(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  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 pursu
e 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.

&nbs
p; 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.