Marjorie:
Why would someone devote their intellectual life to Holocaust denial when they could pick a more plausible cause, like arguing there’s a secret civilization of Mole People at the center of the Earth?
Thanks for those fascinating anecdotes about your family. Tell us more! I bet your parents’ personal papers are a great treasure for you. Your parents sound sophisticated and cosmopolitan and funny. Did your dad’s use of the phrase “stand athwart the annals” inoculate you from ever having to use the word “athwart”? I wish my father had left some papers behind. I did recover a coffee cup, a mushroom brush, and a beat-up leather jacket. He was an intellectual professor, a Beatnik, probably the first in his department to smoke dope, wore a beard, and had an everchanging band of friends, like this one guy named Dave who considered himself a warlock and insisted on making a plaster cast from the naked body of my dad’s fourth wife. Every time I visited my dad he had a new kind of transportation–motorcycle, VW bus, houseboat. He never lived long in one spot; he didn’t live long, period, actually. I might note that my mother had custody.
About “left” and “right” in politics: I’m not sure what the words mean anymore. The people who rage against the government range from hardcore Deep Ecology environmentalists to gun-toting militia members. When I did my reporting for the aliens book I noticed that the belief in extraterrestrial visitors was intense on both the far left and far right. New Agers would throw a UFO conference, and the Ruby Ridge crowd would show up. What the extremes have in common is a strong antipathy toward received wisdom, the official narrative of reality, as promulgated by government stooges.
I probably can’t go to the anti-WTO rally because I’m too busy being an appendage of the Matrix. Must keep typing. And as for the side trip to the inspection station, the car wouldn’t pass anyway. Recently it started making this noise, a scary, metallic clacking every time I exceeded 40 mph, and I dealt with it the way I deal with many such problems, which was ignoring it and hoping it would go away. Maybe the car could just HEAL. (Oops … Caps Lock reflex.) Eventually I looked under the car and saw a jagged, bent piece of metal dangling an inch above the asphalt, apparently something associated with the muffler. I tried to buy a new car, but the salesman refused to tell me the price, and in fact he was taken aback that I would even ask such a thing. We both knew that the price had nothing to do with what it said on the window sticker. The price was whatever I’d pay after a prolonged and painful negotiation, time for which I simply didn’t have, hence my continued motoring in a tin can. Maybe I should buy a motorcycle, or a VW bus, or a houseboat.
Best,
Joel
