Good Training Part 2

About the Book

With Good Training Part 1, Good Training Part 2 completes Panel One in the triptych, The Kind of Life That Was Being Lived.

This omnibus title for the first and the succeeding two panels of the triptych derives from a story entitled Michel Sinyagin, in which the 1940’s Russian humorist Mikhail Zoschenko has the title character observe with heavy irony:  Man is excellently made and eagerly lives the kind of life that is being lived.

The kind of life that is (presently) being lived stems from a change in priorities which became evident during the 1950’s when global thermonuclear war seemed rather likely.  Given the imminence of World War III—third time lucky?—to count on a future was folly.  Sure enough, the stock market had quickened, and by the crystalline law of supply and demand, a day of missile strikes would send the Dow Jones through the roof.  Buy now!  The insanity hadn't even peaked yet.  Add to the classic Fifteen Signs of Apocalypse the evidence found in the back pages of magazines such as Argosy, and Field and Stream, and Gent, wherein was advertised a pamphlet available at a minimum fee from a California entrepreneur—How You Can Profit from the Coming Nuclear Holocaust.  Just send twenty-five cents in stamps or coins.  Another service included complete plans for building a home fallout shelter.

Newspaper readers living in a world of unapologetic compulsion were warned that every weapon heretofore invented eventually was used.  The process had the familiar logic of a cash register.  Certain commentators were indecently eager to point out that courts-martial would deal harshly with the treason of a high command which had failed to deploy all the available weaponry.  What mundane goals command devotion when a finger of rote duty beyond measure or mercy might push the red launch button?  Stockpiled thunderbolts were ready to hurl fire and strontium90 brimstone down like indiscriminate rain.  People in their deep private selves did not prevail but only went through the motions as if stricken by a fatal disease:  lives not annihilated but gutted, without interiors, so there’s less to lose.  Young and old cast the sky fearful glances and sacrifice magnanimity to the demon of the fuming caldera.

Good Training Part 1 is set amid the compulsions of the escalating arms race in a time when the horny hierophant the kids once called Nature Boy could use the possible start of World War Three to seduce his first girl.  Well, she helped.  But they didn’t talk about sex.  Very little about war, or about work, or about sex and love could be discussed and even less was debatable in that period of international hysteria.

Now, hysteria owes its current use to Freud, who slapped the label of a malady on the Greek word for uterus.  Consider the conflict between Mother Russia and Miss Liberty.  The Cold War may have had something to do with different economic systems, but it was conducted with kitchen excuses, and for bedroom motives.  We are now living its long result.

In Good Training Part 1, we meet ex-Nature Boy Herschel Bluestein in the Army as a Private E-2, the lowest possible rank, driving M-1 tank Golf Eleven serving his penance for having flunked out of a sure-thing government-subsidized program in medical research which would have provided him with a doctoral degree that amounted to a union card guaranteeing a gainful and respected career of clean-handed employment for the rest of his life.  Relatively clean-handed.  Most of the blood of the experimental animals we see Bluestein learning surgically to prepare washes off in the sink after the experiment.

As a child Bluestein was thrilled by insects and birds and animals of all sorts.  He wasn’t the sort of boy who pulled the wings off flies. He likens the torture of his good training to the way a person who loved trees might feel on being

About the Author

Arnold Wohl has held many of the typical no-account jobs forced by the United States of Amnesia on its writers. In trying to follow his calling, he has done stints as a carpenter’s assistant, a short-order cook, a carnival roustabout, a French chef (in France), a medical research scientist, a demolition worker, a telemarketer, a stevedore, a street guitarist, a software engineer, and an adjunct professor of English. He is a practicing astrologer, and a father of three. His short story Manicheans is on-line in Crania, #6. Others of his works are in print (Rattapallax, Number One; And Then, Volume 9). An earlier novel, Compromises (1977), dealt in part with what is now called Mad Cow Disease. Good Training Part 1 and Good Training Part 2 (coming soon) comprise Panel One in the triptych, The Kind of Life That Was Being Lived.