Norman Rush - Mortals

He had to get going. He would like to know what, exactly, she was doing, as he began. He held his breath to help him listen in her direction, for any clues. He thought she was on the phone. He wasn’t sure.

Item one before him was a segment of Rex’s tips for long-absent returning natives, a joke genre created specifically for Iris’s benefit that of course relied on the canard that Iris was hearing nothing about movements and events in American cultural life from her husband, not to mention that she was herself an assiduous reader of everything from the International Herald Tribune to The New Yorker . Rex obviously wanted him to be a what, a stumbling block, an incubator of ignorance.

Here was his brother:

I want you not to be amazed by a startling development taking place within the African-American, formerly Afro-American or black, community. What we have is a significant element in the community, a vanguard element, executing something called the Islamic Turn, and dragging a good part of the masses along in that direction. It is serious. You will be greeted from time to time in Arabic. These leaders have brilliantly found a way to align the justified complaints of their people with the interests and image of the main certified declared enemy of the United States of America, the radical Muslim powers. This of course is an eerie replay of the situation in the thirties, forties, and fifties when the vanguard of that time, notably Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, cleverly sought to align their followers with the then main enemy, the USSR and its cat’s paw the Communist Party of the United States. So how excellent is it for black/white relations to have leading African American intellectuals sucking the hem of the main new enemy, now that the former main foe has collapsed in a heap, switching their adulation to the political descendants of the champion slave-trading powers of all time? Yes, the Muslim slave trade went on for thirteen centuries versus two for us, involved a higher overall total of slaves taken, by about a million (thirteen against our twelve), and, nota bene please, featured the castration of black male slaves. Nota bene that there IS NO BLACK DIASPORA IN THE MUSLIM COUNTRIES for precisely that reason. Also nota bene that the only places in the world where chattel slavery persists like a fossil are, guess what, Muslim countries, Mauritania and Sudan. O my coevals! (You can ask my brother what this comes from.) O tempora, O morons! Oh and by the way, with this brilliant feat of identification (Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, is a pal and associate of Muammar el-Qadaffi) these guys are giving the back of their hands to their former best and most effective friends and costrugglers the Jews, friends with power and influence and money and conscience. In addition, not only does the Islamic Turn cut the black community off from bien pensant Jews and their resources, but down the line it also threatens relations with the bedrock of African American community strength, the bedrock black Christian churches, in the following way — it is stone doctrine in Islam that Christ was a fake, a kind of hologram, on the cross. You can read it in the Koran in so many words, Christ was a phantom, of sorts. Of course this has yet to strike the consciousness of the black church, but it will, as the pastors rouse themselves to figure out why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, leaving them in its dust. Oh by the way, above I should have added that the Nation of Islam has gone specifically out of its way to defame the Jews as being leading slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries, a calumny, of course. And also of course, what they forget is that the Islamic Arabs of Palestine in the thirties and forties were fans of and collaborators with the then main enemy, the Nazis, through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Also, just as they line up next to the new main enemy, these guys are shouting out the main demand they have agreed on, reparations for slavery they would like the present white person majority to vote to give them, good luck, given their public relations status. Oh and naturally nothing is going to be asked from their pals the Muslims, who are still in the slave trade business in Mauritania and Sudan. O everybody! But such is this mod’n contemporary world of today in which we live in, to echo Paul McCartney, my dear.

Ray thought, Rex sees himself as Mencken, the gay Mencken, and also as the gay Tocqueville, apparently … and what he doesn’t realize is that what he’s doing is exactly the same thing the trend analysts that Marion made fun of think they’re doing … This is thin stuff: I could do it.

This was Iris’s next assignment:

You need to appreciate certain important deformations that are becoming prominent in Americanese. What is manifesting in our language is a strange hatred of consonants, especially the letters t and n. M is shouldering n aside, but m should not rest. It too is doomed. I realized I had to lay this out for you before your arrival when, the other day, I heard a word used that completely eluded me but that was perfectly intelligible to the people it was being addressed to. The word was plampaernheut. What was being said was, of course, Planned Parenthood.

Anyway, here’s a compilation that will show you what’s happening, pretty much—

imput

turmpike

temminutes (ten minutes)

avertising

love one (loved one)

produck

aministration

aventure

owrage, owlook (outrage, outlook, the t

swallowed)

he braw me home (he brought me home)

gramparens

exackly

carboar (cardboard)

Febuary

tempature

goverment (the t survives in this one so far)

ornjuice

estatic

Ray detected a carelessness or coarsening of his brother’s handwriting in this specimen.

The next selection seemed to be about the same vintage as the one before it, at least in terms of the peculiarities in Rex’s handwriting. But there was something else about it worth noting. It seemed oddly or badly organized, for Rex.

You could call these some useful current tropes you are sure to run into. I am providing them to you partly for desensitization purposes, so that you won’t be disoriented when you hear them used so repeatedly as you will, and partly for you to use, yourself, should you wish to pass for an uptodate denizen anytime you like.

Herewith the candidate tropes and prefab expressions social interactions are increasingly made up of.

— The premier thing to say if you should injure someone whilst you are regrettably in a rage is Let the healing begin .

— Say of any scene of natural disaster that it is just like a movie and if people have been hurt just like a war movie .

— If there is a huge government scandal but you happen to be favorably disposed toward the party in power and responsible for the mess, say There’s enough blame to go around for everyone .

— Remember that however miserably you have wasted or screwed up your life, you should say I’m a survivor , meaning that you are truly proud of uh, well, not being dead. And if you have had a grossly misspent life, be prepared to tell anyone critiquing you that it has been all for the best because you are about to embark on a career as a motivation counselor.

— If a close friend or someone in your family is killed by a malefactor but the malefactor is caught, say Good, but nothing can bring him/her back .

There was more, which Ray was going to skip because it would be similarly annoying. He would read a little more of this rant and then go on to the last assignment.

— Be there for you is a phrase that will quickly make you as sick as it has me, because it means nothing. It is everywhere. It is a phrase that purports . What it promises is that the promiser will lounge lovingly in the vicinity of the person who is in terrible trouble but without undertaking anything as concrete as lending money or driving him to the clinic from time to time. On television recently the phrase was used by a woman who has the largest collection of teddy bears in the state of Oregon. She was asked why she collected the teddy bears so madly, and yes the answer was that it was because they were always there for her. Yes, this phrase says, I will always be there watching the mess you’ve gotten into but not really assisting you, just sadly smiling. You will discover that if you get into deep trouble the people who said they would be there for you really did mean in fact only and nothing more than that they would hang around as spectators to your decline and fall. There is no love.