Sweet Belinda

One of the millions of minor bloggers out there was elevated quite suddenly in just minutes of one day.

She had appreciated a new series on one of the networks, and she said so in her web log, with a readership of twelve, not any of them attending. The program on the network featured the American ideal of the stalwart little man through expertise and tenacity overcoming the vast unholy resistance of the corporate powers. He was a small-town doctor with a degree from a non-elite school called the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine, and his practice included much of what is called alternative medicine.

The medicorps would try and run him off his country roads, and put out evil gossip about him, but the homey kept on curing cancer and raising the dead, despite the distractions. Belinda the blogger thought it a wonderful stirring call to arms for all practicioners of the ethereal arts.

After one posting which contained lots of exclamation points and caps, she noticed there were twenty, thirty comments appended. How can this be? Usually, the only comments on her site are her own. And now they continue, and are not stopping! What have the woodsprites wrought?

She was linked by a major blog with lots of corporate sponsors and also a little-known green chute to the major entertainment corporation which owned both the teevee network and many other entertainment facilities, including plenty of blogs. Our lonesome voice in the wilderness was picked up, amplified, broadcast, and she became a Name.

The cures and practices of the smalltown doctor of the teevee series began to edge up in acceptability. He would in his lab (which served also as his bathroom) concoct a tincture to homepathically treat an ailment, and all over the land the same process would occur, with many vowing to drop their unnecessary medical coverage. The polls showed more and more approval from the public of every cockamamie cult concept known. Carnegie Hall was filled for a lecture on chakra. There were executives of the med firms wondering how they were gonna keep 'em down with the pharm.

All the tribal wisdom came back. Flouridation is a communist plot meant to sap our vital fluids. Vaccinations cause autism (or autonomy; same difference). Cancer is necessary for the AMA to thrive, so it is protected in a secret lab beneath Ft Knox. There are vast colonies on the moon filled with the living dead the Pope doesn't want you to know about, because they were raised by holistic rather than holy orders.

Public funding of science in schools was reconsidered, and the NIH was decommissioned, as was the CDC. No longer was rancor reserved for the doctors who would terminate pregnancies; a more likely challenge was "Why are you sustaining cancer?" The teevee was now full of programs about plucky smalltown practitioners of the subtle arts, and news of the skyrocketing illness and death statistics were not reported, because that was just not a product the public preferred.

Sweet Belindal appeared on Oprah, and then she was given her own teevee program. Everyone was so happy that solutions turned out to be so simple. It had been so humiliating not to know so much; now there was great satisfaction in the confirmation that those who seemed to so far above everyone were frauds and mountebanks.

There was, to be sure, sadness. Not everyone was aboard the magical mystery bus. This family had sickness and death, and they kept quiet about it, for shame. That other one, too. In fact, had they not kept so quiet, they would have learned that sickness and death were pandemic in the land.

And then another blog, right out of the blue, reported that Belinda was under treatment by a physician licensed by the AMA. There was general scoffing, which subsided as medical reports were leaked by disgruntled clinical staff. The reports were headlined.

"Oh, we perceive that you are worried, and lame, and sick unto death. But, weap you when you but behold your own sorry lot? Here is your savior, marred, as you see, by her own private HMO!"

There was great anarchy unleashed in the land, with voices calling in the night. Some would decide, and others reconsider, and this one would take off for another point, from which more returned. It was the worst of times, with memory alone supplying the best.

The Vladistaya Valley

We arrive outside Stalingrad. I say to my counterpart on the other side, "If you but had a place we might rest?" His eyebrows furrow.

I am a Wermacht artillery officer with my company. We don't want any trouble. We are here because we were sent, I say. I see, says Ivan. Well, there is this recently vacated boys military school.

It is a block of stalags somewhere in the Yurals. We drive there in our tracked vehicles, unpack all our gear. There is coal, and some grub. We build a fire and settle in to wait out the winter. From where we are, there isn't a cannon to be heard.

Is there a telegraph? One of my troop is an operator. Well, yes, says Ivan. We locate it, and I begin dictating battle reports.

It is bitter cold, and hard slogging in the mountains. The snow falls and the tracks freeze, and you cannot cross over the bodies in the hard rain.

Two words crackle back. How many? I carefully report, too many to count. We cannot tell the corpses from other berms and won't know until the thaw. We are holding on for the Fatherland. The operator cackles at this.

The Vladistaya Valley is a narrow gorge between rivers I'm told will be running swift with trout come spring. The sun is trapped between the ridges and it is very warm early and long for this climate. It must be held at all costs. It's far superior to Berchesgarten.

Ivan looks quizically at me sometimes, but he doesn't interfere. We are far less trouble than most Germans.

In the Vladistaya, there is a wealth of wheat and even fruit trees in summer. It is superior to the Yukraine. It is so prized that Stalin does not allow it onto any maps. The local citizens trust us now. They bring us eggs and milk. It is a tribute to the Hitler Youth we are so diplomatically successful. There is chocolate for our coffeee some mornings.

As the hard winter grows toward its end, Ivan says., well, now, you must know, there is no such place as the Vladistaya Valley.

And I say, no, of course not, and we're never leaving it neither.

Conflicts, with Roses

I go to the office late for something I've forgotten. There is a seedy type with mock dressup costume, like a tweed coat over blue jeans. He has a pitiful ancient revovler he threatens me with in a dark hallway. I'm somehow not intimidated. He doesn't look that ominous.

You're one of them, he sputters. One of his tormenters. I just waft around a corner into the office, leaving him out in the hall. I hear a click, then two. I reach around the door and with surprising ease cease his weapon.

Now I leave. I must report the revolver. Here, I'll take out the shells. Now who to report to? The crossing guard? No, better ... there's one. I say, I have this pistol here. I took it from one who meant harm. He's still at large.

Now it is very late and I'm at headquarters. So, someone accosted you and you just took his weapon, just like that?

Yep, that's exactly what happened. Strange, ey?

Boy, I'll say.

Eventually they give up asking the same questions. Now it's very late. I must call my Lady. It's after 1:00 AM. I try and call home, and for some reason cannot. I drive very fast along Highway 9, and turn back around Glen Lomond and run through a small garden near a fence and am inside the yard of a wooded plot before I can turn around. When I do, I start for the gate again, but one who is slowly walking towards it unleashes a greyhound.

I am on a motorbike now, and the hound is right beside me. Then the gate is closed, and I'm back in the main house with all the family, and they are all moaning like for a lost relative over their smashed roses. Look, I'll pay, I have to go home. My Lady is waiting.

They try and place over my chest some sort of sign like a horse collar, and another on a family member. They want to take a picture, for proof or something. I've had enough. I rise up. I'm going. One uncle makes to stop me, but he's not very effective. This is a story of blustery weaklings.

I leave, and walk, because I've forgotten where I've left my auto. I don't even have the keys in my pocket. I walk, and the road leads off away from the highway, and I'm now inside a complex that looks like some huge government building. Out of a crowd leaving the offices is my Lady! Our sons are walking before her, in costume, like for halloween in the old days. They're like little lions from Thrifty's.

I am so glad to see them. But what are they doing here? They were here to report my absence?

Maybe I'll find out tonight...

The Usual, the Extraordinary, the Never

Okay, she says, I'm on it. She jumps in her Chevy and she starts her ride. Out to Hatley Field, which is now the Landing Site.

Some weird schlub had hooked weather balloons to his lawn chair in Vidalia, Wisconsin, and gone up, up, and away, all the way to New Hope, Vermont, where she was the ace reporter on the only daily in the county. She thought, as she drove, there are in all matters only the Usual, the Extraordinary, and the Never. She said, I'll come up with a never question, one which will reveal the character and desperation and earnest childlike dash of this daredevil.

It may've been so. But when she arrived on location, she found the flyer had been all wrapped up by the big city news centers for exclusives, during which he shrugged and replied with dull responses to rhetorical questions. It happens like that, she thought on her way back to the paper to draw down her article from the wire services. Maybe that's why I call it Never. In New Hope, Vermont.

Reloj's Career Path

Reloj is just finishing up his doctorate in Childhood Education, specializing in Gifted Children. It is the summer before he's out of school, and he's looking around for a job. He tells me, they have one in a certain tourist mecca we know. I think he's kidding. No, no, he says, it's taking handbills around and placing them under windshield wipers.

I say, well, you know Einstein worked in a Swiss patent office while he was writing three papers some noticed in time. And didn't Hawthorne work in the customs agency, Salem or somewhere? And every day of his writing life, Trollope sallied forth from his writing desk to his job at the postal service. He invented streetcorner mailboxes, you know.

So, maybe I'll take the job, says Reloj, and he does. And now, all he talks about is his adventures placing ads on windshields. He doesn't like Elitists, he tells me, those who have windblown wipers so you cannot place the posters under the blades. 

I saw, what do you sell? And he says, oh, this, that, and the other, something different every day. I say, well, how do the business do? He says, the same as always. The same number of tourists come here and buy the same amount of goods in season year in and year out. I say, then why do they advertise? And Reloj say, well, you know, that's what they do.

I say, boy, I'll bet you can't wait to begin lifting those little geniuses to their appointed higher station. He says, yeah, well they ain't geniuses who simply turn on their wipers to dump the handbills on the road. The nerve of some people. Litterbugs. I bet they use that casuistry, situational ethics, to plea how they didn't place the paper under their own private wipers so they aren't responsible for the mess after. Some people.

I say, boy, you worked long and hard for the kids, and now the benefits to them will arrive, starting next year! And he say, huh?