(Not That You Asked) (30 page)

DePetro spent the rest of the week begging me to come back on the show. His appeals were deeply fraudulent and invariably tender. Listening to him plead filled me with reluctant pity. Is there nothing sadder than a wannabe demagogue, trapped in the outer circles of the inferno, dreaming of a way in?

(Fun fact: A few months after my appearance, DePetro referred to Massachusetts’ Green Party gubernatorial candidate as a “fat lesbian” and got the shitcan.)

Canto XI

In Toronto, I turned off my cell phone and slept for six hours. Then I did that stupid thing I so often do: I checked my e-mail.

I had 359 new messages, among them these:

You are the enemy of my country just as much as bin Laden and Zarqawi. I see no difference. Good. Now fucking drop dead.

Fuck you pansy asshole

It is people like you who get our soldiers killed in Iraq.

I can tell you really don’t like darkies, do you….

I’m a Roman Catholic too and I suport Condoleca Rice as a brave and magnificent princess who is trying to save the world…

Your family should probably disown you.

I love to hear you liberals

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllll like pigs.

Canto XII

Well.

How is everybody doing? Anybody need a drink?

I probably should have mentioned that the trip down was going to be a little rough in spots. Always is. There’s any number of circles where we could put these fellas; the Seventh Circle, which houses the violent, makes the most sense. But there’s also a certain touching purity to these notes. They are a distillate of the modern conservative movement, which, contrary to popular myth, is not a political philosophy at all but an emotional appeal to the primal negative feeling states of childhood: rage, grievance, fear.

And if you listen to the leading orators of the Hateocracy—guilty as charged—what you hear is not the articulation of coherent policy aims, but an almost poignant plea for someone to wash their mouths out with soap. In a mature democracy this would surely happen. But we are living in America, so
Time
magazine writes fawning cover stories about them.

If you step back for a moment, you will see what hard work these men and women must do! It is quite a remarkable psychological feat to experience a visceral sense of your own victimization while the party you support holds absolute power. It’s that something special, frankly, that shoves representational democracy toward fascism.

So how do they do it?

They do it by tapping into their one inexhaustible resource: self-loathing. They take all the ugliness slithering around inside themselves and project it onto those least likely to fight back. I hope this helps explain why Bill O’Reilly (a sexual predator) goes after sexual predators, or why Rush Limbaugh (America’s alpha demagogue) is forever accusing Democrats of demagoguery, or why Ann Coulter (a fame succubus) accuses the 9/11 widows of being publicity whores.

You are a racist. You kill our boys in Iraq. You should be disowned. You would be a lot of fun to rape.
Where do these intimate notions come from is what I’m asking, if not from within the men who wrote them into the world? And what else do they reveal if not a map of their own unbearable fears about themselves?

Canto XIII

By Friday evening, I was receiving an e-mail every ninety seconds. Things had gone
viral.
Some of this was my own fault, in that I provide an e-mail address on my website. (In my defense, I am a writer of short stories. On a good day, I receive thirty e-mails, half of which inquire whether I would like a larger, more powerful penis.) Still, I couldn’t quite figure out how so many people were finding my website.

Enter Michelle Malkin.

For those not familiar with her work, Malkin—an American of Filipino descent—recently wrote a book lauding the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Her eerie, squidlike beauty and radiant self-hatred have won her an occasional spot in the Fox News rotation. Malkin is also a ringleader of some import within the cyber-Hateocracy. She was the first to post my letter on her blog, and to provide her readers a helpful link to my website.

The site Free Republic! went a step further, hosting a reader “forum” about my letter that included the following comment:

Steve Almond’s email address
[email protected]

A little further down came this:

This guys
[sic]
really an idiot. His address and phone number are published.

This is a good start!!!!

Canto XIV

I am sorry to report that I was neither bound nor gagged by this cyber posse, though I did receive a few harassing phone calls. The most interesting came from a gentleman who identified himself as a newspaper reporter from Villanova University.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“You voted for John Kerry, didn’t you?”

“Which newspaper are you calling from again?” I said.

“Actually, I work at Villanova.”

“As a reporter?”

“As a professor.”

“So you’re not a reporter?” I said.

Suddenly, he began shouting. “You’re so pathetic! You fucking pathetic liar!”

“Wait a second,” I said quietly. “Why are you shouting at me?”

There was a brief silence.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. I apologize. That wasn’t cool.”

It was a weirdly poignant moment. I could hear the struggle in this guy’s voice. He was trying so hard to swallow the venom that had prompted his call, trying to assimilate the notion that I was an actual human being—really, I think it stunned him—and that dialing Information and finding my number and actually calling me up and cursing at me, that all this was really, maybe, in a sense…a kind of sickness?

“What’s going on here?” I said.

He took a deep breath, as if to gather himself. Then he was roaring again. “Nobody listens to a word you say! That’s why, okay. You know that, asshole? Nobody gives a shit!”

Canto XV

As it turned out, though, people did give a shit. People like John Gibson. Gibson has said many things in his career as a pundit. He has said that whites should have more babies, to prevent Hispanics from becoming a majority in this country. He has called Third World nations “little more than spots on the map.” Perhaps the best way to capture the depth of Gibson’s moral vision is to cite his 2005 book,
The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

Dante would have stashed the guy in the circle reserved for those who sow discord. I agreed to appear on his show for one simple reason: I had just murdered nineteen of Santa’s elves in cold blood and I wanted to come clean.

Gibson began the interview by focusing on the figure he considers central to the entire Iraq War debacle: Bill Clinton. I pointed out that Clinton had actually left office six years earlier. Gibson seemed briefly disoriented. He shifted the discussion to an article in
Foreign
Affairs Quarterly,
which he claimed proved Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When I insisted on returning to the subject of Condoleezza Rice, Gibson broke into a lovely, full-throated monkey screech:

Duty compels me to note two things:

1. Gibson’s mic was at least twice as loud as mine.

2. Gibson was lying his fucking head off.

I know this because I eventually read the article he was citing, something he apparently didn’t do. “Saddam,” the authors note, “found it impossible to abandon the
illusion
of having WMD, especially since it played so well in the Arab world.” (Italics mine; implied screeching Gibson’s.)

Eventually, Gibson returned to his default setting—attack Bill Clinton—before proceeding to full meltdown.

Yes, John. I failed the Caucasians.

Canto XVI

It will have occurred to you by now to wonder whether I was contacted by any members of that liberal media about which we hear so much. Yes. Exactly one. This resulted in an appearance on a radio show based in Texas, which began unremarkably until a man called in and began to tell me about the International Jesuit Conspiracy, which began in 1371 and involved the covert collaboration of the Vatican and something called, I believe, the Brotherhood of the Orthodox.

As a Jew, of course, I’m always comforted to hear about nefarious conspiracies that implicate people who are not Jews. Still. Still it was sad to realize that the Hateocracy had me all to themselves. This probably qualifies me as a conspiracy nut, but I really had harbored the hope that some brave media outlet might use my resignation as a pretext to examine the veracity of my essential claim (Condi = liar).

Not so much.

I did receive lots of kind notes from individuals. People wanted to tell me what a brave guy I was, what a patriot, and so on. These notes were all well-intentioned and thoroughly disheartening. I hadn’t done anything heroic. I had quit my part-time job. It was a testament to the political lethargy of this country that such a pissant gesture would excite adulation in the first place. In the end, these amens carried no political consequence. They were yet another example of liberals congratulating one another for their noble values rather than confronting the bullies.

Canto XVII

I should mention that my mood was also dampened over that long weekend by the circumstances surrounding my reading. I had come to Toronto to serve as the keynote speaker at something called the Sweets Expo. I assumed this would involve a small auditorium full of Canadian candyfreaks.

But the Expo was being held in a convention center filled with failing confectioners, children in a state of hyperglycemic frenzy, and suicidal parents. The man serving as MC for the Expo was named Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul was dressed in a blazer that resembled snakeskin. He wore many large rings and spoke in an amplified baritone, like Liberace reprogrammed as a boxing announcer.

“It’s
faaaaabulous
to have you here,” Jean-Paul boomed. “Now what do you do?”

“I’m an author.”

“An author!” Jean-Paul offered me a smile whiter than I had thought chromatically possible.
“Terrifique!”

“Where exactly is the reading venue?” I said.

We were standing beside a vast stage in the middle of the Expo, upon which children were sullenly devouring bowls of pudding in the hopes of winning more pudding. “What do you mean?” Jean-Paul said.

“Like, the actual place I’ll be reading.”

“All the acts are on the main stage!”

I gazed at the stage again. It was the size of a small soccer pitch.

“You’re on at four
P.M.
!” Jean-Paul sang out. “Right after the fashion show!”

The fashion show featured an array of anorexic models dressed up to look like Tootsie Rolls and jelly beans, if you can picture such products endowed with cleavage. I had the pleasure of waiting around backstage with the models and eavesdropping on them as they discussed, in exuberant detail, the precise method by which they planned to murder their agents. Then the music stopped and Jean-Paul thanked the ladies and introduced me and I took the portable mic and made my long walk to the center of the stage with my book.