The Voice of Treason

A little excursion…

Writing by treason on Sunday, 25 of September , 2005 at 9:25 pm

I took the weekend off from Rita to watch C-SPAN’s coverage of the book festival and an assortment of rallies, both for and against the war. The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition was there on the Mall with their “Rally Against The War In Iraq.” Well, that was fun.

It’s not that I enjoy bad poetry or hearing odd-looking people scream at me, but I do like giving the other side the opportunity to make asses of themselves. Again, “you people” have a microphone; why do you continue to scream?

All sorts of socialist/communist/anarchist/environmentalist/feminist groups took time out of their busy schedules to saunter on down to the Mall to display signs and bad hairdos. If you thought tie-dye was dead, you were wrong. It lives. And it’s still atrocious.

I like to tune in to these rallies because C-SPAN is kind enough to air them and it gives me a chance to catch up on pop culture. What are the bohemians wearing these days? What are the catch phrases? Who do they hate? What are prescription frames looking like? These are things I need to check on occasion since I no longer spend time near a university campus or at an artsy non-profit.

It’s Woodstock without the music and mud. I listened to enough bad poetry to make me want to write some of my own. I had to hear how the neocons were destroying the planet. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice were all very bad people who hated everyone else - to the point of wanting them dead (especially if they were poor, black, female, Muslim, or Arab-looking). Bad, evil, greedy, warmongering people. Racists, fascists, sexists, religious fanatics, and stupid, too.

Yeah, whatever. Time to go to the other side of the Mall and look at the book people. A calmer, quieter group for the most part. Andrew Carroll (Behind The Lines) was there talking about The Legacy Project and warletters.com. His words were compelling — both funny and heartbreaking. And Tom Wolfe was pulled aside for an interview on the grass. Another little excursion with Tom. He’s just a hoot. Then John Irving staggered by and was reeled in for an interview, too. He and Updike aren’t what you call fans of Mr.Wolfe and are quick to criticize him, yet they are even quicker to complain when they are criticized. So sensitive, these East Coast intellectual types.

Irving used to look healthier. Athletic even. Now he looks like such a reprobate. He was kind enough to offer his opinion on current events, the war, and the administration, but he was also kind enough to not scream. In his condition, he might have fallen over.

I must digress. For years, everyone told me I had to read Garp. Please, I told them, don’t make me read this. I can’t read popular fiction. The same way I can’t run out and see the big new film. It’s not that I think our culture has bad taste and would steer me wrong, it’s just that our culture has bad taste and would steer me wrong. I had the book on the shelf where it collected dust and animal hair for a long, long time. People would see me and run up to ask: “Have you read Garp yet? You’ll love it. You write just like him - really you do!” I’d explain that as much as I’d been meaning to get around to it, life events - deaths, illnesses, catastrophes, finals — were keeping me from it. Then it happened. During the summer before my final year of school, when I would be finishing up my degree and starting my student teaching, I took a job. There was a sixteen year-old girl working with us. We assumed she had very bad acne and we were too polite to discuss it, so we had absolutely no clue — until the job and summer ended and we had all been infected — that what she had was chicken pox.

What a treat. I had just said to myself a few weeks before how happy I was that I seemed to be past acne. My skin was looking good; was this adulthood? Someone must have heard me and thought I needed to be punished. I watched The Lion In Winter on PBS and fell asleep on the couch. I woke up not knowing where I was or what time it was. I staggered off to bed. In the morning I woke up from a weird dream, but was still in a dream state. Foggy, I remembered in the dream that I was searching for something. I rolled out of bed and struggled to my feet. I had to find it. What? I don’t know, but I have to find it. I started to walk but fell against a bookcase. Odd. Why am I dizzy? I need to wake up. I need to find…whatever it is I’m looking for. I took a few more steps and fell against the dresser. I looked up and saw my reflection in the mirror. Something didn’t look right. That’s it! I can’t see - it’s a blur. I must be looking for my glasses. Where are my glasses? Oh, here.

Then I looked in the mirror again. Something was very wrong. It looked like I had small pox. I looked at my hands, arms, legs. I was covered with these reddish pink blisters. They were in my ears, between my toes, on the bottoms of my feet, in my mouth, up my nose, and…well, everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

And I was alone in my little college town. Luckily a friend was still around, so I called her and she brought groceries to my door. She explained that she had to leave them on the porch because she couldn’t bear to look at me.

Trapped in the house. With The World According To Garp. What the hell, I told myself. I’ve got pox on top of pox and they’re starting to ooze green. Can this book be any worse?

It must have been the fever, but I admit that I sort of enjoyed the book. I’d even collected some of Irving’s other books - all quite awful really - and I went home to visit. I offered them to my sister. It was an odd time. I’d been buying a lot of paperbacks and discovered that there were issues with the printing. Pages were out of order. Some were blank. Some were missing entirely. I started to check each page of each book before I bought it. But I’d bought the Irving books before I’d discovered the quality control issues. I think they were Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, and The 158-Pound Marriage. Anyway, when I saw my sister she said:

“I hate you for making me read this book.”

I apologized about the missing pages and errors in the others.

“No apologies necessary. It was an improvement.”

I think I tolerated Irving’s books because I, too, have a special fondness for bears. But back to the book fest.

David Brooks appeared and spoke for a bit. Very amusing, very thoughtful. But a blustery anti-Semite (must have wandered over from the other side of the Mall) opened the Q & A with an attack. Something about blah, blah neocon blah Israel blah Iraq, blah blah Jewish cabal blah blah blah. He was booed by a mixed crowd. And that’s what’s good about books. Both sides can read and appreciate them. Even the Liberals in the crowd wanted to hear what Brooks had to say - not what the anti-Semite was spewing.

Brooks continued. “Yes, I am Jewish.” But he made several interesting points. One being that this period - 2000 to 2005 and perhaps beyond — will go down in history as “not a happy time.” I get that feeling, too. It will, no doubt, be a poor reflection on Bush - and it certainly isn’t his fault (he, like his father, just has awful timing) - but it will be, as Brooks says, “a period of bloodshed.”

Brooks went on to speak on many topics, but he got around to talking about college students. How Liberal Arts majors operate in paragraphs and become Democrats, while others choose majors that operate in numbers. Those people get jobs and become Republicans. He also noted that college educated people are more divided and ideological. High school grads are more open to both sides and might even vote for someone from the opposite party.

T accuses me of that. That I am rigidly one-sided and will only vote for one party. Not so. I would vote for a candidate of another party if I believed that person was better qualified. Maybe. I tell T he’s a Libertarian, but he refuses to be labeled. He hates the extremes and can’t understand why people can’t settle somewhere in the middle.

Here’s where Brooks makes an interesting point. The polls indicate that people might be moving away from the Right, Bush, and the Republicans, but they’re not moving to the Left and the Democrats. They’re hovering somewhere in the middle.

But speaking of Libertarians, Brian Lamb had interviewed Milton Friedman back in October 1994 and C-SPAN re-aired it. Lamb asked him what he’d majored in. Echoing Brooks, he said, “I wanted an income.” It’s how he ended up majoring in numbers: Mathematics and Economics. Imagine - he graduated from high school in 1928, attended Rutgers when it was a private institution, and accepted a scholarship in Economics at the University of Chicago during the Depression. It’s where he met Rose - the only girl in class.

His immigrant family had trouble finding success in business. “We were not poor. We weren’t at a very high income level, but we were NOT poor.” (By today’s standards, his family might have been destitute, but he was not going to be stuck in that mindset. NOT poor.)

But he admitted to Lamb that he was old. How old, Lamb asked. Friedman said 82 and I almost toppled. Still brilliant, articulate, quick-witted. But he felt he was slow to recover from the unexpected side effects of recent back surgery and he just wasn’t feeling all that well. Then Lamb referred to him as a conservative.

“I’m NOT a conservative! We (F.A. Hayek and Friedman) are liberals - in the true sense of the term, and not in the distorted, current sense of the term. People who are liberal with other people’s money.”

“Then what are you?,” Lamb asked.

“I’m a libertarian with a small l, and a Republican with a capital R.”

“What’s Bill Clinton?”

“Oh, he’s a Socialist!”

Very amusing stuff, but the Friedman line is a famous one - he just neglected to repeat the whole thing. What he’s been quoted as saying is:

“I am a libertarian with a small l and a Republican with a capital R. And I am a Republican with a capital R on grounds of expediency, not on principle.”

And doesn’t THAT describe a lot of us!

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