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An online newspaper featuring the columns of C.G. Scavola |
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Run That By Me Again by C.G. Scavola China, with a hemlock chaser "The thing is this." Gosling always had a thing that was this. Usually it was China, which covered the holes in almost any argument. China was the thing in world peace, the economy, even local elections if all else failed. China covered philosophy, ancient to Mao and post-Mao. It covered history, beginning with Napoleon's warning. Art, literature, trade, foreign relations ... you could count on Gosling for China being the thing. Lamar sometimes wished Greece could be the thing more often. Lamar knew more about Greece than he did about China, but Greece stopped covering things after the Romans became top nation. Plato and Alexander and naked wrestling seemed to fall flat when the discussion turned to World War III. "The world will tremble," Gosling was saying. Gosling's world was in constant tremble. It trembled with the markets and the opinion polls and the unemployment reports, and those were the minor trembles, pre- or aftershocks that surrounded nuclear ambitions and germ warfare and collisions with asteroids. Greece did not cover asteroids. Lamar had searched Plato and the rest and found nothing appropriate, but Confucius had evidently weighed in, or at least come somewhere appropriately near in Gosling's memory, so Lamar was left to offer Thermopylae and shrug when the others frowned. Greece had been so orderly. Oh, it had rough edges, but on the whole it oozed order. If the gods were capricious, they were capricious in predictable ways. If the city states fought, they settled back into the same boundaries after the war. And if the vases changed, one could pick up almost any archaeological text and see how orderly were the changes. China had order, Lamar had to admit, but it came in waves of invaders. The dynasties changed and the pottery but they all seemed the same ... to Lamar. There had been the wall, but that was the kind of disruptive change that put one off of, say, British history. If the Romans had stayed, or not come at all, it would have been so much more orderly. All of which seemed to prove, when Lamar found himself admitting truth brutally, that he had chosen the wrong elective course to satisfy the sophomore requirements. China was so much more useful, even if Greece was so much nicer. And China was irritating. After ten years of morning coffee in Styrofoam cups at plastic tables ... "Alexander had it right, in the end, though." Lamar thought he had heard himself say it but he was not sure until he looked around the table. Coffee cups were stopped halfway to lips, bacon and eggs stuffed into pasteboard muffins dangled from greased fingers, and Harland took off his glasses and wiped them with the cleaning cloth he always carried. Gosling frowned. He said, "In what way, in what end?" Lamar looked at the tableau, smiled inwardly as he savored the moment (Gosling was seldom stopped by comments), and said, "The knot." Harland smiled as he wiped his glasses. Baker nodded and Michaels set his coffee cup back on the table without sipping at it. "Now, Confucius said ..." Lamar smiled at Gosling and said, "Whack. One blow with the sword. Solved the whole thing. Didn't even think about it, just whack and it was done. Leave it to Confucius, that damned knot would still be here and ..." "Now just a minute ..." said Gosling. "... and the world would look very different. But Alexander was a man of action, Greek action. Whack. Let's see your man do that." Gosling frowned, worked his lips, and Harlan, still wiping, said, "He's got you there." "The hell he does," said Gosling. "The Chinese studied a problem, found a way to deal with it in the mind. All your Greeks had were phantom chairs and poisoned cocktails." "Smile when you say that," said Lamar. "Confucius ..." "Plato could outthink Confucius any day of the week and Alexander could give him a fat lip, with or without his clothes on, so run that up your flagpole and salute it." "Well the thing is ..." At home that night, Elise asked for the third time, "Why did you hit him?" "I told you ..." "You told me. Lamar, I don't think you should go for coffee in the morning." "That's what they said at the Burger Doodle, too." "I'll make your coffee here at home and you can drink it in one of your cups. Do you want the Plato cup or the Alexander cup?" "But the thing is," Lamar heard himself say, and then he said, "Do we have any hemlock?" Copyright 2012, Robert A. Markwalter |
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Any resemblence in this material to any person, living or dead or in suspended animation, is purely coincidental. Planning a visit to Savannah, GA? Run That By Me Again author Bob Markwalter is also a licensed Savannah tour guide. Visit Savannah, the Walking City at www.walkingsavannah.com to see more about Bob's tours and tour services and the beautiful ante-bellum city of Savannah. ©1998 - 2011, Robert A. Markwalter. All rights reserved. |