THE LAST FAREWELL

THE LAST FAREWELL

Dear Gay Archive Readers,

As Elvis said when they turned up the house lights at Madison Square Garden: "Whoa, it's a big place, man." First time I've been on this side of the aisle, having published about 25 stories in Bi Country. Most of them are in the Incest and Adult/Youth archives and range from 6,000 to 450,000 ("One Fish at a Time") words. Many of the titles are as explicit, politically and editorially, as they are, well, you know... All have romantic, probably to a fault, as against activist themes, at least literary pretensions, and most of them enough humor they really ought not be read by anyone in marginal health or (surgical) stitches, nor in any situation wherein spontaneous LOL might prompt the response: "Whatcha reading, hon?"

He also said: "Thank you, you're beautiful..."

TE

...

The ship lies rigged and ready in the harbor. Boats play about her fortress bulk, rowed and sculled but for the most part sailed. They often dance alongside her, pose at her gangworks, then scatter about other business in the bay. Her name is "HMS Percussion" of eighty guns, and five hundred men and boys (wouldn't you just know it) call her something-or-the-other away from home. Tomorrow for old England she sails.

"Far away from you land of endless sunshine," John Masters said, trying not to sigh, as thirteen year old Adam Jennifer sat by his side looking down over the azure harbor and bay.

"To your land full of rainy skies and gales," he responded, not doing so well at the sigh thing, and not well enough to keep tears from his eyes. The thoughts of the twenty six year old officer and boy half his age whirled over the past week, then the lieutenant's focused on the present.

"Lad," he said, "that's for the poets and singers. The secret is, you have to stay ashore, then the rain is a cool blanket over the at least relatively torrid sun and the wind a breath of god, aye, reminding you that you're alive of a stormy night, and something to praise the passing of on a calm morning. Aboard ship, they're misery well laden with fear, our northern, gray waters with their rocks and tides and fog, but a bit of a farm, that's what one wants, or a shop or a pub or a coach or a mine, for they're all fit to work in, our seasons, never so hot as here, never so frigid as there; never too wet and rarely too dry, and enough perfect days that their want is seldom felt. And change, Adam," the lieutenant went on, "day to day, week to week, and gently from one season to the next. Yes, it can be gloomy, gray; even desolate, for a month at a go, but think ye then how this blasting torch of yours is seen as a blessing and not your fiery curse.

"No, lad, it's not the dreary climes that replace my heart with a pound or two of lead, and it is not your exotic climes I shall miss until it becomes an illness, but your light and intelligent tongue and fair English eyes, there's the sluice that diverts my blood from the affectionate flow of our kind to send it over a sheet of ice, returning it thick and blue where it flowed forth red and warm."

"Never mind all that," Adam said, "unless you want to continue building my case for me. I don't see you as a mistral and don't reckon you as a spirit or phantasm, perhaps being yet too young to be aware of the romance all around me, no John, rather, I see you as the one who leads the herd; practical, big, and hard and something to cling to for awhile, then someone to stay with as partners, and finally someone to feed gruel to as you wither off and let me take over the farm or mine or coach.."

"There is that side to things, Adam," John admitted, "and were I sure of you, as I so nearly am after but a week, I would arrange for passage."

"It's hard for me," Adam responded, "to say `you bloody English', being British, myself, but even if I don't say it, I feel it. You are bound by you know not what. You take that which should be tangential as absolute. You should live in wary compliance with that to which you are, instead, slavishly devoted, from kings and wars to the manners of gentile society, including but not limited to the precise positioning of the pinky finger when imbibing fucking tea.

As an English English there's an incomprehensible rule of form which you interpret as meaning you can do nothing, where to an Island English, ignorant in the ways of the block-headed native-soil tribe, the solution is simple enough to write on the back of your hand. Kidnap me. Stow me away. Let there be no last farewell short of the grave. I have nothing here. Three men already have their eye on me, and all that can be said of them is that they're not blockheads; they see what's real, and mean to take it, laws merely words written by someone not present, and moral strictures nothing but pulpit fodder, as often preached by the devious as by the righteous."

"But to stow you where?" the young man mused.

"In your cabin, donkey," the boy replied, "you're hardly a pound-a-year rascal, you know, you're first mate, next to god after the captain, and yes, you're first officer because you obey first, both the written and unwritten, the spoken and the unspoken, so perhaps it is hard to understand, being a blockhead, being English, and being a donkey, that exceptions can be made, chances taken, risks run, a gamble ventured, that life is not just a series of days added to the last like the steps on a treadmill, that there is more to existence than just diligence and fortitude, important as they are; that there is a you involved, as good a man as any and far better than most, and for that you should be awarded a tiny fraction, and if you're too selfless to realize it, try the think of that fraction left to others who will only glory in sharing the sport of my youth, the tightness of my immature body, and heed my tears no more than they would the tears of a turtle in a pot."

"Where I come from..." John said, then sputtered to a halt.

"Where you come from," Adam responded, "is a sensible place where sensible villages dot sensible farmland and sensible ports dot the coast and sensible cities provide a sensible alternative. Isn't that enough sense? Or is your only goal in life to die of a sensible disease at a sensible age, conventional on the outside and empty on the inside?

"Plus," the likely boy added, "look at the bright side. Our ship may be blown apart upon the heaving waves that brought you once to me, no one to ever know the dark secret of her after cabin."

"We are not taught to calculate," John said, "or, if so, to calculate with a sextant and chronometer using pencil, numbers and paper, while letting all else be calculated for us."

"As blinders calculate for the carriage horse," Adam nodded, "subtraction and division, only."

"It seems to work, nonetheless," the young officer said, "we are a happy people, if healthy and at least a little prosperous. We dance often, sing, play sports and games almost to the exclusion of sanity, excluding much in the name of that happiness, beginning with excessive consumption and including gambling, dueling, and unseemly liaisons. Very Christian of us," he went on, "probably to a fault, and probably, as you said, leaving us frivolous and hollow."

"The American Indians regard you thusly," the thirteen year old noted, "all greed and no ghost, holy or otherwise."

"I suppose we do tend to mint our gods," John agreed, "and leave the poetry of land and seasons to the professionals."

"And who gets the humor concession?" the bright-eyed thirteen year old asked.

"The drolling idiots, naturally," John said, and you can take it as a given that the eyes got brighter, both of them.

"You're not going without me," the lad hissed.

"Save your breath to tell me something I'm unaware of," his friend responded, to a flood of tears and barrage of hiccups that went on for several minutes. Adam gamely tried recovering and seemed settled for awhile, but things that go away by themselves (to quote Clippy) can come back by themselves, so it was fully half an hour before the boy had absorbed the enormity of the anticipated perfection.

"We've never talked about island things, island ways," Adam said, "and, in truth, people here live by the same codes and canons that are the conventions of most societies, with, perhaps, a little more tolerance toward those of an alternate and more natural bent, so long as they behave with decorum and inflict no embarrassment or indignity."

"I've seen no displays from the trees," the sailor allowed.

"In my case it was the mission school," Adam continued after choking out an awkward combination of hiccup and giggle. "Jeffrey Mann. English master, with a particular interest in things Hellenistic."

"And something of an eye for beauty, I should imagine," John noted.

"Yes, he would have liked you very much," the boy responded, keeping up his end.

"Since you have yet to refer to trophies for running," the officer said, "I warrant his eye for you was ne'er thwarted by winged foot nor heaving chest."

"Half correct," the boy agreed.

"And in this heat..." the man mused.

"Well, that's mighty big of ya, pardner," Adam drawled in American he'd heard on a visit, "thinkin' such goin's on are fit for sun and sol, and not the other side of the tree."

Said John: "The log half in ferment / doth / spread from beneath its corpse / dross / to burrow as low as the casket's / cloth / appearing once again as a moonlove / moth."

"Then you can be assured that there is more to his life than meets the eye," Adam responded, assuming correctly the gender of the insect.

"And more yet to cum," the tall, athletic sailor whispered in a new voice as the boy lying beside him on the grassy bank blushed (finally).

"If you want," Adam whispered back, "I want. Since the first day. We could have quit the dinghy race, broken a pintel or split the tiller and hove to a secluded cove and I would have waxed profound on the lapping luxury of the lagoon and begged of thee a swim, though attire for such I wore not a stitch of. Only that you followed me, and that not a demand but a whisper, would have been my hope, unless, of course, you wanted to stay aboard and fool around."

"H'mm," the older male mused, "since there was no principal god of levity, Greek or Roman, while all gods, and especially those of Ancient Greece, loved a little mischief and discombobulating word play and riddles, it rather dawns on me that you must have experienced, some two thousand years ago, an incarnation as chief cook and bottle washer of Mt. Olympus, there to abide until cometh the dreary Israelite with his grinding one-act play, at which time you took it upon yourself to set up housekeeping as a Siren. And a good job you've gone and made of it, even now deeming that `fooling around' which, if memory serves, is a brand of behavior typical of dairy maids and stable boys or stable boys and goats..."

"I was raised by a nanny," the boy broke in, "but should your ship have a ram, all bets are off and I'll await passage aboard a more suitable conveyance."

"A ram would be but a sham," John responded, "in this day of powder, ball and shot."

"That sounds safe," the boy said.

"Why, you never saw the like," the lieutenant agreed with a laugh, "powder monkeys dancing the `tween decks, with the gunner's match showering sparks at each concussion, outgoing or incoming, and the general milieu of a riot. Yes, lad, during such festivities you are immensely safe from any trace of boredom."

"Wonderful," the boy responded. "Now, if, using our minds to the fullest and availing ourselves of the wisdom dished out in class and on campus, we could, between the two of us, determine a way to reduce the tedium of those intervals when tenancy of the water's surface is not in dispute, we might suffer our passage with a light step and fair look, indeed, come to discover that play-acting was required to fit our demeanor to those around us, least our want of subdued refrain infect our companions, open new channels of intellectual pursuit, which, in actuality, merely amounts to dredging anew old channels, leading, should we return safe home again to England, to an overall appraisal of the merits as opposed to the liabilities of allowing ourselves to be blown full of holes."

"Oft' as not," John mused, "the holes of which you speak are well filled with oaken splinters."

"That may staunch the drainage," Adam allowed, "but at what price in discomfort?"

"Why," the young man answered, "since there is no increase in comfort at the removal of the offending dagger, it seems logical that no distress attends its presence." That was a hard point to argue, because in a religious world Logic was a drunken lout fit only to stagger the streets and rebound off the walls of alleys, on top of which it was bastardized and corrupted by Faith, leaving a distinctly unholy and god-awful slobber of a mess only wealth and privilege could alloy, and even these foundations of mitigation were of shifting sands. That left brains: partially free, slightly undisciplined, and smart enough to understand life in a Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim village was very alike, the life in cities, all but identical and a thousand times more a product of prosperity or poverty than which holy pot graced this altar or that mantel, or whether slave or freeman toiled here or labored there. On the other side of the coin, the strife of bell, book, and candle and it's inherent and inevitable aggrandizement of the least intellectually fit had cast the young aristocrat from his estate, opening a larger if exceedingly dangerous world to his ken. It behoove one to advance in such half chaos with a keen appreciation of the silly and absurd nature of it all while maintaining a playful outlook and, at appropriate times and in appropriate circumstances, an insouciant attitude. For what was the alternative? To look fondly at the lean, leggy stripling lying on the grass beside him, then, forsooth, to yonder thick grove of trees? Was the answer to be found there, rather than here in the sun; in shadowed seclusion rather than levity and light?

"One does not preclude the other, you know," Adam remarked, reading his friend's thoughts with great clarity. "How they'd have us think so!" he went on, "that tampering in a bipartisan manner with the devil changes a child and renders him unfit for a useful place in the scheme of things.

"Does covering his sister blunt the lion? His daughter, the bear? Is there the least trace of Oedipal confusion in a herd of a thousand stallions? And are we to take nothing from the feral world? Aren't houses and pots and fire and coaches enough separation? Can we not, at some point, satisfy ourselves we are the superior species and accept the gifts laid out for the very turtle without fearing imprisonment within a horny shell?"

"If we don't get out of this sun," the officer observed, "we'll redden like lobsters, and how much good does any kind of shell do them, perchance they meet the pot you speak of?"

They sat, then stood, the day to waste as they would, at their feet a path back to town and one to the nearby wood. The boy manned the hand of the man, much as he'd planned, guiding without demand, determined to exceed that which was canned with the fresh, the raw, and the grand, which would have read "gland" in a more salacious and less, well, comely lad. And no, their fine spirits and noble mien did not vanish with the first balm of shade, scuttle from them like earwigs and centipedes embodying some pious draftsman's vision of the foul and corrupt. Guess again. Their last farewell would indeed come to pass in a churchyard decades hence, and, innocent though their initial week together had been, they now became determined to ensure their final parting would have its full measure of poignancy and loss through restrained exploitation of their most human sides both natural and unnatural.

"I believe our tiller is split and likewise our rudder adrift," Adam said as they reached the sheltering grove.

"And the water particularly discreet," John observed, what else? dryly.

"At my age we call it `make-believe'," Adam noted, what else? wisely.

They followed a rippling brook to a mossy bank, and there did tarry, like as not to try at love if not to actually marry. Each fetching a handful of pebbles from the bed of the crystal stream, they lay back on the luxury moss, and entertained themselves by bombarding a leaf with toss after toss after toss. (U.K, readers might wish to avail themselves of a dictionary, even a child's will do, in order to complete the stanza as its author intends, thus leaving only themselves to wank for the making of amends.)

The leaf obligingly split, the boy's first to lose its tenancy of the surface, and they lost interest in the childish game, taking up, instead, hot looks from a foot apart. Yes, the tender thing was done and gone and past, the winning of hearts and entrapment of souls; all sails billowing white and tugging a single mast. And so the yielding came about, only poetic in the sense they did not shout, but whispered low, and quietly breathed, as they lay, again, unpoetically (and certainly unromantically), eye to eye and snout to snout. Perhaps their silly minds would not so play and race, if bare they were to each other, overall, as naked they were of face.

"Do you have a boy aboard?" Adam asked.

"He was killed by a shark in Hispaniola," the young man replied.

"Was he beautiful?" the boy then asked.

"In every light," John whispered, "or none."

"Were you complete with him, or did you content yourselves with the edges?" the poetic child wanted to know.

"By word, complete, yes," John mused, "and his wish to yield would have prevailed, but a shipboard life is a hazardous life, though she float at anchor and be unsailed, so from a gang of skylarking boys, he swam in fear, on a wager dear, to a buoy near, and only in returning, failed."

"He is well remembered," Adam whispered.

"Privately, until now," the officer responded, "but you have earned a share. More. You are his memory; his memory and his future."

"What did you talk about?" the boy asked.

"Politics," John replied, "based on a shared belief that the greatest possible human comedy is half-headed people running around voting on things as if politics was some kind of game or party. Village life is essentially the same from China to Switzerland, city life is similar to the point you have to visit a dozen or two from Calcutta to Coventry to realize how minor and trivial the distinctions are, if they can be noted at all. Since the politics involved, however named, are identical, why waste time on them? England has built vast canal and railroads without a single vote per thousand workers, builds ships very nicely without the intervention of the working man who'd only vote to feather his nest today, no different from a child wanting a sweet or a drunkard buying his flask, with no thought of tomorrow. American, James and I agreed, let the unholiest of monsters loose with its Revolution, as Haiti clearly shows, and as it lets ever more children into the act its people will dig its grave. Not even a hundred, and yet a vast internal war looms because with every man a king, and every senator a king of kings, they can't sit down at a table and spend a few months drawing up a thirty or forty year plan to settle their slavery issue. Rich as Croesus so they'll last awhile, but stupid as mules, beating out even we of Blockhead Island, so awhile' will be far indeed from forever'."

"Can it ever work?" Adam asked.

"No," the lieutenant said, "there is no more chance of democracy working over the long haul than there would be for a group of fifteen year olds to run a thing as simple as a school. The cheap rhetoric of the process becomes the end because no one is mature enough to see that the process is immaterial. A million boys your age couldn't run a school in a million years, yet a man of my class, even as young as myself, could run one with a snap of the fingers and a few hundred pounds to get started, and if that sounds like conceit, try to fathom the arrogance of the untutored mob who thinks it knows better just because it occasionally agrees with itself. America's wealth will addict the world to America, its inventors, large and small, will sustain the habit for a period of time, perhaps a century or more, then it will become moribund as it tries to be all things to all voters and grows so many teeth to grin with, none are strong enough to bite, and carry the civilized world to its grave."

"A ripe subject for humor," the boy nodded.

"That's the spirit1" John enthused, making the child giggle with his cynicism.

"Can we go there sometime?" Adam then asked.

"Heavens no," his friend choked, "why, what a thought. The place, by all accounts, and certainly to my eyes, is brute ugly and savage raw. Recent reports say there is not a standing forest left within seventy miles of any city, such is the mix of voters and axes. Manhattan Island is even today continuing its legacy as home of the largest number of people suffering the most extreme misery of any culture on earth for the longest period of time, and it manages this miracle of humanity with the greatest natural harbor in the world, at the base of the mighty Hudson, and separated from the Garden State of New Jersey by a single mile. As if that weren't enough, it is packed to the rafters with bumptious, noisy king peasants of rude education and coarse manner. Of course, it's not as bad as England in that respect, but it has no alternative, where we have at least a stream or brook or two off the industrial mainstream. What you see is all you get, and it's dirty, cheap, and the paint of advertisers is slopped on every possible surface as if the end-all and be-all of life itself were to be found in the sale of a bar of soap."

"Where's a good place?" the child asked.

"India's rude, harsh, stinking, and fascinating," John replied, "though the rubric `two monsoons is the life of a white man' is disconcerting. Your islands, especially those not timbered bald as an egg and regrown in nettles and thistle. The Lake Country in Blighty is lovely. Beirut, they say, is the most beautiful city of all, with the Mediterranean close at hand."

"Where would you have taken James if he hadn't been killed?" Adam asked.

"I don't think that would have happened," John replied, "though I can't say just why, and maybe it would have.

"No one realizes the problems we face," the older male went on, "to be wealthy and free. So many choices, but they boil down to anywhere with anybody. Imagine choosing wrongly; a wife who gets fat and mean or spends her weight of a fortnight; a country beset by the woes of religion. These possibilities point to England, as at least unlikely to be the worst choice, but the lack of excitement and drama of equatorial climes is something but poorly compensated by watching the mist roll through the dell, though a fair enough prospect that would be if one were dying of malaria in his more romantic neighborhood."

"We could just sail forever," the boy noted.

"I want to take one around the Horn," John said, "to pay my dues to Neptune, who, thus far, has given me a fair enough life, but that's the end of it. Enough of salt and enough of sea. In the tradition of the disgruntled mariner I will walk, one day, from the harbor, inland, carrying an oar over my right shoulder. When someone asks me what it is I carry, why that's the place to start looking."

"In how many languages do you know the word for `oar'?" Adam (an early trivialist) asked.

"Why don't we make that your job?" the officer suggested to Adam's immediate nod, the young teen seeming undismayed by the scope and nature of the problem he was to share.

As a writer, I share both their problems. So many possibilities, and, as vets (veteran readers) know, I am given to attack furiously those disgracing and dooming my Anglo-Saxon culture. This is difficult, and I guess that's obvious since I'm the only one with the skill to do it, because a position as the highest molecule, or, more accurately, cell of cream in a conical bottle makes one, very automatically, subject of charges of conceit and hubris, squared, because not only am I a literary paragon, there's the iron connection with the successful persecution of the American Revolutionary War, plus a list of close connections spanning a de facto poet laureate to The Bell System in its formative decades. There's a god thing, too, just to be sure no arrow misses do to the archer's confusion in deciding which is the choicer target, and not quite convinced either artist or king are worth his bolt, but a god, well even if you have to be a Transcendentalist to buy into it, it's still a god, and our yeoman can bend and release with a surety of heart and positive mind. My defense, of course, is to grab bolt and arrow, alike, and sling them back, combining power and accuracy as can only be commanded with the pen.

Here's a for-instance. In the process of completing a little review of my lifetime of Mainstream (as against intellectual, cult, or religious) reading, using my common computer encyclopedia, I typed in the search phase "Anglo-Saxon". Go ahead, boot the thing and follow along. Under "Anglo-Saxon" there is no article, the closest being "Anglo-Saxon Art". Next, "Anglo" -- none. ("Angles" -- 75 words). Saxon(s) -- 281 words. Why, what a scuttling little nowhere tribe dem guys musta been. Jews -- 12,354 words. Muslim (Islam) - 9,675. And to try to establish perspective on the wonder of today's political correctness and New Age sensitivity, how about the 8,744 words on Nunavut, an artic wasteland inhabited by 25,000 indigenous Canadian welfare supplicants.? (Eskimo: not listed; Inuit: 2,106 words).

Am I imagining things, or do we seem to attract, our picayune literary status notwithstanding, a considerable amount of antagonism? How many tribes have there been in all known or assumed history? Ten to twenty thousand? And there are still thousands, seeming, if divided at a hundred points, unified at least in their hatred of us. Do they hate us for ending, at extreme cost to ourselves, the lucrative and hundred-century trade in humans? Our steam engines sometimes blew up and killed children, there, that's a rational reason to disparage any tribe. How many have been electrocuted? Obviously, tens of thousands, and in just a hundred years. The clash of mechanized transport kills forty thousand in the U.S.A., alone, every year. How can we begin to apologize? Have you not heard music too loud, seen dancing too wild, with your own ears and eyes? Yes, you are fit to judge -- be confident. For example, look at yourselves. Use any handy mirror, or look at each other. Have we not rounded you wonderfully with our threshers and combines? Linked you to pizza with the telephone of my own family? Yes, yes, and yes. For all that Asia and India outnumber us ten to one, it is nonetheless true that we are nine-tenths responsible for your houses exploding because of gas leaks, your children being burden with academic regimens, and a very long and comprehensive list of righteous woes. "Sorry" obviously won't cut it, leaving that traditional palliative moot. Then how about defeating us? I know, even a politically correct arsenal of hydrogen bombs is daunting, but we Anglos have an old saying: `where there's a will, there's a way.'" Maybe I can help with the will in my own savage way, much as you would avail yourself of if the shoe was on the other foot, by calling all races but the little tribe of the Elbe mongrels and yapping hyenas, with the exception of the Japanese, who actually seem to be better than we are. Truer words were never written, and even our friends of Nippon favor a monolithic and robotic quality that would become tedious before long. Does this mean you're stuck with us? Only if you want to live. So why not eighty-six the attitude and spend the odd half minute each day giving fervent thanks you, the most vastly privileged humans in the largest numbers of all times, are included in our time? It would do your soul good. That's the way of the truth (it hurts but if it doesn't heel, you are lost).

Did I promise to forgo essays? Can't remember; I think it was more words to the effect I'd said everything, editorially, I had to say, but, you know how it is, you get a thousand "Wicked screensaver" messages in a week or two, and it's hard, if one actually is a king, not to find new subject matter. Look at our international emblem, the Web and its Net. Is it nothing more than the numbing detritus of a culture which is absolutely insane? A landfill in bedlam? Two to three hundred First Amendment spams a day? Is it possible while Monica was on her knees, to preserve the pungent argot, the duly elected president should have been meeting with advisors and protecting our Information Superhighway? Just a thought. Anyway, he didn't and as it gets worse and worse its about the exact equivalent of moving the orange cones used on the Interstate a foot toward the middle each day or two with the associated risk of head-on collisions and road closure. Of course, this is just anecdotal, and the real history engendered is bound to be more colorful and interesting, which goes to increase the poignancy of no one being left to read it.

A new Minnesota Fats. A jelly belly with a mouse. You think you've trespassed into the realm of the unbearable when you see Al-The-Brain sticking his tongue out, then a new figure makes unbearable the lightness of the cathode (and seeing). You monkeys don't need to be led, you need to be driven, ten percent of you into the sea, and the rest about your business which is nothing to do with politics, religion, or, especially, tradeunions.

While I find no difficulty in picturing myself at the top of the literary mountain, examining my ideology is more challenging. Starting from the bottom, from the communists I take a certain role of government in business, even to the extent of temporary ownership and arbitrary mandate. An example would be mandating anti-virus capability in every hard-drive sold, starting in about 1992. Being me, I would have attached specific wording delineating Internet hijinks as high treason with a corresponding death penalty, all executions to be conducted in the manner of public whippings until the profane heart can hurt no more. On the other hand, maybe you have a place in your life for a Wicked screensaver and hold an alternative point of view. How nice it's your country and you get to decide, but remember I'm smarter than you are, and can call on precedent. The English occasionally whipped a troublemaker "around the fleet" -- a death sentence -- and greatly stabilized the world in so doing (if they'd kept it up, about a billion people today in abject poverty would live middle-class lives, but that's just an estimate).

From socialism I accept a highly rationed system of free health care with most expenditures going for preventative medical and dental care for children and nothing beyond comfort medications for the elderly and self-abusive (obesity, smoking, liquor, and drugs, to name the principle factors). In the middle ground would be some care for good people. (Since Christian Scientists have historically paid no more for life insurance than the population at large, internal medicine can be seen, correctly, as largely hype and hypochondria.) Yes, I would permanently abolish trade unions (I spent three years in a major union and know its evil, belly-side-in), while not necessarily blaming the unionists. As a boy, my father, a former master in the Merchant Marine, told me of a cargo ship being held in Long Beach because of a broken fan in the galley. I bought into it as a boy, as boys will, but as an adult blame management (the officers) for not exercising due diligence in making doubly sure ALL crew safety and comfort systems were operating, with spares on hand for crucial elements which might well include a simple fan for the cooks, stewards, and dishwashers boiling soup in an iron box on a ship in the tropics. Unfortunately, in logic, philosophy, and the mundane world at hand, two wrongs don't make a right. Proof: the pathetic husk of our Merchant Marine since the war. Yes, the management are the educated class and should know, but they're just you with better clothes. Why expect miracles, already? So the ultimate blame goes to labor. It ruined England -- her colonial empire was destroyed, to the gain of absolutely no one but a tiny handful of Third World criminals and politicians, not because of anything other than the distraction and unreliability engendered by ceaselessly striking workers -- and it's obviously on the brink of exercising its power of extortion to destroy us.

From monarchy, obviously a favorite, I take the ability of a king to take umbrage at troublemakers and exile them. Newfoundland. It's made to order. Rosanne goes first, but she will have several hundred thousand to entertain, should she survive the parachute ride in.

From fascism, a near favorite, I favor expedient and arbitrary execution in the name of getting things done. Since I advocate the immigration of five hundred million Chinese and people of other worthy and friendly cultures, and favor ethnic mixing over purification (a lesson learned from my own woebegone family), I'm probably closer to a fascist nightmare than fellow traveler, but Mussolini had a remarkable track record before the war muddied the water, and it's not to be ignored.

It goes without saying anarchy is the ultimate goal; people cooperating to the degree no oversight is necessary nor any taxes to pay for the oversight. I'll work on it.

Almost everything else comes from National Socialism (just a name) as practiced by the Germans in the Thirties. Reasonable capitalism with reasonable treatment of workers supervised by an intelligent and flexible government, not unlike the oligarchy that operates virtually every successful corporation on Earth. Ethnic flexibility aside, I not only favor, but insist on the deportation of many troublesome elements including Semites and Eastern Europeans. Germane to my mandate is extensive use of the super polygraph (described in other writings), because the last thing we want to do is kick out good people. Also crucial is the brown-spider theory. There are forty thousand species of arachnids, and thousands of brown spiders, with only the recluse maiming or killing with its searing bite. Yet the competent housekeeper, unable to identify the harmless from the lethal, sprays all spiders to be on the safe side (and, literally speaking, we don't, we ease them outdoors if we can, and otherwise live peacefully together, so the analogy has to be a little more tightly written. Mother Hubbard sprays the cupboard after the spider's bitten. We have been bitten repeatedly. It is time for the bomb.). Most Muslims are harmless, but at all levels of their society, from peasant to philosopher, there are those who terrify. As your king, they terrify me, and I would clean house with twenty-five hydrogen bombs and a twenty year program of destruction of their habitat and capacity to terrify anyone. They have contributed nothing to the welfare and advancement of humankind, and they will not be missed. I call this doctrine Pockmarks for Peace, preferring a cratered globe free of warmongers to a prettier ball of endless strife and trouble, and, since Crater One, on the grounds they should know better, would be Belfast, I deny any racist element to my scheme while wondering at the audacity of those who claim equality with the Anglo-Saxon when my distinctly white family, alone, has accomplished more (Revolution, Bell System, transistor) than the black, Semitic and Latino "races" -- combined. Try to understand: racially, we are equal or the next thing to it. A smart black is better than a dumb white, every day of the week; a pigmy raised in Windsor Castle would be indistinguishable, over the telephone, from an Anglo prince, while an Anglo prince, raised in a jungle village, would be indistinguishable, except in obvious ways, from his fellows. The formula may well have race equaling zero, but it's hard to tell because a thousand years of "artificial selection" centered around various universities (as an example) clouds the issue. It can be summed up: race equals so little, it might as well be zero, and is zero on an individual basis. Ethnicity and culturalism, on the other hand, are of extreme importance. The proof is one tiny tribe dominating invention, art, and enlightenment to the extent its highly inclusive nature placed twelve men on the surface of the moon over thirty years ago. An opposing truth is also provable by today's rapidly growing psychological and physical turmoil resulting from over-inclusion of, in a word, foreigners, in a sophisticated and delicately balanced system (white supremacy) that wasn't all that great in the first place. In other words, we aren't much good, we make bad mistakes, but we do achieve, we do advance, and we are not just better than anyone else, but vastly better as evidenced by the fact that aboriginal Americans made no progress in eight thousand years while yours truly's clan has totally reinvented the world to the vastly extreme benefit of billions in barely more than a hundred years. This is all there is to be said on the subject; anything else is the poobah and the claptrap of arrogant, lying, ignorant, agenized empire builders wishing to enhance their power with your money and/or your life.

Example: my recent foray into historical review led to an article on Lebanon. In spite of Christian and Muslim getting along admirably for centuries, their civil war (1975-1990) broke out over a seat or two in their clop-chop democracy. Theory: sometimes evidence is to be acted on, not argued. In other words, as already noted, there is a time for bombs.

One thing you need to remember is the age of credentials is over. Harvard, itself, matriculates maybe half to two-thirds intellectual scut. Iridium, Enron, and WorldCom, plus a stupefying list of fellow travelers, show that in the post-Vietnam academic era very stupid people can earn very high marks. Then, all you need to do is ignore the brilliant, but un-credentialed, on the basis of something like political insensitivity, and, presto, you've lost it all. Making light of the plight is a poet's delight, for there's fun in the sights of men full of rights learning by lie how the truth bites.

On the domestic scene the terrorism of the balloteers continues, unabated, but watching so many absurd people commit folly on everlasting folly does bring a new shine and miraculous glow to each day they don't let their unions bring the whole pension riddled edifice down in a crash. The down side is our urban leftists, in their commitment to dismantling any system, have left naught but humor as a fit subject for pen and paper. Robot workers in fast-food chains, nuclear waste in a thousand drains, electrical grid strains and strains, and Internet spam is all that remains. What could be more fun, even if it's not very funny, than writing something so droll, as long as it's reader, yes our dear reader, who antes up for the toll?

Terror of loons and whackos aside, all is even and calm in Dangriga. Samantha remains committed to intricate economic planning and we spend a couple of hours in bed every day exhausting all avenues and details. It would be more fun than sex but for her devastating body, but you see in this essay how good I am at putting the salacious on the back burner, keeping it in its place. I remain probably the greatest paradox in literature, a nonpareil pornographer who's not getting any. An attendant dichotomy is, in spite of my everlasting preaching on the subject of a full literacy (i.e., off the reading lists), finding complete satisfaction in a partner who struggles with a five word sentence. So go ahead, if it pleases you, don't read, don't learn history, but, rather, keep your eyes open for a mildly retarded savant with both a luminous and two-fisted personality. There must be another one out there somewhere.

Whenever possible I like to add a note of comfort and security to my non-fiction efforts, and I'm sure many of you will take heart in the fact that though I've published well over a million words on Nifty (boasting a rock-steady fifteen thousand new readers a week), richly marbled with essays, opinion, and journalistic copy, no one has ever written (and many of my stories have my name and e-mail address) supporting any idea or ideal of mine in any way. In other words, you're safe in your socialism, and if your son gets stuck with the bill, well, why did you have him in the first place? Fair-enough, as the Australians say (perhaps to a fault), just so long as you grant to me the simple joy of laughter, being sure to reserve for yourselves the correlated privilege of regarding me as a clown or grinning idiot. In the words of the pop masterpiece of some decade or so ago: "don't worry / be happy."

And speaking of quotes, I should take a moment for a tip of the hat to Rodger Whittaker and his epic (well, short epic, if that's not an oxymoron) ballad of parting lovers which inspired both the title of and a few lines for this story. Along with Harry Bellefonte's "Jamaica Farewell" it focused years of childhood reading and led this New England Yankee WASP to now almost two decades living way south of the border. If you have the resources to, and don't, you're as dumb as Isak Dinesen who should have stayed in Africa, if only to please her kitchen toto. The miniscule white community in the Stann Creek valley wonders why there aren't several million Anglos living between the coast and the capital. Ice Man Bill points out that Americans tend to break down and get shaky in the knees, develop palpitations, and become teary at cultural deprivation and susceptible to acute anxiety attacks if over twenty miles from a Wal-Mart. Well, shop `till you drop, or, to continue borrowing the intellectual property of mainstream literary colleagues, in the words of Dick Van Dyke: "Hop! Hop! Hop! to Hoppers!" Meantime, this does serve to get us back to the Caribbean where the consummate novelist and short story writer can consume away, imbibing an ocean of talent and bestowing a mountain of prose.

"Wouldn't it be more fun," the boy replied, "to learn foreign words for `baboon'?"

"More fun, yes," John agreed, "but knowing `ogre' in a dozen tongues might save you from dismemberment at the hands of a child-roasting flesh eater."

"Just remove my clothing before you strike the flint," the child pleaded, "so you might have something by which to remember me."

Was love a cloud or a blanket? John and Adam gazed at each other from inches away, lost in wonder. Did they want to smother each other, or go play in the clouds? Did they wish to feel thus cloaked for years, or let the feelings drift to perhaps reappear?

"We called it experimenting'," Adam whispered, uncannily embellishing the unspoken issue at hand, "because playing' seemed too trivial, and `loving' overly complete, and, since there seemed nothing the least dirty or lewd about what happened, we foreswore much in the way of common usage."

"James and I called it `touching'," the adult responded. "Not very original. I like yours better."

"How did he tell you when he was ready?" the boy asked.

"He'd walked out with a school master when he was ten," the man replied, "an athlete and a poet, age of twenty-two. Their beginning was verbal during discussions of Greek poetry and manners. We started in the same vein: books leading to talk, talk leading to details, details reoccurring around times alone with Lassiter, his teacher, and ultimately to the details of his shirt, including the buttons."

"How many boys do you think it happens to?" Adam asked, implying his experience with Jeffrey Mann had derived from a similar situation.

"One in twenty or thirty, I should suppose," John replied. "Less than common but certainly not rare. A more interesting question is: how many among boys like yourself? Curious, friendly, funny, and attractive. Most boys are excluded by dint of personality; nobody would really want to do much of anything with them not involving a stick. There is, of course, a large hum-drum middle class who bring to mind the American phrase: `take it or leave it.' Then there are the Jameses, the Adams, the bright and likely. Of these, my guess is virtually all, depending on circumstances, are invited, and most occasionally accept."

"The circumstances of a ship most be all but wonderful," the younger male mused.

"The mates are actually required to spend time alone in their cabins instructing the cadets and best of the middies," John said, "so, yes, if it's an unending supply you crave, the Navy is the way, or I should say `would be the way'. In reality, it would be my guess that two out of the twenty of we officers have (or had) an Erasmus, and that you will be the third for the entire voyage."

"Will everyone know?" the child asked.

"Yes," John said, "hold their feet to the fire, and all would guess in the affirmative. The better question is: `will anyone care?' The answer to that is Yes, at any time our private behavior interfere with our duty in any detectable way, especially if any hint of favoritism is involved."

"So you couldn't have saved James because if you'd prevented him from doing what the others wanted, it would have indicated a special closeness."

"I would have fired my pistol in front of any other," John said.

"Well, it was fiendishly bad luck," Adam sighed. "We swim here all the time, and no one's ever been bothered."

"There is that side to it," the adult admitted, a soft appreciation of the boy's grace in his eyes.

"What's hard to figure out," Adam said, "is why there should be anything. I mean, wouldn't a benevolent god have left us alone, left things alone, let us sleep? Yet it's possible to picture, or at least imagine, everything but nothing, and the harder you try the more something there is, even if it's just your thoughts on the subject, then you go around looking at things and reading about them, and that starts out confusing, gets more so as you learn, finally leading to the realities of religion, which redefines nothing, only they call it `faith', then a friend gets killed, randomly and pointlessly, and nothing is what you're left with, except memories, which are something, and grief, which is worse than nothing, and the future, about which you know nothing except the past, other than it leads to nothing, which, once you've seen how the merciful father bestows travail on the afflicted, you'll probably be glad enough of when the time comes."

"Well, it can't all be funny," John observed. "It's something like James and myself; the two of us; your experimenting with Jeffrey. If it went on all day, every day, it would become naught but an irksome task. By the same light, if we were set aboard to skip and frolic and make merry from morn' till night, any joke would be just another joke, something to groan over, not laugh over, and a dull time we'd make of it. So a greater plan is at work. Make life grim, but reserve for a wealthy and privileged super-class, tiny in number, facets to existence which lend a humorous note to your travails'. Make the word miserable, to laugh at, and subjugate the love of men for boys, gilding it with forbidden gold, and, in furtherance of it all, consign the vast majority to poverty and set war after war and epidemic after epidemic loose in various lands and on the seas. If dauntlessly executed, this divine policy will lead man to having something to tell and write of, leaving for future generations a little something as garnish for their share of your nothing."

"Is the only thing that isn't nothing, writing?" Adam asked.

"I'd call it the most complete foil of nothing," John replied, "not the only one. A builder leaves a house, a planter an orchard, and a sculptor a statue, but these tell little of the artisan or artist. A painting may tell a bit more, but a book has the potential of telling all as Swift or Voltaire tell all. As Milton and Keats do. They become the brightest lights in the darkness and all of us would rather be stranded on a desert island with a few books rather than a hundred canvases or marble gods, unless they're unfortunate or worthless books, and most are, in which case we'd be happier making do with the sand and surf and wouldn't read them for water."

"Sounds more like fire than literature," young Adam observed.

"True," his friend agreed, "warm and comfort or scald and destroy. There's nothing like a wrong-headed writer to wear and dismast a vessel. They sell nonsense as god-given, poison as they scriven, and, like Bolivar, leave disoriented rubbish in their wake. The one you gave me the other day, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" will do the same. If you describe, in gruesome detail, the minute-by-minute catastrophe of a collapsing bridge, people will still use bridges, and perhaps safer bridges, but if you use the same technique of dwelling on the lurid details of a social issue, it's quite a different thing. People who would `never use that bridge' become involved, react to the inflammatory nature of the prose, and go off to do something about it.. The chance of their doing the right things in the right amounts and at the right time is the same as all the debris of an explosion landing neatly in a cart. All that can be said is that it will give us something to talk about well into the future, and, as a thought, it may comfort the Spanish to know that at a certain time in a certain place people at least almost as dumb as they were inhabited the planet."

"You set a high standard," the thirteen year old noted.

"I've served with enough Americans to have great confidence," John replied, "they will at least equal Philip II in their search for the worst possible way, and may actually discover a few new twists and turns of their own. On the other hand, they are rich enough to kill each other, North and South, in prodigious numbers, so the meteor flag may one day flutter to the Potomac's breeze, if the South doesn't sell out to the frogs in the meantime."

"The South knows the world is against them," Adam said, "and it just stiffens their resolve. Religion thrives on persecution and alienation -- finds in them cohesion of a misbegotten sort, similar to that found in the hatred of a scapegoat -- and politics is rarely better."

"But at least it can't be worse," John responded, and, mercifully for all of us, they let the subject drop, if only for the moment.

"What was I to do before the ogre roasted you?" the young officer asked.

"I remember," the boy said, "it almost seemed, at least at the time, the most important part. Leaving you something to remember me by."

"One shoe would suffice," the man whispered.

"That's like saying one dot or dash would suffice for Morse code," the boy whispered back, blinking: .. .-.. . --- .-- . -.-- --- ..- .

"That might suit for a poem," his friend noted, "the life and adventures of a likely boy, full of plan and manly ploy, giving pleasure and bestowing joy, eyes wide open, but never coy, then with fate the young lad meets, through bomb or blast or poisoned meat, and lies centered on a tear-verged cot, until his eyelids flutter their last dot." The divergence did not amount to an intrusion and they lay on the moss looking into each other's eyes.

"There's a way we could reach a conclusion as to how much I should leave for you to remember me by," Adam said.

"It has been on my mind," John nodded.

"Scientifically," the boy responded, "through experimentation."

"Precisely," the lieutenant agreed, "in one duffle I shall carry your head, and in the other -- perhaps my trunk -- the remainder of you, weighing carefully your various bequests and making notes on how I feel about each until I'm able to reach a conclusion."

"Sounds better than poisoned meat," the boy allowed.

"You have a knack for the enduring compliment," his friend responded.

"It's nice to be endurable," the child shot back.

"There was a boy quite invincible, who stood by a single principal; when dressed head to feet, in the humid tropic heat, he let it be know, while lying back prone, what he wore was both washable and rinsable." This time the banter did intrude.

"And there was a boy with a fist, a meaty extension of his wrist, and as he lay back, prone, glad not to be alone, he wished only to be kissed."

"There was a boy on a ketch, who was by the entire crew fetched. Asking why he'd been picked, thinking he was likely to be kicked, he found to his dismay, that the trouble at bay, was the Limerick he had stretched."

"Then the boy, he mumbled, `oh, heck,' all around with his eyes he did check, and seeing no gleam, just those about to steam, he knew they all meant his neck."

"Bon, bon, bon boy, bonny boy, bon;

On, on, on boy, bonny boy, on.

High, high, high boy, bonny boy, bon;

To the sky, sky, sky, boy, bonny boy, on."

Here, their very beauty was an obstacle. So awash were they in each other's eyes they could see no possibility of anything more. They were art, embodied, the somewhat ruffled a fearsome young hawk, and the feline grace of the child. Rugged young man, perky young boy. Just looking was so sufficient, so rewarding and complete it seemed a waste of time to even imagine more than gazing hard and soft at each other until either the island sank or the ocean rose.

"Was James specific about Lassiter?" Adam finally asked, "or did you just get ideas about what happened."

"Very specific," John answered, "but just our first two or three times together."

"I'm glad," Adam whispered, "because Jeff was with me, too. I didn't have anything to tell, just questions, and he answered them, once he was convinced I was really interested, by telling me about his first time. That really helped putting things in perspective. That it wasn't exactly a game or something you did for fun, like playing cards, nor was it half so serious as gambling or conventional love, but that it had it's own place above the trivial but short of the ethereal. That it had its own time and conditions, too; more of the former than given to the toilet, but privacy the essential condition, not necessarily absolute secrecy. We were sketching and talking together, when a storm approached. As it happened, we were drawing a barn belonging to one of his friends, so we merely ducked inside and were safe as houses. We put our pads aside and stood in the door of the tack room, looking out at the storm. He stood close behind me, then put his hands gently on my shoulders.

"Adam," Jeffrey Mann said, "when we talk about the Ancient Greeks I sometimes note a lingering look in your eyes, and sense questions on your tongue that you don't quite manage to get into words. I was the same way at your age. I'd heard the stories, but there was nothing specific in their work; allusions, perhaps, and cloistered references, but only enough to confuse. Soon I had more questions I wanted to ask than there are words with which to ask them, or so it seemed. As you get older, the truth becomes well known. You're twelve, and that's a typical age for boys TO learn. Because there is more; that which happened frequently and in most instances happily, not deemed fit for polite discussion, and I don't mean anything to do with the functions of the outhouse. I see in you what I felt myself, and offer you what I was offered, should it happen you are interested, in the first place."

"I am," the boy whispered firmly enough to be heard above the slashing hiss of the heavy rain.

"Do you like the feeling of my hands on your neck and shoulders?" the twenty four year old teacher asked.

"Yes," the boy replied.

"And if it happens we tarry here for two or three hours, that would be pleasing?"

"Yes," the boy repeated.

"Would you like to talk while I'm teaching you, or just concern ourselves with physical matters?" was the next question.

"To talk," the boy whispered firmly.

"Legends and gossip aside," Jeffrey said, "the Greek way, in the main, was for the man and boy to disrobe and kneel, facing each other, heads on each other's shoulders, depending on the relative height of man and boy. They talked of both ordinary things as well as each other, and the conversation continued once they had dressed and until they parted. There are more exciting avenues, or so I'm told, but I feel a teacher who leaves his student as a slate for others is doing the boy a service, so, in the half dozen special friendships I've had over the years, I've restricted physical behavior to the classic standard with virgins, awaiting, yes, I'll admit it, the company of an experienced boy who can be a new slate to me, if that isn't too confusing."

"I'm not experienced," Adam said.

"I would have been surprised if you were," the teacher said, "not that there is any way to tell, anything that stands out or calls to itself one's attention, but more a figment of a feeling that you had perhaps never lingered alone with a man or boy."

"It must have happened with some boys I know," Adam responded, "and I couldn't tell which ones if my life depended on it; couldn't even guess."

"And yet to get caught is bloody murder," the older male laughed. "We live in an era of such great jokes..."

"Then," Adam interrupted, "it would seem almost unpatriotic not to indulge in one of our own."

"Perhaps outright risky," the handsome athlete agreed, pulling the twelve year old gently to him. "It usually starts like this," he whispered, lowering his hands to the boy's waist. "First, outside the shirt to give you time to beg off, then, if you're comfortable, up underneath. Are you ready for that?"

"Yes," Adam whispered.

The teacher moved slowly, freeing his student's uniform shirt, then slowly inching his hands above the boy's belt. "This can last a long time, and it's okay to ask questions or talk," the man whispered.

"It feels so good I'm going to have to think of something," the twelve year old said, "because it also feels like it could be over really fast."

"I feel that, too," Jeffrey said, "that it could be over almost in an instant. Your skin is incredibly soft and the way you're moving and panting is like drugs washed down with Kentucky moonshine."

"You better pick a subject," the boy urged.

"Nothing tops colonies and colonialism," the man said.

Well, that was a little ham-handed, but I've vetted this script so carefully for compositional errors, not to mention back-to-back-to-back-to-back Limericks, that I feel I can get away with a lumpy change of pace, before returning to our favorite tack room and the hayloft directly above. In executing this bumptious intrusion, I'm pasting in an annotated article from my computer encyclopedia, on the subject just mentioned. This actually saves words, as adroit segues have to be typed out. So we'll just clunk in and I'll follow the editorial content with a column of asterisks so you can scroll to where you really belong the moment you wish to (approx. nine pages)..

[[["Colonies and Colonialism" (Article segments from Encarta).

Colonies of settlement resulted when citizens of a foreign country, the colonizing country, migrated to and eventually took complete control of a new area. [LOWER CASE ENTREES: Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002. © 1993-2001] Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.]

COMPLETE CONTROL? MAYBE IN THE CASE OF THE DONS WITH THEIR WHIPS, CHAINS, AND FLAMES. LESS FERALLY CATHOLIC NATIONS, FRANCE IN HAITI AND ENGLAND IN INDIA, AS TWO EXAMPLES, EXCERCISED, AT BEST (OR WORST, DEPENDING ON HOW ONE LOOKS AT IT), PARTIAL CONTROL, OFTEN WITH AS MUCH SENSITIVITY TO LOCAL WAYS AND WISHES, IN A TIME THAT WAS, BY OUR STANDARDS, THUGGISH AND BRUTISH TO ALL, AS COULD BE EXPECTED. HAITI, AS DESCRIBED MY MICHEAL SCOTT IN "TOM CRINGLE'S LOG", WAS, BEFORE THE BRIGANDS OF THE NIGHT, VERY LIKELY THE MOST HARMONIOUS COMBINATION OF HAPPY WHITES, HAPPY BLACKS, AND NATURAL BEAUTY ON THE PLANET OR IN ITS HISTORY.

These areas came to be dominated not only by foreign people but also by foreign crops and animals.

I GUESS IT WAS PIGGISH OF US TO INTRODUCE THE COW AND HOG TO AREAS FORMERLY RESTRICTED TO THE PROTIEN OF SNAKES AND GROUND SQUIRRELS (WITH GUESS-WHAT AS THE MOST SPECIAL PROTEIN TREAT). ENVIRONMENTAL PROCLIVITIES OF THE TIME WERE SUCH THAT, AS IN THE STORY, NO STANDING FOREST WAS TO BE FOUND WITHIN SEVENTY MILES OF ANY AMERICAN CITY -- BY 1850.

The foreign colonizers ordinarily substituted their culture for the existing one

"MANHATTAN ISLAND" TO "LOS ANGELES". SOUNDS PRETTY INCLUSIVE TO ME, ESPECIALLY IF "CHICAGO" IS INCLUDED. IN NO CASE DID ENGLISH SETTLERS IMPOSE THEIR CULTURE ON SOCIETIES WHICH HAD ADVANCED SIGNIFICANTLY BEYOND THE NEANDERTAL OR THE STONE-PILERS OF THE VERY ANCIENT WORLD (SAID STONES USUALLY PILED BY WHIPPED SLAVES).

Settlers often excluded native inhabitants from their society or killed many of them in violent confrontations or by exposure to disease. In the Americas, many Native Americans died from diseases introduced by Europeans, diseases to which they had no immunity.

VIOLENCE? CORTEZ HAD HIS SCRIBES PHYSICALLY COUNT THE 106,000 HUMAN SKULLS SURROUNDING MONTEZUMA'S CASTLE, FEELING NO ONE WOULD BELIEVE AN ANECDOTAL ACCOUNTING. THE FIRST THING THE OGALA SIOUX DID WITH THEIR SPANISH HORSES WAS RAID AND SLAUGHTER THE TRIBES WITHOUT. WHEN COLUMBUS TOOK ABOARD SAILORS OF THE FRIENDLY ARAWAK TRIBES, THEY'D BECOME CAMATOS WITH FEAR IF HE EVEN TURNED HIS SHIP IN THE DIRECTION OF HISPANIOLA. LATER WHITE INTERVENTIONISTS DESCRIBE CARIB CAMPS WITH PREGNANT GIRLS, CAPTURED FROM THE ARAWAK, KEPT IN CAGES, A PRECOLONIAL VARIATION ON THE THEME: GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER.

EUROPEAN COLONIALISTS, ASSUMING THEY SURVIVED SCURVY AND THE HAZARDS OF PRIMITIVE SEAS, DIED LIKE FLIES FROM MALARIA, ALONE ON A LIST OF MAJOR DISEASES. THIS SHOE COULD HAVE JUST AS EASILY BEEN ON THE OTHER FOOT, I.E., A PLAGUE BROUGHT TO EUROPE (AS SYPHILIS PROBABLY WAS). ALSO, WHAT COULD BE MORE DARWINIAN THAN "FITNESS" IN RESISTANCE TO DISEASE?

Eventually, native people were able to successfully contest white control of the colony, both the control by the colonizing country and control by the settlers.

INTERESTING USE OF THE WORD "SUCCESSFULLY". ALL COLONIES HAVE SPIRALED OUT OF CONTROL AND INTO AT LEAST TEMPORARY MADNESS ON INDEPENDENCE. I'VE LIVED 12 YEARS IN THE FORMER COLONY OF BRITISH HONDURAS AND HAVE YET TO SEE THE VAGUEST IOTA OF EVIDENCE THE COUNTRY OF BELIZE WOULDN'T BE FAR BETTER OFF HAD IT REMAINDED, LIKE BERMUDA AND THE CAYMAN ISLANDS, A PROUD ADULT PARTNER OF A GREAT PARENT. I WOULD FEEL THE SAME ABOUT MEXICO, WHERE I LIVED, AT STREET LEVEL, FOUR YEARS, WERE ITS MOTHER COUNTRY ANY OTHER THAN CATHOSICK, SAVAGE SPAIN.

In internal colonialism, one geographic area or ethnic group dominated another within the same country. Examples of this kind of internal control include the economic domination of the American South by the North after the American Civil War (1861-1865), or the influence of England over other areas of the British Isles.

AND WHAT WERE WE YANKS MEANT TO DO, LET THESE LOATHSOME, ASSASINATING, PLAGUE SPREADING (OR AT LEAST THEY TRIED) FORBEARERS OF HOLLINGS AND HELMS STARVE ALL THE WAY TO DEATH? TO THIS DAY, THE IRISH HATE US BECAUSE WE DIDN'T DO -- ENOUGH -- TO HELP DURING THE POTATO FAMINE. EVERYONE ELSE INSISTS OF HAVING IT THEIR WAY, OPPOSING OUR WAY USUALLY DEFINING "THEIR WAY".

In spheres of influence or informal empires, Europeans interfered in the internal affairs of a state but stopped short of formal political annexation

FAMOUS STORY FROM INDIA: A RAJA KILLED AN UNTOUCHABLE. TO THE ENGLISH HE GAVE A TYPICALLY CLEVER RATIONALE: RAJAS CANNOT COMMIT CRIMES, KILLING WAS A CRIME, THEREFORE THE RAJA COULDN'T HAVE KILLED HIS SLAVE. THE ENGLISH HANGED THE RAJA. RAJAS STOPPED KILLING UNTOUCHABLES.

It has been said that the three primary motives for establishing colonies were gold, God, and glory, but the main incentives were usually economic.

THE LITERATURE ("OUT OF AFRICA", FOR EXAMPLE, AS WELL AS THE WORKS OF JOHN MASTERS, E.M. FORSTER, AND THE BBC'S "THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN" SERIES) PLAINLY DELINEATE A MOTIVE OF LOVE. OF COURSE MY FICTIVE CHARACTERS OFTEN LOVE EACH OTHER, SO MAYBE I'M JUST THAT WAY.

...Spain became a rich and powerful country largely by plundering the riches of existing civilizations in the Americas and by seizing the area's mineral wealth through mining.

WELL SPOKEN. THE GREATEST TRAGEDY, BY ONE MILLION TIMES, IN HUMAN HISTORY IS SPAIN'S INTRUSION IN THE AMERICAS. THE GREATEST MIRACLE IN HUMAN HISTORY IS THAT HIS MOST CATHOLIC MAJESTY SQUANDERED HIS NEVER-SINCE-EQUALED WEALTH ON ARMADAS TO SEAT A BISHOP IN LONDON.

Sometimes such regulations [THE NAVIGATION ACTS] backfired. During the French and Indian War (1754-1763) in North America, the British Parliament sought to increase revenues to pay the costs of defending the American colonies. It used the Navigation Acts to levy heavier duties on the American colonies. American colonists felt oppressed by these taxes, which are considered to be one of the causes of the American Revolution (1775-1783).

SILLY BOY, THE COLONIES WERE PROSPEROUS AND THE ADDED TAXES A PITTANCE (COMPARED TO THOSE LEVIED IN ENGLAND). THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS CAUSED BY A TINY GROUP OF RECALCITRANT MISFITS AND DISGRUNTLED SYNCOPHANTS (BOTH EMPOWERED AND ENABLED BY MY ANCESTOR, WILLIAM EMERSON, MINISTER OF CONCORD, MASS., 1760 -- 1775 (SEE "POET OF PHU BAI" IN THE BI ADULT/YOUNG -FRIENDS ARCHIVE)) TOUTING "LIBERTY", LIKE SHOE POLISH, TO GET RID OF THE ADMIRATLY WHICH KEPT INTERFERING WITH THEIR PIRACY AND SMUGGLING, TO WIT, SAM ADAMS AND THAT INCALCUABLE HYPOCRIT AND MORON, HANCOCK, DEMANDER OF "THE BILL OF RIGHTS".

Because most settlement colonies gained political self-rule early, they could use protective tariffs (taxes on imports) to shelter their young industries. These industries could grow without competition from more advanced industries in other countries. The result was high-wage labor and a high standard of living, both for white settlers. Examples of settlement colonies that followed this model include British colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

AGAIN, A GRAIN OF TRUTH. THOSE "FIT FOR" GOT.

THE SLANT AND ATTITUDE OF THIS ENTIRE LEFTIST ARTICLE IS THAT COLONISTS INVADED UTOPIA. IN MOST CASES, THE TRUTH IS THEY PARTNERED WITH HELL, MAKING THE BEST THEY COULD OF IT TO THE LONG-TERM BEST INTERESTS OF EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD. I'LL TAKE THE LIBERTY OF INCLUDING HERE ANOTHER QUOTE, THIS FROM THE ARTICLE ON MANIFEST DESTINY: Manifest Destiny, jingoistic tenet holding that territorial expansion of the United States is not only inevitable but divinely ordained. AND WHAT IF WE HADN'T BEEN "JINGOISTIC"? AND HERE'S A NIFTY IRONY: ISN'T IT A COLLETRAL TENET THAT MICROSOFT'S EXPANSIONIST POLICY (THIS USER REMEMBERS "GEOWORKS") SMOTHERED HUNDREDS OF COMPETING ENTERPRISES TO GIVE US A LARGELY COMMON SYSTEM THAT SAVED THE CIVILIZED WORLD? (UNLESS THERE'S AN ECONOMIST OUT THERE WHO BELIEVES WE'D STILL BE VIABLE (OR EVEN ALIVE), LESS THE SEVEN MILLION JOBS AND 25 PERCENT OF GDP ATTRIBUTED TO THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION.)

As a whole, the problems of an exploitation colony economy have tended to persist after the colony gained political independence, for several reasons. The former mother country sometimes continued to exercise some control over the economy, maintaining close relationships with the former colony's new rulers and policy-makers. These colonies have also had difficulty attracting loans into the subsistence sector because returns on such loans are low. Investment has tended to go into the export sector where it will produce better results because exports, such as tin, coffee, or palm oil, are in demand and have established markets. For the same reasons, foreign aid has tended to flow into the export sector.

WHY? BECAUSE THEY WERE DRIVEN OR MANDATED OUT, IN THE FIRST PLACE. THAT THE FORMER MOTHER COUNTRY CONTINUED EXERTING INFLENCE IS THE ONLY REASON, IN MOST CASES, THERE WAS SURVIVAL, AT ALL. THESE COLONIES HAVE HAD DIFFICUTLY ATTRACTING LOANS, BECAUSE INVESTMENT ISN'T A GAME, IT'S LIFE AND DEATH (HOW ABOUT YOUR PORTFOLIO?) THE ARTICLE IS ACCURATE IN ITS APPRAISAL OF FOREIGN AID, AS ONLY ONE WHO OFTEN SEES GIANT NEW U.A.W. PICKUP TRUCKS BEARING THE LOGOS OF UNICEF, W.H.O., AND THEIR ILK, BUT NEITHER KNOWS OR KNOWS ANYONE WHO KNOWS, AFTER OVER A DOZEN YEARS IN RESIDENCE, ANYONE WHO HAS EVER BEEN HELPED BY ANY UNITED-FUND TYPE ORGANIZATION, CAN FULLY APPRECIATE. (OF COURSE, WITH THREE HUNDRED BIG-BROTHER/LITTLE-BROTHER MATCHES IN LOS ANGELES, THEY AREN'T DOING MUCH BETTER IN THEIR IMPLEMENTATION OF SOCIALIST IDEALS AT HOME.)

A pivotal point in European expansion occurred at the end of the 15th century. In 1492 Italian navigator Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic in an effort to reach Asia by a new route. Basing his voyage on his calculation of the earth's size (an estimate that turned out to be wrong), Columbus reached the Caribbean islands off what would later be called North and South America. On that journey as well as others that followed, Columbus claimed the areas and established outposts for Spain, which financed his voyages. Although at first he insisted the area was part of Asia, Columbus eventually realized that he was exploring what he called a "New World," as yet unknown to Europeans.

EVER HEARD THE EXPERESSION "TO DAMN WITH FAINT PRAISE"? PERFECT EXAMPLE. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, IN RETURNING, PRIMITIVE NAVIGATION AIDS NOTWITHSTANDING, FOUR TIMES TO HIS OUTPOSTS IN THESE TREACHEROUS WATERS, DEMONSTRATED LIKELY THE GREATEST GENIUS IN HUMAN HISTORY, TO SAY NOTHING OF MONUMENTAL COURAGE. ASK ANY MODERN MARINER IF HE OR SHE WOULD LIKE TO TRY IT THEIR WAY.

A distinct type of resistance in exploitation colonies was the slave revolt. The most dramatically successful was the Haitian Slave Revolt, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, led by François Dominique Toussaint-Louverture. The revolt, which was triggered by the French Revolution, lasted from the early 1790s until 1804, when Haiti received its independence.

THIS POLITICALLY CORRECT ASSESMENT CAN BE RIDICULED WITH BUT A SINGLE WORD: HAITI (OOPS, ALMOST FORGOT PAPA DOC).

Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860), two conflicts between Britain and China over trading rights. In the Second Opium War, also known as the Arrow War or the Anglo-French War in China, French forces joined the British. The wars are so named because they centered on the trade of opium, a powerful narcotic that British merchants were smuggling into China in vast quantities.

MY FORBES ANCESTORS, VIRULENT ABOLITIONISTS, MADE THE LARGEST (AND LEAST KNOWN) OF AMERICAN FORTUNES IN THIS TRADE, BEFORE GOING ON TO FUND AND MANAGE THE BELL SYSTEM AND THE BURLINGTON ROUTE. THE TRUTH IS, WHATEVER THE OFFICIAL POLICY, WE WEREN'T ALLOWED IN WITHOUT THE DRUG. IF WE HADN'T, OTHER WOULD HAVE -- YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD THAT ONE BEFORE -- AND THE WORLD WOULD NOT HAVE TRANSISTOR ONE.

Nationalism is not easy to define BUT THEN NEITHER IS "STUPIDITY". Nations are ideas, imagined communities. HE SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN CHEAP AND CHEESY, CHANGE-WITH-THE-WIND (OR BLINDLY-RESIST-ANY-AND-ALL-WINDS) EMOTION. They may derive in part from characteristics that members of a group have in common, such as language, religion, race, political state, or historical experience, PLAIN IGNORANCE, OF COURSE, NEVER PLAYING A ROLE. Even in Europe, virtually no nation is completely homogeneous. Typically a country contains several ethnic, religious, and perhaps other kinds of divisions, which could claim to be nations in their own right. The same is true of colonies and former colonies, only more so. Some colonies contained a hundred or more different tribal groups with histories of long and bitter conflict and weak to nonexistent economic links. Often they had nothing in common except their incorporation into highly artificial colonial units made up by Europeans.

I SEE IT AS "TRIBALISM". ROBERT E. LEE, HAD THE SOUTH WON, WOULD HAVE FOUGHT FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF VIRGINIA, HIS COUNTY, HIS TOWN, HIS STREET, AND, ULTIMATELY, HIS FRONT LAWN. LET'S USE "ENCARTA" TO PROVE THE POINT, QUOTING FROM ITS ARTICLE ON MY GREAT GREAT GRANDUNCLE, JEFFERSON DAVIS: He was in constant conflict with extreme exponents of the doctrine of states' rights, and his attempts to have high military officers appointed by the president were opposed by the governors of the states. The judges of state courts constantly interfered in military matters through judicial decisions. OF SUCH STERN STUFF OUR MANY OF OUR HEROES MADE. ON THE OTHER HAND, TRAITOR LEE IS DESCRIBED BY "ENCARTA" THUSLY: Lee, Robert E(dward) (1807-70), brilliant Confederate general, whose military genius was probably the greatest single factor in keeping the Confederacy alive through the four years of the American Civil War.

"ALIVE" -- IN CONTEXT -- IS THIS GUY (JOHN W. CELL, PH.D. (WOULDN'T YOU JUST KNOW IT)) TRYING TO BE FUNNY?

Conclusion

Were colonies worth the costs to the colonizing country? The answer to that question varies. A visit to London or other centers of British trade reveals the docks, shipping and trading firms, merchant banks, and even street names that were closely related to commercial ventures with India, Malaya, the West Indies, and Africa. But profitability was by no means constant, and the mother country was responsible for administrative and police costs.

Especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, colonial relationships undoubtedly helped the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries accumulate capital for industrialization. Even then, however, the bulk of the capital was raised internally from the profits of agriculture. In the 18th century, before the abolition of slavery, Great Britain's colonial relationship with the West Indies was much more lucrative than afterwards, when those slave-based colonies became a liability. Some experts believe that the long-term decline of the British economy that set in about the 1870s was cushioned by its colonial empire. Without colonies, the long slide might have been more like a sudden crash. A crash, however, might have encouraged the British to create a more modern, efficient industrial plant, as Germany and Japan did after their disasters in World War II (1939-1945). DIDN'T THEY COST 55 MILLION DEATHS, RUNING PERHAPS FIVE TIMES THAT NUMBER OF LIVES?

On the other hand, colonialism caused many problems for former colonies. The economics of old colonial systems linger, especially in former exploitation colonies, where these nations struggle to overcome INDIGINOUS, PERVASIVE, AND OF LONG STANDING depressed economies and archaic class systems. Also, one of the most controversial legacies of colonialism is cultural intolerance OF WHITES. White settlers who conquered nonwhite peoples often held the attitude that ethnic and cultural differences define some people as superior and others as inferior. SOME CULTERS ARE SUPERIOR AND OTHERS ARE INFERIOR, AS WE CONTINUE TO DISCOVER IN OUR OWN COUNTRY OF TODAY. Some colonizing countries began education programs that maintained white superiority by distancing native students from their own culture and history, A/K/A PROGRESS.

Although imperialism, OR LACK THEREOF, in one form or another remains an issue, by the late 20th century colonialism had become obsolete. In 1970 the United Nations General Assembly, which by then was dominated by a huge majority of former colonies, declared colonialism a crime. LIKE I ALWAYS SAY, THERE'S NOTHING LIKE DEMOCRACY (EXCEPT, OF COURSE, RELIGION) WHEN IT COMES TO THE OUTRIGHT INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF SHORT-SIGHTED, NARROW MINDED, OBSTRUCTIONIST, BIGOTED INFERIORITY. TWO EXAMPLES: FIRST, THE LAWYER WHO REFUSED TO ACCEPT TEN MILLION DOLLARS AS A LEGACY FOR AN ISLAND BOY, INDAVERTENT AND UNNAMED HEIR TO A SHIPPING FORTUNE, KNOWING U.S. TAXES WOULD REDUCE THE LEGACY TO ZERO IN SEVEN YEARS, THE FOREIGN-BORN ATTORNEY HELD OUT FOR THE LUCKY BOY ON THE BASIS HE COULD NOT TURN DOWN FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS FOR HIS CLIENT (THIS HELPS WITH OUR DEFINITION OF "STUPIDITY", ONE THING LAWYERS ARE GOOD AT.). SECOND: HERE IN BELIZE, IF YOU GIVE SOMEONE A NEW FIVE DOLLAR BILL, THEY WILL IMMEDIATELY FOLD AND CRUMPLE IT TO THE BEST OF THEIR ABILITY -- I SUPPOSE A REFLEXIVE ACT AGAINST THE SYSTEM. IF A PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN WERE LAUNCED ENCOURAGING THE PUBLIC TO MAKE THEIR CURRENCY LAST, THE RESULT WOULD BE YET MORE FOLDING AND SPINDLING. INDEPENDENCE. THE REAL DEAL. ON TOP OF ATTITUDE, THERE'S COMPETENCE. AGAIN, AN EMBLEMATIC STORY. I'VE HAD A PHONE FOR FIVE YEARS. THE FIRST YEAR, I WASN'T LISTED IN THE BOOK, THE SECOND YEAR, LISTED CORRECTLY, THE THIRD YEAR LISTED WITH FIRST AND LAST NAMES REVERSED, AND IN THE FOURTH, NOT LISTED. After that, even though Western societies continued to intervene in other countries' affairs—for example, the U.S. invasion GIVE ME A BREAK of Panama in 1989—the idea of establishing formal colonial control had become unthinkable, ALBEIT THE ALTERNATIVE IS UNSURVIVABLE.. The remnants of colonialism were confined to a few small islands, such as Bermuda, a HAPPY, SAFE, AND PROSPEROUS self-governing dependency of the United Kingdom. Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved, SPECIFICALLY INCLUDING THE RIGHTS TO OBFUSCATE, INCULCATE, FABRICATE, ELIMINATE, ALIENATE, AND, ABOVE ALL, TO INDOCTRINATE.

COLONIALISM WAS BY FAR THE BEST OPTION OF ITS TIME. WITHOUT IT WE'D STILL BE SIX INCHES FROM BERRY PICKING, STONE PILING, UNIVERSAL PRIVATION AND UNENDING SLAUGHTER, WITH NOTHING OF ELECTRICTY, FOR EXAMPLE, TO SHOW FOR IT. THE VAST PROBLEMS, SO LIKELY TO BE FATAL, FACED TODAY ARE ENGENDERED BY TRIBALISM, INVARIABLY PROMOTED BY INGRATES, PERENNIALLY DISGRUNTLED AGITATORS, CHARLATANS, EMPIRE-BUILDERS (IN THE SMARMY SENSE), AND CHARISMATICS. (JIMMY HOFFA WAS AN ARCHETYPE, AS WAS JOHN GOTTI, WHO ENJOYED A HIGH LEVEL OF POPULARITY, RESPECT, SUPPORT AND LOYALTY BY VIRTUE OF A HAIRCUT, A SUIT, SHOES, A PERSONA (ATTITUDE), AND SUPPLYING CHICKEN AND FIREWORKS FOR THE OCCASSIONAL BLOCK PARTY.)

IF BELIZE, WHOSE REAL DOLLAR IS WORTH TWO CENTS, NOT FIFTY, EVER WANTS TO HOLD A PLACE IN WORLD HISTORY, IT MAY DO SO BY BEING THE FIRST COUNTRY TO SUE TO BE FULLY REINSTATED AS A CROWN COLONY BY VIRTUE OF BEING MISLED INTO INDEPENDENCE (BY A POLITICIAN NAMED GEORGE PRICE) DURING A PERIOD OF TEMPORARY DISORIENTATION AND VICTIMIZATION -- THE PRODIGAL NATION. I GO AROUND ASKING KIDS: "WHAT'S SEVEN-TIMES-SEVEN?" REUNITED WITH ENGLAND, WHO KNOWS, SOME YOUNGSTER MIGHT ONE DAY ANSWER: "FORTY-NINE." YES, BUT WILL I BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND? AT LEAST IN THIS COLONY, LOSS OF PARENT MEANS LOSS OF LANGUAGE. CHILDREN GROWING UP INARTICULATE, IN ANY TONGUE, AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO ANYONE OUTSIDE THEIR IMMEDIATE PEER GROUP. I HEAR IT EVERY DAY AND HAVE DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING A WORD OF IT.

CONCLUSION.

DEAR DR. CELL:

IN RECOGNITION OF AND IN OUT OF APPRECIATION FOR YOUR ARTICLE ON COLONIALISM, WE WOULD LIKE TO COMMISSION ANOTHER PIECE FOR "ENCARTA". THIS WOULD DELINEATING THE ROLE OF THOSE OF HEBREW DESCENT IN THE MEDIA, LABOR LAW, THE FASHION INDUSTRIES, AND THE JEWELRY TRADE OF OUR DEMOCRACY. WE LOOK FORWARD TO RECEIVING YOUR BALANCED AND CONSIDERED DISCUSSION OF THESE SUBJECTS FROM BOTH THEIR HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES.

SINCERELY,

LEFTY L. LEFTISTA EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

AS A WRITER, I'M REGRETTABLY LIKE OUR BAD-BOY PUGILIST, MIKE TYSON. I DON'T WANT TO SEE MY OPONENT SO MUCH AS MOVE AFTER I'M DONE WITH HIM (WISHING HIM NO PERMANENT HARM, OF COURSE). READ "ENCARTA'S" ARTICLE ON PRISONS, AS AN EXAMPLE. SEE HOW OFTEN CANADA IS MENTIONED. MEXICO, OVER THREE TIMES ITS SIZE, AND MUCH CLOSER IN A REAL SENSE, IS ALMOST NEVER MENTIONED. (AN INTERESTING ASIDE: THE MOST LOPSIDED STATISTIC I'VE EVER READ IN AN ADMITTEDLY NOT PARTICULARLY SCHOLARLY LIFETIME: IN THE U.S. THERE WERE, IN A RECENT YEAR, 14,000 ASSAULTS OF PRISON OFFICIALS BY PRISONERS. IN CANADA, THE SAME YEAR, THERE WAS ONE.) THIS IS TRUE OF MANY ARTICLES, MUCHO CAN-NA-DA, POCITO MEHECO. SOMEBODY IN REDMOND, PERHAPS A LITTLE FAR NORTH FOR HIS OWN GOOD, SHOULD RESPOND TO SUCH A GLARING AND BIASED OVERSIGHT, OTHERWISE ANOTHER SOMEBODY MIGHT COME ALONG AND KNOCK HIS LITERARY BLOCK OFF. PARTING B-B: IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA'S ARTICLE ON THE MOTION PICTURE, "CAPE FEAR", JOHN D. MACDONALD, THE FILM'S WRITER, RECEIVES NO MENTION, WHILE ONE BOB NOBLE, PEDESTRIAN, IS IMMORTALIZED.

RECENTLY I'VE BEEN PUBLISHING MY STORIES ANONYMOUSLY. MY NAME IS THOMAS C. EMERSON. I LIVE IN DANGRIGA, BELIZE. MY URL IS Thomas@btl.net. ALL COMMENTS IN CAPITALS ARE MINE.]]]

Yes, the subject had worked its spell, allowing them to slip out of their clothes and make their way to the loft as the intensity between them slowly grew rather than ending abruptly in a panting flare of fireworks. They knelt and huddled to each other, their hands finally homing in on the deferred pleasures of first tentative then open fondling. The rain hammered overhead. "Feel free to break any rule you wish to," Adam whispered to his handsome teacher.

"Great temptation inspires great discipline," Jeffrey whispered back, "and, while shall always wonder what it might have been like sharing alternative pleasures with you, breaking my rule, however silly, as time passes I shall be rewarded with the knowledge that at some imagined moment you will pant and shudder to the mouth of another, much as I anticipate an experienced `other' running his fingers through my hair and feeling his hands clench into fists as his hot spill approaches."

"In other words," the boy rasped, seeming to anticipate the prophesy in regard to his panting, "being true Greek allows us to talk."

"The conversational adjunct works both ways," the older male noted, "as we've already seen. It allows extension. Whatever would we have done without the perfidies of colonialism, for example? but it, under other circumstances, also stimulates completion, while leaving just that tantalizing bit incomplete, a deficiency you will actually take away as something concrete, as in something to stimulate your next forbidden engagement."

"Well," the boy mused, "with so many gods they must have had it come out right once in awhile."

"Nothing makes a strange gift," the teacher agreed with a nod, "lacking to inspire yearning, I suppose one might say."

"Besides being a point of conversation," the boy noted.

"Exactly so," the teacher responded, "to dither on, perchance to dither the more, thus standing you in good stead as precedent for those alliances you make before you marry."

"Blimy," quoth the boy, "wouldn't that be overdoing it?" and indeed he reacted physically to the very thought, shrinking to half his engorged size.

"The more severe the alternatives," his teacher observed, "the more graceful their want."

"Ah, yes," the child sighed, "and the more distracting discourse devoted to them. It almost seems tricky, yet the rain abateth not, the hours stretch ahead, and I've never dreamed of anything this engaging happening to me.

"I wish it never to be over."

"The spinning world will see to that, I'm afraid," Jeffrey said, "as it always does."

"I think it brings as much relief as parting sorrow," the mature boy noted.

"And perhaps many times more," his friend agreed, "for what a curse to be born for most."

"And if you survive, you get old," the boy mused in his turn, instinctively joining his teacher in milking the most from their stormy interlude. But they were young and healthy, vastly fit and attractive, free of that sex which tumbles precipitously precipitates at age thirteen, having, at the same time, the audacity to age. All was not lost in a bleak and clammy fog of nadir. People were dumber than animals, they'd always be up to something a baboon would circle to avoid. Life was a plethora of Machiavellian spears and arrows, loud mouths dominating large brains, sometimes to the great merriment of any survivors. (A particularly repugnant cult had the droll audacity to base their misbegotten legacy on a tea party.) In Blighty, Victorian Calvinism, while causing widespread frustration and repression along with frequent episodes of addiction and outright madness, had, at the same time, intensified tenfold precisely the pranks and play sternly and arbitrarily denied. Even in tragedy -- Nelson's fall to a cruel citizen sniper -- there had been the march into Russia as a comic counterpoint, so say nothing of the rest of the battle. The joke of a Latin American constitution; did it ever fail to jolly a table of hail fellows? And it was both self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing; the more jokes, the more laughter. The more laughter, the madder people got, forming laughable nations in response and thus beginning, often with verve a gusto, an entire new circle. There were jokes concerning slaves: the shabby, if not violent, treatment of the field lot by their cousins, the house lot, as an example. Impressment. Spill away your life in the ale house and you might as leave spill it away in service to queen and country. The humor of the rich: gout and distemper. That of the middle class: the rich. And workers managed to drink and gamble away enough to make a joke of their want. The military with its fuss and feathers; schools with their pedagogues and waspish spinsters. Yes, in sum, it was a world of volcanic insanity intermingled with vast deserts of mediocrity (on a good day), but for all its helplessness and hopelessness it did put on a vivid series of spectacles, however transient the virtues of the entertainment and oblique the orientation required to appreciate the finer points of the presentation.

Ah, it was a show, and it had but one purpose: to go on.

"It can happen without the use of hands," Jeffrey whispered to his student, "spontaneously, while holding each other as we are now."

"I was more wondering how one might go about keeping it from happening," the twelve year old responded.

"Well," he teacher replied, "the worst thing I could do is tell you about my hunting trip with my uncle, Shell. How he first helped me with my marksmanship from the standing position, then sitting, and, finally, prone. Detailing, for example, the sound and texture of his voice as I squeezed of my first shots with the little training musket -- I was just your age -- and how his hands, first teaching and steadying, began stroking and coaxing. Stories like that would be inappropriate, as would your questions regarding my young uncle's age and, of course, the appearance of the tall, Nordic athlete with his long muscular legs and flat belly. You would not want, I feel sure, to know the feelings which tingled through me the moment his fingers got bold at the sleeve of my jersey, wending their way, as I drew my bead, across my upper chest and gripping to steady my shot, yet not moving a blessed inch as the report echoed to silence."

"None of that would do any good," Adam panted in agreement.

"Well, it is a dull old world if one doesn't carry a light," the master mused to the boy, "though I haven't the least idea what that means."

"Maybe you just said it so I wouldn't ask about how long after you fired your musket, your athletic young uncle kept his fingers inside the sleeve of your shirt," the boy intoned.

"Cor, and haven't you just put your finger on it," Jeffrey said, "and in the very nick of time, too, for mark my words, I was about to add to my folly by detailing Uncle Shell's experiences with a band of training artillery men. How he availed himself of his bedroom window to journey forth at night to spy on the detachment, finally realizing, night by night, he could steal veritable handfuls of powder. They were encamped for a month but it only took him a week to gather enough ordnance to make a fine explosion in the embers of their campfire, and how, availing himself of a strategic boulder, he sheltered himself from the concussion, immediately resuming a stat on the rock so he could watch the scramble to put out the two hundred or so small fires started by the shower of embers. His levity, aye, his very presence was at first looked upon askance, well, that wouldn't be hard to imagine, now would it? But his winsome way, and the fact he'd done no real harm, the horses inured to the pranks of artillerymen, quite quelled those for the moment inflamed, and, to shorten the story considerably, the twelve men and two officers of the troop took a mighty shine to young Shell and welcomed him frequently as their mascot and, well, I suppose `toy' isn't too far off the mark."

"But he'd toyed with them, first," Adam noted, finding in technicality some relief from the rising tension, inevitable in the presence of his engaging friend.

"Indeed, it all did start in fun," Jeffrey responded, "and so it remained for the rest of the month. He was used with great care and only entered once by a doe eyed beauty in celebration of that lad's fifteenth birthday."

"I'd have thought they might have bound him and then had each of his victims, in turn, torment him with long, tangential stories."

"The stories were more derivative," the teacher observed, "related to the early experiences of each of the officers and men, not to extraneous events."

"I stand erected," quoth the boy.

"And the longer rejected and protected," the young man responded, "the more perfected."

"It does rather give one something to live for," Adam couldn't help agreeing.

"And you will carry that from here," Jeffrey said, "the very imperfections will make you seek perfection, which you will easily find, but the fact it came with some struggle, something more than routine involvement on your part, will always stand you good stead and place you a cut above the others. A lout with an alternative beginning will end up in gin mill alleys, unable to find the missing link, but a boy of your spirit and refinement, well, that's a very different story. You end up with a guide who may lead you, especially in an island environment such as this, almost anywhere you can conceive of. Not any hand will do for you, not any mouth, yet you will know one might, and that possibility -- nay, probability for one so lithe and fair, indeed, inevitability -- will cause you to be more alert to others with many fair consequences, should the fickle nature of fate deny you the satisfaction you wish but are worldly enough and smart enough not to crave."

"It might be simpler to read Chinese in a mirror," the boy responded, "but I'll probably understand in due time."

"If it helps," the teacher suggested, "you can anticipate teaching. Being together as we are, at my age, with a stripling your age. Will you be able to intoxicate him to the point of no return merely with the imagery of your fair words, suspend him, so a blind and mindless -- soon forgotten or perhaps bitterly remembered -- lust for gratification doesn't ensue? Steep him in the Grecian way without indoctrination so that in the end you add something to him rather than subtracting it? Imbue him with sensuality in its proper place, presenting it as neither frivolous nor all-consuming? Teach him to seek, and, as I just said, not to crave? Be special in his life, for whatever time fate allows you to spend together, without becoming the center of his life?"

"I think I'd prefer Shell's way," Adam replied, "I mean how many boys actually get to pull off a gunpowder plot?"

"I'm in no fair position to argue the matter," Jeffrey pointed out, "having myself yielded in the presence of powder and ball."

"A story with a long fuse," Adam sighed.

"Well," the teacher responded, "if you picture a tall, athletic young adult standing close behind a willowy sprig of a boy, the former's hands caressing the child, first through the sleeves of his light cotton jersey, then at his waist and up under his shirt; if you were close enough to hear the ragged quality of their breathing and the half-croak of a frog as the man quizzed the boy on any previous occasions he might have let an older male touch him, and saw for yourself how gentle the adult was with the child, and how shyly the twelve year old responded, how they talked of various things as they became naked for each other, how they then huddled together as the talk went on, how the details of what had happened to the man when he was a boy, how a blanket had been placed on his famous rock and the lad held on it, spread-eagle and panting chest to the sky, as well as how each of the sixteen approached, fondled the lithe, arching form and then spilled heavily of his seed on the heaving chest or the slim belly and sinewy legs, and how the boy looked after an hour, after repeated visits from each and every young stallion, how he was slicked with their cum, how it sheeted his flanks and pooled at his navel, well, my guess is you wouldn't mind a bit of a fuse, yourself, and that's not even taking into account the actions of the little doe-eyed drummer boy, how steadfast he was between the legs of the youth, using his strong and skillful hands to, well, this is an awkward way to say it, to beat in a perfect rhythm as adult after adult splashed and showered the lad, yes, for the best part of an hour, before taking the boy fully so each male present could watch the jet of his youthful seed as he wildly released himself for all to see."

"Vivid is nice," the boy murmured.

"And so life will be for you, from this day on," Jeffrey said, "made the more vivid by a curiosity heightened by the unease prompted by the likelihood I'm not the only eccentric deviant out there as well as the possibility your further adventures may not proceed in a linear routine to a forgone conclusion."

"Heaven forbid," the boy couldn't help whispering.

"There's nothing so sweet to a teacher's ear," Jeffrey said, "as the perfect response of a likely boy. To establish an ideal balance; it seems such an unachievable goal in times such as these, to blend curiosity and skepticism with exactitude in such a complex vessel as is the boy of a dozen years. Yes, Adam, you are a sensation, a triumph deluxe, the faultless creation of a refined artist, the very prodigy a soul like myself, who willingly encouraged his handsome young athlete of an uncle by wriggling to the lingering touch of the fingers of a young man against the flanks and chest of a young boy and who actually unfastened his own trousers as the fingers became more intense in their wandering, ever touching lower and fondling more nervously, and who responded to the touch inside his underwear by gasping and panting and surrendering absolutely, wishes to carry on what has been so earnestly begun. And you can tell the story on day, if it suits you to do so. Tell how your teacher, at age twelve, did subject, did allow his handsome uncle moments to slip out of his clothes, and how they returned to each other, utterly as created, man behind boy at first, as secrets passed from mouth to ear, then boy beside man, his left arm around the waist of his older partner, his right hand motioning as one day a partner will use his motion on you. Try to have your lover picture the feelings in the man, the young hand of the boy at first experimental and hesitant with the hard shaft in its grip, but before long, settling into a steady, rhythmic stroking. Remember, I only imagine how it will feel, too, and, indeed, there is a chance you will have the actual experience before I do. Yes, I performed on Uncle Shell, but as I was doing so, my release galloped up like a brigand and I was showering his right leg from the knee to the hip."

"Like this?" Adam whispered.

Jeffrey, already huddling with his student, took pains not to blink. Adam knelt quaking and gasping in his hands. His slim, five inch penis probed high between his slim, white thighs, its now dark pink inches from the belly of the mature male, who, himself, jutted hard against the silky skin of the gasping young boy. The first hot rush of the twelve year old's seed jetted so violently against the taut belly of his athletic teacher the "hiss" could have been heard ten feet away. As Jeffrey gripped his forearms, the boy began fully ejaculating, his cum no longer hissing against the man but splashing wetly as his orgasm intensified. As he had with his uncle, Jeffrey began cumming spontaneously at the sight of what was happening with his beautiful young friend, and for almost a minute they thoroughly wet and slicked each other, arms linked and foreheads together the while.

"Lesson very well learned," John said to the thirteen year old Adam.

"I'm glad you think so," the boy responded, "because that means there's no need to repeat it."

"Heaven forbid," the officer intoned, and by acclimation they spontaneously stripped out of their shoes and clothes, the boy bracing himself facing a tree, arms reaching high to grasp a pair of branches, and the mature male approaching from behind, first touching the slim neck and undeveloped shoulders, then running his hands, as he stepped close, down the child's flanks and over his heaving belly. Adam spread his legs and thrust his hips in welcome. "Will we be able to do this in your stateroom?" he whispered as John's left arm encircled his chest and the young man's hand found his jutting erection.

"Yes," the officer whispered back, "there will be plenty of privacy and off-duty time. It will happen a lot at first, then taper off to once a week. With James, it only happened twice in the last month he was aboard, both times when he brought young midshipmen to the cabin."

"I can't imagine ever not wanting to," the boy said, now thrusting smoothly into the tight fist of the older male.

"It's an attraction, not a distraction," his friend said, "and as time goes by it fades into its proper place, but remains an attraction to others, so it's not as if it dries up and blows away completely."

"Leaving us free to fight when we see the foreign flag a-raisin'," the boy noted.

"Their guns on fire as we sail into hell," John agreed, "and splinters aplenty to keep us lively of mind and body and vanquish all thoughts of idle moments and sensual interludes.

"I have no fear of death," Adam said, "it would bring no sorrow, but how bitter would be this last farewell were I to stay and you to leave."

"I would watch the English mist roll through the dell," the elder said, "for you are beautiful and I have loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell."

"Keep an eye on enough dells," the boy noted, "and there's bound to be a shepherd boy in one of them."

THE END

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