A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
WLAM

You know him when you see him,confidently pushing through the aisles of Wegmann's with about two feet of space on either side of his wide-bodied shopping cart, filled with a 12 pack of microbrew and twelve other high ticket grocery items which will total up to what you and I make a week. Or blocking the canned specialty food aisle at Greenstar,omnipresent beret, greying pony tail poking out, Grateful Dead T-shirt,


a slight gut from too many faculty-student receptions, as he chats with a class of '84 Bard College graduate, slightly greying, rather stern looking Natural Foods socccer mom. (Baby had to wait for the PhD and major career milestone.) Inevitably you see him at Gimme, latte in place, lap top open, oblivious to anything short of an appearance of the Dalai Lama. Or barrelling up State Street in the largest Volvo stationwagon still under the radar of community gas guzzling standards, several hundred telling decals plastered on the rear bumper, advertising his commitment to social change and environmental self-righteousness.

He is the White Liberal Alpha Male. The top of Ithaca's food chain. Carving a swath in the academic jungle or booming restaurant market. Remember the old print ads for Dewar's, profiling the players and niche makers of the booming 90's? He wrote a symphony, brought futures trading to Eastern Europe, and he only drinks Dewars scotch. Well, this guy would definitely be featured in any Utne Reader pantheon of shakers and bakers of the 21st Century, Two Phd's under his belt, tenured at 45, a fistful of publications, regular appearances at several international conferences, memebership in professional organizations up the wazoo. (How do you spell 'wazoo.') Yeah, and a community point person for a wife,a handful of trophy kids to boot with the orthodontist and violin lesson bills to prove it. So he talks about his colleagues' hair loss issues behind their backs, does his attractive graduate students, is a political tiger in his department, snorts a little now and again. That's to be expected.



Thank you, Charles Darwin. Thank you for the theory of natural selection. Thank you for bringing science to bear on the chaos of reality. Thank you for your iconic 19th Century beard. Thank you for reminding us that it's still a jungle out there.

Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 7:27 PM