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Tale 40

 

A Formal Complaint Against
mj lorenzo

 

 small square surrounded by
                neat houses except on the far side an official building
                with big windows and tower and flag

“...if it hadn’t been for them, mj lorenzo would not know ‘to this day’

that his book, The Remaking, had been published and had turned out to be a success.

He would ‘still be... in the Poconos making babies’...”

 

as it appeared in November 2018:

Stroudsburg town square and Monroe County courthouse

in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania

where the complaint was originally filed

 

The pundits had presented their ‘nightmare confession defense’ (as the press had facetiously nomered it) in late ‘82 without consulting mj or Sammy Martinez, either one.

 

They had defended his Tales of Waring with clever arguments that appeared valid, as all sides agreed; but in the meantime they had remained SECRETLY aggravated by the entire affair, the foolishness of their hero’s having published ‘such a scandal of a book’ in the first place. And they had hidden this fact lest the press discover such a ‘chink in their armor’, as Bill Blackburn would have called it, and ridicule them for – first of all: (1) having encouraged their hero, mj, to publish his crazy book without having studied it adequately first themselves; and secondly: (2) having regretted in PUBLIC like stupid fools that they had encouraged mj to publish Tales of Waring, now when it was far too late to undo that mistake gracefully; and thirdly, (3) having stuck their necks out so far as to defend the regrettable book publicly after mj had published it, already feeling, even then, that it was truly a wreck of a book; and fourthly: (4) having secretly ‘taken back’ their elaborate and erudite defense of mj lorenzo’s Tales of Waring even after all of that CRAZY SLOPPINESS!

 

They were livid at the thought of how much they had done wrong. They would be discovered as stupid pundit fools, if they recanted in public now!

 

They knew perfectly well by now that they were up to their highbrow eyebrows in alligators, but they were too blinded and panicked by alligator teeth to see what they should NOT do next, and so they did it! For, the more they thought about what they had done, about how this second book of mj’s had made them feel obligated to come to its rescue and his, and the more they chafed at the thought that they had done so when in fact the book was ‘trash’; and worse, the more they steamed about what he had done by writing ‘such trash’, he of all people, the more furious they got. They stewed for a whole year remembering at least fifty times each day how they had stuck their necks out for something as ‘juvenile’ as Tales of Waring. They stewed too long and cooked their nervous systems so hard, as a result, that they turned their nerves into madness itself. A detailed list kept growing in their minds over the months, a longer and longer list they were making of all the not-so-tiny things about the affair that fed their aggravation, a list that grew and grew the longer they thought about it and the madder they got, until they finally held a big formal conflab, this group of extremist mj lorenzo defenders, mostly ‘culture hero’ people, and decided to have the human source of the rot come back to Philly himself for a little review of things.

 

He was a little too content anyway, in their ‘humble’ opinion, all the way out there in Denver with Dlune and his – now – two kids and his psychiatric practice, which was starting to take off at last. Meanwhile they had been spending every day of the week with his Remaking in one way or another and thinking about him constantly therefore, and they frankly would have preferred to see him more often. He ‘owed them’ that much, they said. He was ‘too comfortable out west’. They had thought he would come back east to live, to be closer to his ‘closest and most loyal followers’. They, the ‘early Remaking pundits’ and ‘culture hero pundits’, were the ones, after all, who had essentially created mj lorenzo’s fame, as they realized and told themselves loudly in the conference hall through the microphone, the day of their big secret conflab in one of the smaller halls of the Philadelphia Civic Center on Civic Center Boulevard. They were the famous group who had discovered mj lorenzo’s The Remaking for the rest of humanity; and if they had not screamed and yelled bloody murder about their discovery and promoted his crazy underground book to high heaven, he would not have been the recognized writer worldwide he had become between ‘71 and ‘82. And yet he just kept on practicing psychiatry out there in Denver, perfectly content to be a nobody and to keep ‘ignoring’ them. He had never even said one word of thanks!!! And this got some stormy applause.

 

 color photo, old and almost
              blurry, 30-ish man standing in yard cradling sleeping
              infant baby girl in right arm while 2-year-old boy sits on
              his left forearm

Dr. Lorenzo 1976

first summer as proud Daddy of two babies

 

Mj, of course, had visited this core group of ardent pundits in Philadelphia a couple of times recently, on his way to see his parents and sister, or to go to the Jersey shore with his wife and kids (and parents and sister, and her children) in Ocean City, in August, as a few quieter ones at the conference reminded the louder ones. He had even encouraged them to invite other pundits from around the country to those conference-format ‘visits’ where he answered questions on his writing, his life, and anything they wanted to ask. Didn’t they remember?

 

No, said the loud, angry ones, ‘once a year’ was not enough for a ‘culture hero’ to meet with ‘his people’, especially since they were the ones who had ‘pointed out to him that he was a culture hero’. If they had not had the ‘wisdom and perspicacity’ to see that quality in him and see it in The Remaking and point it out to him, he would never have figured it out, they reminded each other and themselves; because the truth was, though he had said as much in The Remaking – that he had ‘come into the world to keep humanity from destroying itself’ – he had also seemed to equivocate about that at times in the very same work (and other works), the more they studied the matter. They weren’t deserting him though, they emphasized. They had not changed their minds about him or about who they thought he was. They were still rather sure they had done the right thing in applying Joseph Campbell’s term ‘culture hero’ to mj lorenzo. They were more and more sure of it every day, in fact, because, as they were now starting to realize the hard way, Campbell, in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, had ‘lumped some pretty opposite dudes under that banner’, throwing Christ and Buddha together with Cuchulainn of Irish folklore and Coyote of the southwest tribes; because, that ‘unholy mix’ of characters and of ‘hero’ and ‘anti-hero’ characteristics all at once, seemed to ‘fit mj lorenzo more and more’, as time went by, they said, the more they got to know him; and with those words they sounded just a little bit too sarcastic for some. That was what the quieter, less angry ones at this eventually famous Secret Pundit Strategy-plotting Conference said afterward anyway. The angry bunch had gone ‘over the top a little bit’.

 

And that was another thing which the angriest ones remembered, right at this point in the conference, this angry bunch which seemed to be getting more pushy and demanding every minute: they were the ones who had gone to the trouble to interview mj’s parents for information on his childhood; and they were the ones who had begged Sammy to get mj to meet with them; and when Sammy had refused to help them find and meet mj, they were the ones who had spent hundreds of collective man hours at the New York Public Library trying to track him down without Sammy’s darn help, until they themselves, and nobody but them, had succeeded in finding him. So, if it hadn’t been for them, mj lorenzo would not know ‘to this day’ that his book, The Remaking, had been published and had turned out to be a success. He would ‘still be screwing Dlune in the Poconos making babies’, as they always loved to put it, so irreverently for some reason, down through the years; he would still be ‘blissfully unconcerned with his mission’, which he had defined ‘so clearly’ in The Remaking, they said (but forgetting in their anger the fact that they had just said he might have ‘equivocated’ on that point).

 

For the fact was, they went on, despite that mission of his, despite his having written ‘the most important book of the second half of the twentieth century’, The Remaking, despite all of their devotion to him and their demonstrated, proven ongoing need for him to keep on being an inspiration to them, as physically present an inspiration as possible, and despite his clear statement in The Remaking that he would need help for the rest of his life from people who could support him in his mission, he had gone and hidden away from the world for years in the Poconos and then Denver; he had not even published The Remaking so that the world could receive its benefits; he had left it in a box in a closet on top of which he routinely had tossed his ‘dirty, smelly socks’ (they actually said these words loudly into the mike and considered the option of using the words in the audacious formal complaint they were brewing in the crock pot of their minds, the crock pot they kept firing up with their anger), he had walked away from his true work and true people and just plain gone fishing with Bill Blackburn, they complained. He had shifted his focus from them, from the people who needed him most and would do anything to help him promote his cause, and he had focused all of his attention instead on one of the twentieth-century Western world’s most arrogant men, Fred (‘fucking’ could be heard right here, since they were all burnt out sixties street-marching leftists, and angry) Waring; and then, instead of writing a second book like The Remaking, a second book which might have inspired people to a better life and showed them the way to that life, he had written this second book instead: about this arrogant, selfish man in hopes of glorifying this arrogant and selfish man and the author himself thereby; and he had even been disappointed, and even defensive, when the people he had interviewed (the Blackburns) had resisted his attempts to get a ‘good’ story out of them, about this arrogant man. He had been upset when his interviewees (the Blackburns) had told him the truth about the man, instead of the lie lorenzo had wanted to hear, the truth which he should have been capable of seeing himself if he had only been less self-indulgent and self-deluded, the truth of Fred’s arrogant character; which the world desperately had needed mj lorenzo, of all the contemporary world’s biggest role models, to repudiate absolutely; they had needed, they themselves, every one of them at this conference, had desperately needed mj lorenzo to take an outspoken stand against this Fred Waring’s truly arrogant way of dealing with everybody in the world – (everybody except Ike and Mamie Eisenhower, the only people in his whole lifetime, apparently, that Fred Waring had not treated like dirt).

 

The quiet people at the conference could not deny it was true, of course, all of it. That was not their objection and worry. The press as well as readers everywhere had acknowledged that mj lorenzo had apparently forgotten himself and his first book, The Remaking, and had apparently ‘turned traitor’ on liberal causes everywhere when he had written Tales of Waring; and the quiet ones agreed to some extent. Mj had ‘backslidden’ from his Remaking mission. It was too true. What they didn’t like was the tone of the angry ones. The ‘attitude’ worried them. Maybe a tone and attitude like that would chase their mj away forever, they said among themselves; but they were too intimidated to say it aloud at the conference. It was useless to push against ‘that loud-mouthed group’, they said to each other, ‘useless’; and they kept hearing the word in their heads over and over: ‘useless’.

 

This last point of the angry ones about Fred’s arrogance would have been a real good kicker for the angry bunch to quit with, if only they had thought to stop right there once they had finished saying it. It would have made a good dramatic finale for their oratory; and – they were right – Fred Waring’s arrogance was a much more important part of Tales of Waring than they realized, as they would soon find out the hard way. But: they did not know how to stop there, apparently, and went right on to complain that ‘worse yet’, the ‘stupid’ book that had resulted from all this mess had ‘not even been any good’. It had been an embarrassment to mj lorenzo’s reputation as writer and crucial commentator on his culture, and an embarrassment to their reputation and the reputation of their very important cause, that of promoting him as ‘culture hero’, which didn’t deserve such treatment either. Because, they said: the book had merely presented the actual night-long interview in all of its detail, and the detail had often been boring. He hadn’t made the least effort to find some way to present the story, for the sake of readers, in a way which would hold interest better. They could find a million other things wrong with the book along such stylistic and popular-thinking lines, they said, but this thing was its biggest problem. It was the reason they had written their ‘nightmare confession defense’: the lack of a standard fiction format, the insufficient paring down of ‘unnecessary detail’ (such as mj ‘peeing in the Blackburns’ bathroom’), and the absence of a suspenseful buildup to a dramatic crisis that would have resolved tension just before the end, where all readers expected it. They said this despite the fact that they had defended him so staunchly in their ‘nightmare confession defense’, where they had announced to the world that he had been trying to confess with as much accurate detail as possible his actual nightmare of an experience, which had not included any ‘denouement’. They were letting the cat out of the bag at this conference, by these words, in effect, that they had been or still were royally mixed up about the book; or perhaps they hinted that they had been robbed of their senses by anger, or that they had been forging a cover up when they had invented the defense, and never really believed in their own defense: one or more of these awful things had to be the case.

 

Maybe they had been lying outright to the public!

 

But whatever the terrible explanation for their backtracking, there was no way they could deny after this conference that by adding their final point about ‘his stupid book’, even though it might have been correct that the book had lacked drama right where some people might have wished for it most, right near the end where one usually expected a denouement of some sort, they had actually shot themselves in the foot; for this final point of their ‘Formal Compaint against mj lorenzo’, as it came to be known, damaged their reputation more than mj’s, and damaged their reputation more than it helped it, because it contradicted a very loudly voiced opinion of theirs from only a year back. They were looking crazier and crazier and less reliable in their opinions about mj lorenzo every minute, a result they should never have wanted, of course, since they were a very vocal group who still had a bit of a global audience via the press (and some were noted published scholars in their own right); and they had believed until now in their cause of promoting mj lorenzo as ‘global culture hero’ as ardently as the English Separatists and Puritans had believed in theirs, when they had climbed on board the Mayflower and left Plymouth, England for the dangerous voyage into the unknown, ending up at Provincetown and Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its Rock, and a new and better world. But, unlike their Pilgrim predecessors, these pundit forgers of a new world, the ‘culture hero’ pundits, had succumbed to deep inchoate anger. That was the problem.

 

And the quiet ones feared them, and so, the angry group did call mj lorenzo on the phone and invite him; and he flew to Philadelphia in the spring of ‘83. Pundits came from all over the country, as was customary (for the rare historic chance to see, hear and maybe even meet their hero), even a hundred or so from Europe, and scores from Latin America, Australia, India, etc., and the press attended of course, as always; and they met in Irvine Auditorium on Penn’s campus again, just as they had the first two times in their lives they had ever seen mj lorenzo, after finding him in the Poconos in 1980, having worked so hard to find him, with nobody helping them. And he ‘looked just the same as then’, they thought. And he defended himself as best he could, very much along the lines they had suggested in their position statement, their ‘nightmare confession defense’, in fact; and the press reported every word of it. And the whole fracas hit the media airwaves with the headline that mj lorenzo’s most ardent followers had ‘turned against him’.

 

And the U.S. political right came to mj’s defense!

 

 mj in black cap and gown in
              front of college-hall-type tower

Dr. Lorenzo before he was a Dr.

(the day he graduated from Wrigley College in 1964, age 21)

 

“A group of students at Wrigley College, mj’s alma mater near Chicago,

formed an active nationwide ‘Support MJ Lorenzo Committee’ of Evangelical Christian college students

on Evangelical Christian college campuses to defend the defender of Fred Waring,

to ‘defend the burnt-out leftover sixties leftist’, mj lorenzo,

a most infamous Wrigley alumnus,

who had 'finally' been ‘big enough a man to speak the truth instead of towing a party line’,

a man who, ‘when he had seen the greatness in Fred Waring

had not hidden it in confusion and shame but had written it down honestly and forthrightly in a book’...”

 

No one could have invented a ‘more ironic and insanely twisted plot’ if they had been inventing fiction, as the student newspaper at Gettysburg College put it. They had been following the story with interest because Fred Waring had played golf in Gettysburg often. He had hung out there with Ike Eisenhower in the sixties, after Ike had left the Presidency and retired to live in Gettysburg, just as Ike had hung out with Fred at his Shawnee Inn at times. And students at other colleges were more vocal. A group of students at Wrigley College, mj’s alma mater near Chicago, formed an active nationwide ‘Support MJ Lorenzo Committee’ of Evangelical Christian college students on Evangelical Christian college campuses to defend the defender of Fred Waring, to “defend the burnt-out leftover sixties leftist,” mj lorenzo, a most infamous Wrigley alumnus, who had 'finally' been “big enough a man to speak the truth instead of towing a party line,” a man who, “when he had seen the greatness in Fred Waring had not hidden it in confusion and shame but had written it down honestly and forthrightly in a book” that was bound to do Fred’s reputation (and that of the Republican party’s right wing, of course) more good than bad with posterity; and mj lorenzo had done this wittingly, said these right-wing student defenders, not unwittingly or stupidly. He had done it fully aware of the possible consequences, despite the fact, in other words, that Fred Waring was a staunch God-and-Country Republican. And mj had done this because he had wanted to do something that might hopefully help heal the growing rift between the two extremist political-ideological camps in the U.S.A. This was what mj’s conservative student defenders maintained in interviews with the papers. They knew it to be the case, they said when pressed, because they had called him on the telephone from his alma mater, Wrigley, and he had explained to them that this had been part of his intention in writing a book about Fred Waring, and this kind of book in particular, as it was his intention in all his writing, to find ways to heal the rift between fractious opposing camps ‘rather than make the rift broader or deeper with any careless, un-circumspect writing’ of his.

 

So the scandal of a formal complaint, a scolding, almost railing, even hurt-sounding, formal public complaint against poor ol’ mj lorenzo, having arisen from the very core of his own most ardent (until now) pundit defenders, mainly the 'culture hero pundits', aroused the public’s sympathy for him, and especially – remarkably – the political right’s sympathy, on behalf of this young author of two (now) rather famous books. It aroused their passion against the ‘ridiculous culture hero pundits’, of whom they had never felt very fond anyway; for the ‘culture hero’ pundits had seemed at times surprisingly similar to extremist-Protestant, Bible-pounding Sunday morning TV preachers. The culture hero pundits’ politics were opposite of the right’s, of course, but these ‘culture hero’ pundits had behaved at times remarkably like the most exasperating members of the extreme right, too much like them, in short.

 

And ‘they had no right to be that excited or upset about mj lorenzo or anything else’, as mj’s Aunt Tisha, Jo Lorenzo’s sister, told the Camden Courier, the paper read in Collingswood and other South Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia where mj’s mother’s family still lived; for, as Tisha was quoted, ‘not a single one of those culture hero pundits was a believer in anything worthy of anyone’s believing in it’. And she knew perfectly well they believed in her favorite nephew, Mortimer Jack Lorenzo, her own sister Josephine’s son, ‘Jackie’, with all their hearts, and in the leftist ideals he sometimes seemed to be fostering in his writing; because she was a brilliant woman and extremely hip politically, tuned in like a hidden computerized listening device, night and day, to ideological sub-currents in the U.S. American culture war, ever since the sad days when FDR had gone ‘pinko’ overnight suddenly, as she thought of Roosevelt’s friendship with Russia’s Stalin, and his big-government solution to economic depression, ‘betraying his country’. She had studied her nephew and the ‘culture hero’ pundits, including their little ‘manifesto’ that had promised crazily that her ‘Jackie’ would ‘never be crazy again’; and she had studied their ‘midnight confession defense’, which actually had made some sense to her. And now she had studied this ‘Formal Complaint’ which ‘made them look like a bunch of out-of-control sixties crazies all over again’, as she editorialized in the Christian Beacon, her own newspaper, the weekly rag sponsored by her own church, The Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, New Jersey.

 

 perfectly respectable hairdo,
              glasses frames, earrings, pearl necklace and smile on
              55-ish white-haired matron of morality and political
              uprightness

Aunt Tisha

in the Lorenzo Family Photo Collection[1]

 

For though she liked nice clean living in the light of day, she felt it essential to have an inside track into what she thought of as a dark and sordid nightmare of a world across the Delaware River in that big dark city of Philadelphia, an inside track few knew about. And using information she had gathered surreptitiously underground, she had studied the ‘culture hero’ pundits’ pasts, individual by individual; for she had powerful church and political connections that helped her get such information. And the ‘culture hero’ pundits were too ‘socialist-or-worse’ for her, in short; and they seemed to her to be just about as capable of becoming tyrannical as anyone else in the world could be. And so, if the country were approaching the day when tyrannical abuse of power might have to be risked for some reason, as the country seemed to her to be doing (and after all, didn’t Bible prophecy predict and promise it?), then she preferred such tyranny come from her own side, not from that of the ‘extreme leftist’ other side. That was how mj lorenzo’s Aunt Tisha put it to the Camden Courier, a paper people in South Jersey still got at their front door every day, back in 1983. And it was treated as a news article, printed on the third page: “Collingswood Family of mj lorenzo Condemns Pundits.” And thus the culture hero pundits had worsened their cause and mj’s with their error, because mj had been trying to bridge the gap between the sides, not make it wider, and they were supposed to have been helping him reach that goal.

 

So the scandal delighted the media unspeakably, naturally. And: this drama spawned by the ‘culture hero’ pundits had ‘provided for mj lorenzo’s allegedly lifeless and plotless book, the very life and drama that had been needed to sell it like hotcakes’, as the New York Times put it in an editorial, ever so wisely. (!)

 

And it was ten whole years later, 1992 or so, before the ‘culture hero’ pundits finally realized they had looked like fools the whole time they had been doing this. It took ten years for the truth to finally hit these would-be supporters of mj lorenzo like a wrecking ball, that they had merely been demonstrating, and in fact, worse yet, proving, an essential point mj had wanted to make in his book, perhaps more than any other essential point, a very essential important point for the world to grasp indeed, a point mj was stressing in lectures in 1992, one they had overlooked when they had defended or attacked his book. Nor had they thought about it much even; but in 1992 they had begun talking about it, since mj was doing so: that Fred Waring had not been an ‘unusual’ U.S. American in his arrogance, but a ‘typical’ one, and that Americans across the spectrum, politically and religiously, had become a little more noticeably arrogant after winning the Second World War, practically down to the last little individual U.S. American ‘from West Hicksburg to East Cotillion’, as mj liked to put it in lectures. And that was when the ‘culture hero’ people started adding: ‘and Upper Buttfuck’.

 

For it hit them suddenly that they were living in ‘Upper Buttfuck’. It dawned on them that mj, in his lecture circuit talks, starting in the early 90s, had been saying increasingly that U.S. Americans had entered a new phase of growing arrogance, starting around 1990; for that was the year when the U.S. had begun to realize that they might have won the Cold War after all; and mj had been ‘preaching’, as some called it, and teaching that because of that greatly increased arrogance, U.S. Americans, as the one and only unchallenged superpower on the planet, had to be understood by the rest of the world to be a real and possible threat to all of humanity, now, and in the future.

 

The U.S.A.’s inordinate one-sided power in global power politics now, a power more one-sided than ever in the history of the world, required of them more humility than ever, not more arrogance, mj had been saying in every lecture since about 1990: more humility, we need more humility, he kept saying everywhere and all the time. The U.S. American people were ‘scaring the planet’, as he said, with their ‘unthinking mix of power and bumptious willfulness’, offending and worrying ordinary people in countries around the planet; and inevitably there would be some Bill Blackburn somewhere, or maybe a whole lot of Bill Blackburns, who would not stand for it any longer no matter how many nice things anyone might say in defense of those very clever but arrogant Americans. Mj had been through such an experience with Bill Blackburn and knew what it was like exactly, trying to calm him down enough so Bill could listen to a defense of Fred Waring. Once all the little power-threatened warlords in all the little, so-called ‘insignificant’ developing countries of the world got together, once enough of the Bill Blackburns of this world had come along and decided they had experienced enough arrogance from one too-powerful country, that country would be done for. Those warlords would find a way to do you in, said mj lorenzo. He had been there. It was one of the lessons he had learned from his first night interviewing Bill and Betty Ann Blackburn, that: once a determined small-guy underling and a pal or two of his had turned against a super-powerful Fred Waring, or a super-powerful United States of America (which treated the world ‘exactly the way Fred treated the world’), cooperation and collaboration came to an end. The relationship was done for. There simply was no defending the super-power any more. It was pointless to try. And the rest of the world, and the warlord world in particular, once it reached such a point, would seek its revenge until it was satisfied or had died trying, for it had felt so profoundly offended, like Bill Blackburn; it had felt offended right down to the very quick, to the point it would give up life rather than give up a chance to ruin that abusive Fred-Waring-like superpower forever.

 

And it ‘wouldn’t be with just a book the united little warlords of the world would ruin such an arrogant superpower’, mj had always regretted having to say out loud to people in conferences and public speaking engagements; it wouldn’t be with just a book that the power-threatened warlords of the world would get their revenge, as Bill Blackburn had gotten his little ounce of spite. The warlords in all of the little, seemingly powerless developing countries around the world would not be satisfied with books, as Bill had been satisfied with his storytelling for purposes of a book, in order to get his revenge against the arrogant abuse of power. Those little guys would want something more telling than a book, for the U.S.A. would ignore books from small people and small countries. U.S. Americans were ‘celebrity mad’, as mj put it. You had to be BIG to get attention, HUGE; even famous friendly France’s opinion barely fazed the U.S. Americans any more. The Americans ‘suffered from the same flaw that had dehumanized Fred Waring’ and they ‘could only see ultra-celebrity as real, and of value’. Simple and unsung people, peoples and nations, though they were all human beings and many were far more authentically human than the Fred Warings of the Western world, and far wiser, were treated as nonexistent or as dirt by that arrogant, celebrity-mad, Western world crowd, just as Bill had been treated by Fred. Their feelings were of no importance, nor the pain they suffered, struggling to survive and stay sane. A book might have succeeded in getting Fred Waring’s attention, only because he was so narcissistically uptight about his reputation (and maybe conscience-ridden, but no one could be sure); but the U.S. Americans had ‘gone beyond even narcissism’ in their arrogance, said mj lorenzo in his conferences time and time again. And that was how the little warlords would know that the U.S. would not feel aggrieved until something had hurt them much more than an angry, insulting book from an uncelebrated developing country. And so, as mj would say, if U.S. Americans didn’t do something soon about their own arrogance, they were in for something much worse than ‘a mere book’. And he offended and aggravated, with such strong words, even provoked to vituperation, not a few people in very important places, on more than one occasion; to the point that his pundit supporters worried about how to protect and preserve him from harm. But they felt helpless to do anything to protect him and gave up on it and just kept going, hoping for the best for him and for them.            

 

And the ‘culture hero’ pundits – having heard these words from mj on numerous occasions, and having realized finally that they too might have been a little arrogant, especially in their reaction to mj and his second book – realized that Tales of Waring showed the Western world and especially the U.S. not just its ‘worst nightmare’, i.e., its ‘culture hero’ in a state of ‘backsliding’ from his mission, and not just their ‘culture hero’s’ capacity to confess such a thing publicly in a book, so that his people could study it under a microscope, all of which they had stated in their famous ‘nightmare defense’; but also, and very importantly, to mj’s credit and to theirs for being his defenders (sometimes), Tales of Waring showed mj lorenzo’s capacity to portray effectively in a book one of his culture’s most dangerous traits, the arrogance of its people toward the rest of humanity, practically down to a man, as they admitted publicly, implying they recognized at last that even they, the culture hero pundits, were included when mj said ‘practically down to a man’, meaning ‘just about every single man and woman born and/or raised in the United States’. And they felt humbled but at the same time relieved and proud once again to be associated with him, just as they had felt before their huge and embarrassing blow-up, though hopefully a tiny bit less arrogantly now. And they trusted him a little bit better after 1992 whenever a new book of his struck them at first as looking off the mark. They gave the book more time to sink in than they had given Tales of Waring, lest they turn out embarrassingly wrong again, and make themselves victims once again, just like Fred Waring, victims of their own arrogance, and of ‘mj lorenzo’s inimitable sagacious cleverness at seeing straight through to the soul of his people and catching them up in their own worst blind spots’, as they put it in a statement that was printed, eventually, in Newsweek, Moscow’s Pravda, Stockholm’s Svenska Dagbladet, Bogota’s El Espectador, and many other papers and magazines worldwide.

 

And the ‘culture hero’ pundits, after this profound taste of epiphany and metanoia that became theirs in 1992, returned to backing Tales of Waring with more oomph. They restored their hearts to their ‘last best configuration’, went all the way back, in other words, to the last time they had made any real sense, 1982, when they had composed the ‘nightmare confession defense’, and picked up from that point again. And when they did so, they discovered that in that defense of mj they had used the term ‘backslider’. They must have been the first to use it, in fact; and in the intervening ten years it had become a catchword for understanding Tales. The book by ‘95 was almost always referred to on the street by its informal nicknames, ‘mj’s backsliders’ manual’, or ‘the manual for backsliders’, just as the street had called The Remaking ‘mj’s handbook for psychotics’ or ‘the handbook for psychotics’. And one member of this infamous angry group whose anger had now mellowed, wondered aloud if they all might not have been ‘backsliders’ themselves. Was it possible? And with difficulty they came around to seeing that they must have been; for they had not supported mj for almost ten years, or his second book; and they had become arrogant and had hurt their own cause by increasing the polarization between the two opposing sides, rather than decreasing polarization, as mj had wished to do. And with such a newly refreshed perspective they realized the book, Tales of Waring, was more of a successful and useful ‘mirror’ for ‘backsliders’ than they ever could have dreamed, for it had ‘mirrored’ them to a T. It had mirrored quite accurately the way people attempting to remake themselves might backslide and back off from the sometimes laborious effort (as mapped out by mj in The Remaking), the effort of addressing life and the world humbly and naturally, without dehumanizing themselves or other people; and it had mirrored them without their ever realizing it; because they had been too arrogant at the time to see themselves in that aspect of the book.

 

There was still at least one more stage to their famous reform, one they discussed frequently and passionately afterwards, for in it they had found yet another way to help their leader and hero, they hoped, and redeem themselves maybe a little. They realized that just as mj lorenzo’s life and writing were a mirror for revealing and understanding themselves, they themselves were a mirror in which they could see and understand him. Once they realized how they had ‘backslid’ and how it had made them feel when they discovered it, then they could take stock of how it must have felt to mj when he had found himself caught in the same kind of bewildering trap, and they felt more compassion for him. They surmised that his wish to delude himself with a fairy tale and hang out in that fairy tale world, instead of in the real world, must have come from some form of arrogance, as had happened to them. They could not discern at first where the arrogance might have lain or come from, or how exactly it could have led to his wish to live in such a self-deluding way, running away from the real world and its real problems. But they decided to make it their project to find out, and they began by talking this up wherever they went, triggering an entirely new glut of 1990s web page chat rooms and journal articles on the subject. Their starting hypothesis, purely hypothetical, was that mj lorenzo’s self-delusion in Tales of Waring might have sprung from arrogance in the same way that their own self-delusion had sprung from arrogance; and so they studied just exactly how they had managed to pull that off: what had been their arrogance? How had it come to exist? And how had it then made them delude themselves into believing that the book and mj were failures or that they had been ripped off and used by him in a way to make them lose face? They spent endless hours studying the roots of arrogance and the consequences of arrogance and by 2000 and shortly thereafter some of their published work had become legendary, a core component of the package of learning which mj lorenzo’s new world of Remaking was inspiring around the globe, a package of learning focused specifically on understanding human nature in exactly those ways most needed to keep humanity, hopefully, from blowing itself up out of one person’s or one group’s arrogance.

 

The core group of feisty ‘culture hero’ pundits were extremely elated and proud of themselves for this ‘brilliant tour de force’ of theirs, as they called it, because, up to the late nineties, no one, not even mj lorenzo himself, had been able to figure out where his wish to cling to a fairy tale had come from in 1974, i.e., the desire to run from the real world and the direction in which it was obviously headed. As the pundits said, all of them, it didn’t fit with his brave, humble, risk-taking comportment throughout his remaking year of 70-71, for instance, as portrayed in The Remaking; and it left everyone who knew him flummoxed; but now someone had hit on a possible angle, ‘arrogance’, and the ‘culture hero’ pundits were back in the news as real contributors, once again, to understanding and hopefully ending ‘the worldwide culture war among the various arrogant groups of secular progressives and religious reactionaries’, as mj had called it. And in the end, just as they had been before, the ‘culture hero’ pundits were real major contributors once again to Dr. Lorenzo’s mission to save humanity from doing itself in.

 

Where did the arrogance of U.S. Americans come from, they asked? What caused it? And even if the U.S. were to learn to be ‘more humble’ dealing with other peoples, how were they supposed to react to the groups on the planet who continued to behave with dangerous degrees of arrogance toward them, i.e., toward the U.S.?

 

The reformed culture hero pundits provoked critical discussion on these all-important topics everywhere, helping their culture hero and his mission, which was to save humanity from physically extinguishing itself.


[1]  See Bibliography.

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