In recent months I have been reading a lot of short fiction, stories that are sometimes no longer than a few pages. Most recently I have read Bernard Malamud's The Jewbird and yesterday I finished the last paragraph of James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues. Set in the same city (New York) and at a similar time, they could not be more different. The former might well be called magical fiction, for a talking bird of the Hebrew faith is the central character. Sonny's Blues is far removed from this world, located in the tough realism of being black in Harlem, though told with an often beautiful poetic, intense language.

All this is leading me to another short story, Updike's A & P, which I was halfway through when news came on the TV that another gun massacre had occurred at a Walmart in El Paso. I stopped to watch (not in disbelief given the frequency of these events in that country), but really out of a desire to try to understand why someone would do such a thing. We have much tighter gun laws in Australia, thank goodness, or else people with mental issues and /or irrational points of view might well be doing the same here.

Looking at the images that came out of El Paso, it struck me that the America of Updike's short fiction was a very different place to that inhabited by the innocent folks of that unfortunate border town, who were going about their own very mundane business, only to struck down by the delusions of another. That someone was heavily armed, not because it makes any sense to be so equipped, but because of another delusion that equates owning guns with liberty.

The A & P is really an innocent tale of male rights of passage perched on the cusp of the revolutions that were about to engulf the West in the 1960's. It pits the dawn of the new with the mores of the old. I am not saying that either is right or wrong, for only time will tell in that respect. Suffice to say that humans have a way of throwing out the baby with the bathwater where revolutions are concerned. May Aristotle's Golden Mean be a guiding principle.