the two heroes of my youth

BEGAN WITH ERNEST HEMINGWAY...

FROM WHOM I PILFERED THE GUISE  of the stoic, barrel-chested drinker, who mixed it up in olden days of memory with  Humphrey Bogart, a man who also enjoyed a drink or two along the way, as well as an ever-present cigarette dangling from between his lips; two men who had apparently come through tough times and deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors (or so I thought), men who quickly taught me that the only unforgivable sin was self-pity.  The mantra was simple:  If a girl broke your heart?  Go get a stunner.  You lost a fight with another guy?  Get up.  Wipe off the blood.  Have a shot of rotgut.  And go back and break his nose. 


  Bogie got Bacall.


  Hemingway, the Nobel Prize. 


  I first came across on how I thought I might best live my life in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a romantic novel where in the climax of the drama, the hero, Frederick Henry, deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths.  Living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country.  I felt as if I had written these pages, as if I were saying these words about who and what I hoped one day to become.  I discovered places I wanted to go, people I wished I would one day meet.  Women I desired to love. 


  Then there was the magic of Bogie in Casablanca, as he said: Of all the joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine...and at the end of the movie, with the dense fog and airplane awaiting her departure, Bogie looks into the eyes of Ingrid Bergman: "I'm saying this because it's true.  Inside of us, we both know you belong to Victor.  You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going.  If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it.  Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life..."  And Ingrid says: "But what about us?" And Bogie replies: "We''ll always have Paris...I realized at that very moment: this was the honorable way to treat the woman I loved, and if the romance suddenly did go awry, I could always add: Here's looking at you, kid. 


  There was no doubt about it: I was in awe of these two guys.




  Many of the Twenties writers and artists had become expatriates.  Which became another word I had become enchanted with; as I read about Fitzgerald going to the Riviera, T.S. Eliot to London, Hemingway to Paris.  They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I imagined), in countries where there was wonderful food and shelter and the drinks were cheap and the women were beautiful.  In my imagination, drinking absinthe with Hemingway in Paris became the golden city of my dreams.  I envisioned cafe tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparnasse; and there, striding through the door, was the beautiful Ava Gardner as the Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises: "She wore a slipover sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's.  She started all that.  She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey...Hemingway wrote.


  It was around this time, that I saw Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris with the athletic Gene Kelly and the magical Leslie Caron; and here was Gene, living on the GI Bill after World War II, telling me that if you can't become a painter in Paris, you may as well spend the rest of your life as a packer in a meat-packing plant.  He then took me to the windows  of the French Quarter that were open to the air of spring, the Paris rooftops, the cobble-stoned streets, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread and , of course, the cafes.  He wasn't Hemingway or Bogie, but he was good enough for me.  I had never seen a man as athletically elegant as he was.  Oscar Levante was his best friend, a piano player, and they met every day at the Cafe Bel Ami.  A relationship which, of course, immediately reminded me of Bogie in Casablanca, and his nemesis, Captain Louis Renault, played by Claude  Rains; as the two of them were walking together through the fog at the movie's end,  and Bogie says to him: "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
  


  My hope was, that one day, I would find the Cafe Bel Ami and sit at a table and order a liqueur coffee and read little magazines too.  And then study at the Sorbonne and paint in the street and all night long, I'd discuss with my fellow expatriates literature and art.  And then sample other pleasures, as well.  Women and wine and absinthe, of course.




  But I didn't go to Paris.  Humphrey Bogart died in 1957 at the age of 57 after long bout with esophageal cancer from smoking too many of those god-damned cigarettes.  And Ernest Hemingway took a shotgun into the kitchen of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, put it into his mouth, pulled the trigger, then died at age 61 in 1961 because he was clinically  depressed.


  What the two of them had given to me, however, was what Shakespeare had Prospero say in his play The Tempest:


  "We are such stuff As dreams are made on..."


   

the life of a seminarian is not all it's cracked-up to be and...

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT MY TIME IN THE SEMINARY...

AND TELLS THE TALE OF THE WAY ONE HUMAN BEING became aware of the fact that the culture of a seminary life endures because it offers so many pseudo rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love from a God you cannot see or hear or feel or touch.  Snuggling up with God is the goal; thus, you embrace it, struggle with it, get hurt by it, and perhaps finally leave it behind.  The tale has no hero.


  The year was 1962, my final year of study at Central Lutheran Theological Seminary in Fremont, Nebraska; and after a long and hard academic climb of 4 years and 4 years in the seminary, my goal was just about to be reached.  I was happily engaged to a wonderful girl and about to be ordained.  The problem with all of that was this:  I listened in class, and to the fearful whisperings of my older professors about sin and evil and redemption and salvation; but I didn't know if I believed any of what I had been taught.  This is one of the secrets I carried with me throughout my days as a seminarian.  I couldn't talk to my Mom or Dad about my terrible failure to imagine the reality of a God; I certainly couldn't discuss it with my professors; so I kept silent. 


  I seemed not to care about the Holy Ghost (though I loved his cartoony name), the Blessed Trinity, or Original Sin.  I couldn't figure out what exactly my own sins were, was unable to get anyone to explain it to me in any detail whatsoever, and wondered why Original Sin was my responsibility, since it had apparently come to Earth long before I was born.  One other problem I had with the church was that it didn't follow its own list of rules.  It certainly did not seem to care passionately about the poor.  It shamed us into contributing money every Sunday  under the guise of what we liked to call Stewardship, which became a regular November ritual affectionately titled: Stewardship Month.  I seldom saw ministers on picket lines outside a factory, fighting against the bosses who were defrauding workers.  After sex-out-of-marriage, most of their negative passion was reserved for communion, which would apparently save us from our most recent sins, but had to be repeated on a monthly basis to ensure that the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ had remained in proper working order; and when asked,  the majority of our professors would never try to help us understand the truth behind the mysteries of the church, of our faith, or how communion actually worked.    


  We were taught that the chief sources of sin were: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth.  Most of the focus seemed to be on Lust; which was something I had been quite fond of, thinking of it as something that was awesome and darkly attractive, so I made the decision to discuss my doubts with one of my younger professors about this sin which apparently would eventually lead to blindness of the intellect, hardness of the heart, loss of faith and piety, the ruin of health, and a whole slew of unnamed diseases; all of which had magically been sent down to us  from Heaven above by the ancient philosophers of the Old Testament who seemed to me to be guys with a well-developed sense of horror.


  I could not imagine that someone as all-powerful as God would be sitting on some throne, being pissed off about what I may or may not be doing down in Fremont, Nebraska.  The seminary professors made God sound as if He were some glorified scorekeeper, endlessly filling in box scores  of sin and lust and then punishing those who made errors.  It seemed to me that with so many people on Earth that He would have little time for anything else.   That alone would keep Him busy.  And if He really had to do all of America, all of Russia, all of Europe and every woman and man committing sins of Lust, all the movies stars and all the baseball players and all the wise guys in the Mob, how in the world would He ever get around to noticing what I was or was not doing in the backseat of my Chevy  Impala?


 
  I did, however, respect some of my professors, particularly a kind man named Wesely Fuerst who, at the age of 36, was only 6 years older than I was.  He taught Old Testament Theology, and was the fastest man in a pulpit that I ever saw, the words falling from his lips as if he were a tobacco auctioneer, mostly due to the fact that he did not think of himself as much of a preacher.  Since none of what I had learned thus far made any sense and because I trusted him, I asked if I could have an appointment with him in his office at the end of the school day.  


 
  And when I arrived, I began by telling him of the disbelief I had carried with me, even as a school boy.  I informed him that sex seemed to be as natural to real life as is breathing; that I felt that the Prophets were just men like other men; and that the more I learned, the more I thought that it was all very strange.  I also wondered why I had entered the seminary in the first place, and thought that I may have done so at the urging of my pastor at my home congregation in Denver, Ben Weaver, and the fact that my grandfather, Albert Daugs, had once been a Lutheran minister.  Professor Fuerst sat quietly listening as I rambled on-and-on-and-on, and when the quiet finally came, he asked:


  Do you believe in a God exists in any manner or shape or form, Mister Daugs?


  I do, Sir, I immediately said. 


  He then began to ask rapid-fire questions: What kind of a God? I'm not sure, I answered.  Why aren't you sure? he said.  Are you stupid? he asked.  No! I replied.  I was agitated.  If you're not a stupid ignoramus,  what are you? he asked.  A blithering idiot?   A fucking fool? What?! No!! I shouted.  Fuck you! I yelled.  I didn't know what else to say.  He then got up from his chair, his face was swollen but he looked directly down at me as I sat on the other side of his desk. 


  I'm sorry, he said.


  Okay, I said.  I'm sorry too.


  He then eased himself down into his chair. 


  I want you to listen to me very, very carefully, he began:  Believe it or not, I've been where you now are.  I had doubts.  About myself.  About the existence of God.  About my worthiness as a man of God.  I then realized something.  And that was this:  There had never been a human being born who was was exactly like me and there never would be again.  Thus, it was my duty to come to an understanding of exactly what the meaning of God meant  to me.  What I did believe and what I did not believe.  And if I found that I would be a good fit as a minister in the traditional sense of the words:  time-honored religion; I would allow myself to be ordained.  If not, I would choose another profession.  And that is the choice you have to make.


  So it's okay for me to doubt? I asked.


  It's vital, he replied.


 And I was ordained.

I became a worrywart at the end of World War Two which all began...


IN THE THE WINTER OF 1946 WHEN...
GWYNETH THE WHORE'S HUSBAND came home from the war.  He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man man by the name of Jake who had been a Japanese prisoner for 3 years.  But when he went into his old home on Jasmine Street in Denver there were no Welcome Home signs and no Gwyneth either.  He took a taxi to the Ship Tavern on 17th Street inside of the Brown Palace Hotel and got very drunk.  Then he started tossing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror in the men's room and punched out another man at the bar.  The Police came.  They took him to jail.  He stayed in jail overnight.  The next day he left our neighborhood and never came back.
  


  While Jake had been away Gwyneth had been playing house with both single and married men from Lowry Field Army Air Force Base almost every night.  Gwyneth did not seem to be a woman who was cut-out to make a  husband proud - thus the nickname, whore.  She was, however, one who could make 10 year-old boys like me whisper and giggle with delight.  She had hazel eyes and dark-brown hair and very long-tanned legs, which we would later learn that she had derived from sunbathing in the nude out in her backyard on lazy summer's afternoons; she also seemed fond of sitting of sitting on her front porch as Carl Johnson and I played a game of catch in my yard across the street; then liked to wink at us and hike-up her skirt and show us that she was not wearing any panties.  And up until the day that she eventually moved away, both Carl and I thought that she was a most spectacular visual sight.    


  My Dad did not.  When I told him what she had been doing because I trusted him completely and knew that he would not tell Mom, he said:   We adults call women like that exhibitionists, Son.  That means that she gets a kick-out of showing-off her body to men.  Women like that can give you certain diseases with names like syphilis and gonorrhea.  You can transmit that disease to others.  It's not a good deal.  You could go blind.  You might even go insane.  I then began to wonder if a kid my age could get diseases like that, suddenly go blind-as-a-bat, become as crazy-as-a-loon,  and be institutionalized in an insane asylum with other nut jobs by the time I was 11 years-old,  from just taking a peek now-and-again at a woman who liked to lift her skirt up?  


 
  It was at that very moment when other things began to to bother me and my Worrywart Syndrome began.  


  The war might be over, but the shortages were not, and into our kitchen marched margarine, along with the onset of the above mentioned Worrywart Syndrome.  My Mother told me that the butter people would not allow the margarine to be pre-mixed, so she'd place the white waxy blocks in a bowl, sprinkled them with a yellowish powder, and churn and mix and mix and churn until the results looked vaguely like butter.  I was almost certain that the dreaded Nazis had absconded with all of the butter in the entire world, and substituted it with margarine, which was probably filled with either cyanide or some sort of a laxative like Milk of Magnesia; in order to weaken our immune system and eventually take over America without having to fire so much as a single shot.  So  I decided that if that were the case, and if I could not have butter, which was naturally yellow, then I would have nothing.  Shortly after that, the rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally butter, and I thought that I was  about to be happy again. 

  Which turned out to be a short-lived dream.  It was then that the family went to our usual Saturday night movie at the Bluebird Theater on Colfax Avenue to see It's A Wonderful Life with James Stewart; and as the newsreel came onto the screen, the voice of Mel Allen began giving the names of concentration camps  like "Buchenwald" and "Auschwitz," which were filled with emaciated men in striped pajamas, all of them barefoot, their eyes mere dots in black holes, their cheekbones sharp and bare, their arms like dowels, their mouths slack, and I said to myself You have it good, you have a bed, you have pancakes, you are not from Buchenwald, you have a Mom and a Dad, and you are not a Jew.  That night I lay in the dark, thinking that perhaps my parents were fibbing to me and that we were actually Jewish, too; that they were afraid to tell me the truth.  It took courage to ask my Dad if it were true that I was not a Jew.  He assured me that we were not.  That we were, in fact, Lutherans.  Although I was uncertain as to what a Lutheran actually was, I was greatly relieved.  

 
  That, too, did not last.  


  Winter refused to end.  After school, every afternoon, I would walk from Montclair Elementary School  down Monaco Parkway to our homes on Jasmine Street with another neighbor, Jerry Derryberry, my head bent into the wind.  Jerry asked me one afternoon if I might be interested in diddling her twat when we got home.  I took a moment to ponder the question since I was unsure what diddling meant or what a twat was, and finally said that I didn't think would be interested in doing something like that.  The very next afternoon my  best friend, Bobby Dixon, informed me that Jerry was telling everyone at school that I was a queer.  Why? I asked.  Bobby's dad was a gynecologist.  His dad told him why she might have said something like that.  He then told me.  He added that the guys in the know at school, called what she had wanted me to do to her was called Playing Stink Finger.  He told me  why she would like me to do something like that to her.  I was worried.  I told my Dad.  My Dad got mad.  He went out the door.  And the next thing I knew Jerry was sent off to a private school in Colorado Springs. 


  In the spring, I began to feel better about myself.  The Rocky Mountain News was a handsome broadsheet that sold 100 thousand copies a day and most of its circulation was home delivered.  One afternoon, I was talking to my friend Billy Reezab in our living room, and he told me that he was now delivering the newspaper.  He asked my mother and father and then asked me if I might be interested in doing something like that.  My parents said that would be fine and Billy took me out into the front yard to show me how to throw a paper  onto a front porch, then the two of us went off to The Bluebird Theater to see The Devil Monster - Mammoth Killer of the Sea starring Barry Norton and Blanche Mehaffy. 


  I started the very next morning in the pre-dawn hours. There were dozens of boys in the Chat 'n Chew Restaurant parking lot "boxing" papers in triple fold and sliding them into our delivery bags.  Most of the boys were older than I was and they shouted and kidded and worked with amazing speed.  I was given a list of the addresses of the people on my route and away I went.  At first, I wobbled under the weight of the bag.  But as I moved on riding my bike, the load got lighter, and toward the end, with only a few papers left, I rode into the rear of an apartment complex to deliver the last of my load.  It was then that I saw it inside of a car port, swaying slowly back-and-forth in the pre-dawn darkness! 


  I was certain that it was The Devil Monster and it was coming to get me! I pedaled out of there as fast as my legs could pedal, laid my bike down on our front porch, took the porch steps two and three at a time and burst into the kitchen, frightened and shaken.  Nobody was up yet.  When my Dad eventually came into the kitchen, I told him what I had seen.  He listened to me with a rather odd look on his face and then drove me over to the apartment complex.  And there it was: A 100 pound Everlast boxer's punching bag, swaying to-and-fro in the wind.


  My Dad smiled and rubbed my hair and laughed.  You're a worrywart, Son, he said.  He then gave me a hug and added, Don't worry.  You'll grow out of it. 


  There was only one real story:  A 100 pound punching bag had brought me closer to my Father and I did eventually grow out of it... 

A COALITION OF RACIST CONFRONTATION ...
HAS ONCE AGAIN COME BACK TO AMERICA in the form of a white police officer shooting an unarmed African- American man.  This time in a small Missouri town.  The young man died while making an attempt to raise his hands in the air in an act of surrender, when 5 bullets hammered into his body and 1 hurtled into the top  of his skull, instantaneously causing his death.  That was when the outrage began.  Police wearing body-armor now roamed the streets, shooting rubber bullets at the protesters. When that failed to work, canisters of teargas were shot at them and at TV cameras filming all of it, journalists were cuffed and placed under arrest, molotov cocktails were thrown, shops were set ablaze by flash-bombs, a police officer threatened to kill a protester with a semi-automatic rifle aimed directly at the man's chest; and when all of that was botched in an attempt to quell the protest, the Missouri National Guard was called-in by the Governor of the State.  The town immediately filled with incoherent indignation and uncontrollable fear.

  This peculiar American capacity for anger seems to be without limit. And it is not only a matter of the anger of white-against-black or black-against-white.  Millions of women claim to be the victims of men, while men cite alimony laws and stake claims to their own status as victims of feminist hypocrisy.  The American day seems to begin with one long and penetrating cry: Look what they have done to us!  And they are  Catholics or Protestants or Jews, liberals or conservatives, northerners or southerners, members of the NAACP or the NRA, which often seems to be an illustration of Jean Paul Sartre's that Hell is other people.  In the end, all adherents of victimism have a few things in common.  They are full of self-loathing, despise their jobs and their wives, their husbands or kids or dogs, the city in which they now live and the town into which they were born, the politicians who disagree with them, people of a different color, and almost all foreigners.  

  As a case in point, not too many years ago, I was on a New York City bus listening to several black men talk about a photograph of Denzel Washington on the cover of Parade Magazine.  "What does that friggin' pretty boy know about bein' down an' out?" one of them said.  Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, soon the familiar rap was flowing.   They'd drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made.  Their fathers had run off when they were kids, or their mothers, or their girlfriends.  They'd been locked up by bad cops, beaten up or flunked out or abused by Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses.  It was then that one of them saw me looking at them.  He stared at me for a long moment.  I could see the hatred in his eyes.  And then slowly, almost as a matter of duty, he gave me the finger and asked, "What th' fuck are you lookin' at, white boy?"  I departed the bus at the very next stop. 
 

  And now, in Ferguson, Missouri, a town of 21 thousand, the blacks are filled with the same dread and dismay I felt on that bus so many years ago, only this time it is the fear of whites and what we stand for, so much so that they now are overwhelmed with alarm and panic at the mere sight of a white cop: Alarm for their lives and panic for the lives of their children and grandchildren.  This is a darker, more dangerous aspect to victimism.  It can be used as a license.  Like a white cop who shoots first and asks questions later, and a young man of 18 by the name of Michael Brown, who then lay dead in the street with only a sheet covering his corpse for 5 long hours before the ambulance came to take him to the morgue. 


  I am not sure  when or exactly why - racism has, once again, become a way of life; a  scenario which goes back to the State of Mississippi in 1958, when a 14 year-old boy by the name of Emmett Till was murdered for theoretically flirting and whistling at a white woman.  His eyes were gouged out and he was beaten to death, his body was then tossed into the Tallahatchie River;   then came Trayvon Martin, who was shot to death by George Zimmerman in 2012 in the State of Florida, simply because he was an African-American and Mister Zimmerman said that he was afraid of him, so Zimmerman Stood His Ground, and slaughtered the young man; and now, Michael Brown, assassinated by a white police officer named Darren Wilson, has been added to that rather disgusting list.  By all accounts Michael Brown was far from a saint.  He was, in fact, reputed to be a minor criminal; yet I cannot help but wonder what Officer Wilson's wiggle-room  excuse for the senseless slaughter of another unarmed African-American man will  turn out to be? 



  I also pause to wonder if there will ever again be a splendid exchange between the Black and the White on American soil: Hemingway for Alex Haley, Joyce for Satchmo Armstrong, O'Casey for James Baldwin, Mantle for Willie Mays; each celebrating our heritage and sharing it with one another in the simple faith of appreciation for each other and and the cultural traditions of our past?  Perhaps then, our Nation would have less adolescent posturing and gnashing of teeth, and more optimism and bawdy horselaughs shared with one another in the face of adversity.  And then in may be possible that there will be no more lifeless bodies of unarmed young men,  who lay dead on a street due only to the color of their skin...

Drugs, TV, and the Tea Party:


WILLIAM J. BENNETT IS A CONSERVATIVE PUNDIT...

POLITICIAN AND POLITICAL THEORIST WHO ONCE talked vaguely about the heritage of the 60's permissiveness, the collapse of Traditional Values, and all that.  Both he and President George H.W. Bush, under whom he served as the Secretary of Education, offered the traditional American excuse: It is somebody Else's Fault.  This posture set the stage for the self-righteous invasion of Panama; Bush even accused Manuel Noriega of "poisoning our children."  But neither he or Bennett ever asked why  so many Americans demand the poison.  Even then, there was unemployment, poor living conditions, governmental stupidity, a gap between rich and poor.  And neither "Bill" or "George" ever seemed to consider that may be a part of the problem, as well.


  Back when I was young, drug addiction was not a major problem.  That, of course, was 60 years ago, during the placid 50's.  There were drug addicts.  So Commissioner Harry Anslinger pumped up the budget of the old Bureau of Narcotics with fantasies of reefer madness.  Heroin was sold and used in most major cities, while the bebop generation of jazz musicians jammed up with horse.  But until the early 60's, narcotics were still marginal to American life; they weren't the $220 billion market they make up today.  


  If anything, those years have an eerie innocence. There were only 1.7 million TV sets in use in the entire country (the number is now was 200 billion).  But the majority of the  audience had grown up without the amazing new medium.  They embraced it, were diverted by it, perhaps even loved it, but they were not formed by it.  In the last Nielsen survey of American viewers, the average American family was watching television 8 hours a day.  This has never happened before in history.  No people has ever before been entertained for 8 hours a day.  The Elizabethans didn't go to the theater 8 hours a day.  The pre-TV generation did not go to the movies 8 hours a day.  Common sense tells us that this all-pervasive diet of constant imagery, sustained now for 50 years that have changed us in profound ways. 


 
  Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts.   And though many lonely Americans leave their sets on without watching them, using them as electronic companions, television usually absorbs its viewers the way drugs absorb their users.  There are other disturbing similarities.  Television itself is a consciousness-altering instrument.   With one touch of a button, you can be taken out of the "real world" and be placed at a baseball game, the streets of New York, or the back alleys of Paris, or in the cartoony living rooms of Sitcom Land, usually with music or a laugh track; read "self-help" books, and obtain our news from Jon Stewart.  


  In short, television  works on the same imaginative and intellectual level as  psychoactive drugs.  If prolonged television viewing makes passive, then moving into drugs has a certain coherence.    Both provide an unearned high, in contrast to the earned rush that comes from a feat of accomplishment, a human breakthrough earned by earned by sweat or thought or love.  It's no wonder that 19 other nations lead us in literacy ratings and 22 are ahead of us in both science and math.


 
 Both drugs and television give people what they want.  We Americans no longer seem able to distinguish truth from fiction or reality from fantasy.  This is easily attained by popping a pill or flipping a switch, a choice between cheap emotion over logic, where there are good guys and bad, nice girls and whores, smart guys and dumb, and the steady growth in American politics into the world of a new and somewhat absurd adventure filled with halfwits called:


  The Tea Party...


  ...And now have Nation wherein the the tail is now wagging the dog...


  ...Because we are only giving people what they want...

I NOW SEEM TO BE A MEMBER ON A GROWING GENUINE HIT-LIST...

THAT OF THE DEMOCRATIC CENTRAL COMMITTEE, even though I am still getting daily emails from what I thought were my newly minted friends, I have grown to doubt their sincerity, so please allow me to begin by saying this:


  Folks like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Al Franken, to name only a few, have in recent months, desired to  keep in close contact with me.  My new buddies seemed unable to get along without me, paid more attention to me than my children and grandchildren did; and it was as if I had somehow become a really close pal.  So close, in fact, that I even got an invitation to toss-away any Labor Day plans that I may have had, in order to have a BBQ with Barack.  Needless to say, I was more than delighted.  I was tickled-pink.  


  I could almost see the members of the Tea Party, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions for my future and that of every other American!  The collective public faces of my new enemy, made up of the usual suspects: Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, and the Congressional sometimes bible whacker and Constitutional scholar, John Boehner; along with the TV puffball, Rush Limbaugh and the ever-present Sarah Palin, who were now marching in lockstep and pounding the drums with the yahoo crusaders of the newly minted Tea Party. 


 
  As for me, I, too, was marching in front of the parade with the Democratic drum of peace and purity and equality and protection for all from evil.  That zeal was shaped by the urging of my new friends, the major players in the real world who were foes of those who insisted that God was on their side.  A God who was, apparently, not fond of homosexuals or women or abortion or voting rights or other-than-white presidents, was now my enemy, too.  This was now the heart of my new crusade.  Like the people who once brought us Prohibition (and the Mob), I now had allies with their vision and rules for the entire country.  An essential tool for any social change. 


  It was then that an email from alert@dcc.org came my way, informing me that they were not going to sugarcoat what came next:    Apparently, my Democratic buddies were being outspent 3 to 1 by our dreaded enemy, and 365 thousand dollars was needed immediately and that I apparently had not heeded President O'Bama's call to action; then asked me to chip in up to $250 dollars.  The explicit subordination of my value was now apparent.  If my torrid vision were true, I was no more than a cash cow to those I once thought of as my fellow amigos!


  In a lifetime as a man, of growing up in Denver, Colorado, as a student in college and then the seminary in the State of Nebraska, as a Lutheran Minister who moved among some really odd people and downright bigots in Fargo, North Dakota and Roswell, New Mexico; and later in life, after having left the ministry, as I mingled with my fellow drunks and familiar bartenders in the City of New York, I had never in my life felt so betrayed and utterly brutalized. 


It was now obvious to me that me and my fellow Democrats would not live happily ever after. 


And the kicker to all of this came the very next day:  Al Frankin, a man that I had grown to love and trust on Saturday Night Live and had enjoyed reading his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Liar, informed me that since I had yet to donate to the cause, I was about to be deleted from his email list.  Forget whip, chains and handcuffs: What Al had done to me was an act of emotional and psychic destruction! 


  Obviously, Al was no longer a man I could trust.


  It got so bad that one morning, in the moments between sleep and true consciousness, I thought that I was at the Democratic Convention, happy, full of possibilities, when I took note of other folks staring at me and pointing in my direction.  I was confused.  They were pointing at my T-shirt, which bore the inscription: "Cheapskate."  I immediately began to regret that I had not donated to the cause.  I could not begin to forgive myself.  But then, it got even worse.  Joe Biden walked up to me and hissed in my face: "I emailed you Monday.  I emailed you yesterday.  Where's the money?  It's folks like you that make me ashamed to call myself an American!"  And then Hillary Clinton peered at me over Joe's shoulder, adding: "What you have done is even worse than what Bill did with Monica!  It's no wonder that Barack gave a shoot-on-sight order if you dared to show-up at the Labor Day BBQ a couple of years ago!" 


I wanted to shrivel away. 


Disappear forever.


Folks I had once embraced had now deserted me.  They would no longer cheer when I entered a room.  The illusions of my youth were now forever gone.  Perhaps all of this would not have happened if had not wasted so much of my young manhood as a Republican; I had some great good times with them, but could not bring myself to vote for any of them, particularly when it came to Barry Goldwater.  Now I was just another aging almost former Democrat.


  What I need is a vestibule to open up my own future happiness...


  ...And I wonder if you would think about making a small donation to my cause?