The Annals

by Petronius Jablonski

  “That’s a contradiction in terms,” she laughed. “You can’t want a libertarian government and an emperor.”

  “I am pining for both as we speak. This paradox may stand as my foremost contribution to political thought. Only the force of a wise and benevolent philosopher-king could maintain such a system.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be libertarian, doofus.”

  “Need I clarify the nature of a paradox for you? It is not two Dachshunds. It is best exemplified by —”

  “I know what it is,” she said, obviously enjoying our discourse. The combination of tetrahydrocannabinol and sunshine invariably suffused her with the finest of moods. “You think you can just call your nonsense a paradox and that settles everything.”

  “What theorists fail to understand is that freedom must be enforced and that it is bitterly at odds with the collective tyrant of democracy,” I said, closing my eyes and basking in the only light that shines brighter than the sun: the light of Truth. “Indolent, cowardly, and imbecilic by nature, human beings will expand the scope of their government until it bears full responsibility for wiping their behinds. This is the deleterious repercussion of addiction to the opiate of security. Verily, a sound government cannot consist of junkies. To prevent this, to remind the populace they are not zoo animals with diligent keepers but free and responsible men, a wise and inflexible king must show the whiners no quarter.”

  “This is like that speech you gave in public speaking, remember?”

  I squirmed at the unpleasant recollection. “Where half the deep thinkers condemned me as a fascist and the other half thought it would be cool that they would be able to take all the drugs they wanted? Another failed harvest of minds. Allan Bloom, was he not a sage, a doomsday prophet? Now, as I was saying, a benevolent force is needed to defend against the perpetual union of lazy ignoramuses.”

  “The professor said it was too inflammatory to be persuasive.”

  “That censorious fool. It was both milder and better argued than the critiques of democracy put forth by Plato and Nietzsche, not that I would expect a professor to have read either of those subversives. Now please, let me expound upon my Utopia. Should I fail to transcribe it the duty shall be entrusted to you.”

  “Really?”

  “Come to think of it, Buzzcut Bartul is already composing a draft,” I said, cheered by the thought of my friend and fellow historian. His blazing shorthand and eye for detail had proved invaluable to countless projects of mine. “Anyway, the fundamental axiom is that particles of stupidity pose no threat compared to the blunderous, nose-picking ogre of collective stupidity: democracy, in short. Particles of stupidity possess a dangerous magnetic faculty and to prevent them from clustering —”

  “An emperor is needed,” said Sandy.

  “Exactly,” I said, with the delight Socrates must have experienced in the Meno. “The emperor does not rule his subjects; he saves them from being ruled. No matter how the liberated zoo animals whine and plead, he will not permit them to return to their cages. Traditional libertarians hallucinate about unbounded freedom absent a powerful force barricading the zoo gate. I suffer from no such delusions.”

  “You know, all these big political ideas sound great in theory — especially when you’re stoned — but how would you prevent a bad emperor?”

  “Just as this nation once had a document specifying the limits of the government’s power, we shall have a sacred decree carved in gold above a statue of a locked zoo gate. It shall specify, in no equivocal terms, that the emperor exists only to suppress democratic uprisings, ignore pleas for assistance, and shun suggestions that he forcibly meddle in the lives of his subjects. His annual State of the Diffusion speech will expound on the consummate virtue of self-determination and the unrivaled bliss of being left alone.”

  “Who would pay for the force that keeps people free? You couldn’t tax anyone. That’s anti-libertarian.”

  “Sandy, the philosopher concerns himself with forests, not trees. Technical details would be tweaked and adjusted as needed. The greatest leaders always gave themselves some elbow room. Remember, my vision is still in its infancy.”

  “Can’t you think of anything going wrong with it? What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Contemplating this seemingly innocuous query, a hideous phantasmagoria flashed behind my eyes. To describe it was agony. “Each emperor, to accommodate the whines of his lazy, cowardly subjects, would re-interpret the sacred decree in order to expand the responsibilities of the government. Within a few generations the accumulation of these tumorous growths would metastasize into —”

  “The same shitty mess we have now,” Sandy said gleefully. “You’re already living in your Utopia. Why aren’t you happy?”

  I massaged my temples. “Damn this mind-tangling weed. Once I retain my senses I shall conceive of a precisely-worded sacred decree that will both isolate and avert the cancerous growth of government.”

  “Dave says you’re just an anarchist who doesn’t like the word anarchist. It’s totally easier to criticize all governments than to promote one or the other. It’s a copout. Some sort is always necessary. Would you really want to live in chaos?”

  “Monarchist has more of a ring to it. That an intellectual pygmy like your ex continues to exert an influence upon you is most disheartening, especially regarding the deadliest assumption ensnaring mankind. Regarding this chaos you all fear: sundry governments of the twentieth century slaughtered upwards of one-hundred-million of their own people. How could so-called anarchy have been any worse?”

  “My dad likes that you’re a conservative,” she said, exhibiting the tangential, free-floating engrossment characteristic of reefer fiends. “I tried explaining that your views are actually pretty radical.”

  “They most certainly are not. You make it a point to tell your father I am indeed a conservative, the only true conservative. The question is what one wishes to conserve: a unique puree of polytheism, monarchy, Stoicism, and the limited government man enjoyed prior to the dawn of agriculture — all prepared in my innovatory Blender. It is the radicals who have besmirched these venerable traditions. New and improved is the ultimate oxymoron.”

  She put her head in my lap. “Petronius, do you remember the night we met?”

  My thoughts converged upon the Frisbee. It unzipped the sky and my mind drifted through. “Sandy, I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  • • •

  I stood in Sheridan Park across from the supreme master of the Frisbee, Buzzcut Bartul. Squat yet graceful, his opulent lifestyle never impaired his finesse with the disk, which earned him widespread renown. A heavy rain dangled silver chords between us. As many as the Frisbee severed, the sky repaired.

  “Damn this rain,” he said, marching toward me in cutoff jeans and sandals, his stately midsection reverberating from his powerful steps. “Let’s go in your car for a smoke.”

  Clouds of steam drifted off my gargantuan red Catalina as the chords lashed it. Once seated, Buzzcut helped himself to one of my Lucky Strikes. Though a tobacco aficionado, he possessed a moral terror of purchasing it.

  “Let’s call it a day. What time should we commence our research this evening?”

  In secret defiance of geometric harmony, a round face clung to his brick-like head. He turned it from me to look out his window. “I think I’m going by Heather’s tonight,” he said sheepishly.

  “For a night of Scrabble with a vestal virgin? You can remain celibate while engaged in our historical quest.”

  “Just because my girlfriend doesn’t sleep around,” he said, a fury displacing his quiescent nature and departing with the fickleness of a summer storm. “Sorry Petronius.”

  “That Tricia gratifies her lubricious needs is a fount of joy to me. One, it keeps her skills sharp. Two, the same rules apply to me. Three, how she spends her time is —”

  “We’ve spent the last three nights working on it.”

  “No doubt Gibbon wrote Decline
and Fall in three-day weeks. Dr. Harris was more than a little skeptical of our grand project. If we produce anything short of a masterwork, he, never having produced anything original or significant, will feast on Schadenfreude.”

  Buzzcut held his cigarette in front of his face and made small circles with it, an indicant of a conclusion rushing toward the surface.

  “While our so-called peers use page-long quotes to argue for bland, harmless conclusions, we are uncovering a whole unchartered universe. We stand to become the Mason and Dixon, the Louis and —”

  “Alright,” he said. “Seven o’clock at Otto’s.”

  • • •

  The gloomy, taciturn Dr. Harris, glaring at us through his bifocals and removing them to intensify his sulphurous gaze, had stroked his unkempt beard and shook his head when we had proposed a joint independent study titled, A History of the Cudahy Taverns: Packard Avenue. We had returned the following day to plead our case, wielding the deadly argument that his dismissive reference to Cudahy as “some small, blue-collar abutment of Milwaukee” was no less contemptuous than describing the Temiar of Malaysia (his dissertation subject) as a group of uninteresting savages with absurd religious beliefs. A twenty-minute session of furious beard stroking had ensued, probably infested by the realization that we had actually perused his dreadful, meandering, hagiographical doorstop.

  “Alright boys,” he had whispered. “Three credits. Due at the end of the fall semester. I will not give you an incomplete. I will not extend the due date.” After a brief but intense session of beard stroking, he had removed his bifocals and fixed us with his legendary disintegrating stare. “Don’t disappoint me.”

  I had emerged from his office like Trajan returning from Dacia, but Buzzcut expressed reservations. Though in possession of an uncharacteristically athletic mind for a member of our generation, a congenital diffidence often restrained him from ambitions of heroic proportions. “Petronius, what if there aren’t any records at city hall or the historical society?”

  “Records? We are starting ex nihilo. The historian who relies on books is no more than a glorified plagiarist. We are poised to become the primary source to which posterity, in humble gratitude, shall turn. For this we must go to the primordial, oracular sources themselves.”

  • • •

  The vintage Schlitz globe above the entrance to Otto’s tavern, was it not an atlas of dreams, radiant with the light from a better world? Buzzcut did not look up from his notebook as I sat down and positioned my feet on the adjacent stool. “Bottle of Pabst,” I commanded, my voice a crash of thunder. Though billions of nights had preceded this one, and billions would follow, I detected a singularity, a hand-woven weave in the strands of Fate. I beheld the label on my bottle as Edmund Hilary must have looked upon the flag he planted atop Everest. “So where do we stand, Buzzcut?”

  “I think we’ll need to present this thing as a horizontal tree, the trunk being the first tavern established. Branches multiply over the course of the century.”

  “Will we wear cute matching dresses when we present our little chart? Will we invite our mommies? Will we serve cookies?”

  “We have too much data to put in a simple paper,” he said, squeezing a slice of lemon over his gin and tonic.

  “No doubt Boswell warned Johnson not to put too many words in his dictionary.”

  “Different old-timers are giving us different names and dates. We at least need a thesis.”

  “Please remind me, what was Suetonius’ thesis? Did he use a mulberry or chestnut tree to coalesce the staggering volume of data he worked with? A great historian does not theorize; he installs a window where none existed, he provides a clear view of what has been obscured.”

  “Gibbon theorized.”

  “I am aware of that great man’s shortcomings,” I snapped, “all of which are more than redeemed by his pinnacling prose. Now, while we gather data unrelentingly, tonight we must address the question of whether to begin with a prologue, a prolegomenon, or a preamble. I contend that a prolegomenon is the proper choice, prologues being the filthy denizens of science fiction and fantasy novels. And given Harris’ modest scholarship we can safely assume he has never before encountered a prolegomenon. The very word will strike terror into his black heart, an overture of the awe that will send him to his knees long before our addendum to our prolegomenon.”

  “We need to visit different bars. This well is dry. We’ve interviewed all the regulars.”

  I bristled at the gruesome inevitability of this. It was neither the patrons nor the ambience of the other taverns that offended me, but their infernal, nerve-frazzling, soul-raping, caterwauling jukeboxes. Otto’s boasted CDs by Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Perry Como.

  “We’ll stick with the oldest buildings,” Buzzcut announced, usurping my role as the commander of our voyage. “I checked with city hall. Out of the eighty-two taverns on the mile-long strip we’re concerned with, only a handful were built before the First World War.”

  I sought Quietude with the reflection that our sudden change of method might facilitate the extraordinary evening prophesized to me. We finished our drinks and plunged into the abyss, exchanging the air-conditioned, submarine-like enclosure of Otto’s for the rainforest outside. Twenty feet as the crow flies, The Stone Age beckoned.

  “The name and the sixties theme is brand new,” Buzzcut said, mounting a stool while I admired a laminated poster of brontosaurs sipping from a stream of beer flowing out of a giant can. Beside them, a tyrannosaurus in a tie-dyed shirt clutched a bottle in one of its scrawny forelimbs. Artificial ferns and plastic boulders segmented a hall beyond a rectangular bar, within which a cherubic girl in a cave-girl outfit serviced customers on all sides.

  “You are aware that Homo sapiens did not, at any time, co-exist with dinosaurs,” I said. “Furthermore, the connection between them and sixties rock music is far from transparent.”

  “We’ll have a gin and tonic and glass of Michael Collins,” said Buzzcut. “Is the owner around?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The proprietor is either unaware or willfully ignorant of the fact that the Rat Pack created some of their finest music in the 1960s. Excluding them from your theme involves a most invidious distinction.”

  “There’s no problem,” said Buzzcut. “We’re doing a survey.” He opened his notebook and paged through it.

  “On behalf of the Milwaukee Journal, my associate and I are rating the taverns of southeastern Wisconsin. Our list will adorn the front page sometime in the fall. Mr. Bartul, put down two-and-a-half stars, at least until we resolve the music issue.”

  “We don’t have Michael Collins,” said the cave girl. “How about Jack Daniels?”

  “One star. Inform the owner that his neighbor, Otto, received five. Prehistoric gimmickry cannot fill the awful chasm created by a poorly furbished bar and jukebox.”

  “If you want a straightforward Suetonius-style narrative there’s still the question of organization,” Buzzcut said, barely audible above the wails of the damned seeping through the amplifier behind us.

  “Transcribe this verbatim,” I said, lighting a cigarette and jumping off my stool to pace behind his. The awful noise initiated a seismic shift in my critique of rock music, completely inverting the reasons why it was horrible. “Concerning the essence of rock music’s awfulness: a reassessment. Contrary to my earlier condemnations, the true curse is not the appalling lack of competent singers, but the incessant repetition of phrases. Whether a distinction can be drawn between choruses and verses is disputatious but irrelevant: some locution is repeated ad nauseum. Far from being an artistic method, this is the bastard offspring of necessity. Were all phrases to be used no more than once, few rock songs would last longer than ten seconds.”

  “What’s he doing?” the cave-girl asked.

  “He’s also a music critic,” Buzzcut said.

  “The upshot of this new alignment is momentous. If the primary curse was merely a function
of the performers, an actual singer with the support of an actual band could, in theory, perform the songs in a manner that resembled music. This is impossible for virtually all rock songs. For example — Buzzcut, did the perpetrators of this abomination dare to name it?”

  “‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles.”

  “Now, even the Rat Pack, while reading the lyric off the matchbook necessary to contain it, could not salvage ‘She Loves You’ because it is not a song but an incessantly repeated phrase.”

  “This is why we never get anything done. Do you really need reasons not to like certain types of music?”

  “Et tu, Buzzcut? Worshipping the Moloch of subjectivity? The sacrifice slaughtered on your vile altar is civilization herself.”

  “Vile altar? Surely some things are subjective.”

  “A thousand times no,” I said, returning to my stool. “Were I to edit Dante’s modest effort to make some improvements and updates, aside from the obvious change from mono to polytheism, the second lowest circle of hell would now be populated with the subjectivity mongers: flightless parrots condemned to eternity in a filthy cage squawking, as they did in life, ‘To each his own, to each his own. No accounting for taste, no accounting for taste.’ The only fitting backdrop to this nightmarish, though perfectly just punishment, would be the mind-rending wails of the Beatles.”

  “Who would be in the lowest circle?”

  “Egalitarians.”

  “Of course. Isn’t stuff like food subjective?”

  “Truth is not an exhibitionist. Truth is a shy damsel. A man must woo the Truth, not throw up his hands with a lazy resignation of to each his own at the first sign of resistance.” I drank the foul varnish in my glass and winced. “Now, how does my reassessment compare with last night’s reflections on music?”

  He flipped a few pages. “On the Greatness of Moon River? An Inquiry Concerning Mack the Knife? I don’t think it contradicts them. This whole snobby music-thing of yours — There’s no virtue in being a contrarian.”

  “One, I am not being a contrarian; it is a matter of being right. Two, being a contrarian is, a priori, virtuous. Most mortals are mongoloids. Holding an opinion contrary to a majority view ipso facto places one closer to the bosom of Truth.”