whatever torments her consort, or the gods, devise so she might be fully primed for the heavenly bliss that only comes when all of her yearnings for female fulfillment are consummated with nothing less than the Biggest Of Big Bangs. And, if what's good for the goose is good for the gander Art of Lifewise, doesn't the same rule apply to a man who finds himself in your Small Pond Predicament?" After which she would usually add some reassuring words of her own "brainless blonde wisdom" like: "Just as now and then you—or even I—might think these endless lovemaking tortures we put ourselves through aren't worth the fleeting ecstasy they produce; I promise you, beloved—no matter how long it takes, eventually you will attain the undying fame awarded (albeit posthumously in most cases) to such other 'late bloomers' as Charles Ives, Anton Bruckner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean Dubuffet, Winston Churchill, Oskar Pannizza, Grandma Moses, Martin Ramirez, Adolf Wolfi, Joseph Hoakum, Alfonso Ossario, Heinrich Hermann Mebes, Karel Brendel, Henry Darger, Charles Bukowski, Lucian Freud, William Gass, Maggie Thatcher, Martin Buber, Henri Rousseau, Karl Sternheim, Vincent Van Gogh, Abraham Lincoln, William Brann, Aphra Behn, Golda Meier and Ronald Reagan."46 And while my chances for ever fulfilling Doris' prophecy seemed less and less likely the longer I remained trapped in that most wretched of all wastelands; it was—as the Morons (privately) tell themselves about their own PieInTheSky dreams of escaping from that pispoor excuse for the Land Of Milk&Honey promised to them in The Good Book [Moronic Chronicles] when they regained the Blissful state of Ignorance lost by Ådûmb & Œfë after making their Big Mistake [ie, the Original Sin committed by Adam & Eve according to JudeoChristian theology]—"A pig in a poke that was better than no pig at all." In addition to which;
(3) It was Doris who tutored me on the eccentricities of a Moronic gynecology which for more than 5,000 years had baffled not only Moronia's menfolk but those male members of the invading hordes from more advanced societies who raped (or at least tried to) and pillaged their way through that strategically located but otherwise worthless patch of real estate in the name of Lebensraum, Empire, Civilization and/or Christendom. Happily the lessons I learned from her concerning this esoteric subject also proved themselves applicable (like so many other aspects of Moronia's unorthodoxy) to "normal" females and thereby laid the foundation for what would later become the Universal Principles Of Superprotracted Foreplay. And, even more importantly for the future welfare of humanity at large;
(4) As the (more or less47) direct result of Doris' boundless affection for the land of her birth I began writing what would become my epic 16 volume History of the Morons. To hear her tell it, as she so often did when I complained about being buried alive in a wasteland of mediocrity so flat it made America's hill of Blissful Ignorance beans look like Mount Everest: "Despite its sociocultural shortcomings, ethnoeconomic warts and geopolitical drawbacks Moronia is still the greatest little country in the world when it comes to those countless minidramas constituting the daily lives of ordinary people."
Wow! Talk about what occasionally comes from the mouth of a babe! I ask you, dear reader—has any statement of mine put the NeoEgalitarian kernel of this book into a more quintiessential nutshell? Unwittingly or not, Doris had put her finger on the tandem of ideas I was to spend the next half century constructing into those Twin Pillars of Microcosmicity & Everyday Aesthetics that would eventually support the Archway of Born Again Klutzianity through which mankind will pass on its NeoEgalitarian pilgrimage to SocioCultural Grace (if not that Truest Bliss Of All—Consummate Erudition). When I began writing my History of the Morons, however, I was unaware of the profound implications of what turned out to be the superseminality48 of Doris' words—the greatest little country in the world—and their even more prophetic juxtaposing with the most pregnant of Morons Awake!'s Major Motifs—"those countless minidramas constituting the daily lives of ordinary people."49 And in the 50 years it took to finish those 16 volumes Doris inspired me to write I acquired the work habits—if not all the literary skills—that would help me grapple with the Herculean task thrust upon me by God when He chose me to tell you the story of how Jack F. Klutz died and, more significantly, lived to prove even an average Moron can overcome his—or her—congenital mediocrity in striving to emulate (as closely as any hominid can) that divine image in which he—or she—is theoretically created.
WHILE THIS ANALYSIS OF THE PIVOTAL ROLE Doris Darlinge had, in one way or another, always played in guiding me along the path to not just my own salvation but that of Western Civilization seemed irrefutable; the only way I could be absolutely certain about such a crucial issue was by returning to the Main Street CoffeeShop and asking her in the plainest possible English if she was in fact a Muse—or what the Germans call Ein Kunstengel (Art Angel). Which is what I started to do. But in the act of turning around it suddenly occurred to me: Even if Doris had, as a matter of theological fact, been sent from heaven so I might be the one to proclaim Klutz's NeoEgalitarian Gospel of SocioCultural Redemption in the more accessible form of a bestselling nonfiction novel would she admit it? Or, upon further reflection, could she? After all: By doing so wouldn't she violate what are traditionally those mysterious ways by which such supernatural affairs are carried on between a Muse (or Kunstengel) and the mere mortal upon whom she exerts her magical charms? Hence the confusing nature of that first "So long handsome—and thanks for the memories" farewell remark she made to me at the corner of Hollywood & Vine and repeated only a few minutes ago (but this time without the aforementioned auditory distractions caused by Mahler's 5th Symphony Adagietto climaxing simultaneously with that roar from the Eldorado's engine). If that clue weren't sufficient for solving the riddle of Doris' true identity, how could I ask her to be more explicit without destroying my credibility as a "literary mastermind" whose need for the odd miracle had nothing to do with his lack of imagination but arose from the beleaguered state of his morale solitaryvoiceinthe wildernesswise?50
And finally: After all my Born Again Klutzianity preaching that art is not an elitist luxury but a Practical Approach For An Average Housewife In Her Pursuit Of Daily Happiness wasn't I obligated to ponder all the aesthetic factors involved before embarking on an escapade whose less than fully critiqued outcome might leave me with the egg of Tartuffian hypocricy on my face? For instance. Would I really be better off knowing for a metaphysical certainty that Doris was indeed an extraterrestrial creature at the risk of being told by her she wasn't? Moreover, there was this technical problem to consider: Exactly how does one go about composing such a delicate question without either embarrassing the woman to whom it is addressed because you aren't the exclusive reason for her being; or look like a fool for not knowing you always were without her having to say so? But above and beyond such egotistical concerns there was the larger issue of whether it is prudent to remove the last of those veils in which the most tempting but forbidden of life's mysteries are cloaked. Just as in art there is a profound difference between nudity and starknakedness, when seeking the ultimate truth it might be wiser to pursue a policy of discreet valor by leaving at least a modicum of uncertainty to one's imagination. In other words, dear reader—but please don't tell anyone I said so!—under certain circumstances, and within carefully defined limits, a little ignorance can be a good thing.
If this sounds like heresy let me explain what I mean as follows: The benefits derived from being discreetly ignorant are themselves a truth; the proof of which couldn't be more obvious than it is when we consider what our lives in this hostile universe would be like without those fantasies, daydreams, selfdeceptions, fables, fairytales, fibs, humbugs, flimflams, mendacities, pretensions, figments, hallucinations, chimeras, mirages, myths, fictions and yes, trashy romance novels!—not to mention delusions of massianic grandeur—which keep us from losing the minds we have. For these reasons (and the "providential" fact that from the corner of my eye I could see the red light at the intersection of Main & First had turned green) I decided in midturn to reverse course and proceed toward my original destination. Which, since that detail is of little consequence,51 ends my telling of this tale.
Return to Book Two Chapter 6 Part 5 or Book Two Chapter 8 Part 1 Return to Index
Footnotes
45 The "highpoint" of my working days were those languid lunch hours (usually from 12-3) I spent in the Main Street Coffee Shop shooting the bull, chewing the fat and swapping the latest scuttlebutt over a Blue Plate Special with the "pencilpushers," "papershufflers" and "deskjockeys" who constituted Moronia's (relatively) privileged Whitecollar Class—hence that establishment's neonlit logo—THE PLACE WHERE MORONVILLE'S ELITE PREFER TO EAT! And at the height of the Cold War in addition to these "local yokels," a substantial crowd of MajorLeague spies, secret agents, saboteurs, intelligence operatives and assorted KGB, CIA and MI-6 types could also be found loitering in this otherwise least likely of the wateringholes preferred by Europe's professional Cloak & Dagger set.45s1 For reasons similar to those establishing Moronia as the one fault line where East/West tensions could be discreetly managed in geopolitical circumstances even more clandestine than those of such other microstates adjacent to the Iron Curtain as Cretiny, Macedonia, Carpathia, Duncesylvania, Ruthenia, Bukovina, Kosevo and Kurdistan—by virtue of its sheer improbability Moronville's Main Street CoffeeShop became the venue of choice from which we and the Soviets launched our foreign policy trial balloons during the period 1945-1952. So it wasn't all that surprising when, in July of 1948—several weeks after the Berlin Airlift began—I was introduced by a KGB agent (posing as a turnipschnapps exporter) to someone calling himself "Mister Hammer, from Stockholm." What made Mister Hammer so unusual to me (and all the other nonMorons in the Main Street CoffeeShop on that day) was how miserably his Groucho Marx nose, mustache and hornrimmed spectacles failed to conceal the obvious fact he was Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (molot is Russian for hammer) the Kremlin's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Molotov had a business proposition his "colleague in Stockholm, a certain Mister Steel," thought my colleagues in Washington "might find profitable." The substance of which (once all its Marxist rhetorical, doctrinaire and jingoistic figleafs were stripped away) was this: The United States and Soviet Union should terminate the Cold War forthwith and thereafter settle their ideological differences in a peaceful, sane and scientific competition to decide whether communism or capitalism was the better system for satisfying the broadest range of needs for the largest number of people!
Apparently the AngloAmerican decision to resist the Soviet blockade of Berlin "at all costs" had convinced Stalin ("Mr. Steel") he was in for a long and, more importantly, expensive struggle with an opponent whose pigheadedness was exceeded only by his vast economic resources. In my opinion the Soviets were sincere. They had not only seen but believed what was written on that—then figurative—Berlin wall in the summer of '48, namely: Sooner rather than later their Costly ICBMs & Cheap Vodka plans for winning an armsrace with us—not unlike LBJ's Guns & Butter scheme to bomb "North Vietnam back into the f**king stone age" while building his Great Society on the home front—would go down the toilet along with Muscovy's ancient dream of imperial glory and Marx's hopes for a Second (SocioEconomic) Paradise On Earth.
† † †
To shorten a long and, as it turned out, yet another sorry chapter in the history of mankind's refusal to believe in the practical benefits that come from loving one's enemies—and/or thinking before it repeats the same stupid mistakes ad infinitum—my recommendation to Washington that:
"We should take advantage of this temporary thaw in our icey deadlock with the Soviets (who, by the way, have proven themselves to be no slouches both siege- and winterwarfarewise) and without hesitation accept the olive branch they are offering us. If only for propaganda purposes, should it fail to bear fruit. Which, based on my man-to-man, face-to-face and, more significantly, heart-to-heart dealings with Molotov I remain convinced it won't."45s2
was dismissed out of hand as "a pipedream." Only after hinting to Washington the terms of Molotov's Entente Cordiale might be leaked (by him or me was left unsaid) to the press if we didn't officially respond to them did the State Department send me one of their TOP SECRET DESTROY IMMEDIATELY AFTER MEMORIZING cables, whose brief message:
"Should the U.S.S.R. decide to unilaterally withdraw from the arms race for humanitarian and economic reasons, the United States would naturally welcome such a refreshing admission of democratic capitalism's superiority over the apparent advantages enjoyed by a totalitarian socialist state as the first step toward relieving the tensions between our 2 nations. Tensions which, it should be remembered, were unilaterally created by the Soviet regime in the first place."
I was ordered to "repeat verbatim—but in a quasiofficial manner that will preserve our deniability if the bastards go public with what amounts to our Declaration of (Continued) War—"for the enlightenment of 'Messers Hammer & Steel." Needless to say, this terse rebuke of (what I continue to believe were) Stalin's sincere—if not altogether "good" intentions did what it was designed to do: Bring any hope there might have been for ending the Cold War in 1948 to a screeching halt
As an interesting side bar to this sorry affair; 9 years later the Soviets made Molotov their ambassador to Moronia. Not, as Isvestia and Pravda so typically misinformed the West—"to the Mongolian People's Republic as punishment for his role in the [1957] plot to depose Krushchev"—but rather to put someone with Molotov's Politburo prestige and worldclass foreign policy credentials personally in charge of what the Soviet's always regarded as their most important diplomatic post. Nevertheless, despite the proximity of our bailiwicks (the U.S.S.R. mission occupied a defunct Arthur Murray Dance Studio on First Avenue only a few doors from the former chiropractic offices housing our embassy)—and the fact Moronville's size made it virtually impossible not to cross paths with every 1 of its less than 300 residents in the course of an average week —another 5 years went by before Molotov and I finally got around to our first meeting ,when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted in 1962. On which occasion we found ourselves sitting across the table from each other in the "neutral territory" of the Main Street CoffeeShop's VIP booth initialing the protocol whereby we and the Soviets agreed that: In exchange for removing all their offensive weapons from Cuba, Uncle Sam would exempt that obnoxious little island from the No European Meddling In America's Hemispheric Affairs provision of the Monroe Doctrine.
46 This litany was one Doris learned by heart from hearing me repeatedly praise the names it contained as: "Belonging to those unsung heroes (and the odd heroine) who persevered in spite of the obscurity (or outright ridicule) they were forced to endure for most, if not all, of their longsuffering lives before the world (or at least a few scholars, curators and critics) finally got around to giving them the accolades they so richly deserved. With the exception of Ronald Reagan and Grandma Moses—both of whom enjoy a popularity among the Morons equal to that of their American admirers—it's unlikely Doris ever understood—or felt the slightest curiosity to know—the reasons why (well before it was clear to me the ignominy I would undergo by being buried alive for 50 years at the very bottom of the world's birdcage geographic- and socioculturallywise, made theirs look like an episode of I Love Lucy) I chose these particular Dishonored Prophets for my Personal Hall of LateBlooming Fame.
47 What might appear as a gratuitous qualification is used only because had I not been literally bored to tears by the life I was living in Moronia it seems unlikely a man with my "thinking big" propensities would have ever embarked on what seemed at the time like such a trivial pursuit.
48 How else can one describe that single stroke of genius by which a common coffeeshop waitress rendered all the history books ever written—from Herodotus' Persian Wars and Thucydides' Pelopennesian War to Marx's Das Kapital and Spengler's Der Untergang Des Abendlandes—obsolete?
49 My immediate concern was to discover how the Morons had managed to survive (by the skin of their teeth) for more than 10,000 years since they established what remains to this day as not only the smallest but the most socially, culturally, intellectually and economically disadvantaged nation on the face of the earth.
50 Naturally I exclude my direct and tangential dealings with God as His emanuensis from this critique of the ad hoc and intermediary role Doris played in the writing of Morons Awake!. In my secretarial capacity there was never any real doubt about whether He or I was in charge; or even which of us might be wiser when it came to nonecclestialical matters.
51 This may be true in your case, ladies, but as his editoress—and the woman whose relationship with him went well beyond the normal intimacy arising between an average Publishinghouse Reader and a Maiden Novelist when they collaborate on turning his brilliantbutunreadable manuscript into their first bestseller (let alone a blockbusting literary masterpiece)—I would certainly like to know where the author went after crossing the intersection of Main & First because no one has seen hide or hair of him since he did so! Nor, with the single exception of the envelope containing his "final draft" of this appendix, have I received any other word from him, written or verbal. And, while those few colleagues of mine whose opinions in such personal matters I tend to respect all told me:
This riding off into the sunset of your Lone Literary Ranger doesn't sound terribly serious to us, Jayne. Like William Roth, J. D. Salinger and B. Traven did after finishing their Great American Novels, he's probably chosen to avoid the hullabaloo that will be made over his when the critics hail it as—
"A seminal event in the hitherto sterile annals of massmediated art forms, major metaphysical motifswise!"
"The Wakeupcall Western Civilization has been waiting for since The Revolt of the Masses!"
"A document no less earthshaking than the Bible, Magna Carta and/ or the Declaration of Independence!"
"The finest—and, more importantly, most profitable—feather to adorn a North American thinking cap worn in recent times by only the worstselling of our novelists, playwrights and poets!"
"A blockbusting bestseller which not only treats ordinary housewives as if they were intelligent but argues persuasively that: By virtue of their posthighschoolgraduate reading habits (no matter how nonliterary) they represent mankind's last and best hope for living happily ever after in a Third Millennium where the blissfulness of erudition supersedes that of ignorance!"
"An heroic struggle by one writer (and a rank amateur at that!) to create a single work of (Salingeresque?) art that saves the entire human race from sleepwalking over the cliff's edge of its carefree quest for everlasting juvenile happiness!"
"A book which, if it doesn't make history by reversing the decline of Western Civilization will, at the very least, alter the course of nonfiction novelwriting by raising what has always been the lowly footnote to an artistic respectability no future author can ignore!" and:
"At last!—a Revolutionary Manifesto the average American (or UpperMiddleBrow Moron) can read from cover to cover (if not from the top to the bottom of every page) without being ashamed for having engaged in an exercise whose intellectuality would otherwise raise the gravest questions about his or her belief in the democratic dogma of mindless egalitarianism!"
I still had my doubts. Along with the author's mysterious disappearance there was the disturbing fact all of my phone calls to Vicky Truelove at the State Department were answered by some decidedly less than civil servant at the other end of the line telling me—"for the umpteenth time"—no such person ever worked there! Not that I would blame Vicky for keeping me in the dark concerning her plans for furtively flying from that secretarial coop where she had remained so stoically on his behalf to consummate her lifelong crush on the author with an unheralded wedding and honeymoon in Moronville, or one of Europe's more elegant hideaways where they could avoid the celebrity that would otherwise be theirs when the publication of Morons Awake! was bannered as the headline of every newspaper from Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun to Bloomfield's Independent Press. If the heroine of any romance novel ever deserved to live happily ever after with the man of her dreams it was certainly Miss Victoria Truelove who, for a halfcentury, provided our ambassador to Moronia with his only link to a government conspicuously unimpressed by the sacrifices he made during those same 50 years to preserve an American way of life in which all "eggheads," "highbrows" and "Weisenheimers" (particularly those of his Semitic ilk) are—if not systematically exterminated along the lines of that Germanic triumph of blind obedience to the Führerprinzip over the will to resist a criminal regime (no matter how many elections or public opinion polls it wins) known as the "Holocaust"—verminized in sociocultural terms for posing a threat to the fundamental credo that All Men Are Created Equally Mediocre) from the lethal antiIntellectual evils of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. But what really started those WorstNightmareEndingToMyDowntroddenPublishinghouseReader'sDreamOfDiscoveringTheGreatAmericanNovelist AlarmBells ringing was when, one by one, it seemed as if all of Morons Awake!'s other "characters" were disappearing!!!! In addition to the author and Vicky Truelove—Jedgar Ballbraker, Lord Y, Lady X, Icky Vanderphd and Doris Darlinge had also vanished into thin air. At least that's the way it looked when not a single one of them could be located by the organizations (including the UN Commission on Refugees, Interpol, Traveler's Aid, the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, the EEC Missing Persons Bureau and Skiptracers International) from whom I requested information on their present and/or past whereabouts.
Most ominously of all: King Ambrose, the Prime Minister, Moronville's Chamber of Commerce and the Main Street CoffeeShop were no longer reachable by telephone, cable, letter, Fedex, UPS or even in person via the couriers we dispatched from the office of our own corporate affiliate in Country B! It was as if Moronia itself were being sucked back into the black hole of that global conspiracy masterminded from Moronville and Washington to keep a lid on the Klutz Affair! My anxieties in this regard were confirmed when the deals I previously negotiated with the major publishers of America's reference- and textbooks to include and/or feature Moronia in their initial 21stCentury editions all began to fall through for various reasons; none of which were in the least convincing. "We've run out of space," said one. "Our research on the Moronia article hasn't been completely finalized," explained another. According to a third: "Frankly, my dear, this socalled 'nonfiction' novel about a worldsaving Massiah living and dying in some cockamamie microstate populated by Morons sounds more like a social satire than it does the kind of 100% kosher gospel for which we folks at the Encyclopedia Judaica have earned our reputation as The Horse's Mouth in matters of metaphysical certitude." My response to these felonious acts of industrial sabotage (after several centuries of never mentioning Moronia these paragons of scholarly virtue were now trying to cover up the fact they had been "scooped" by a house previously known for publishing trashy bestsellers) was swift and uncompromising. I fired off a fax to our attorneys explaining the situation and demanding that they:
IMMEDIATELY FILE SUITS FOR: BREACH OF CONTRACT; ENGAGING IN A CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY TO SUBVERT 1ST AMENDMENT; EMOTIONAL DISTRESS; SEX DISCRIMINATION; VIOLATION OF CITY, STATE AND FEDERAL RESTRAINT OF TRADE STATUTES—AND ANY OTHER LEGAL REMEDIES YOU DEEM APPROPRIATE FOR RECTIFYING THIS EGREGIOUS INJUSTICE ASAP.
/s/ JAYNE PLAYNE
EDITORESS-IN-CHIEF
Unfortunately, in the "carefully considered and unanimous opinion," they sent me the following day, such a course of action was deemed to be inadvisable for a variety of reasons, including:
34. Since the contracts at issue (all of which, by the way—and thank God!—are oral) were designed to promote Morons Awake!'s credibility as a nonfiction novel via the most illegal (the public's right to blindly trust every word printed in a reference/textbookwise) of all means for doing so they are themselves in violation of every city, state, federal and international Trade Restraint, AntiTrust, RICO, False Advertising & Collusion To Rig A Hit Parade Or Bestseller List Statute.
59. Moreover, in litigating such a suit plaintiffs would be required to prove as a matter of geographic fact that Moronia does indeed exist. Which, unless you can provide us with more concrete evidence on that issue than we currently possess (and neither yours nor the author's testimony falls into that category), seems highly improbable—even if we were fortunate enough to present our case before one of those juries comprised entirely of "morons."
The result of which was to leave me in a predicament even more daunting than that confronting the author when, with the very first of his sentences, he began the uphill struggle to overcome the insurmountable problems of establishing the credibility a book claiming to be the true story of how the future course of human history has been forever altered by the teachings of a selfeducated Moron named Klutz as told in the literary masterpiece of a 70plusyearold former diplomat who was writing his first novel. Because unless he reappeared by the time Morons Awake! was published I would face the additional burden of proving "Mordecai Goldberg" himself wasn't a figment of my imagination!
And, to make matters that much more frustrating, it suddenly dawned on me there might be those to whom "Jayne Playne" sounded just as fictitious as "Jedgar Ballbraker," "Doris Darlinge," "Maria Bimbeaux," "Leopold Bloom," "Moronia," "Cretiny" and "Jack F. Klutz!" Especially when my overnight rise from the rags worn by a lowly First Reader to the haut couture in which the EditoressInChief of a major New York publishinghouse glamorously drapes herself was the stuff from which fairytales—and the trashiest of gothic novels—are made! So, there I was—on the very eve of its publication faced with the nightmarish possibility that, after all the capital I invested reputationwise (not to mention those millions of corporate dollars) to promote Morons Awake! as "THE FIRST NONFICTION NOVEL WITH A DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK GUARANTEE IF A SINGLE UNTRUE WORD CAN BE FOUND BETWEEN ITS COVERS," I could either:
(a) Delete every word, phrase, sentence, passage, paragraph and/or page (including footnotes) in the text which could even be remotely construed as misleading the public fictionratherthannonfictionwise;
(b) Issue a general disclaimer stating "All the 'divinely inspired gospel truth' insinuations, hints, inferences, suggestions, innuendoes and outright assertions made in, or on behalf of, Morons Awake! were the 'tongueincheek' type used by such now respectable satirists as Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, or;
(c) Hope and pray that as a result of reading their first hundred or so pages the vast majority of average housewives would become sufficiently sophisticated thereby not to hold the author and me morally—or financially—responsible for having "swindled" them into improving their minds.
Option (a) was never really a viable choice because the author had so thoroughly woven his Nonfiction Motif into the fabric of Morons Awake! any attempt by me to remove even 1 of its threads would result in the complete unraveling of its Grand(iose) Design. As for Option (b) my chief concern was that in defaulting on the Double Your Moneyback Guarantee I might be creating more credibility difficulties than I solved! Which left me with Option (c) as the least problematical, if not the ideal, solution. Although the more thought I gave to the proposition that: In its final Klutzian analysis, the success of Morons Awake! in reversing the decline of Western Civilization, launching a Second American (SocioCultural) Revolution and altering the course of human history (for the better) didn't depend on its factual accuracy but on whether or not Klutz's Message of Autodidactic Happiness so enthralled the reader she couldn't care less about the "implausibility" of its messengers! Yes, ladies—when all the Cartesian dust settles ("I think therefore I am"—or art, as Klutz paraphrased it in one of his most divinelyinspired flashes of "Moronic genius"), it doesn't matter if Morons Awake! is a nonfiction novel or a pack of literary lies, a Revolutionary Manifesto or an exercise in artistic vanity, an AllAmerican WakeupCall or a planetwide literary masterpiece, a Revelation of Biblical magnitude masquerading as a bestseller or a bestseller written by someone suffering from delusions of Biblical grandeur—because only you, dear reader, can answer this series of $64 questions the author asked himself before he embarked on this most gallant of all postQuixote crusades to rescue we fair damsels from the evils we do unto ourselves by seeking romance between the covers of all those gothic novels we read:
If this book is written will it be published? Y N
If it is published will it be a bestseller? Y N
If it is a bestseller will it be read from cover to cover? Y N
If it is read from cover to cover will those ordinary housewives who do so understand (even if only on the most elementary level) what they are reading? Y N
If a sufficient number of ordinary housewives do understand (even if only on the most elementary level) what I have written will they in fact launch America's Second (SocioCultural) Revolution? Y N
If America is rerevolutionized will that change the course of all human history from its present somnambulistic search for the false bliss of ignorance to a pursuit of that One True Happiness which only comes to those who (at least try to) turn every microsecond of their everyday lives into (if not the Greatest Story Ever Told) the finest tale they are capable of telling once their dormant mentalities have been fully reawakened by the most Magical Of All Kisses—that which is received by those who practice the NeoEgalitarian preachings of Born Again Klutzianity? Y N
And that, dear reader, was how things stood when I put my Editoress' Seal of Approval on what began as merely the last (and probably least enlightening) footnote to the final (and seemingly most inconsequential) of the author's appendices but, to my complete surprise, ended as what might very well be the most precise summary of what this (at times confusing) book is all about!—J. P.
Subfootnotes
45s1 Although this has nothing at all to do with Doris—or reversing the decline of Western Civilization—the record should be set straight concerning: (a) What might otherwise seem like my abuse of taxpayer's money in routinely taking 3 hours off for lunch, and; (b) The fact that before writing a book which will forever alter the course of human history I was by no means. a complete stranger to what were—or could have been, like my 1941 attempt to end WWII and prevent the Holocaust—some of the 20thcentury's most earthshaking events.
45s2 It's possible the rather less than precise crafting of this last sentence might have created some ambiguity for those in Washington who read it over whether I was saying in my carefully considered opinion Molotov's olive branch would or wouldn't fail to bear fruit; but believe me, dear reader: In all the subsequent traffic I exchanged with the State Department regarding this momentous matter my meaning (ie, Neville Chamberlain's Munich fiasco notwithstanding I remained convinced that, given a chance, peace was possible in our time) couldn't have been made plainer.