About Us

Question

Quitting

The Year 2079

Merchants of Shame

The Outside View

To Alexander Pope

Diffidence

Powerlessness

Old Goats

Edgar de Santos - Author

Yup, that's my dad. He never let me forget while I was growing up that I was somebody special. Every child deserves to have someone who thinks they are something special - and expect them to act accordingly. When circumstances seemed unbearable he did not give me sympathy, he suggested solutions. His life was a hard one, but he always had a ready smile and a bounce in his step. He was still a swinger of birches at 50 years old. He died in 1990, but he left behind the house and valley that he loved to roam and all his writing as well as a huge library of books, complete with hundreds of bookmarks and notations for anyone who wished to continue where he left off. His favorite sayings were, "I doubt, therefore I am," and, "God must have hated the common man because he made him so God damn common!" He did not suffer fools gladly, but he had the biggest heart of any man alive. He never saw any individual as truly common. He would frequently admonish me that being nice and being kind were not always the same thing and when the two diverged one should choose kindness. He always did. This page begins with the poem that best defined him, Question:

Question

Quitting

When the world smells of fear, it’s time to quit
When everyone is on guard, quietly resisting
It’s time to ask, resisting what?
It’s time to know

When the world knows each greed and sells to it
When it says, come, take a look at this
Then we hear, listen to this
It’s time to refuse

Then, if we won’t look, if we won’t listen
Then we are apart, we are gone
It’s time to look and also to listen
And then we are doomed

Lost in a world of rings, things and stings
Lost in a world of buying, dying
We firmly resolve to say no
We no longer can

When the world smells of fear, wave after wave
It’s time to become very nasty
It’s time to raise the middle finger
All by itself.

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THE YEAR 2079

The census shows six thousand prims
Engaged in earthy trades
In the nineteen hundreds, almost all
But now the memory fades

Two nuclear wars, hospital states
Something had to be changed
Laws were passed around the world
And genes were rearranged

It’s tricky work and slips occur
Passion sneaks back in
In placid crowds a face is seen
With a devilish sort of grin

Prims pop up no matter what
The birthing never shows
That little errant gene is there
Until the passion grows

A noxious zest to break the peace
A willingness to learn
The things that no one ought to know
Consistency to spurn

The will to take a chance and mock
The everlasting fates
Then take the mind and wrench it round
To open up its gates

One has to tolerate the prims
The primitives of life
Splicing genes is fussy work
With scope and laser knife

Genetic records didn’t start
Till the second thousandth year
In seventy-nine we’re doing well
With just six thousand here

Some have said we might as well
Prepare ourselves for more
Let their passions run the course
And do what prims adore

Painting pictures, writing books
Wild emotion things
Reliving all the old desires
From which the chaos springs

Others though, still wish to make
Their reproduction cease
One female prim a year ago
Was trying to mate with geese

And males are getting bolder too
Making strange remarks
And even lewd advances now
To women in the parks

Among themselves, one hates to think
Of adversary ways
Last month a rogue prim took a girl
And kept her two whole days

She’s been debriefed as best we can
But patterns still lie deep
Last week she went right back again
Like walking in her sleep

If they had served no use at all
They wouldn’t have been freed
But only they know how to grow
The foodstuffs that we need.

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MERCHANTS OF SHAME

Light without darkness is no longer light.
This is a primal fact.
A pacifist pose where a fight never rose
No longer a pacifist act.

Do we actually wish for peace and light
Without the alternate stress?
Though we say we do, it's a nauseous brew
Which few will ever confess.

A jingo makes loud and belligerent noise
When danger is far away,
But what is the name for a simpering dame
Saying men are so brutal today?

She's not the target of any aggression
Beyond the media blitz.
There's hardly a danger some masculine stranger
Will grab her and scramble her wits.

She claims the right of protection today
From a lurid and sexist culture;
Humiliation and degradation
As the man circles round like a vulture.

People poke fun at a henpecked man.
The response seems to be inbred.
If it's really the dame whose subjected to shame
They'd ridicule her instead.

If he were to claim the right of protection
From shame and degradation.
Each one in town would laugh it down
As a childish expectation.

A gal should observe a man at work
If she wants to see him crawl
Or life so merry in the military
And that, dear soul, isn't all.

She complains to him about being a slave,
But slaves aren't allowed complaints.
A contradiction without the restriction,
But still the picture she paints.

Humiliation comes from within;
A reaction that's self imposed.
The only bind is there in the mind,
For in chains we're all enclosed.

So seek the woman who knows the dark
As well as the time of light
And not persuaded she's being degraded
By a lurid and sexist night.

One who can flirt with danger for fun
Tempting Satanic deeps.
Taking the dive and staying alive
Enjoying the harvest she reaps.

The harvest of trying and knowing herself
A target that can't be torn
Back from the dark rekindles a spark
A shining that none may scorn.

The jingoist gals march grudgingly on
Afraid that the world won't change.
A feeble glow is all they know
So the grudge is not so strange.

Let's cherish and hold the target lass.
Who doesn't want life so tame
And is happily using instead of accusing
The man as a merchant of shame.

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THE OUTSIDE VIEW

We all live in a society that usually tries hard to feel comfortable with differences between people, and also, it usually fails to feel comfortable. The melting pot sits, exactly like a pot, and pots don't melt. Only the contents are expected to melt, and if they don't, they're being most uncooperative. In some areas even the pot is uncooperative.

I discovered at age five that I was beginning to wonder what was going on around me. My father had died when I was three and mother assumed that every male was as much a chauvinist as he, so she declined any nudge toward the alter again. She knew that her job was to produce another chauvinist out of this male child, because every female in the neighborhood had told her that she was bringing up a sissy. Look at him, velvet jacket, velvet shorts, shoes with a strap and a button, a wide black silk bow under the full round collar of a blouse, hair in a long pageboy cut; good heavens, that was the style before the war, not now in the nineteen twenties.

Mother didn't agree and sent her boy to school that way. It was a one-room country school with three grades and he was a bright boy, so he listened to the work being done in the second grade and knew all of that also. They placed him in grade three that next fall. During the summer mother had been involved in a minor accident with her car. The newspaper ran a short notice with the comment that the little girl in the back seat had sustained a cut lip. Mother enjoyed that one immensely and showed it to visitors for years.

Fourth grade meant transferring to a large grade school in town, and that school met this vision of subliminal femininity with no enthusiasm whatever. I guess the teacher may have spoken to mother by the end of the school year, because I went to fifth grade dressed like any other boy. Mother earned a meager living as a pianist, and a piano and voice teacher, and after father's death, had taken a roomer to stretch the finances a bit. This person was Myra Sprague, a music teacher in the public schools, and I was to call her Aunt Myra. These two women fulfilled their responsibilities with determination. Dinner usually began with a new word or two to build the vocabulary, theirs as well as mine. Then the meal settled down to an intense discussion of whether a skirt hem could go as high as two inches below the knee, or was three inches the absolute minimum. From there the conversation went to the really big problem, to bob one's hair or not to bob one's hair, and I became equivalent to the wallpaper at that point. I learned a lot about women in those discussions and now, more than half a century later, it is still a problem. Men should not know that much about women, because it makes them less malleable to feminine wishes.

At seven I had to begin piano practice, and join the boy's choir in the Episcopal Church, a large stone affair in the middle of Cohasset, MA. It catered to the summer trade of wealthy Bostonians who owned summer homes. One of them, Mr Baron, donated the world's second largest carillon of 53 bells. He tried to make it the largest, but the Belgians wouldn't allow that outside of Belgium. Eventually I was able to learn that instrument, and play it between services on Sunday. This was also the time when mother's use of lipstick would produce mutterings of "painted woman" from Myra.

After four years in preparatory school I became the bass soloist and the Sunday-school superintendent, but although mother had been born Nellie Esther Dunham, and I had been brought up in the traditions of England, she had married a man with a Portuguese name. That name didn't fit the WASP mold and I, with the speech and actions of England, didn't fit with the Portuguese people either. Our society has spaces between its layers and I was in one of those.

There was yet another space that I occupied, because of the female upbringing, and that was the space between genders. I should have been a homosexual by society's standards, but to homosexuals females are a mystery and they don't like them very much. Women were hardly a mystery to me. I knew them too well and couldn't help being intrigued by them also. The result was that I enjoyed their company and wasn't entirely entranced by the strong silent males who seemed so terribly dull. I was a bloody "portugee" who didn't know how a male ought to act.

There is only one benefit to being outside of the various layers of society; the ability to see what's going on in there without all the trees getting in the way of the forest. I knew exactly how a woman builds a large turn-of-the-century hairdo, because Myra built one every morning in full view. It was fascinating. Then she got herself laced in the hourglass corset, and that was an amazing transformation, because she kept shrinking in the middle. Mother had given up both of these habits years before, but mother wasn't a determined spinster, she was a determined widow instead. Her main determination was to construct a male who would stay with her and not take after some floozy, and his name was Edgar.

Ah yes, she was brilliant, but not brilliant enough to know that women had to be a mystery to keep men tied down. She saw World War II coming and we enrolled in The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization. Her boy must not get away, and he didn't for awhile, but then he began to figure this one out and withdrew his conscientious objector status. He was in.

The army is full of men and not always the brightest ones either. When they get a Pvt. Edgar de Santos in the M.P. battalion at Camp Edwards with a limited service status because of his eyesight, they assume that they can keep him there. Who would ever guess that this nut would try to arrest the Provost Marshall, get his limited service entry stamped out, and wind up in the Combat Engineers in Louisiana? Neither did anyone guess that I had a reason for doing so.

The military can always find a suitable spot for a nut. General Electric and Westinghouse had pooled their talents to build a floating power plant experiment. There were two of them, the Resistance and the Inductance, literally two floating bombs, and the Resistance was to be quietly towed across the Atlantic. After a team of British special construction men had built two piers in total silence several miles above Antwerp, inside German held territory, the new "bomb" could arrive. It was towed up the river Escaut at night to hook into the main line of Belgium's power plant, now a mass of rubble, and start generating electricity for all the cranes that were without power in Antwerp Harbor. This was the method chosen to invade Europe, and the life expectancy for its 47 electrical engineers and 6 deck hands wasn't too optimistic, but one of the deck hands was the nut from Camp Edwards.

Life expectancies don't always work out. Fifty-three men survived with fifty-two still sane. The other went permanently catatonic during the 175 days that Hitler tried to wipe that insult off the face of the earth. When the war was over the Pentagon sent an order to give the men total freedom, except for their work schedules, and I arrived in the living room of a lovely divorcee for tea one afternoon. I had met her at a symphony concert. She was one of Antwerp's leading socialites and I had worked hard for this tea. Who would be better equipped to release a 27 year old American from the problem of virginity?

Now a man may know a woman very well, but very well does not even come close to a total, and this woman, Madame Jeanne Van der Voort, had ideas. She had an American who spoke French passably and as it turned out, she was going to have him for almost 6 months. In Belgium a man gets a wife first and then, if he doesn't get a mistress to take the sexual load off her, she tells him how to go about it and insists that he get one. Jeanne had tried the wifely role and discovered that she had a sadist for a husband, so now she wanted to try the mistress role without getting involved with another Belgian. More than that, she wanted to be one mistress who had a man taught to do all the things that she wanted to do. It was startling to find out how many things she had on her mind.

I doubt that there was any other American in Belgium who had an acrobatic dancer invited to his table to tell him about her experiences in Tunisia, or who was teased into singing "Autumn Leaves" at a secluded café; nor were there any who wound up in lesbian clubs, homosexual parties and even one sado-masochistic establishment. Jeanne knew the tall, brittle looking "baroness" who owned that one and the dreary, grim determination of her clients was something that I had never connected with eroticism before. Jeanne avoided simplicity in her own bedroom as well, and when it came time to say good-bye, she managed to shed a few tears.

America had always seemed a little strange, but now it appeared to have changed into something from another planet. Few men could treat a woman the way she should be treated, and few women had the vaguest notion of what that entailed. I was outside of race, outside of gender, and now found myself outside of sexuality as well. The next step was 35 years of marriage and seeing a society at war with itself and losing.

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TO ALEXANDER POPE

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing
Drink deep or drink not the Pierian spring."
Well thought, I thought - or thought I thought
Already I was getting caught

The first little bit is still just a bit
With such a risk, it takes true grit
To let it leak in unresisted
Unless poor Pope got something twisted

Figured I'd learn it and keep real quiet
Like banquet tickets when starting a diet
It's now I know it's how he knew
The terrible danger he traveled through.

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DIFFIDENCE

The woman's cry is heard
Why doesn't he talk to me?
But never the question of what she'd do
If ever allowed to see
He knows the weapon there
And the bond is not so strong
That it won't be used when passions rage
And rage makes memory long

The woman's cry is heard
He won't confide at all
But if he would, there is no way
Unless he likes to crawl
For crawl he will and soon
His mind is open season
She knows he's hiding something there
And privacy is treason

The woman's cry is heard
From martyred halls of pain
He won't allow a closeness still
A stranger he'll remain
A stranger like her father
The god who wouldn't bend
She worshipped him but always hoped
She'd get him in the end

A woman's cry is heard
What are his fondest dreams
The shocking things he'd like to do
With visions of extremes
We know he's a little boy
And boys are always cruel
But a man is awfully hard to burn
If he won't provide the fuel.

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POWERLESSNESS

All through this civilization, our silly words embarrass us, and even haunt us, but we are dedicated to them. In the silly words that are written for others to read, we find a reiteration of the powerlessness of women, and their shame at masochistic sexual fantasies that must, of course, be the product of powerlessness. Feminist writers - and few dare be otherwise these days - frequently mention the frightening question at a meeting, followed by reassurances. It's the patriarchal system that is forced upon females which forms the root of these fantasies. Pain and humiliation are woman's lot in this culture. Being oppressed for thousands of years is bound to produce an attempt to alleviate suffering by turning that oppression into the only benefit possible. It is at this point that someone may mention the Kinsey findings that give a higher number of males of masochistic bent than to females, and the nodding of heads indicates understanding, but the words go on, just as if this had not been mentioned.

Are the males of our culture oppressed by women? Let's wait a moment till the roars of laughter subside, and then take a look at history. I know, it's unforgivable to ignore all the doctored texts, and go right back to the bare facts, but let's be unforgivable.

It started early. Governor Winthrop was the first to be the governor of that colony called Massachusetts. It was the early sixteen hundreds, and in 1639 he had an upsetting visit from a group of women. They had some rough comments to make concerning males. Wives throughout the colony were in want, because every damn male would grab his musket and a jug of booze periodically, to head for the woods. You know, they never came back till the jug was empty, so something had to be done. The solution was clear, just install hunting seasons.

Poor Winthrop scratched his head and tried to puzzle out what kind of excuse he could find for some unheard of law like a hunting season. Being painfully religious, he didn't by-pass the Bible, and it said right there that man shall have dominion over the earth, and all the creatures on it, so how are you going to have dominion if you don't go out and knock off a few? No, it just wouldn't work, so he extended his sympathies and bid them good day.

Frankly they expected this, but they had step number two just in case. They spread the word, and every employer in the colony was contacted. How was production? What about absenteeism? In the end they had a sizable number who would descend on the governor, to air their production problems and Winthrop knew where that came from, but what could he do? Those hunting seasons have been part of our laws for three hundred and fifty years, and we thought they were to protect the game, didn't we?

When we finally won our independence in another century and a half, we had a marriage system. The church took care of it all the way, so it doesn't appear in our constitution, but almost another century landed us in the civil war. The problem this time was dropped on the preachers. Women complained that their husbands intended to take them along. What's to do? Of course the preachers wagged their heads in dismay, but if the man says to go, you've got to go, that's it. And they went.

During that savage war the women were less than appreciated. If they got into the wagons, the officers yelled at them for taking up valuable space, and made them get out and walk. A few miles down the road, however, the same officers came tearing back, yelled at them for slowing down the march, and made them get back into the wagons. Those women learned that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, but when it was over, the top brass had some different words for the congressional hearings. They testified that if it hadn't been for the women the men would have worn their clothes till they rotted off their backs. The food situation would have been even worse, and most of the army would have been sick. In addition the wounded would often have been left to die. The women pulled it through by sheer guts, and sometimes with rifles blazing in their hands.

The women did some testifying too; a lot of it. They barged into every legislature in the country, and demanded to know why they were left out. The war was fought to eliminate slavery, and here they were in absolute serfdom. That word, serfdom, was reverberating through the state capitols, and governors got together to hunt for an escape route. In addition to the word serfdom there was also a female drug problem that was worse than anything we have seen since. After all, they could freely buy a little bag of coke for a nickel, and laudanum sold for thirty cents a quart. The country had supposedly been patched together, but it was already falling apart.

The first laws that emanated from this debacle were a debacle themselves. The men, as usual, got it all wrong, but in 1873 they cleaned up the mess. Any law student today, in his text on contractual law, reads about Illinois, 1874, with the explanation that all the states got together on this one, at about the same time, so one central state is used to represent all of them. The whole concept of marriage was heaved out the window, and an entirely new marriage system was installed; a contract.

That same law student is whisked through this section of contractual law pretty fast. After all, we don't want students to notice that this contract matches another type, the murder contract, because both become legally void as soon as the second signature is completed. There are functional contracts and there are void contracts, and marriage is the latter. So, the males got their revenge, or did they? The women had hounded this one all the way through, and they knew that the items of exchange could not be listed, because sex was one of those items. They also knew that, unlike support, the refusal to provide sex worked both ways, because John Rushkin's wife, Effie, had been given a divorce in 1854, twenty years earlier. The famous writer had never had sex with her, and English law said that's a no-no, and so did ours.

We don't bother to think that one through in both directions today and ask why it is that a ticked off wife can shut off sex for a month, and then charge rape if he takes her by force, but a ticked off husband who shuts off the money for a month, has more than her on his tail, because the government joins in and rapes him thoroughly. But then, males have to pay for "male supremacy".

Yes, the women pushed through a brand new marriage system in 1874, and this "male dominated" society couldn't dominate anything. In the next hundred years males were constantly reminded by women of the female powerlessness, and therefore, of their masochistic fantasies. They said it's a fact of life in a patriarchal system; it can't be helped. And, with that wedge in the door, they went on to impose a law, in 1964, on the same pay for the same work, without a word about the legal responsibility of support that has predicated the difference. Powerlessness? No, but that front is maintained.

Males have been confused ever since, and if Kinsey were around today, he would find that the predominance of male masochists has even been increased. The day-to-day bustle of male activity hides a facet that is beginning to worry many men, but more particularly, those in foreign countries. The reason for this is that living in this society tends to project a feeling of normalcy in relation to it, but men in other countries have a comparison, to convince them that the United States is not only slipping in confidence, but also in its economy, and they consider that there is a connection. They believe, and are beginning to convince a few people in this country, that the feminine push to eliminate powerlessness is ill advised. First, because there is little support for its actuality, and secondly, because male power and female power function differently.

The figures themselves are sobering, and the U.S. slide from a lending nation to a debtor nation, which occurred in April 1985, is one indication. Another is the avoidance of marriage, which is escalating. Neither of these is a fatal blow, but the normal male masochism that begins to change from its use as a private eroticism, to a growing marketable commodity, expresses a need which should not be ignored. Men need some power. Not over others, that can be faked, and is, but over themselves. Women are shutting that off with a strident insistence on their own powerlessness. This can certainly be fatal.

Several female authors have tagged the avoidance of our traditional marriage as "The Male Revolt", but that's too easy. Let's look at the word, balance. Nature won't tolerate anything else, and we've had a balance between genders. Now however, the deprivation of females, in the form of "powerlessness" has rallied the troops, and they are loading guilt on the male by the truckload. It's neat too. Elizabeth Janeway's book, The Powers of The Weak did the job well, because few people were suspicious enough to ask, if they have powers, who says they are weak? Groups of women all over the country are jacking up the ante for all they're worth, and this power is not lost on the males.

What few reputable books there are on "bondage and discipline" note that England and America are both devoted to it, but in opposite directions. The upper class English gentleman has his whip, but the gentleman in America wants it used on him. It's a problem only because the "powerless" woman doesn't want to tip her hand, so she cringes and calls him a sickie. Good heavens, if he is sick, then the whole human race is sick. Worldwide, careful pain is used for erotic excitement, and has been since Hector was a pup.

Something is going to have to be done. Professor Higgins said, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" So have a lot of others, and waited for the logical rejoinder, "Why can't a man be more like a woman?" but it never comes. One reason for this is that most men and many women consider females to be covert manipulators by nature. The anti-feminists have printed four central guidelines: #1 - Men are stupid. #2 - Men are weak. #3 - Therefore lock one into the marriage contract. (no shared husbands here) #4 - Flatter him, be a bunny in bed, and puff him up to get whatever you want. The odd thing is that ardently feminist script writers have written scripts that are right down this ally. An intellectual male is beginning to wonder if there is some way in which he can abandon this society entirely. Male revolt? Not really, male confusion is closer to the facts.

Anyone who has escaped being twisted into psychic knots can feel the erotic tingle from the fantasy of powerlessness. It is something specific and structured, but we've built a strange framework of contradictions into this society in recent years. Of course, the waiter is arriving with the bill, because there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Today's male is beginning to get the idea that he hasn't been doing something right, and that's correct, he hasn't. He has become domesticated. He has forgotten his musket and the jug in order to marry a career, marry technology, and marry every female myth, till he doesn't dare marry the females themselves. Why can't a man be more like a woman? He can, in fact that's what he's doing; heading toward the "powerlessness" where the power is. If he can pull it off he'll have a weird bag, but all he has to do is watch the women, to see how beautifully functional it is.

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OLD GOATS

A popular joke over the years
Tells of a man so crudely made
That any strange woman who suited his taste
Would get a proposal that's hardly chaste
How would she like to get laid?

The joke goes on to explain - he is asked
How many times his face has been slapped
He cheerfully states it is done quite a lot
But think of the number of times it is not
And how many chicks he has tapped.

Enough of these crudities, horny old goats
Squirting their whiskers like pheromones sent
Over the airwaves, the shot gun approach
No better than moths or even a roach
Odiferous means toward an end.

It raises a question of culture and style
Humanity knows how to do it much better
From present computers to old hieroglyphics
For centuries now we could lay out specifics
To woo her and still not upset her.

But that is the crunch, wooing takes time
A bird in the hand is safer it seems
Signals get scrambled and misunderstood
She may say of course not while wishing he would
To multiply idiot schemes.

Over the centuries, man has composed
A dance to the tune of his fears and needs
Till personal integrity went down the drain
A sly minuet is all we can gain
The dance in which neither one leads.

After you Alphonse, after you Gaston
Etiquette's lubricant poured till it spills
Is it really so certain no message is there
In the crudeness of jokes, when the man is stripped bare
Of all the acceptable frills?

Politeness can keep us from total disaster
Only to strangle us slowly each day
Forgetting our genders are carefully shaped
Simply by guilt, some man can be raped
Because he was taught to obey.

So let's take a look, a long hard look
At all of our jokes and why they were born
Why do we chuckle at dirty old men
While calling a woman a foul-mouthed hen
We do strange things with our scorn.

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