(Not That You Asked) (32 page)

Suddenly, I heard one of those metallic whooshing sounds, which meant the segment was being thrown back to the studio. Then I heard Sean Hannity’s voice blaring into my ear.

Canto XXIV

I should confess that this opening salvo caught me off guard, as did the speed with which the discussion had degenerated into an inquisition. Had I not been so acclimatized to the noxious atmosphere of the Hateocracy, I’m certain I would have lost my shit. As it was, I shook my head and chuckled sadly.

Hannity, now incensed, began to yell.

On this insinuating note, with Almond against the ropes and Hannity looking ready to devour a forty-ounce steak using just his eyeteeth, Colmes stepped in.

Now the silence was profound. It was interrupted only by a faint rustling, which may or may not have been the sound of a thousand Fox interns dropping their loofahs in astonishment. Yes, I had dropped the O’Reilly bomb. I had made reference to his sex harassment case, and I had done so during prime time, on his very own network. It was precisely at this point, I like to imagine, that an executive decision was made, which involved a senior producer yelling into his headset something like this:

Good Christ! Code red! We’ve got a live one on the air! Repeat: CODE RED! We’re going to abort. Cue up the next ad block. Now! Go! Go-go-go!

But of course, it takes a while to cue up the next ad block, so they were stuck with me. Colmes looked at the camera, in that unbearably sexy quisling way of his.

Suddenly, bizarrely, I lost the audio feed. I assumed this was a simple technical glitch, a mistake. But no, that wasn’t it. They really and truly had pulled the plug on me. I ripped my earbud out and shouted, “You goddamn losers!”

Canto XXV

For a day or so, I felt exuberant, as if I had faced down the Hateocracy. The truth dawned on me only after I took a second look at the segment. My promised ten minutes of airtime had run 5:16, nearly half of which had been devoted to the footage from Boston College. By the time Hannity finished his initial cross-examination, less than two minutes remained. I had spoken for a grand total of twenty-five seconds. Something else I noticed: Several seconds after my veiled reference to O’Reilly, the background music that signals a cut to commercial had come on. The producers really had gone
Code Red
on my ass.

This, then, was my great victory—twenty-five seconds of free speech on Fox News.

Canto XXVI

Dante made his harrowing descent in the hopes he would find a path to paradise. And I do believe that I had some idea of paradise in mind when I resigned from BC and decided to throw my puny weight against the gnashing of the Hateocracy. Or maybe
paradise
is too grandiose a word.

What I had was more like a hunger for justice, one linked to a specific auditory memory of a newsreel I heard long ago, in which Joseph Welch, an elderly lawyer from Boston, implored Senator Joseph McCarthy to stop slandering one of the young lawyers on his staff. “Let us not assassinate this lad further,” Welch says, in a tone of exhausted despair. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

It didn’t happen quite this simply, but Welch’s statement has always played as the beginning of the end for McCarthy, the moment in which his purported crusade to protect the homeland collapsed and Americans could see that he was merely trying to make himself a star by turning us against each other. That’s what I was looking for—my Joseph Welch moment.

This no doubt has to do with my maternal grandparents, who were, as I’ve mentioned, the very people whose lives McCarthy ruined. They held fast to the outrageous notion that the bounty of the earth should be fairly divided among its citizens. They lived in fear for this belief, and my grandmother lost her job. So I take it personally when I see our democracy being hijacked by McCarthy’s descendants, those who cling to power not by seeking to solve common crises of state, but by demonizing the weak and the just.

I’m sorry to report that my own family of origin suffered from the same essential tyranny. My brothers and I lived—as McCarthy did, as the extreme right wing would have us all live—in a shame culture. It was either humiliate or be humiliated. No retreat, no compromise, no apologies. We savaged one another in direct correlation to our self-loathing. And so my dream of Joseph Welch, which is the dream of every embattled child: that a good and caring father will step in and rescue us from our destructive urges, will demand to see
our
decency, at long last.

My father was a good man. He tried to rescue us. But we had him outnumbered and outflanked. We were children, after all, the first true demagogues, and we behaved as children often do, choosing to be cruel to one another when we might have chosen to be kind.

It is a choice, after all.

This is the main reason Welch’s words have always haunted me, and the reason they once resonated so powerfully in our national psyche: not because he stood up to the bully of his era, but because he reminded us that McCarthy was, for all his monstrous actions, a human being capable of contrition.

You have done enough.

The precise tragedy of our present circumstance is not that conservatives in this country are incapable of compassion, but just the opposite: that they choose—as my brothers and I did—to ignore their best impulses day after day. There is no loving father, no Joseph Welch to stop them. And thus they turn to the glowering guardians of the Hateocracy, in the hope that the ecstasy of rage will cleanse their consciences.

As for the rest of us, we play our part. We worship the same false god of convenience, gulp the same burgers and happy pills, enjoy the same lives of plenty, slap bumper stickers on our slightly smaller cars, and thereby manage to convince ourselves we’re the good guys.

In some sense, though, the left has come to depend on the Hateocracy as much as the right. They have become convenient scapegoats for our own moral laxity. Maybe this is why the great and decent people of this country continue to allow cruel children to lead them: because if we insisted on adult leaders, we would all have to grow the fuck up.

Canto XXVII

The day after my appearance on
H&C
, a young woman called to invite me on Sean Hannity’s radio show. She promised Sean would let me speak this time. He wanted to engage in an honest debate. I told her I’d think about it—mostly, I suspect, for the sick pleasure of listening to her beg for the next few days. But I was done. I had spent two weeks absorbing the pathologies of these people, and felt utterly defeated by the experience. My career as a demagogue of the left was officially over.

This is what the Hateocracy does: They wear people down, into silence or cynicism. Yeats had it right:
The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.

I do believe that Americans will look back upon this era some day and discern the seeds of their own ruin. History will regard the conservatism peddled by the Hateocracy as a contagion. But it gives me no joy to say any of this.

My daughter is an American.

Canto XXVIII

One final (bizarre) disclosure: My paternal grandfather, Gabriel Almond, was one of the political scientists who urged Condi Rice to join the faculty at Stanford, where she came to the attention of Bush the Elder. When my grandmother passed away five years ago, Rice—then the National Security Advisor—actually sent my grandfather a personal note of condolence.

Small world, right?

You have no idea.

A few weeks after the BC mishagoss, I flew to California to visit my family. We were all sitting around after dinner one night when my father said, more or less out of nowhere, “You know Condoleezza Rice was almost your aunt?”