The Khaki Man's Burden

All you Masons out there, take heed! This Bud’s for you.

           

Outside – “Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!”

Inside – “Brother”, an’ it doesn’t do no ‘arm,

We met upon the Level an’ we parted on the Square,

An’ I was Junior Deacon in my Mother-Lodge out there!

So wrote the young Rudyard Kipling, pictured to the left.

I like to think that some good can come out of any disaster. That was certainly true for one Kipling-esque film. Anyone remember a cinematic bomb the size of Nagasaki called Heaven’s Gate? I won’t go there in detail. If you want the details, treat yourself to a copy of a spiffing book by the Medved brothers called Hollywood Hall of Shame and read the jaw-dropping details of the fiasco. But I was living in L.A. at the time, going to film school. I remember the t-shirts that started popping up that said, “Relax – you could be selling Heaven’s Gate.”

What’s relevant here is that the film was such a piece of crap, it left a couple thousand theatre owners across the nation literally holding their genitals in their hands, with nothing on the screen after it was pulled from release by United Artists following its disastrous premiere. I mean, film critics, grown men and women, were throwing food and making barfing noises. I’m talking disastrous premiere.

As fate would have it, a little indie film from Australia was making quite a splash then. It was called Breaker Morant. It deserved the splash it made. Suddenly those empty screens were showing a film worth seeing about a folk hero to the Australian people. And in the 1980’s, the era of Miles O’Keefe, a good film was newsworthy. 

It was a true story, based on the autobiography of one of the only survivors, Lieutenant George Witton, called appropriately enough Scapegoats of the Empire. For a long time after the movie came out, fans clamored for this book, which was expensive and difficult to lay hands on, though now I’m happy to say it’s more available; you can even get a Kindle copy for a lousy four bucks. It’s a heart-breaking film, a soul-searing examination of the ethics of war, and what constitutes a murder in that context. Do not make the assumption that it is either over your head or boring. It is neither. You’ll be having flashback memories from it for days.

It was a play before it was a film, and in all its incarnations it tapped into a deep vein of resentment of British rule in Australia. Aussies were rough riders when you needed them, and savages when you’d done with them. My father fought his way across the Pacific in World War II, in every hell-hole imaginable, and though he rarely spoke of the war, he often spoke of the huge contingent of Aussies with which he served. He loved them, and always dreamed of going to Australia. He spoke often of their down-to-earth goodness, their wit and their gallantry, but most of all of their complete contempt for the authority of their British officers, a thing the Amerians found shocking. Dad said the Americans were far more likely to obey one of their orders. Strange they never had a revolution, as we did.

The film also made the compelling British actor Edward Woodward a major star, as he deserved to be. He played the character of Harry “Breaker” Morant, soldier, horse-breaker, poet, Renaissance man. His poetry is read here and there throughout the film. It was at the time just becoming known, not only in Australia, but faraway Britain, as well. It simply reeks of Kipling, being of the same period, for the period in question was 1901, the war in question being the Boer War, two separate revolts of Dutch farmers in South Africa against British rule that occurred between 1880 and 1902. Another one of those “Just what in bloody hell are we doing here anyway?” wars so common in the last two centuries. It will make you turn to your Kipling again, and not just for his most beloved and remembered poem, If, still wonderful, still rich with beauty and truth. Over the course of the last century, when manhood was something expected of a man, little leather-bound copies of If were often tossed into Christmas boxes and birthday cards by parents and grandparents anxious for their boys to grow up with courage and an ethical framework for life. This is not to say that American men aren’t the greatest guys in the world, but the fact is, you don’t see it much nowadays.

But the other night, by chance, I turned to my Kipling for another reason. You see, Christopher and I happen to live in the Library of Congress. I have extrapolated the weight mathematically from our last move and concluded we are sitting on about 6.5 tons of books, on 27 bookcases. Christopher roused himself to go out of the house once during his last round of chemo. It was when he found out that the Borders up the street, where we had practically lived, was closing, and selling off their bookcases. Eyes alight with an Oxycontin glow, he bought an entire wall of them for a pittance, with ladder, and sign above that says “Literature,” then he hired the best carpenter in Indiana, Mike Kelly, to install them on either side of our fireplace. I had my misgivings, but God, it’s so cool. It comforts me for the loss. And for the first time in my adult life, I have more than enough bookcases for the books I own, a startling state of affairs.

And so, using my own Dewey Decimal System, I’ve been slowly rearranging our books by topic, room to room. Yesterday, unable to bear any more news of the Middle East, I did my poetry section, and came across my Kipling, sadly falling to pieces. Instead of finding a rubber band, I ordered a new copy, something I do rarely now, since we’re watching every penny in the Age of Obama. As I picked it up to put the broken spine back together, my eye fell on a poem that no one, and I mean no one, is allowed to read anymore. It’s called The White Man’s Burden. Need I say more? 

Actually, yes I do. Was Kipling a racist? No, he was not.

In fact, being what he called Anglo-Indian, just as Swift called himself Anglo-Irish, Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent most of his life in India, was a huge admirer of their culture, and wrote many of his best stories about it, including The Jungle Book. But try convincing a knee-jerk reactionary teacher of our arid, oppressive PC age that when he said “white man’s burden,” he was speaking metaphorically. Of course he lived in a world of general ofay dominance; what idiot would argue otherwise? But he was talking about The West.

He no more meant white skin than he meant Viking when he wrote this line from another famous, and still painfully relevant political poem: “We’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.” Another poem Mr. Obama and the Congress might take a peek at.  

For many a Freemason, Kipling is the Fountainhead, the artist who wrote The Man Who Would be King, and this is enough. My Christopher has fallen a bit behind the typical Mason, having only screened the epic John Huston film version with Sean Connery and Michael Caine 47 times. But he’ll catch up. 

However, if nothing else proves Kipling’s high ideals on race, it was his Masonry. His poem The Mother Lodge, quoted above, is a love letter to the racial, religious and class freedom of Freemasonry. The whole point of the lines is that what one is outside the Lodge is one thing, but inside he’s simply Brother. Of course, PC’ers would have to dig for this info, and in fairness the poem is tough slogging in places, riddled with that individual British slang sometimes incomprehensible even to the British, for it was the slang of those who’d served in India, and it came thick, fast and constant.

But the theme of the poem, even without a copy in your hand of the Oxford English Dictionary, (Praised Be Its Name) is easily understood. It begins as he walks through the town, greeting brothers of every race and religion, “Bola Nath, Accountant, An’ Saul the Aden Jew, An’ din Mohammed, draughtsman, of the Survey Office, too.” He doesn’t miss Amir Singh the Sikh or Castro the Roman Catholic, either. Meanwhile he reminisces poignantly, “I wish that I might see them, My Brethren black and brown, With the trichies smellin’ pleasant an the hog-darn passin’ down.” You see what I mean about the slang. “Trichies” were cigars, and though “hog” was slang for a shilling, in this case “hog-darn” means the lighter. The dropped h’s don’t help.

But you don’t need a degree in linguistics to understand this part:

We ‘adn’t good regalia,

An’ our Lodge was old an’ bare,

But we knew the Ancient Landmarks,

An’ we kep’ ‘em to a hair;

An’ lookin’ on it backwards

It often strikes me thus,

There ain’t such things as infidels,

Exep’, per’aps, it’s us.

Obviously a close-minded racist bastard. Another dead white guy with his foot on my neck!

Sorry. I had a Sandra Fluke moment there.

What most people don’t know is that the poem White Man’s Burden was addressed, not to his fellow Englishmen, but to America, one more argument against its being racist, since he was fully aware of our melting-pot status. In fact he married an American, and lived in Vermont for a few years. The poem was a warning over our interference in the affairs of the Phillipines. It was a flashing neon sign cautioning us not to become the world’s policeman, the saps of the globe, for it would gain us nought but hatred.

Sitting on my step stool, I read it once more, for the first time in decades. And whether you credit this or not, I began to cry. I saw our dead soldiers in Afghanistan, murdered by the very people they hoped to aid. Anyone remember the sorry joke from the first Gulf War? How do you get a thousand Republican Guards in the back of a van? Throw in a peanut butter sandwich! Once the initial push was over, our troops spent more time feeding and giving medical aid to the Iraqis than they did killing them. Not to mention the roads, schools and mosques we’ve built in Afghanistan, while our own roads and highway bridges crumble. Or the hundreds of billions that Bush the Plentiful poured on Africa to fight AIDS, and later malaria and TB, saving untold millions of lives. 

I saw the Towers falling. I saw the Arabs in Gaza, on whom we’ve dumped billions, dancing in the streets afterwards, handing out candy. I saw the sad remains of the Pentagon, across the street from my hotel when I attended that September’s Bouchercon convention with three hundred other idiotic writers, flying two days after the ban was lifted. Picture Reagan airport absolutely empty. I saw the images of Egyptian thugs carrying anti-American signs, in English (does that strike anyone else out there?) screaming their vile hatred, burning our flag with the matches we paid for. And along with the tears, I shook with rage. It was all so true, and so damned inescapable. It will doubtless remain true, until the American Age passes. By then I’m sure their civil war will be over, and we can let Sudan pick up the ball.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

And hundred times made plain,

To seek another’s profit,

And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

The savage wars of peace –

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

No tawdry rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper –

The tale of common things.

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go make them with your living,

And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard –

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly) toward the light:

‘Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?’

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

Ye dare not stoop to less –

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness;

By all ye cry or whisper,

By all ye leave or do,

The silent, sullen peoples

Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

Have done with childish days –

The lightly proffered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgement of your peers!

But we brought democracy to Iraq. Didn’t we? 

The Ugly American

I know this blog is already getting longer than the itemized national debt, but I simply can’t resist delivering up these sparkling and pithy tableau vivant from the past. I could keep you up all night just with funny stories about Mussolini.

Here’s a good one: Did you know that the “Kosher mob” gangster and founder of that ultimate American icon, Las Vegas, Bugsy Siegel, almost blew Muss’ brains out one night at the dinner table? Here’s the 411.

There once was a lady (well, sort of a lady) who was quite a character; the Countess Carla Dentice di Frasso, known as Countess Dorothy di Frasso, born Dorothy Caldwell Taylor in Watertown, New York. Like all American poor little rich girls, she just had to have a title, and Daddy’s money bought her a much older Italian gentleman, Count Dentice di Frasso. Together they poured her money into a run-down but gorgeous villa north of Rome called the Villa Madama. She had affairs with the best and brightest, devoured both Hollywood and Gary Cooper, and was a regular in what was once known as “cafe society.” (That's a photo of her and the Coop.)

But after Coop, the biggest love of her life was Bugsy Siegel, gangster, professional killer, the blue-eyed Lothario who had all the starlets swooning when his New York bosses sent him to Hollywood. Of course, he had a nice Jewish wife he kept tucked away in New Jersey with his two daughters, but, like the Countess, he didn’t let it cramp his style. Hearing that Chicago was going to muscle in on the Hollywood rackets, one more time, (a passel of them had just been thrown in the clink for doing same to the projectionist’s union) the mobsters in New York sent Siegel out to beat them to the punch. He’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen with actor George Raft, who was mucho big at the time; Raft got him into the homes, and beds, of some of L.A.’s finest. Bugsy went totally Hollywood. In fact, he became so vain he was constantly applying cosmetics to his skin and his, he feared, thinning hair. Which didn’t, of course, mean that he ever went anywhere unarmed.

That’s because he was also a Grade A sociopath, one of the founders of Murder, Incorporated.


But la Countess thought she could make a gentlemen of Bugs. Unfortunately, traveling abroad (so to speak) and dating a countess hadn’t really broadened him much. In fact, he knew about as much about international relations as Warren Christopher. And so, he wasn’t really aware of the fact that the Axis powers, prodded by Germany, had declared war on “World Jewry.” The Japs, of course, had never even seen a Jew. The story is not apocryphal that, before the signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, after touring the new highways, weapons factories and buzzing nationalized industries that had bound the nation together once more in the health and joy of their shared Aryan heritage, commented, “Yes, it’s a wonderful system. But we don’t have any Jews.”

Juden Raus! The hot board game for Nazi kids in 1936. Really.

All of this is a little sad in and of itself, since Mussolini didn’t really go along for the ride on this one. In fact, most people don’t know that, in the beginning, it was Hitler who idolized Mussolini rather than the reverse, while as time passed, of course, Italy fell under Germany’s heavy-handed shadow. Of course Mussolini was a bully; his war of conquest in Ethiopia, airplanes and machine guns against spears, illustrated that full well. But despite his weaker military, Il Duce nevertheless had the balls, at first, to inform the world’s most murderous former house painter that Italy’s Jews were still Italians, and that he had no intention of turning them over to Herr Himmler. In his 18 previous years of iron rule, he’d never shown a whiff of anti-Semitism, and in fact, he made fun of Hitler’s Aryan obsession constantly. Of course, later, after relentless pressure from Berlin, he passed a pile of crap called the Manifesto of Race, stripping Italian Jews of their citizenship and barring them from government jobs. Italians were for the most part appalled. He often said later that he regretted having done it, and that race was a matter of “the heart,” rather than biology. Anti-Semitism as a national policy was never enforced much beyond this, the truth of which can be seen in the fact that there is no Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen in Tuscany. Would that Poland or the Ukraine could say the same.

Nevertheless, he was still Hitler’s closest ally and personal friend, and the countess was swelling up with “society circuit” pride that he was coming to the villa for dinner. Unfortunately, their other dinner guest that evening was that perennial Nazi favorite, Joseph Goebbels, come to soak up a little sun. So, as they were dressing for dinner, when the countess casually mentioned this little quirk of the Axis, Bugsy got very, very pissy. Already feeling she’d put her foot in her mouth, she realized she was going to get a boot up the arse if she didn’t explain it all to him.

At which point, true to his nickname, (totally bug nuts) Bugsy pulled out his favorite pocket .38 Special, waving it in the air, proclaiming that he was going to go downstairs and 'blow that goddamn Wop greaser’s brains out,' then take out the Kraut for good measure. Needless to say, this would have created something of a faux pas at the countess’ table. It took her a lot of diplomacy, and perhaps some quick intercourse, (Bugs was, as the French say, toujours prêt) to calm him down.

No question about it. Jew baiting makes for strange bedfellows.

Pauline Bonaparte & the Cult of Priapus

Or perhaps we should say le culte de priapisme, for I'm speaking of the remarkable and insatiable Pauline Bonaparte (1780 -1825), known today mostly for being Napoleon's sister, born, like him, to relative poverty as part of the very, very petty Corsican nobility. There were thirteen children in all, so it's probable that her formidable mother, Letizia, did a little penis worshipping herself. The family was only French by about a decade and a half, after France took Corsica as a colonial possession in 1768. But with Napoleon's meteoric rise, from victorious general to First Consul to emperor, Pauline followed, reveling in the life of luxury and privilege he showered on his favorite sister.

Unfortunately, she reveled in something else even more, this being her astonishing sexual appetite. She loved her brother, despite the fact that he bitched at her constantly and chose both her husbands; she hated the second one, a powerful Italian noble named the duc d'Borghese. She couldn't wait to get away from him and return to Paris. But it was while she lived with the duke in Rome, in 1804, that the great artist Canova did the sculpture above, called Venus Victrix, or Venus Victorious. A naked Pauline did the posing, which gave her stuffy brother fits.

Of course, the Lefevre painting to the left shows that she usually wasn't painted as a little shepherd girl, a la Marie Antoinette. Her face and form were legendary, and she kept her perfect complexion, all over, with a daily bath in 20 litres of milk mixed with warm water. She was always carried to the tub by one of her male servants; she had a real thing for being carried. Once, as a guest of her late husband's brother, she arrived, hauling her baggage and bathtub, and blithely requested her regular bath. He said he could provide the milk, but not the shower she liked afterwards. So she simply shrugged and had a hole knocked through the ceiling so the servants could pour the water over her. He said the place stank of rainwater and sour milk for weeks till he fixed it. But her regimen must have worked, since the men high and low lined up to be her lover. She rarely turned one away.

But they rarely lasted long. Pauline not only had an insatiable appetite, she also had an obsession with size over skill. Her physician, Dr. Peyre, was already telling her that her constant pelvic pain was due to sexual overindulgence. Unfortunately, he prescribed that she take the waters at a spa in Plombieres, and it was there, when she was supposed to be getting better, that she met Louis Phillippe, the Count de Forbin, who was apparently hung like an ox. She nailed him at once, took him home with her, made him her chamberlain, and was in constant need of his attention. Constant.

At last her pain became unbearable, and Peyre called in a famed gynacolagist and imperial physician, Dr. Halle. His diagnosis was pointed. The princess was suffering from what he called furor uterinus, an over-abused uterus and vaginal canal, which was a nice way of saying nymphomania. Apparently she was in agony, with pelvic pain, headaches and uterine spasms. In his reports to Dr. Peyre, Halle stated bluntly that she must be "saved" by being kept from the cause of the inflammation, a cause he knew full well but refused, for propriety's sake, to name.

Pauline's nickname, especially in England, was "Messalina", a rather cruel reference to the debauched and power-hungry wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Well, maybe it was better than simply la puta, French for "the whore," although this appellation was generally reserved by the Bonaparte women for the Empress Josephine. Worse, especially in British political cartoons, she was graphically accused of having slept with her own brother, the emperor. If they can be believed in the back-stabbing atmosphere of the court, several people claimed that Josephine had told them of having caught them in the act, and in fact, Pauline never denied it.

Pauline would die a sad death at 45 of stomach cancer. But, despite her frivolity and grotesque spending habits, she was the only one of Napoleon's family who followed him into exile, even though he'd showered money and kingdoms on them all. And she had a sense of humor about her own debauched image. It often took dinner guests some time to realize that the gold cups they were drinking from, that looked so much like reproductions of ancient Roman cups, were, in fact, modeled on Pauline's breast. A glance at the cup compared to the statue above is all that's needed to prove this more than an historical myth.

Pauline, you really rocked!

A Marriage Proposal In Secret Code

This curious love letter is in the Library of Congress, and is written in a secret lover's code, undoubtedly to conceal its true meaning from the Lady's father. Read it through once, then go back and read every other line. (Click the image to make it a little clearer.)

Facts and Figures

The word “baroque” gets tossed around a lot, describing everything from a necklace to a symphony to a political speech, and so, often, its real meaning gets lost in the shuffle. If, indeed, it has one. Its label as an historical period in art and architecture isn’t so much in question; we’re talking roughly, very roughly, 1600 to the mid-and-late 1700's. In that sense, when you study it awhile, Baroque style becomes discernable with a modicum of confidence, though I wouldn’t say it too confidently when you’re touring the Louvre. You could choke your little self on a Rococo and look the fool, a thing Americans in Paris seem to fear more than death itself.

But when attempting to discern the actual definition, one is assaulted by a variety of complex and meaningless phrases that sound quite academic, but are in fact complete bullshit. Some refer to the Baroque obsession with rational philosophy and geometric grids, while others cite its adherence to emotionalism, metaphysical high drama and an adoration of the forces and free forms of nature, two ideas that would seem to cross one another out. God knows, anything that even smacks of the “science” of pure philosophy is worthy of contempt. Never have so many said so much to express so little. The word “baroque,” though not as bad as “phenomenological Neo-Hegelianism,” brings out this kind of nomenclature.

A good enough example - 17th and 18th century French gardens are often called Baroque style, and even our good friend Wikipedia, supposedly here to help us, lucidly explains that French Baroque gardening is inspired by both the Italian Renaissance and the works of the philosopher Descartes, “epitomizing monarch and man dominating and manipulating nature to show his authority, wealth and power . . .,” since “all movement is a straight line therefore space is a universal grid of mathematical coordinates and everything can be located on its infinitely extendable planes,” based upon the principles of Cartesian mathematics.

It really does make a person long for a couple of red geraniums in a plastic pot.

Rembrandt was one of the great Baroque painters, perhaps the father of the style, and he seemed to like his ladies chunky. In fact, he loved naturalism in his work, and could be downright ruthless about every physical imperfection; his self-portraits are anything but flattering, and though many of his commissioned portraits seem a bit kinder, others do not. In a few I’ve seen, if I’d paid the man to paint my portrait and then had him take such glee in highlighting every bag and sag, I’d have demanded my gilders back. But the simple fact that several of his most idealized works of great beauties of the past, from Bathsheba to Danaë, were modeled on his wife and, after her death, his live-in mistress, both of whom were quite hefty and clearly never refused a second helping of spekdikken, clearly shows that, for him at least, it only meant there was more of her to love. In fact, Rembrandt's Baroque "naturalism" gets taken to some really weird extremes. In the images below, he's sketched himself having a flurry with his wife, the beauteous Saskia, (how'd he hold the pencil?) in a sort of 17th century-version of dirty home videos, while in another fit of deviance the little perve drew her peeing in the back yard. How could you do that to your own wife? There is one artist, however, who unarguably epitomizes the Baroque style - the earthy Flemish painter Peter Paul (and Mary) Rubens. And so was born, for women everywhere, the adjectival phrase “Rubenesque” figure, a politically-correct synonym for those with the dimply thighs, turgid breasts and meaty backsides like carnival bunting that Rubens liked best. Of course, for feminists, Wiccans, sci-fi conventioneers and those who love fudge brownies, this has also come to imply that two centuries ago, men had far better taste in their ladies faire. And that, by extension, men these days have tried to box women into an idealized size and shape that is unattainable as well as unattractive. Of course, I love it in principle, but in reality I’m not sure it passes the historical smell test. A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, whether stoutish or petite. There’s no question that slim wasn’t really in until the late 18th and very early 19th centuries, when idealized paintings of the great beauties of the day, from Emma Hamilton to Madame Tallien, dressed in their gauzy white empire gowns, glorified their far more elegant curves. They’re women who would knock any man’s eyes out walking along a beach in Cancun. Nevertheless, there are enough paintings of the Baroque period of lovely, curvaceous but still fairly slim ladies to put rout the notion that everybody wanted femme fatales with butt cheeks like two sofa cushions. Despite the erotica of the period often going into panting detail on men sinking their fingers into well-upholstered butts and buets, I think it’s a wishful misreading of the era as a whole for well-padded American ladies to suppose that the Baroque figure is something that had universal appeal. In other words, then as now, there is such a thing as chubby chasers. There were just probably a lot more of them. Exhibit A for the defense: The following was written in the late Baroque period in England by one Sydney Smith, who was a churchman and the canon of London’s treasure, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Professional churchmen were a lot different then. It was more a career choice than a divine revelation. Nevertheless, he also had a reputation as a rather liberal gentleman, who expected both the government and the people to occasionally live up to the principles of Christianity. Though largely forgotten now, he was considered to be the most savage wit of his day. His favorite targets were pomposity and stupidity, which means he shares a proud heritage with everyone from Mencken to Benchley to P.J. O’Rourke. But occasionally his gunsight strayed. Despite being a very well-upholstered specimen himself, he wrote the following on discovering that a friend of his was about to marry a widow twice his age, probably for the cash. One interesting historical side note on the last line - the term “reading someone the riot act” has a very real historical meaning. As a sop to the feelings of liberals, (called Whigs in those days) Britain passed a law in the 18th century that allowed free assembly, so long as everyone stayed calm. If they didn’t, the police were only allowed to bust heads and haul arses after they had read the “Riot Act,” officially announcing their intentions and giving the crowd a chance to just sober up and go home on its own. It rarely worked. In his missive Smith uses it to distinct humorous advantage. “Going to marry her! Going to marry her! Impossible! You mean, a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but of trigamy; the neighborhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her! It is monstrous. You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning walks around her, always providing there were frequent resting places, and you are in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything with her but marry her.” De-formalize some of the language, and it could have been some politically incorrect dialog on Sienfeld. It does, however, lead one to the inevitable conclusion that, in any time or place, this “Rubenesque” thing can get carried too far. It is undeniable that, in ages past, skinny often meant unhealthy, perhaps tubercular and probably syphilitic. Only people with some flesh on them had a chance to fight off the ravages of the age like cholera and typhus. And, then as now, the “rosy glow of health” translated in the minds of many to “horny.” But gals, let’s face it; it doesn’t help an already avoirdupois situation to glance at your spreading backside in the mirror and shrug, “Well, in the old days the guys would have loved it.” There is, of course, another side to this, another line of common sense in the sand. I should like to see a new movement in this country for women to stop pretending that a size 2 is something to shoot for; it’s not even something you could shoot at. The average female in America is a size 14, a perfectly respectable size, perhaps a little hippish, depending on the frame of the woman wearing it. In the fifties and sixties, 12 was good, but the best was embodied by the phrase “a perfect 10,” which was considered quite svelte. Sizes haven’t changed - a trip to any vintage clothing store will prove that. But young women nowadays would never know this, since between the modeling-reality show piffle and ads for mega-corporations built on dieting they’ve been told a 2 or a 4 amounts to success. In the aforementioned ads, these five-foot-six women who’ve gotten down to 145 pounds are just plain lying about their new size - they couldn’t get a size 2 over their thigh, shapely as it now is. Truth to tell, when I’m assaulted by this crap, I’d love nothing better than to see some wisp of the “fat acceptance movement” gain a little footing, so that women can have a more realistic notion of what estrogen has done to them, and learn to love, or at least accept the consequences. But anyone who thinks the ideal will ever be someone who takes up two if not three airline seats is living in a baroque daze.