All for One and None for All (Julja)

Dear Julja,

° What a joy to be done with Dumas, the last few hundred pages wore me down something fierce, I couldn't wait for the Musketeers one by one, Napoleon, Monte Cristo, the whole lot to expire.

° Not that Dumas père didn't end the way he had begun, as the most skillful narrator I ever encountered--from word one to word fine, just a neverflagging sweep of engaging action. And the man himself knew the charms of selfdeprecation to a T.

° But he wore me down, so much blood so much guts so much field of honour. So entirely unaware--as if he were some ArbustDynasty Principe--of any means of settling a dispute, unless by bloodshed.

° Reading him was like a protracted bad marriage, a perpetually haemorrhaging pustule of fundamentally unreconciled differences.

§

° I reckon you read about it, or saw it on tv, the big Peace Rally in Overton. I didn't know one thing about it till I turned onto the Trace and beheld walltowall peopleage as far as the eye could see. I pulled over, parked partway in the street (for there was but a single parallel space), and joined the edge of the masses, there must've been thousands. Folks around me were chanting, "Hell no! We won't go!" Just like Viet Nam. They were also chanting, "Satan! Bush! Satan! Bush!" As if--. Bimeby I found myself with the Rainbow Coalition under a streaming banner proclaiming, "Stay Out Them Bushes!"

° Jesseé, said I to myself drawlingly.

° Then the crowd began to flow fitfully and sluggishly, without any visible leadership; we seemed to be headed downtown. The weather, you remember, was unusually cool, and really the walk was a lot of fun. "We Shall Overcome," "Go Down, Moyses," "Strange Fruit"--just one oldtimey anthem after another. From thirdfloor dormitory windows University girls were throwing their panties down, I expect it was a reference to Lysistrata. Victoria's Secret mostly, but a few Hanes.

° About half an hour later we of the Jacksonian Wing became aware that forward progress had stopped, in fact there seemed to be some sort of whirlpooling backwash. (What had happened, we later learned, was that the front of the rally had come to D--------- Street, found the bridge out--and really, don't you reckon the organisers might could've checked that out in advance?--and started milling around like the water beneath a dam. We still pressed forward, singing all the while.

° Of course, when the backward flow became too insistent, there was naturally some trampling, and that accounted for the first of the casualties, we didn't even know about it way in the back of the bus as we were, so to speak. But apparently when the scent of blood--Dumas!--hit the air G. Gordon Liddy's "jackbooted thugs," aka the paterollers, charged on their foamymouthed steeds and all hell just broke loose, they were beating folks upside the head and running them over with their mounts and just generally expressing a militant turn of mind.

° As soon as word reached us to explain the shrieks and screams we were hearing echoing off the limestone depot walls, my group just panicked, helterskelter, devil take the hindmost. I was lucky to get shoved off the cliff into the gulch--I fell onto a liceridden mattress that was the al fresco bedroom for some brownteethed homeless folk--and me and a few others dashed across the tracks and up the other side and took refuge underneath the controversial new Nine Big Brassed Naked Dancers sculpture in the piazzale, where we were safe as safe could be, 'cause the paterollers, unacquainted with Vice, were askeert to behold a giant nekkid--

§

° Well okay, actually there were between 25 and 50 at the rally, depending on whether you counted the overweight ones twice. They stood on two corners there where the Borough catercorners the University. A fiftysomething guy with a long white ponytail was beating a tomtom. Some fortysomething plump females held up a poster of "The Emperor Has No Clothes," and indeed he did not, but he could've either used some or else a personal trainer. The twentysomething boy was handing out leaflets advocating the transmutation of the gunmonies into buttermonies, truly Reagan is dead.

° I chatted with the twentysomething girl, reminisced about "America, Love It or Leave It," watched a couple of immaculately groomed matrons lower their car windows and spit out most unseemly epithets, then toddled away, still right squishy from Jean Petit's bloody mary, to the movie. The Saddest Music in the World.

° When I returned to daylight, there wasn't a sign that there'd ever been a rally, not even a littered leaflet.

§§§§§

° In the good old days, when War threatened, nice boys had "hunting accidents," a carefully placed shot through the foot, no permanent deformity, and no careerending execution by the Viet Cong or by Friendly Fire. (In those same good old days, when nice girls grew suddenly plump about the middle, they went up North for a month's vacation, and came back all thin and rested and smallbreasted.)

° In the bad old days, when War threatened, nice Roman boys used to have a thumb surgically removed--all right, they just chopped it off--to avoid conscription without in any significant way interfering with a life of leisured debauchery.

° Peace had some value, gangrene can be smelly.

° But in these best of days, the cost of War ($151,000,000,000) is not one dime more than the cost of Peace ($151,000,000,000perannum, did you get through all 54 pages of the ips wishlist?), while the aesthetic cost of War in terms of stigmatised feet and graspless hands has actually gone down to nothing, thanks to the sleightofhand of a volunteer Army.

° No wonder the Peace Movement is dead as dead can be.

° Peace just doesn't pay.

° Placidly, Giac.