WHAT WE ALL NEED
Or MAKE LOVE NOT TERRORISTS
About seven miles from where I live, in the middle-class suburbs of New York, is a college campus with old oak and maple trees, green open spaces, redstone buildings, women. Spectacular women. Women who own themselves. Women whose buttock-jiggling walk, with unapologetic high breasts leading, is that of free women--a walk born from their consciousness of a two hundred year history of freedom, of an American Empire on which the sun never sets, and of being Number One, heirs to the richest diet in the world. A walk like that, perhaps, of Roman women in the Second Century A.D. Paradise. (Except that if, in the course of my not-long life, I have learned anything, it is that what seems Paradise often isn't.)
On that campus, a friend of mine teaches, not unconscious of his good fortune and the pneumatic beauty that surrounds him (those who have eyes, let them see). This friend of mine, a poet and a humanist, is a darling of the women who know him deeply (no pun intended). But for his integrity, he might easily have used his charisma to become a millionaire guru.
This is an essay in defense of that friend. (Greater love than this hath no man than that he write an essay on behalf of a friend.) But it is also an essay about love, war, Christianity, and the relationship between the three.
Now this friend of mine was recently in trouble, because he said of a woman he knew and cared for and protected, a woman who worked in his academic department but who was a confused mess and a bother to everyone around (men and women): "What she needs is . . .”
EXCERPT FROM:
A Short History of My Pecker
If I were to write a history of France and omit any mention of Napoleon, would you not think me to be a fraud or someone who wishes to insult the intelligence of his readers? And if I were to present you a biography of Napoleon and blot out any mention of his ruling member, his dick or his bishop, should you not laugh at my naivete or my dickophobia? The dick is so central in men’s lives that it either rules them or they are overcompensating for its shortcomings by the relentless pursuit of power, money, big phallic cars, big phallic buildings, or big phallic missiles with which to destroy other competing countries ruled by other owners of dicks. When your lingam is unruly or in pain, it rules you. When it is too quiet, it is disquieting, indeed it is far more trouble, because you feel an emptiness, a void in your manhood, and to remedy this you gulp down quantities of Vitamin E, aphrodisiacs, raw egg yolks, testosterone supplements, and in some cases, tiger penises . . . and send $89.99 to some post box address for that elixir that is supposed to make you roar like a tiger in bed, once again.
And yet, the dick is greatly understudied and underrated, and this will not change until like Semiotics, Marxist Feminist Literary Criticism, and Epistemology, Lingam Studies becomes a subject of serious scholarly study, with a Chair in Lingam Studies at Harvard or Princeton (the chair can be carved by Balinese traditional artists in the shape of a large lingam, since they must by now be sick of producing wooden lingams for key chains). Lingam Studies should cover at least three subspecialties: Lingamology, Linganomics, and Lingam History, and additionally a special one-week course for the British and their victims called "Making Peace With Your Lingam", a course to which Bengalis and Tamilians will be given scholarships, but Punjabis and Sardarjis will be denied admission, for they have no need of it, having never had their libidos successfully tamed by the British. Indeed, in a certain Punjabi princely state, the Maharaja had to ride annually around town displaying his magnificent erection to his subjects, so that they could sleep comfortably at night knowing that the kingdom’s Ruling Member was in prime condition.
In modern times, it is only with the presidency of Bill Clinton that the process has begun to be reversed, that the peckers of men and their "zipper problems" are getting at least as much mention as the color of their ties or their penchant for riding horses or taking naps in the Oval Office. Indeed it is notable that Bill Clinton was an admirer of John F. Kennedy, a President whose zipper problem was legendary, as was the quality of the actresses that were required to minister to it. But whereas in the Sixties, the presidential dick could operate in classified and CIA-protected secrecy, it was a different story in the Nineties. Now, when the First Penis of the United States - and by extension, that of the world (which is nothing but a colony of the United States though it sometimes doesn’t know it)- strayed out of the reach of the First Lady, it became a Prime Time news story and a legitimate subject of investigation and comment for conservative pundits, the Congressional Record, and scores of comedians - even though the First Penis could rightfully have claimed that it hadn’t participated in the Presidential swearing-in ceremony, had in any case been dragged to the Inauguration against its will, and couldn’t therefore be bound and gagged by the Constitution of the United States of America.
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