There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  IV

  This lasted all of one morning, thanks to my daddy.

  I’m not sure that I spoke to him during my time in Washington, but I did speak to a man I met through him—or, more precisely, through Rod Gerald. The man had been a major champion of Ohio State football and an early supporter of my eighteen-year-old future father. Aside from finding Daddy a job when we fled Dallas for Columbus six months after I was born, and making sure we were never evicted while we lived there, and sending me a computer and coat my freshman year of college—all this without me ever seeing him in person after my fourth year of life, that I can remember—he also offered immediate aid, as a rabid conservative and owner of Prescott Bush’s former summer home, when I called about my possible conversion.

  He sent me to the best evangelist he knew: a short, beyond-middle-aged Ohioan with a resilient head of gray hair, who spoke calmly but with the intensity of a man who would consider murdering for his beliefs, though the messiness of the exercise would keep him from following through. He was on the board of the American Conservative Union, and invited me to join him at the most important event in the world of the right, the Conservative Political Action Conference, one Saturday morning in February 2010.

  * * *

  —

  I left my Capitol Hill apartment and took the metro out of Washington proper into suburban Maryland, to a Marriott hotel where ten thousand conservative activists and leaders had pilgrimaged for what National Public Radio called, in 2017, equal parts political rally, conservative boot camp, recruiting tool, trade show and merchandise mart, Beltway celebrity watch party, and this year . . . a celebration—though on the February 2010 morning I attended, CPAC was the epicenter of resistance to Barack Hussein Obama (they made sure to say his middle name as much as possible).

  Some in the Marriott were my peers—at least, they were about my age, judging from their faces and haircuts, though I did not know a single person in my generation, until that day, who carried posters of Ronald Reagan. Somebody else showed up in or changed into an oversized furry elephant costume. A small regiment of grown men wore antique military uniforms. Away from these masses, on a balcony, behind a glass wall that might have been bulletproof, were a few dozen elderly men in suits and dames in gowns, one of whom was the woman who had funded Charlie Wilson’s war.* She and her fellow grandees were nice enough to give me their word that I would not be harmed while in attendance, and so I tramped back down the stairs to the ballroom floor, where the day’s main speaker, a lanky blonde, had just stepped to the podium.

  What a difference a year makes she purred with a wry smile.

  The crowd, as soon as the speaker released these words, hooted and whistled and yeaahed and stomped and clapped and kept on going for a period of time that seemed disproportionate to the gravity of the line, to me. Apparently it had been a big year for the people in this room.

  This time last year the Republican party, according to the media, was finished, dead, moribund. It was the beginning of the Democrats’ thousand-year reich. But this year we have a new governor in Virginia, new governor in New Jersey. Scott Brown has taken Teddy Kennedy’s old seat . . .

  She did have a point, you know. Not that I was glad about any of these events. But I like an underdog story as much as anybody and so I didn’t take much issue with the jubilation, even if I did not join in it myself, standing as I was at the very back of the ballroom, straining to see the podium over a man’s tricornered hat.

  Polls show that less than fifty percent of Americans approve of the job President Obama is doing. The best thing most respondents could say about him was that he was one of the least dangerous people they know named Hussein. Even Obama’s staunchest supporters are starting to leave . . . Last week Michelle Obama demanded to see a copy of his birth certificate.

  This was a reference to a theory involving the 44th president, ginned up most forcefully, if you can believe it, by the 45th president—that Barack Obama was not only a Muslim, but a foreign-born Muslim, birthed in Kenya and therefore constitutionally barred from being president of the United States. The hoots and whistles and yeaahs and claps came back. The speaker breezed through the requisite comments about William Clinton’s personal scandals, which the crowd also enjoyed despite having heard them for nearly twenty years by that point. There was new material, though.

  The liberal elites keep telling us that they know what’s best for us but you know we keep finding out that these liberal elites, the smart people, are kind of creepy—first we had ACORN on tape counseling people on how to bring underage prostitutes from El Salvador into the country. Then we got Obama’s “safe schools czar,” Kevin Jennings, whose apparent raison d’etre is to introduce homosexuality to grade school children. Jennings’s idea of a good sixth grade field trip is to take the kids to the Tony Awards.

  The crowd erupted in laughter.

  He’s even written the introduction to a book titled Queering Elementary Education.

  No, no! some members of the crowd cried. The speaker took a short break from her gay-bashing to denounce Mr. Obama’s efforts to fix the economy (failed), to end the war on terror (treasonous), to save the environment (counterproductive), and to get people healthcare (socialist). The crowd was interested enough in these issues, but had calmed from their earlier fever pitch. The speaker went back to what seemed to work best.

  CNN calls them—she was referring to opponents of Obamacare, the president’s healthcare bill—“tea baggers,” which is the gayest term I’ve ever heard on CNN, other than “Anderson Cooper.”

  This line drew the longest mix of applause, whistles, shouts, and laughs of the day—you can see for yourself, on the internet. Once the crowd recovered, the speaker sped through a few other issues and brought her address to a close.

  Thanks for being here, she said. Keith Olbermann—another cable news anchor—is a girl, she threw in. God bless America. And then once more—And remember: Keith Olbermann is a girl—before I’ll take questions now.

  I didn’t ask any questions, nor did I count, but it felt to me that many of those ten thousand CPAC attendees had just experienced something marvelous, based on how much noise they made, how they clapped above their heads rather than right in front of their chests, how they did that whistle that I can never accomplish, where you put your fingers in the sides of your mouth and the noise goes real high. Maybe that’s just what they always did. But it sure seemed that this woman’s message had touched them in a special way. Touched me, too: in less than fifteen minutes, this speech, along with the proceedings that preceded it, had convinced me that there was a roughly zero percent chance that I would ever be a Republican. Between an open mind and a fool, the line is thin. I have not crossed it.

  Liberals might have been hypocrites, might have been out of touch. But conservatives—at least those ten thousand I encountered—seemed terrifying, even deranged.

  You might be similarly terrified to know that, less than a decade later, those ten thousand conservative activists—some of whom were leading a newly formed group called the Tea Party, a few of whom were allegedly spitting on congressmen and definitely hanging Barack Obama in effigy—took over the Republican party and, in short order, the White House and, to some degree, the country. And to the extent that America still leads the West as I tell you this story, these Americans for Freedom have thrown much of the known world into chaos. All the while, the liberals who were in charge at that time are still more or less in charge, which means that the main opposition to fascism in America is a cohort of dedicated people with good intentions and able minds yet little clue how any of this could have happened. And to make their lives more difficult, great numbers of citizens in the West have taken to mass hysteria, to strange votes and street protests. If they have not stopped working (though many have done that, too, possibly against their will, since even more jobs have vanished since ’08), then they have surely stopped believing in
certain things or at least in certain people and have said, in essence, to their would-be leaders: The jig is up. Life comes at you fast when you’re not paying attention.

  I was not a prophet, but thanks in part to my mother and father I knew when the folks in charge were not looking out for me. And since I learned early on at Yale that I knew nothing, and found that my best remedy was to listen and to watch, I also learned how to quickly tell whether those I watched and listened to knew anything themselves—which helped save a lot of time while I was in Washington, but also meant that by spring 2010 I had exhausted my most trusted tactics. I had no known tools or living people to turn to and so I turned at last, in desperation, to books.

  V

  It took me just a little while to discover why anyone who’s ever wanted to keep the people deaf dumb and blind kept them first and most importantly from the written word. My lord.

  I soon found my first poet, Walt Whitman, because of that Levi’s commercial with those beautiful young people kissing and wrestling and switching jeans in the dressing room, and standing smiling in rainstorms, and running through fields with sticks and flags, and jumping off little statues in the daytime, and doing cartwheels in the night while fireworks explode overhead while some man with a reedy voice recites Pioneers! O Pioneers! in the background. I found my first philosophers, Camus and Emerson, though it was hard at first to remember the difference between the existentialists and the transcendentalists. Since then, I’ve learned that Camus did not consider himself an existentialist (he and Sartre ended like me and Daniel, in a way) and Emerson, at least the Emerson I read, was very different from Thoreau, who I did not care for if only because I don’t like nature very much. So it turns out I did not fall in love with existentialism or transcendentalism, but with Camus and Emerson—this would have been helpful to know, since labels caused me so much misery at that time. I also found my first novel since James and the Giant Peach. This caused some trouble, too. On the Road was so original (everything I read was original because I hadn’t read nothing) and thrilling that all my fantasies of being a truck driver came back and I had to force them out of my mind again by remembering how Auntie O looked at me the first time I shared my desire to live on the road. It also helped to remember that I was trying to be president and could not admit to the people that I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

  And this, being president, was no longer just my teammates’ idea. It was mine. I wanted to be president and I was going to do whatever it took, because it was worth it.

  The presidency would be the ultimate sign of excellence and thus the ultimate revenge. Nobody would call me by my name or any other smart-ass moniker; they would only call me Mr. President unless I told them otherwise and in the meantime I would be leading the world, wouldn’t answer to anybody ever again, wouldn’t take shit from nobody, would leave behind all my troubles and take on new troubles, nice troubles, like peace in Israel and sending people into outer space and curing disease. I would be the most loved person on the face of the planet—hell, people I never even met would love me would hang out of windows when I walked by would remember the day they shook my hand. I would also be the most hated person in the world but the people who hated me wouldn’t get close to me and so what if they did—if I died being president ooh I would die for big old causes I would die for freeing slaves I would die for investigating Fidel Castro I would die and it would be a grand affair and people would cry when I left for a change instead of me crying for them because nobody leaves a man once he’s president, even when he’s dead. If I died as president that would be fine they wouldn’t find me tied up on the floor, there would be hundreds of people around as soon as I expired and thousands more soon after that and then they’d make me a statue—I would want one far away from Lincoln I don’t want that bastard stealing my visitors and I wouldn’t want to be close to Jefferson either because I don’t like the son of a bitch. I would like to be near the Washington Monument because it’s tall and unadorned and Washington was first and I would be last because if I died as president I’d make my final order to end the country just shut down the whole thing party’s over folks gotta leave America I’m dead you’re dead it’s all dead. And at the very least nobody—nobody—would be indifferent about me nobody would ever forget that I existed nobody would forget to pick me up from school nobody would forget my birthday—shit my birthday might be a national holiday it might be a global holiday by the time I finished helping people or at least ruling the world.

  But first I had to be president, which did not seem impossible. So I stopped reading novels and started reading books that would help me with my job. And so I was glad to also find, right around this time, my first bookstore.

  Seeing as though I had so few monies, I should have gone to the DC Public Library, but ever since my time at Yale, libraries had overwhelmed me. There were eleven million volumes of books in the Sterling Library, floors and floors of books that you had to ride creaky elevators to reach and walk down spooky corridors to peruse and interpret varied alphanumeric schemes to find and have your Yale ID to swipe you in and out and hand to the authorities behind the desk who would stare at you like you were buying condoms in the drug store. On top of all that you had to open your bag and let some nosy officer snoop through your belongings just to get back into the light of day and then, even if you had not stolen a thing from the library, you still would be at risk of fines and investigations and failing to graduate from Yale, all on account of one book that nobody had even asked about for seventy years.

  And don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re too good for the library, thinking you were going to walk into the big chain campus bookstore like you owned the place. Ha. Soon as I stepped through the door they were always trying to sell me other stuff aside from books, which I already didn’t have the money for in and of themselves. I surely had no extra coin for tote bags and umbrellas and cups of coffee and croissants, which looked nice and all but were so expensive, just like the books, which were never on sale, at least not at a steep enough discount so that I could afford them without worrying about my other Life Expenses. No, I did not go to the big chain campus bookstore, either. Now, let me say, as a recovering ex-politician, that the libraries and chain bookstores of America have my full unqualified support. I’m just trying to explain how I felt at that time and why I was so grateful to discover Capitol Hill Books down the street from my Washington apartment, just a ten-minute walk to Eastern Market, with that adult-sized American flag hanging over the narrow wooden door that, once you entered through and got your allergies under control, welcomed you to a paradise full of first-rate books at second-hand prices.

  The incredible thing about little bookstores like Capitol Hill Books is that the people inside—often wonderfully strange boys and girls, even if they now reside in the bodies of adults or the elderly—don’t seem to take orders from some honcho in an office somewhere who wants to tell them what to sell or how much for, or what labels to put on the shelves—or to buy new shelves to replace the old ones that are leaning, threatening to crush people like me who were turning to books to be saved, not killed. These little bookstore people go through the trouble of asking themselves What do the books on this shelf really have to say to somebody??? and then they take a marker and write the answer, their answer, on a slice of cardboard and tape it to the shelf. Sometimes, as in a little Canadian bookstore I recently visited, the book people seem to just throw all the books in a pile on the floor and say, as did the year 2008: You figure this shit out . . . which is fine with me, now that I know what I’m doing and reading is not such a desperate act. But at twenty-three I was an eager novice, so I’m glad that whoever owned Capitol Hill Books took the time to write U.S. Presidency on their slice of cardboard and tape it to the bookcase on the far-right wall of that pulp jungle, the bookcase that I mazed my way to, where I immediately saw it, saw him, on the tattered cover of a much-passed-down book: Theodore Roosevel
t.

  I want to cry when I think of Theodore Roosevelt (though for a different reason than why I wanna cry for Tom and his buddies), and I actually did when I finished the third volume of Edmund Morris’s biography of him, Colonel Roosevelt, at the end of which my hero died, which should not have surprised me as much as it did. I was and remain a slow reader, so it took me almost a year to get to Teddy’s death (took him sixty to get there himself) after meeting him in the first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which was, aside from the Bible, the most important collection of words I had yet encountered. Once I followed Mr. Roosevelt from his birth to his ascendancy to the presidency, thanks to William McKinley getting himself killed, becoming the youngest man ever to hold the office—once I plodded through those 780 pages, 814 if you count the epilogue that describes the day (1 January 1907) when Theodore Roosevelt shook 8,150 hands at the White House for New Year’s (still a record), once I closed the pages of that book, I no longer considered any man or woman alive to be great, especially not me, and I immediately, almost as if I had been struck down on my own road to Damascus, decided to press toward a new mark: his.

  There was nothing particularly compelling, to me, about the young Teddy—a bookish pampered snob, for the most part. I prefer my heroes and my lovers to have some tragedy befall them. But then TR turned twenty-three and things got interesting.

  On 14 February 1884, at three o’clock in the morning in the Roosevelt home at 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt’s mother died of typhoid fever. She was forty-nine. Upstairs in the same home, eleven hours later at two o’clock in the afternoon, his wife, Alice, died of kidney disease. She had given birth to their first child two days earlier. Morris writes: