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| The Cynic |
The Cynic at the
Diner
The Country Mouse looked his friend over carefully. He hadn’t so much as spoken word to him in nearly a half century. The Cynic was much the same.
The timeless features of humans – the sound of the voice,
the color of an eye, the general bone structure of the face, a smile in motion
– remain steadfastly constant. And, of course, though The Cynic was still tall,
he had put on some pounds and his muscles were in retreat. He still had a full
head of hair, tinged with white. Genetics are decisive, thought the Country
Mouse.
“Do you remember…” The Cynic a week earlier had begun their phone call.
For the Country Mouse, this was an incantation that had
always opened the mercifully locked doors of memory that connected him immediately with a specific painful or joyous moment.
Before The Cynic had finished the sentence, a scene flashed
like lightening through the Country Mouse’s mind. He saw them both traveling in
an old row boat ladened with cement bags towards a small island a half mile off
the mainland.
The two were to build a wall around the island, owned by a dentist who would, at some distant point in the future, build his retirement house there. Walls make good neighbors, but lakes, particularly when one is situated on an island surrounded by water, make better ones.
That was why
Orwell, said The Cynic, retreated to the remote Scottish Island of Jura to stretch
his mind around Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was why the monks of the
dessert took to the dessert, to better commune with the molten God burning in their
souls. And it was why Antisthenes, thought to be the father of Greek Cynicism,
established his school in a famous gymnasium built to service the nothoi, the bastard children of Athens.
The Cynic, nearly always a solitary, had asked the Country
Mouse to help him build the wall, a self terminating endeavor, thought The
Cynic, because the unpredictable effects on water disturbed by wind, rain and
the pull of moon will overturn even the best laid plans of mice and men. But
the pay was a bonus for the two student roommates who needed pocket money from
time to time.
It was summer; the lake was blue ice, its quiet surface
hiding the clamor and rough motion below the surface. What if the old boat
sank? Would any attempt be made to save the cement? Would one, or both the
project managers, drown, pushed under the quiet surface of the lake by a weight
of weakness and ungovernable laughter?
“Who could forget that wall?” the Country Mouse had replied, before making arrangements to meet at a local diner.
Not he, not ever. The job amused The Cynic. His unappeasable
κυνικός burst forth not in frowns but in what he called therapeutic laughter.
Laughter, he had once told the Country Mouse are tears turned, like socks,
inside out.
“Comedy,” he said, “is the tragedy that happens to your
worst enemy.”
And now here was his old friend in the flesh. There was no
“catching up” between these two. Heart spoke to heart. Time was foreshortened,
and the two picked up pretty much where they had left off. Friendship, the
Country Mouse thought, is rooted in requited expectation.
The Cynic, like the Country Mouse, was no stranger to
politics. Both had written about Connecticut’s political absurdities for more
than 30 years, and each had followed the other’s occasional writings, though
neither had felt the need to reestablish contact, perhaps from fear that
re-contact would abort a cherished friendship. Why spoil the past by
resurrecting it, dripping with mold and moss, from its comfortable grave?
The Cynic had proposed a project that would allow both of
them to create a semi-perishable narrative that might be of interest to people
not too far gone in partisanship, as is the case, The Cynic pointed out, “with nearly
90 percent of the state’s highly compromised media. Searching for dispassionate
reportage from this group was like searching in a whore house for glints of
modesty and shards of morality, not,” he hastened to add, “that immorality was
a bar to honest truth seeking.”
“Your figure might be low,” the Country Mouse replied,
though he instantly had accepted the proposal.
Both had for the past three decades been “writing on water,”
The Cynic’s formulation, for a slumberous audience that could not, or
perversely would not, recall what had happened yesterday. Then too, the windy horror
stirring on Connecticut’s horizon hardly ruffled these bouts of self-enforced
somnolence. Working in the moment had unfitted them for unabashed journalism.
So, why not disturb some restless ghosts?
“We should,” said The Cynic, bestowing a smile upon his
omelet, “draw up an enemies' list.”
“A friend’s list,” said the Country Mouse, “would be shorter
and more manageable. I can think of two reliables.”
“None for me,” said The Cynic.
Now, whenever The Cynic’s temperament was aroused, his
voice rose as well, and he pronounced every syllable of every word as a
Shakespearian actor might. Naturally, this captured the attention of nearby
diners who began leaning into the conversation.
Responding to the Country Mouse’s remark that beaten people
in Connecticut seemed emotionally exhausted by measures that had been taken to shut down the state,
The Cynic launched the following philippic:
“At some point, someone – and if not the media, then who? –
must scream loudly enough to pierce waxen ears -- “THE EMPEROR IS NAKED!”
This produced a stir at a nearby table.
“Too few in the state’s media do it,” The Cynic continued. “Politics
is the only profession on earth that professes nonsense without media reproval.
We’ve just recovered from a Coronavirus “pandemic.” The entire state was shut
down – and NOT BY THE PANDEMIC – for a year.
“Just take one instance, and try to remember that the
state’s political hegemon, the Democrat
Party, has controlled politics, without the least interference from
Republicans, in all three of the state’s larger cities for nearly half a
century, plenty of time to set things right.
“Whatever is wrong with Connecticut’s cities, the solution
to urban social disintegration and lawlessness cannot be a bill to provide previously
illegal pot in every urban pot.”
This produced some suppressed laughter from a couple sitting in a
nearby booth.”
“Urban problems cannot be solved,” the Cynic continued in a
lower voice, “or even addressed, by a state that asserts the elimination of
zoning restrictions in suburbs will magically solve problems in cities related
to causes untouched by the proposed solution.”
This produced slight applause and appreciative nods and
smiles from a different booth.
Quieter still, The Cynic continued, “Removing partial
immunity from prosecution within urban police departments will not reduce
criminal activity in the state’s cities. Still less will early release from
prison and the decriminalization of crimes reduce criminal activity in cities,
though it may improve the kinds of statistics politicians cite in the heat of a
campaign. The elimination of partial immunity celebrated by Connecticut’s
progressive Democrats will reduce the number of police in urban police
departments. In fact, a little noticed migration of police officers from urban
to suburban departments has already begun. And it cannot be good sense to
reduce police presence at a time when crime in urban areas is “MOVING FORWARD,”
a favorite expression of blind progressive mice, at warp speed. Any politician
unwilling to attack the rot at the root of a problem cannot be said to care for
the plant.”
A lady to the left of the two reunited friends waved her
fork in their direction. All the Coronavirus protective masks in the diner had
been discarded. For the first time in a year, both the Country Mouse and The
Cynic, who regarded the masks as emblems of subservience to autocratic
governors, could once again read faces. And this one was smiling, the Country
Mouse thought, sardonically.
“Excuse me,” she said, “who ARE you?”
“He’s The Cynic,” answered the Country Mouse.
END
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