The fugitive

for the new Paschalis

Did Queensberry never say to Wilde, You really don't get it, do you. Did he never compare Wilde's pandering to his son with his own, and urge less consideration, not more, of qualities which may have had little to do with what he might want, could become? Now there is a new edition of Dorian Gray, purporting to restore explicities suppressed as infelicities in the last one. Well, this is happy news, for the knead for magnification; not long back, the same gladdening gloss was laid upon Death in Venice, for taxonomists on training wheels. Where will it end, before no one is more than one, undifferentiated epithet - so we can start over? 

Who does not understand the resistance of the present President to the typifications of nomenclature, participates in his predecessor's fratty delight in bullying even his intimates, with contemptuous nicknames. But nobody does not understand the diversion on the birth certificate, except those who cannot explain their loss of influence except through tricks of their own trade - distraction, conspiracy, and outright treachery to the truth. Now the President has not only his point, he has our point. Nobody but the shabbiest sectarian could tolerate being perceived by any one term, and of all the President's foibles, the boldest is this rejection of calumny by identity.

We have a new Paschalis, improbably half Greek, half Turkish; improbably a subject of Her Majesty, to ponder this dynastic day of revelry and rite. How Obamic can an infant be, to reconcile in himself so soon such marvelous complication - yet threaten, too, anxiety to typify, and thus to deny his true descent? One might as well divide the Bosporus, and freeze one fragment here, one fragment there, to make the kind of world we need for zealots to be mariners.