2/10/12

How Gardner Phrased His Side of the Argument on Moral Fiction with Gass, circa 1976


Barbie® has been very P-O’d 
at G.I.Joe® lately, mainly because 
he keeps trying to blow her 
up; not all of her, exactly or actually, but for 
no good reason, appropriately enough, just her head 
and all the empty stuff inside and the polyethylene 
Cali-blonde coif outside, or the suburbia red, 
or the derring-do brunette, worth twenty-nine cents.

What Barbie® wants to know is 
what does Hasbro, with their 12-inch 
men with life-like hair – as though 
all of life and its like is wiry, 
stiff and unmanageable (unlike the you-can-really-comb-it™ 
blonde with its really life-like Made in 
China™ proudly displayed on the nape) – 
have against Mattel with their tennis-playing Kens,
whose blonde hair rarely remembers 
the unfortunate swinger years of ’75-77, 
when moustaches and turtlenecks defined 
the man and brown was still the new 
brown.

Ken and Barbie® are perfect 
together, and today’s editions come 
with accessories:  messenger bags
and laptops that really open!, and Barbie® 
can accessorize bandwidth like it’s 
nobody’s business.  Why Hasbro 
doesn’t go after Revell is beyond Barbie:
Revell’s models aren’t so realistic, she thinks,
if you blow them 
up, you can always glue them back
together again.  What’s perfection 
anyway but an aesthetic unreachable, some 
high moral fling of poo and more poo, 
with the safety net of no 
right answer.  Like some elethreal gas 
still undefined by the guardians 
of the scientific moral bind
that says that the dark matter 
of the universe that we
can’t see is actually God as we
don’t know Him and He’s changing
before we define Him.
Or Her.

Heady thoughts for an airhead.
Especially one who’d rather find a boy 
scout to call her own:  give her a boy
with a stick and two rocks
instead of a man with a flame-
thrower any day.  It’s merit
badges she’s after, not hearts
purple or otherwise,
and her pull to the innocence
and dread of the experience
comes with a tip of the slight
of the hand.
Abracadabra!
Ancient poesy calls or calms
the creeps, and though Orpheus
may be sated, anon,
Persephone still howls
at her doom.

All G.I.Joe® wants is another
BOOM! 
another instance
of character-setting-plot.
Barbie® eats steak at night,
dreaming of lamb, 
dreaming of verb before object 
all pillow long.  Except,
when not.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All rights reserved

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