The Cat in the Hat for President

by Robert Coover

  It is no time for no, it is time for yes!

  It is time to elect our candidate!

  Here is the Cat who will clean up the mess:

  The Cat in the Hat for the Head of State!

  So go to bat for the Cat in the Hat!

  He’s the Cat who knows where it’s at!

  With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!

  Go! Go! The Cat in the Hat!

  They passed out buttons, introduced the Cat-Call (Me-You!), and yak-yakked their way through a cornball vaudeville routine with such awful gags as:

  Joe: Hello! Hello!

  NED: I said hello! Can you hear me, Joe?

  JOE: What is this, a party line?

  NED: Well, that’s what I’m calling about, Mr. Joe!—to tell you about our new party line!

  JOE: What line is that, Mr. Ned?

  NED: Why, a Fe-line, Mr. Joe! I’m talking about the next President of the United States!

  JOE: The next President! Who’s that, Mr. Ned?

  NED: Why, it’s the Cat in the Hat!

  JOE: I’m sorry, Mr. Ned, I didn’t get your predicate...?

  NED: A pretty cat? Well, no, he ain’t so pretty, Mr. Joe, but he’s got a lotta pussy-nality!

  JOE AND NED SING THE “CAT IN THE hAT CAMPAIGN SONG” WHILE PASSING OUT BUTTONS, THEN SOFT-SHOE OUT.

  It is no time to fear, it is time to cheer!

  It is time to play on your instrument!

  The New Day is near, the New Way is here!

  The Cat in the Hat for President!

  So go to bat for the Cat in the Hat!

  He’s the Cat who knows where it’s at!

  With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!

  Go! Go! The Cat in the Hat!

  BY EVENING MY BEAUTIFULLY PLANNED CONVENTION HAD turned into something of a circus. Regardless of political commitments, nearly everyone had taken to singing the Cat in the Hat song, and, even alongside their other pins, to wearing the Cat button—I even caught my man Riley with one of the damned things on. On the toilet walls: “What This Nation Needs Is More Pussy!” And sure enough, at the banquet that night, in pranced a hundred gorgeous milk-fed Midwestern coeds, dressed in tight elastic catskins, wearing the goofy hat, bow tie, and gloves, leaping in and out of laps and licking faces, sending up a delicious caterwaul of Me-You’s. The new gimmick of the night was a miniature replica of the Cat’s Hat with an elastic band for fastening under the chin—when you squeezed the Hat, it emitted the Cat-Call. “Keep it under your hat!” the girls purred as they passed them out, then whisked away, twirling their tails. For some reason, everyone kept grinning at me, apparently conjecturing that I’d arranged the whole gag, and since I still wasn’t sure just what was up, I grinned along with them, returned their winks, even—though only one time—squeezed the silly Hat.

  The Cat in the Hat himself appeared a day later right in the middle of my man Boone’s big parade and rally, breaking it up. It’s against tradition for a candidate to appear on the Convention floor before his final nomination. It’s against all propriety to intrude on another candidate’s rally. And the Cat’s performance itself was against every standard of Convention-floor behavior, not to say all probability. But that damned Cat couldn’t care less—in fact, this balmy flaunting of the rules of the game was to become the pattern, if not in fact the message, of his whole Presidential campaign.

  Boone, a Californian, had been nominated by the Governor of Kentucky, with handsome seconds from Alaska, Virginia, California, and Idaho. I was delighted. His symbols were coonskin caps (Boone-skins, his supporters were calling them) and b’ar guns (in fact, before politics, he’d been a chemist and later vice president of one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies, had never had any kind of gun in his hands before in his life) ; his slogans: “Explore the moon with Boone!” and “We want Boone soon!” A thousand frenetic, hollering, coonskin-capped, placard- and flag-waggling, bull-roaring, Madison-Avenue-b’ar-gun-toting demonstrators had piled in, pushed wildly to the front, seized the microphones to broadcast their chants, looking like they might decide to take the Convention by force, when the Cat in the Hat turned up. Clinking and clanking in on that goofy clean-up machine of his, the machine now bearing in red-white-and-blue letters his famous line: “Have No Fear of This Mess!”

  Maybe the Boone people thought the Cat was one of their own—certainly he was lugging a rusty old b’ar gun over what he had of a shoulder. At any rate, they went suddenly silent, quick as it takes to snap off the TV, and turned expectantly to the Cat, who said:

  “Hello! hello!

  How are you?

  Can you do

  What I can do?”

  Arms reached out from the clean-up machine, snatching Boone posters. The Cat shuffled them, passed them out again. Now they read: “Eat a prune at noon with Boone!”

  Another mechanical arm stretched forth and from the crowd plucked, by the seat of his honorable pants, Boone’s nominator, the Governor of the State of Kentucky, by image a rotund dignified Southern gentleman, already looking a little out of character in his Boone-skin cap, much more so now dangling, rump-high, over the Convention floor, the tail of his cap down between his eyes. The Cat in the Hat lowered him to the platform, whisked off his coonskin cap. Under it was another, oddly a bit larger than the first. The Cat pulled this one off, revealing yet another, larger still. The next coonskin lay on the Governor’s ears, the next flopped down over his eyes. As the Cat whisked off caps, the Governor gradually disappeared beneath them. Soon he was wearing a cap that covered his head and rested on his shoulders, then one that flopped down his shirt front, others that lay on his plump belly, reached to his knees, his shoes, until finally there was only one huge coonskin cap on the platform. The Cat lifted the cap: no Governor! Shouts of amazement, even fright, from the Convention floor. The Cat, though smiling still, looked perplexed. Silence fell. The Cat doffed his own Hat, and there, on his head, in the lotus position, sat the Governor of Kentucky. “Me-You!” the Governor said, then clapped a pudgy hand over his mouth, gazed sheepishly at the now wildly cheering, wildly hooting crowd.

  The Cat fired his b’ar gun suddenly, a tremendous explosion and cloud of smoke: when it cleared, all the Boone-skins had turned into live raccoons which were scampering madly about, sending the ladies shrieking up onto chairs with lifted skirts. Sure enough, under most of the Boone-skins, the delegates had been wearing the miniature Cat Hats, which they now merrily squeezed, raising a din of happy Cat-Calls. Some of the coons balanced balls on their noses, some rolled and tumbled, but most of them started humping each other. The whole nationally televised Convention floor was a mad melee of shrieking laughing girls, Cat-Hat-squeezing delegates, and copulating coons. I fainted dead away. Later, they told me that the Cat fired one final salvo on his b’ar gun, and a little flag popped out that said:

  “Come along!

  Follow me!

  Don’t be afraid!

  There are many more games

  That we haven’t yet played!”

  And then he’d clinkclanked out of the hall in his clean-up machine, the Governor of Kentucky squeezed, wide-eyed and jolly, in beside him, most of the delegates deliriously Me-Youing along in his wake.

  Riley never even got nominated. It took hours to clear the hall of coons—in fact, as far as I know, they’ve got the run of the place yet—and anyway the delegates never came back. In the media nothing but the Cat in the Hat: he was a national sensation, though the media people themselves, infected by it all, were filing haphazard and even outrageous stories. The Cat, though in great demand, slipped out of sight, but his disruptive spirit lingered on. The delegates were completely out of hand, and the banquets that night were slapstick, table-dumping, pie-throwing affairs. Only one of my scheduled speakers ha
d the nerve to carry on—someone rigged his mike through a tape recorder so that everything came out backwards; when he paused, his scrambled voice carried on, and when he spoke the speakers went silent. “What’s happening?” he cried and sat down abruptly on a miniature Cat Hat someone had planted in his chair, issuing a lusty ME-YOU!—had a heart attack, and nearly died. Things were that serious. And through it all shuffled Ned and Joe with their lame-brain hayseed routines:

  NED: Say, Mr. Joe, our nation has got cat problems!

  JOE: How do you mean, cat problems, Mr. Ned? Can you make me a list?

  NED: Make you a list? Why, Mr. Joe, I’ll make you a catty-log!

  Joe smiles as the audience guffaws and issues the Cat-Call.

  NED: I mean, things is catty-clysmic, Mr. Joe. They are catty-plectic, catty-strophic, and all cattywamptious !

  JOE: That bad, hunh? Well, what’re we gonna do about it, Mr. Ned?

  NED: Well, Mr. Joe, I say you gotta send a cat in to do a cat’s job.

  JOE: Send a cat in to do a cat’s job? How do you mean, Mr. Ned?

  NED: Well, Mr. Joe, supposing your house was full of rats, what would you do?

  JOE: Unh-hunh, I think I see what you mean, Mr. Ned! The Cat in the Hat for President sounds like a good idea.

  NED: It’s not just a good idea, Mr. Joe—it’s a catty-gorical im-purr-ative!

  AS I KNEW SOONER OR LATER THEY WOULD, THEY CORnered me. Intermediaries arranged it. In a locked hotel room. Darkened, shades pulled. Sixty-buck fifth of whiskey between us. With them, to my astonishment, was my old friend Sam, popular governor of a northwestern state and a Favorite Son candidate for the Presidential nomination, one of the men I’d counted on to break any possible deadlock between Riley and Boone. All three tense and serious, no comedy now.

  At a late-afternoon press conference, I’d issued some pretty harsh statements about the Cat. His forces, most vocally Ned and Joe, had countered with accusations of king-making and obstructionism and even senility.

  Attempting that evening to put my Convention back together again, I’d discovered a terrible foolishness, a vast derision, a widespread breakdown of all I’d considered solid and meaningful in American politics. As far as I could tell, Riley and Boone were not so much running neck and neck as skidding rump and rump. In a desperate gesture, I’d pressured Boone into agreeing to throw his support to Riley upon the latter’s expected nomination the next day, but it was no longer certain Boone had any support. I’d sought out the Favorite Sons, but most of them were wearing those silly little Cat Hats and chasing drunkenly after the catskinned coeds. The sane ones left had seemed to be clustering around my friend Sam, as I’d hoped, but Sam was nowhere to be found. When I encountered him at last, in the locked hotel room, cheek by jowl with Joe and Ned, I knew that all was lost. The laws in Sam’s state forbade his running for reelection and he had no chance for the Senate. I knew that, more than anything else, he wanted to be Secretary of State, and I figured he’d made his deal. But I hadn’t made mine, and I wasn’t about to.

  In spite of their attacks and the reported rumors I was soon to be dumped, I knew they needed me—needed my long experience, my innumerable contacts, the accumulation of favors owed me, my weight with party regulars, my notorious capacity for political prophecy. As for my part, I didn’t need them so much as I needed their absence. But I respected their sudden power and knew I’d have to negotiate. I was trying my damnedest to see Joe as a Vice President, Ned as Secretary of Agriculture or something. As a result, we never really got on the same circuit. As we drank, Joe was talking about air power and the Red menace, Ned about technology and history, and I was trying to pry out of them what they wanted for themselves. Finally, I turned to Sam. “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “Well, as you know, Sooth,” said Sam, who was, almost ineluctably, to get tagged Sam-I-Am by the media in the campaign to come, “I live existentially. I’m not as confident as these fellows are that the Cat is going to be our next President, but I do believe nobody else is going to get nominated by our party. For good or bad, Sooth, we’ve got to accept the Cat’s success and timing.”

  I grunted depreciatively. I knew he was right. But I was too disgusted to admit it.

  “Besides, as I’ve learned, the Cat has many virtues. He’s fresh and original, and famous, too. A whole new generation of voters, Sooth, has grown up on his tales. He’s a living legend.”

  “So is Woody Woodpecker,” I said grumpily.

  Sam smiled. “Well, okay, he’s something of a nut, it’s true, or at least that’s the way he chooses to come on. Yet it’s a charismatic kind of zaniness, Sooth. He’s funny. He’s captivating. And ultimately I think he’s sane. Did you see what he did to that Convention today?”

  “Are you kidding?” I’d seen the replay of my swoon on the six o’clock newscast, and I supposed that Sam had, too. Stuffy, they called me. Cat Shatters Brown’s Bore, said the press. “But, damn it, Sam, what are we running here, a political party or a carnival freak show? You want a deal, I’ll make you one. But I won’t see my party given over to a bunch of short-sighted crackpots without a fight!”

  Sam winced; the others seemed offended. They leaned back. “Let’s let him talk to Clark,” Joe said.

  And so that was how and when I met Clark. Large. Pale. Soft. He emerged from the obscurity of the room like an apparition. He was ugly, stark, nearly expressionless, spoke in a monotone—yet so charged the space around him as to seemingly snuff out the rest of the world. Joe, Sam, and Ned were surely there all the while, but I didn’t see them. I recognized my new antagonist intuitively: the political visionary. Suddenly, though still indistinctly, the Cat in the Hat movement took on a new dimension. For one blinding instant, I glimpsed beyond the Cat’s antics toward something new and extraordinary, beyond the disruption of National Conventions toward a vast reconstruction of human life. And then, as instantly, it faded. I resent, instinctively, such illusions. “Mr. Brown,” he said with a slight nod of his head, but without extending his hand, “they call me Clark.”

  He sat, or perhaps he was sitting all the time. There was nothing, directly, to fear from him. Yet I was afraid. My own lucid perception of the vectors of politics was fast dissolving. In self-defense, I got right to the point: “What do you want?”

  “A new world, Mr. Brown.”

  “Full of rutting raccoons,” I said derisively.

  “We had to work with what you gave us.”

  “What does a hall full of fucking coons got to do with government?” I asked angrily.

  “What does grown twentieth-century men wearing their skins on their heads have to do with government?” he countered.

  “It’s a metaphor, Clark. That’s politics.”

  “Exactly.” A brief smile seemed to flick over his face. “You have a reputation, Mr. Brown, for phenomenally accurate political analysis. Yet not only do you seem unable to understand why your metaphor failed and ours worked, you seem unable to accept the simple fact that this is what has happened.”

  “All right,” I admitted, “it worked today. Maybe. But tomorrow the building employees will probably be out on strike, refusing to clean up all the coon shit. Then what?”

  “If it were necessary, the Cat would have them wallowing in it up to their ears and loving it,” said Clark calmly. “Though of course it won’t be necessary.”

  “Okay, okay, I accept the fact. Now what?”

  “No, Mr. Brown, I’m afraid you don’t. You came here hoping to make a deal. You still hope to make a deal. But the revolution has begun, Mr. Brown. There are no deals to be made.”

  Something whistled through me like a cold damp wind: illusions, I knew, could blow holes in you. “But what’s the Cat in the Hat got to do with your so-called revolution?” I asked with what little sarcasm I could still muster.


  “Most immediately, Mr. Brown, the Cat is funny. And dramatic. We have a terrible need for the extraordinary. We are weary of war, weary of the misery under our supposed prosperity, weary of dullness and routine, weary of all the old ideas, weary of all the masks we wear, the roles we play, the foolish games we sustain. The Cat cuts through all this. We laugh. For a moment, we are free.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but clowns never win elections.”

  “I see you are still resisting,” said Clark. “In your adoration of the past, Mr. Brown, you have isolated yourself from the actual and the possible. It is the great Western disease.”

  “What? Freedom from illusions?” I asked dryly.

  “No, history.” Clark was utterly imperturbable. Or else he had a worse sense of humor even than I did. “The mystification of history produced by our irrational terror of reality. If you’ll pardon the pun, Mr. Brown, we need to perform a kind of racial historectomy on all humankind.”

  I smiled politely, though Clark did not return it. “So your Cat is going to wield the surgical blade,” I said, the smile having soured. “With Tricks and Voom and Things like that.” Still, I knew what a random business being was, what a hoax, what a hobble history could be. Hadn’t I been thumbing my nose at it all my life with my practiced anonymity? Clark had got to me there.

  “He’s the first step, Mr. Brown, that’s all. Remember, I speak of a total revolution, not merely this election.”

  “Now you’re resisting, Clark. There’s still the election to be won. Otherwise, your would-be revolution doesn’t get off the ground.”