Interface (55 page)

Plato,
Republic

32

On a gentle summer evening back during the Eisenhower
administration, Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane had once watched his
uncle Pervis beat a man up with a sharpened motorcycle chain. It
happened outside of a very inexpensive and dangerous bar in north
central California that catered to agricultural laborers. Okies.

Nimrod's grandfather, James McLane, had obtained a piece of
land in Oklahoma during one of the land runs in the late 1800s. He
commenced to work that soil literally within the hour, scooping
out shallow graves along the Cimarron River in which to place the
bodies of the previous occupants, who had arrived shortly before he
had, with faster horses but not quite so many guns.

A few decades later, that stream dried up and all the topsoil blew away to Arkansas. James had long since died, and so had his eldest
son Marvis, who had gotten into an altercation with a piece of
newfangled farm machinery and spectacularly lost. James's
surviving sons, Elvis and Purvis, abandoned the land and went to
California, following a rumor of jobs. Elvis married another Okie
- actually, an Arkie - named Sheila White, and they started to have
kids. Purvis joined the Navy and came back from World War II full
of lies, liquor, and shrapnel. Half of him was covered with tattoos and the other half with burn scars. For the next few years of life,
until he discovered some exciting new career openings in the
benzedrine trade, he shuttled back and forth between short-term,
low-paying jobs on the waterfront in Oakland and in the vegetable
fields of the Valley. Purvis later obtained a sinecure of sorts, as a
founding member of the Hell's Angels.

Elvis and Sheila, by contrast, were stay-at-home types. Elvis
stuck to the one thing he had talent for, which was stoop labor, and
over the years, more because of his reliability than because of brains
or skill, he managed to work his way up into a position as foreman
for Karl Fort Enterprises, Inc.

Karl Fort was also an Okie who had gone west in the 1930s, but
he was different: he was from Tulsa, and he had gone west with
money in his pocket and connections in Washington. His money bought him land. The money went a long way because at the time
he bought the land, it was worthless. His connections in
Washington knew that the federal government was soon to estab
lish huge irrigation projects in the area. As soon as water reached
Karl Fort's land, it became worth a hundred times what he had paid for it. Fort established agricultural Gulags where his fellow Okies
labored under the watchdog gaze of Fort guards, occasionally
getting enough of a paycheck to keep them and their families alive.

Elvis McLane was not really cut out for management. He didn't
understand that when you made the cut and moved up to the next
rank, you had to stop drinking next to the people you were giving
orders to, hiring, and firing. His brother Purvis sat him down and
talked to him about it. Purvis had been in the military and
understood the concept of fraternization and why it was a bad idea.
But he never really got through to Elvis, who (it was rumored) had,
while still in the womb, lost a wrestling match with his own
umbilical cord.

It was only a matter of time before Elvis went into a bar and ran
into someone he had fired, yelled at, or otherwise humiliated, and
trouble broke out. Actually, it happened several times, but the most
memorable case involved a sullen, dangerous broccoli picker
named Odessa Jones. He was named after the city in Texas where
he had been abandoned by his mother.

Nimrod McLane, who among other distinctions had a Ph.D. in
philosophy from Notre Dame, despised liberal hand-wringing
types who were always whining about America being a violent society. These people had read too many poorly written accounts
of bar fights that turned grisly.

The standard newspaper account of a grisly bar fight contained a
deeply buried assumption: that people participated in bar fights because they were stupid. Some minor slight, such as looking at
another man's girl or jumping the line for the pool table, would
degenerate into meaningless, pointless violence. Liberals would
read about it in the paper the next morning, wring their hands, and
advocate better education and gun control.

Nimrod McLane had seen a lot of these altercations as a child.
After his voice changed he participated in a few. He had a pretty
clean understanding of how bar fights started and why they turned
ugly. Americans participated in bar fights for exactly the same
reason they had joined, with such gusto, in the Civil War: because
they had values and considered violence and mayhem a small price
to pay.

Odessa Jones was a case in point. He was a proud, hard-working
man who had been fired by Elvis McLane because of what
amounted to a personality conflict. So when he walked up to Elvis
in that bar and went upside his head with a glass beer pitcher, he
wasn't doing it because he was a stupid low-class drunk. He was
doing it because his honor had been violated and because honor
was more important to him than temporal, earthly considerations, such as keeping his front teeth or staying out of jail. Odessa Jones
probably had ancestors who, like him, were rootless white trash, but who had picked up rifles and gone North to fight the Yankees
anyway, not because they believed in slavery but because they were
incensed that the Northerners refused to stay at home and mind
their own business. They were willing to have their legs shot off in
Pennsylvania because principle, to them, was more important than flesh. This was what made America such an ethereal society.

Sprawling out on the floor of the bar, Elvis's eyes fell on the
underside of a nearby table, and he realized that he could probably rip one of its legs off and use it as a cudgel. Which is what he did;
but the much larger Odessa Jones beat the shit out of him anyway,
or at least continued to until both of them were thrown out of the
bar, and he ran afoul of Purvis McLane and his motorcycle chain.
Years after this event, when Nimrod was pursuing his
philosophy degree, he spent a lot of time contemplating the
following question: if Odessa Jones was fighting for a principle, and
Elvis McLane was fighting out of a defensive reflex, then what was
Purvis McLane up to?

Purvis McLane was engaged in long-range strategic thinking. He
acted calmly and dispassionately. Uncle Purvis, Navy veteran and
cofounder of the Hell's Angels, simply did what was needed to look
out for the overall welfare of his family unit. Nimrod McLane had
come to believe that all persons could be divided into Odessas, Elvises, and Purvises, and he considered himself a Purvis all the
way.

Representative Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane values. He went to
church, he studied the Bible, he read Aquinas. All his life he had
despised materialistic people who could only think about money. He had made himself famous and got on the cover of
Time
by becoming The Conservative Who Hated Yuppies. Which was why
he wanted to become president: so he could clean up America.

Tip McLane watched his chief rival for the nomination, Norman
Fowler, Jr., sign his own political death warrant, with a flourish, at
precisely twelve o'clock noon on the day after Memorial Day. Norman Fowler, like Dan Quayle and a few others, belonged to a
fourth category of humanity: he was a Marvis.

McLane was late for a luncheon in Bel Air and had stopped by his hotel suite in downtown L.A. for a quick change of clothing
when he happened to notice the digital clock turning over 12:00.
Reflexively he turned on his television, which was already set to
one of the local network affiliates, and was treated to the never-to-
be forgotten sight of Norman Fowler, Jr., at Disneyland, shaking hands with Goofy.

"My god," said his media consultant Ezekiel ("Zeke") Zorn.

"Is this something from
Saturday Night Live?"
asked his campaign
manager Marcus Drasher.

"He's a dead man," was the only comment Tip McLane would
make.

"Jesus, the man is worth billions," Drasher said. "He can afford
to hire the best. And what do they do? They sent him to
Disneyland. And they let Goofy shake his hand!"

"This has got to be Cy Ogle's work. Ogle has a Goofy fetish. It's a known fact," Zorn said suspiciously.

"Are you crazy?" Tip McLane said.

Zeke Zorn was a high-intensity sort of guy. He was an Elvis -
he reacted but he didn't think much. For all this, he has a basically sunny, open, California personality, and it was unusual to hear this
kind of paranoia coming from him. This was the third time he had
brought up the subject of Cy Ogle, apropos of nothing, in the last
week.

"I would bet you money," Zorn said glaring suspiciously at the
screen, "that the man in that Goofy suit is none other than Cy Ogle
himself. It's just what he would do."

"You're off your rocker," McLane said.

"Well, let me just say that if this campaign ever went to
Disneyland - which it never would - I would have half a dozen
snipers following you around with orders to blow Goofy's head off if he came within half a mile. Because this is just the kind of thing
that Ogle would cook up."

Drasher watched this startling performance and then burst out
laughing. Drasher was a Purvis. Like McLane, he had grown up
poor and become a highly educated conservative. He was black and
had grown up in Mississippi; but he and McLane had much more
in common with each other than they did with Zeke Zorn, a man who dressed so finely that they did not even know the names of
many of the articles of clothing that Zorn wore every single day.

"You're serious," Drasher said in wonderment. "You think that
Cy Ogle sent Goofy in to do a political hit on Fowler."

"It's just too perfect," Zorn said. "When these perfect things happen, you have to look for a guiding hand somewhere. It's like
Dukakis and the tank helmet in '88. I suppose you think
that just
happened."
Zorn said these words almost contemptuously.
"Someone
noticed that Dukakis looked like Snoopy.
Someone
put the Snoopy
helmet in his hands. Mark my words - somewhere out there is a
cartoon character with your name on it, Nimrod McLane."

"Yosemite Sam," Drasher suggested.

"Sounds paranoid to me," McLane said.

"Hey," Zorn said, throwing up his hands, "once Norman
Fowler has shaken hands with Goofy, no force in the universe can stop us. But" - he shook his finger accusingly at the television, "once the presidential campaign gets underway, this is the kind of
thing that we have to look out for."

"Let's not get cocky," Drasher said. "There is still one force in
the universe that can keep us from the nomination."

"What's that?" McLane said.

Drasher suddenly raised his voice into a polished baritone with a
white southern accent, rendering a flawless imitation of the
Reverend Doctor William Joseph Sweigel. "The power of
JEEEEE - zuss!" he said.

"Good point," Zorn said. "Let's get our butts over to that damn picnic."

33

"I was spreading some of this fancy gourmet mustard on my
frankfurter just now," the Reverend Doctor Billy Joe Sweigel said,
holding a jar of the savory condiment up so that all the people at
the luncheon could see it, "when I noticed that there were some
small flecks of material mixed in with the mustard. Now, in the part
of the country where I come from, mustard is bright yellow and
perfectly smooth and homogeneous in its composition. But since I
have come to California
..."
Having telegraphed the joke, he
paused briefly to allow laughter to build, and then subside. Then,
as only a politician could, he went ahead and delivered it anyway. "Let's just say that I have spread some things on my frankfurters
here in Southern California that were labeled as mustard, but in my
part of the country probably would have been confiscated and
analyzed in a police laboratory." The crowd laughed dutifully, for
the second time, but Rev. Sweigel would not let go of the theme.
"I engaged one of my staff in a lighthearted conversation about this
mustard, or MOO-tard as it says on the jar, and he informed me
that these flecks of material that I had alluded to were, in fact, actual
seeds of the mustard plant. Mustard seeds."