As fragmented reports of impending Russian use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Ukraine and Russian TV analysts openly discussing how to invade NATO’s Baltic countries and Poland clutter our news feeds, here’s an old tale.

-Marlow

Today’s American politics are sorta like being in junior high with nothing going on in the whole world, nothing. The best only thing anyone thinks of to fascinate themselves with is a constant reappraisal of who is popular and who is the most popular. Hence, our endlessly being regaled by polling results of a several hundred people-sized sample meant to measure what we 330 million Americans think at that moment. The word “popular” guides our lives and spirits to the exclusion of real stuff. In fact, real stuff is banned as inappropriate and faintly stinky. Nice people don’t have anything to do with it. God — Code Red real problems, suffering, injustice, unrestricted warfare — there’re just awful like chemical warfare WMD destruction bad.

Squashed into acquiescence by the weighty media braying, we try to behave like we’re supposed to and keep ourselves from peering around and into world’s dark recesses for real life or clear focus, though some of us are secretly praying for fire that would come from somewhere and burn off the prairies of peaceable but dreary pastiche, actually just burn these loud honks naked. These endlessly roadside flat tires we find ourselves plagued with form a hole in our collective past.

We older types can only be described in today’s limited officially sanctioned vocabulary by the old timey phrase “poor attitude.” Yes, it’s an anxious and innocent label to try to pin on us yesteryear Aces, “attitude.” We’re not some enemy inside the “goodie two shoes” (translation for the younger crowd “self-anointing virtuous”) castle walls. Any way, it’s too late and there is no way to get us out of here because we’re older than 65 and the law says that we now get sizeable monthly payments based on the contributions from today’s younger workers still pulling and hailing it. There’s nothing they can do to permanently expel people like us.

In any event, the arc of my current attitude was reset during my childhood.

I was like nine or ten years old when my brother and I suddenly developed fevers of 105° and red rashes on our stomachs. Our family doctor dropped by, took one look at us, and we were then told we had Scarlet Fever.

Luckily, penicillin had just perfected, so we lay on our back for six weeks and listened to AM radio with a black-and-blue asses.

The house was quarantined. City officials actually came and put a red quarantine sign on the front door like the plague while we lay upstairs snugly listening to black music being played on a low power college radio station two miles distant from our bedroom and eating sponge cakes.

Before I contracted Scarlet Fever, I had been disinterested in the world around me, and it was only by being isolated for weeks on end, that I started to read the daily newspaper, my parent’s copies of their subscriptions to Readers Digest, Newsweek, and the Harvard Business Review cover to cover. What I had been seeing in my child’s world underwent a metamorphosis. Our orb was one screwed up and scary place. How it came so to be wasn’t really explained. So, this not making any sense led me to start pulling down books from the local Clintonville library History bookshelves. There was no relation between my former kid’s worldview and how it really was. We were all way behind.

It was strange to hear my friends’ astonishment the first time they heard me briefly summarize our place in the world on our parochial school’s playground. One even called me sacrilegious for thinking let alone saying things like this.

By the time I graduated from Bishop Watterson High, I dreaded people’s discovery of my reading habits. When I got to college and took history, the professor said, “You’re too young to have read this stuff and think like that. Aren’t you afraid . . .” as I noticing his fluster over how he could say it nicely.

“Yes.” I replied.

He looked relieved.

“I had Scarlet Fever,” I told him.

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