You probably at some time have wondered just how it is you would explain the dry-damp dichotomy to a fish. But in a world of constant light, or a region in which there is never a storm, or that land which is eternally conservative, then you will be hard pressed to describe such alien abstractions as dark, hurricanes, liberalism.

“What’s a liberal? What’s a conservative? What’s the difference?”

Well, we figured if you could catch any one of the three, you’d reel in the others, since we knew they sort of clumped together like the Three Stooges.

I knew some smart guys back in the 4^th St Era. (Even smarter were the girls – they were always tops of the classes in Bonhi; in fact a special award category had to be devised to keep the boys in school with the girls always making Valedictorian and Salutatorian and such: `High Boy’, which is actually furniture, I think.)  I’d hear the smart boys on politics, which was the way kids who went away to school began to think as adults, or to talk like it anyway.

My cousin Johnny was very bright. He was some years younger than me, and he went to Rice, and then one summer he came up to Texoma with us, and he talked politics. He spoke very fast, and in all that I saw he was arranging the sliding scale of politicians according to their associations. If Fulbright teamed up with Humphrey then he was a “liberal.”

There oughta be something more to it than that. After all, nervous high school kids put stock in who they’re standing with come noon; surely adults have more to go on. Besides, by that rule I must be a conservative Republican, because I freely associate with them. (I once blundered onto the blog of a famous model, and she had a picture of mom and dad posing in a modern tableau after American Gothic. I said, it must be a burden for anyone in the arts to be from an unbroken home, and she responded, “Just because they’re standing together doesn’t mean they’re married,” and I thought, “Well, boy, I forgot already; I already learned that back in ’69 when I went to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…”)

Where were we? Oh, yeah. Stalking the wild liberal.

In all my years growing, I don’t think I ever met a liberal, or a progressive, let alone a communist. Everybody was of the same opinions: the races were aligned in god’s own order and welfare was bad for the soul and yankees trying to reformat our social grid was an interference devoutly to be squished. Our newspaper, the Daily Failure, did include national news, say from Little Rock in 1958, but from the standpoint not of the little girls who wore sunglasses so their vicious adult tormenters would not see them cry but that of poor beset Governor Faubus bullied by Eisenhower.

From the age of two, children if they are alert and feisty say no to mom. In young kids going away to school, another way to do that would be to try on foreign and forbidden ideas.

So they would become liberal – if they knew what that meant. And even when they had been attending classes, they did not seem all that sure. I knew two smart guys, at least. One was Chuckie, and he asked me that question. I told him a parable, which was all I had been able to learn on the subject.

You know musical chairs, the game? There are too many players or too few chairs. You march around the chairs while the music plays then hurry and find a seat when it stops. Okay, imagine the game is stopped. There are those sitting down, and those standing up, waiting for the music to start the game again. Only the music doesn’t start. The ones sitting down don’t want the game to continue, for why should they? They would have to give up a seat for a chance of getting one back again. A lousy investment. And so they sit, and those standing, they remain standing, and they all are loyal to the game, and they like it well enough, figure it’s their duty to play it, after all, it’s who they are, only the ones sitting sit and the ones standing stand and the music doesn’t start.

I – ah, see, said Chuckie, with a furrowed brow.

The ones standing, I said. Those are the liberals.

I asked Norman, who was smarter than any boy in town except for my brother Donnie, and me and Donnie never talked politics in that season. Norman said, “It relates to ceding federal power to the judiciary, but not really.” I went back to my parable.

There was one progressive newspaper in all of Texas those years. The Midlothian Mirror was allowed to stand, too, sort of like a crazed soapbox orator in the park. Nobody bothered disturbing him because, after all, who would follow the advice of a kook?

So we became liberals by default in that era, but to do that took steely nerve and ironic gumption and also we should learn just what it was we had become. After all, you had to know the lingo, even if we were only saying no to mom.

You ever have artichoke? I could not understand peeling what resembled an armadillo when I first came to California, but some liked it. You peel away spiny leaves until you are to the heart of the matter. That’s a good practice.

So I peeled away leaves to see what meant “liberal.” I don’t know if I saw a copy of the Midlothian Mirror in my search; probably it would’ve assumed you already knew what they were about, else why buy the paper? Like, some lessons you are supposed to know going in, a prerequisite for the course; you don’t buy Hot Rod magazine without knowing what one is, do you?

In my research I came upon an article by one William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor, written in 1914 and called “Inequality, Liberty, and Progress.” Now I won’t quote the whole of it, don’t worry, but I do think it states the issue we’ve been seeking here quite well. Briefly, Professor Sumner believed if you have the middle quality he lists in his title, then you may have the third at the expense of the first.

The professor holds there is no moral authority which would require him to share what he has been able to gain with his own initiative and labor with those who choose to exert none. Charity is my own choice, he says, or else it is pure theft.

This was not an original thesis, for Professor Sumner was a follower of the great Herbert Spencer, who created the term “Survival of the Fittest” seven years before Darwin. Mr Spencer, a philosopher and social commentator, appeared on our shores in 1882 to great applause, such as “the smartest man in the world” from a former Secretary of State and a former Union general said there would have been no war had the South been aware of the works of Mr Spencer, and the president of Columbia said of him he was “not only the profoundest thinker of our time, but the most capacious and most powerful intellect of all time.”

Not bad for a guy who never spent one single minute in a classroom. He was, as he said, an autodidact, which means those without formal education can make up big words too. Self-taught. And he had nourished the fancy of laissez-faire capitalists with his view that competition was preordained, its result was progress, and any institution that stood in the way of individual liberties was violating the natural order. There, then.

Mr Spencer on welfare: “There could hardly be found a more efficient device for estranging men from each other, and decreasing their fellow-feeling, than this system of state-almsgiving. Being kind by proxy! – could anything be more blighting to the finer instincts?” … And “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”

The US was ever ripe for Social Darwinism. I remember a story of one of the victims of the homicidal hysteria of Salem village in the seventeenth century. One of the unfortunates was a lady plumb out of luck and resources in a cold country; she would knock on the door of farmers and ask merely to sleep in their barns. She would be refused, for to provide aid and comfort to one damned by god would be an abomination unto the lord, and so the self-righteous farmer would escort the poor lady off his premises.

“It’s like her karma, man,” is the way it was put in the sixties. They hanged her eventually as a witch.

The Germans took solace from Mr Spencer and Nietzsche and other Will to Power players, and millions died in the attempt at enforcing Social Darwinism.

And so as the sun traces its sad transit over Our Town, we still have that self-reliant individualist generating his produce at the expense of the sweat of his brow, and still the government is troubling him to extort a portion of his proceeds, but far more of it than goes to those in need is routed to those who ain’t, to subsidize water to farmers in Nevada who raise sorghum which the feds pay landowners in Florida not to grow; to allow favored ranchers to graze at public expense on federal ranges; to underwrite loggers in parks; and great boondoggles are slipped out the back door of the Congress to benefit campaign contributors; and the most important product of floods and wars is graft. Nowadays the leech wasting your resources might well wear a three-piece Armani suit and have offices high up over Wall Street.

So our search concludes, and, by the best of my estimation, a liberal is anybody who shivers for the poor unfortunate in Salem village, or cries for the schoolgirls in dark glasses on their way to school in Little Rock.

Maybe that’s why nobody reads Spencer no more. He drew a fine diagram of the Fox Trot then in fashion, very nice lines, with probably quite elegant choreography and apt notation, but … those who are sitting remain seated and those standing must still stand and the music it just never ever will start.