NEXT STOP WILLOUGHBY

Over half a century ago there was an episode of The Twilight Zone called “Next Stop Willoughby” which even as a child I deeply understood the essence of.

It told the story of a put-upon, ulcer-ridden ad exec who has to “push, push, push” in order to stay ahead of the pack. His boss is an evil tyrant, his wife is an effete snob and he is on the verge of a collapse. HIs only escape is his daily commute on the train which lulls him to sleep and in his dream he’s still on the train, but it’s the 19th century and the beneficent conductor announces that the next stop is Willoughby which, through the windows he can see is an idyllic, Tom Sawyer-like world of civility, decency, kindness and good barefoot, straw hat fishing.

He resists getting off over and over again, until, finally, when the world around him is simply too cruel and unforgiving, in his dream, he finally gets off. I won’t tell you how it ends. It has an amazing ironic end.

Creator Rod Serling to this day remains my writing idol and I know a bit about him. He was a nice, Jewish boy (turned Unitarian) who upon returning from fighting in the South Pacific during World War Two, carried inside him, all kinds of demons and his battle to fit comfortably into this world became the ongoing theme of The Twilight Zone.

The Confucian way of life posits a fixable human nature but I’m pretty sure that Confucius didn’t have cable news and most definitely did not have to contend with the universe that is our currently flushable cesspool created by Trump and the lying, scheming, pure evil cartoon villains of the GOP.

It is no wonder that we flee like hordes of escaping immigrants to the movie theaters to get our fix of Superheroes because, in our everyday life, that is what is missing.

Those who support the Trump die-nasty, to no one’s surprise, are either spectacularly rich or reside on the far distant other end of the spectrump: the huddled, uneducated masses who think, that because they are on the TV all the time, via their rallies, that they have become, by association, powerful, reality show stars too. Becoming rich has got to be just within their grasp.

The truth, of course, is that the desperate are cranked on the single most addictive mind control drug that is offered free of charge in America today: rhetoric whose single most powerful ingredient is pure American bullshit.

And that is why we live in the Walter White House today. 

You do the meth.

Trump’s Field Marshalls, guys like McConnell, Grassley, Graham, Hatch, and Cruz remind me of those pictures of Don Jr and his brother Fredo posing on the Serrengetti triumphantly waving severed elephant tails over their heads, like Taliban flags, standing on the carcass of a just shot, innocent-as-Dumbo elephant.

It’s good pickings out there for those on the hunt. The weapon of choice is pretend Christianity (dispensed Elmer Gantry style) while making sure that the insane are fully stocked with bump stock AR-15s for your school shooting pleasure.

If you think I’m being too harsh, tell me what has changed in America since Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, and Parkland. What lesson has been logged and learned and has made life better and safer for everyone?

Not even bullet-ridden GOP senators who were shot down on a softball field have made a difference. The target audience is everyone.

It seems like no one wants to go to the college of life anymore and major in the kind of empathy and genuine patriotism that we see on display in the old black and white movies from the thirties and forties that are shown on TCM.

You know what those movies are today?

Willoughby.

So are take your breath away museum exhibits, enchanting Broadway plays, transplendent novels and music like The Beatles, who no longer exist, but still, with a magical mystery mixture of major and minor chords, instantly transport both the old and the new back to a much giddier place, when melody and harmony transformed a collective long-haired, bell-bottomed war loathing barefoot tribe into a civilization of a spontaneous, happy in the groove toddlers. At least until side two was over. Then we had to return to the real world. But at least we had a place to go.

Today, we are all, my lost generation friends, stuck on one, helpless, hopeless, back and forth track, going from station to station, which is either MSNBC or Fox, while we secretly yearn for our own, personal Willoughby.

The only power that we have is the mute or power button on our TV remotes that we leap towards and PRESS the second that Trump or Huckabee’s bloated, Halloween mask faces suddenly appear on our flat screens, which gives us our moment to scream at those two Animal Farm pigs like club beaten banshees from our appropriately named La-Z-Boy chairs.

We are, for now, a country of Munch Screamers, whose red face, vein pop rage in the discomfort of our own barely living rooms, full of bloodthirsty, atypical thoughts that up to now was the provenance of the ultra-violent.

Worst is that this is all justifiable. 

Trump is treating us and our country exactly like he has his long list of spectacularly failed businesses. He is literally poisoning the planet while creating massive emotional and financial debt in return for making enormous profits for both him, the pretend Republican, and the rest of the GOP who prefer their cash fed like caviar on silver spoons.

The sole purpose of Trump for the conservative right is to for infect, for decades to come, the Supreme Court by delivering an anti-abortionist to the now vacant seat, which Trump created by convincing Judge Kennedy to retire early. 

The GOP does not give a rat’s ass who that person is. Not even a lying, woman abusing scumbag like Brett Kavanaugh whose true colors were nationally displayed when he went off on a full-tilt partisan rant about how he is the mob hit victim of the Democrats who are out for a little post-Clinton impeachment revenge.

Is this a man who is even a little judicial on any level? This is the man, who might decide the fate of Trump should his case go all the way to the Supreme Court.

None of that matters to the GOP. None of them care about abortion. Or guns. Or anything else that they preach about. Those are just fundraising PR talking points to get the clueless devout to believe that they are one of them.

And business is a-boomin.’

Until the blue wave washes over us and sends the rats scrambling, the best advice I can offer you is to occasionally get off at Willoughby by reading something delicious, writing something meaningful, listening to soul filling music, go see the Delacroix exhibit at the Met or To Kill a Mockingbird or Network on Broadway. 

Better yet seek out other prophets, besides Howard Beale, like Joseph Campbell. Join Bill Moyer and listen to The Power of the Myth.

Real heroes, real or otherwise, after all, never die.

They are always there, hidden in the shadows of the lost human heart, forever there to whisper the truth to you which is the only way that we can stay connected by the slender silver thread to the true, vital, invincible, God sanctioned spirit of the human race.