by Jane Smiley
“Or it would look ugly, like the Brobdingnagians.”
“Who are they?”
As he tested how close he could get to the edge of her labia and whether he could make out the hood of the clitoris, she said, “Did you ever read Gulliver’s Travels? When Gulliver goes to the land of the giants, they are very kind to him, but he can’t stand the sight of their pores and moles. Like high-definition TV.”
“Well, I can’t see your pores. I can see your hairs, but not really well. When they are in focus, they seem quite bright, as if something in the digitization makes them sparkle, and when they’re out of focus, they seem quite soft and welcoming.” He widened the camera angle, and the rest of her torso came back into the frame. He closed in on her navel, then on her right breast, and then on her right nipple. She said, “Do you like it so far?”
“Yes. Open your mouth.”
She opened her mouth. He looked at her whole face, then closed in on her lips and teeth, after that her tongue, which was somewhat pinker and even more sparkly than her labia, because, of course, it was moist. Her teeth glistened, too. She stuck out her tongue. Because the aperture was almost completely shut down, her tongue seemed to balloon at him and then retreat, as she made a point of the tip and then put it away. He said, “Eat the banana now.” She moved out of the frame. He didn’t watch her with his other eye: he had to keep that eye closed because it was nearsighted. He held the camera steady on the pillow she had been leaning against, and then she appeared again, or, rather, the banana appeared again, peeled and pale, all its little dimples and ridges magnified in the frame. He said, “I never realized what a pleasing color bananas are.” Her mouth bit off the top of the banana, and he went for a wider shot, a shot of her whole face as she took the banana down, inch by inch. She said, “You aren’t actually filming, right? Because I didn’t see you put in a tape.”
“No, just experimenting.”
“How do I look?”
He took the camera down. He said, “You look great. I love how you look. I want to fuck you.”
“Oh, yes, you do. I reciprocate your sentiments.” She smiled again.
“Oh, yes, I do want to fuck you. I should have taken advantage of that big one when I had it.” He sighed.
Elena sat up. She said, “You’re sighing.”
“I want to fuck.”
“Then stop the war.”
He lowered the camera. After a moment, he said, though with a smile, “I’m not sure your analysis is accurate.”
“What else could it be? We were fine until Thursday. Even when Colin Powell went before the Security Council and showed all those aluminum tubes and aerial photographs, we were fine. You were fine.”
In fact, Max thought that this was a rather amusing line of thought, so he went along with it. Whenever she talked about it, it was a relief, better in every way, he thought, that erectile dysfunction not be a personal matter. He especially did not want her wondering about her attractiveness or desirability, and her geopolitical theory was at least better than “I’m just not feeling very sexy lately,” an explanation he had relied on in the past. Because, of course, as soon as you said that, you started counting up dates and times and trying to decide when “lately” began and if “lately” might be the dawning of a new era. He was fifty-eight, after all. Fifty-eight had the air of seeming old, and even though when he saw other men his age on TV he was astonished at how old they looked in comparison with himself, when he passed himself in a plate-glass window he sometimes didn’t recognize the Max he thought he remembered. She said, “You can be sure that he is not suffering any difficulties. I’m sure it’s in the DNA. Don’t you remember, in the first Gulf War, how the dad really seemed to just get happy as soon as he decided to invade? Here he’d spent two years in the White House, shuffling around, looking depressed, and then he got that coalition together and his whole demeanor changed. You could tell it gave him a boost just to be attacking someone. He was smiling more, standing up straighter. It’s only people with consciences that actually suffer when the country goes to war.”
Max set the camera inside the box, and removed the box to the floor beside the bed. She was glaring—though, he knew, not at him. After a moment, he said, “Honey. In the last two and a half years, you have done everything you could. You’ve protested and voted and marched and written letters to the editor. You’ve subscribed to progressive newsletters and magazines. You’ve signed petitions and made sure that none of this has been done in your name. You’ve sent in money and you’ve made signs. I know you would never take up arms or go outside the system, so you’ve exploited every single path you have open to you. Maybe you should take solace in the fact that you’ve done your best, that lots of others agree with you, and that at some point the pendulum will swing back. Maybe you should relax.”
“Relax!”
“Well, that’s the wrong word. Maybe you should accept that it’s out of your hands and that events are going to take their course.”
“Maybe I should, but I can’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I can’t stop feeling offended. Here’s what I think. If they hadn’t cheated to win the election, I might feel different. First of all, they prevented likely Democratic voters from voting by manipulating the voting lists. They knew they were doing it and intended to do it. Then a cousin of the Bushes on Fox TV called Florida and the election for Bush, even though the election was at least too close to call. Then, when it looked like the recount was going to go our way, they sent in thugs to intimidate the recounters, and after that, the Supreme Court stopped the recount, even though Scalia and Thomas had blatant conflicts of interest. And then they gloated. Cheating and gloating. I mean, people give up power all the time, and it’s difficult to do, but in this case the power was stolen because they cheated. Even the Supreme Court justices knew they were cheating, and it’s their job not to cheat and to understand cheating and to prevent cheating.”
Max shook his head, though discreetly. “It always seemed to me more like what happened was that they gave in to temptation. Yes, they had set up a scam by which Jeb was going to give Florida to his brother, but it was only circumstances that made that one little scam so important. If Gore had won Tennessee, even, the Florida thing would be just one little corrupt wrinkle—”
“But you asked me why I still care. It was the aggressive, open gloating. It was more than a lack of shame. Not only were we supposed to acknowledge that they had the power, we were supposed to admire the idea of cheating as a method of attaining power. They preened themselves upon being corrupt and morally bankrupt. If he had gone to his inauguration and said, ‘I know I cheated, and I know most of you didn’t elect me, and I know I am indifferent to all issues of right and wrong as they apply to me personally, but I’m here and I plan to make the most of it,’ I wouldn’t be so angry.”
Max laughed. The fact was, there was an element of delight that he felt about everything she said. But he tried to speak seriously: “I always think it’s funny that the main thing you want is for them to see themselves as you see them, when that’s exactly the very thing that they can’t do. Honey, you’re never going to get that from anyone. It doesn’t matter who they are, they get to have that one thing, their own point of view.”
“It kills me that the sociopaths have taken over everything. I mean, okay, all through the eighties and nineties we had everyone screaming about how great the free market is, how wonderful it was that everything in the world was going to be defined by self-interest and monetary relations. There were going to be no regulations or sense of obligation, and people were to accept that they were tools of the economy, and the economy was not to have any higher goal than expanding. And the economy was going to be the nation. I hate all these theories that you could get something for nothing, that aggregate selfishness somehow turns into a humane society when, quite evidently, it does not. And then the voters did turn away from pure free-market capitalism. They did v
ote for a guy who cared about global warming, for example. But then the free-marketers stole it anyway, and in the process, they showed that they were as they had appeared all along, that they had no principles. The playing field was not level, there were no rules, and it was just like we always knew the free market really was, not healthy competition, but dog-eat-dog. No, not dogs. Dogs have some sense of propriety. More like crocodile-eat-crocodile.”
“But why do you care?” He thought, We’re here, in this room. In this room, things are fine.
“Because it’s not human.”
“It is human.”
“Then it’s not American.”
“It is American. Winning without caring is completely American. Do you know what a ‘knock-down, drag-out fight’ is?”
“I don’t know. A bad fight.”
“A knock-down, drag-out fight was a certain type of combat that people in frontier towns used to set up and wager on. Every sort of tactic was legal—including ear-biting, eye-gouging, tongue-biting, testicle-crushing. Men would fight, and other men would watch the mayhem and cheer it on. That was an American form of recreation. Genocide was American. Slavery was American. Witch-burning was American. What conservatives hate about liberals is that liberals repudiate cruelties that are truly American in the name of something larger or somehow alien. Conservatives don’t necessarily embrace those cruelties, but they don’t mind them, either, because they think they are natural and because they are American. Conservatives figure that, if Americans killed off the native population, then so be it, since Americans did it, it must be okay.”
“If Americans invade Iraq, then so be it, it must be okay because Americans are doing it.”
“Yes.”
“Do you expect me to agree with that logic?”
“No, but I expect you to recognize that it is ineradicable, that it’s the price you pay for living here.”
“You aren’t offended?”
“I am offended, but I’m not surprised. You seem surprised or shocked.”
“Well, I don’t know that I am. I don’t think I’m naïve. But the death and destruction that comes from that sort of logic seems so pointless. If you can foresee the waste, then why suffer it?”
“You know, I’ll tell you a story,” said Max. “I just thought of it, and I don’t quite know how it applies, but it seems to. Maybe, after I tell it, we’ll both relax and I’ll get an erection.” He smiled. “But maybe not. Anyway, when I was in college, there was a kid on my floor who I sometimes talked to, and one night we ran into each other in the coffee room really late, maybe two or three a.m. He had an odd name—Ulli—and I asked him sort of idly where he was from, because he didn’t have any sort of accent. He was from Germany. Well, I had never met a German before, not a real German, and it was, what, 1962, so people were very aware of East and West Germany and World War II and everything. And then he told me, without me asking, how his family had gotten through the war. He said that he had an older brother, born in 1933, and another sister, born in 1938. His parents were born in 1910, and they were prominent, wealthy Berliners. On both sides, his family was full of Lutheran ministers and theologians, all the way back to Luther, but his father and grandfather had a dry-goods business, and they were successful and the family was well-to-do. Nevertheless, it was a closely connected extended family, and all the relatives knew each other and spent time at one another’s houses. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Ulli’s father, a man named Klaus, and his mother, a woman named Uta, were not convinced that Hitler was a decent man or that the Nazis were good for Germany, and throughout the thirties, Ulli’s father continued not only to serve Jews in his shop and to maintain, as far as he could, his Jewish connections, he also went every day to some kind of café that was run by a Jew he knew. Toward the end of the thirties, two SS guards were stationed outside this shop, and every day Klaus greeted them as he walked through the door. They greeted him, and he greeted them, and he always greeted them formally—‘Guten Tag, Herr Doktor Kommandant Wolfgang Binder,’ or whatever. He never in any way showed disrespect, or even irritation, toward the guards, but he always sat down, in the same sort of overtly dignified way, with the café owner, and stayed for half an hour and had a cup of coffee. Eventually, of course, the café owner disappeared, and the café was closed, but Klaus continued to conduct his life with complete integrity, you might say. He never allowed the Nazis, or his relatives, to dictate to him how he was to treat the people he met on the street, and though he never spoke up unasked, he also never kept his opinion to himself when he was asked. Ulli’s brother told him that the scariest thing was after the fall of Stalingrad, in 1942, when the Germans, including all the Germans who had been resisting or doubtful, gave up and, at least on the surface, became Nazis because it seemed then as though there was no alternative. Ulli had a picture, which he later showed me, of the street where they lived in Berlin. There was a big parade celebrating the victory at Stalingrad, and flying at every single window was a Nazi flag. Every single window except the three windows belonging to Klaus and Uta, which were closed and not flying any flags. Ulli didn’t know who had taken the picture—his father or some informant—but it was a picture he was very proud of, and he kept it in the frame he had of pictures of his parents, between their pictures and the backing. Some of Ulli’s relatives never forgave his parents for resisting. I’m sure some other people never forgave them for not doing more, I don’t know. He did say that they had become atheists as a result of the fact that all the Lutheran ministers in the family had supported Hitler. But Ulli was proud of them because they had remained more or less themselves in spite of pressure. He didn’t call them heroes, and I don’t think he thought of them as heroes, but I think he thought that they took into consideration all of the pressures they felt—including the pressures of having to protect and care for two small children—and they acted for the best. The thing that strikes me now, though, is that, even though they might have wished that things had turned out differently, they had no occasion to feel remorse.”
“But remorse isn’t what I’m trying to avoid. The destruction of the country is what I’m trying to avoid.”
“But do countries get destroyed? Germany and Russia aren’t destroyed. Hitler lasted twelve years, Stalin lasted about thirty or so, and Communism itself only lasted about seventy years. Milosevic lasted a few years. In Iran, it’s been twenty-five years, but I heard that the younger generation doesn’t pay much attention to the Islamic revolution anyway. Yes, there may be a political convulsion, but the country and most of the people outlast it.”
“But we aren’t a country like that. We are a country based on a certain set of ideas about how things are done—how governing is done and how wars are fought, and how the private and the public sectors limit each other’s power. If those ideas are destroyed, then there is no country. There is no ‘United States,’ there’s only something else, like non-Canadian North America. ‘England’ and ‘France’ are countries. ‘The United States’ is an abstraction about how to accommodate diversity and unity at the same time. When one faction seizes power and ignores everyone else and just adopts a try-and-stop-me sort of attitude, then the whole system is put at risk. I don’t see how they don’t understand that.”
“They don’t understand it because they don’t care. Or because they see the country as being based on being special or making it economically, or being victorious, or some sort of social Darwinism. Maybe it’s just tribal. For liberals, the question is between right and wrong, but for conservatives, the question is between me-and-mine and not-me-and-not-mine. And anyway, the way the government is supposed to work has often been used as a fig leaf for simply getting what you want. What do you think the motto ‘Don’t tread on me’ was all about? Independence came first, and trying to organize came second. Not being told what to do is the first and foremost American value, not checks and balances. But I see that as our salvation as well as our danger. Are they able to tell you what to do? Are they able
to tell me what to do? Are they able to tell anyone at the offices of that magazine you read, The Nation, what to do? No, they are not. Don’t tread on me. Even if the government ends up being entirely corrupted, millions and millions of people will still adhere to the ‘Don’t tread on me’ principle. Guess what? Waldo Salt was purged by the right wing of his day, and he came back to write, yes, Taras Bulba, but then Midnight Cowboy and Serpico and Coming Home. Yes, he was gone for ten years, and for him they were ten years of trouble and hardship, but he was back for almost twenty years, and he regained everything he’d lost and more. Ulli’s parents were no doubt terrified and horrified, but they lived to have Ulli, who lived to respect and love them for the hardships they endured.”
“A lot of people in Iraq aren’t going to live.”
“You are absolutely right, and I would not have sacrificed them, either, but opinion is divided in Iraq, too. You can accept that without agreeing with the war, can’t you?”
“I can accept that.”
“You are not in danger.”
“How do you know?”
“What is it you always say, that the statistical likelihood of any given member of the Evangelical Free Church of Sedalia, Missouri, getting blown up in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, and so why do they vote for the congressman who authorizes the Patriot Act? Well, the statistical likelihood of you, Elena, getting arrested for terrorist connections is infinitesimal, too, as is the statistical likelihood of this house being stormed by an alliance of right-wing Christians, NRA adherents, and Halliburton-employed mercenaries. I won’t say it’s impossible. I won’t say that. But I will say it’s unlikely. It’s so unlikely that we don’t have to prepare for it.”