Snow White by Donald Barthelme Page B

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     decadent absinthe. “Remember that. You are tense as a wire-walker, Hubert. If it is
     still possible to heave a sigh you should heave it. If it is still possible to rip
     out a groan you should rip it out. If it is still possible to smite the brow with
     anguished forefinger then you should let that forefinger fall. And there are expostulations
     and entreaties that meet the case to be found in old books, look them up. This concatenation
     of outward and visible signs may I say may detonate an inward invisible subjective
     correlative, booming in the deeps of the gut like an Alka-Seltzer to produce tranquillity.
     I say may. And you others there, lounging about with expressions of steely unconcern,
     you are just like Hubert. The disease is the same and the remedy is the same. As for
     me, I am out of it. I have copted out if you want to put it that way. After a life
     rich in emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads
     to destruction. Now I limit myself to listening to what people say, and thinking what
     pamby it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus of the
     mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content.
     Actually, when you get right down to it, I should be the monk, and Paul the leader
     here.” “We have entertained the notion,” Hubert said.
    “THEY can treat me like a rube if they wish,” Clem said holding tightly to the two
     hundred bottles of Lone Star at the Alamo Chili House. “I suppose I am a rubish hayseed
     in some sense, full of down-home notions that contradict the more sophisticated notions
     of my colleagues. But I notice that it is to me they come when it is a question of
     grits or chitlings or fried catfish. Of course these questions do not arise very often.
     I have not had a whiff of fried catfish these twelve years! How many nights have I
     trudged home with my face fixed for fried catfish, only to find that we were having
     fried calimaretti or some other Eastern dish. Not that I would put down those tender
     rings of squid deep-fried in olive oil. I even like the squarish can the olive oil
     comes in, emblazoned with green-and-gold devices, flowery emblemature out of the nineteenth
     century. It makes my mouth water just to look at it, that can. But why am I talking
     to myself about cans? Cans are not what is troubling me. What is troubling me is the
     quality of life in our great country, America. It seems to me to be deprived. I don’t
     mean that the deprived people are deprived, although they are, clearly, but that even
     the fat are deprived. I suppose one could say that they are all humpheads and let
     it go at that. I am worried by the fact that no one responded to Snow White’s hairinitiative. Even though I am at the same time relieved. But it suggests that Americans
     will not or cannot see themselves as princely. Even Paul, that most princely of our
     contemporaries, did not respond appropriately. Of course it may be that princely is
     not a good thing to be. And of course there is our long democratic tradition which
     is anti-aristocratic. Egalitarianism precludes princeliness. And yet our people are
     not equal in any sense. They are either . . . The poorest of them are slaves as surely
     as if they were chained to gigantic wooden oars. The richest of them have the faces
     of cold effete homosexuals. And those in the middle are wonderfully confused. Redistribute
     the money. That will not ameliorate everything, but it will ameliorate some things.
     Redistribute the money. This can be achieved in only one way. By making the rich happier.
     New lovers. New lovers who will make their lives exciting and ‘rich’ in a way that . . .
     We must pass a law that all marriages of people with more than enough money are dissolved
     as of tomorrow. We will free all these poor moneyed people and let them out to play.
     The quid pro quo is their money. Then we take the