Not that You Asked

DEMAGOGUE DAYS

OR, HOW THE RIGHT-WING HATEOCRACY CHEWED ME UP AND SPAT ME OUT

A Shameless Multimedia Extravaganza Featuring Sean Hannity, Dante Alighieri, Ann Coulter, and a special cameo by that super-classy Secretary of State who never met a war she didn’t like…Condoleezza Rice!

Canto I

This is the story of my descent into a modern inferno, so I’m going to start the way Dante did back in the day. As our saga opens, I’m pushing forty, about halfway through my life’s journey. I’m not lost in a dark wood. I’m schlepping my suitcase through the Portland airport, where travelers are granted the foolish pleasure of free e-mail.

I open my account and find a message protesting Boston College’s decision to have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speak at commencement. The Rice invitation has been public knowledge for several weeks, but it’s news to me, because I’m just an adjunct professor at BC and because I’m on a book tour this term and because I’m in the midst of trying to buy my first home for my pregnant wife while on a book tour.

My initial reaction is your basic spasm of ick. How could my school do such a thing? This is a rhetorical question. I know exactly why Condi got the nod: It makes BC appear enlightened—Look at us honoring a woman of color!—while also generating the kind of prestige PR that helps pump dough out of the wealthy alumni. Before I can think better of it, I do something I have pledged never (ever) to do: I hit reply all.

Guys—

I’m astonished to hear BC has selected Rice as a commencement speaker. It is the sort of decision that leads me to reconsider whether I want to teach at the school.

Rice has been an integral part of a political machine whose values run contrary to virtually every humane tenet expressed in the New Testament and Catholic doctrine…

It’s finally come home to BC. Are we going to respond?

Canto II

If I were another sort of person—a reasonable person, for example—I’d have stopped here. I’d rattled my saber. I’d done my best lefty kvetch. Now it was time for a soothing latte. But I am not a reasonable person.

The more I thought about the Rice invite, the less reasonable I became. I was having trouble letting it go, as the therapists say. I was having trouble letting it go because I had grown up in a family where a certain brand of cruelty had been tolerated, and I had never gotten over that injustice, and when the same cruelty played out in the political world, it afforded me the chance to return to the delicious misery of my childhood.

I had spent the months after the 2000 election, for instance, thinking (quite a lot, actually) about how best to murder James Baker. Then I remembered that shooting zombies never really kills them, it just makes them stronger. And now, six years, one stolen election, and two failed crusades later, Bush’s office wife—a classically trained pianist and war criminal—had been invited to serve as a role model at my very own school. What was I supposed to do with that?

Canto III

In the Inferno, Virgil is the one who shows Dante the way into hell. I myself did not have the ghost of a dead, world-famous poet close at hand in Portland. (They are hard to track down on short notice.) But I did have a nondead, sort of famous poet named Julianna Baggott. Julianna and I were on a book tour together, because we had co-written a novel.

When I told Julianna about the Rice invite, that I was considering resigning in protest, her expression was not one of surprise or dismay. On the contrary, she knew me as someone deeply attached to my outrage. And so she was happy to give me a good hard nudge through the Gates of Hell. “If you’re really that upset,” she said, “why don’t you send your letter of resignation to the Boston Globe?”

Canto IV

I didn’t do this immediately, because I was in the midst of this long-distance house buying nightmare, one complicated by the fact that, unbeknownst to anyone but my wife and my lawyer, I had put offers down on two homes, which, as my attorney had sternly informed me earlier in the day, was against the law, but I was doing it anyway because the second home was an insane bargain and I myself had fallen so deeply into a temporary real estate psychosis that a little jail time didn’t really faze me anymore, just so long as we got the house. I was making 173 phone calls per day, mostly on my obnoxious cell phone, mostly in transit, and thus kept misplacing my outrage about Rice.

Our hotel in Portland was one of the fancy downtown places that dress their doormen up like Beefeaters, in the errant belief that this is somehow not humiliating to everyone involved. I headed upstairs, fully intending to draft a letter, but my lawyer called to remind me that I was in legal jeopardy, then one of the seven or so real estate agents now parasitically affixed to my life called, then Julianna called and began speaking in the hysterical fashion that signals a writer has located free food.

As it should happen, we had landed in Portland on the day our hotel threw its annual Client Appreciation Buffet. The spread was obscene: a raw bar featuring the entire edible population of Puget Sound, plus tuna sashimi, crab cakes, chicken skewers, a mountain of malodorous cheeses, petits fours, strawberries the size of small fists, and, shinily displayed in the Lord of the Flies banquet room, an entire snout-to-tail suckling pig. Julianna and I ate to excess, then continued eating. All around us, consultants and salesmen were devouring fish and fowl, belching ecstatically, dabbing at their greasy lips.

In the Inferno, before Dante enters hell proper, he sees a swarm of figures referred to as the opportunists. These are people who led morally unconsidered lives, who took no side between good and evil. And as silly as it might seem to say so, this is what I saw as I stood in that bloated lobby: my fellow Americans (and me) lapping at the trough, gulping down what we could, not for a moment questioning our fortune, or whether such fortune lay on the side of good or evil.

That night, after our reading, I returned to my room and called my wife. I meant to give her a real estate update, but the first words out of my mouth were these: “BC is inviting Condi Rice to speak at graduation, and I’m fucking quitting.”

Canto V

The next day, on a plane headed to Seattle, I wrote this letter to William Leahy, S.J., the president of Boston College:

Dear Father Leahy,

I am writing to resign my post as an adjunct professor of English at Boston College.

I am doing so—after five years at BC, and with tremendous regret—as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year’s graduation.

As you well know, many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing—reasonably, in my view—that Rice’s actions as Secretary of State are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university, and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.

But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental.

Simply put: Ms. Rice is a liar.

She has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy.

The public record of her deceits is extensive. During the ramp-up to the Iraq War, she made 29 false or misleading public statements concerning Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda, according to a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Government Reform….

Like the President whom she serves so faithfully, she refuses to recognize her errors, or the tragic consequences of those errors to the young soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq. She is a diplomat whose central allegiance is not to the democratic cause of this nation, but absolute power….

I am not questioning her intellectual gifts or academic accomplishments. Nor her potentially inspiring role as a powerful woman of color. But these, after all, are not the factors by which a commencement speaker should be judged. It is the content of one’s character that matters here—the reverence for truth and knowledge that Boston College purports to champion.

Secretary Rice does not personify these values; she repudiates them. Whatever inspiring rhetoric she might present to the graduating class, her actions as a citizen and politician tell a different story.

Honestly, Father Leahy, what lessons do you expect her to impart to impressionable seniors? That hard work in the corporate sector might gain them a spot on the board of Chevron? That they, too, might someday have an oil tanker named after them? That it is acceptable to lie to the American people for political gain?

…I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both.

I would like to apologize to my students, and prospective students. I would also urge them to investigate the words and actions of Secretary Rice, and to exercise their own First Amendment rights at her speech.

Respectfully,
Steve Almond
Ex–Adjunct Professor

Canto VI

To my mind, the letter showed considerable restraint. I did not mention, for instance, that Rice was working her AmEx at a Manhattan shoe boutique while thousands of poor people were trying to avoid drowning after Hurricane Katrina. I simply said my piece and zapped the letter off to some editor at the Globe, who I assumed would be too distracted to read the thing and/or too wimpy to run it.

I was more concerned with getting back to Boston so I could slap a down payment on the house we had decided to buy. But my flight, almost predictably, was canceled due to windstorms in Chicago, and I spent six hours trying to rebook. In the end (by which I mean there was some begging involved) I secured the last seat on a flight from Seattle to Charlotte to Hartford. At some point in the midst off all this, the Globe called to say they were going to run my letter. I believe my exact words were: “Fine.”

Canto VII

I arrived in Boston at four in the morning and didn’t bother to unpack my bags, because as soon as I handed over the down payment, I was flying to Toronto for another reading. The phone began ringing before 8 A.M. I assumed I had overslept (I had) and that my realtor was calling to wake me up. But it was someone named Brett, or perhaps Brent, calling from a local TV affiliate. He had read my letter in the Globe and wanted to know if I’d be willing to come on the air and talk about what he referred to, in that unctuous, caffeinated tone favored by TV producers the world over, as “my brave decision.”

I told him I was heading out of town.

“Where to?” he said. “We might have an affiliate.”

Now my cell phone began ringing. It showed a New York number I didn’t recognize. I explained to Brent/Brett that I had to go. I answered the cell and a woman from CNN began speaking with great vehemence. I asked her to call back later and hung up. There was a moment of silence. Then, as if by some previous arrangement, both phones began ringing at the same time.

I was now—though I didn’t quite realize it yet—in the midst of an official media feeding frenzy. It was a Friday morning in May, what the pros call a slow news day, and all over the nation, media underlings were scouring the major newspapers to figure out who and what constituted “news” and how to turn these people and events into telegenic brawls that might goose their own careers.

The Boston Globe had made me easy to find. Though I didn’t know this either, the editors had run my letter at the top of the editorial page, under the thoughtful banner headline Condoleezza Rice at Boston College? I Quit.

My attack on Bush, Inc., was especially enticing to all those newsmakers because it seemed to reflect what pundits enjoy calling the national mood. Yes, it was finally dawning on Americans that their emperor had no clue. His approval ratings—90 percent when he stood atop the rubble, 75 percent when he declared mission accomplished, 60 percent when Saddam Hussein was captured—had just dipped below 30 percent.

A responsible Fourth Estate might take this as an invitation to investigate the integrity of his words and policies. But that was awfully complicated stuff. It was much easier, really, to focus on some wacky part-time prof who—get this—actually quit his job in an effort to question those words and policies.

Canto VIII

Dante wrote the Inferno as a warning. He was exhorting his countrymen not to drift into moral torpitude, to find salvation in the performance of righteous acts. But the poem is also a political allegory. Dante was bitter about his exile from Florence at the hands of the black Guelphs, so he wrote his enemies into hell and subjected them to various colorful degradations.

I would love to report that my resignation was a purely righteous act. Unfortunately, it also involved a revenge fantasy, one I’ve inflicted on friends and family with increasing vigor over the past few years: to become a Demagogue of the Left.

This would involve me getting a radio show, which would start local, but, owing to my astonishing eloquence, would quickly earn a national following and allow me to expose the sadistic hypocrisies of the Hateocracy, as well as the abject cowardice of their media enablers, and would culminate in a televised debate with Ann Coulter during which she would admit that she, like Adolf Hitler, has only one testicle.

I am suggesting, in other words, that I was not merely a noble liberal knight hoping to slay the dragons of the right, but a willing accomplice in the descent that followed.

Canto IX

The first interview I gave was to a local National Public Radio show. I was at the airport by now, about to fly off to Toronto. It was a perfectly reasonable conversation. No one shouted. Nonetheless, it marked the beginning of my formal descent into the inferno.

I know this will upset those of you who view NPR as a counter-weight to the Hateocracy. But surely I can’t be the only one to notice that NPR (in its own reasonable way) has no moral compass whatsoever. That it dependably dances to whatever tune Karl Rove calls out—immigration, gay marriage, flag burning, all the Goebbelsish spew invoked to distract citizens from more substantive and failed policies.

I can’t remember the last time I heard an investigative report on NPR. Like about, say, the sitting president launching a war based on bogus intelligence, or the vice president inviting lobbyists to rewrite our environmental laws, or the Speaker of the House turning Capitol Hill into a gold brick factory. Instead, NPR waits until these scandals have become conventional wisdom, then calls in Terry Gross for mop-up.

I used to spend a lot of time at WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate. The staffers I met there were intelligent and hardworking. They were also tragically demoralized. That’s what happens when your job is to cover the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history, and every day you churn out timid drivel.

Canto X

So let’s assign NPR to the first circle of hell, where virtuous pagans hang out and bitch about dental deductibles. And let’s put John DePetro in the second circle.

Who is John DePetro?

DePetro is a short, weasel-faced man with a Rhode Island accent. In another era, he’d be the guy who hangs out with the reputed mobsters and laughs at all their jokes and occasionally gets punched in the face for trying to be clever. As it is, DePetro is the former morning guy on WRKO, Boston’s official AM Hateocracy outlet. He bills himself as “The Independent Man,” an independence he recently affirmed by calling a public official a fag on the air.

I’m not sure how many of you have been a guest on a right-wing talk radio program, but I can tell you exactly what it’s like. It’s like throwing a book at a monkey.

I spoke to DePetro for thirty minutes, during which his central rhetorical strategy was to read various portions of my letter in a sneering voice. I would then say something like, “That’s very good, John. Your reading skills are excellent!” And he would screech like a monkey. A number of his listeners called in to screech, too. The consensus was that I was an elitist, which is a right-wing term for someone smarter than you. One guy was so incensed he yelled for five minutes straight while I said things like That’s right, let it out…It’s good for you to let it out. I was on the jetway by now and other passengers could hear him ranting through my earpiece. I’m pretty sure they thought I was a social worker.

DePetro asked me (sneeringly) what I thought of Cindy Sheehan.

I told him Sheehan was a grief-stricken mother whose son died in a war she didn’t understand. I wanted to ask DePetro if he had any kids and how he might feel if one of them died in a war he didn’t understand. Could he bring himself to that sort of humility? But I had just found my seat and the woman next to me was a nun, so I hung up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was on a radio program.”

I felt a sudden urge to ask the nun if she could take confession from a Jew, if that was in any way allowed, because I had obviously sinned, I had conversed with men of unclean intentions, wantonly, on the public airwaves. But she was immersed in her magazine.

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 sbalmond@earthlink.net

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:

GIBSON:	WELL, YOU HAVE CONVINCED YOURSELF THAT SHE’S A LIAR—
ME:	I haven’t convinced myself. I’ve researched the facts, John. That’s what you do when you’re a rational adult. You research the facts, you—
GIBSON:	YOU DON’T SEEM TO WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING NEW. DO YOU WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THE WMD THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN HAD?

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.

GIBSON:	Did you think lying to a judge was a good thing?
ME:	Yeah, you know, that’s what all of us…lefties advocate. And I’m so glad that you think bullying me, an adjunct professor, is going to distract the American people from the fact that this administration is a disgrace and has conducted a foreign policy that is immoral. I’m so glad you think the American public is that stupid, John.
GIBSON:	CAN I PRETTY MUCH COUNT ON IT THAT THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE TEACHING YOUR STUDENTS THERE AT BOSTON COLLEGE…THAT WHEN A KID CAME INTO YOUR CLASS. IF HE DIDN’T REPEAT THIS CRAP EXACTLY, YOU WERE GOING TO FAIL THEM? DID YOU FAIL ANY OF THEM IN PARTICULAR?

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.

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.

Suddenly, I heard one of those metallic whooshing sounds, which meant the segment was being thrown back to the studio. Then I heard Sean Hannity’s voice blaring into my ear.

Canto XXIV

HANNITY:	Joining us now, Steve Almond. He resigned his position as an adjunct professor of English at Boston College when Secretary Rice was invited to campus. Welcome aboard, sir. Thanks for being with us. Steve, I guess it’s fairly obvious. You probably voted for John Kerry in the last election. So politics play any role in your position here?
ME:	I think actually morality plays a role. I just feel public officials shouldn’t lie to us, especially about matters that are as important as war.
HANNITY:	I got that. But did you—but you are politically a Democrat. You’re politically lefty. You voted for John Kerry, right?
ME:	I believe that politicians shouldn’t lie to the American people.
HANNITY:	I didn’t ask you that. Did you vote for John Kerry, sir?
ME:	And I’m telling you that I don’t believe that our public officials should lie, Democrat, Republican, or—

I should confess that this opening salvo caught me off guard, as did the speed with which the discussion had degenerated into an inquisition. Had I not been so acclimatized to the noxious atmosphere of the Hateocracy, I’m certain I would have lost my shit. As it was, I shook my head and chuckled sadly.

ME:	What is it that you want to say to me? Are you going to try to establish that I’m a lefty or Democrat? I believe that public officials shouldn’t lie, and Condoleezza Rice has lied repeatedly.

Hannity, now incensed, began to yell.

HANNITY:	I already know you voted for John Kerry, but you won’t admit it! Well, I’ll quote John Kerry, the guy that I suspect you voted for. He says, “If you don’t believe Saddam is a threat with nuclear weapons or WMDs, you shouldn’t vote for me.” Is the guy that you voted for a liar?
ME:	The Secretary of State, who has also been a part of prosecuting this war incredibly ineptly—
HANNITY:	All right, you can’t even answer a question. Is John Kerry a liar?

On this insinuating note, with Almond against the ropes and Hannity looking ready to devour a forty-ounce steak using just his eyeteeth, Colmes stepped in.

COLMES:	Steve, I don’t care whether you voted for Kerry or not—
ME:	Thank you. It’s a matter of morality. Not everything is politics. Some of it is basic morality.
COLMES:	Let me pursue a different line of questioning here. Why quit your job? Why not turn your back, or speak, or hold a protest rally, or hold an alternate ceremony to put forth your point of view?
ME:	Well, there are plenty of ways. For me, you know, it was an act of conscience. I didn’t want to collect a paycheck. It would be as if you worked at a TV station, for instance, and you were a strong advocate for women’s rights, and one of your colleagues, a powerful colleague, sexually harassed his employees. And you didn’t want to stand for that. You didn’t feel the TV station had done enough to punish him, and you might, as a matter of conscience, resign because of that.

Now the silence was profound. It was interrupted only by a faint rustling, which may or may not have been the sound of a thousand Fox interns dropping their loofahs in astonishment. Yes, I had dropped the O’Reilly bomb. I had made reference to his sex harassment case, and I had done so during prime time, on his very own network. It was precisely at this point, I like to imagine, that an executive decision was made, which involved a senior producer yelling into his headset something like this:

Good Christ! Code red! We’ve got a live one on the air! Repeat: CODE RED! We’re going to abort. Cue up the next ad block. Now! Go! Go-go-go!

But of course, it takes a while to cue up the next ad block, so they were stuck with me. Colmes looked at the camera, in that unbearably sexy quisling way of his.

COLMES:	I might, or I might use my platform to speak out, or I might do things behind the scenes to speak out that have nothing to do with what I would do publicly, but you chose to quit.
ME:	Well, I don’t think I’m really the issue here. I think Condoleezza Rice and her campaign of deception and this administration’s prosecution of an immoral war is the issue. There are no WMDs, unless you got them there at Fox News under your desk. And we’ve been hearing [these lies] for over three years and coming up on twenty thousand casualties, and the American people are getting sick of it—
HANNITY:	You know what? If that’s the case—and I suspect I’m right, and you voted for Kerry—you voted for a guy that made that exact same case as she did. What would that make you?
ME:	I’m sorry, the administration in power is the one that has gotten us into this mess, okay? You’re not going to blame it on Kerry—
HANNITY:	John Kerry voted for it.
ME:	You’re not going to blame it on Clinton—

Suddenly, bizarrely, I lost the audio feed. I assumed this was a simple technical glitch, a mistake. But no, that wasn’t it. They really and truly had pulled the plug on me. I ripped my earbud out and shouted, “You goddamn losers!”

Canto XXV

For a day or so, I felt exuberant, as if I had faced down the Hateocracy. The truth dawned on me only after I took a second look at the segment. My promised ten minutes of airtime had run 5:16, nearly half of which had been devoted to the footage from Boston College. By the time Hannity finished his initial cross-examination, less than two minutes remained. I had spoken for a grand total of twenty-five seconds. Something else I noticed: Several seconds after my veiled reference to O’Reilly, the background music that signals a cut to commercial had come on. The producers really had gone Code Red on my ass.

This, then, was my great victory—twenty-five seconds of free speech on Fox News.

Canto XXVI

Dante made his harrowing descent in the hopes he would find a path to paradise. And I do believe that I had some idea of paradise in mind when I resigned from BC and decided to throw my puny weight against the gnashing of the Hateocracy. Or maybe paradise is too grandiose a word.

What I had was more like a hunger for justice, one linked to a specific auditory memory of a newsreel I heard long ago, in which Joseph Welch, an elderly lawyer from Boston, implored Senator Joseph McCarthy to stop slandering one of the young lawyers on his staff. “Let us not assassinate this lad further,” Welch says, in a tone of exhausted despair. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

It didn’t happen quite this simply, but Welch’s statement has always played as the beginning of the end for McCarthy, the moment in which his purported crusade to protect the homeland collapsed and Americans could see that he was merely trying to make himself a star by turning us against each other. That’s what I was looking for—my Joseph Welch moment.

This no doubt has to do with my maternal grandparents, who were, as I’ve mentioned, the very people whose lives McCarthy ruined. They held fast to the outrageous notion that the bounty of the earth should be fairly divided among its citizens. They lived in fear for this belief, and my grandmother lost her job. So I take it personally when I see our democracy being hijacked by McCarthy’s descendants, those who cling to power not by seeking to solve common crises of state, but by demonizing the weak and the just.

I’m sorry to report that my own family of origin suffered from the same essential tyranny. My brothers and I lived—as McCarthy did, as the extreme right wing would have us all live—in a shame culture. It was either humiliate or be humiliated. No retreat, no compromise, no apologies. We savaged one another in direct correlation to our self-loathing. And so my dream of Joseph Welch, which is the dream of every embattled child: that a good and caring father will step in and rescue us from our destructive urges, will demand to see our decency, at long last.

My father was a good man. He tried to rescue us. But we had him outnumbered and outflanked. We were children, after all, the first true demagogues, and we behaved as children often do, choosing to be cruel to one another when we might have chosen to be kind.

It is a choice, after all.

This is the main reason Welch’s words have always haunted me, and the reason they once resonated so powerfully in our national psyche: not because he stood up to the bully of his era, but because he reminded us that McCarthy was, for all his monstrous actions, a human being capable of contrition.

You have done enough.

The precise tragedy of our present circumstance is not that conservatives in this country are incapable of compassion, but just the opposite: that they choose—as my brothers and I did—to ignore their best impulses day after day. There is no loving father, no Joseph Welch to stop them. And thus they turn to the glowering guardians of the Hateocracy, in the hope that the ecstasy of rage will cleanse their consciences.

As for the rest of us, we play our part. We worship the same false god of convenience, gulp the same burgers and happy pills, enjoy the same lives of plenty, slap bumper stickers on our slightly smaller cars, and thereby manage to convince ourselves we’re the good guys.

In some sense, though, the left has come to depend on the Hateocracy as much as the right. They have become convenient scapegoats for our own moral laxity. Maybe this is why the great and decent people of this country continue to allow cruel children to lead them: because if we insisted on adult leaders, we would all have to grow the fuck up.

Canto XXVII

The day after my appearance on H&C, a young woman called to invite me on Sean Hannity’s radio show. She promised Sean would let me speak this time. He wanted to engage in an honest debate. I told her I’d think about it—mostly, I suspect, for the sick pleasure of listening to her beg for the next few days. But I was done. I had spent two weeks absorbing the pathologies of these people, and felt utterly defeated by the experience. My career as a demagogue of the left was officially over.

This is what the Hateocracy does: They wear people down, into silence or cynicism. Yeats had it right: The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.

I do believe that Americans will look back upon this era some day and discern the seeds of their own ruin. History will regard the conservatism peddled by the Hateocracy as a contagion. But it gives me no joy to say any of this.

My daughter is an American.

Canto XXVIII

One final (bizarre) disclosure: My paternal grandfather, Gabriel Almond, was one of the political scientists who urged Condi Rice to join the faculty at Stanford, where she came to the attention of Bush the Elder. When my grandmother passed away five years ago, Rice—then the National Security Advisor—actually sent my grandfather a personal note of condolence.

Small world, right?

You have no idea.

A few weeks after the BC mishagoss, I flew to California to visit my family. We were all sitting around after dinner one night when my father said, more or less out of nowhere, “You know Condoleezza Rice was almost your aunt?”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“It’s true. Gramps tried to set her up on a blind date with your uncle Peter.”

My cousin Karla said, “Wasn’t she also supposed be my babysitter or something?”

“That’s true,” said Aunt Susyn. “Grandma asked her if she would look after you when you were a baby.”

“It was very inappropriate,” my mother added. “She was a young academic, not a babysitter.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “She actually dated you, Pete?”

He did not look pleased to have been reminded. “We had lunch.”

“So it’s true! I almost had an Aunt Condi!”

“It was one lunch,” Pete snapped. “At the faculty club. Gabriel brokered the whole thing.”

“No chemistry?” I said.

Pete shook his head. “She was dating an NFL player or something. I wasn’t exactly her type.”

Canto XXIX

I have only one more story to tell.

It does not take place in hell, though it does take place in Salem, Massachusetts, where, at this country’s dawn, the Hateocracy enjoyed a brief and famous outburst. I had come to Salem to read in a small bookstore.

This was a few months after my resignation. I had slipped back into my normal life of private triumphs and miseries. My descent was coming to seem more and more like some strange fever dream.

After the reading, a young man named Tyler came to get his book signed. He told me he thought maybe he wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know exactly. But he felt certain things when he read books and he wanted that, to be able to feel those things, and maybe to make other people feel them, too.

I looked at this kid and I knew right away that he was one of those who, had I still been teaching, would have crushed my heart with hope. Other people were waiting behind him, so I signed his book and handed it back to him.

“Thanks, man.” He paused for a second and looked down at his shoes. Hair fell into his eyes. “I was supposed to be in your class next year,” he mumbled finally.

Canto XXX

I’m sorry, Tyler.

I’m sorry about the whole damn shooting match.