Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns: An Artist's Odyssey Through America

By Curt Chiarelli

"Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns: An Artist’s Odyssey Through America" is not only a chronicle of an artist's search to understand the forces that shaped him, but also an epic snapshot of the American Century in its twilight years. Full of insights, anecdotes and twisted tales from the front lines of show biz, it is a witty and wickedly scathing tale of the B side of the American Dream. One part "Catch 22" and another "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies", it is a voyage of personal discovery that reveals some larger truths about how America came to be as it is today . . . . and what the future may hold for it tomorrow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Curt Chiarelli
• Release date: May 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301382460

Curt Chiarelli

Curt Chiarelli has been providing design, sculpture and illustration services for the motion picture/television, toy/collectible, video game, museum exhibit and publishing industries for 25 years. A native born and bred Chicagoan, Curt began his career early at the age of 20 when he was contracted to create storyboards for the McDonald’s Corporation. At the age of 23 and barely after receiving his B.A. in Communication Arts from Columbia College, he became this country's youngest production designer when he was hired by HBO to art direct a comedy feature presentation, "Men Will Be Boys". From that point forward he began to receive a steady stream of commissions until his first major career breakthrough occurred in 1991 when he created the stop-motion animation model of the character, Goro for the Williams Electronics international blockbuster hit video arcade game, "Mortal Kombat". In 1994 he left his staff position in the Exhibit Design Department at the John G. Shedd Aquarium to accept an invitation from Skellington Productions to join their team in the creation of the stop-motion animation models and effects for the feature length motion picture, "James and the Giant Peach". Noticing that his employment prospects were much enhanced and the weather far more accommodating, he decided to remain in the balmy climes of California for the next 13 years. Now, 15 years later, after having his work featured in the prestigious "Spectrum" anthologies, enjoying a rewarding collaboration with world renowned fantasy illustrator, Boris Vallejo and tackling such high-profile commissions as the creation of the action figures for the "Halo" video game product line, the advertising campaign assets for "The Age of Empires III: The War Chiefs" and theatrical masks for a collaborative effort between Cirque du Soleil Productions and illusionist, Criss Angel titled, "Believe", Curt has moved to the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area where he continues to teach advanced-level university courses and to create work of distinction for such clients as Microsoft Corporation/Bungie Studios, Miller Brewing Company, Capital One, Gemmy Corporation, Walt Disney Productions, Universal Studios, Steve Johnson's Edge FX, Michael Curry Design, Chiodo Bros. Productions, Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, Cartoon Network, MTV, HBO, IMAX, Lucasfilm Licensing, Nickelodeon, Warner Bros. Toys, RC 2 Corporation/JoyRide Studios, Hasbro Toys, Mattel Toys, Kenner Toys, Moore Action Collectibles, McFarlane Toys, Playing Mantis Toys, Fisher-Price Toys, Dark Horse Comics, Diamond Comics Distribution, Conte Collectibles, Franklin Mint, Noble Collection, Ashton-Drake Galleries, Illusive Concepts, 3DO/Cyclone Studios, Electronic Arts, Accolade, the Field Museum of Natural History and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, amongst many others. Member of the National Sculpture Society, the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the Film Music Society and the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists. Always looking for new horizons to conquer, Curt has added a fresh wrinkle to his career as an author. His first book, the gonzo Lovecraftian satire, "Shoggoths & Shibboleths and Other Eldritch Tomfooleries" and his second, a comic memoir of his life as a commercial artist, "Fiddling Whilst Rome Burns" are now complete.

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FIDDLING WHILST ROME BURNS: An Artist’s Odyssey Through America

by

Curt C. Chiarelli

Text and Cover Illustration Copyrighted © 2010

by Curt C. Chiarelli

Published at Smashwords Editions

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. 

ISBN#: 978-1301382460

HEALTH WARNING ADVISORY

This book contains high levels of irony and satire. If you experience dizziness, headache, nausea or if your family has a history of criminal activity, inbreeding, pre-senile dementia, addiction to Fox News or belonging to certain veteran's organizations in Paraguay, please cease reading and immediately contact your psychiatric therapist. Side effects of continued exposure may include high blood pressure, improved IQ test scores and a heightened intolerance for stupidity combined with uncontrolled, intermittent bursts of laughter. Please abstain from reading this book while driving or under the influence of alcohol as it may cause a hallucinatory effect and/or sudden, premature death. The contents of this book are the feverish, deranged opinion of its author. Some characters depicted in this screed should be fictional. Any resemblance to primitive hominids, living or (preferably) dead, is merely inconvenient and an embarrassment to their modern counterparts with larger brain cases, erect postures and opposable thumbs. For a handy guide to volume discount book burning please contact your Republican or Tea Party state representative for assistance. So there.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all creatives, past, present and future. Fortes fortuna juvat.

All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of excellence, ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand; but they ought not to attempt so fine an enterprise till they have passed the age of forty.

Benvenuto Cellini, Vita

CHAPTER ONE

TOTAL RECOIL

(This Being a Portrait of the Artist in His Larval Stage of Development)

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Michel de Montaigne

The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

Anatole France

A man is the sum of his dead ancestors; to reform him you must start with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves.

Ambrose Bierce

Have you ever sat in a darkened theater and marveled at some special effects shot or developed a serious case of lead boots viewing an illustration? Have you ever held a collectible figure in your hands and found yourself captivated by its artistry or unleashed your alter ego in a video game and asked yourself some very fundamental questions about who made this magic happen and what drove them to create it?

I am that person and for the last twenty-five years making fantasy a reality has been my stock in trade. If you have gone to the movies, watched TV, bought an action figure, visited a museum or played a video game during that time it is likely you've seen and enjoyed my work.

At some point, you may have wondered about the formative influences that temper an artist's world view. What are the plate tectonics of an artist’s psychology? What are the cryptic forces that subduct and surface tension below someone's public persona that compels them to pursue such an offbeat field of endeavor, fraught as it is with economic hardship and social disapproval?

Or, more prosaically, what's the clockwork mechanism that makes that twisted motherfucker tick? And am I available for your son's bar mitzvah on the 18th?

But more importantly, why this book and why now?

I’m glad you asked.

Because you see, when pressed into that particular corner, inquiries made, depositions taken, the yellowed clippings and shed traumas of memory ransacked for clues and the folds of the subterranean passages of one’s mind pried back to allow the cold scalpel of Reason to penetrate its moist, inky grottoes, I’ll admit that definitive answers escape me definitely. Try as I may to live up to the Socratic ideal of the examined life, when it comes down to cases and the occasional nosy inquiry as to why I chose to build my life on the back of a bucking chimera, I can only draw a few nebulous conclusions.

This volume is several things rolled into one package. Its purpose is to understand and be understood and to answer some nagging questions about the nature of personal origins while posing many more about its destiny. It is a record of an era that is quickly being lost in the collective memory lapse of a new, autistic age and an attempt to gain perspective on a society veering dangerously out of control. It is a quintessentially American story about an artist, his relationship to his country and the pursuit of the American Dream . . . . even if that dream does metamorphose into a Horatio Alger-meets-Franz Kafka-on-their-way-to-Hollywood nightmare scenario. If I've done my job right patterns will coalesce and a cohesive architecture will emerge; the good guys will be applauded, the guilty will be pilloried by your laughter and my scalp will escape the tender ministrations of their attorneys.

But the human cockroaches remain, lying in wait for you within these pages.

My career in the arts, like all such careers now or since, is a chimera, a crazy-quilt, fabulous beast of mismatched parts in conflict with itself and the world around it. Its function is found within its dysfunctionality because the friction between the parts makes for a scathing commentary on the absurdity of the whole. Building a career in the arts is similar to bronco busting this bizarre, hybrid monster in some kind of rodeo of the damned. The ride is as challenging as it is addictive: you're often thrown, but you always climb back into the saddle and try again.

At least for those who haven't become another casualty littering the arena.

It ain't gonna be pretty ladies 'n' gents, but, then again, that's show business. If you're seeking a cuddly, heartwarming affirmation, a sugary confection of Capra-eque bilge with commercial interruptions by Hallmark Greetings, then you've arrived at the wrong book. Our destination and the winding path leading up to it is much darker, but in spite of all that there's still a lot of drollery to be found within these pages. It is the laughter of the knowing heart who flips his middle finger at Fate.

That's the why; here's the how: mine remains an unrepentant, damn-the-torpedoes, the Whole-Megillah-and-Nothing-but-the-Whole-Megillah-So-Help-Me-Reader policy. The guiding ethos of this book is to always entertain, perhaps even to enlighten, but never to stoop to chicanery. I do not pull punches, especially with someone who's spent the money and taken the time to give my work serious consideration.

It's quite a treacherous process to sort through the raw, tangled cordage that comprises any life, even one as twisted as mine. What is rejected and what is selected to be wound into the skein? What will strengthen the thematic threads that binds this narrative together, to entertain and enrich the reader without compromising honesty? It's quite a balance of art and craft to spin a tapestry that is at once a satisfying aesthetic experience, yet robust enough not to be unraveled by a single loose end. So too with any tale, especially one as close to the bone as a memoir.

Writing a memoir is really all about making connections between the individual and his/her society - about the small stories weaving through the larger one. Alone, a thread may be brilliant and strong, but when woven into a larger design with a plurality of other hues and textures it becomes a thing of rich, sublime intricacy. Each thread in the warp and weft of your narrative tapestry impacts the one next to it. Sometimes it complements the color harmony of its neighbors, in other cases it clashes terribly. And contact sometimes causes friction which frays the structural integrity of the whole.

I wish I could report to the reader about my many youthful indiscretions and colorful, miscreant acts, to turn this book into a three-ring confessional booth of sin and redemption. (Tarting up my story would be more fashionable, get this book to market faster and make me far more money.) The fact remains, I was too closely monitored and heavily disciplined as a kid to allow such a possibility to exist. Still, I always managed to brew up my own particular brand of trouble. It seems that my default setting was to question and challenge everything in my environment: a very sane, moral response to the immoral madness that lay around me. My childhood icon and hands-down favorite cartoon character was Felix the Cat. As you'll see, there's a reason why this character resonated so deeply with me. It was one born troublemaker tipping his hat to another.

Even so, I'd cut a lousy figure as an angel and an even worse one as a devil. Worse still, I'd make a very poor media clown whoring half-truths and pandering cheap laughs. Cardboard halos and rubber noses aside, my reality is far more nuanced than that, but it does have a genuine stinger in its tail. I'm a guy rich in imagination, but impoverished in his ability to tolerate anything that offended it. Someone with a strong moral compass and a maverick streak who charted a different course in an age where that combination has become a liability. For someone who devoted his entire life to the creation of illusions in art, I had very little patience for slight-of-hand and smoke-and-mirrors in my personal affairs. Denial and self-delusion have never been my style. I had enough clarity to see through the crap and swindle of American life and in doing so caused a lot of friction. The heat generated by that friction has burned me far more than it has burned others and I have the scars to prove it. But if that has to be the price of the ticket to my chosen destination, then so be it.

So perhaps the language of memoir must be that of an outsider for it to have any worth beyond that of a reflecting pool for its author to preen and posture in. I’d agree that a memoir should perform its traditional rôle, to reflect the author’s intimate emotional impressions, but it should also hold up a mirror to the environment that triggered those responses in the first place. Without such contextualization and casuistry a story has no resonance. After all, you can't step outside of your own skin or out jump your own shadow, but you can take bearings during the course of your personal journey. The direction you're headed and the reactions you garner from fellow wayfarers gives you important clues not only about your own character, but also the character of the times you travel in. If the character of the traveler and his environment are at odds the result is often tragedy, but never without meaning and often not without comedy. The destination is always the same, but the meaning of each traveler's path is varied and unique and not imposed by an external agency, either temporal or metaphysical in nature. Personal responsibility demands that it be this way. In many cases, it's the only thing that we have complete control over.

For those of you who believe that an artist's life holds no relevance for them because, by definition, artists are cultural élitists and, therefore, not real Americans, that what we do is not important enough to warrant your attention, I would reply: check your biases in at the door. We are a nation of doers and dreamers. Artists are both. Whatever we take from society, we give back a thousand-fold. For over twenty-five years I was a stooge of free market capitalism. And like millions of others, I became its patsy during the Great Recession. You can't get much more American than that. Paradoxically, my story is yours, yet I remain an outsider. For those of you who come to this volume with reservations, I invite you to read on and reconsider the possibilities.

So, welcome. For better or worse, in anger or in levity, for the next three hundred pages I hope you'll enjoy the weave of the narrative tapestry that is my story. I can't say that your guided tour through my life won't have its slubs and nits, its rough patches. That's natural enough for any relationship, no matter how tenuous or ephemeral. Agreeing to disagree is the lingua franca of any democratic, civilized mind. Sometimes I'll piss you off, but I promise never to bullshit you. That's the line I stubbornly draw in the sand. There's a reason why it is so and I am thus.

But who to collar? What parties will shoulder the mantle of guilt for distorting the warp and weft of the mind of that eccentric kid from Chicago’s Southside? That geeky nonconformist who would have otherwise grown up to become another faceless pod-person, whose social programming seduced him into forsaking his dreams in exchange for the sham security of a nine-to-five office cubicle of a life before Old Bladebones himself punched his time card.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I wish to call your attention to the fact that the culprits responsible were clumsy, they left their fingerprints everywhere and the crime scene littered with tantalizing clues. They even returned to the scene of the crime, not once, but many, many times. Damning stuff, really.

It started with Jim Henson and Sesame Street. He planted the first seeds in the fertile garden of my imagination. Later on, others sowed their inspiration into the receptive furrows of my psyche. Ray Harryhausen. Willis O'Brien. J. R. R. Tolkien. Carl Sagan. George Orwell. And then there was H. P. Lovecraft. We’ll deal with them all in good time.

But first a digression. I promise the reader that we'll tie up these seemingly disparate threads later on. And so, as it is in such cases, it's always best to begin at the beginning:

Like most three year old children in the latter half of the American Century, I was parked in front of what author Harlan Ellison has so quaintly referred to as the Glass Teat, my kisser surgically attached to that silicate nipple, sucking away with the gusto of a freshman on a beer bong, all the while being quietly seduced by the blandishments of Oscar the Grouch and the Roman Alphabet System when . . . . it happened.

It happened to be one of those short vignettes that the producers of Sesame Street would wedge in between scenes of Bert’s anal/obsessive-compulsive hissy fits, Ernie's passive-aggressive stunts and Big Bird’s paranoid/delusional mastodon sightings. It, in this case, was a film segment - remarkable for its economy and precision - that demonstrated how to draw an elephant (not, may I add, Mr. Snuffalupagus). Live-action footage of a walking elephant in profile freeze-framed into an optical overlay of an artist's hand using a pencil to sketch his subject by first breaking down its component shapes into ovals and sausages. I could almost smell the ozone as my synapses crackled, its blue electricity arcing across neurological contacts with what was to be the first of many epiphanies in my life.

Feeling the heat of that first inspirational moment, I began to draw every chance I had. Not elephants, though, but rather the objects of my first burning passion - dinosaurs. And so, by the time I was four I had already memorized all the Greek and Latin nomenclature for these marvelous and exotic beasts.

Even at this early date I was aware that I was significantly different from others, that I was destined for something in that wide world somehow richer, bigger and altogether better. I wanted a life of non-stop adventure, color and excitement, which is to say, the exact opposite of what lay around me, which was the intellectual equivalent of a boneyard. I wanted to become a paleontologist when I grew up, to explore more rewarding ossuaries than the one I currently inhabited. (Either that or a scientific mastermind living in a laboratory built into a volcano somewhere in the South Pacific. With a giant squid tank. And a death ray gun. Dove-gray Nehru suit optional.)

However, the gray, crumbly soil of Illinois is not fossil-rich in dinosaurs. There are no stark, rolling buttes with Jurassic skulls and thigh bones jutting from its escarpments, waiting to be plucked like a bed of weird, osseous flowers. The Land of Lincoln is as flat as a skillet and twice as hot during summer and has never known the tread of a T. rex stalking its prey. Just my luck, I thought, to be born in such a place. Undeterred, at age three I dug up mom's flower bed in search of my heart's desire only to be disappointed when all I found were the roots of her rhododendrons below and one angry parent towering above. When I wasn't driving her nuts with a spade in one hand, I was driving her to distraction with a pencil in the other and a one-word inquiry poised on my lips: Why? If I couldn't commune with the objects of my passion by reaching across the gulf of time and touching their vestige, then I would represent them in all their glory with a box of Crayolas.

I would stare for hours at books illustrated by the great paleo-artists, Charles Knight and Zdeněk Burian and at pictures of the cave paintings at Lascaux. An elegant, sinuous line of charcoal on a limestone wall in France could not only convey volume, mass and movement, but also collapse time and distance itself to speak eloquently to an impressionable young mind on Chicago’s Southside thirty-five thousand years later. There was an undeniable and compelling power to it all. The deft, red ochre strokes of my ancient forebears and my own primitive scribblings with a brown crayon were animated by a common need to own our dreams, master our obsessions. It became a premonition of things to come, but more than that, my artistic awakening made me a part of a much grander tradition. Without knowing it I was becoming a part of an extended and much more quarrelsome family with very deep roots.

By this point it hadn't yet occurred to me that becoming an artist was even a viable career option. Along with teething, bed wetting and chicken pox, creativity was considered merely a passing phase. Once these regrettable stages were overcome, the real business of life could begin in earnest (or so people told me). My first inkling that I had real artistic talent arose when the local schoolyard bullies pressured me to draw pictures for them. I didn't like the terms (my drawing arm left in its socket in exchange for the drawing) nor the commission fee (the honor of appeasing their wrath). In what would become a repetitive pattern throughout my life and career, I fired the client and spent the rest of the school year trying to dodge their fists on the playground.

Other early misadventures in the world of art awaited me in grammar school. Some teachers can take the driest, mummified subject and resurrect it to bouncing, vibrant glory. Others are the assassins of all that they touch, demonstrating a plodder’s relish for snuffing out a pupil's innate curiosity in utero. Some teachers do it out of spite. Most out of ineptitude. And then there were those who viewed education as an off-Broadway production starring them . . . . with their students playing the captive audience.

My grammar school's music teacher was a real character, a force of nature: one part Auntie Mame and another Lady Macbeth. The class really was more about her than the music she taught. A histrionic personality type given to sweeping gestures, mercurial mood swings and wildly colored caftans, her alienated students experienced the class two degrees removed, like watching themselves star in a performance art tableau that was filmed in grainy 8mm, complete with jarring jump cuts and a murky, unfocused image. Essentially, she was an incompetent pedagogue: if you came to her with talent and some grounding in music theory then you received her seal of approval - if not, she didn't have the time of day for you.

In spite of the alternately wacky, brusque and pedantic conduct she subjected us to, I was able to glean something of extraordinary value from her class. The pivotal moment came when she introduced us to a recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Those opening chords smote me like a thunderclap and I was launched ass-over-teakettle into a lifelong love affair with classical music. That was the take-away. In my book, an ounce of Beethoven absolves a ton of bullshit. And there was much more to come.

The public education system oversaw a vast quagmire of bullshit for me and my fellow students to wade through . . . . with precious little of it forgivable because much of it had no take-away value. Many of these early, unnecessary controversies revolved around my artistic talent and the adult compulsion to control something which they didn't understand. With the misguided energy that only the human race can summon, we have ascribed creativity to everything from supernatural forces like the Muses to psychological aberrations like substance abuse and mental illness - everything except its true source: a happy collision of genes and a need to connect with our wider humanity.

The received wisdom and trenchant insights of my parent's generation weren't much of an improvement. They believed artists had a hungry arm, a randy eye, an empty pocket and always ended up dead in the gutter, where they no doubt belonged with the rest of society's other trash. From out of the dark, narrow labyrinth of their prejudice came its knee-jerk, conveyor belt judgments: Parasite. Pervert. Parvenu. Pariah. Case Closed. Admittedly, chronic poverty, a liver marinated in absinthe, a galloping case of tertiary syphilis and hanging oneself at the tender age of twenty-four in an unheated, cold-water garret on the Left Bank of Paris just didn’t sound very savory to me. Character flaws never being a proper substitute for talent, I decided to stick with the dashing, colorful exploits of paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, thank you very much.

In the meantime, my kindergarten teacher, a woman who looked like J. Edgar Hoover's drag queen stunt double, was determined to divert me from such an imminent fate. At least that's what she claimed. Savoring the humiliation of another child as their spirit was slowly crushed under the grinding wheel of her authority, she rewarded my manifestations of high-verbal ability, an independence of spirit and a chalkboard festooned with a menagerie of dinosaurs by exiling me from the class once a week to the probing ministrations of the school psychologist - a decision made under the patronizing benediction of the school's principal, a man whose features and mannerisms were a seedy, queasy blend of Jimmy Stewart and Richard M. Nixon.

America is a nation that likes to receive its information straight from the horse's mouth, while acting on it in a way suggestive of a horse’s ass. The experts of my era held that creativity was borderline criminal: a harbinger of incipient pathology, a psychological disorder as well as an essentially un-American activity. It was all too introspective, too intellectual, too redolent of a European sensibility. Or, in rather less oblique terms: homosexual, atheistic and communist. The adults fretted over the possibility that I might not embrace the American Way of Life: annual pilgrimages to Disneyland, sleepwalking through church services, channeling my emotional life through televised contact sports and dreary sitcoms, guns, lottery tickets, canned beer and cold pizza, V.F.W. meetings and drunken debacles in topless bars. The idea of my den lined with books instead of hunting trophies was just too much to bear. If left unchecked, creativity could warp me into a commie-pinko degenerate egghead who would subvert American democracy by associating with Democrats and such fellow travelers as uppity Civil Rights niggers, Red-diaper A.C.L.U. yids, bra-burning femi-dykes, draft-dodging pantywaists, free-thinkers, vegetarians and the other foot soldiers in Satan's legion of the damned. It simply would not do. I needed to be converted to the True Shining Path. I needed to be saved from my own baser instincts. I needed to conform. Like a set of splints, further, more invasive indoctrination and conditioning would be needed to straighten out the growth trajectory of my maverick tendencies.

But it was too late: I'd gotten a taste of the creative life and lusted for more. Hooked, I wouldn't allow anyone to wrest this glorious narcotic from my life without one hell of a fight. The many scoldings, lectures and harangues that I was subjected to from teachers and family alike were injections of Death used to vaccinate me against contracting a serious case of Living. My stubborn personal challenge to authority was made at a critical juncture in American history when rebellion became the national fashion. At a time when American society's obsession with normalcy had become strained, I threatened to become the very antithesis of it. Even at this early date it was clear that the conflict between individualism and communitarian values, between personal liberty and conformity, would become a defining theme of my life. Who was accepted and excluded and why would provide the torque and tension that drove my search for identity. So it went with me, so too our nation. Alea jacta est.

The old sci-fi pulps predicted that mankind's conquest of space would be a fait accompli by 1970, the year I entered school. In reality, we hadn't even conquered our own primitive impulses and appetites - let alone the solar system - in the wealthiest, most powerful, most advanced free nation in the history of the planet. We were masters of the material world, yet we couldn't even understand our own feelings. It was a dangerous imbalance. Jetson's-style pop culture ephemera aside, welcome to Archie Bunker's sweaty fever dream of Cold War paranoid, Vietnam perfervid, Wonder Bread Amuuuurica.

The school administration's reaction to me was typical of an era where the status quo was under siege by the forces of change. Threatened by these seismic shifts, the knee-jerk response was to suppress anything that strayed from their baseline of doctrinaire normalcy. For many, the complexities, subtleties and nuances of the issues needed to be packaged into terms that were safe and simple . . . . and divisive. That meant demonization. And the politicians were there, waiting in the wings as they always are, to encourage and exploit this fear. People identified with one of two camps that Tricky Dick Nixon would later define as The Silent Majority and Those Bums. Identified as an oddball and a troublemaker before the starting gate opened, everyone could see towards which camp I was headed. And they didn't like it at all. There were already too many oddball troublemakers taking to the streets, protesting the unsustainable way America had been doing business for the last three hundred years.

Why all the divisive rage and social upheaval, I asked. Because, I was duly informed, Those Bums were ungrateful and Those Bums didn't know their place. Misguided were they? No matter, I was told, God will punish them for their impertinence in questioning the Natural Order. (Either that or His assigned representatives on Earth will: the Chicago Police Department and the National Guard.) Oh Lord, we thank Thee for Thy strength and wisdom to combat the evil forces which encroach upon Thy whitest of macho, Wild West, free market tabernacles: The United States of Amuuuurica. Now pass the truncheons and tear gas. Amen.

The Establishment easily loses sight of the fact that a critique of capitalism does not render you by default a Marxist radical bent on the destruction of America. On the contrary: it makes you a patriot and a good citizen because unregulated capitalism has become a greater threat to democracy today than communist Russia did fifty years ago. Marx approached the problems of society and its discontents via class divisions. Capitalism's organizing principle is content to divide and conquer nations with its enslavement to the Almighty Greenback. Both systems are essential to understanding the 20th century, but it's important to bear in mind that more blood has been spilled in the pursuit of business profits than international brotherhood.

Dominated as it was by this conflict between social justice and commerce, America in the 1960s was a fairly blood-soaked decade. That governments manipulate their citizens like pawns on a chessboard offends most, but surprises few. However, to represent human rights violations as normative in pursuing national security objectives is a moral obscenity. Young men believe in their own righteousness and immortality, that's how old men can trick them into fighting and dying in senseless wars like Vietnam. Initially, the youthful arrogance of the Baby Boomer Generation was informed by a principled love of American democracy and a more sophisticated understanding of the issues that faced their country. Those Bums weren't so easily seduced into harness to pull the wagon of the Military/Industrial Complex, States Rights in the Deep South or any other repressive political agenda. At first, the impulse was high-minded and communitarian in nature, but an inversion slowly took hold during the struggle for civil liberties in the 1960s. Decades worth of consumerism and post-war prosperity was responsible for softening their convictions with a focus on indulging the self, but it was the years of bitter conflict against the entrenched forces of corporate greed and political corruption that finally broke them spiritually. Discouraged, community activism was displaced by personal actualization. Self-sacrifice was out of fashion and self-involvement crept in to take its place by the mid-1970s. Better to get back in line and go with the flow. They told themselves that it was far wiser to live on your knees than to die on your feet, to take a regular paycheque from The Man and tow the company line . . . . while lying to themselves that they still upheld good liberal values, even as they served and enabled a system that savaged them at every turn. A decade later, the election of Ronald Reagan by these Baby Boomer firebrands would complete their fall from grace. L'enfant gâté? More like l'enfant grise. But we're getting ahead of our story: more on this later.

Few suspected it at the time, but America was teetering over a yawning abyss. Nineteen sixty-six, the year I entered this world, would be the last good year we as a nation would experience before our steady descent into it. And then came 1968. The Year of the Assassin's Bullet took both Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King from us. An epidemic of race riots erupted across the nation. The Tet Offensive. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr.'s repartee during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon's election. (Not to mention his sabotaging of the peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War that year. As a result, thirty thousand more U.S. soldiers were sent overseas to die needlessly. But why quibble over actuary charts and dry statistics? The Republican Party won the presidential election because Johnson was thwarted in his effort to end the war: that's all that counted.) It was one of the most disastrous years this country has ever known. If America's innocence was on life support after J.F.K.'s assassination, then 1968 was the year it flat-lined.

So, this was the world I was born