The DownGoing of High Romance

April 1, 1994

     “I am beginning to suspect that you are one of those travelers,” Regina needles me, “who are so spiritually restless that they find themselves uncomfortable in any clime.”

     “I don’t want to live my life as a B-Grade movie,” I respond. “However, the B-Grade shoot-em-up Western seems to be about all that the Vespucci mentality is able to accept.”

     “Where would we be without their jazz rhythms?” Regina objects. “The Vespucci may have lost the ability to say anything worthwhile in a philosophical vein, but their music is really divine.”

     “That music,” I remark pointedly, “is something that has been developed by the Atlantaens who always get shot whenever the Vespucci begin firing their B-Grade Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles.”

     “I just like to listen to their rock and roll,” she says.

     “What used to be rock and roll has now become the music of hard drugs and hard time,” I find myself critiquing. “I find it rather hard to believe, that a society so wealthy should be so cold and callous towards its poor people and disenfranchised ethnic groups.”

     “Thank you for confirming my feeling,” she declares, as she allows me to kiss her hand. “What I am concluding is that the Vespucci are really afraid of their own shadowgraphs. The Western Man needs to sympathize with us, because he has allowed the woman to do all of the feeling, while he does all of the thinking and directing. But of course, naturally, feeling which goes beyond our capacity for assertive action must necessarily be tragic.

     “The historic Culture of the High Romance,” I find myself responding, “tried to build up a sense of courtesy and custom, which would bring a man and a woman to the point at which they experience each other as suffering souls, before they get so naked that they know exactly how to kill each other. Unfortunately, when the Vespucci popular culture decided to get rid of everything the Communists from the Maquis had tried to smuggle over, respect for the comradeship of women was the first thing that had to go.”

     “Lethality,” she agrees, trying hard to pronounce the word with a Boston accent. “That is the exactly the problem.”

     “When I examine the statistics on Domestic Violence among the Vespucci,” I reflect, “then I become thoroughly shocked. I know that I am one of the Children of the Wanderer – but even normal, conservative Muslims become shocked, when they see how the Frontier Lords of the Vespucci brand their women like animals and then ride them into the ground. Of course, under this sort of condition, you’ve got to convince the women that they really are free and equal. Women who acknowledged they were servants would keep something in reserve for themselves, and know better than to give themselves so completely to their masters.”

     “That is a rather extreme statement,” she shrugs uneasily.

     “I guess, when men let us develop a positive image from the shadowgraph,” she quickly recovers with a wicked smile, “they don’t like what they see.”

Must all Ishmael’s children suffer, because he cursed the rain?