In Persuasion Nation (7 page)

Out
out out, Vivian said.

Then
she gave me this Patient Permission Form, which the first question
was, Is patient aware of risk of significantly reduced postoperative
brain function?

And I
wrote, Yes.

And
then it said, Does patient authorize Dr. Edward Kenton to perform all
procedures associated with a complete gargadisk removal, including
but not limited to e-wire severance, scar-tissue removal, forceful
Kinney Maneuver (if necessary to fully disengage gargadisk),
suturing, and postoperative cleansing using the Foreman Vacuum
Device, should adequate cleaning not be achievable via traditional
methods?

And I
wrote, Yes.

I have
been here since Wednesday, due to Dr. Kenton is at a wedding.

I want
to thank Vivian for all this paper, and Mr. Slippen for being the
father I never had, and Carolyn for not giving up on me, and Dr.
Kenton, assuming he does not screw it up.

(Ha
ha, you know, Dr. Kenton, I am just messing with you, even if you do
screw it up, I know you tried your best. Only please do not screw it
up, ha ha ha!)

Last
night they let Carolyn send me a fax from the Lerner Center, and it
said, I may not look my best or be the smartest apple on the
applecart but, believe me, in time I will again bake those ninety-two
pies.

And I
faxed back, However you are is fine with me, I will see you soon,
look for me, I will be the one with the ripped-up neck, smacking
himself in the head!

No
matter what, she faxed, at least we will now have a life, that life
dreamed of by so many, living in freedom with all joys and all fears,
bring it on, I say, the balloon of our excitement will go up up up,
to that land which is the land of true living, we will not be denied!

I love
you, I wrote.

I love
you too, she wrote.

Which
I thought that was pretty good, it being so simple and all, and it
gave me hope.

Because
maybe we can do it.

Maybe
we can come to be normal, and sit on our porch at night, the porch of
our own house, like at LI 87326, where the mom knits and the dad
plays guitar and the little kid works very industrious with his Speak
& Spell, and when we talk, it will make total sense, and when we
look at the stars and moon, if choosing to do that, we will not think
of LI 44387, where the moon frowns down at this dude due to he is
hiding in his barn eating Rebel CornBells instead of proclaiming his
SnackLove aloud, we will not think of LI 09383, where this stork
flies through some crying stars who are crying due to the baby who is
getting born is the future Mountain Dew Guy, we will not think of
that alien at LI 33081 descending from the sky going, Just what is
this thing called a Cinnabon?

In
terms of what we will think of, I do not know. When I think of what
we will think of, I draw this like total blank and get scared, so
scared my Peripheral Area flares up green, like when I have drank too
much soda, but tell the truth I am curious, I think I am ready to
try.

They
will attempt to insinuate themselves into the very fabric of our
emotional lives, demanding the dissolution of the distinction between
beloved and enemy, friend and foe, neighbor and stranger. They will,
citing equality, deny our right to make critical moral distinctions.
Crying peace, they will deny our right to defend, in whatever manner
is most expedient, the beloved. Under the guise of impartiality, they
will demand we disavow all notions of tradition, family, friends,
tribe, and even nation. But are we animals, forced to look blankly
upon the rich variety of life, disallowed the privilege of making
moral distinctions, dead to love, forbidden from preferring this to
that?

—
Bernard
"Ed" Alton,

Taskbook
for the New Nation,

Chapter
3. "Are We Not We? Are They Not Them?"

Mt. Terence Rackman

Leadville
Courier-Examiner

Leadville, PA 13245

Re: "Not in This
Town, Friend," June 15 issue,

"My Turn"
Lifestyle Section

Dear
Mr. Rackman,

Very
much enjoyed you recent article and wish to weigh in with some of my
thoughts on this troubling matter. I agree with all you had to say.
Like any sane person, I am against Same-Sex Marriage, and in favor of
a constitutional amendment to ban it.

To
tell the truth, I feel that, in the interest of moral rigor, it is
necessary for us to go a step further, which is why I would like to
propose a supplementary constitutional amendment.

In
the town where I live, I have frequently observed a phenomenon I have
come to think of as Samish-Sex Marriage. Take, for example, "K,"
a male friend of mine, of slight build, with a ponytail. "K"
is married to "S," a tall, stocky female with extremely
short hair, almost a crewcut. Often, while watching "K"
play with his own ponytail as "S" towers over him, I have
wondered, Isn't it odd that this somewhat effeminate man should be
married to this somewhat masculine woman? Is "K" not, on
some level, imperfectly expressing a slight latent desire to be
married to a man? And is not "S," on some level,
imperfectly expressing a slight latent desire to be married to a
woman?

Then
I ask myself, Is this truly what God had in mind?

Take
the case of "L," a female friend with a deep, booming
voice. I have often found myself looking askance at her husband, "H."
Though "H" is basically pretty masculine, having neither a
ponytail nor a tight feminine derrière like "K,"
still I wonder: "H," when you are having marital relations
with "L," and she calls out your name in that deep,
booming, nearly male voice, and you continue having marital relations
with her (i.e., you are not "turned off"), does this not
imply that you, "H," are, in fact, still "turned on"?
And doesn't this indicate that, on some level, you, "H,"
have a slight latent desire to make love to a man?

Or
consider the case of "T," a male friend with an extremely
small penis. (We attend the same gym.) He is married to "O,"
an average-looking woman who knows how to fix cars. I wonder about
"O." How does she know so much about cars? Is she not, by
tolerating this non-car-fixing, short-penised friend of mine,
indicating that, on some level, she wouldn't mind being married to a
woman, and is therefore, perhaps, a tiny bit functionally gay?

And
what about "T"? Doesn't the fact that "T" can
stand there in the shower room at our gym, confidently towelling off
his tiny unit, while "O" is at home changing their
sparkplugs with alacrity, indicate that it is only a short stroll
down a slippery slope before he is completely happy being the "girl"
in their relationship, from which it is only a small fey hop down the
same slope before "T" is happily married to another man,
perhaps my car mechanic, a handsome Portuguese fellow I shall refer
to as "J"?

Because
my feeling is, when God made man and woman He had something very
specific in mind. It goes without saying that He did not want men
marrying men, or women marrying women, but also what He did not want,
in my view, was feminine men marrying masculine women.

Which
is why I developed my Manly Scale of Absolute Gender.

Using
my Scale, which assigns numerical values according to a set of
masculine and feminine characteristics, it is now easy to determine
how Manly a man is and how Fem a woman is, and therefore how close to
a Samish-Sex Marriage a given marriage is.

Here's
how it works. Say we determine that a man is an 8 on the Manly Scale,
with 10 being the most Manly of all and 0 basically a Neuter. And say
we determine that his fiancée is a -6 on the Manly Scale, with
a -10 being the most Fem of all. Calculating the difference between
the man's rating and the woman's rating—the Gender
Differential—we see that this proposed union is not, in fact, a
Samish-Sex Marriage, which I have defined as "any marriage for
which the Gender Differential is less than or equal to 10 points."

Friends
whom I have identified as being in Samish-Sex Marriages often ask me,
Ken, given that we have scored poorly, what exactly would you have us
do about it?

Well,
one solution I have proposed is divorce—divorce followed by
remarriage to a more suitable partner. "K," for example,
could marry a voluptuous high-voiced N.F.L. cheerleader, who would
more than offset his tight feminine derrière, while his
ex-wife, S, might choose to become involved with a lumberjack with
very large arms, thereby neutralizing her thick calves and faint
mustache.

Another,
and of course preferable, solution would be to
repair
the
existing marriage, converting it from a Samish-Sex Marriage to a
healthy Normal Marriage, by having the feminine man become more
masculine and/or the masculine woman become more feminine.

Often,
when I propose this, my friends become surly. How dare I, they ask.
What business is it of mine? Do I think it is easy to change in such
a profound way?

To
which I say, It is not easy to change, but it is possible.

I
know, because I have done it.

When
young, I had a tendency to speak too quickly, while gesturing too
much with my hands. Also, my opinions were unfirm. I was constantly
contradicting myself in that fast voice, while gesturing like a girl.
Also, I cried often. Things seemed so sad. I had long blond hair, and
liked it. My hair was layered and fell down across my shoulders, and,
I admit it, I would sometimes slow down when passing a shopwindow to
look at it, to look at my hair! I had a strange constant feeling of
being happy to be alive. This feeling of infinite possibility
sometimes caused me to laugh when alone, or even, on occasion, to
literally skip down the street, before pausing in front of a
shopwindow and giving my beautiful hair a cavalier toss.

To
tell the truth, I do not think I would have scored very high on my
Manly Scale, if the Scale had been invented at that time, by me. I
suspect I would have scored so Fem on the test that I would have been
prohibited from marrying my wife, "P," the love of my life.

And
I think, somewhere in my heart, I knew that.

I
knew I was too Fem.

So
what did I do about it? Did I complain? Did I whine? Did I expect
activist judges to step in on my behalf, manipulating the system to
accommodate my peculiarity?

No,
I did not.

What
I did was I changed. I undertook what I like to think of as a classic
American project of self-improvement. I made videos of myself
talking, and studied these, and in time succeeded in training myself
to speak more slowly, while almost never moving my hands. Now, if you
ever meet me, you will observe that I always speak in an extremely
slow and manly and almost painfully deliberate way, with my hands
either driven deep into my pockets or held stock-still at the ends of
my arms, which are bent slightly at the elbows, as if I were ready to
respond to the slightest provocation by punching you in the face. As
for my opinions, they are very firm. I rarely change them. When I
feel like skipping, I absolutely do not skip. As for my long
beautiful hair—well, I am lucky, in that I am rapidly going
bald. Every month, when I recalculate my ranking on the Manly Scale,
I find myself becoming more and more Manly, as my hair gets thinner
and my girth increases, thickening my once lithe, almost girlish
physique, thus insuring the continuing morality and legality of my
marriage to "P."

My
point is simply this: If I was able to effect these tremendous
positive changes in my life, to avoid finding myself in the
moral/legal quagmire of a Samish-Sex Marriage, why can't "K,"
"S," "L," "H," "T," and "O"
do the same?

I
implore any of my readers who find themselves in a Samish-Sex
Marriage: Change. If you are a feminine man, become more manly. If
you are a masculine woman, become more feminine. If you are a woman
and are thick-necked or lumbering, or have ever had the slightest
feeling of attraction to a man who is somewhat pale and fey, deny
these feelings and, in a spirit of self-correction, try to become
more thin-necked and light-footed, while, if you find it helpful,
watching videos of naked masculine men, to sort of retrain yourself
in the proper mode of attraction. If you are a man and, upon seeing a
thick-waisted, athletic young woman walking with a quasi-mannish gait
through your local grocery, you imagine yourself in a passionate
embrace with her, in your car, a car that is parked just outside, and
which is suddenly, in your imagination, full of the smell of her
fresh young breath—well, stop thinking that! Are you a man or
not?

I,
for one, am sick and tired of this creeping national tendency to let
certain types of people take advantage of our national good nature by
marrying individuals who are essentially of their own gender. If this
trend continues, before long our towns and cities will be full of
people like "K," "S," "L," "H,"
"T," and "O" "asserting their rights"
by dating, falling in love with, marrying, and spending the rest of
their lives with whomever they please.

I,
for one, am not about to stand by and let that happen.

Because
then what will we have? A nation ruled by the anarchy of
unconstrained desire. A nation of willful human hearts, each lurching
this way and that and reaching out for whatever it spontaneously
desires, trying desperately to find some comforting temporary shred
of warmth in a mostly cold world, totally unconcerned about the
external form in which that other, long-desired heart is embodied.

That
is not the kind of world in which I wish to live.

I,
for one, intend to become ever more firmly male, enjoying my golden
years, while watching P become ever more female, each of us vigilant
for any hint of ambiguity in the other.