Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  Joel nodded. It was rare, he reminded himself, when his own opinions were given the respect they deserved.

  “Not only that,” she added, “they practice the equality we only preach. There is basically no private property. Everything is shared equally among members of the tribe.”

  Joel was very attached to his own possessions, but he was not doctrinaire and was more than willing to accept gifts from others.

  “Best of all,” she went on, “because the Ju/’hoansi are not driven as we are by the meaningless pursuit of material goods, they have lots of leisure time, which they spend visiting each other, singing, telling stories, and playing games.”

  Joel had a deep regard for leisure time.

  “The highlight of community life is a healing dance. Specially trained men and women—the Ju/’hoansi do not draw our artificial distinctions between the sexes—dance in front of a communal fire until they go into a trance. This summons an awesome force—the Ju/’hoansi call it n/um—which can then be directed toward healing those afflicted by evil spirits.”

  Joel imagined that he would have made a very good healer and regretted that he had not been born to Ju/’hoansi parents in the Kalahari.

  “So you’ll come tomorrow?” Heather asked. Joel could hardly say no. He was in love.

  XX

  It was warm and sunny the day of the rally, with just the occasional passing breeze. Surely the gods were looking with favour on the protest. All the same, attendance was short of the ten thousand someone had predicted at the faculty meeting. Even short of the one thousand someone else had predicted. There were, in fact, at most 270 people gathered in front of the steps of Graves Hall, including a scattering of faculty, but mostly graduate students and undergraduates.

  You might be inclined to suppose that the turnout reflected badly on the faculty, but there were mitigating circumstances. When H. Avery Duck sat down to write the statement of principle he would present to Felicia Butterworth, he almost immediately realized that there were many more issues at stake than he had initially suspected. And so the document grew lengthier and lengthier. And when he was finally done, he knew he could not entrust the English translation to a graduate student. “I’ll just have to do it myself,” he acknowledged with a sigh. Which meant, as he explained to members of the union executive, it would be necessary to postpone the rally for two weeks.

  Now, here was the problem: The protest was originally scheduled to take place the last week of lectures. The delay pushed it back past the end of term, into May. Not many people beyond the halls of university life seem to appreciate the full extent of professional obligations pressing down on academics. In addition to teaching (both graduate students and undergraduates), professors must carry out original research, present papers, write reviews, articles, and books, produce grant proposals, serve as referees for scholarly journals and funding institutions, attend conferences, and fill administrative positions both at the institutions where they hold appointments and in professional organizations. Many of these obligations require extensive travel. And so it was that on the day of the rally, a significant proportion of the faculty happened to be out of town.

  The truculent English professor, for example, was chairing a session on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at a conference in the south of France on literature and pornography in twentieth-century America. The young astrophysicist was in the south of France to assess whether data she had compiled on the Andromeda galaxy while working at the David Dunlap Observatory north of Toronto could be confirmed with sightings by binoculars from a beach on the Mediterranean. Chester Pinkston was in the south of France boldly searching for Connecticut warblers. The chairman of the History department was researching technological innovations in warfare during the Qing dynasty in the many fine Chinese archives located in the south of France. And Ariel McNicken and Bettina Fetterman were in the south of France on a cultural exchange. Or what would become a cultural exchange once they found two scholars from Provence who wished to spend the spring in Toronto.

  Nor should we forget Yale Templeton. Yale Templeton missed the rally as well, although not, it must be admitted, because of some pressing professional commitment. Several days earlier he and Bobbi Jo Jackson had been listening to Sunday Morning on the CBC when they heard an interview with the mayor of a small town in northern Quebec where a controversy had erupted between English and French speakers over one of the few laws in the province dealing with language issues. Actually what seized their attention was not the interview itself but rather the barely audible fragment of a background remark picked up by Bobbi Jo Jackson.

  “Wow! Did you hear that?!” she said.

  “What?” Yale Templeton asked.

  “‘Un orignal blanc.’ Someone said, ‘Voyez! Un orignal blanc! Sacrebleu!’”

  “I’m afraid I never learned Spanish.”

  “French,” she corrected him. “I once had an assignment in Senegal. Orignal blanc means ‘white moose.’ Someone said, ‘Look! A white moose!’”

  “Amazing that they have a word for ‘moose’ in Senegal,” thought Yale Templeton as he went looking for his suitcase. And within less than an hour, he and Bobbi Jo Jackson were speeding north in a rented car along Highway 400. (As she had explained when she diverted him from the bus depot to an Avis franchise across the street, she had been trained to drive cars at very high speeds while avoiding police surveillance.)

  So the rally took place without the presence of the individual whose suspension had prompted it. Not that anyone seemed to care. The atmosphere was upbeat, even festive. Various participants had hoisted aloft colourful protest banners: “Freedom of Speech Is a Right Not a Privilege.” “Unshackle Yale Templeton! Shackle President Butterworth!” (This particular banner showed a cartoon of Felicia Butterworth, red hair exploding out of the top of her head, and a gag over her mouth.) “Abraham Lincoln Is Alive and Well in Canada. So Why Does the University Treat Its Professors Like Slaves?” “Watch Out for the Squirrels!!!” And just as the speeches were about to begin, a large van pulled up carrying men and women dressed as Frito-Lay products. They jumped out and began to distribute free potato chips and pretzels to the protestors—a peace offering from Felicia Butterworth, someone speculated. And yes, Heather was at the rally. And Joel as well, although he held himself a little off to one side.

  The agenda for the day’s events had been worked out in advance. Normally H. Avery Duck found it distasteful to deal with the president of the Student Administrative Assembly (or, indeed, any undergraduate), but in this case he had seen no practical alternative. According to the deal they had reached, the SAA president would take responsibility for organizing the speakers and seeing that the afternoon’s events unfolded (as Duck subsequently testified during the court proceedings) “in a dignified, orderly fashion.” A half-hour after the rally began, Duck himself would arrive, say a few words to the crowd (presumably in English), and then proceed up the steps into Graves Hall to deliver his statement of principle to President Butterworth. It would not take him long, he managed to convince himself, to demonstrate the ironclad logic of his arguments. She would thank him for explaining the flaws in her reasoning, and he would then return to the protestors to announce that she had seen the error of her ways and had agreed to lift her suspension of Yale Templeton. There would follow wild celebrating, capped by a victory march around Regency Circle. “The students will probably want to carry me on their shoulders,” H. Avery Duck said to himself. And he inwardly shuddered at the prospect.

  And so the rally began. There were the usual calls for revolution from the militant fringe of anarchists, Trotskyites, and Presbyterians that can be found on any campus. But the threat to freedom of expression represented by the suspension of Yale Templeton had raised alarm across a broad spectrum of the university population. And so the president of the Young Conservatives gave a speech, as did the presidents of the Young Liberals, Young New Democrats, and Young Undecideds. In attendance as well was the Isadora Dunca
n Marching Band from the Engineering School, its seventeen men and one woman dressed in their familiar neon green hard hats and magenta overalls.

  At exactly the appointed time H. Avery Duck arrived wearing his best brown suit and a new tie and with both volumes of his statement of principle in hand. He made his way up to the microphone, offered an awkward greeting to the crowd, and delivered the abbreviated remarks he had prepared for the occasion (or remarks as abbreviated as he could make them, given the gravity of the situation). An hour and a half later he took his leave of the one hundred or so people who remained and walked through the doors of Graves Hall to the accompaniment of the strains of a well-known drinking song performed by the Isadora Duncan Marching Band—which partially addressed the problem of rapidly diminishing attendance by attracting fifty or so fraternity brothers from Delta Kappa Epsilon who had been taking part in an Ultimate Frisbee tournament on the opposite side of Regency Circle.

  And then the rally started up again with speeches from a spokeswoman for the United Jewish People’s Organization, a minister from the Nation of Islam, and two or perhaps three indistinguishable missionaries from the Church of Latter Day Saints. Representatives of Asian-Canadian, Caribbean-Canadian, and Inuit students all warned of the dangers to minority groups if freedom of speech were to be curtailed, a sentiment echoed by several gay and lesbian speakers and two transvestites (who seemed to take a special interest in the proceedings). A campus gospel choir sang “Go Down, Moses” followed by a moving rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” An Ojibwa poet delivered a verse he had written specifically for the occasion, celebrating the respect for liberty shared by First Nations peoples across Canada (then offered a collection of his poetry for sale, at a greatly reduced price).

  When the list of scheduled speakers had been exhausted, the SAA president invited others to come forward and voice their concerns. Many did, not only students and faculty, but several members of the maintenance staff and even some interested passersby. For more than two hours the protest continued. But H. Avery Duck did not reappear. And now a chilling wind and threatening clouds began to move in from the west. Thunder could be heard in the distance. The protestors moved toward the shelter of the few nearby trees, then, in twos and threes, started to slip away. Unwilling to let the day’s events end on such an irresolute note, Heather jumped forward and grabbed the microphone. “Before you go,” she called out earnestly, “we should hear from someone uniquely qualified to talk about the heinous crime that is being perpetrated on this campus. Although, regrettably, Professor Templeton could not be here with us today, we are privileged to have one of his most brilliant and dedicated students.” And rushing into the dwindling crowd, she grabbed Joel by the arm and pulled him toward the microphone.

  Now there were many things Joel had never hoped to become in his lifetime. Ambassador to Kuwait. A contestant on Survivor. The world’s leading authority on bonsai plants. But among the things he had most hoped never to become was a public speaker. He simply did not have that supreme self-confidence required of anyone who aspires to make a living by public speaking. Or maybe what I mean is he was possessed of that very human sense of self-doubt that so many public speakers seem to lack. Still, at that moment, he was in love. Madly, deeply in love. And so, with a reluctance that must have been evident to attentive observers in the crowd, he stepped forward.

  Once in front of the microphone, he cleared his throat, coughed lightly, then cleared his throat again. The faculty and students looked at him expectantly. “What a bunch of maroons!” he said to himself, quoting a favourite phrase from the Bugs Bunny cartoons he still liked to watch every Saturday morning. And then he cleared his throat a third time and began to sweat. Silence. Heather leaned over and whispered, “Tell them about your class. Tell them about Professor Templeton.”

  Joel coughed once more, cleared his throat yet again, then started to speak, his voice wobbling about half an octave in either direction. “Yes, I was in Professor Templeton’s class on the American Civil War.” The crowd cheered.

  “Uh … he was, uh … he was, uh, very well organized.” More applause.

  “He gave us lots of details.” Still more applause.

  “Um … and, uh, statistics.” A smattering of applause.

  “He told us that pig iron production in the West went up 693 percent during the Civil War.” Silence.

  “I think maybe he gave us too many statistics.” Laughter. Joel exhaled. He was damp all over.

  “Tell them about the lecture,” whispered Heather.

  Joel looked at her blankly.

  “About Lincoln. The lecture about Lincoln.”

  Joel tried to swallow but his throat felt like sandpaper. “I was at the, uh, lecture where Professor Templeton told us about, uh, Lincoln … uh, President Lincoln.” Applause once again.

  “About, uh … about his, um, faking his own, uh, assassination.” Louder applause.

  “So he could, uh, live openly as … as a, uh, transvestite.” Still louder applause, especially from the transvestites. Enthusiastic whistling by the few remaining fraternity brothers from the DKE house.

  Then he grew silent again. What else was there to say? That no sane person could believe that Abraham Lincoln had faked his own death so he could live as a cross-dresser in Canada? That obviously Yale Templeton should not be allowed at large in society, let alone entrusted to lecture at a university? That the only reason he, Joel, was standing in front of them at the moment was because barely more than twenty-four hours earlier he had met the woman of his dreams?

  As the silence expanded he started to grow more agitated. And as he started to grow more agitated, he became convinced that the friendly faces in front of him were turning sinister, hostile. The casual chatter of the crowd now took on an ominous tone, and he strained to hear what people were saying. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of what looked like a giant pretzel advancing menacingly toward him. The fears overtaking him were irrational, he recognized that. But he decided to surrender to them anyway, and turning to Heather he released a barely audible, plaintive moan, then blurted out, “This is all about me, you know!!”

  The protestors looked at one another in confusion, but Heather shouted back at Joel, “Yes, it’s all about you. And about me, too.”

  “And me!” shouted the Ojibwa poet. “And each one of us. About our right to be able to speak our minds freely.”

  “Right on, mon!” shouted a gay Rastafarian. “It’s about me!” “And me!” shouted a Scientologist. “And me!” shouted the president of the Young Liberals. “And me!” shouted a dental student who had actually turned down medical school. “And me!” shouted Maurice Ronald Tarryton, who had happened by the rally on his way to the post office to send the Pioneer Fund his latest research proposal on sex organs and intelligence. “And me,” shouted the Ojibwa poet again, who in a fit of exuberance offered to drop the price of his book of poetry by a dollar and throw in, at cost, a guide to fine dining in the vicinity of the campus. And soon everyone was shouting, “It’s about me! It’s about me!” Heather hugged Joel and threw his arm triumphantly in the air as the Isadora Duncan Marching Band broke into “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Or perhaps it was “Camptown Races.”

  And in all the exuberance and commotion no one noticed that H. Avery Duck had finally emerged from Graves Hall. And because no one noticed that H. Avery Duck had finally emerged from Graves Hall, no one noticed that his pants were bulging obscenely where Felicia Butterworth had unceremoniously stuffed the two volumes of his statement of principle. Nor that he had a bag of Nachos Cheese Doritos over his head. Which the Dean Responsible for Relations with Manufacturers of Feminine Hygiene Products, who had escorted him out the door, was kind enough to remove, after which she placed complimentary bags of Rold Gold pretzels and Funyuns Onion-flavored Rings in his hands.

  He stood there in a paralytic stupor for several moments, until the SAA president happened to turn in his direction. “Look!” the SAA president sho
uted at the crowd. And then, using the bullhorn to make himself heard, he repeated, “Look! Look!” The crowd looked, and catching sight of H. Avery Duck, gave a collective gasp. H. Avery Duck tried to speak but gagged on the corn chips in his mouth. At that point Heather grabbed the microphone and, pointing to him, shouted, “Well now we see what the administration really thinks about freedom of speech!”

  The crowd gave an ugly roar.

  “And are we going to let them get away with it?”

  “No!” everyone shouted in unison.

  “Are you with me?” she yelled, ripping off her clothes.

  “We are!!” returned the crowd, several of whom doffed their hats.

  “Then let’s occupy the president’s office!!!” she shouted. And as Joel silently but quickly slipped away, she raced up the stairs past H. Avery Duck.

  Just at that moment, however, the men and women dressed as Frito-Lay products ripped off their own clothes—their costumes, to put it more precisely—to reveal police uniforms underneath. Two constables tackled Heather before she could get to the door, while a third grasped H. Avery Duck, who in trying to speak succeeded only in spitting corn chips into the officer’s face, a transgression that earned him a club to the side of the head. Most demonstrators fled in alarm. The few that raised an outcry were dispersed by the police with little difficulty. The tepid nature of the resistance convinced the officer in charge to show forbearance. He ordered only three people taken into custody: Heather and H. Avery Duck for inciting the crowd to riot, and the Ojibwa restaurant critic for impersonating a poet.

  Joel watched it all from the security of the Edifice Building. He was understandably unhappy when the police led Heather away. Still, he had learned long before that love could be fleeting. And in any case, the constable who escorted her to the van looked very striking in her uniform. He always had a weakness for women in uniforms.