(Not That You Asked) (31 page)

There is a moment in the life of every author when you realize with perfect clarity the depth of your irrelevance. Mine had arrived. Canadians of all ages surrounded me, staring up, waiting for me to do something,
anything,
that might be worth watching. I had been listed on the program as a
world-famous candyfreak,
and it now dawned on me that the crowd expected some significant anthropological event. Perhaps I could pass a Pixie Stick in one earhole and out the other. Or I could defecate in the precise shape of a Hershey’s kiss. Instead, I stood under the bank of lights, absorbing disappointment. I tried to figure out how to hold my book with one hand, which led to my fumbling the mic. It hit the stage with a thunderous crack. A child started wailing, then another. I began to read. The crowd looked bewildered. People began to turn away. I pondered whether I might hire an agent, for the express purpose of murdering him. Left with no respectable exit strategy, I dropped the book and launched into this bizarre borscht belt routine that involved dragging children onstage and asking them candy trivia questions. Was it appropriate to call this a keynote speech? Probably not.

“
Fantastique!
” Jean-Paul said afterward. “They loved you!” Then he snatched the mic and summoned the salsa dancers to the stage.

Canto XVIII

I returned to Boston on Monday, May 15, exactly a week before Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver her commencement speech. The phone was still ringing nonstop.

“Is this Steve Almond?” one young woman shouted. “The former BC professor guy?”

“Yes,” I said. “Who is this?”

“Oh. This is Brandie Jefferson. Of the Associated Press.”

Brandie was not of that traditional school of journalism that favors simply asking questions. No, her own thoughts were an important part of the interview. She asked me questions like “What’s the point of quitting your job? I mean, isn’t that a little
extreme
? When I was in college, kids were always protesting something or other and it never did any good.”

I spent a long time on the phone with Brandie. I was fascinated by the idea that the Associated Press would hire someone so unprofessional. I also knew that most newspapers would be pulling her story off the wire. Our conversation thus took on an aspect of supplication. I felt like a mad courtier pleading my case to an idiot princess.

I’m not calling Brandie Jefferson an idiot. Really, she’s just a typical American young person, happily cocooned within her own radical naïveté. The notion that her leaders might lie to her, that they might be making apocalyptic decisions on her behalf—that was all so
…sixties.
Politics was really just a second-rate Reality TV show to her, with ugly actors who never kiss. Her world, the one she actually lived in, was like that of my former students: a swirl of flashing screens and frantic buy messages, all of them vivid, smiling, and unbearably lonely.

For the record, Brandie’s account ran in more than fifty newspapers. It contained a single quote from me, which had been carefully stripped of its context so as to neutralize any disturbing side effects: “I think Americans have lost touch with the idea of sacrifice.”

Canto XIX

It was my conversation with Margery Egan that convinced me that I was at last drawing close to the heart of the Hateocracy.

Egan has built a nifty little career out of bland populist indignation. She has a column in the
Herald,
Boston’s official tabloid of the Angry White Male, and a radio show on the lesser of our two hate-talk stations. In fact, Egan had badmouthed me on her show the day my letter ran in the
Globe.
When she called me a few days later, I figured she wanted to invite me to appear on her show. But no. Instead, she had a vital question for her next column. Are you ready for her vital question?

“How much did you earn as an adjunct at Boston College?”

Egan had devoted her considerable investigative skills to this question already. “I was told you were paid four thousand dollars per class,” she said gravely. “Can you confirm that?”

I am hoping that all of you will sleep just a little safer tonight in the knowledge that there are intrepid journalists out there like Margery Egan who stand prepared to defend your freedom by asking the tough questions, not just of this nation’s rulers—in fact, not of them at all—but of adjunct professors who quit their jobs without publicly disclosing their salaries. But being the insouciant democracy wrecker I most assuredly am, I refused to confirm or deny.

Not to worry. Egan had a second question ready: “How did your letter of resignation wind up in the
Globe
?”

“It was an
open
letter,” I said.

“Right,” she said, trying her best to sound confused. “But it’s addressed to Father Leahy.”

I was so stunned by Egan’s playing dumb that I could say nothing for a few moments. “Do you even know the sort of cowardly hatemonger you are?” I said finally.

Egan was wounded. Why was I so angry at
her
? She was just doing her job. And part of her job—a big part of it actually—resided in pretending she was a journalist pursuing an actual story related to the public good, rather than a purveyor of poorly manufactured gotcha journalism.

Dante would have condemned Egan to wander the Eighth Circle of hell, with its boiling lake and false prophets. But I found the transparency of her ploy oddly touching. It must have been quite painful for her to face the possibility that someone might perform a genuine act of conscience. So she did what false moralists always do when those feelings of self-loathing become unbearable—she projected her shamelessness onto me. The emotional logic never changes:
If my motives can’t be good, yours must be bad.

Canto XX

As it turned out—a late inning shocker, folks!—Egan got my salary wrong. I was being paid
five
thousand dollars per class at the time I quit BC, plus free Danish on Fridays. This should tell you a little something about the brutal economic shifts in higher education, which is now stocked to the gills with an academic underclass known as
us dumbass adjuncts.

We do not, as a rule, teach for the money. (My pay stub, when divided by the number of hours I worked teaching a class, came out to less than the minimum wage.) We teach because we dig teaching, because we enjoy our students.

When I think of them now it is with the utmost tenderness: Beth Dunn, with her fearless prose and her embarrassed giggling. Donald Mahoney, with his redolent chicken fingers and bedhead. All of them juiced up on Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and cigs, muffin crumbs caught in the cuffs of their sweaters. How unbearably young they looked! How hard they took everything! I couldn’t help thinking, as I gazed at them these past few years, how cruel it was for any nation to send such soft humans into war, where their deepest needs—to be understood, to be forgiven—would be torn right out of them.

So it was more than enjoyment. I
loved
my students. I depended on them. They filled me with an irrational hope for the future, just by being so kind to one another, so brave in pursuit of the truth locked inside themselves. Every term, one of them would write a story of such reckless beauty that it would take me a few minutes to realize I had stopped breathing. That’s what I had sacrificed by quitting my job: that feeling, the honor of that feeling.

Canto XXI

By the middle of the week, I had grown tired of the hate mail, the slimy reporters, my own self-righteous blather. Why then, did I consent to appear on
The Hannity & Colmes Show
? I suppose because, having come this far, I felt compelled to brave that ninth and final circle, which Dante reserved for political traitors. I knew I would never have another chance like this, and that if I didn’t take this chance—to confront these traitors, to do so on national TV—I would be no different from the rest of the liberal collaborators in this country.

Also, Fox News offered to send a limo.

Hell, why not? This is the economic secret that helps keep the Hateocracy humming: It’s such cheap entertainment! All you need is a few sociopaths, a studio, and a camera, and you’re in business. None of this tedious news gathering stuff.

And Fox was offering me a piece of the action, too! “We would absolutely promote the book of your choice to our two million viewers nationwide,” a producer informed me. Do you understand how completely psyched I was about this? I mean, the folks who watch
Hannity & Colmes,
those people are fucking
monsters
when it comes to reading modern short fiction. So now I was going to be a bestseller.

For those philistines who have not seen
H&C
, it features a conservative host (Sean Hannity) and a small punching bag (Alan Colmes). Hannity is the star of the program and, not incidentally, looks like a star: Reaganesque slab of hair, broad shoulders, oversized mandible. Hannity’s reputation as an attack dog is matched only by his more recent role as press liaison for our vice president. When Big Dick rises from the coffin for some reason other than shooting aged lawyers in the face—say, for instance, to remind Americans they should still live in fear—Hannity is his designated buttboy.

I hope it will not shock you to learn that Hannity has no journalism experience. In fact, he has no job experience whatsoever, outside of speaking into a microphone. He is untroubled by the moral complexities of the real world precisely because he has spent no time there.

Canto XXII

The deal was this: a ten-minute live interview on Monday night, pegged to Rice’s commencement address. I spent the weekend pacing my apartment, rehearsing what I would say when Hannity accused me of being a satanic pornographer.

Monday finally rolled around. The reports from commencement were depressing. A small white plane did circle Alumni Stadium, towing a banner that read
Your War Brings Dishonor.
But no one was there to see it. Things were running late because of all the security measures, which included metal detectors, a bomb squad, and, comfortingly, a phalanx of sharpshooters positioned at high points around the stadium. The serious protesters who might have publicly challenged Rice were all kept at a safe distance.

And what did our secretary of state have to say after all this? Mostly, she dispensed the sort of tranquilizing bromides required of commencement speakers, which, in her case, came off as inadvertently chilling. Stuff like “All too often difference has been used to divide and to dehumanize.” And “It’s possible today to live in an echo chamber that serves only to reinforce your own high opinion of yourself and what you think.” Contrary to initial press reports, Rice did not explode into oily shards of blarney at the conclusion of her speech. She received a standing ovation.

So now Hannity had himself another delicious opener:
I assume you saw the standing ovation Secretary Rice received this morning? Care to react?

Canto XXIII

I spent my time in the green room doing breathing exercises and trying to think pleasant thoughts. I had come to an important realization over the past week: I needed, above all else, to
not take the bait.
Why? Because Hannity was a bar brawler. He won fights not based on skill, or facts, but because he operated more effectively in the zone of adrenaline. (This is why conservatives tend to stomp liberals on the TV playground—aggression is like Ritalin to them.)

The show opened with a lengthy report on the alleged rape of a black woman by white lacrosse players at Duke University. Hannity was interviewing two emaciated blond legal correspondents of the sort that Fox News apparently keeps stored in a warehouse somewhere in midtown Manhattan. The essence of their legal opinion can be summarized thus:
The black slut got what she deserved.

As this segment wound down, I was ushered into a small back room and seated at a desk in front of a black screen, upon which an image of the Boston skyline was projected, so that it looked like I was high atop some skyscraper, rather than stuffed in a tiny, airless box in Watertown. The tech who led me in asked if I wanted to watch the live feed from the New York studio during my segment.

“Sure,” I said.

“The only thing is you’ll have a delay.”

“Meaning what?”

“Everything you see will be, like, six seconds behind. Some people find it kind of disorienting.”

“Better not,” I said.

“Okay, just stare here.” He pointed to a small black square mounted six feet away, beneath the camera. Then he demurely reached up my shirt, hooked a mic onto my collar, and gave me an earpiece. I stuck the bud in my ear and waited. After a few minutes, an excited voice said, “Professor Almond?”

“Yeah?”

“Great to have you! Thanks so much for joining us!” There was a lot of commotion in the background, voices, laughter. It was a regular hoedown. I stared at my black square miserably. “We’ve got footage from the speech, then we go to you, ’kay?”

There were two notable things about this footage. First,
H&C
provided by far the most thorough coverage of the event. Second, they managed to get the story entirely wrong. They made it look like Condi had been under siege by rabid liberal hordes, when in fact the protests had been smaller than anticipated. Such sensational treatment served the greater goal of convincing Fox viewers that a Communist invasion of the United States might still be imminent.