“Something concerns me,” the Director of Marketing of the health club said.

I was sitting on the couch kittie-corner to the office he had come out of. I was near the men’s and women’s locker rooms, with a stack of “Cheesesteak”s and a “Buy Bob’s Books!” sign on the table in front of me. I had sold seven copies there. It was my second best location.

“What if ‘Joe’ wants to offer tax advise?” the Director said. “What if ‘Mary’ wants to sell her pots? You see where I am going?”

I offered the club ten percent of my gross.

“The ownership,” the Director said, “frowns on commercial enterprises on its premises. Thank you for understanding.”

I had already put my sign away. I was surprised I had gotten away with it for this long. A tri-athlete had told me she had been forbidden from selling the pain relief ointment she smuggles in from Germany when she competes overseas.

I left one book out. “What if I’m reading a copy and someone asks about it?”

“That would be fine,” the Director said.

And if I read it upsidedown, I thought, that should increase interest.

Bob Ingram, a writer I like, has reviewed “Cheesesteak” at “The Broad Street Review.”
http://bit.ly/28vmc8s
Since that is where most of the contents originally appeared, I may have had a home court advantage, but once he assured the editor he’d “never met the dude,” she ran it.
Now we’ll see if anyone can figure out where to buy it, should they be so inclined.

My admission that I judge people be whether they buy “Cheesesteak” and, if they do, by how they respond to it has troubled my friend Robert, a visual artist and man of unimpeachable ethical standards, who is not undelighted by jerks of my chain.

First, he suggests, a certain hypocrisy may lie. “Would you buy a book from someone you saw selling it in a café?” he probingly inquires.

That exact situation has never presented itself, but I once bought a book from a wandering troubadour-like North African fellow perched on the sidewalk outside Vine Street Peet’s. I have bought volumes of poetry from Julia Vinograd as she roamed around Telley, and I’ve bought homemade CDs from aspiring Rap artists outside Downtown Berkeley BART. Support the arts, is my motto.

So, yeah, pure as driven snow, I am, here.

But Robert’s second area of concern, that my actions with my book represented a moral defect, which had been recognized as long ago as Richardson’s novel “Clarissa, struck a sore spot. For Clarissa said she would be displeased with herself “if I should judge the merits of others as they were kind to me…. For is this not to suppose myself ever in the right and all those who do not as I would have them act, perpetually in the wrong.”

Okay, I am going to have to work on that one.

(To be continued…)

Some months ago, readers will recall, I decided to solve the mystery of a half-century old domestic political murder. My approach was to take the arguments in two books which believed this murder resulted from a vast conspiracy and compare them with the arguments in two books which believed one crazed individual responsible. In my research I came across an argument put forth by a member of the first school, whom, for purposes of this discussion, I will call A. One part of A’s argument stood on a “message,” reported by a man I shall call B in a book of B’s authorship. This message, A concluded, came as a “direct” order from C and constituted “conclusive evidence” of the greater proposition in which A believed.
I did not believe this proposition. And while much else argued against this leg of A’s argument, I could not directly kick it from beneath him since my local library lacked B’s book. Then recently I came across a copy at Alibris, thought to myself, What the hell, and plunked down 99-cents, (plus $3 postage). It seemed a sign that I should once again re-engage with this twisted bowel of American political thought.

There turned out to be no “message,” as A described it. He had clearly considered it a single communication. (“(T)his message,” “this same message,” “this announcement,” “the… message,” and “that message” is how he referred to it.) It is also clear that he believed this message contained two factual assertion. The first of these, which we’ll call “a,” asserted something’s existence; and the second, which we’ll call “b,” asserted the non-existence of something else.
In point of fact, B’s book reported a series of communications – not one – and they, neither singly nor in any combination, recreated what A said. There was, to be specific, an “a”; but there was no “b.” Viewing his thinking most favorably, A seems to have reasoned that since none of the communications discussed “b”’s existence or non-existence at all, they were denying it. Of course, by this measure, these communications could also be said to be denying the existence of chicken noodle soup.
Furthermore, none of these communications were attributed to C; nor was he referred to in any of them. A seems to have divined C’s responsibility for the messages from the fact of their existence, coupled with C’s alleged authority over the location from which some of them issued. It should be noted in this regard that A’s overall thesis is otherwise replete with people acting counter to what their superiors would have expected, C among them. Why those ostensibly under C’s command might not have acted similarly is not apparent; but, irregardless, C-directed or not, since there was no“b,”this portion of A’s argument collapses.

It is hard for me to believe that someone could read as carelessly or report as inaccurately or reason as shoddily as A had. (His greater argument, by the way, did not even require the existence of this “message.”) It is, of course, possible that A was not inaccurate or careless or shoddy but that he was deliberately duplicitous. I am, however, too positively disposed toward my fellow man to believe this. I prefer to think his ardent belief in the importance of the truth he had to deliver to the rest of us led him to overlook the troublesome aspects of the product he was selling. Sort of like Mormon missionaries and the Angel Moroni.
Besides, this inability to read, this indifference to facts, this insult to reason, this presumption that your assertions will not be checked is not the point. Who these people whom I have alphabetized are and what was and was not said in this “message” is of secondary concern. What is significant to me at this moment in history is what that which I have described says about the difficulties involved in determining what – and whom – to believe. Every day, from any number of sources, we receive an uncountable number of assertions which we are asked to accept as true. But we rarely have – or take – the time to check the ins and outs or twists and turns of these assertions.
It may be that the public has been so discouraged by discourse of the caliber of A’s that it has given up hope of discovering truth. It may be, before you can turn around, the Republican Party will have nominated for president a bozo whose lies are larger than his ego, which is vast, more numerous than his slanders, which are plentiful, and more repellant than his comb-over, which is stomach-turning.