The Weekly Screed (#712)

“You wanna make somethin’ of it?”
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Unlike Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren and Opie Taylor, I didn’t engage in a whole lot of pugilism in my school days. Every normal kid in the combative 1950’s had ample opportunity to get beaten into tapioca by thugs at recess. However, operating under the assumption that I couldn’t possibly prevail against the sadistic hulks who roamed the playground like Jurassic reptiles, I learned how to evade most near occasions of bloodshed.

In retrospect, I’m a little regretful. Later in life, I learned that I have a certain moronic tenacity and a talent for taking a punch. Beating me senseless was a little like whacking a sheet hanging on a clothesline. I just kept hanging there, white and limp, while my assailant grew ever more arm-weary, knuckle-raw and aggravated.

But in grade school, I didn’t know how durable I was. Instead, I figured out how easy it can be to talk your way out of a potential subdural hematoma. I also noticed that, whenever a ruckus broke out on the St. Mary’s School playground, the final act was an anticlimax imposed by a grownup — usually Father Mulligan — who required the combatants to emulate Jesus and shake hands.

As testament to the warped psychology of kids, these coerced truces often evolved into friendships.

I remembered all this while pondering the fuss in Washington over President Obama’s delicate nuclear-arms talks with Iran. The Republicans — who took the extraordinary measure of writing a cautionary primer on U.S. civics to Iran’s ayatollahs — have stipulated that their idea of foreign policy involves neither my conversational strategy nor Father Mulligan’s invocation of divine authority. A handshake is unthinkable, and talking? To those guys? Just plain sissy.

I realize that it’s metaphorically dubious to suggest an exact parallel between schoolboy playground battles in the 1950’s and 21st-century nuclear diplomacy, but this GOP stunt nevertheless harked me right back to noon recess at St. Mary’s.

I mean, you remember how it went. The first kid, usually without evident provocation, would get himself chin-to-chin with some other kid. He would address him by his last name (fights never began on a first-name basis), followed by something like, “You’re a slime-sucking horse’s ass!”

To which Kid #2 would wittily respond: “Oh yeah?!”

Back to Kid #1: “Yeah!”

After which, the second kid was required — according to time-honored juvenile protocol to say, for example, “Yeah, well, (Last Name), you’re a pigfaced pile of crap.”

A few more “oh yeahs?” and “yeahs!”, culminated then in the rhetorical gauntlet-blow, always framed as: “Oh, yeah? You wanna make somethin’ of it?”

This was the cue for dialog to end and combat to commence, with lots of rolling around on the playground and body blows that had no effect because each kid was wearing a winter coat, two layers of clothing (one flannel, one wool) and long underwear.

What I figured out around fourth grade was that you could reliably forestall one of these contretemps by altering the standard liturgy, essentially tossing in an “Et cum spiritu tuo” where a “Christe eleison” was supposed to go.

For instance, let’s say Laufenberg, one of my more dependable antagonists, got into my face and delivered his line about me being a slime-sucking horse’s ass. Rather than taking his cue and intoning the obligatory but hackneyed, “Oh, yeah?”, I would cross him up with, “Jeez, John, d’you really think so?”

Laufenberg, expecting a question but not that one, would hesitate. This gave me time to rustle up a little more food for thought: “OK then, John, but what sort of horse?” Laufenberg might rally with a cunning riposte like, “Hunh?” But, by then, I was positioned to defuse the threat — and launch a general equine debate among the kids gathered ‘round — by asking, “I mean, could I be an Arabian horse’s ass? How ‘bout a mustang? Or a Clydesdale? A Shetland pony’s ass maybe?”

Forgive the obviously flawed metaphor, but it seems to me that, ever since the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, the ayatollahs have been saying to America, “You’re a slime-sucking horse’s ass,” and the U.S. response, for 35 years, has been the same old, “Oh yeah?” Followed by you-know-what — which would probably be OK if we’re talking about a couple of ten-year-olds on a parochial-school playground.

But here, the “you-wanna-make-somethin'-of-it?” part involves hydrogen bombs. This is why, at last, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry surprised the ayatollahs and said, “Jeez, guys, d’you really think so?”

This altered liturgy now seems to be approaching the “What sort of horse’s ass?” stage. I think this is good, but it obviously violates the Republicans’ foreign policy principles, which appear to be stuck on the “oh-yeah?-yeah!-well-you’re-a-pigfaced-pile-of-crap!” plateau. GOP senators are so miffed over the Arabian vs. Clydesdale discourse in Geneva that they’re writing mash notes to mullahs.

Ironically, Sen. Cotton’s Letter to Tehran is another positive sign. My old foe Laufenberg wasn’t known for parsing the Marquess of Queensbury Rules before grinding some kid into the asphalt at recess. If he had, he wouldn’t have remained — from 1st through 8th grades — the alpha-male Cro Magnon whom we all knew and feared. The last thing a true bully ever does is explain himself.

The President is getting the mullahs to explain themselves, and recess is already a little safer. But even if he can humor the Iranians, he faces a bigger challenge with the local bullies, who’ve been calling him a pigfaced pile of crap — and worse — for more than six years now. I don’t think they’re going to let up.

As Dorothy Parker didn’t quite say, “You can lead a horse’s ass to Congress, but you can’t make him think.”