Pulphead: Essays (19 page)

Standing on a garbage can and commanding a lot of attention is a strange figure. A small man or woman—you can’t see enough of its body to tell—holds a handmade sign that reads
YES I AM
. The creature wears an Obama mask. When people holler “Obama!” it looks in their direction and does a little shuffle. Atop the Obama mask sits a fake gold crown. Obama thinks he’s a king! (Is that what
YES I AM
means? Yes, I am a king?) The king has on a bright purple pimp’s coat with faux-leopard-skin trim. An African king? It looks like something you’d see and turn away from in a Southern antiques shop. We do turn away, after taking a pic.

You can’t move sideways as easily as you could a minute ago. The march is slowly moving. To the Capitol!

The date of this march has been carefully chosen. Indeed, the date is the name of the march. This is the 9/12 March. “9/12” refers to a movement begun by Glenn Beck, of Fox News, who’s monitoring the events from the studio. Glenn calls on us to return as a nation to the way we were on the day after September 11, when there was no red and blue, no left and right, just Americans, unified, ready. People in New York City had clapped in the streets for Bush, people who hadn’t voted for him and wouldn’t in 2004 either. He was the president.

Is it strange to feel nostalgia for that day? That was the first day of some kind of war. People’s remains still lay smoldering in the wreckage of those buildings. A time of deep psychic trauma for untold numbers of people, it seems a day that only someone with the most distant and abstract connection to it would want to revisit, much less re-create, and that nothing short of a near-galactic narcissism could bring a person to suggest enshrining it as a state of being. But we didn’t name the march. Beck named it, although he disavows ownership and is absent today. On TV, in describing his role, he puts it like this: “If you build it, they will come.”

Beck is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top.

How many of us are here? As is typical with political-crowd estimates, the question will become charged in the coming weeks, with wildly high guesses (between 1.5 and 2 million, the figure getting passed around today at the march) down to some probably slightly grouchy ones offered later by city employees, who put the number at roughly sixty thousand. Perhaps the fairest count would place it at about seventy-five thousand. What matters at a march is that it feel large, and it doesn’t take much to feel like an army.

Every so often someone shouts, “Can you hear us now?” (It’s a phrase of the day, like “I want my America back.”) The response to these calls is most often a smile and chuckle from people in hearing range. You know how, when you’re at a concert and someone shouts something funny from the crowd, there’s a tight smile people do while scanning for the one who did it—that’s what we do when someone yells, “Can you hear us now?”

This tickled reaction reminds you of something, which is that our march is in part—we could even say mostly—an act of mass irony. Conservatives do not march. We shake our heads and hold signs while lefties march. But today we are marching. We are “marching.” (We can march, too.)

That explains why so many of us believe there could be 2 million people here, many more even than came to the Obama inauguration, which paralyzed the city (whereas we have not even impeded traffic). It’s that none of us have ever been in a march before.

For the first time in our history, a black man lives in the White House, and today’s is the first massive protest against his administration, and 99.9999 percent of us are white and fan-followers of race-baiting pundits—and mind you, this is in America, where you can’t walk into a convenience store without having or witnessing at least three intense, awkward, occasionally inspiring moments of racial tension—but despite all that, today has “nothing to do with race.” This phenomenon will be known to future Americans as the “Race Miracle of 9/12.”

As evidence, when you approach the Capitol—surely America’s most stirring man-made view, where you stare into the gray shadows behind those columns and realize you’re witnessing the stone projection of a psychic landscape, a landscape that is not this country but the idea of this country, the very heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers (you’re “caught literally and physically,” as a quotation inscribed into the asphalt of Freedom Plaza had put it, “in L’Enfant’s dream”)—an unexpected sight awaits you there: a dark black man, wearing dark glasses, on a video screen. He’s here with us in person, but you can’t see him because of the crowd. On the screen he turns and speaks directly to the other black man, the one in the White House.

He’s the Reverend C. L. Bryant, a conservative preacher from Louisiana. This is his moment.

“Politicians have built walls,” he says. “Walls of misunderstanding” (we roar approval), “walls of racism” (louder), “walls of classism” (louder still).

“And to quote Ronald Reagan, when he spoke to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall,” Bryant says, his preacher voice intensifying, our own volume trebling, “Mr. Obama, tear down these walls!”

God knows what this means, but he’s on our side.

There is open racism here. Later you’ll hear there wasn’t, but it’s just strangely coded. Perhaps owing to the advanced age of many of us—the same factor, in other words, that caused the tea-bagging embarrassment—we still revert to seventies soul-brother jive talk when we want to be racist. The
YES I AM
pimp king is one example, but there are plenty of others. A sign shows Obama digging a grave for the Constitution, with the caption
I DON’T DIG BARACK
. That’s too subtle to serve as a convincing example, maybe, but another man holds a sign that reads
HEY, BRO, HANDS OFF MY WALLET
, next to a picture of a monkey’s face. You start to see.

A father and a little boy standing by a tree. Father’s sign reads
WE KNOW HE SNEAKS CIGARETTES BUT SERIOUSLY IS THE PRESIDENT STILL SMOKING CRACK?

There’s music again. A conservative folksinger has taken Reverend Bryant’s place, with a song called “We Gotta Get Back” (meaning to our 9/12 ways).

Ronnie Reagan is everywhere. One sign says
DIG HIM UP FOR 2012
. I ask the young man holding it—Franklin McGuire, a polite, sharp-looking kid from South Carolina who’s living in D.C. for the fall semester and interning at a conservative leadership institute—which issue he’s here representing, and he says, “Personal responsibility.” He’s young, but already he feels he’s been able to witness his country’s decline.

At smaller Tea Party rallies throughout the states, while we wait for speakers like Joe the Plumber to arrive, we play old Reagan speeches from iTunes over PAs and listen to them, standing in fields and parks. We want to remove ourselves from history.

You spot only one counterprotester, if that’s what he is. He wears a suit, and his sign reads
TAX THE RICH.
He stands in the middle of the outgoing flow, so you can’t avoid him. His sign puzzles people. One Tea Party patriot in jeans, sneakers, and cap approaches him, demanding to know “What’s wrong with rich people? Aren’t rich people good?”

“Some of ’em,” the man in the suit answers and sort of shrugs, as if he’s paid to be here. The back of his sign has Christian stuff on it.

The patriot squints at him, preparing to launch into a stream of abuse, but waves his hand with ah-phooey disgust and stalks off.

*   *   *

Later that evening, in a paid-for suite at the Mandarin Oriental, a tall blond “government-affairs executive at a well-connected industry-trade group” (that is, a lobbyist at one of the top policy “shops” here in the demimonde where private insurance and D.C. politics mingle) was helping me to explore the minibar.

He is my first cousin, with whom I grew up and have stayed close. In the 1940s, our grandfather and two of his childhood friends inherited an insurance company in Kentucky that had been operating since the 1850s. They spent their lives making it into what today is the oldest and, in many years, most successful small firm in the state. My twin uncles run it now. Their sons are being groomed for takeover as we speak. It’s the American story. It’s an American story. My grandfather drove Buicks; my uncles fly on private jets. My grandfather promised people his vote; my uncles help people get elected. I grew up at the margins of it, dead-middle-class, enjoying the company’s benefits at someone’s generosity, charging unlimited Cokes at the country club under one of my cousins’ names, aware that the whole mechanism of wealth perpetuation would take care of me in a pinch but then settle me back at arm’s length.

My family never made me or my siblings feel any of this; they’re kind and humor-possessing people, conscientious to a fault, the kind who stress you out trying to feed you, give you spending money, make you stay at their houses instead of hotels, a few of the reasons they’ve done well—but they never had to make us feel anything. It was Southern class, and we had functioning IQs. In the twilight, from the balcony, it became possible to see my lovable wide-smiled cousin, whose tooth I had once helped pull, as the next logical evolutionary phase, a kind of probe put forward by our provincial-family genome into the D.C. atmosphere to examine possibilities there. Politics, my boy. He was liking it.

We talked about the 9/12 March, some of which we had watched together. I was accusing him and his colleagues of essentially having created it. Didn’t the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and “former CEOs” and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear “socialized medicine” so intensely? An elevated number of them had “marched” in wheelchairs or while manifesting obvious signs of chronic health trouble and obesity, not to mention age—surely Medicare and VA benefits were covering a whopping percentage of all that. These tea-partiers owed their very lives to socialized medicine. You and your dad, I said, are the only people who have any reason to fear it.

My cousin denied any connection. He said he and his colleagues viewed the marchers as at most “a welcome distraction,” which I took to mean, they lend a helpful populist sheen to what remains a disagreement among the powerful over how things will be settled.

“That was Palin Nation,” my cousin said.

“Yeah,” I said, “that was Old People Discover the Internet.”

He told me a bunch of them had been in his office earlier that day. “So,” I said, “the attitude is, if they want to go on TV shouting against a public option…”

“Great!”

I still had the feeling of being down on the street with them in my nerves. The way my cousin talked, this wasn’t how they’d seen themselves, not hardly. They were taking back power, seizing a destiny. But even the African pimp-king was some kind of pawn, as Bob Dylan might have put it in an eleven-minute impressionistic story song.

We were watching footage of the march on TV, flipping back and forth between that and a sports thing my cousin wanted to see. The distance between up here and down there began to deepen. Had we been marching to keep my relatives rich? Standing up for the rich people, like that guy who’d accosted the counterprotester? What a bizarre turn in American politics. The 9/12 March for Aetna! Vans I’d passed on the highway, driving in, were decorated with handmade pro–Fox News propaganda.

My cousin told me a casual story about a breakfast three months earlier with a leading Republican senator, by the end of which this senator had vowed to “make the public option radioactive.”

I was souring, noticing the conventional unattractiveness of the crowd. It hinted at undiluted Germanic stock. It had been wrong to think people like this don’t march; they just do it with torches.

Some text message made my cousin have to run. “Good luck with the story,” he said. We man-hugged.

A sign read
THIS TIME WE COME PEACEFULLY AND UNARMED. THIS TIME
. But the man holding it was smiling the same way they do outside the
Today Show
studios.

I arrived at the town-hall meeting in Virginia on time, but the doors were locked. Too many people inside already; the fire department had made the call. A bunch of us stood outside, going through the ritual bonding gesture of greeting each new person who came up to try the door. “It’s locked,” we muttered in friendly warning. Really? (Trying anyway.) What the hell? “We know! What the hell!”

I asked a willowy redheaded woman who looked about forty why she was there. “Because I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m really afraid of this president. I mean, they’re starting to talk about limits on family size, how many children you can have. In our America.”

A guy came up and pulled on the door. “Figures,” he said. “He’s a liberal” (meaning the Democratic congressman hosting this town hall).

People around me snort and harrumph, but there are some guys here from a union. “Oh, some of us are pretty smart,” a white-bearded one of them says.

“Oh yeah?” the guy says.

“Yeah,” the labor guy says. “Some of us even have
master’s degrees
and
Ph.D.’s
.”

Pretty tame, as political combat goes, but you could tell it made the people in our little group edgy. (A couple of days later, somebody would bite off someone else’s finger at a health-care-related event. We were ready.)

Three people exited, the fireman let in three, that’s how it worked. It took me over an hour to sausage-press my way through this process into the hall itself, where Representative Tom Perriello was facing questions from a constantly self-refreshing queue of disgruntled Republican constituents. It turned out I needn’t have worried about missing anything; this meeting would go for hours. It seemed every person who’d come intended to speak.