President Carter is nice. Ronald Reagan is nice, too, but in a different way. You know: President Carter is really nice—nice family man, nice smile, nice to people, nice church man; but Ronald Reagan has such a nice sense of humor, and a nice grin, and a nice way of presenting himself.
You just can’t help thinking Mr. Reagan is so nice all around that it would be nice to be with him, but of course it would be nice to be with President Carter, too, only in a different way.
I was thinking about this yesterday morning while shaving. It was nice to shave. Not terrific, mind you—don’t get me wrong—but, still—nice.
I guess what got me thinking along these lines was the day. It was a nice day. Not one of the great days, to be sure, but not really rotten either. It was the kind of day when it doesn’t really rain, but the sun doesn’t really make much show either, the kind of day when you feel stiff all over and ten years older than you really are, but not like you might have to go into the hospital right away. In short, a nice day.
Downstairs for breakfast the usual question arose: “How did you sleep?”
“Nice. How about you? Did you sleep nice?”
“Very nice.”
Actually, I had not had an astonishingly pleasant night. There had been a medium-weight nightmare sometime during the hour of the wolf, but on the other hand it hadn’t waked me with such terror that I had to get up and go into the parlor and read myself back to sleep in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Not a really awful night’s sleep, and not a wonderful one either. Just nice.
To make conversation I said that breakfast was nice. It was, too. There was frozen orange juice and ersatz cholesterol-free bacon followed by caffeine-free coffee. It was pretty artificial but still a good deal tastier than no breakfast at all. It was nice to have a breakfast when you considered that the alternative was hunger. I could see I was going to have a nice day.
This proved to be the case. The people on the subway were nice. Nobody you would want to meet, but nobody trying to kill anybody else either. Just nice people. The subway was nice, too. Filthy, as usual, but most of the lights were working. It wasn’t one of the dazzling subways such as come along every few months or so, but it wasn’t one of the really unspeakable subways either. It was just a nice subway.
Things at the office were also nice, which wasn’t terribly interesting, but on the other hand didn’t leave you with heartburn or indigestion or an urge to ask the widow in accounting to run away with you to Macao and start a new life.
“It’s very nice at the office today,” I remarked to a nice vice-president, and he was so pleased that he invited me out for a nice lunch.
We had a nice talk. “Whatever they say about President Carter,” he said, “nobody can say he isn’t nice.”
“The President is nice, all right,” I pointed out, “but have you noticed how nice Ronald Reagan is, but in a different way from President Carter?”
“That’s a nice concept,” he said. “It’s nice for the country having two nice men to guide our destiny.”
“I don’t think niceness is too much for the American people to ask for,” I said.
Walking back to the office we saw a nice madwoman. Not a wonderful madwoman who thrusts $100 bills into your pocket and disappears into the crowd, and not a dreadful madwoman who accuses you of kidnapping her babies and slaughtering her cattle, but just a nice madwoman who was walking through the streets screaming to herself about a volcano erupting in her kitchen sink.
It was like that all day. Arriving home, being asked, “How was your day?” and replying, “Nice. How was yours?” I received the reply, “Very nice.”
Then we had some martinis and got out the pistol and shot out the tube in the television set. The woman downstairs came up to see if anyone was hurt. “We just shot the television set,” I explained. “That’s nice,” she said. “Not really great because you could have missed and hit the wall and not have to buy a new telly. But not really terrible either, since you didn’t shoot each other. Just nice.”
I made us all another martini and propounded the theory that the 1980’s were going to be The Nice Decade and we all had a nice chat. It was a nice evening. I mean, it wasn’t V-J Day in Times Square, but it wasn’t London in the thirteenth century either. Just nice, so nice, like President Carter and Ronald Reagan, only in a different way.