#like they have all completed honors theses like five times over

[macbcth]

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[silhouetteofacedar]

Fox Mulder, Closet Romantic Ch. 11: Postmark

Previous Chapter - AO3 - MSR, rated E

He has to do this right.

Mulder’s written some hefty works in his life; term papers, theses, monographs, case reports. But none have made his heart pound quite like this.

He actually went to a stationary store this Saturday morning and spent forty-five minutes browsing different textures of card, weights of letterhead, holding up watermarked sheets of paper to the ceiling lights for further scrutiny. None of them were quite right.

He can’t possibly give Scully an illuminated manuscript with gilded edges, so he goes home and digs around on his desk until he finds a usable, albeit leaky, ballpoint pen.

He cracks his knuckles absently. It’s been decades since he’s done this, and he’s out of practice, but what he lacks in finesse he’ll make up for with devotion.

He’s going to write Scully a love letter.

Romance isn’t dead, but it’s certainly on life support; he’s hunched over at his desk in his boxers and a wrinkled t-shirt, trying to pour his heart out onto a sheet of copy paper while his neighbors are arguing down the hall.

Dear Dana,

He never calls her Dana, and he doesn’t want this to sound too out of character. And the word ‘dear’ doesn’t really seem right either. He crumples up the page and pulls out a fresh one.

He should probably write the date, first off. That’s what he learned in grade school, writing letters to his assigned penpal in North Carolina or someplace.

May 2nd, he thinks. He checks his watch, squinting at the tiny date dial to make sure he has it correct. He does.

May 2, 1998

Scully,

He nods to himself. The greeting is to-the-point, yet familiar. Not overly formal or sentimental.

I’ll bet you didn’t expect to be accosted by my purple prose in your mailbox, did you? As though my case reports aren’t enough.

He’s been told his writing style is at times florid to the point of excess; Scully often takes to his reports with a machete, unbidden, and crosses out phrases, begs him to reword things so he can pass as a sane person during review. But hell, this is a goddamn love letter. He’s going to be as melodramatic as he wants.

In all seriousness, however, recent events have shown me that I can no longer afford deny the longing of my heart, body, and soul.

I know I have shown my dedication to you over the past five years we’ve spent together, and received your loyalty and trust in kind; but some months ago I discovered a new dimension to the deep regard I have for you, a faceted gem previously cloistered in stone.

I am disastrously, deliriously, desperately in love with you. My feelings are not platonic, and are deeper than our current partnership. I want to be partnered with you in all things. I ache for you in new ways, hunger for things I don’t deserve, dream of things my eyes may never behold. Nevertheless, I yearn. I yearn knowing that I may never be sated, never taste that which I thirst for. I don’t want to die without knowing your touch, without holding you, but I will carry empty hands to my grave if that’s what you want. I lay myself before you now as an offering, to serve whatever purpose you see fit.

I know my timing is never good, and I’ve been overly cautious in my attempts to make my intentions known. Even now, part of me is hesitant to reveal my feelings, since you’ve only recently split from someone else. But you were right; there is power in the truth, and I gift my truth to you now.

I cannot shake the feeling that everything I’ve worked for, every truth I’ve sought, has led me to you; not by way of any conspiracy or government manipulation, but because I am destined to love and honor you. I am an imperfect man, changeable and obsessive, unreliable and stubborn. Many of my quests yield no fruit, my efforts culminating in failure. But I want to be better for you. I am already better because of you. You are the fire that refines me, melts me down and burns away the bullshit. You make me golden.

You can do what you wish with this letter; burn it in your kitchen sink, and we can pretend I never said a thing. Hide it under your mattress, stick it to your refrigerator, whatever you want. It won’t change how I feel about you.

I love you, Dana Katherine Scully. My heart is yours; say the word and the rest of me will belong to you as well.

Always,

Mulder.

He signs the letter and puts down his pen, wiping his thumb on the hem of his shirt in an attempt to remove the ink smudged on his skin. His eyes scan the page, rereading his missive.

He can wad up the letter and try again, but he knows deep down that no rewrite will be sufficient; words can only convey so much. He blows on the ink to make sure it’s dry, then folds the paper into crisp thirds and slips it into a plain legal-size envelope.

That evening he slips the stamped and addressed envelope into the post box outside his neighborhood minimart. He’s decided to mail the letter; that way he won’t know when, or if, she receives it. It’s completely out of his hands; all he can do is wait.

He has a moment of panic when the envelope leaves his grasp, disappearing into the slot and out of reach, but he lets the momentary wave of anxiety roll through him and dissipate.

He thinks of sixteen-year-old Fox, biking to Laura’s house, so overcome with nerves that he has to go home.

This one’s for you, buddy, he thinks, and walks home in the spring twilight feeling one ounce and thirty-two scents lighter.

[charlesbrianorner-blog]

Heterodox America

I WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND the mysterious mechanics of the universe—not like an Albert Einstein, or a Richard Feynman, or a Steven Hawking, or a Neils Bohr. I cannot see the world through the eyes of Leonardo or Michelangelo or Pollock or O’Keefe. I lack the business acumen of Jobs; the global vision of Musk; the profound mysticism of Gurdjieff. I am an ordinary man, possessed of ordinary attributes, and in the failure to reach the high places, I am, like most of us, entirely innocent.

No one expects to become Hemingway or the Pope, but each of us labors to learn and grow beyond our clumsy childhood in the sheer pursuit of survival—to become the best version of ourselves that we can be, in the hopes of living a comfortable and satisfying life. This is also entirely ordinary, and entirely innocent.

Ten seconds’ reflection reveals that there is more to this life than comfort and satisfaction, however, and those among us with higher natures in embryo pursue the perfection not only of themselves, but also of the wider world in which they live. These include the luminaries above, certainly, but also scientists and social workers; physicians and philosophers, artists and architects, journalists and the judiciary. Educators. Monks. Anyone at all who understands that the world is capricious, nothing in life is certain, and we all do better when we throw in together. Anyone who values the life of the mind, the beauty of the natural world, and the abiding wish to unburden the downtrodden. Anyone, finally, who understands that the betterment of society begins with the betterment of oneself in service to the noble attributes: honor, integrity, intelligence, and being.

Many of us understand this at some level. We are imperfect, to be sure, but we aspire to nobility, and we work in whatever way we can for a moment of kindness, or justice, or insight, or grace. The school of hard knocks is hard, yes, but it is nevertheless a school, and within its walls, people of good will are constrained to learn and improve—not only for the acquisition of their creature comforts, but for the betterment of society. Such people venerate selflessness beyond success, and compassion beyond quid pro quo. They own the mistakes that they make, and work like hell to avoid repeating them. They revere virtue, and revile cowardice. They pursue sincerity and detest hypocrisy. They respect truth and excoriate mendacity. They witness. They dream.

I used to believe that this described the essential human condition. I used to believe that many of us was in fact most of us—yea, that any of us was in fact all of us. I believe this no longer.

Today I live in a world in which the preponderant political faction of society is characterized by none of these attributes. These fine citizens have dispensed with the essence of the American experiment—compassion, inclusion, generosity, and fairness—in service to elevating one of the world’s most despicable human beings to the Presidency of the United States. I live in a world in which the aggregate power of the political class is now devoting itself to crippling the institutions that we ordinary folk have by generations labored to build and to better. These fine, fine citizens believe that education is effete, the rule of law is transactional, and the social safety net is suspect. Business is boffo, Science is sorcery, religion is Rorschach, and liberalism is libel. In fact they believe any old thing at all, no matter how preposterous, so long as it was jawboned by an obscenely wealthy white bigot with shiny teeth and shiny hair and a Brobdingnagian bully pulpit.

These fine citizens are citizens, yes, but they are only fine after the fashion of volcanic sand, or livestock manure, or the aromatic waft of a cheese factory. You can find them crooning in lemming uniformity at the guttural twaddle emanating from any one of the Cow Palace shit shows known throughout the Republic as a Trump rally. This is the circus as Colosseum; verbal violence and boorish boosterism replete with really good lines—short at the door, long at the latrine, and crossed at the cusp of common decency.

Expect profound rejoinders like “Goddam right!” and “Fuckin’ A!” and whatever the neofascist form of “Sieg Heil!” might be. The latest schoolyard swipe is “AOC Sucks!”—a devastatingly clever double entendre from people whose goose-step soliloquies ordinarily extend all the way to three words, from “Lock her up!” to “Build that wall! to the lyrics of some Kid Rock drivel, which may or may not actually have three words. Within these hollowed halls, policy is for pussies. What sells is sloganeering.

Note the tribal conformity in headwear and hoodwear and Silver-Shirted signage, but do not make the mistake of inquiring as to when, precisely, it is thought that America was great.(1) Oh no. That road can only end in tears. Note the popularity of histrionic gestures—middle fingers and O-KKK!s and the odd skinhead with his thumb up his ass—plus the ever-impressive Bellamy salute, courtesy of the hatless, hairless, brainless homunculi of Proud Boy pedigree.(2)

This is Heterodox America—angry and arrogant; entitled and abusive; full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing beyond the Dunning–Kruger Effect.(3)

Ten seconds’ endurance reveals that these are not ordinary men and women, possessed of ordinary American attributes. These are people not of the high places, and they are nothing like innocent. Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, Bohr—such inquisitive minds flee in confusion and horror. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Pollock, O’Keefe—mere also-rans in the company of Julian Raven and Jason Heuser.(4) (5)

Really, who can compete with a painting of an uzi-wielding Ronald Reagan astride a flag-waving velociraptor? Please. Jackson Pollock is just a putz. And the noble attributes? Open-carry that liberal bullshit back out the Palace orifice, pal—we have mantras to memorize.

The central message of every Trump rally is bald-faced cruelty. They exist to denigrate and debase; to fictionalize and fool; to inflame and incite. Trump pontificates and poisons, accuses and aggrandizes, and trades in the currency of fear, completing perhaps one sentence in five. He knows nothing, says nothing, lies with abandon, and his rancid mob howls. It’s ad hominem as ad lib; pusillanimous pogrom as political theater; mental illness as Mein Kampf.

It was not so long ago that Hillary was not crooked, Comey was not shady, and AOC did not suck. Pocahontas was an historical figure, Adam Shiff had an ordinary neck, and Rocket Man was the anthem of a generation. It was not so long ago I that believed in the essential goodness of the American character—that we all strive for perfection, and we all do better when we throw in together. But I have witnessed the depravity of Trump’s base, and it is base, indeed—slavish to suggestibility, inured to actual fact, and entirely absent the American values that once made this country great. These fine folk have dispensed with their innocence in favor of bigoted bread and circuses, and they belong nowhere near the magnificent, imperfect pantheon of the American experiment.

Time will eventually consign theses fine citizens and their Dear Leader to the trash heap of history, therein to molder with the likes of Benjamin Tillman, and Eugene McCarthy, and Huey Long, and every other tin-horn demagogue who has ever soiled the national stage. When that time comes, Donald Trump’s mindless minions will know only shunning and shame, while the rest of America resumes its reach for the high places. Till then, we will wait, we will worry, and we will weep.

- CBO

_______________________

(1) The Silver Legion of America, commonly known as the Silver Shirts, was an underground American fascist organization founded by William Dudley Pelley that was headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. A white-supremacist, antisemitic group modeled after Hitler's Brownshirts, the paramilitary Silver Legion wore a silver shirt with a blue tie, along with a campaign hat and blue corduroy trousers with leggings. The uniform shirts bore a scarlet letter L over the heart: an emblem meant to symbolize Loyalty to the United States, Liberation from materialism, and the Silver Legion itself.

(2) The Bellamy salute is a palm-out salute described by Francis Bellamy, the author of the American Pledge of Allegiance, as the gesture which was to accompany the pledge. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute.” Both the Pledge and its salute originated in 1892. Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which was very similar, and which was derived from the Roman salute, a gesture that was popularly (albeit erroneously) believed to have been used in ancient Rome. This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the Flag Code on December 22, 1942.

(3) In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

(4) For more than two years, Julien Raven tried to convince the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to display his 300-pound painting of Trump, with no success. Now, after failing to win his case in D.C.’s U.S. District Court, he’s threatening to take the matter to the top of the judicial system in order to get his painting placed. Raven and his huge, eight-foot tall, 16-foot wide painting of Trump, “Unafraid & Unashamed,” was the aesthetic highpoint of last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, after he displayed it at the annual conservative confab. The painting is a portrait of Trump’s head posed next to a falling American flag that’s being rescued by a bald eagle while flying in space.

(5) San Francisco-based artist Jason Heuser, who sells his work on Etsy under the name Sharpwriter, was recently honored by Representative Mike Lee, who displayed Heuser’s image of former President Ronald Reagan shooting a machine gun atop a Velociraptor holding a torn American flag in chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives.