From the Welfare to the Waif Heir State.

Waif Airing: Profiting from the plight of boys Wayfaring North.

One would think I would have noticed. The clamor at the border, the crocodile tears on the news, the  Corporate tax bonanza that allows the most powerful "citizens" of the United States to wreak havoc via financial rape of down-trodden economies with impunity, must all have informed my decision, and perhaps did, but I was caught unawares, I see the why, but not the how.

As I opened to the first pages of Hannah Tinti's novel, The Good Thief, I shouldn't have been surprised that it was about a foundling, a parent-less orphan, a Waif.

I had only recently finished reading George Sand's, The Country Waif, and was on my way home from visiting a friend in hospital, so had been riding MUNI on a daily basis, which means I've been reading more than usual, so just had to drop into my local branch of  La Bibliothèque and see what I could see. But it was almost closing time. "Five Minutes!", the attendant warned as I scurried into the back to raid the stacks. The selection has been getting more and more diluted from one comprised of mostly literature to one replete with Mystery and Romance novels, graphic novels, Chinese and Russian language (not in the same book, of course) texts, and large print books taking up more and more shelf space as avid readers have lost interest in using libraries' services, starting to push any good choices off the shelf and back to the main branch. So when I glimpsed The Good Thief, amongst the detritus, I grabbed it, quickly scanned the synopsis on the jacket and whisked it up to the checkout desk, before scurrying out the door with my new-found treasure.

So when I discovered, upon digging into Ms. Tinti's tale of a one-handed boy and his adventures in what was most decidedly not Wonderland, that this was yet another story centered around a waif (a term, btw, I've learned is unfamiliar to most people ... Huh? I am soooo out of the mainstream), I started to wonder, to take stock, because that night I was being most unexpectedly taken to the opera. And not to just any opera, but one of Wagner's Ring operas; namely Siegfried.

There are four operas in Wagner's Ring cycle. Any one of them could've been chosen by my friend who had the tickets bestowed on him through the unfortunate timing of a patient hospitalized at precisely that point in time when he and his wife were to attend the performances, so rather than see the BOX SEAT (!) tickets (at like $450/per) go to waste, offered them to him ... at no charge, no less.

And he chose Siegfried. The only one of the four opera's making up the cycle he had yet to see. I'd seen the entire cycle several times, yet it only occurred to me as I was watching the Opera, that this particular one related the story of Siegfried's life, after explaining how Siegmund and Sieglinde, his parents, had both died. Meaning that, as you've already surmised, he was a waif ... a male waif. But

that wasn't enough. As I watched the actor playing Siegfried, he seemed familiar. His big protruding belly and small waif-like arms and red hair were reminding  me of someone, but I couldn't quite grasp who, until the end of Act 1. That's when it struck me that the reason I couldn't quite put my finger on it was that it wasn't an actor the same age as Siegfried. No. Who this Siegfried made me conceptualize was what the kid in The Bad Santa, my favorite anti-hero, would look like as a grownup:

... and like Siegfried himself, the boy in The Bad Santa is essentially a waif: he supposedly has parents, but we never see them; he is basically all alone, with only his TV-addled grandmother as  company; the only adult in his life all but catatonic. And like Siegfried, he was a 'nilla,  but not a thin, waif'er.

All of this waif airing occurred in the same week. I'm still reading The Good Thief.

Why I chose to share this is because it occurs to me how strong the Zeitgiest of the moment can be. Did someone request The Good Thief? I imagine it languishing in storage until it was requested, and then, upon its return, instead of being put back on ice, ended up on that shelf where I scooped it up from. The interest in fictional waifs being sparked by the influx from the actual waifer factory at the border, where wayfarers were being systematically and deliberately turned into waif heirs.

As they stuff the deserted War-Mart on the border with chocolate waif-ers, it seems to have stuffed my own life with the literary variety. The question for me being, as I can't simply dismiss as easily as you (Since you can always decide I've contrived the whole thing in my own brain, but I have the evidence right there, I can't pretend it was conscious, but you can think it was somehow contrived)  what I can only describe as a phenomena, an unconscious clustering of material to go with the actual
clustering of this same type of character, in the same heart-wrenching plight of all the fictional ones I'm all of a sudden been surrounded by. Ah, The Curiosity shops for whom the kNell Toils.

That's all. I have no comment on it, I just had to share it, well, blog it really, as every now and then I remember that that's all a blog is: a Web log. A diary of sorts one decides to edit and share, but keep as close to the truth as possible. So that's what I decided to do. Because I'm sure in a week or a month or so, I'll have forgotten how this rather strange confluence of events, or really, fictional events, clustered in such an unlikely timeframe to dovetail with the sad, pitiable event playing out at our border, and the even more dire events that necessitated the journey of all those wayfaring waif farers to seek a better life in our land. Little dreamers never dreaming that they would be left, bereft of counsel, to plead their own case and hope against hope that the welfare of the wayfaring waifs airing on the nightly news would weigh fairly heavily on the collective conscience of the richest country in the world. And perhaps then they'd not turn such a tin ear to how stark is the difference between what it thinks makes it "Great", and those things that actually make others refer to it as such:

" ... remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”