An incident far from here

It would occur to me little by little, after his death, and after my complete indoctrination into academic life, that he stood for the emptying of all rural places, man in his environment driven out by the closure laws, the weakening of support for the small communal farmers, the transformation of agriculture from the family to the business, to the monopoly wheat and beef producers. He was caught in the last upheavals of that effort to end man's connection to the earth, and to create an economy of total dependence upon corporate services. We were there long ago, whenever we partook of the boxed foods at the supermarket and played listlessly at gardening in my youth. But my brother was that atavistic remnant of rural man, whose every tic and twinge and falling was part of some discarded language of a former era, a glory passing out of consciousness.

It began to glimmer in me that the last two hundred years of turmoil and political history were in fact the limp, partial, fragmented accommodations and moilings of society over what to do with the humanity spilling into cities and leaving behind an empty natural world. All the waves of equality and sharing and the laws against naked exploitation of ignorant labor in the slaughterhouses, the mines, the factories, the child labor, the acts against prostitution and drunkenness, drug abuse, abandonment were the price of urbanization. And those two centuries of bitter struggle ended in the collapse of public education and the expansion of the prison system to capture all the wayward energies of youth; when that didn't work, the army was there to commit such lives to an easy and predictable slaughter in small, strategic market wars whose motives were never clear to the soldiers who fought in them. After two hundred years of communist passion and agrarian resistance, such men and women whose bodies were perfect and whose minds were tolerant of the most menial tasks, were given nothing, ended with less than fringe lives.

And they were always grooming themselves according to the same vision my brother followed--a pastoral ideal of men judged by their natural gifts, their prowess as lovers. They found part of it, a substantial element of it, in cars, with chromium exhaust pipes and metallic paint jobs. They would cruise in such cars and play the radio loud and sit back coiffured and perfumed and plumped like fighting cocks, and the girls would come in a trance to them and get inside their cars and go anywhere, do anything. Even if their own future was blocked by loving such men, they did it anyway, because they were searching for a world of pleasure and life cycles and mortality where youth was all, the only thing. Respectability and the waiting suburbs of lawn sprinklers and kids getting on buses and moms driving station wagons to the market and all the other social ideals bored them. Any form of repression and delay of gratification insulted their hunger and desires.

But they also knew this was a world sliding away, falling into the national unconscious, a disgraced and eclipsed world of mere organic life. They were beautiful creatures who lay on the beaches at Coney Island and Atlantic City necking, drinking beer, rubbing their sleek, beautiful bodies with suntan oil, wolfing down burgers and fries, soda pop, tattoos glimmering on their arms, rings in their ears, the girls' mouths slathered with glaring colors, their eyes hard and suspicious of those who judged them. My brother, an outsider from early in his childhood, ostracized by my own father, was looking for, aching for, pining for this world no matter how fragile and dated it might seem.