(Not That You Asked) (28 page)

“It sure would be great to have dinner with the President,” I said.

“Yes, that is a great honor, sir.”

“What sort of additional cost would that involve?” I was imagining ribs and slaw in Crawford, cold brewskis, cracking a few faggot jokes over horseshoes.

“I don’t know for sure,” David said. “I think last time it was twenty-five hundred for a seat. But that includes meetings before the official dinner.”

I whistled. “That’s something I’d have to think about.”

“It’s just five hundred for the ad,” David said. “But we’d need to process your payment in the next day or two. This is a limited-time offer.”

“Still,” I said. “That’s a lot of money for me. I’d have to check with my board of directors on this.”

“That’s the thing,” David said. “Because of campaign reform, it’s illegal to solicit corporate contributions, so this would have to be on a personal level.”

I told him I understood, but needed more time to think about it.

David lowered his voice. “If cash flow is an issue, we could probably get your name in the ad for two or three hundred dollars.”

“I thought it was five hundred,” I said.

“Yeah, it is five hundred. But there is a minimum contribution of a hundred dollars.”

This was almost
too much
generosity.

“If you have a credit card, we could take care of this right now.”

I didn’t want to have to break it to David, because I knew he regarded me as a pretty hard-core business leader at this point, but I wasn’t sure my credit card was in good standing. “Let me call you back later,” I said.

He was pretty disappointed.

I, on the other hand, felt buoyant. It was high time I stopped regarding the GOP as a bunch of greedy crooks devoted to enriching themselves at the expense of our national character. I needed to realize that they cared about the little guy. The party was filled with folks like Tom Reynolds and David Lucas, men who spent their days endeavoring to make sure that tiny voices like mine were heard in the great halls of power. I couldn’t wait to tell my bitter pinko brethren about this brush with bipartisan phone solicitation.
Don’t you guys get it?
I’d say.
This is how democracy is
supposed
to work.

WHERE’D YOU HIDE THE BODY?

B
ecause I don’t own a TV, I’m often struck by the appearance of entire TV genres that have risen up in my absence. The other day I found myself in front of a TV (a wide-screen sucker at that), and in the space of two hours saw ads for the following series:
CSI, Without a Trace, Cold Case,
and
CSI: NY.

The basic premise of all of these shows, from what I could discern, is pretty similar: There’s a dead body and the investigators have to figure out how it got dead. So, in other words, we’re talking about
Quincy, ME,
only with cooler gadgets and hotter actors. In most cases—and I think this is crucial—the bodies have been forgotten, overlooked, or otherwise misplaced. The best example I can cite is the promo for
CSI: NY,
which I had the pleasure of viewing seventeen times. It shows a woman on a bus nudging a fellow passenger, apparently a black youth dressed in baggy clothing, who is dozing. His baseball hat falls off and we discover that the kid is actually
…a skeleton.

Now, I want to make clear that I have never seen any of these shows. I’m sure they’re gripping and ingeniously written and expertly acted. But that’s not why I find them interesting. I find them interesting because they (and their massive popularity) strike me as a deep expression of the current national neurosis.

By which I mean that we, as a nation, are suffering from an odd form of survivor guilt. We are being told, almost constantly, that we are at war. We are aware that killing is being done in the name of our protection. Like the President, we see the casualty reports on TV. But we are not seeing any of the bodies.

This is the single most conspicuous aspect of our so-called war coverage. No bloody footage allowed, nothing that would make the consequences of our military operations too apparent. The media isn’t even allowed to photograph the caskets of the fallen. It’s as if the bodies of the Americans (not to mention the foreign combatants, not to mention the foreign civilians) have disappeared
…without a trace.

Not only are the bodies gone, they have been stripped of any concrete narrative. Why? Because if we saw all those bodies, and learned something about the life that animated each of them, their deaths would become too real. We might start to ask the appropriate moral questions that ought to accompany preemptive military action. Namely: Why did this person die? For what cause? Was that cause worth his death, and the anguish felt by his survivors?

In this sense, we can see the deluge of necro-investigative shows as a displaced psychic response, a kind of compensatory pantomime. While the military are engaged in an elaborate cover-up of all those bodies (with a friendly assist from our free press), our popular culture crafts shows in which intrepid techno-equipped heroes start with a body and uncover the truth about its death. These programs are not concerned with morality, though. They are intended to deliver the viewer a sense of closure, of a job well done. They inoculate us against the senselessness of death by rendering death as a mystery to be solved.

I’m not sure I can convey the strangeness of all this.

But just imagine if a person from an indigenous culture with no access to media tried to take stock of our current historical circumstance. She would find a culture completely insulated from the abundant by-products of actual killing and yet curiously obsessed with precise, artificial renderings of death.

Americans have always had a tremendous knack for self-delusion, of course. We were founded by self-deluders, and we have been happily sustained by the habit. But I do think the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised our capacities to a new high. All we heard about in the days afterward was the scope of the tragedy. Initial estimates, if you’ll recall, were up to forty thousand dead at the World Trade Center alone. And yet, oddly, we were shown very few images of human carnage. Instead, we saw an endless tape loop—the collision, the collapse, the rubble. The bodies simply disappeared.

A psychic vacuum was created, one we’re still trying to fill. I don’t mean to suggest that America’s death fetish is premeditated, or even recognized. On the contrary, it’s a powerful
subconscious
effort to explicate (and thereby tame) the horror of death.

One might locate the same paradoxical impulse in a Reality TV game show that subjects Americans to temporary states of starvation and disease when in fact these hardships define human existence in much of the world. Or a hit series such as
Dexter,
which stars a serial killer with a heart of gold whose elaborate torture methods are justified by the greater evil of his victims. (Don’t get me started on the sado-fetishism of
24.
) Can it be any coincidence that Americans are offered such stylized visions of torture at the very moment our administration is arguing for its necessity against actual terrorist suspects?

Or consider the rash of recent films, such as
Turistas Go Home,
in which innocent Americans abroad—generally dressed in bikinis—are abducted by murderous foreigners. These movies arrive in the midst of a sustained campaign by this country’s leaders to cast our citizens as victims facing a villainous immigrant mob ravenous to pour over our borders and steal our jobs. (And the really plum ones, too, such as cleaning toilets.)

I’m not suggesting that the Bush administration has a secret pipeline to Tinseltown. Notwithstanding the Disney/Cheney collaboration
The Path to 9/11,
they don’t need one. These fables arise spontaneously, as a way of reinventing the world in a manner that absolves us of the violence carried out in our names. They are generated by the growing burden of our imperial guilt. America is talking to itself through these dramas, issuing frantic alibis that play more like twisted confessions.

It all comes down to dead bodies—the real ones, the fake ones, our profound national confusion over which is which. Do we even know anymore?

The figure that comes to mind when I consider this paradox is Lady Macbeth. As you’ll recall, she isn’t the one who does the killing. She sends her husband to do the dirty work. And yet she goes mad anyhow, rubbing and rubbing at a spot of blood that isn’t there, but was, and will be.

DEMAGOGUE DAYS

OR, HOW THE RIGHT-WING HATEOCRACY CHEWED ME UP AND SPAT ME OUT

A Shameless Multimedia Extravaganza Featuring Sean Hannity, Dante Alighieri, Ann Coulter, and a special cameo by that super-classy Secretary of State who never met a war she didn’t like…Condoleezza Rice!

Canto I

T
his is the story of my descent into a modern inferno, so I’m going to start the way Dante did back in the day. As our saga opens, I’m pushing forty, about halfway through my life’s journey. I’m not lost in a dark wood. I’m schlepping my suitcase through the Portland airport, where travelers are granted the foolish pleasure of free e-mail.

I open my account and find a message protesting Boston College’s decision to have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speak at commencement. The Rice invitation has been public knowledge for several weeks, but it’s news to me, because I’m just an adjunct professor at BC and because I’m on a book tour this term and because I’m in the midst of trying to buy my first home for my pregnant wife while on a book tour.

My initial reaction is your basic spasm of ick. How could my school do such a thing? This is a rhetorical question. I know exactly why Condi got the nod: It makes BC appear enlightened
—Look at us honoring a woman of color!—
while also generating the kind of prestige PR that helps pump dough out of the wealthy alumni. Before I can think better of it, I do something I have pledged never (
ever
) to do: I hit
reply all.

Guys—

I’m astonished to hear BC has selected Rice as a commencement speaker. It is the sort of decision that leads me to reconsider whether I want to teach at the school.

Rice has been an integral part of a political machine whose values run contrary to virtually every humane tenet expressed in the New Testament and Catholic doctrine…

It’s finally come home to BC. Are we going to respond?

Canto II

If I were another sort of person—a reasonable person, for example—I’d have stopped here. I’d rattled my saber. I’d done my best lefty kvetch. Now it was time for a soothing latte. But I am not a reasonable person.

The more I thought about the Rice invite, the less reasonable I became. I was having trouble
letting it go,
as the therapists say. I was having trouble letting it go because I had grown up in a family where a certain brand of cruelty had been tolerated, and I had never gotten over that injustice, and when the same cruelty played out in the political world, it afforded me the chance to return to the delicious misery of my childhood.

I had spent the months after the 2000 election, for instance, thinking (quite a lot, actually) about how best to murder James Baker. Then I remembered that shooting zombies never really kills them, it just makes them stronger. And now, six years, one stolen election, and two failed crusades later, Bush’s office wife—a classically trained pianist and war criminal—had been invited to serve as a role model at my very own school. What was I supposed to do with that?

Canto III

In the
Inferno,
Virgil is the one who shows Dante the way into hell. I myself did not have the ghost of a dead, world-famous poet close at hand in Portland. (They are hard to track down on short notice.) But I did have a nondead, sort of famous poet named Julianna Baggott. Julianna and I were on a book tour together, because we had co-written a novel.

When I told Julianna about the Rice invite, that I was considering resigning in protest, her expression was not one of surprise or dismay. On the contrary, she knew me as someone deeply attached to my outrage. And so she was happy to give me a good hard nudge through the Gates of Hell. “If you’re really that upset,” she said, “why don’t you send your letter of resignation to the
Boston Globe
?”

Canto IV

I didn’t do this immediately, because I was in the midst of this long-distance house buying nightmare, one complicated by the fact that, unbeknownst to anyone but my wife and my lawyer, I had put offers down on two homes, which, as my attorney had sternly informed me earlier in the day, was
against the law,
but I was doing it anyway because the second home was an insane bargain and I myself had fallen so deeply into a temporary real estate psychosis that a little jail time didn’t really faze me anymore, just so long as we got the house. I was making 173 phone calls per day, mostly on my obnoxious cell phone, mostly in transit, and thus kept misplacing my outrage about Rice.