Some Final Thoughts on Norman Mailer

There’s a story about Mark Twain going to visit James McNeill Whistler in his art studio and approaching one of the painter’s canvases resting on an easel. Leaning in to examine the detail of the work, Twain reaches out a finger to touch the face of the painting before being stopped by Whistler who shouts, “Wait! The paint is still wet!”

“That’s okay,” Twain says reassuringly, “I’m wearing gloves.”

It is one of the earliest examples of artistic celebrity trumping art, something that Norman Mailer would, some 60 years later, master better than anybody else in his generation – elevating, in fact, the notion that the ego of a writer, when inflated with massive amounts of hot air, may be capable of carrying him to heights so great that he is required to look down to observe the culture of his time. And while such a perspective might, at first, seem an unforgivably arrogant position from which to comment on a society made tiny by such a lofty point of view and panoramic range of vision, it was the humanity of Mailer’s brain and the fallibility of his all too human eyes and the contradictions in his heart that made the artistry of his observations divinely lacking in condescension. In fact, he maximized the reach of his sympathies by offering their emollience to saints and sinners alike, something that no God wishing to subjugate those beneath him with the jurisprudence of a codification of their souls would ever do.

“He may have been a fool,” Mailer once suggested as a suitable epitaph for himself, “but he certainly did his best and that can’t be said of all fools.”

Certainly, many would say that Mailer’s massive ego was precisely what ruined him as an artist. True, he appeared sometimes not to entirely trust the ability of his audience to understand his writing without excessive coaching. Often times, his work seemed as if it were being presented to a reader pre-chewed; that is, so rigorously vivisected that those readers not repulsed by having to slog through the innards of whatever he’s over-written – which is typically full of plot points that are revealed slowly, from the inside out, and with the greatest aplomb for the stench and creepy sinewy-ness of the whole exercise – might still wish that they were the ones doing the chewing and subsequent tasting of the material. It’s the difference between being handed an entrée at a restaurant and being left alone to eat versus being brought back into the kitchen to have the cook explain why each ingredient he’s cooking with needs to be appreciated – a lot. And then there’s the help in the preparation. And the clean up. And then the picking through the excrement days later to see that, in fact, each ingredient was properly digested and nourishing to the right bones.

The question is: Is that art of terrific depth or is it just the expression of a mammoth insecurity that forces a writer to continuously talk over his reader’s shoulder because he doesn’t want anybody to notice how thinly his characters are rendered or how idiotic the scenarios that inspire them to act one way or another are when they are left unadorned with an author’s incessant commentary?

Of course, suggesting an answer would belie the whole point in asking the question.

One thing that is undeniable, though, is how seriously Mailer took his responsibilities as a novelist – responsibilities that are indeed profound. He knew how pitifully incompetent and morally bankrupt real reality was when compared to fiction and yet he always did his best to outfit his ideas with strings that would prevent anything resembling escapism from suggesting that the brutal truths of existence should be fled. He understood better than most how fiction, by simulating reality, was able to harbor all the emotional significance and inspiration offered by real reality with one rather remarkable difference: unlike real reality, fictitious reality was both editable and portable. The fictitious Manhattan of 1951, for instance, as gray as a pewter ashtray and cold as the bottom of a wishing well, can be experienced anywhere in the world by anybody with a library card. Likewise, if you’ve never enjoyed the rare pleasure of jerking off into a hissing frying pan or pissing into the uterus of a cackling fishmonger’s wife, nor did you plan on ever having the gumption to enjoy such rare pleasures using your own fluids, you can always pick up something by Charles Bukowski or Henry Miller. Real reality is never that generous. Real reality is immutable; it’s nothing but the prop closet and the set upon which we stage our fiction.

Fictitious reality can also do something that real reality couldn’t do in a million years: suggest that the universe is not indifferent to the existence of human beings. In fact, fictitious reality remains the only version of reality that, by being both editable and portable, people are able to conduct controlled experiments upon as a way of figuring out how to manage their real lives in real reality in a way that maximizes the unsubstantiated fantasy that what they think and what they do has some meaning other than simply being more cosmic balderdash. Fictitious reality provides human beings with the only reality that offers them anything like justification for their continued survival as a species. It is literally the lie of sanity.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was his invention of something I’ll call theophysics in fiction, which might be defined as a detailed study of how the spiritual dimension (assuming there is such a thing) might coexist with the corporeal dimension, both sharing and affecting the same exact reality without being entirely aware of the other’s presence or purpose. I imagine that it’s not dissimilar to how plants and animals coexist. Despite the fact that a fruit-bearing plant possesses a completely different type of awareness of the world than a rabbit or a deer and that neither is, therefore, capable of having anything resembling sympathy for the other’s suffering or empathy for the other’s quest for comfort and joy, both, by being able to experience each other’s existence through interdependent cycles of sustenance and reproduction, still have an obvious influence on each other’s behavior. Likewise with humanity, there most certainly must be a number of super and substructures of reality in the universe that are completely incomprehensible to human beings, yet they are still an influence on how humanity behaves, or, in the case of Mailer’s work, misbehaves.

“God,” he once said, “like us, suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him – yes, God is like me, only more so.”

And now God is dead. And we are left with the remarkably profound gift of nothing being any better or worse as a result.

1973

When I was seven I wanted to be Angela Davis.

Not a fireman, not an astronaut, not even what so many of my friends in 1973 dreamed of being, none other than the voice – some would argue the moral conscience – of our generation, Cornelius from Planet of the Apes, but a black feminist revolutionary communist ex-convict philosopher genius sistah what are you looking at, honkey?! hellraiser; afro as big as a Hoppity Hop, no make up, fist in the air, whitey afraid to walk down the same side of the street as me, the biggest shoes anyone could imagine seeing on a woman – a woman, that is, with legs of equal length, a clarification that I feel I must make because my grandmother had a friend who had one normal sized leg and another leg maybe ten inches too short, the difference being made up by a gigantic black shoe that looked like a small suitcase containing what I’d always imagined were silver dollars packed so closely together that there was no sound from her walking to indicate any value in her handicap. I used to imagine that she was one-sixteenth a Frankenstein, as uninteresting as somebody one-sixteenth a Kennedy, barely worth the ingredient because it did more to point out the much larger portion of herself that was unpedigreed mutt.

Her name was Aida Hobson and during summer afternoons at my grandparents’ house in Springfield, Pennsylvania, I’d hear, sometimes as many as three times a week, the screen door off the back porch open and then slam shut and her walk across the linoleum like half a pony and unload an armload of tomatoes and spiders from her garden onto the kitchen table, the flabby drum roll of picture perfect fruit reverberating through the house as faintly as aristocrats applauding through white gloves. Then the pony would turn and the screen door would slam shut again, but not all the time. If my grandmother wasn’t busy with a crossword puzzle or the painting of her hideous yellow toenails, some as thick as cough drops, or a card game with my twin sister and big brother and me, she’d meet Mrs. Hobson in the kitchen and the two would settle into chairs on the back porch for cigarettes and coffee and inaudible talk about what always sounded like plans for either a prison break or a murder or how much more salacious the next sorority party was going to be, Aida’s Spanish accent lisping through third grade English with the allure of exotic cooking. The laughter inside their conversation was always too secretive or lustful or serious to seem entirely appropriate for two women with such dainty mustaches and underwear one could easily imagine, if mounted properly, capable of pushing a mid-sized skiff full of useless books across a vast ocean.

“Angela who?” said my grandfather straining to hear me over the applause of the forty pieces of bacon that he was cooking on his brand new birthday present, a slab of superheated Teflon as big as a headstone that, when plugged in and shingled with bacon, dimmed all the lights in the house and made every dog in the neighborhood spin in circles and roll around on the ground and ululate.

“Davis,” I said. “Angela Davis. Roger has a poster of her in the basement.” Roger was my twenty-four-year-old uncle who was still living at home and was slowly turning the 1950s décor into something more conducive to the growing of mutton chop sideburns and the cashing of unemployment checks. “You know, the big picture of the black lady, near the air hockey table?” No response, the bacon grease beginning to fog mine and my grandfather’s glasses. “The black lady!” I insisted, balling up my tiny white fists. “Free Angela Davis!” I said, quoting the poster and feeling the injustice of the words. “Down in the basement!”

Pause.

“Air hockey table?” he finally said.

“Forget it,” I said, going out the back door and down the steps and into the garage to climb into the backseat of my grandparents’ station wagon where I planned on using the momentum of my foul mood to properly mourn the end of summer. It broke my heart to smell the newness of the upholstery, only three months old, the intoxicating aroma of fresh plastic mixed with suntan lotion and cheeseburgers, and to remember the long summer days spent being driven back and forth to the mall and the tennis courts and the movie theaters and the public swimming pool and how in less than forty-eight hours I would be crammed in between my sister and brother in the backseat of my parents’ green Nova, the upholstery smelling like old snow and my mother’s menthol cigarettes, with my stepfather’s empty beer cans rolling around under the driver’s side seat like tiny skulls from an indifferent slaughter of retarded children. It wasn’t that there was any less love at my parents’ house than there was at my grandparents’, it was just that there were cats and dogs and a television that burned twenty-four hours a day and a fondness for alcohol to compromise the rationing size of the available portions.

“You’ve got to understand,” my brother would explain to me with some measure of impatience, “some of those dogs have been around a lot longer than you or me. For Petesake, Buffy’s almost eleven.” He was right. Buffy was almost eleven. And although Bullet, her second husband, and me shared the same exact age almost to the day, the fact that he was able to toilet train himself years before I was made him, by comparison, something of a fecal prodigy and me an exhibitionist of utter helplessness. There was no contest. In fact, while I’d never even kissed a girl before, although I was swung around hard by my hood once and thrown into a stack of trashcans by Betty Boyle for trying, Bullet was already a grandfather.

Lying down on the cool leather and looking up at the dark cab light on the ceiling, I sighed and closed my eyes and tried to imagine what I’d be doing if I was Angela Davis. Admittedly, I knew nothing about the woman beyond the picture of her in my grandparents’ basement, but, of course, I didn’t know anybody who really knew much about who their hero really was beyond the most trivial sort of personal information such as height and weight and, occasionally, batting average. My best friend, JJ, for example, was a huge Lassie fan and I could only imagine the army of PR guys hired to make sure that there were no pictures of the superstar Collie published in Time, Life, or Look where she was licking her own rear or shoving her nose into the crotch of a studio executive or eating the vomit of one of her stand ins.

Still, despite the fact that I didn’t know who Angela Davis was, I felt as if I knew who her detractors were. I knew, for example, that there existed a portion of society that thought black people – negroes they were called back then – were inferior to white people and that women were inferior to men and that black women were, therefore, inferiority squared and what drew me to Davis was the complete self-assuredness that she seemed to exhibit from the center of that very specific hurricane of racial and sexual prejudice that was blowing loud and clear through the American culture in 1973. Having both a best friend who was black and who incurred daily salutations of nigger and coon and Washington and a twin sister who could easily match every mental and physical feat that I was capable of, I knew that any notion that attempted to cast negroes or girls into a subcategory of human being, besides being a boldfaced lie, was some kind of extreme cowardice; it had to be, for there was no accidental ignorance capable of being so completely blind to reality. It was the kind of dumbness that existed crouched inside the mind, behind closed eyes, cowering in between capped ears and behind a clothes-pinned nose sealed off from the unmistakable stench of happy smoke from a joyous and inevitable and all consuming revolution. So much stupidity is deliberate; an attempt to avoid comparison with any fact that might denigrate the notion that any of us are objective participants in the world and that our observations are made cleanly through glass un-graffitied by any bogus or prejudiced ideology.

Looking at the Angela Davis poster in my grandparents’ basement, her face locked in something like a battle cry, I wished to be on the winning side of the argument using just the constant and unwavering statement of my own sex and skin color. I wanted to be a hero who existed contrary to stupidity; somebody who by simply living was the actual proof that the worst misconceptions held by the dimmest wits in society, many of them policy makers and architects of public opinion, were wrong. I wanted to believe that the truth was invincible. And it was.

And this is what it said: your opinion here.

An hour later I woke up to the sound of my grandparents talking on the back porch and having their lunch, as they did every day during the summer months when my grandfather wasn’t driving a school bus, of bacon, lettuce and tomato, their voices remarkably clear for having to travel through the wall of the garage and the body of the car and the fog of my grogginess.

“It wasn’t about her leg, exactly,” continued my grandmother, clarifying a point that had apparently entered my grandfather’s head hurriedly and half-dressed. “It was more about the universe in general.”

“Uh huh,” he said, still confused.

“She said that she wished that she could wake up every day–” she stopped herself, thinking. “No,” she went on, “every other day and the world would see her as somebody with one normal sized leg and one extra long leg.”

“What do you mean?” He exhaled affectionate boredom like an ungrantable birthday wish and took a bite of his sandwich.

“You know, instead of thinking that her short leg was too short, people would think that her normal sized leg was extra long.”

“Too long?”

“No, just extra long.”

“Well, longer than the other one I mean.”

“Right.”

“What would be the difference?”

“Between too long and extra long? I don’t know, I guess just your point of view.”

“No, between one leg that’s too short and one leg that’s extra long?”

“Well, instead of just having pity for her she figured that on the days when she had an extra long leg people would be fascinated by her. You know, the idea being that people respect the concept of more a lot more than less.”

“They do?”

“Sure they do. What do you mean, they do?”

“Why not just wish for two normal sized legs?”

“Oh, Eugene.”

“Oh, Eugene what?”

“She didn’t say that she wanted to be invisible.”

Somewhere in Chicago in the backseat of a black Ford Mercury sat Angela Davis looking out through the rain. Passing a crowded diner on her way from O’Hare International Airport, she sighed and leaned back against the upholstery and, looking up at the dark cab light on the ceiling, she closed her eyes and wished that she were invisible.

Living her dream, I was.

The Con

Before I say anything about Paul Conrad – cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times from 1964 until 1993, three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, name on Richard Nixon’s infamous enemies list, and, by some people’s account, the greatest editorial cartoonist ever produced by the United States of America – let me say that editorial cartooning has never had a Mozart, much less a Bob Dylan, although there are a shitload of Donovans in the profession. And that’s how it’s always been. Always. While the best cartoonists might be able to, on occasion, press themselves up against the high ceiling of creative expression, none have been able to go beyond that ceiling into the diseased and limitless sky where real artistic relevance resides, largely indefinable, open to an infinite number of interpretations and, therefore, an infinite number of uses by an infinite number of people. An editorial cartoonist is only successful if he can get the number of viable interpretations of his work down below two, and he is only expected to express opinions about other people’s problems, never his own, which is more in line with the responsibilities of a mother-in-law than with an artist hoping to starve to death on his own integrity.

Editorial cartoonists, thusly, do not practice art as much as they practice journalism, and as journalists they are, at least the most successful ones are, nothing more than polite hecklers of despicable men whose faults are glaring enough to serve journalism’s shorthand; that is, whose faults are so obvious that they provide a point of fact that allows the raison d'etre of the cartoon to make sense to as many people as possible. (Example: What makes George W. Bush the most lampooned U.S. President worldwide in history, surpassing all 20th Century Presidents combined, is the fact that you don’t need a house of mirrors to confirm that he is a complete asshole from every angle.) In that way, an editorial cartoonist sheds no new light on a subject, but rather relies on the manipulation of pre-existing prejudices to gently cajole his fans into continuing to agree with themselves. He is a jingle writer for the op-ed page with his commentary usually fitting as comfortably into the whimsy of his readers as the Oscar Myer Weiner song. Paid by advertisers who provide his publication’s income, it is his job to package and sell cultural criticism in a way that is fun! and completely innutritious, helping the country to remain so deliciously democracy-flavored while the First Amendment remains untouched like a musket over the hearth of our national identity, too precious to ever fire, all the marksmen of such a weapon long dead, their limbs and vocal cords murdered into coins and statues and lore.

And Paul Conrad is no exception, and, truth be told, neither am I. Still, the difference between him and me is that he respected the field of editorial cartooning enough to want to be a part of it, citing Herblock and Bill Mauldin as his biggest influences, while none of my primary influences for what I do were ever cartoonists; they were Lenny Bruce, Jack Benny, Noam Chomsky, John Lennon, Benjamin Braddock and all the dogs my family had while I was growing up. In fact, cartooning for me is the equivalent of waitressing until my true gifts are able to earn me some serious dough. My gifts? Well, right now, I have two that are running pretty much neck and neck: writing unpublishable fiction and rewriting unpublishable fiction. I, like every other writer and musician and painter who I’ve ever hung out with, am a hamster in a wheel motivated by the smell of his own ass. Like excessive masturbation, some part of me believes that the repetitive nature of writing and rewriting will eventually magnetize my intellect and make it so that other intellects will be inexorably drawn to what I do. I’m hoping that one day my brain will be charged sufficiently to fuck up clocks when I walk down the street and to pull the pacemakers out of the chests of ailing poets and to yank the chains from the necks of dogs straining to run and hump and poop like hell.

I suppose that an argument could be made that the repetitiveness of my writing and rewriting is no more admirable than, perhaps even subconsciously modeled on, the same repetitiveness that allows a sizable portion of all editorial cartoonists to stay in business, completely independent of how good or bad their work may be, that repetitiveness being daily syndication. Seen everyday, many cartoonists become like family members to some readers and, like real family members, it may take them decades to say or do anything worthwhile. Garry Trudeau, for example, while he might’ve earned the moniker of great innovator for bringing politics to the comic strip format, hasn’t had anything to say for thirty years, yet I’m sure that if I saw the car he drives I’d think that he was at least as current as a Rubik’s Cube. He’s not, and he’s in 1400 newspapers.

Then, often times, along with the repetitiveness of the cartoonist’s artwork, comes the daily bombardment of the cartoonist’s reputation, particularly in the case of the political cartoonist, as a dangerous character, the type of outlaw who tears truth a new asshole every time he sets pen to paper. Example? Two words: Ted Rall, purported to be the most dangerous progressive cartoonist working today, which he is, if the furthest you’re willing to lean to the left is George McGovern. I’d qualify Rall’s dangerousness this way: the flabbiness of his vaguely liberal commentary only contributes to the guarantee that the general public won’t recognize real radical humor when or if it ever again appears in the culture. It’s like conditioning people to define irreverence as being what prop comedian, and all around jack ass, Gallagher does when he uses a sledgehammer to splatter his audience with the guts of a watermelon, so that if somebody like Lenny Bruce ever comes along and uses an analogy to splatter his audience with the metaphorical guts of some exploded societal myth better blown apart than allowed to propagate, nobody will know how to react, the definition of irreverence having been hijacked and outfitted with speed bumps and NO SPITTING signs. And, of course, a laugh track.

And, speaking of being unfairly labeled with the reputation of dangerous cartoonist, I have to say that Conrad’s inclusion on Nixon’s enemies list loses some of its prestige when one looks at some of the other people on the list with him, particularly those closer to the top; people like Carol Channing, Bill Cosby and, news to me, the Che Guevara of the Hollywood sub-elite, Tony Randall. Suddenly, the list becomes what it really was: the work of a complete imbecile whose opinion of who was naughty and who was nice shouldn’t merit anything but embarrassment and pity. Being proud of appearing on such a list is not unlike being proud that your neighbor’s retarded uncle calls you a doofus turd every morning when you step outside to pick up the paper.

Now, lest anybody think that I dislike Paul Conrad or that I think his work is substandard or that his new autobiography, I, Con, is not worth looking at, the opposite is true. I do like Paul Conrad and I believe that his cartoons are about the best the tenuous profession can withstand. In fact, I think that he is an absolute master at achieving the singular purpose of editorial cartooning, which is to remind people that politics are not so complicated that every Tom, Dick and Harry shouldn’t have an opinion about them. They should. Editorial cartoons, good ones, help prevent the authoritarian powerbrokers of society from suffocating the democracy completely with the bogus idea that only professional politicians and high powered businessmen should be allowed to engage in the public debate about how government should function. I just want to point out that when it comes to an editorial cartoonist speaking truth to power and championing the causes of the downtrodden and the politically shatupon, Paul Conrad is by no means the best that there is. No editorial cartoonist is. In fact, they are all often times decades, even centuries, behind a very long line of writers and painters and sculptors and musicians whose insights and ruminations on life better exemplify what really deep and thoroughly engrossing commentary should look like at its most insightful and profound.

Specifically, when one considers the work of people like Mark Twain, Honoré Daumier, Frederick Douglas, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg, Karl Marx, Louis Armstrong, Henry Miller, T.S. Eliot, Francisco Goya, William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Aristotle, and on and on and on, the qualification of any editorial cartoonist as being anything even approaching a genius of creative expression or radical behavior becomes problematic at best, outrageous at least. Specifically, the occupation of cartoonist is too narrowly defined to be able to contain within it something so vast as the concept of genius, the same way that a tournament level nose picker will never compete in the Olympic Games, no matter how good he is.

Drawing on the definition that I started with, the one about editorial cartoonists being more like journalists than artists, it might be informative to think of them, all of them, as the print equivalent of broadcast journalists, with Paul Conrad being the equivalent of Walter Cronkite. His longevity is obvious, his work ethic is ridiculously Catholic, his likeability immense, but one should not be afraid to ask if Walter Cronkite is a journalist whose gifts justify his legend or does his notoriety come largely from the celebrity of his celebrity?

In other words, just because he has been the journalist who we most often recognize seated at the table closest to the action unfolding on our national stage, and just because his is the voice that we’ve been conditioned to hear as the most reliable when it comes to telling us what’s going on and why, there’s no reason I see to believe, after reading the words of Bill Moyers and Robert Fisk and Bob Scheer and Tariq Ali and Seymour Hersch and Lewis Lapham, that the person seated closest to the action is the one with the clearest view. Typically, he’s the last one to know where the exits are and, sadly, also the last one the coroner is able to identify after the fire sweeps through, all of a sudden, from the back of the room.

Virtual Democracy

When it was over, Eli Pariser, executive director of the internet-based political group MoveOn.org, spoke to us all through a laptop speaker the size of a kazoo’s sphincter and said, as if he’d just read the stage direction (breathlessly, like you’d just witnessed the miraculous invention of Velveeta cheese), that, “Tonight was a historic event.” Everybody in the room clapped, while I sat on the rug picking cookie crumbs off my pants and feeling a little bit embarrassed by the pronouncement, figuring that a truly historic event should be more self-evident than needing to be pointed out – “We’ve done something historical tonight!” – twice in a row.

The event was, according to the invitation email that I’d gotten the week before, to be the “first ever Virtual Town Hall meeting” and promised to involve thousands of house parties across the country that would make it possible for hundreds of thousands of people, via the Internet, the chance to “hear directly from candidates” and to “inject [progressive perspectives] into the debate early” so that Presidential hopefuls “know where we stand,” thereby allowing us to “shape what issues count in ’08.”

There was mention of participants getting a “front row seat” and “hearing the candidates answer questions straight from MoveOn members’ mouths,” the old dynamic of not being able to “connect with presidential hopefuls face to face” being “turn[ed] on it’s head.” The description read like an impossible promise, like it was being hawked by a sideshow huckster peddling a fantastic stunt that was wildly appealing, not because of the triumph that its success would inspire but rather because of the perverse thrill that it’s failure would guarantee.

As if I were signing up to watch a pair of Siamese twins play tennis against each other, I entered my name and phone number onto the online signup sheet and was promptly given the Pasadena address where I’d need to go in order to “make history” with my “fellow progressives.”

With my prerequisite laptop in hand, I arrived at my host, Yuny P.’s house in Pasadena dressed like Richard Lewis, all black, like an exclamation point, and sauntered into a living room the color of pancake batter and decorative hotel soap; puce and tan and waiting room white. A half-dozen large, soft-spoken women rested on sofas and chairs, appearing as if they’d been poured into their immense t-shirts and Fila sneakers by a pastry chef, none of them wishing to meet my eyes. By the looks of them, contrary to my concept of what a progressive should look like, these were women as likely to burn their bras in protest of the more totalitarian attitudes of the patriarch as they were likely to refuse a gift of lingerie from any member of the patriarch willing to do any one of them the cruel favor of objectification. They looked like the moms of the hipsters that I wanted to hang out with. Smiling hard into their peripheral vision, I considered reaching for my car keys and putting on my best oops-I-forgot-to-douche-the-cat face, when I was grabbed suddenly by Yuny, a Latina grandma in slippers and a face like the moon. “You brought a computer!” she said. “Good!” She turned me towards a big screen TV the size of Damien Hirst’s shark tank and asked, “Can we get the computer inside the television so that everybody can enjoy it?” Although I was dressed in black, I wanted to tell her that I was not a witch.

“Well,” I said, “what kind of cords do you have?”

Yuny bent down next to the gigantic picture tube and, looking at the connections at its base, said, “I have red, yellow and…white.”

The fictional cat that I had at home fanned its putrid crotch with a magazine and mouthed the words lousy cocksucker while looking at my picture on the mantle.

Two excruciating hours later, after the Virtual Town Hall had been revealed to be nothing more than a pre-recorded collection of brief statements by seven democratic presidential candidates – the chance for MoveOn members, we’ll call them virtual progressives, to sit huddled around a laptop that was begging to sleep in a stranger’s house like it was 1939 and they were huddled around an old Philco listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, but, instead of enjoying the antics of that show’s namesakes, they got to experience the comedic hijinks of Bill Richardson saying mah-slums over and over again and Hillary Clinton chasing her personal integrity around her own narcissistic political ambitions like Sambo around a tree – I felt no more reassured as to the health and wellbeing of our system of self-government than I was prior to arriving. In fact, I worried that virtual democracy was being tested to replace real democracy and that, given the joy on the faces of everyone around me, it had a pretty good chance of literally succeeding.

On the way out, an awkward bald guy in glasses as thick as hockey pucks, his eyes I imagined having been destroyed by hours of scouring the Sgt. Peppers album cover for clues corroborating the death of Paul McCartney, stopped me to say that Dennis Kucinich was our best hope for peace in the world. “Of all the candidates,” I said, “I tend to agree. Unfortunately, the Presidential election is a beauty contest and Kucinich is too short and too funny looking to win.”

“He’s not short!” said the guy, a faint Klingonese accent buried inside his tongue like pantyhose and a garter belt beneath everyday clothes.

“He’s not?” I said.

“No, I’ve met him. He comes up to here on me.” He touched the bridge of his nose.

“Were you two dancing?” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’d just heard that he was short.”

“Maybe here,” said the guy, touching his upper lip. I left feeling as if either the political viability of our being able to sustain a healthy social democracy into the 21st Century was sinking or I was getting taller.