Have their ever been fouler platitudes that pressed the emotional "feel-good" center in the tit-thirsting mammalian brain?

"There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by America"

So you had "the madhouse". . . . . a bedlam of tulip-tossing homilies that was a cross between Yanni and grad student "i-dotting/t-crossing" but about two-and-a-half steps cruddier when lost upon the teenagers was that "Captain Planet & The Planeteers" was spun out of a South Korean animation conglomerate "as cheaply as possible" in a bid to get young people "off the scent" of true & substantive change that challenged the lobbies, the criminals, and the forces that had no name. That wild dogs-- whether canine or young and black-- wandered the ghettos within easy walking distance and "we were to avert our eyes" and "think the principled thing".

In this value system, there were known quantities. . . . . the hallways tacked up with student paintings of still life, a bowl of fruit for instance or a gnarled, anti-social dog in "a street dude" hat and a trench-coat "getting one over on the man" with petty teenaged victory. Perhaps "a little bit of wine", "a little bit of cheese", a bit of a Renaissance flavor in the spirit of "Woodstock '69" that called a wind-burnt, vacant expression "deeper truth" as the rest of America drank beer and bounced the can off their television screen at the sight of Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno.

Funny thing though. . . . . how force governs the cosmos. Why, even within the very atomic structure that gives us form-- positive and negative charges of spinning electrons and atomic nuclei-- for without it, a teacher would walk right through a student like "a piping ghost".

And then you had the moments of "Amnesty International" posturing against "the system" when the real threat of "the club" and truncheon crack of torture comes from peer pressure and leaves them bound in a strait-jacket of mutual adolescent suspicion. The onus of "group norms" is subject to change, usually depending on the basest whims of the ringleader or one of their lieutenants who wants to seek status. . . . . . sound familiar?

The real circus of morals happens when the gathering of kids collectively sees what it can "get away with", even if individuals in the group are hesitant to express their resistance or spoil the aggregate hallucination of shared agreement. No one wants to seem as off-key and hokey as "The Lone Ranger" or an unnaturally-dancing animatronic "Hillbilly Bear" at "Showbiz Pizza" that keeps jerking around and talking unnaturally with its rolling eyes and hokey voice long after "the moment" has passed and come across as John Q. "one-note".

Whatever. . . . . the midtown bar crowd wasn't "tuned in". Whatever passed beyond the "Square C" gaze of what you wanted to call those who looked about two cuts below the Brad Pitt/Kaeto Kaelin crowd of the world dabbing their hairy fingers in a plate of nachos and carrying on a conversation with a leer-faced trollop with dyed red hair and a black strap dress as they brushed back their blonde locks and looked up at "The Home Run Derby". This was theoretically "democracy in action". . . . . that everyone had an equal chance, even the guy from the gym who looked like Ted Kacyniski out jogging in sweatpants under the orange sodium-arc lights and sparkling sidewalk in some strange, random moment when "Kaeto" swivels his head around his shoulder before going back inside to entertain a trio of women who sit on his couch like emotional splotches of Exercycle-bait.

It's "Hootie & The Blow-Jobs" on "David Leno-man" with those soul-papa vocals and omnipresent golf cart and low-key threads from the local mall and the slap-bass of Jerry Seinfeld's penurious whining that hit you in the nostrils like taxi exhaust and taste like watery issues of "MAD" magazine, if not stale boxes of cereal-- dusty and sticky as this seemed to be the state of the nation, the consensus narrative that wasn't getting anymore hopeful.

Make a muckety face. . . . . and suppose this was all there was.

In my well-to-do town used to be an old auction house in the building where a Famous Bar used to be, a span crossing an intersection that yet has to be filled with office space of doctors and lawyers and chiropractors attending to the bottomless maelstrom of boredom-crisis that affronts the wealthy who had seen better, more vigorous days. There was an image of a classy 1960's actress, since faded with lines on her face and obsessed with vegetarian cooking and this storehouse full of jade vases-- the difference between class and kitsch and tumorous, polyp-studded rectums.

Whatever you wanted to call the sadness of mud, pus, and slime that never really "added up to much" as a burnt-out shrew in dress-pants smoked a cigarette and directed the ignorant help-- maintenance men in blue coveralls-- with these petty items. Buy low, sell high, the obsession with the materiality of this junk and how it could apparently turn a profit among the tasteless.

I spied an old "Space Invaders" machine going for $900 that had wires dangling out the back of it "like something the cat had dragged in", and made chipper, yet rubber-eyed "small talk" of embarrassment about how that would look neat up in my teenaged bedroom. The shrew said nothing, and merely took another drag off her cigarette.

One turned away from this dubious silence with their hands in their jeans pockets, wearing a rock n' roll t-shirt, and wanted to think that there could be "a happy end" forever and ever with this booming economy and the little curio of my mother's candied visions of real estate investment dreams. Yet dark storm clouds seemed to rumble like the swelling surf, how it was whispered that aging acquaintances were stricken with cancer, or this overall haze of unreliability among the hired help, or a flurry of gossip n' scandal about supposedly "solid" figures like the beat of a crow's wings across the sun.

Then there was Robert, the son of one of my mother's mediation partners, a boy of smooth Indian persuasion and wholly a creature of the Clinton boom trying to make it off in Hollywood in whatever capacity, the sad tug of liberal arts humanism pulling down at the corners of his mouth.

What chance had I in this politically-correct world of surfaces, "lip service", and illusion? I wished that I could merge with a painting and stay "frozen". . . . . lost in that world forever where everything was "okay". But no, hold your mouth for war and ramp up your effort "to conquer the universe" yet when it felt as if you were trying to punch your fist through Jello, or rotting syrup.

Sure could go for some "Red Meat". . . . .

When you had "nothing to press against", but yet so much "young pup vitalism" that "had hit a wall". . . . . when all the risk and adventure had gone out of the world with a curdled cynicism. When "strivers" for childish, adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasies mull along the bottom of the castle wall "in a siege" without much character, and notice that the parapets for which they may throw up a hook and scale up "like Errol Flynn" are fewer and crumbling, and oftentimes those with the greatest capacity for joy are those who end up "the most sour and cruel-eyed".

Sometimes one had these thoughts, but then they'd ramble on endlessly and somewhat "without direction" like a man playing "Pong"-- only, that he hit the ball and there was no opponent to hit it back, only that it went sailing on and on through space forever like a dangling participle "when the silence was the only answer". You'd knock another one, another one, and another one, and the depression and anxiety for all these things "threatened to spiral downward & inward" as you fought to hold your own, a battle that was being slowly lost like a ship taking on water and the captain standing proudly, resentfully on the prow at some kind of pompous, whale-like attempt at "Hindenberg" greatness.

But then you had someone else.

Call her "O'Brien", a natural leader, a gifted community organizer. A teenager in the elder grades who had a way of pulling everyone into "The Zone", once you dipped in the warm bath of her personality which was like essence of green-eyed "shamrock idealism" that would make you never want to let her down with petty deviations into self-centered, overly-abstracted irrelevance-- and if you did, she would shrug with a half-embarrassed expression and make one self-correct themselves for the sake of her agreeable kindness.

There she led Tuesday Announcements with the soft light of morning falling over the semi-ghetto region of cracked pavement-- fat bag ladies waddling by to-and-fro with smirking, dishonest expressions outside the windows like a gaseous hot-air balloon of surreality-- and with an air of easy, light humor on the air, everyone kept on the same page with the onus of behumbled self-consciousness that could not rise up and change the stream of thought with strange subcurrents made embarrassingly manifest, roughly the right results were delivered and we had the impression that together the crowd could do anything "with enough focus".

One morning in bleakest February, making the turn at the stoplight on the closing stretch to school, we saw her selling newspapers on the corner, an edition held up in her hand and a pleasant expression on her face. It was "National Newsboy's Day" or some kind of half-assed program of a community mobilization effort that put a middle-of-the-road "snot rag" that no one read, but was importuned "to pay as much as they wished" for the edition.

I told my Dad "to pull over".

As he rummaged for his wallet, fishing for a reasonable sum to the tune of $3, I held out a penny through the rolled-down window with a blast of idle auto-exhaust and snickered like a 13 year-old boy. But O'Brien never lost her composure and seconds later, the bills and paper were exchanged with a community-minded "thank you" that wouldn't find themselves out here "doing community service" exactly, but would subsidize it out of guilt.

One time I was sitting by myself at an outdoor restaurant in the height of summer vacation, perhaps trying to look a lot more like I belonged in this hip little equivalent of a New York City shopping district than I really felt. She must have spotted me by coincidence, because all of a sudden O'Brien pulled back a chair and took a seat right across from me. Evermore, she was a winner, she was successful, she was the equivalent of a bright, optimistic U.N. aid worker who talked to me for a minute or two and made me feel "a little less lost".

On the local level, at least, "a little bit of idealism" works. . . . . though it would be a rather shaky foundation to build a broader policy upon with the fallibility of man and the mass psychology of crowds. I just hope this young lady has come to realize that without the pleasant nature of her personality "being turned into toxic waste". And may the Irish eyes keep smiling!

Watch the Alternative Liberal Arts
Circus get its ass kicked here