LOL

Love the sentiment, not the attribution

“what didn’t you do to bury me/

but you forgot that I was a seed”

Dinos Christianopoulos (1931- )

Portions of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” were written, or at least conceived, in Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park.  Everyone turn to page 156, second paragraph, where Nabokov dismisses Iceberg Lake (evaporated) and the snow on Continental Divide (still here, although no longer what divides us).  Nabokov was writing from first-hand experience, not cribbing from Chamber-provided pamphlets and postcards.

This was the summer of 1947, when Nabokov and his wife stayed for a week at the Columbine Lodge (gone), making at least one side trip to Tolland (gone, although already ghosting when they arrived) to hunt butterflies (his preserved at Harvard, what’s left dying), and no, he didn’t have a secret nymphet in tow.  Either on that 1947 trip or later, Nabokov’s son climbed Longs Peak, and signed the register.  I have a copy somewhere, just lack the energy right now to dig it up.

Here’s one of those inexplicable coincidences:  Estes Park serves as backdrop for “Lolita” (the book, the heresy, the dirty male secret splayed on a board for all to abhor), first published in France in 1955.  Kubrick and Nabokov adapt it for the screen beginning around 1960, film premiered in June 1962.  Sue Lyon, the eponymous star, life in shambles, moves to Estes Park (three failed or in-the-process-of failing marriages later) in 1974, looking for work. 

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Sue walks into this one?  Decides her mission in life is to barmaid at the new Ramada Inn (gone)?  Puh-lease.  Sue was born in the Quad Cities, but raised mostly on the mean streets of L.A.  So I suppose her family could have vacationed here when she was a kid, but the more likely explanation is that Nabokov cached something on one of his butterfly hikes, a poop-snake or pill which germinated into salmon Sue Lyon, the soon-to-be single once more mother thrashing upstream, mixed-race marriage #2 baby slung over one hip, or not (accounts vary, meaning sworn-in witnesses swing either way).

The opening quote I love.  The man responsible for it, at least his lifestyle choices and how he responded to attacks upon them, not so much.  One thing on which we can all agree:  The quote’s misappropriation and misattribution to greater, or lesser (both sides) causes, oh so very predictable. 

The “you buried us, unaware we were seeds” raised fist is not, as at least one sign in a Washington, D.C., rally proclaimed yesterday, a “Mexican proverb”.  If the families of the 43 victims of government-sponsored murder in Guerrero want to appropriate the writings of a mid-20th century Greek homosexual as birthright, imbue it with the wisdom of ancients by rushing it over Mayan lips, they have more than earned this privilege, but, far removed in place or time, civilizations involved with the assembly of truth must finally admit from whence it came, and fess up if a Christianopoulos precursor is found. Otherwise, why would Beyonce keep writing the hits if everyone downloaded them for free?  

But the “suffocating dirt = necessary seed covering” equation, the reversal of fortune and “you thought you had us but really we were playing you all along” yin-yang is so empowering, especially to those who envision themselves lacking in power, whatever power they feel is theirs by virtue of occupying a motile skin sack, who really cares who gets the credit?  In America, we are all oppressed.  I’ve just oppressed your freedom to believe in fake Mexican proverbs.  You just referred to me in print as "garbage".  Victimhood is our national anthem, a right accorded by the founding fathers, falling somewhere between the right to enter any bathroom or any conversation draped in whatever gendered garb you desire, and the right to manufacture $94,000 pickup trucks. 

Americans complain, often loudly, at restaurants.  Does no one see the hubris in this?  We can no longer raise the crops or assemble and prepare the raw materials necessary to feed ourselves, but instead require others to perform this basic task for us.  So naturally, we yell at them self-righteously when they do.  Bird and Jim hasn’t even opened yet, and we’re already disappointed.  Around the table, we don’t have conversations, we read from personal menus of affliction .  We accord friends BFF status and increased facetime based on how willingly they yield their own grievance list up to our inventory of endless slights and presumed insults.  Is there something significantly wrong with every one of us? 

Last time I checked, I hadn’t killed anyone (yet), or deflowered their underage daughters.  W.T. Parke was a sex-offender, no different (except real) from the fictional Humbert Humbert, whom we revile.  George Hix’s unbalanced first wife killed their adopted children.  Generally, this type of behavior is frowned upon.  But guess what happens in a society where everyone gets participation ribbons:  We allow bronzed perverts and murder-enablers to decorate storefronts and scenic waterways, distract tourists with photo-op rodents and saddles in which to rest their ever-widening asses (except now with a disclaimer, naturally, that said device may get hot enough to blister skin, a result of metal unthinkingly placed in direct sun, or of George residing in eternal Hellfire, unclear).  Don’t bother raising concerns about mixed-messaging or potentially better choices, because “everyone has skeletons in their closet”, another myth and instant faux-leveler advanced by those plagued by their own serious troubles/felonies.

Locally, the Trail did an awful job of advancing the rights of Dreamers, especially as regards providing context and counter-example to those who contend, case closed, they arrived illegally, free will or not, and should either pay up or go.  Part of the Trail’s failure was the clumsy veil of anonymity thrown over the family profiled (hmm, how many illegals in town own a restaurant employing 30 people?), but mostly, it’s the reeking “why apologize?” sense of entitlement, the laudatory “I wanted/needed a better life, so I reached out and grabbed one” slant.  Great.  Costa Rica beckons and my passport just expired, but there are laws on the books, and moral quandaries besides, that discourage me from stealing someone’s identity and appropriating their unexpired travel documents instead of just filling out the necessary paperwork at the post office.  

But that’s not a fair comparison.  No, and nothing ever is, once the singular cult of victimhood becomes so personalized, so buried under solipsism, that literally no one but you can truly know or understand the troubles you’ve seen.

Nationally, a former Secretary of State goes on record admitting our current President hasn’t tortured or killed any members of the press, at least not yet, at least not to her knowledge.  The reporting of this "discovery" is not news, it’s identity-politics pandering.  CNN has adopted the crusade of dispensing righteous justice, appropriated the occasionally tin voice and hair-trigger sensitivity of those always being trodden upon, victims of a system which denies perpetual ensconcement with the cool kids or first chair in the philharmonic, despite not knowing what a violin is, except as something to air-bow while weeping.  Liberal internet news-magazine “Slate” dogs closely on CNN’s heels.  Either they have both recently found Jesus, or they have decided to throw in and provide perverse balls-out counterbalance to Fox.  In any event, all sides and their content have become parodies of each other, with sponsor clickbait (Yes, I probably will believe Susan Dey’s appearance has changed in 40 years) only adding to the laugh-out-loud silly. 

For CNN, every week under the current administration achieves another shocking low, a new and even worser decline in the fall of America and her citizens, savagely mugged by the sub-human toad molt somehow still in power, left for dead in polluted gutters.   Huh?  Last I checked, everyone in Estes Park (save for four in the obits) was alive and breathing, elk-entranced or screaming like newborns over the record Dow.  Does poisonous bias not self-fulfill discontent and untempered hate?  “Things are getting worse by the minute, dolts, and what are you going to do about it?” guarantees placement of your acolytes, some of whom will be mentally unbalanced anyway (as some percentage of all groups larger than two are) directly on the primrose path to inalterable consequence, for which you and they will likely both claim additional persecution once arrested.  Hurting people or wishing them hurt, aloud, on impressionable ears, or (and this is beautiful) claiming they hurt first, so a hurtful response is justified, makes it only a matter of time before we start toting bodies.  Both sides.  You like aiding and abetting this, CNN producers, Slate contributors, FOX News, or is it just fun guiding someone else's index finger more and more slowly through the flame?

If there is hope, it comes from the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we read to our children, those they gradually, stumblingly at first, nestled in our laps, begin reading (or read-guessing) to us.  You are unbreakable, son.  Heaped-up shit on all sides, fairly or unfairly, throughout life, sister, but you are a seed, a chain-mailed warrior, Archbishop Tilpin on the battlefield, Marie Curie fighting cancer, and the rest is just fertilizer.  And if your dead body don’t rise, perhaps the nitrogen and calcium leached from your bones will nourish a latent peach tree (or woolly mullein) enough to pierce the earth.  How’s that for a gender-neutral sex-organ reference, or at least gender balanced?

Let us now praise empty tombs and resplendent winged angels, born of cocoons.  Winter is coming, with time enough still to sow the winter wheat.  Hosanna in the highest the paradise unimaginable, the glories yet to come, streets paved with gold, taps flowing with soy milk and clover-fed honey.  But until then, you might work another MLK quote into your hatred, either of me or the untenable situation involving your hairdresser and her latest take on gluten-free, “God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day.”