The crazed search for a silver lining

You just might be looking at my next home.

The media have been telling us relentlessly, for months now, that the outcome of next week's presidential election is a done deal. Inevitable. Preordained.

Of course they said that about Hillary Clinton too, didn't they?

But the message coming from the Washington Post and the New York Times is pretty clear: unless you're planning to vote for Barack Obama, you might as well stay home.

As we used to say when I was in high shool, "They wish."

No, I'm going to go out and cast my vote for John McCain, as should anyone who doesn't especially relish the idea of living in the USSA -- United Socialist States of America.

I saw a bumper sticker years ago that I loved. "Like Your Mail Service? You'll LOVE National Health Insurance."

Get ready for it, and don't come crying to me when you feel a twinge that might be appendicitis and are told that you can see the doctor next November.

But I don't want to get started on that. I've already outlined my personal strategy for surviving four years of President Obama and his cadre of crypto-Marxists led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid: total disengagement. Unlike Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon, both of whom have threatened to leave the country if there's a Republican victory and neither of whom has actually put their money where their big mouths are, I'm not going to leave the country when Obama and his politboro take over. Don't get me wrong: if I could afford it I'd move to the Orkney Islands. But I can't. (Unlike Baldwin and Sarandon, so what are their excuses?)

Yes, the above-depicted manhole cover just might be my new front door. I'm going to batten down the hatches, cancel my newspaper subscription, quit listening to the radio, give my TV to the nearest needy cretin and change my home page to, oh, I don't know, SorenKierkegaard.com? Some place where I am absolutely assured that I won't see or hear anything remotely resembling news. I just don't want to know what Obama and his gang are up to out there. But if I peek out from under that manhole cover and see that all the trash cans in the neighborhood have "PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT stamped on them, I'll have a pretty good idea: someone decided that "spreading the wealth around" also applied to trash, and the Democrats rolled it through their one-party Congress without a rhetorical shot being fired. (Can you imagine garbage collectors as federal employees? In no time the whole country would look like New York City in the 1970s, when the garbage collectors were going on strike every forty-five minutes.)

I have to prepare for the worst. Even Rich Lowry and Byron York, writers for National Review, the country's premier conservative magazine, are already assessing what McCain did wrong. That sounds like fatalism to me, and those guys are more in the know than I am. Come November 5 we're probably going to be looking at the apotheosis of Jimmy Carter II. God help us all.

So I'm trying to think of something, anything good that might come out of this. Yes, of course, there's the feely-good factor that America elected itself a black president. I don't have a problem with that. I've been telling people all summer and fall that if Shelby Steele or Thomas Sowell were running for president, I wouldn't be able to get my sneakers laced up fast enough to run out and vote for either of them. For me the feely-good factor just doesn't outweigh the fact that the country is about to take a sharp swing to the left, and no good is going to come of it except the feely-good factor. Get ready for a LONG recession, everybody. Because it's government's endless tampering with the economy that makes recessions run long, and Obama and his crowd are going to tamper with the economy until its nipples are raw. (Had FDR and his cigarette-puffing "brain trust" kept their mitts off the economy, the Depression might have been called just that, not the GREAT Depression.)

Racking my brain, however, I have been able to come up with two -- no, maybe three --good things coming out of an Obama presidency.

Clearly, the feely-good thing is one. No longer will anyone be able to get away with calling America a horrible racist country. Not if we have a black president. Of course we've known that all along, haven't we?

Actually, my number-one positive thing is an offshoot of that. You see, I came to the realization long ago that if Obama is inaugurated on Jan. 9, 2009 or whenever it is, on January 10, 2009 Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are both going to be out of a job.

And Jackson, for one, has never had a real job in his life. "He's a REVEREND," my friend Jim insisted.

Like I said, he's never had a real job in his life.

Think about it for a minute. Jackson and Sharpton. What are those two guys, basically? Grievance peddlers, that's what. They traffic in grievance, and their little Johnny One-Note message, which gets screamed from the nearest soapbox every time Don Imus opens his mouth or some lying bimbo hired as a stripper gets the whole Duke University lacrosse team crucified in the biggest kangaroo court the media ever whooped up, is "We're VICTIMS! And as VICTIMS, we demand, demand, demand!" Well, with Barack Hussein Obama paring his fingernails in the Oval Office while he waits for Pelosi and Reid to arrive so the three of them can decide what they're going to nationalize next, (and should they check with Hugo Chavez for his advice first?) Jackson and Sharpton's message is all of a sudden going to sound pretty hollow, isn't it?

And wouldn't that be just too bad?

I can see Jackson now, opening a hot dog stand for the tourists on Constitution Avenue (within view of the White House! YESSS!) and counting on his name to build the clientele: "Jesse's Snacks For Snivelers! Best In The City! Get 'Em While They're Hot!"

As for Sharpton, there's no question in my mind as to the best post-Obama career choice for him. That guy has "pimp" written all over him. Right down to the hair.

Now watch him try to sue me. Sorry, Sharpton, I read up on libel. You're a public figure and that makes you fair game.

Now, as for the other salubrious effect I see coming out of an Obama presidency, well, it's the same something that my very best friend, die-hard liberal Jim Provenza used to try and get me to vote for John Kerry in 2004. "If you vote for Kerry," Jim explained, "Hillary will be out of the picture until 2012. Because the party in power always renominates the incumbent." You know, that was actually a good argument. I didn't vote for Kerry, but if I had, that would have been my reason. I couldn't think of another, that's all.

Now here comes that argument again. Same principle, four years later. If Obama wins, we're rid of the Clintons until 2016. Whether Obama gets re-elected in 2012 or not is a moot point. If he's president, the Democrats will renominate him. It's a given. In 2016 Hillary Clinton will be almost 70. Not quite as old as McCain, but getting up there. Someone is sure to bring up her age as a factor, not to mention the fact that she lost the 2008 nomination to Obama.

My point is, if Obama becomes president, we stand a very good chance of not seeing the Clintons again for another eight years. I have no illusions; they're going to keep coming back until someone drives a wooden stake through both their hearts. But eight years without either of them around sure would be nice.

Oh, what am I saying? I won't know whether they're there or not. I'll be in my room with the door locked, reading Tolstoy.

Don't bother me unless it's important. You know, like telling me it's time for my annual checkup. And that I should be there on time. Next November.

What, Me Worry?

I’ve had nearly two years to think about this, since the current presidential campaign, set to mercifully end in two weeks, began approximately two years ago.

Really, it did, didn’t it? Halfway through the second Bush administration, those who control what we see and hear on TV and in the newspapers became as restive as children on Christmas morning who can’t wait for it to be morning. You remember getting up at 4 a.m. to poke around in the dark under the tree and see what you got? Then your dad thought there might be burglars in the house, came out with a baseball bat and chased you back to bed?

That’s what the media did around mid-2006. They couldn’t wait for it to be Christmas morning, e.g. January, 2009. So they started hawking up Hillary, Barack and the rest of the gang even before the 2006 World Series was over. (For those who have forgotten, the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Detroit Tigers that time, revenge for 1968, when it went the other way.)

This has been the longest presidential campaign anyone has ever seen. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who will be glad to see it over and done with. It feels to me as if Barack Obama has been running for president since I was in college, and I was in college when Jimmy Carter was running for president. You know, back around the time Barack Obama was born.

So I’ve had plenty of time to think about how I’m going to deal with what the media are relentlessly, joyfully, orgasmically telling us is “inevitable:” “President Obama.” Ooh, all I have to do is say the name and I can hear the squeals of joy coming from 1150 15th St. NW. (For those of you who don’t live in Washington, D.C., that’s the address of the Washington Post, which even my friend Holly Inder, a Democrat, admits is so biased that it deserves to be called the official newsletter of the Democratic Party.)

I’m not voting for Obama. And anyone who suggests that it’s because of the color of his skin can wait for me to take my morning dump and then dine heartily on it. Were it not for the fact that he’s a crypto-Marxist whose political dues, if you want to call them that, were paid in the corrupt Chicago wardheeling machine, and who moreover has no problem rubbing elbows with ‘60s bomb-throwers and crazed hatemongering preachers, I probably would vote for him. I’m not voting for Barack Obama because I don’t like his politics. Period. I wish I did. But I don’t.

Furthermore, I expect an Obama presidency to yield little good for America outside of giving bubble-brained white liberals another opportunity to feel good about themselves. And frankly, I don’t care if the Lexus-driving crowd out there in Fairfax County that hasn’t gotten around to scraping the John Kerry stickers off its bumpers feels good about itself or not. I’m concerned about the well-being of the republic as a whole, and I don’t think a reincarnation of Jimmy Carter, the worst president of the 20th century, is what the republic needs, now or ever. And that’s exactly what I see Obama shaping up to be: another Carter. Another dithering feely-goody who smiles and makes speeches while America’s enemies overseas are building nuclear arsenals and sneering defiantly at what they see as the easily-exploitable weaknesses of the Great Satan. Obama thinks he can deal with people like Ahmadinejad by making nice with them? We’ll see what comes of that. I only hope that it isn’t a dirty bomb wiping out downtown Raleigh, NC, followed by the sound of snickering laughter from the shadows. But that’s what I more than half-expect once President Obama has made good on his promise to bring back September 10th and act like the next day never happened, then proceed to approach those whose wettest wet dream is to kill as many Americans as possible by offering them tea and cookies. Good luck.

I spent the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2001 riveted to my TV set with horror, as did millions of others. But when the next September 11 comes around, and Raleigh NC is in ruins, or Des Moines IA or wherever they decide to strike next, I don't want to hear about it. When President Obama has renamed Homeland Security The Peace Department in the name of making us more popular overseas, and made terrorism once again a game in we respond to bombs with subpoenas, don't ring my phone.

I’m serious. I live in Washington. More than likely they will strike again here, not in Raleigh or Des Moines. And when they do, President Obama will be busy signing legislation to raise taxes, not for defending our country from global terrorism, but for more federal giveaway programs and an expanded bureaucracy. It’s going to be 1965 again, which is what all those aging former hippies out there who now teach Comparative Literature and Gender Studies in America’s universities are secretly whispering to themselves. They’ll be young again; it’ll be the summer of love again. Maybe the word “groovy” will come back.

But when President Obama and I both go up in smoke, (I live about four miles from the White House) let my last thinks all be thanks, as W.H. Auden wrote. I don’t want to know. He’ll be busy building socialism while the house burns; I’ll be reading William Blake. On the day Obama is inaugurated, I’m canceling my subscription to the newspaper and all my magazines except Gramophone and IndyCar. I already don’t watch television, so I don’t have to worry about that, but I’m going to change my home page to poetry.com or perhaps catfancier.com. People like Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon are always threatening to leave the country if the Republicans win (and you’ll notice they never do.) I can’t afford to leave the country, and furthermore I live right in the cross-hairs, not in Hollywood where it’s nice and safe.

But for the four years which, I hope, is all it will take for America to get over the idea that life is just one big Oprah Winfrey Show and that if you hear a big kaboom somewhere, all you have to do is hit the “play again?” button and go back to your video screen, I’ll be ensconced with Yeats, Thomas Hardy and perhaps the Venerable Bede, who was writing when the dust of the Roman empire had not yet cleared and it wasn’t safe to go outside.

In one of his earliest songs, written when he was obviously quite young, Paul Simon wrote, “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.” He was thinking of frustrated love, I’m sure. I’m thinking of something much more ominous. I am a rock, I am an island. Knock before you enter. I’ll have the music turned up loud. I always said I wanted Mozart to be the last thing I hear before I depart this earth.

Rabbit Gets Old

I'm in California at the moment, preparing to leave for a family reunion in Reno, NV this weekend. I flew in from Washington, D.C. on Tuesday so I could spend a couple of days with my old pal Jim Provenza and his wife Donna. They're "empty nesters" now, which I guess is the comfortable euphemism we Baby Boomers have finally managed to come up with for "senior citizen."

For reading on the plane and in those quiet pre-dawn moments that east-to-west jet lag always gives me, I have brought along, and am re-reading John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment in his 40-year tetralogy project chronicling the fate of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom which began with Rabbit, Run in 1960, continued through three more full-length novels published between 1971 and 1990, and then rounded off with a fifth installment, the epiloque-ish Rabbit Remembered (2000).

I've read the entire Rabbit series, some of them more than once. But I have an especially personal relationship with this third installment, published in 1981. I was enjoying a brief tenure in the fall of that year as Sunday book reviewer for the Vacaville Reporter, a newspaper in Solano County, California on which I was a staff writer in those days, covering education mostly. Book reviewing was a side thing I did primarily for kicks. But the Sunday features editor was a good friend and she was glad to have my contributions. I reviewed Rabbit Is Rich
when it was first published. I also turned 26 that fall, the exact same age as Harry Angstrom in the first installment of the series, Rabbit, Run.

That review no longer exists. I lost almost all of my book review clippings in the many moves I've made since then. But it doesn't matter; at 26 I remember being most impressed with Updike's chops, as most of his readers are. He was one of the most dazzlingly gifted writers of his generation. But I had a few critical things to say about this novel even when I was 26, and now that the novel is a year older than I was when I first read it, I have a few more. By the way, at the time I reviewed Rabbit Is Rich for the Reporter I was sinking into a clinical depression, one strand of which was that very fact that I had just turned 26. As Truman Capote once said, "Here I am 26, and I wanted always to be 25." Suddenly turning 26 gave me a nauseating sensation of no longer being in my early twenties. I felt encroaching old age rapping on the door, or at least lurking over the next hill. Now I'm re-reading the novel, and I'm exactly twice the age I was when I read it for the first time.

I like to think that I'm aging well, (I recently took up oil painting with a vengeance) but I have to say that this novel has not. It has some features that seem built-in to sabotage any eventual status as a classic, although who knows? Perhaps the tetralogy as a whole will gain "classic" status among the 4,500 people in America who will still be reading novels in 2060 as a cultural artifact of the century before. But I suspect that Rabbit Is Rich will not stand on its own for very many years.

For one thing, Updike was a member of that generation of American writers who suddenly found themselves liberated in the early 1960s by such events as the lifting of the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to write just as frankly and candidly about sex as they wanted, using any and all words they wanted. "Fuck" no longer had to be rendered as F***. Understandably, they swam like dolphins in this new freedom, and the watchword of the 1960s in the literary game was sexual freedom. No holds were barred.

By the time Erica Jong published Fear of Flying in 1974, it had been a full five years since Philip Roth had created what might be called bookchat's last sexual scandal when he published the riotous Portnoy's Complaint, an ode to sexual neurosis with a steady ground bass of masturbation. By then sex had just about shot its wad as far as the potential to shock anybody. Fear of Flying's novelty lay in being the first Tropic of Cancer clone written by a woman. When I was paring down the manuscript of my own novel Tower-102 in 1994, assisted by Al Lefcowiz of the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, he was particularly insistent that I carve out nearly all descriptions of characters having sex. "We needed this in 1960," Al said. "We don't really need it anymore."

In 1981 that memo had apparently not reached Updike's desk. Harry Angstrom in the novel, who carries the nickname "Rabbit" from his days as a high school basketball star, is by the time this story opens a 48 year-old man, a Toyota dealer with a troubled past, a drunken wife and a more-than-a-little annoying, whiny, nearly grown-up son. But Harry at 48 is as wildly obsessed with sex as any American teenager. This betrays his origins as a 1960s character. By 1981 he seems somehow out of his time. I failed to note that in my 1981 review; we were still too close in time to the novel's origins (the story takes place in 1979) and I didn't quite have the perspective to notice that, although I do remember writing that the author seemed fixated upon the world's genitalia, a quality which, as I pointed out, Updike shared with his contemporary Norman Mailer. The wife-swapping episode in the Caribbean near the end of the novel is so pre-AIDS as to be quaint beyond quaint in 2008.

But the sex-rich sauce that's ladled over Angstrom's tale is only one of the book's flaws. From the long view, it seems to me a little too obvious that by the time Updike wrote Rabbit Is Rich, he was rich enough himself to be able to afford a team of researchers to do his legwork for him. And it shows like a too-loud necktie. The novel wears its research on its sleeve: the snappy to-and-fro between Harry and his employee Charlie Stavros, who handles the used cars while Harry sells the new ones, is just a bit too facile, as if Updike were showing off his recently-gained insider's knowledge of how a Toyota dealership is run.

Also, in each entry of the Rabbit series, Updike becomes increasingly hellbent upon creating a realistic stage for his story and giving the novel contemporary verisimilitude. By the third volume he's throwing around cultural trivia like Jackson Pollock throwing paint. Does anyone really care anymore, outside of Rams and Steelers fans, who won the 1980 Super Bowl game? And his characters spend endless amounts of restaurant and dinner-table chitchat pontificating about what's wrong with the world in 1979. It's like you're constantly being preached at, and the theme of the sermon comes from today's headlines. Only they're not today's headlines, they're the headlines of the late Carter Administration. If Updike had used a conventional first-or-third person narrative in the past tense, this might have been a formula for a period classic as surefire as The Great Gatsby. But this novel, and in fact the entire Rabbit series, is written entirely in the present tense. That's a fine device for making the reader feel that he or she is right in the middle of an unfolding story -- it really keeps the action moving along. The problem arises when Updike's characters begin talking in the present tense about things like Jimmy Carter, standing in gas lines, Three Mile Island and how the Japanese automakers are kicking Detroit's butt. 1979 was a long time ago, and while all of this gave the novel a bracingly "now" feel in 1981, today it gives it the look of a postcard turning yellow.

Imagine if Scott Fitzgerald had written The Great Gatsby in the present tense. I wince to think of it: "Gatsby gets up from his chair and walks across the yard near the pool. He's thinking that this Prohibition business really brings out the contours in the American soul. But what the hell, he decides. It's making him rich, and as for the contours in the American soul, well, someone's always doing something to bring those out, aren't they? Like this new dance everyone's doing, the Charleston. Gatsby actually thinks people dancing the Charleston look fairly idiotic, but then reminds himself that the country is living through times that might be thought idiotic by the same standards with which he's judging the Charleston, what with the flagpole-sitting and raccoon coats and all that. The world is always ending, but new people keep showing up too dumb to know it and thinking that the fun's just getting started."

I doubt whether Gatsby would have become a classic written like that. Rather, it would have become an instant relic-of-an-era, noteworthy today only as a distant mirror on the 1920s. The kind of a book that writers like Updike would be re-assessing 60 years later in think pieces written for The New Yorker and deciding that that it was better than they originally thought when they read it in college for History 432, a survey of the American cultural and social scene between the two world wars.

If I'm still around in another 10 years, I'll be back to see how the next volume, Rabbit At Rest, is holding up. I'm not real optimistic, though. From my last re-reading I remember that he mentions things like Garry Larson's Far Side cartoons and the reruns on the Nickelodeon network, and both of those things seem awfully "'90s" even now.