C4 antho - Chamber Four

~188~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
down his mint julep and grabs another from a passing
waiter.
“Our time is over,” he continues. “It’s the Southeast
Asians’ time now just like it used to be the Japs and the
British and the Dutch. I don’t know who before that. Maybe
the Vikings, or the Visigoths. It doesn’t matter now because
you can’t get away with anything because America is fucked.
The pioneering spirit is dead. Look around. People are bored
like they’re going through the motions except maybe in times
of national tragedies they are alive. We need more national
tragedies. Tragedy is relative to the time you live in. Gettysburg
makes 9/11 look like people comparing the cleanliness
of tap water to getting repeatedly stabbed in the face by your
dead grandmother. Tragedy is what forces people to act
human. You can see it on their faces. Overall people’s expectations
have lowered. Why have people’s expectations lowered?
The deterioration of the service industry for one, but
that’s always the first to go. Ask anyone. Every morning our
parents had milk delivered to their doorsteps. People
pumped their gas while wearing uniforms and singing in unison.
Does that mean we’re dying out as a culture? Probably.
We cured polio. We can’t cure shit now. What I’m saying is
this is a dying culture, but it’s probably not as bad as the
French. The French are probably a lot worse. They’re irrelevant
and secondly they smell. Who cares about wine and
smoking at cafes? Nobody cares. Maybe a few people do, but
they’re doing it ironically, or just pretending that they live in
those times when those things meant something. My wife
likes going to France for the holidays, but I don’t care. It’s a
good country to play tennis in, but it’s a dead culture, like
Italy or maybe Norway. I went fly-fishing in Norway once,
but everyone looked depressed like they knew their time had
passed. The whores I fucked were depressed and reluctant to
think about the future. Do you know what I’m saying? We