Someday_ADE (15 page)

Not true, not false, not one, not the other. Standing before an object, his job was to see it, as it was to him, simple and complex.

Repetition with variation: A man, whose insufficient portrait has been rendered just now, does not keep cats or sport a beard. He is of medium size, sensible weight, and could appear to be an academic or a violinist or a bookseller. He’s a painter, has a studio in a village and a house near a city, and journeys between those places, and others, coming and going, thoughtfully, deliberately.

Day by day, he would add, every day is a good day.

Madame Realism’s Conscience

“Whatever it is, I’m against it.”
—Groucho Marx, Horse Feathers

Way past adolescence, Madame Realism’s teenaged fantasies survived, thought bubbles in which she talked with Hadrian about the construction of his miraculous wall or Mary Queen of Scots right before the Catholic queen was beheaded. Madame Realism occasionally fronted a band or conversed with a president, for instance, Bill Clinton, who appeared to deny no one an audience. Could she have influenced him to change his course of action or point of view? Even in fantasy, that rarely happened. She persevered, though. At a state dinner thought bubble, Madame Realism whispered to Laura Bush, “Tell him not to be stubborn. Pride goeth before a fall.” Laura looked into the distance and nodded absent-mindedly.

Over the years, Madame Realism had heard many presidential rumors, some of which were confirmed by historians: Eisenhower had a mistress; Mamie was a drunk; Lincoln suffered from melancholia; Mary Lincoln attended séances; Roosevelt’s mistress, not Eleanor, was by his side when he died; Eleanor was a lesbian; Kennedy, a satyr; Jimmy Carter, arrogant; Nancy Reagan made sure that Ronnie, after being shot, took daily naps. When Betty Ford went public with her addictions and breast cancer, she became a hero, but Gerald Ford will be remembered primarily for what he didn’t do or say. He didn’t put Nixon on trial; and, he denied even a whiff of pressure on him to pardon the disgraced president. Ford’s secrets have died with him, but maybe Betty knows.

The Pope, President Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and an Eagle Scout were on a plane, and it was losing altitude, about to crash. But there were only three parachutes. President Clinton said, “I’m the most powerful leader in the Free World. I have to live,” and he took a parachute and jumped out. Henry Kissinger said, “I’m the smartest man in the world. I have to live,” and he jumped out. The Pope said, “Dear boy, please take the last parachute, I’m an old man.” The Eagle Scout said, “Don’t worry, there are two left. The smartest man in the world jumped out with my backpack.”

Whatever power was, it steamrolled behind the scenes and kept to its own rarefied company, since overexposure vitiated its effects. So, when a president came to town, on a precious visit, people wanted to hear and see him, but they also wanted to be near him. They stretched out their arms and thrust their bodies forward, elbowing their way through the crush for a nod or smile; they waved books in front of him for his autograph, dangled their babies for a kiss, and longed for a pat on the back or a handshake. Madame Realism had listened to people say they’d remember this moment for the rest of their days, the commander in chief, so charismatic and handsome. And, as fast as he had arrived, the president vanished, whisked away by the Secret Service, who surrounded him, until at the door of Air Force One, he turned, smiled, and waved to them one last time.

Without access to power’s hidden manifestations, visibility is tantamount to reality, a possible explanation for the authority of images. Everyone comprised a kind of display case or cabinet of curiosities and became an independent, unbidden picture. Madame Realism dreaded this particular involuntarism; but interiority and subjectivity were invisible, they were not statements. Your carriage, clothes, weight, height, hairstyle, and expression told their story, and what you appeared to be was as much someone else’s creation as yours.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

If the President of the United States—POTUS, to any West Wing devotee—dropped his guard, power itself shed a layer of skin. Ever cognizant of that, one of the great politicians of the twentieth century, Lyndon Baines Johnson, called out to visitors while he was on the toilet. Suddenly, Madame Realism took shape nearby, and seeing a visitor’s embarrassment, she shouted to the president, “Hey, what’s up with that?” LBJ laughed mischievously.

It gave her an idea: maybe he had consciously made himself the butt of the joke, before others could. A Beltway joke writer had once said that self-deprecating humor was essential for presidents, though Johnson’s comic spin was extreme and made him into a bathroom joke. Presidential slips of the tongue, accidents and mishaps supposedly humanized the anointed, but the unwitting clowns still wielded power. Laughter was aimed at the mighty to level the playing field, but who chose the field? To her, the jokes also zeroed in on powerlessness; and Madame Realism trusted in their uneven and topsy-turvy honesty. To defame, derogate, offend, satirize, parody, or exaggerate was not to lie, because in humor’s province, other truths govern.

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should
automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”
—Gore Vidal

She herself followed, whenever possible, G.K. Chesterton’s adage: “For views I look out of the window, my opinions I keep to myself.” But presidents were nothing if not opinions, and, at any moment, they had to give one. Maybe since they were kids, they had wished and vied for importance, to pronounce and pontificate, and they had to be right or they’d die. The public hoped for a strong, honest leader, but more and more it grew skeptical of buzz and hype, of obfuscation passing as answer, of politicians’ lies. Yet who one called a liar conformed to party of choice.

Some people are talking, and one of them says, “All Republicans are assholes.”
Another says, “Hey, I resent that!”
First person says, “Why, are you a Republican?”
Second person answers, “No, I’m an asshole!”

Some jokes were all-purpose, for any climate. Madame Realism first heard the asshole joke about lawyers, but most proper nouns would fit, from Democrats to plumbers, teachers to artists. Jokes could be indiscriminate about their subjects, since the only necessity was a good punchline that confronted expectation with surprise, puncturing belief, supposition, or image.

“Mr. Bush’s popularity has taken some serious hits in recent months, but the new survey marks the first time that over fifty percent of respondents indicated that they wished the president was a figment of their imagination.” —Andy Borowitz, The Borowitz Report

Her fantasies often skewered Madame Realism, threw her for a loop, but at times they fashioned her as the host of a late-night talk show, when, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, she held the best hand. Madame Realism imagined questioning presidential also-rans, who had sacrificed themselves on the altar of glory and ambition—Al Gore, John Kerry, the ghost of Adlai Stevenson. Suddenly Adlai stated, out of nowhere, “JFK never forgave me, you know, for not supporting him at the Democratic convention.” Then a familiar, haunted look darkened his brown eyes, and pathos quickly soured their banter. Pathos didn’t fly on late-night TV.

Anyone but an action hero understood that even a rational decision or intelligent tactic might awaken unforeseen forces equipped with their own anarchic armies, and some presidents agonized under mighty power’s heft. In portraits of him, Abraham Lincoln morphed from eager Young Abe, saucy, wry candidate for Congress from Illinois, to a father overwhelmed with sadness at his young son’s death, to a gravely depressed man, the president who took the nation to its only civil war. Madame Realism treasured soulful Abraham Lincoln, because he appeared available to her contemporary comprehension, a candidate ripe for psychoanalysis. She pictured speaking kindly to him, late at night, after Mary had gone to sleep, the White House dead and dark, when words streamed from him, and, as he talked about his early days, his ravaged face lit up, remembering life’s promise.

What do you call Ann Coulter and Jerry Falwell in the front seat of a car?
Two airbags.

In the nineteenth century, even Thomas Carlyle believed “all that a man does is physiognomical of him.” A face revealed a person’s character and disposition, and, if skilled in reading it, like physiognomists who were its natural science proponents, why human beings acted the way they did could be discerned. Also, their future behavior might be predicted. Criminals and the insane, especially, were analyzed, because the aberrant worried the normal, and, consequently, deranged minds had to be isolated from so-called sane ones. The sane felt crazy around the insane.

Though face-reading as a science had gone the way of believing the world was flat—poor Galileo!—facial expressions dominated human beings’ reactions; each instinctively examined the other for evidence of treachery, doubt, love, fear, and anger. Defeat and success etched an ever-changing portrait of the aging face that, unlike Dorian Gray’s, mutated in plain sight. Animals relied on their senses for survival, but beauty made all fools, democratically. And though it is constantly asserted that character is revealed by facial structure and skin, plastic surgery’s triumphal march through society must designate new standards. For instance, Madame Realism asked herself, how do you immediately judge, on what basis, a person’s character after five facelifts?

“Images are the brood of desire.”
—George Eliot, Middlemarch

Before appearing on TV, politicians were commanded: Don’t move around too much in your chair, don’t be too animated, you’ll look crazy, don’t touch your face or hair, don’t flail your arms, don’t point your finger. Their handlers advised them: keep to your agenda, make your point, not theirs. The talking heads tried to maintain their pose and composure, but these anointed figures faltered in public, and, with the ubiquity of cameras, their every wink, smirk, awkwardness, or mistake was recorded and broadcast on the Internet, the worse the better.

At a political leadership forum led by his son, Jeb Bush, former President Bush wept when he spoke about Jeb losing the 1994 governorship of Florida. Madame Realism took a seat next to him after he returned to the table, still choked up. “Did you cry,” she asked, “because you wish Jeb were president, not your namesake?” President Bush ignored her for the rest of the evening.

Why are presidents so short?
So senators can remember them.

A happy few were born to be poker-faced. A rare minority suffered from a disease called prosopagnosis, or face blindness; the Greek prosopon means face, and agnosia is the medical term for the loss of recognition. An impairment destroys the brain’s ability to recognize faces, which usually happens after a trauma to it; but if the disease is developmental or genetic, and occurs before a person develops an awareness that faces can be differentiated, sufferers never know that it is ordinary to distinguish them. They see no noses, eyes, lips, but a blur, a cloudy, murky space above the neck. What is their life like? Their world? How do they manage? But she couldn’t embody their experience, not even in fantasy.

He wants power
He has power
He wants more
And his country will break in his hands,
Is breaking now.
—Alkaios, ca. 600 BC, from Pure Pagan, translated by Burton Raffel

Those who ran for president, presumably, hungered for power, to rule over others, like others might want sex, a Jaguar, or a baby. Winning drives winners, and maybe losers, too, Madame Realism considered. Power, that’s what it’s all about, everyone always remarked. But why did some want to lead armies and others want to lead a Girl Scout troop, or nothing much at all? With power, you get your way all the time.

She wanted her way, she knew she couldn’t get it all the time, but how far would Madame Realism go to achieve her ends? She wasn’t sure. And, why were her ends modest, compared, say, with Hadrian’s? Like other children, she’d been trained not to be a sore loser, to share, not to hit, but probably Hadrian hadn’t. And, what a joke, she laughed to herself, the power of toilet training.

“Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Thought bubbles gathered over her head, and she attempted, as if in a battle, to thrust into those airy-fairy daydreams fates that she didn’t crave, like serving as a counselor in a drug clinic or checking microchips for flaws. In fantasy only, Madame Realism ruled her realm, and she could go anywhere, anytime. She would be lavished with awards for peace and physics and keep hundreds of thousands of stray animals on her vast properties. Fearlessly and boldly, she would poke holes in others’ arguments, and sometimes she did influence a president. She did not imagine having coffee with the owner of the local laundromat, she didn’t make beds or sweep floors. Though she believed she didn’t care about having great power, her wishes, like jokes, claimed their own special truths.

“The King of Kings is also the Chief of Thieves. To whom may I complain?”
—The Bauls

There was a story standup comic Mort Sahl told about JFK and him. Mort Sahl was flying on Air Force One with Kennedy, when they hit a patch of rough turbulence. JFK said to Sahl, “If this plane crashed, we would probably all be killed, wouldn’t we?” Sahl answered, “Yes, Mr. President.” Then JFK said, “And it occurs to me that your name would be in very small print.” The comic was put in his place, power did that. Madame Realism wondered how wanting power or wanting to be near it was different, if it was. Maybe, she told herself, she would give up some of her fantasies and replace them with others. But could she?