Tale 40
A
Formal Complaint Against
mj lorenzo
“...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
in the Pocono Mountains of
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
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
And the
Dr. Lorenzo before he was a Dr.
(the day he graduated from
“A group of students at
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
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.
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
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
For it hit
them suddenly that they
were living in ‘
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
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.