One's race for the Senate
Offshore readers are simply going to have to take it on faith, that one's career in the United States Senate used to be one of the presumptions on most American boys' to-do list. Now that we know what we know about one of the halves in this equation, it's hard for us all to believe it. But there you are: times change, so who's to say anyone can feel safe from a Senatorial career, nowadays?
Yet there was a time when having to go ahead and win a Senate seat inhibited a guy from slappable behaviour at a college mixer, or dumping a few loose snakes into a hot VW at a shopping center. It meant the unthinkable possibility of a come-down, and many were loathe to explain such a thing to their family. You can almost hear them: Is that what you want to be for the rest of your life, a nude stockboy?
There's nothing like the specter of a Senate-dashing fall from grace to inflame the youthful disposition, from the inertest indifference to the most compelling inclination. Now that naughtiness is impossible, the youth of today can have no comprehension of how compulsory it was, to seek it out and extract it for all its worth. "Nude stockboy," you say? Hey, neat.
Anthropologists are unanimous in telling us, the Intifada wouldn't exist but for constituting a come-down. Inevitably, though, Wal-Mart will open in Sinai, and peace will break out for a naughtier career. Only the stockroom of democracy remains.
Yes, indeed, one did at one point aspire, or at least hold out the prospect of aspiring to, higher office than one has. And the Senate, indeed, was a worthy place, if not the worthiest. Today, sadly no more than a holding pen for jackals, but still a nobler house than the House of Representatives, which has become a cesspool of fools and angry boobs. But then, one's "proclivities" made it all moot, or so it seemed for so long that by that time one had indulged in such sophomoric antics as you describe that such an aspiration was out of the question. I only hope that photographs of one's nude stockboy days aren't in circulation, at least any more...
ReplyDeleteEvidently (even as it was going to press) one of this page's misfires, it is visibly caught in the antic contradiction of "holding out" this prospect and simply having to "fait les 400 coups," or, "raise hell." Into that merry and all too unstable equation, the introduction of proscribed "proclivities" made for an experience which I should have blogged quite straightforwardly.
ReplyDeleteWith the friend discussed at the Nov 2nd post last year, one had 40 or 50 million unspoken assumptions of things in common, and "the Senate career" was an ongoing jest between us, as to how imperiled it might be at any moment. In the event, it always turns out that one's family doesn't really care about the nude stockboy so much as whether one was prepared to set one's path in that direction - of course. (I thought the image was pretty risible, but perhaps not).
The matter of slappable conduct was so widespread, among prospective Senators one knew, that it should have been discounted. After a Presidency wagered on the chivalry of an astroturf truckbed, a daring peck on the cheek could reasonably be blamed on the darkness of partying, rather like the fog of war. One needed, however, to emphasise the reality of that little tightrope in the back of one's mind, so menaced by sharper edges as it may have been.
At least one has never indulged photography in that way. Can't be sure if anyone's a "stockperson" - of course.
Finally, the Darwinian disproof, as Adams said of President Grant, penned up in the bicameral nursery of our government today, cannot reasonably be seen as less sociopathic than a career with Wal-Mart, scourge of every landscape, family enterprise, community context, standard of wages and benefits, and architectural principle between its nefarious wellspring in Dixie (why is no one surprised?) and the Aleutians. One didn't mean to be cruel to the Intifada.