What everyone knows to be true is not necessarily so!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 24, 2019

 

Abstract

It occurred to me, given the upset and anxiety expressed by some of my correspondents, that they consider free will and individualism of little consequence.   To them, it is now all about social, political and economic injustices in the United States.  We have become a society obsessed with “the big picture” when our lives, now as always, have revolved only about “the little picture.” We can cherry pick a role for ourselves on a grand scale believing American society resembles Hell in a basket but that changes nothing.  Everything begins and ends in how we handle our own specific existence. The conclusion of DEVLIN epitomizes this assumption.  It is why it is shared with you here.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin.  Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

G. K. Chesterton, All things Considered

The Devlin Intrigue Continues (from DEVLIN, the novel)

Devlin felt strange in America.  A willful blankness had overcome him as he saw his family off at JFK to Florida.  He roamed the United Air Lines Terminal looking into myriad kiosks, restaurants, bars, gift shops, newsstands and book venders idling his time away until he boarded his 7:35 p.m. flight for Chicago. 

The commercialism had all been there when he left fourteen months before, but somehow it seemed more sinister.  He wondered why.  Had he changed?  Obviously, he was older and carried more psychological baggage than when he departed, but that was to be expected.  But had he changed? 

He stopped at a restaurant and ordered coffee.  His waiter seemed to take umbrage when he ordered only a beverage.  He expected his second cup of coffee would be free, but he was wrong.   He was charged for two cups of coffee at $1.20 each or $2.40.  He left a dollar tip hoping that would assuage his waiter’s resentment.  He wanted to yell, “Hey, I’m on your side,” but he didn’t.

While he drank his coffee, and watched the constant flow of people pass by, people of all sizes and descriptions, races and nationalities, dress codes and hair styles, none of them relaxed or smiling, all in a hurry to get to somewhere else, somewhere, he suspected, that they would have to again wait in disgust. 

The only exceptions were the children.  They smiled, laughed, cried, and refused to go any further or faster, provoking their parents who insisted on dragging them on anyway.  Many saw Devlin looking at them, some smiled, some stuck out their tongues, some laughed joyously, and some stretched out their arms to him as if he were there to extricate them from their plight.  He wondered if he had been like that as a child, and decided he hadn’t, as he was of The Great Depression Generation, which had not enjoyed that luxury.   

He could tell by the newspapers left on chairs at the departure check-in stations that all wasn’t right in America.  The Vietnam War, which he had not followed in South Africa, had created great divisions in American society between the young and the old, especially young white college aged students, who were fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft, while apparently young under educated blacks were fighting this misbegotten war. 

Nixon was the new president, whereas Johnson had been president when he left.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the interim.  Reading between the lines, it seemed America was an armed camp with one group against the other, while the new president boasted he was for “law and order.”  America didn’t seem that much different than the South Africa he had just left.

Perusing the books in a newsstand, he was delighted with the colorful titles of two books in particular by a Tom Wolfe, whom he had not read before, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang.  The words fairly jumped off the covers in an outrage of what he suspected was inside lingo. If this was the current diet of American culture, Devlin felt he was about a century behind as a reader.  With a name like Wolfe, he had expected to find something like Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel or You Can’t Go Home Again, biographical novels written in traditional American language that he understood. Tom Wolfe seemed to address a culture which he knew nothing about, a culture that seemed consumed in angst, but exciting and free as well.   Scanning the prose style before making the purchase, which was his habit, it seemed the author’s efforts were directed at readers suffering from some attention deficit disorder. A fast reader, Devlin expected he would have them both read before he got to Chicago.  He looked at his watch.  God! He’d better get a move on, his plane was scheduled to leave in twenty minutes!

*     *     *

Once aboard the 747, out of breath, and in his first-class seat on the aisle for his long legs, he took a deep sigh of relief.  What would he have done if he had missed the plane?  Blame it on Tom Wolfe?  He smiled at the thought as he continued to read the iconoclastic author.  One book had a picture of the author in a white suit, which Mark Twain had made famous.  He suspected the author was a consummate self-promoter.  He used language like a weapon whereas Mark Twain used it like a tickling feather. 

As he read, the author kept getting in the way of his words with his imageries and metaphors.  Devlin had read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion and was moved by it.  Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were the subject of one of the books.  He hadn’t known Kesey was an acidhead.  That was a universe far removed from his own world.  Yet he found Tom Wolfe’s books entertaining, but self-consciously written as the heart of the sentence was mainly the subject, not the verb, and least of all, the object.  Wolfe knew his subject well, but he suspected as an observer more than a player as was true of much of his own work.  Neither he nor Wolfe appeared to be participants.  Oscar Wilde warned in Picture of Dorian Gray that spectators to life reject life’s battles and therefore are more deeply wounded as victims of life’s verisimilitudes than those who actively participate in life.  Was that his problem?

Perhaps he should table the idea of becoming a writer.  He was not flamboyant, not an exhibitionist, not into shocking the reader with word images, but hopefully making the reader think as was true in his own case.  He was not a psychologist, but Wolfe’s ego was palpable, and demanded to be fed, but for what: for celebrity, for acclaim, for wealth, for notoriety?  If so, what could be crasser? 

His heavy lids had almost closed, as he realized he was quite tired.  He was sitting upright as the plane taxied down the runway.  His head fell forward with his chin nearly resting on his chest.

A pretty airline stewardess woke him when she attempted to prop up his head with a small pillow.  “You look tired,” she said.  “Had a rough night?”

“More like a long 36-hour night.”

“That bad?”

He said nothing. 

“Mystery man,” she said.  “Where were you thirty-six hours ago?”

“South Africa, but I should explain I spent two days in Rome, deplaning again in London, and then on to New York City, and so it has been a series of cat naps.” 

“Can I say something?”

“Yes,” he said looking at her curiously.

“You had to correct yourself, so I would get something of the complete picture, am I right?”

“Yes, I guess I talk like that, please forgive me.”

“No forgiving is necessary,” she smiled warmly, “what were you doing in South Africa?”

“Working.”

“Well, there is work and then there is work.  You don’t look like a laborer.  You could be a professor, but you don’t dress like a professor.  I’d say you are an executive.”

“Something like that.”

“How long were you in South Africa?”

“A little over a year.”

“I see you’re wearing a wedding ring.  Married, or trying to keep curious women from asking questions?”

“Yes, I am married.”

“Any children?”

Devlin smiled at her warmly.  “I don’t mean to dominate your time.”

“This is my job,” she informed him, “you pay for this service.” 

There was a little edginess to her voice.  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Yes, I have children, four, two boys and two girls.”

“That’s not possible.  Are they your own?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“You could pass for much younger.”

“I know.  That has been my bane.”

“I meant it as a compliment.”

“May I ask you how old you are?”

“Twenty-six.”

“My name is Dirk Devlin.  People call me Devlin,” he said as he held out his hand.

“Mr. Devlin, I know who you are.  It is on the manifest.”

“I see by your name tag that you are Siobhan (Shiv – awn) Murphy, a good Irish name, Siobhan.  My name is Seamus (Shay muss), which everyone mispronounces so I don’t use it.  How about your given name, do people get it right?”

“Never.”  And they both laughed. 

“You have a little lilt to your voice.”

“You noticed that?”

“Were you born in Ireland?”

“No, but I grew up in Dublin, and went to college there.”

“And now you’re an American.”

“I have a dual citizenship, Irish and American.”  A bell rang.  “I must go.  We will be serving dinner soon.  Can I get you something to drink, wine, a Jack Daniels?”

“I’d love a cup of coffee, cream and sugar.”

“Then coffee it is.”

After the meal was served and cleared away, Siobhan returned.  “So what are you going to do now that you are back in the States?”

“That is the 64,000 dollar question.  I don’t know.”

“How is that possible, I mean, given your job?”

“I’m going to take a sabbatical from work for a while.”  Seeing the puzzled look on her face, “I’m leaving the company.”

“It may seem impertinent, but can you afford to do that with a wife and four children?”

He wanted to say, I can’t afford not to, but said only, “I can for a little while.”

“But what will you do, I mean, travel, garden, paint, write, go back to school, what?”

He showed her the two books he was reading.  “I’ll read.  I might write.  I’ll play tennis, and I suppose vegetate.”

“You don’t look like the type to vegetate, the tennis I can imagine, but writing, have you ever published?”

“Yes, in South Africa, a company book.”

She left him again, and served her customers with desserts, aperitifs, soft drinks, wine and whiskey, but Devlin, only with coffee.  “You drink a lot of coffee, but you eat like a bird.  Are you in training for something like the marathon?”

“No, hardly, I’ve never developed an interest in stimulants other than coffee."

“You’re disciplined!”

“Some might call me robotic.”  He smiled broadly.

“You have a nice smile.  You should smile more often.”

“Thank you,” Devlin said, “but it doesn’t match your smile.”

She smiled broadly, “It’s part of the gig.”  They both laughed.

She left him again and didn’t come back until shortly before the plane was ready to land. 

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“At the Palmer House.”

“I have a flat downtown not far from there.  Here is my number.  Give me a call if you’d like to talk some more and have a cup of coffee.  I make a special brew.”  Then she went forward and strapped herself in for the landing.

Devlin took her number with no intentions of calling.  She had no idea what baggage he carried.  How could he tell her he would like to just roll up and disappear?  If he had learned anything in his short life, it was that everyone lives in quiet desperation.  Did he want to complicate her life?  No way! 

The same persistent deceits, the same brilliant breakthroughs go on in perpetuity.  Power leads to betrayal at the personal level as well as at the corporate level.  The evil that stood before him was a puzzling variable. He was coming back to America, which amounted stepping into the future, disarmed, disadvantaged, speechless, and betrayed. It was as if his whole life had been fought against the wrong enemy.  He had been living in a world in which the right people always lose, and the wrong people always win.  He still had to face Polychem’s corporate piranha tomorrow.  He didn’t need hell tonight.  It was already going on midnight when he reached his room.  No, Siobhan doesn’t need a dose of me.  It would be worse than a sexually transmitted disease.

After he got out of the shower, and was in his pajamas, the phone rang.  “Devlin, this is Siobhan.”

“Hi, I was meaning to call you,” he lied, “we’ll have to get together sometime soon.’

“How about now?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“But I’m in my pajamas.”

“That’s okay.  I’m downstairs in the lobby.  I brought you my special brewed coffee with me.  Can I come up?”

Downtown Chicago, Friday June 13, 1969 – Late Evening

Father Anthony Dressler had listened to this young man for more than two hours, and was tempted to ask what happened with Siobhan Murphy, but was too shattered by this misplaced Marquis de Sade with the open face and shameless conscience to descend into that amoral abyss.  He wondered if St. Augustine was like this young man before his conversion.  Women seemed to be attracted to him like iron filings to a magnet.  All he could offer was, “You are a troubled young man, my son.”

“Yes, Father, you said that before.”

“It seems you have lost your faith in God, in Catholicism, and in the Church.”

“Is that how you would summarize my story?” Devlin asked trying to hide his annoyance. 

How often had he encountered that bromide to his misery?  That explanation only suspended the natural order of life.   Pull away the curtain of confusion and the natural order would be restored, ticking away, clockwise and preordained.  But to him there seemed to be no normal state of things.  Life was a muddle and God, Catholicism and the Church were part of the muddle.

“In broad terms, my son, yes I would.”

“Well, then I’m disappointed.  Corporate speak seems to be the preferable language in your world as in mine.  If there is a God, and I believe there is, we must amuse Him or Her.  I don’t think God is too concerned about Catholicism or the Church.  The natural order of things is not about a church or a religion.  It is about us the living.  We exist and are supported by our spirituality.  We don’t exist for a church or a religion.  Somehow that has gotten lost in Corporate speak.   

“My sense is that the church fails to understand this.  When I went to South Africa, God and the church were thought by me to be one.  Now, the church doesn’t make sense to me, as it seems more interested in its survival than its mission. 

“The God I have seen in my travels has many faces.  No epistemology or eschatology is province of a single church or religion.  Given this set of circumstances, are we meant to submit to the church as the lone infallible authority to what constitutes the nature of the human condition?  If so, I find that bizarre.”

The young man’s views, the priest noted, bordered on apostasy, but there is a kind of integrity about him.  He’s put off by paradox.  For most people, there are a dozen reasons for doing nothing.  He appears to be made the other way around.  Apparently, there is only one reason for doing anything and that is because it is right.  It also seems apparent that no certainties guide him, only misgivings.  He lives in the mist where there are few distinctions, or where there is everything and nothing at all.  The priest decided it was best he change the subject.  “What will you do now that you have left your employment?”

“I am heading for the land of Ponce de Leon.  It is called Florida, not to look for my lost youth but to find a place to lose it.”  Then he looked at the priest seriously.  “I thank you, Father, for your patience, and for listening to me.  I will carry your kindness forward as a gift that shows the best face of the Roman Catholic Church.  By listening to me, allowing me to tell you my story without judging me, at least not verbally, Father, you have renewed my spirit enough to go forward.”

“But, my son, nothing has been resolved.  Yes, I have listened to you, but you carry a burden that cannot be ignored.”

“Father, it is no greater than your own.  This is 1969.  How would you describe America at this moment in the wake of its recent history?”

“My son, I think you are avoiding the issue.  I don’t think you can look at problems in general and find personal resolution.”

“You see them separate, Father?” Devlin asked.  “I see the general and specific part of the same thing.”

“Well, of course, they are connected, but clearly, you cannot see them as the same,” the priest insisted.

A hundred twisted threads were running through Devlin’s mind.  “Fourteen months ago, Father, prior to South Africa, I would have agreed with you because that is how I had been programmed.  In South Africa,

"I saw how powerful a system could be in repressing a people, and how that people would take out their anger on each other.  Ninety percent of Bantu murders are by other Bantus, not by police or any other group. 

“A colonial culture of privilege is more profoundly decadent than anything I have ever experienced or read about in literature.  Being exposed to this decadence, Father, eventually gets under your skin, and then finds its way to the very marrow of your being, silently, until you are a puppet without a will.  What would shame you in another life, Father, becomes normal fare. 

“You see, Father, that is my problem.  I suffer from a condition you have not experienced therefore cannot understand.  You did listen to my story, but I fear without appreciating the operational word.”  The priest moved to speak. 

“No, no, Father, hear me out.  I was in South Africa.  Now South Africa is in me.  As I influenced the country in my work, South Africa has changed me, and I suspect, for the rest of my life.”

“You’re speaking again of apartheid, am I correct?”

“Apartheid is only part of that image, Father.  The operational word is trust.  I have lost trust in the system, in my culture, and therefore in myself.  Stated another way, my trust has been shattered by the failure of my anchors to support me in my drowning confusion.”

“What anchors?”

“My beliefs and values have been challenged and they have disintegrated in my hands.”

“This has happened to you?”

“Yes, Father, precisely so.  That is what I’ve been trying to say.  A system imposes its culture on you.  This predisposes you to trust that culture to be real and supportive.  When it is not, you are shocked awake, and in my case, taken for a ride on the wild side ultimately collapsing into boredom as nothing makes any sense to you anymore.” 

The priest moved to get up.  “Before you go, Father, however disturbed you think I am, how much you believe me to be unhinged, I have attempted to look at my dark side with open eyes, can the church say the same?”

“Yes, my son, I think it can.”

“Then explain to me why the Roman Catholic Church in the 1940s ignored the massive extermination of Jews in Europe, especially in Germany and Poland.  I’m familiar with the rationale of Pope Pius XII, who was the Supreme Pontiff at the time.  I’m not faulting the pope or the church but trying to understand the church’s motivation.  I experienced the same problem with my church in South Africa, Father, when it was clear the church’s policy was that of non-interference with Afrikaner apartheid.  The church makes no sense to me when it is not a voice for moral authority.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“I think you do.  Scratch the lofty idealism of the church, and underneath you discover an anti-Semitic institution predisposed to believe, as Tolstoy did, that the flaw in Christianity, and therefore the tragedy of Western man, comes from the racial incompatibility between Christ, who he claimed was not a Jew, and the rationale that since the Jews were killers of Christ, let them burn.  If this was not the commission of the church, it was surely its omission as nothing of any significance was done to prevent the Holocaust.

“Now a generation after WWII, the Afrikaner government gives the Roman Catholic Church a free pass in the richest country in Africa as long as the church doesn’t upset the ethnic and cultural balance.  I had the temerity to ask my pastor why there were no African priests in South Africa.  You would have thought I had sworn in church.

“Diplomats use the word ‘rapprochement’ to establish cordial relations with the state whatever its practices.  That you see, Father, is my problem.  I leave you with that, my final thoughts.”  He started to leave the confessional.

“Don’t you want to know your penance?”

“Father, life is my penance.”

With that, Devlin left the confessional and the church, walked out into the clamor and cacophony of Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, looking for the refuge of a good bookstore.  He wondered if Brentano’s was opened at this late hour.

Devlin may be out of Africa, but now he was entering limbo, not the purgatory of the afterlife, but the real world of chaos in his fading youth and equally fading idealism, no longer employed while returning to a collapsing marriage with an equally collapsing American economy of runaway inflation and unemployment.  Meanwhile, his four children were going speedily through puberty without the guidance of a father who was about to retreat into Nowhere Land as Nowhere Man. 

George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” wrote about his plight as fiction, but Devlin was entering that dystopian world as his reality.  One of the blessings of life is its uncertainty and Devlin knew a lot about uncertainty and was destined to learn much more in the future.    

*     *     *