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.
* * *
