Born in a reeking rural slum,
Rafe, at first a merry and energetic lad, worked hard in the local school, joined the WoodKids of America (Kumquatt was too poor for the bourgeois Boy Scouts) then became a Junior Firefighter and Superpatriot Air Raid Buddy in the waning years of WW II, which experiences honed his desire to spy on people, interfere in their lives and dream up pointless regulations and restrictions. Old-time Kumquatters remember young Rafe sprinting up and down the three dirt streets of the village with a helmet, flashlight and whistle, trying to find people guilty of necking in the shrubbery or showing a light to guide hordes of Junkers Ju-88 bombers from Der Vaterland to firebomb his beloved home into the Stone Age. Rafe, his fellows noted, had grown tall, gangly and devoid of humor, grace or self-insight.
Rafe quickly pulled himself from the quagmire of Kumquatt, shaking its dust from his feet, when he received a prestigious Lompoc-Spondulix Fellowship to Yale on the basis of his schoolwork and a relentless letter-writing campaign to former Wisconsin Governor “Fighting Bob” Wakamole, last of the old-time Farmer-Banker-Workers’ Party reform politicians. Wakamole wrote young Rafe a glorious reference in spondaic verse without ever setting eyes on him.
Arriving in the perfumed quadrangles of Yale in 1950, Rafe put his ear to the ground, his nose to the grindstone and his shoulder to the wheel and was still able to do his schoolwork. He had grown to a Lincolnesque young man, tall, shambling, bewarted and tongue-tied. Thus he became the butt of endless jokes from suave Skull & Bonesmen, Hasty Puds and others belonging to ancient Yale institutions of pointless japery. He never forgot or forgave their cruel caricatures and developed the wide streak of surreal paranoia that has disfigured his career. Resolved to conquer his shyness and leave an impression on the haughty denizens of Yale, he took speech classes, joined the debating society and began writing.
This led to his notorious obsession with antique typewriters, when he acquired a No. 253 L.C. Smith Upright Organ Model (1919) to pound out his perorations. He then found a Remington Double-Action Over-Under Portable (serial no. B116348, 1923), then an Argentinian El Diablo Typoscriptico Modelo 1934 and a German HochDeutsch Ober-Unsserscripter Hegeldenfleigenmachinischt XVIII of 1937, once used by Hermann Goering to type his memoirs. From there, Nadir’s collection exploded exponentially, until today he owns an estimated 2/3 of all mechanical typewriters left on the planet, plus an assemblage of electrical and electronic models numbering in the hundreds of thousands. No one has any idea why he still collects typewriters.
Leaving Yale in 1955 with his A.B. in Realpolitik, Semper fi beta krappa (with fig leaf), Nadir shambled off to Washington, determined to find a way to regulate, trammel, oversee, harass and intimidate anybody or anything in his path. He also followed election results obsessively, noting how one relentless loudmouth can easily bollix the delicate workings of democracy. He took to standing on streetcorners around D.C., scaring pedestrians and launching marathon whining sessions.
In his spare time he drew unemployment compensation and swotted up on industrial practices in the Library of Congress. He hit upon the key appliance of the 20th century, the refrigerator, as an Achilles heel in big-time industrial capitalism’s throat grip on the
In 1960, Nadir struck, writing a bestselling sensation called Unsafe at Any Temperature, which sent waves of panic through suburbia. In it, the dour and fixated author averred that household food-cooling was a deathtrap engineered by the military-industrial complex to tranquilize and subdue the population. His many graphs and charts showed that refrigerators were laden with toxic coolants, wired flimsily, equipped with faulty valves and compressors and designed to create Hunchback Syndrome in those trying to use them. When he tested the gas-powered Servel, he exploded, “Who ever heard of making things cold with a gas flame? It’s sheer voodoo!”
His greatest scorn was reserved for the new streamline moderne Frigidaire Cooler Queen Model BZ 1124k, pride of the 1959 Wonderful World of Fridges Show in
The herculean rant of Unsafe at Any Temperature meandered for 411 pages, with graphic color photos of rotting cabbage, phosphorescent gefiltefisch, reeking haggis and other poisonous tidbits from his infamous test fridges. It concluded with a peroration worthy of Anaxarchus on the loss of the homey icebox—the old neighborhood iceman and his tongs, leather apron, horse and ice-pick, the quadrangular sign in the window, the plangent cry of “Any ice today, Lady? It’s nice today, Lady!” and other memories of the halcyon days before El Monstro Refrigerato dominated all aspects of
It is familiar history how Nadir’s satanic verses undermined the US refrigerator industry and opened the door for flimsy boxes haplessly stuck together in places like Uruguay, Montenegro, Andorra, Irian Jaya and other obscure spots hitherto unknown for the manufacture of anything more complex than a doorstop.
Nadir, however, became famous and revered as a champion of the consumer and a cultural seer. He went on to years of meddling, canoodling and jiggery-pokery, until he flailed into national politix in 2000, when his infamous “spoiler” campaign for president was justified as he allowed the biggest dullard in recorded American history actually to reach the White House, launch a wholly meaningless war against a nation of unarmed peasants and kill boxcarloads of them, as well as many a thousand of us.
Rafe Nadir had at last found his true depth as silent co-sponsor of genocide, and we all carry his dire signature inscribed on our suffering minds and bodies. Thus the feckless youth from Kumquatt, now hailed as “Collateral Damage Nadir,” achieved full revenge on an uncaring world! ###
Soon to be a very long b & w movie by Ursome Whales, written and directed by Ursome Whales, starring Ursome Whales, manufactured by Ursome Whales Movies Inc., as first conceived for the Ursome Whales Fireside Theater of the Air on AM radio.
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Implement -504-6 subject Lewis Unserwasser, and 915a following REPLACEMENT FINAL PARAGRAPH, NADIR PIECE, lieu final 2 paragraphs beginning "Nadir, however" and "Rafe Nadir had":
Nadir, however, became famous and revered as a champion of the consumer and a cultural seer. He went on to years of meddling, canoodling and jiggery-pokery, until he flailed into national politix in 2000, when his infamous “spoiler” campaign for president was justified. Rafe Nadir at last found his true depth as silent co-sponsor of social, political and cultural mediocrity, and we all carry his dire signature inscribed on our suffering minds and bodies. Thus the feckless youth from Kumquatt, now hailed as “Collateral Damage Nadir,” achieved full revenge on an uncaring world! ###
Please forward Lewis Unserwasser dossier PROTOCOL PASTORAL HAY
Please forward Lewis Unserwasser dossier PROTOCOL PASTORAL HAY
Please forward Lewis Unserwasser dossier PROTOCOL HARUM
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| The Journal of Provincial Thought |
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