The Fantasy Years

WITH FREEDOM UNLEASHED, the Dittoheads could read whatever news source they liked and take every breathless word of it as gospel, whether it had anything to do with reality or not. They could take everything they were told at face value as long as they knew it wasn’t liberal. And they could dismiss every bit of news from the liberal media because it wasn’t told to them by Rush Limbaugh. And if the facts conflicted with their worldview, well, there was a term for that, too. The facts were “political correct.” And the Dittoheads weren’t buying them. Any of them:

“Rush is right about one thing: liberals get furious if you don’t agree with them” said a voice in Dallas.

“You should have seen my wife’s friend when I told her feminism was just a plot to allow ugly women access to mainstream society,” said another.

“You should have seen my nephew in college when I told him that Clinton killed someone.”

“Or my wife’s feminist friend when I told her abortion should be outlawed!”
“Or that Hillary is a dyke.”
“And that abortion should be illegal especially in cases of rape and incest!”
“And that Chelsea is ugly!” said a voice in Colorado.
“And Janet Reno is another lesbo!” from a voice in Maine.
“And Vince Foster did not die by his own hand!” a voice in Virginia exclaimed.
“But Clinton uses Secret Service agents like roadies!” said a voice in Georgia.
“And yet those liberals get mad when you tell them!”
“They can’t bear the truth!”

This was proof! The liberals’ response to these ideas was proof the liberals were wrong. And what did Rush fans get out of the liberals being wrong? What did they get out of digesting and regurgitating Rush’s all over anyone willing to listen? Fun.

They got to have fun because it was fun having opinions. It was fun for people to be experts about politics from information they got on the radio. It was particularly fun to know something, to believe something in a life that had gone pointless, in a wide open country that had grown fat and directionless, a country that had become unmoored and enemy-less.

“Welfare pays people to stay poor.”

“No it doesn’t!” the liberal voice in upstate, New York said.

“Welfare pays people to say poor. If it doesn’t then why are there still poor people?”

“What?”

“If liberals created welfare to supposedly help poor people because liberals are all-so-morally superior how come the poor never got richer?”

The liberal was stumped – silent with vexation — and the Dittohead smiled triumphantly. The fact that they had no comeback was proof that he was wrong.

So was the conversation in Center City, Philadelphia,
“Hate to break it to you, Clinton has no moral authority.”
“Not to you.”
“Here’s a man who had state troopers round up women he wanted to have sex with.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s in the press. Everyone knows it. But that’s how it is with your liberals: Everything is permissible.”
“That’s not true.”
“Sure it is. Liberals don’t believe in the rule of law.”
“Yes, we do.”
“Not these days. Not according to my sources. Liberals want to do whatever feels good. Hate to break it to you, that’s how liberals are.”

And the liberal, steaming with anger could only deny it. And denying it only proved to the Dittohead that what he believed of liberals was true because if it weren’t true, why would the liberal be so upset?

Liberals tore their hair out after these conversations. They beat their fists into their hands as they walked away. They gritted their teeth.

They shook their heads in vigorous disapproval but when they did, they were only talking to themselves because liberals had no mass form of entertainment to unify them with the same message. So their retorts came as dismissive waves and bitter hisses between individuals, in their own words, in the privacy of small groups.

Liking Rush Limbaugh was some kind of social disorder, they’d conclude, like people who wore camouflage in their daily life, or domestic abuse, or how hate crimes surged in times of high unemployment.

Like that Because beyond disparaging the Dittoheads in their totality, it was no fun for liberals to dwell on how the Dittoheads always had a readymade comeback for anything a liberal could say.

“People who listen to Rush Limbaugh don’t know what they’re saying… They’re angry, ill informed people…”

“You can’t have a serious political discussion with them,” and so they didn’t have to be taken seriously. Because they weren’t well enough informed to know what they were talking about. And so they weren’t to be dignified by being taken seriously.

Liberals, however, failed to note one detail of the Dittoheads in their hurry to dismiss them: Dittoheads voted. In high numbers.

Don certainly didn’t trust white liberals. He didn’t trust white moderates, either. He didn’t trust white moderate presidents, either. Oh, no. He didn’t trust the white senators or the white congressmen.

He didn’t trust the white Supreme Court judges or Clarence Thomas either. But then again, Don didn’t trust white bailiffs and white law school deans. He certainly didn’t trust policemen whether they were white or black. He didn’t trust the way they looked at him. He didn’t even trust the way they dressed these days.

Cops had always been threatening but they used to dress like they belonged on city streets, in parks, in the civilian world.

Don noticed that more and more cops dressed for combat. If cops were going to dress for confrontation, their most likely victims of excessive force, police brutality, wrongful arrest and misidentification should dress for the confrontation too.

Like the Black Panthers did.

Don’s Uncle Ken had been in the Black Panthers. He had a picture of his Uncle Ken when he was a Panther. That’s how the family story went. Uncle Ken had been a Black Panther back in the Sixties out in California, where he lived.

Don had seen the picture. Just the way they dressed struck fear into the hearts of white people. Stuck fear, like how those cops dressed for combat did today.

And what did white people fear in the Black Panthers? Probably that they wanted just what anyone else wanted in this racist society. They wanted to live. And they wanted their own dignity.

RIGHTWING THINK TANKS and their dutiful ideologues couldn’t look more normal. They couldn’t appear more bland, especially amid a media world gorging itself on bare bellied pop singers, muscled wrestlers, chisel jawed actors, stars of 30 million dollar movie productions.

The rightwing ideologues couldn’t sound more monotonous, unflappable and even-toned as they went about their dull, glamorless existences dressed in their off-the-rack suits and patent leather shoes.

Even as their ever lengthening list of research papers offered proof of their vision of the world and helped remake the American vocabulary, in which the freedom of one-sided speech and the freedom for the toxic effects it brought were mainstream.

The freedom to think whatever Rush and his imitators told you to think entailed also the freedom to blame most of the ills of the county on one side and one-side only.

But these changes, to describe them at the time, were mere abstractions; these changes occurred only in slow gradations. They were very real, but always peripheral in the American mind.

No one came on the TV and announced the coordinated push for a new reality. Many Americans considered the roar of Rush and his Dittoheads only a strange irritation. Or possibly a novelty. After all, many Rush fans were country music fans, many Rush fans hunted. Many Rush fans drove SUVs without apology. So AM talk radio was a niche lifestyle choice as much as anything else. One that craven marketers somewhere made a buck on. That’s all.

Besides, nothing the right wing think tanks could say was nearly as interesting as OJ Simpson’s murder trial. Or the John and Lorena Bobbitt trial.

“Did you hear that?” An outraged voice asked. “She cut his dick off and now they’re going to let her go free?”
“Fucking feminist liberals!”

Brandon wasn’t listening to the radio today. He was asking himself how he knew he’d be a good father? How, he wondered. How did he know he’d be a good dad?

He knew in the same way he knew he wasn’t always going to be a wastoid stoner. That’s how. And how did he know that? He knew because he knew. Like how a few years ago, he knew his life would make more sense one day.

More sense than when he was just out of high school. Back when confusion and doubt was everywhere. Back when he couldn’t see through the fog of bong hits and six-packs. Even back then. Yet he felt something else, some other force, humming below, telling him,

“Things would be okay.”

Just like with his old Buick.

If that Buick had broke down just once in those months before he got back to community college, he probably would have never got back to community college in the first place.

If that car broke down he would probably still be hauling dirty dishes around the kitchen of a Denny’s, bleary with a hang over.

Really, if the car broke down during that critical time of him pulling himself up by his bootstraps, he’d would probably not be where he is today in life, with Carolyn, with a child on the way.

But it didn’t break down and he did get back to college and he did meet Carolyn and she did change his life so maybe he should just say a prayer thanking God for keeping his alternator working.

Maybe he should say a prayer to ask God to make him a good father.

He almost locked his wheels in the middle of traffic when he realized what he’d honestly just thought… Say a prayer?

What was it, Jenny wondered? What was it about her own life? What blackness awoke her at this hour in the middle of the night? She couldn’t say. She got out of bed, leaving Rick to snore alone.

She padded past Jakob and Joshua’s room, looking in on them, seeing their little cub faces turned up in the moonlight. Jakob drooled into his pillow. They both slept the deep sleep of children. Deep. Untroubled. Not at all the fitful nights Jenny knew.

She walked to the kitchen. Always to the kitchen. Instinctively to the kitchen. She searched the fridge but she knew what she was going for was in the freezer. She opened it and took out the half gallon of Rocky Road. Carefully, she shut the door between the living room and the hall.

She turned on the TV. It was way past the hour to see Frasier, way past the time for NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope or Picket Fences or any other show whose plot or characters could give her mind a hook to rest on for half another. It was past David Letterman and Jay Leno even. And she didn’t even enjoy them. Only CNN was on. When she unmuted the TV, the curly-haired anchor’s authoritative, baritone voice violated her home’s sleeping silence. She frantically jammed down the volume.

Jenny made herself comfortable on the Laz-Y-Boy, a tea towel unfolded on her lap, the container of ice cream opened on top. There were advantages to being awake in the middle of the night. She spooned the Rocky Road into her mouth, experiencing the taste and the texture of the nuts, marshmallow, the ice cream. She dug the spoon deep.

The TV cast a glow. Like a campfire. Like a torch in the night. And it almost didn’t matter that the news was about that philanderer Clinton.

The TV’s glow beamed light into the darkness, in the unknowingness. In this vast expanse of the night, of sleep, of absence. Outside, the suburban streets crept deeper into the unlit Iowan farm fields, where even if there were homes, the land remained as abandoned and empty as if no one was really there.

Some nights, Jenny felt as alone as if nothing was there. Not even Jakob or Joshua or Rick. Like she was surrounded by nothing. As if everything she saw around her was a prop from TV, flimsy and made of wood. And that it could all fall away. And beyond what she could see there was only an inky blackness, a darkness awaiting her. Where there was nothing to feel, or know. But just a shapeless fear out on the horizon of nothingness.

Jenny licked the spoon, the pieces of nuts scraping like rivets against her tongue.

But there was something alive in the darkness. Something real. A force itching with agitation. With the tension of life. Of conflict. There were the voices.

In Oklahoma it said, “LBJ used the n-word…”
“So welfare is racist,” answered another.
“After all, LBJ was a liberal.”
“A liberal who couldn’t hide his feelings about black people.”
“Which proves he was a racist. He held minorities back for the Democrats gain.”
“That proves it, said a voice calling in.”
“But I’ll say this: at least LBJ was honest.”

And into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans like Jenny, facing the blankness of an American life that no longer had place for the Americans, there was something to think, to feel!

It was fun for the Dittoheads to test out the ideas they absorbed from the radio. To take some of Rush’s spark and apply to their own conversations. And so in Tennessee a voice said:

“Liberals don’t understand personal responsibility.”
“They don’t understand freedom,” said another in Minnesota.
“They don’t understand enlightened self-interest,” said one in New York.

“Or altruism,” said another.

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute,” protested another. “The Republicans have been the party of white power for years. How the hell do you say liberals hate minorities?”

“Oh, that’s real helpful. All you can do is spew hate at the Republicans. I’m talking facts about the liberals and you come at me with hatred. How many white liberals do you see living in minority neighborhoods?”

“There’re some.”

“Liberals are rich. They live in rich neighborhoods. The rest of us live together. And you can see there aren’t many liberals here,” said a voice in a working class neighborhood in Chicago.

“I’m here.”

And the conversation, only seconds before about the GOP’s record on race, became the liberal trying to prove his bona fides.

The opinions, the accusations were much more fun if an actual liberal threw up actual resistance like the one did in Washington:

“LBJ was from Texas. How was he not a racist?”
“Just because he was foul mouthed doesn’t mean—“
“He used the n-word.”
“—So?”
“—That proves it! You see I’m not politically correct so I can say it: Democrats have always had ulterior motives with minorities.”
“—But the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act—“
“—You’re so lost in that hype you believe that.”
“—It’s history.”
“—Politically correct history, maybe.”
And with that, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was gripped by its most graspable contours and heaved aside dismissed as complete liberal propaganda.