Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  * * *

  They were the last great rock band that didn’t think there was something a bit embarrassing about being in a rock band. There are thousands of bands around at any given time that don’t think rock is the least bit funny, but rarely is one of them good. With G N’ R, no matter how sophisticated you felt yourself to be about pop music (leaving aside for now the paradoxical nature of that very social category), you couldn’t entirely deny them. They were the first band I got to be right about with my older brother. It was that way for a lot of people in my generation. All my youth, my brother had been force-feeding me my musical taste—“Def Leppard is shit; listen to the Jam”—and now there was finally one band I wouldn’t have to live down; and I recall the tiny glow of triumph, blended with fraternity, that I felt when one day he said, “Dude, you were right about Guns N’ Roses. That’s a good record.” That was Appetite, of course. Things got strange after that.

  You read things that say Nirvana made Guns N’ Roses obsolete. But Guns N’ Roses were never made obsolete. They just sort of disintegrated.

  Closer to the case is that G N’ R made Nirvana possible. When you think about the niche that Nirvana supposedly created and perfected—a megaband that indie snobs couldn’t entirely disavow, no matter how badly they wanted to—G N’ R got there first. Or almost there. They dressed silly. They didn’t seem to know the difference between their good songs and their crap songs. But we have to remember, too, how they came along at a time when bands with singers who looked like Axl and thrust their hips unironically, and lead players who spread their legs and reeled off guitar-god noodling weren’t supposed to be interesting, melodically or culturally or in any other way. G N’ R were. They were also grotesque and crass and stupid sometimes, even most of the time. Even almost all of the time. But you always knew you were seeing something when you saw them.

  Shouldn’t the band just get back together? Don’t they know how huge that’d be? Dana Gregory told me Slash and Izzy will never play full-time with Axl again: “They know him too well.”

  I don’t know him at all. Maybe if his people had let me talk to him, he’d have bitten and struck me and told me to leave my fucking brats at home, and I could transcend these feelings. As it is, I’m left listening to “Patience” again. I don’t know how it is where you are, but in the South, where I live, they still play it all the time. And I whistle along and wait for that voice, toward the end, when he goes, Ooooooo, I need you. OOOOOOO, I need you. And on the first Ooooooo, he finds this tissue-shredding note. It conjures the image of someone peeling his own scalp back, like the skin of a grape. I have to be careful not to attempt to sing along with this part, because it can make you sort of choke and almost throw up a little bit. And on the second OOOOOOO, you picture just a naked glowing green skull that hangs there vibrating gape-mouthed in a prison cell.

  Or whatever it is you picture.

  AMERICAN GROTESQUE

  The first American revolution was fought over socialism, in 1609. This is rarely mentioned. Even before slavery and the Indian genocides, it’s our founding schism.

  In that year, a ship called the Sea Venture was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. Shakespeare based The Tempest in part on her story. She’d been on her way to relieve the struggling infant Jamestown colony in Virginia. So the ship hadn’t even reached here yet—that’s how early this was.

  Among the passengers were several of separatist tendencies, the Brownists and Familists, whose ideas about society and Christianity had been shaped by the radical sectarian movements that rose up before the English Civil War. These were the parents, then, of the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers (the people you read about in Christopher Hill’s 1972 classic, The World Turned Upside Down). Most of those movements contained at least some communitarian element.

  The passengers made it ashore and right away set to work building another ship.

  Some of them did. The others said, What are we doing? Why are we killing ourselves to get to Jamestown, where they’ll put us to work as colonial drones until we starve or get eaten by heathens, when we have everything we need on this island? Fresh fruit, seafood, plenty of space. Let us live here in common, worshipping God and sharing the bounty of the earth, and no man shall be master to any other.

  Nor was there any indigenous population in Bermuda. It was terra pura, pure soil.

  What happened? The ones who intended to go to Jamestown tried to imprison, banish, and execute the ones who wanted to stay. The latter ran off into the forest.

  The governor killed one of their leaders, a man named Henry Paine, to set an example. He wanted to hang him, but Paine begged to be shot, as more befitting a gentleman. His last recorded words were “The governor can kiss my arse.” Those were his exact words.

  In the end, almost everyone went to Jamestown and perished.

  * * *

  Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching.

  Actually, at this moment we are massing around a parade float that will guide us from Freedom Plaza to the steps of the Capitol building.

  You rarely see a lone parade float, one that’s not in a line with others. It gives this thing the look of a ship on a sea of people. The sea is us. (In a different mood it might look like a hayride wagon gone wrong and run into a mob.)

  A woman calls to us from the wagon-ship. She’s about sixty; we don’t see her well. She has a microphone, but the sound system it’s connected to can’t compete with this level of crowd noise, so we don’t hear much. Another day, this would be annoying. Today it’s thrilling. We’re too many even for ourselves, and more are coming. As many of the signs say, silent majority no more.

  The woman introduces someone; she says we may have seen him on the Internet. In the past week or so, he’s become a YouTube sensation. He recorded himself at home with his webcam, just talking, speaking from his heart about what he feels is happening to his nation, the trouble it’s headed toward if good people don’t make a stand. He’s a brown-haired man in his thirties. In the video, he said something, used a phrase that resonated. If you’ve seen it, you know the phrase; some of us haven’t seen it and can’t hear well enough to catch the phrase today, but we feel the tone. Something like: “I want my America back.” Or, “What happened to my America?”

  A guy behind me is holding an ingenious sign he’s made. He’s cut out the mouth from a giant cardboard poster of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s face, creating a hole, a gaping maw, and attached a bag to the back of it, like a corn hole at the fair. He’s handing out Lipton tea bags to people and urging them to “tea-bag Nancy Pelosi.” People are doing it and laughing, even ladies. Pelosi, with her giant crazy eyes, gulps the tea bags eagerly.

  It’s only fair. Liberals made fun of us because, at first, some of us didn’t know what “tea-bagging” meant—that it meant dipping your testicles into a woman’s or, if you tend that way, another fella’s open mouth—and a few of us, the older ones, may have referred to ourselves for a brief span as “tea-baggers,” in ignorance and in innocence. Now we’re turning the joke back on them. No one with a sense of humor gets hurt.

  Standing on a garbage can and commanding a lot of attention is a strange figure. A small man or woman—you can’t see enough of its body to tell—holds a handmade sign that reads YES I AM. The creature wears an Obama mask. When people holler “Obama!” it looks in their direction and does a little shuffle. Atop the Obama mask sits a fake gold crown. Obama thinks he’s a king! (Is that what YES I AM means? Yes, I am a king?) The king has on a bright purple pimp’s coat with faux-leopard-skin trim. An African king? It looks like something you’d see and turn away from in a Southern antiques shop. We do turn away, after taking a pic.

  You can’t move sideways as easily as you could a minute ago. The march is slowly moving. To the Capitol!

  The date of this march has been carefully chosen. Indeed, the date is the name of the march. This is the 9/12 March. “9/12” refers to a movement begun by Glenn Beck, of Fox News, who’s monitorin
g the events from the studio. Glenn calls on us to return as a nation to the way we were on the day after September 11, when there was no red and blue, no left and right, just Americans, unified, ready. People in New York City had clapped in the streets for Bush, people who hadn’t voted for him and wouldn’t in 2004 either. He was the president.

  Is it strange to feel nostalgia for that day? That was the first day of some kind of war. People’s remains still lay smoldering in the wreckage of those buildings. A time of deep psychic trauma for untold numbers of people, it seems a day that only someone with the most distant and abstract connection to it would want to revisit, much less re-create, and that nothing short of a near-galactic narcissism could bring a person to suggest enshrining it as a state of being. But we didn’t name the march. Beck named it, although he disavows ownership and is absent today. On TV, in describing his role, he puts it like this: “If you build it, they will come.”

  Beck is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top.

  How many of us are here? As is typical with political-crowd estimates, the question will become charged in the coming weeks, with wildly high guesses (between 1.5 and 2 million, the figure getting passed around today at the march) down to some probably slightly grouchy ones offered later by city employees, who put the number at roughly sixty thousand. Perhaps the fairest count would place it at about seventy-five thousand. What matters at a march is that it feel large, and it doesn’t take much to feel like an army.

  Every so often someone shouts, “Can you hear us now?” (It’s a phrase of the day, like “I want my America back.”) The response to these calls is most often a smile and chuckle from people in hearing range. You know how, when you’re at a concert and someone shouts something funny from the crowd, there’s a tight smile people do while scanning for the one who did it—that’s what we do when someone yells, “Can you hear us now?”

  This tickled reaction reminds you of something, which is that our march is in part—we could even say mostly—an act of mass irony. Conservatives do not march. We shake our heads and hold signs while lefties march. But today we are marching. We are “marching.” (We can march, too.)

  That explains why so many of us believe there could be 2 million people here, many more even than came to the Obama inauguration, which paralyzed the city (whereas we have not even impeded traffic). It’s that none of us have ever been in a march before.

  For the first time in our history, a black man lives in the White House, and today’s is the first massive protest against his administration, and 99.9999 percent of us are white and fan-followers of race-baiting pundits—and mind you, this is in America, where you can’t walk into a convenience store without having or witnessing at least three intense, awkward, occasionally inspiring moments of racial tension—but despite all that, today has “nothing to do with race.” This phenomenon will be known to future Americans as the “Race Miracle of 9/12.”

  As evidence, when you approach the Capitol—surely America’s most stirring man-made view, where you stare into the gray shadows behind those columns and realize you’re witnessing the stone projection of a psychic landscape, a landscape that is not this country but the idea of this country, the very heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers (you’re “caught literally and physically,” as a quotation inscribed into the asphalt of Freedom Plaza had put it, “in L’Enfant’s dream”)—an unexpected sight awaits you there: a dark black man, wearing dark glasses, on a video screen. He’s here with us in person, but you can’t see him because of the crowd. On the screen he turns and speaks directly to the other black man, the one in the White House.

  He’s the Reverend C. L. Bryant, a conservative preacher from Louisiana. This is his moment.

  “Politicians have built walls,” he says. “Walls of misunderstanding” (we roar approval), “walls of racism” (louder), “walls of classism” (louder still).

  “And to quote Ronald Reagan, when he spoke to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Berlin Wall,” Bryant says, his preacher voice intensifying, our own volume trebling, “Mr. Obama, tear down these walls!”

  God knows what this means, but he’s on our side.

  There is open racism here. Later you’ll hear there wasn’t, but it’s just strangely coded. Perhaps owing to the advanced age of many of us—the same factor, in other words, that caused the tea-bagging embarrassment—we still revert to seventies soul-brother jive talk when we want to be racist. The YES I AM pimp king is one example, but there are plenty of others. A sign shows Obama digging a grave for the Constitution, with the caption I DON’T DIG BARACK. That’s too subtle to serve as a convincing example, maybe, but another man holds a sign that reads HEY, BRO, HANDS OFF MY WALLET, next to a picture of a monkey’s face. You start to see.

  A father and a little boy standing by a tree. Father’s sign reads WE KNOW HE SNEAKS CIGARETTES BUT SERIOUSLY IS THE PRESIDENT STILL SMOKING CRACK?

  There’s music again. A conservative folksinger has taken Reverend Bryant’s place, with a song called “We Gotta Get Back” (meaning to our 9/12 ways).

  Ronnie Reagan is everywhere. One sign says DIG HIM UP FOR 2012. I ask the young man holding it—Franklin McGuire, a polite, sharp-looking kid from South Carolina who’s living in D.C. for the fall semester and interning at a conservative leadership institute—which issue he’s here representing, and he says, “Personal responsibility.” He’s young, but already he feels he’s been able to witness his country’s decline.

  At smaller Tea Party rallies throughout the states, while we wait for speakers like Joe the Plumber to arrive, we play old Reagan speeches from iTunes over PAs and listen to them, standing in fields and parks. We want to remove ourselves from history.

  You spot only one counterprotester, if that’s what he is. He wears a suit, and his sign reads TAX THE RICH. He stands in the middle of the outgoing flow, so you can’t avoid him. His sign puzzles people. One Tea Party patriot in jeans, sneakers, and cap approaches him, demanding to know “What’s wrong with rich people? Aren’t rich people good?”

  “Some of ’em,” the man in the suit answers and sort of shrugs, as if he’s paid to be here. The back of his sign has Christian stuff on it.

  The patriot squints at him, preparing to launch into a stream of abuse, but waves his hand with ah-phooey disgust and stalks off.

  * * *

  Later that evening, in a paid-for suite at the Mandarin Oriental, a tall blond “government-affairs executive at a well-connected industry-trade group” (that is, a lobbyist at one of the top policy “shops” here in the demimonde where private insurance and D.C. politics mingle) was helping me to explore the minibar.

  He is my first cousin, with whom I grew up and have stayed close. In the 1940s, our grandfather and two of his childhood friends inherited an insurance company in Kentucky that had been operating since the 1850s. They spent their lives making it into what today is the oldest and, in many years, most successful small firm in the state. My twin uncles run it now. Their sons are being groomed for takeover as we speak. It’s the American story. It’s an American story. My grandfather drove Buicks; my uncles fly on private jets. My grandfather promised people his vote; my uncles help people get elected. I grew up at the margins of it, dead-middle-class, enjoying the company’s benefits at someone’s generosity, charging unlimited Cokes at the country club under one of my cousins’ names, aware that the whole mechanism of wealth perpetuation would take care of me in a pinch but then settle me back at arm’s length.

  My family never made me or my siblings feel any of this; they’re kind and humor-possessing people, conscientious to a fault, the kind who stress you out trying to feed you, give you spending money, make you stay at their houses instead of hotels, a few of the reasons they’ve done well—but they never had to make us feel anything. It was Southern class, and we had functioning IQs. In the twilight, from the balcony, it became possible to see my lovable wide-smiled cousin, whose tooth I had once helped pull, as the next logical evolution
ary phase, a kind of probe put forward by our provincial-family genome into the D.C. atmosphere to examine possibilities there. Politics, my boy. He was liking it.

  We talked about the 9/12 March, some of which we had watched together. I was accusing him and his colleagues of essentially having created it. Didn’t the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and “former CEOs” and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear “socialized medicine” so intensely? An elevated number of them had “marched” in wheelchairs or while manifesting obvious signs of chronic health trouble and obesity, not to mention age—surely Medicare and VA benefits were covering a whopping percentage of all that. These tea-partiers owed their very lives to socialized medicine. You and your dad, I said, are the only people who have any reason to fear it.

  My cousin denied any connection. He said he and his colleagues viewed the marchers as at most “a welcome distraction,” which I took to mean, they lend a helpful populist sheen to what remains a disagreement among the powerful over how things will be settled.

  “That was Palin Nation,” my cousin said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that was Old People Discover the Internet.”

  He told me a bunch of them had been in his office earlier that day. “So,” I said, “the attitude is, if they want to go on TV shouting against a public option…”

  “Great!”

  I still had the feeling of being down on the street with them in my nerves. The way my cousin talked, this wasn’t how they’d seen themselves, not hardly. They were taking back power, seizing a destiny. But even the African pimp-king was some kind of pawn, as Bob Dylan might have put it in an eleven-minute impressionistic story song.

  We were watching footage of the march on TV, flipping back and forth between that and a sports thing my cousin wanted to see. The distance between up here and down there began to deepen. Had we been marching to keep my relatives rich? Standing up for the rich people, like that guy who’d accosted the counterprotester? What a bizarre turn in American politics. The 9/12 March for Aetna! Vans I’d passed on the highway, driving in, were decorated with handmade pro–Fox News propaganda.