NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I am going to the party in response to a flyer found under my door-knocker one afternoon last week. It isn’t far away, at the Waymarsh place up the hill on Bails Lane. The narrowest road in the neighborhood is jammed with trucks and vans parked on both sides. Armed rent a cop types stand at intervals in dark glasses. Their lips reduced to a narrow line of stress and concentrated hostility above crisp pressed uniforms from Urban Safety Security Solutions. Their black SUVs are pulled up off the road into Lou’s front yard. The engines are running, but they couldn’t get back on the road because two rented yellow trucks are in the way, unloading. The last of the golden rod is crushed under their tires along with the weeds. I can hear beeps and code numbers through their high volume radios: ‘Beep one, one, two BEEP three, five, eight, thirteen’ and on and on. The partiers’ cars and SUVs are parked among the bigger vehicles making it difficult for any more to pass. I dodge an old Toyota sedan barely moving with a Spinoni hanging out of the driver’s side back window panting in the exhaust from all these automobiles. The driver parks in the ditch where it has filled with enough compressed leaves to keep her axles within an ant’s crawl of the ground.
The party has filled the house and people are standing outside the front door, chatting, maybe waiting to get in. They all have a lot to say to each other. I think of Jake, expecting to see him in the crowd and introduce myself to various strangers, but can’t think of anything to say. They invariably turn to talk to someone else as soon as the sound of my name has faded into the buzz. I am easing my way as close to the door as I can, trying not to spill any one’s drink. Big men in denim uniforms are moving steel-edged wooden boxes into the house. Some are small enough to be carried by one man alone. Big women in the same uniforms are wheeling other larger crates in. It could be amplifiers and other equipment, but I don’t see any mikes, wires, or speakers. Waymarsh is squeezing through the door past two men carrying a long narrow box. He shouts directions over his shoulder back into the crowded house. “I am taking a break out here” he yells and turns to look where he is going. Seeing me he offers a warm greeting.
“Hi Lou”
“Glad you could make it.”
“What’s with all the boxes and security?”
“Speech.”
“Yes, I mean what is all the freight?”
“Like I said, speech.”
“There’s speech in these things you mean?”
“That’s it. See that truck over there, that’s the heavy stuff. I mean Supreme Court Justices, The President, and products of research and so on.”
“What do you mean research? Sounds expensive.”
“Oh focus groups, data mining, that kind of thing. You know some of the most effective themes are uncovered through focus groups. Speech using these themes is the best money can buy.”
“Where do you get it?”
“Our party buys speech from the PR firm. They have bonded warehouses full of it.”
“Your party?” I asked.
“Yes this is a political party we are having here and we want plenty of speech.”
“Wait a minute, the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech. You shouldn’t have to pay for it.” Lou draws close and speaks in a quiet confidential voice. “Your speech and mine, that’s free. You know why it’s free?”
“Why Lou?”
“Because no one is listening: it is just us. If you want to be heard, if you want the attention of the people who count, then you need this stuff.” He points to the crates being unloaded from trucks. Political and commercial speech is prepared, processed and packaged, and it is a valuable commodity. It is used to sell products and it can win elections.”
“Yes I can see the packaging is heavy duty stuff.”
“These days, speech is money and money is speech, and money isn’t free. Some of this speech is heavier than gold; and a lot more valuable. Come over here”. Lou leads me around the side of his house past the crowd that is chatting in a swarm outside the front door. We walk along a curving narrow path with tall magnolias screening both sides. There’s a huge stack of bottles and cans in shrink wrap standing in an area fenced off from the rest of the yard, and accessible only along the path.
“That’s the canned speech we get cheap from Snaz Super Stores, and here’s the water.”
“Why buy water?” I asked. “The well water here tastes pretty good and it’s potable.”
“We call it water. Those are slogans, mass-produced in Taiwan and highly effective, but you need a lot of them so your message gets repeated often enough to soak in. This is about enough for our neighborhood for a week.”
“Soak in?”
“ That’s it, an effective slogan is memorable and readily comes to mind.”
“Yes, like rising damp!”
“That’s unkind. More like your Mom’s advice.”
“I suppose it depends on whether or not you agree with it.”
I can’t remember my Mother buying canned speech. I remember peaches and peas, and sweetened condensed milk, and evaporated milk. Yes I can see Mother now in my mind’s eye. There she is in the kitchen with no one around her, in a long pleated skirt and sleeveless blouse. She is opening a can of evaporated milk. The cat is lying in a yellow rectangle made by the morning sun on the tiled floor. She pours the milk into a saucer and she goes over to the cat and puts the saucer on the floor in front of it, saying “Here Kitty, you’ll enjoy this milk. It’s from ‘Contented Cows,’ or so the label says.”
“Yes, we all tend to remember a good slogan, agreed or not,” said Lou after Mother receded into the memories from where she had been recalled.
“Yes.”
Lou hands me a red can of Snaz Super Store speech, and we go back to the party as Lou’s ring tones sound the Battle Hymn of the Republic. He starts texting as fast as his rheumatic thumbs allow. He excuses himself and disappears into the surrounding talk. Looking at a label on the can he handed me I read: ‘Instant relief from burdensome thoughts!’ In smaller print, like a warning label. I read below: ‘This can contains certified conservative speech produced by the best American speakers of our time.’ I open the can and it gets me into conversation at once with a women in a red blazer, golden girandoles, black pants and big hair that rises in a wave off her forehead like a breaker which crashes down around her head, flying into the air and coming down again, covering her ears in frozen agitation. We are talking about taxes and big government, and the damned liberals. Big government in huge neoclassical buildings pours out of my can forming a critical mass, much of which disintegrates harmlessly before reaching the ground under the thundering rhetorical power contained in my can. She shakes out a few despairing remarks on moral relativism and then starts dropping names: Newt and Bob and Frank and several Johns and Mikes. These names fall to the ground too, untouched by the remnants of big government, which separate from them like oil dropped into vinegar. A small man in a yellow tie appears and starts teasing her in familiar tones about the mess she is leaving on the grounds of his most cherished political convictions. It was then I noticed Lou’s yard had expanded. It is no longer a sloping half acre of wooded gardens. Now I can see across the valley to the Elysian Fields in the East and Westwards, endless meadows of repetition as far as the horizon with patches of civility growing among geysers of overheated rhetoric steaming over the crowds gathered there. I can see a distant Vineyard of Liberty, where people in loose fitting nineteenth century clothing are tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. A torrent of righteous indignation is clearing the area nearby like a fire hose at a demonstration. It is too close for comfort. I turn to find the reason for a hot sensation on the right side of my face. Not far off, another geyser of steam rises from a fat man with several chins jiggling under the nozzle of his mouth. My can is empty. The woman with big hair has turned to her friend in a yellow tie and I want to get away from the heat. I leave them to banter on in the steamy atmosphere, while looking for another can full of speech. Now I know what to look for, I see a stack of blue cans on a table by the house. The blue can is just as effective as the red can. Moments after opening it, I am talking to a tall thin friendly white haired man in a an old fashioned seersucker suite. It is about the forty million uninsured Americans who can’t get health care, and we go on to discuss various single payer plans that he was studying, and he explains them in more detail than I ever knew before. I look down for any names he might have dropped but see he is wearing shorts, not the trousers one might expect with a seersucker suit. His legs are brown and white and furry. His hooves are polished black. In fact everyone I can see has two furry legs. Hooves in brown black and white are evident at the bottom of people’s trousers and long dresses. I step back when searching the ground for dropped names and bump into a Hispanic waiter with a tray of unusual looking hors d’oeuvres.
“What’s that?” I asked him after apologizing.
“Cud sir, best cud for chewing. Try it sir?”
“Cud generally comes from one of the ruminant’s stomachs.”
“He smiles, ignores my objection and assures me this is the best.
“Where do you get it from?”
“The freezer.”
“No thanks.”
“It is hard to move my feet. They are all tangled up in something. Looking carefully it becomes obvious that the healthcare plan pouring out of the blue can in my companion’s left hand is coming out of my can too. It has spread like geometric ivy in a grid all around us. It is as if we are standing on a sheet of growing green graph paper. The shoots speed across the ground faster than the frightened chipmunks who try to out run it. Our every moment is quantified and plotted in lush green plan. The man in seersucker is at the center of a growing mat of vegetation. Conservatives trapped in the tangle of vines, are crying for help. Two hulking Liberals are rolling a fifty five gallon drum of blue speech toward the trees. They reach their objective and pour it out toward an elderberry bush, jeering at a group of poor conservatives who were picking berries to add to their wrath wine. Now the mat is up to my knees. A young conservative has taken refuge on the flat roof of a cattle shed. He is trying to pull his girlfriend up to safety with his triceps rippling and sweat pouring from his buzz cut. The girl’s hooves are kicking in the sides of the shed. He is telling her to stop struggling but she is screaming in mortal terror of the liberals. Waves of her blond hair straighten in the breeze as her head rises above the roofline and her bosom heaves from her torn blouse as he pulls her safely on to the roof. Another group of conservatives is climbing on to the exposed roots of a hickory tree as the vine surrounds them. A furious woman is beating it back with a cane. As her arm brushes up and back against the side of her head her glasses lift off her ear and then they fly the with force of the down stroke. She doesn’t hesitate, perhaps she hasn’t noticed yet. The bald man who gave her his cane has his hands clasped in prayer. The bald man is passing out. He is slumped against the tree. Now I can hear cheers of joy. It is Grant Gasberg, one of the biggest names in talk radio. He rolls into sight on a throne. It looks like a massive electronic wheelchair moving under control of a fellow in a red blazer, blue slacks, white shirt, and straw boater. He is holding the remote control and guiding Grant on his cart with the joystick. Grant is flanked by his unmounted, uniformed ideaologs marching in lock step, wearing Hussar uniforms, and solemnly carrying their orthodoxies like banners. Grant is as big as a blimp bulging out of his business suit with a huge bald pink head and tiny gold-rimmed spectacles well down on his nose. He must be fifteen or twenty feet high. It is getting too hot for him as he crosses some open ground. His head is expanding and turning red. Grant isn’t one to surrender to discomfort and waves his entourage on when the man in the red blazer signals to abort the mission. Four energetic young women are running towards him from his pavilion in the Elysian Fields, dressed like cheerleaders with big blinding white smiles. I have to look down to let my eyes recover, and notice the smell of fabric softner in the air. Grant is going to be fine. I can see the reason on looking up again. The cheerleaders are showering him with cool scented water from big squirt guns shaped like assault rifles. “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” the cheer leaders chant, flashing the white stars on their deep blue knickers when they kick high in mid chant. The Hussars bring forth their side arms and fire into the air, raising more cheers. Grant has now reached the leading edge of the spreading plan. He starts spraying the vegetation with invective from two tanks high on his back. The muscular young man on top of the shed strips off his tea shirt. With one arm he waves it above his head in joy, and with the other arm presses his svelte blond girlfriend to his manly, bared chest. She smiles sweetly through her tears, looking up at her hero in admiration. One of her delicate pink hands is spread across his pecs and there twinkling like a star in the night is the diamond on her engagement ring. The vines burst under the stream of Grant’s invective. The leaves curl up withering into dust in the heat of Grant’s rancorous tones and the dust floats harmlessly along the ground with the remains of big government. The two hulking liberals have lost control of their fifty five gallon drum. They are getting crushed under its weight which only grows heavier as the drum spills out more and more green plan. The weight of the plan’s consequences builds up within the drum until it is as immovable as a Congressional appropriation, and so terrifying to conservatives that it has to be somehow hidden from public view. Grant Gasberg drills them with sarcasm. They writhe in green goo oozing from disintegrating vines, but he is saving their lives by reducing the drum to tin foil.
I want to get home before any one is killed, but can’t see Lou’s house any more, and don’t know what direction to take. The man in the seersucker suite is smiling at me. “We always have lively parties in Fauxmont” he remarks in his faint and gentle old man’s voice.
“Lively isn’t the word.”
“You don’t look well. This is strong speech and it can get to you on warm day like this. Have you had this brand before?”
“No, this is my first experience.”
“Why don’t you follow me?” He guides me carefully with his hand on my elbow into the rickety wooden shed. He isn’t obstructed by the plan’s growing depth and extent. Grant’s action hasn’t reached us yet, but as soon as the old man touches me, my feet come clear of the vines now grown as thick as hawsers and we enter the shelter of shed’s loose planks. It is dusk. Sunlight pierces clouds low in the sky, as if they are slits in a timbered wall of evening sky. I can see the lights on in Jake’s dream house, only a few hundred feet away. The man in the seersucker suit has gone, and I never did get his name. I walk over to the house and find a woman in jeans and flowery blouse bending over to give her Spinoni a bowl of water. We are in back of Jake’s place on his deck. She looks at me as she rises and asks if I am alright. When it has finished drinking the Spinoni checks me out, and dries the wet fur of his snout on my trousers as he sniffs diligently.
“Did you see Frank?” she asked expectantly. The spinoni’s drying snout is in my crotch.
“No. Frank who?” I am easing away from the dog.
“Why, Frank Shibboleth of course! he was here over in the Vineyards of Liberty.”
“Really, good old Frank. I’m sorry I missed him. Did he bring that wonderful folk group ‘The Singing Nostrums?’
“Hi, I am Alice; and yes we had a really great sing along. Here have a bottle of ‘Frankly Speaking’.” She had drawn a small bottle out of her knapsack as she spoke, and now offers it to me.
“I am Fred and thanks but I have had enough political speech for now.”
She produces several more objects the size of beer bottles but made of clear glass in the shape of Doric and Ionic Capitals. They contain cloudy liquids, deep red in the Doric and sky blue in the Ionic Capitals.
“How about some of these?” She offers. I hesitate, wondering what is in these sparkling bits of crystal. She goes on, “Aren’t they great? This is a program for city trees, and here this blue one is for clean air.”
“Yes, they sound much needed.”
“That’s right. I have a government solution for just about any problem you can think of!”
“You mean the answers are suspended in that liquid?”
“Right again. This is in a very concentrated form. Just add taxes and then watch it grow.”
“Where do you open them? I mean what do you do with the bottle of liquid?”
“You can ask your Congressman to open it on the House floor.”
“Yes I get it.”
“Oh you should have seen those conservatives run for it.” She goes on, “Frank brought a truck load of plan in fifty five gallon drums and the Nostrums really spread it around with that high volume singing.”
“Yes that much I saw.”
“I listen to Frank every morning at 8.” she told me earnestly.
“Yes I know he is a big Liberal talker.”
“They always have such great political parties here in Fauxmont, and they are so much bigger now we can use this beautiful new home.”
“I thought the party was held at the Waymarsh House.”
“You must be new. Yes it started there and sort of spread out.” She sneezes and sneezed again. ”I really am allergic to Golden rod. It gets me every year!” She recoveres, wiping her nose with a brilliant yellow paper napkin. “The political party is a tradition around here. This has been as good as any I can remember, and I have been driving over to come to these parties for twenty odd years.”
