Month: August 2025

A Confederacy of Doofuses

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In the first quarter of the 21st Century, there was an imperial president so exceedingly fond of adulation that he appointed his cabinet officials based, not on experience and competence, but on their television chops and their talent for groveling and abasing themselves. This president cared nothing about the welfare of US citizens who weren’t millionaires but rather spent his days playing golf or monitoring his presence on television and social media.  

For example, in the wee hours Wednesday last, as the Russian Ukrainian war raged and disease and starvation racked Gaza, the imperial president complained on his favorite social media platform that “There is a sick rumor going around that Fake News NBC extended the contract of one of the least talented Late Night television hosts out there, Seth Meyers [. . .] [who] has no Ratings, Talent, or Intelligence, and the Personality of an insecure child. So, why would Fake News NBC extend this dope’s contract. I don’t know, but I’ll definitely be finding out!!!”

So, he spent most of his days bragging about himself or castigating his enemies on his favorite platform, Truth Social, an Orwellian name if there ever was one! Unlike most presidents, who might devote their time in office analyzing budgets or conferring with world leaders, the imperial president squandered almost all of his time on Truth Social making preposterous claims like he’d reduce drug prices by 14,000%.  Otherwise, when not posting on social media, at great expense to US taxpayers, he rode around golf courses, hopping on and off of carts, taking mulligan after mulligan.

But what the imperial president really loved the most were cabinet meetings where his obsequious department heads heaped upon him praise so hyperbolic that it might very well cause Kim Jong-un’s plump cheeks to blush.

For example, at the most recent cabinet meeting, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told the imperial president, referring to a three-story banner of his visage hanging from the facade of the Labor Department. “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker.”

The Imperial President’s Big Beautiful Face

Not to be undone, the imperial president’s special envoy to the Middle East and Russia, Steve Witkoff, gushed, “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.”

Wow, the only thing that Witkoff wishes for isn’t world peace or a cure for cancer but that the imperial president, who famously fomented a riot on 6 January 2021, receives a prize for peace.

And although these cabinet ministers were every adept at praising their leader, they were also very inept at running their agencies. The Pentagon and the CDC were both in shambles, and many of the imperial president’s subjects were growing increasingly unhappy as farm workers were deported, crops rotted in the fields, and grocery prices continued to rise.

To make matters worse, the imperial president was not only mentally unwell, but he also suffered physical ailments.  His “big, beautiful face” was in fact, despite the inch-thick orange make-up he wore, puffy and haggard, his ankles grotesquely swollen, and his hands bruised from IV punctures.  If Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer were more honest, she might have very well called him “a fat, decrepit fuck.”

Many of his subjects speculated that the imperial president was suffering from dementia as well, as he obsessed about non-existent gigantic water faucets and, like Don Quixote himself, tilted at windmills. Increasingly, his observations devolved into rambles so disjointed that the reporters covering the president put their fingers in their ears so they wouldn’t have to quote him.

Although the president continues to rule, it seems that his days may be numbered, which is especially bad news for him because he can’t sue or denigrate Death, which is his favorite way of dealing with adversaries. 

After the imperial president’s demise, what will become of his cabinet members is anyone’s guess. 

Emma Bovary Meets the Hardy Boys

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Obviously, I’m a huge fan of the novel as a literary genre. Just the other day, I was explaining to someone at Chico Feo how literary novels can be treasure troves of vicarious experience because they feature lifelike characters who behave like real people.  These novels aren’t didactic, but by co-experiencing Emma Bovary’s tragic vanity, you might glean that fabricating a persona through conspicuous consumption is not the way to go. 

In other words, rather than discovering through personal experience that purchasing a vintage Rolls Royce Silver Shadow will likely destroy your credit and leave you destitute, you can witness rabid Emma’s spending sprees, yet not personally suffer the consequences of her foolhardiness.

Of course, part of Emma’s problem is that she mistook the romance novels she misread as real life, the way I misperceived the Long Ranger as real life when as a five year old in Biloxi, Mississippi, I leapt from the top of my chest of drawers onto a rocking horse that catapulted me face first on a wooden floor, a hard lesson (literally) in appreciating the difference between illusion and reality. If I had read about a fool boy doing that in a book, I never would have tried it myself.

As Laurence Perrine states in his wonderful textbook Literature, Sound, Structure, and Sense, “inexperienced readers” [of commercial fiction] want their stories to be mainly pleasant. Evil, danger, and misery may appear in them, but not in such a way that they need be taken really seriously or are felt to be oppressive or permanent.”  A steady diet of happy endings could inculcate in an unsophisticated reader (or movie goer) the misperception that things always work out.  

In other words, evil, danger, and misery need to be taken very seriously.[1]

Of course, the puritans, those “vice crusaders farting through silk,” who have taken over the schoolboards in our budding authoritarian state are aware of the potential for fiction to alter attitudes.  For example, reading a novel that portrays a gay teenager as a decent, sincere person doing her best to navigate the perilous journey of adolescence might suggest to a homophobic sixteen-year-old that gay people are worthy of respect and empathy. 

The vice crusaders certainly don’t want that.

Just for the hell of it, after rereading Jo Humphrey’s brilliant but under-appreciated novel Fireman’s Fair –set in the disorienting wreckage of post Hurricane Hugo Charleston – I switched to escapist fiction, and for the first time since I read it out loud to my sons, ripped through the Hardy Boys series’ first title The Tower Treasure.

Whereas Jo’s book featured an array of well-rounded characters, The Tower Treasure trots out a series of underdeveloped static, one-dimensional mouthpieces: the indulgent dad, ace detective Fenton Hardy, his wife, a homemaker who doesn’t merit a first name because all she does is make sandwiches, and the boys themselves, Joe and Frank, and their various “chums” and female friends.

(A sidenote to budding fiction writers: avoid elaborate dialogue tags like “‘You’re elected,’ the others chorused.'”[2])

Truth be told, I actually enjoyed The Tower Treasure, which, despite its flaws, boasts a fast-moving plot that creates temporary suspense, but I never feared that the one of the two helmetless boy detectives would crash his motorcycle and end up a paraplegic.

And, of course, the novel also offers sociological insights into the attitudes of White people in the early 20th century and how those attitudes changed as the series progressed through the decades, e.g., Mrs. Hardy’s earning a first name –– Laura –– and eventually working outside the home as research librarian.

Someone (but not me) should do a scholarly paper on how the Hardy Boys novels reflect the social mores of their times and how those changing mores are reflected in changes in the novels’ depiction of the white enclave of Bayport, a city in New York in some novels and New Jersey in others.

After all, the ways things are going here in the dumb-downed US, the Hardy Boys may replace Animal Farm as required reading.

[1] Just last week a cook a Chico Feo, Jorge, who had a valid visa and a green card, was apprehended by ICE as he played by the rules by visiting his immigration office. ICE handcuffed him and swept him away to god knows where.  I don’t foresee a series of hairbreadth escapes in his future but, rather, disorienting displacement, maltreatment, in sum, a horrible existence. A novel dramatizing his sad journey could offer insights into the human condition; however, although an action novel depicting his escaping might be fun to read, it would literally be escapism, a means to avoid our everyday humdrum. 

[2] That the six “youths” in the scene all “chorus” the exact phrase “you’re elected” is distracting and Hindenburgs my suspension of disbelief.

The Unlikely Story of How I Became an English Teacher

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Sleep Walking on High by Pauline Lim

I left for college as a journalism major, but I quit before ever taking even one introductory journalism class.  All of the journalism professors I met at the freshman orientation were chain-smokers who seemed to have a mild case of the heebie-jeebies.  Also, you had to pass a typing test, and not only didn’t I know how to type, but I also possessed –– and still do –– the fine motor skills of a platypus.[1]

So I gave up on being a newspaper scribe, and without declaring a major, took whatever classes seemed interesting ––  German Expressionism in the Weimar Republic, Film Studies, Shakespeare’s comedies, etc.

Because I was dream-ridden, impractical and enjoyed reading, when forced in my junior year to choose a major, I opted for English without giving future employment a nanosecond’s consideration. No way did I ever envision myself as a future high or middle school teacher. I recalled my highschool days, not with nostalgia, but with a feeling of good riddance, like Japanese Californians might look back on their internment during WW2.

Yet somehow I ended up teaching highschool for 34 years, and how I got that job is not unlike that Popeye cartoon where Olive Oyl sleepwalks her way across crane-hoisted girders swaying several stories above sidewalks far below during the construction of a skyscraper. 

She’s unconscious but amazingly lucky as she blindly makes her way

[1] In fact, believe it or not, I’m still a hunter and pecker.

In 1977, I was engaged to be married but unemployed.  I had only taken one education course as an undergraduate, so teaching high or middle school was out of the question.  Not only that, but I had dropped out of graduate school after earning the requisite 30 hours.  

In late August or early September of that year, I ran across an ad in the Post and Courier seeking an adjunct instructor at Trident Technical College.  The ad directed the applicant contact the Dean of English, Ed Bush.

So the next day, I drove to the North Charleston campus seeking Dr. Bush, although I was supposed to apply at the central office, a detail that I had somehow overlooked.  After asking around, someone directed me to Dr. Bush’s office.  Obviously, I didn’t have an appointment, but there was a line outside his office, so I got in the queue and awaited my turn.  When I approached his desk, he asked what class I wanted to drop or add.  I informed him I was there to apply for the job advertised in the paper.  After asking a few questions –– did I have a Master’s –– “no but I have the hours.”

“But you do have experience teaching, right? 

 “Um, yes” (after all, I had occasionally presented papers to fellow grad students in classes). 

So he hired me on the spot without checking any of my credentials. After all, classes were about to begin, and they needed someone to teach English 102, Technical Report Writing, and Business Communications.

So at 24, I became a podunk adjunct professor who grew to really enjoy teaching, even continuing to teach at night when I had a full time job keeping books and training for management of a company that sold safety equipment. 

Professor Rusty

My wife Judy ended up also teaching at Trident as well, but full time, and she eventually became the head of the psychology department.  After being one of 12 writers selected to study under Blanche McCrary Boyd in a SC Arts Commission workshop, I quit my daytime job, wrote short fiction by day, and taught by night.[2]  

However, once we had our first child, Harrison Moore, Ruler of the Third Planet, Judy wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.  I took care of Harrison in the day, then drove him and handed him off to Judy before teaching my night classes.  It was the worst of both worlds, sort of like being two single parents living under the same roof.

In that first autumn of being a father, I received a call from the chair of Porter-Gaud’s English Department, George Whitaker.  Ed Bush, my former boss at Trident, had given George my name.  Some teacher had been fired mid-year, and Porter-Gaud needed someone ASAP.  I told him I couldn’t, given my child-rearing responsibilities, but that I would love to teach at Porter in the following year.

As it turned out, the fellow they hired midyear also had to be fired that spring.  In addition, an older teacher, Mr. Hubbard, was retiring, and George himself was leaving to pursue writing.

So I interviewed for the job, and despite my not stellar credentials, the new chair, Sue Chanson, the greatest high school English teacher I’ve ever known, hired me, because she later told me, Ed Bush had given me such a stellar recommendation.

So perhaps there is some truth in the old adage “It’s better to be lucky than good.”

Right Olive?

[2] Other writers selected included Josephine Humphreys, Billy Baldwin, Lee Robinson, Harland Greene, Steve Hoffius, Rebecca Parke, and Greg Williams, to name a few.