The Brothers K (57 page)

He got his first all-out roar of laughter. “It’s a kind of litmus test,” he said. “Or as the brownish White Folks say” (he made himself look toothless), “lithmuth.”

He got his second roar. The crowd grew bigger. His painful awareness of Natasha grew smaller. “When the teeth do start to go,” he said, “the dirty work is pretty well done. C&H just fires all the workers who want a dental plan, hires a few of the cutest ones to do their TV commercials, and proudly labels the rest of their TV- and Sugar-lovin’ wage slaves ‘converts,’ or in some translations ‘employees.’ And converts they are. But to C&Hianity, not Christianity.”

“It’s true!” giggled Melanie.

“It’s fairly decent bullshit,” Hank admitted.

“Bullshit?” Everett retorted. “Have you guys seen that new translation of the Bible? The one
sponsored
by C&H? I read what it called ‘The Brochure of Matthew’ and it blew my mind! Wanna hear a few lines?”

Natasha’s solo “No!” was obliterated by the boisterous yea-sayers. So in his best Southern Baptist drawl Everett said, “I quote:
And as they were eating, Jesus took the Three Musketeers bar, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and at the top of His lungs shouted, ‘T
AKE!
Then
EAT!’
Thus spake He the Two Commandments, and henceforth by C&Hians the Ten were kept no more.”

There was laughter, and a
hallelujah!
or two.

“Then He took out the quart Coke jug and the ten-ounce Crown Z paper chalices, and gave thanks, and poured it for them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament.”

The crowd was ecstatic, or sounded like it. Everett gave them a modest little bow. But when he turned to grin at Natasha she wasn’t even shooting the usual eye-bullets through his head. She was on her way to the kitchen. Dammit! This woman was starting to make him angry! She was also starting to make him desperate.
So what’s to lose?
he thought.
Go with the anger!
“Very good, Natasha!” he bellowed. “The Christian woman’s place is in that very room, working her slow, terrible revenge upon the Christian man!”

Natasha remained invisible. But his audience was still with him. “More!” roared Deluxe Dave.

“Yeah!” Melanie laughed. “I’m all
for
terrible revenges on men!”

“Then check out the one being worked three times a day in every Christian kitchen throughout the land,” Everett growled. “Its name, as Natasha could no doubt tell you, is Christian cuisine.”

“He’s so
funny!”
Melanie gasped.

“He’s so
ill,”
Natasha called in from the kitchen.

“You’re so right!” Everett erupted. “For I was raised on food designed with a single purpose: to put the Christian Husband in his richly deserved grave so the Christian Wife can kick up her heels for a few years before she has to join him!”

Natasha reappeared with a beer and a scowl and resumed shooting her beautiful eye-bullets at him through the doorway. New life! New death! He put the spurs to his magic tongue:
“All
women are feminists. Even those who wish they weren’t. Baptist women, Muslim women—liberationists all! They can’t help it. It’s in the blood, the glands, the DNA. Oh sure, the menfolk like to corral the ladies with patriarchal Gods, scriptures and cultures that order otherwise, and some of the ladies go, ‘Whatever you say, honey! We’re brood stock, we’re chattel, we like it this way.’ But look what these faithful little wifeys turn around and
feed
the men of the clan! These dames aren’t bimbos! They’re
assassins!
They’re Female Supremists! Key ingredients in the Pillsbury Patriarch-Slayer’s Cookbook? Pure white sugar! Bleached white flour! Salt by the pound! Crisco by the tub! And don’t forget the Wonder bread! Just one loaf and he’ll wonder if he’ll ever crap again!”

Ah! The sweet cacophony of laughter!

“Metastasizing meats dripping with fat! Fat dripping with amphetamines! Potatoes dripping with gravy! Hydrogenated this, saturated that! More meat! More fat! Meanwhile the Biblical Wife nibbles a stick of celery and stays in perfect shape lifting, lugging and
serving
all this tripe! And what’s for dessert? Prefab cakes and cookies! Canned puddings so viscous they don’t even jiggle! Du Pont chemical ice cream that changes temp but never melts! A second helping of each! Then up she jumps again, batting her lashes and saying, ‘Why, look, Daddy! Your
heart’s
still beating! How can
that
be? How about another cuppa coffee with a dose of this neat new nondairy liver creamer?’”

Another detonation from the delighted fans.

“‘No, thanks, honey!’ wheezes the comatose Lord of the Household. ‘The kids are screaming, and the Good Book says it’s your job to go shut ’em up. My job is to read the paper, and after a while go try ’n’ take me a humongous dump, and maybe read a little more paper in there.’

“‘How about some tea, then, hon? It only takes three seconds to brew! It’s got those neat new carcinogenic dyes!’

“‘Oh well, in that case,’ groans the Patriarch.

“And so it goes. Christian cuisine is not a culinary art. It’s the art of taxidermy practiced upon the living!”

There was applause, cheering, an outright ovation, some of it even standing.

And, once again, Natasha was nowhere to be seen.

I’ve never liked guilt-tripping. I’ve always left the concept of sin to the Catholic Church. When I was four, my mother said, “There’s millions of people starving in China. Eat your dinner.” I said, “Ma, name one.”

—Abbie Hoffman

O
nce upon a time there was a quirky little literary and theatrical genre, called farce, whose sole allegiance was to pursue comic effect. Since it was a purgative, like Ex-Lax, it was farce’s duty to hit below the belt. It was also its prerogative to be tasteless if necessary, to care not a fig for veracity or integrity if necessary, and to cream-pie even blind men, retarded people and sleeping infants if necessary. And the only thing it defined as necessary was to grovel shamelessly after its one true god, the Funny Bone.

But lo and behold, the tacky little genre proved surprisingly powerful. Because of its announced lack of “higher considerations” it could probe darker places more blithely, take more dangerous or ludicrous risks, say more vicious and hilarious things, and be forgiven more quickly and completely than any other genre. And being purely for show, it freed
artists, writers and playwrights to make a Punch-and-Judy doll out of any sacred cow or person on earth, then to attack it so outrageously and mercilessly that the genuine outrage and mercilessness pent up in its audience or readers came bubbling into the open, where it could disperse in the harmless form of laughter. So it was that artists as varied as Aristophanes and Mozart, Plato and Swift, Chuang Tzu and Shakespeare, Kabir and Apuleius, all grew to admire farce, and all used it to varied and powerful effect.

We were young. We were arrogant. We were ridiculous. There were excesses. We were brash. We were foolish. We had factional fights. But we were right
.

—Abbie Hoffman

I
n the decade after World War II a number of very powerful American politicians also discovered farce. These politicians had such Machiavellian philosophies and rudimentary senses of humor that they didn’t recognize it as a cathartic or comic genre. But they did recognize its power over people. They therefore began applying none of farce’s funniness but all of its unscrupulousness to such tasks as smearing opponents to win elections, groveling shamelessly after the lowest common prejudices of the people, blacklisting dissent, whitewashing corruption and prostituting themselves to wealthy private backers who used them to de-democratize entire constituencies. And though quite a few citizens soon recognized that incredible abuses of power were taking place, there seemed to be no rational, nonfarcical way to combat them. The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard: government by force of farce.

Meanwhile the Pentagon had been watching. And when they saw the humorless new style of farce catapulting one Pecksniffian lump after another into political power and keeping him there, they deployed the same little genre, not as a psychological or political purgative, but as an economic one. Pouring Bolshevik scares and Red threats like Ex-Lax down everyone’s throat, the military created a kind of “emergency peace” that kept Americans crapping out tax dollars and nonrenewable resources at a suicidal rate. And again, farce worked like a charm, and no one who cared about integrity or truth had any idea how to protest or resist.

So in the early 1960s our D.C. military and political farce-artists decided
to combine forces, put the petal to the metal, and see what their hot little genre could
really
do: to that end they prepackaged and mailed two million reasonably innocent and increasingly unwilling American boys to Southeast Asia, ordered them to engage in an experimental farce of a war, and further ordered them not to win this war, but only to fight and possibly die in it in support of a clique of corrupt Saigon businessmen. If this clique failed to stay in power, our federal farce-artists told us, the countries of the free world would topple like dominoes and our children would worship Marx and Mao instead of Baseball and God. So the two million boys simply
had
to go.

At this point it grew apparent to a great many Americans that we were no longer the audience of our D.C. farce-writers: we had become the boobs and butts of their humorless scripts. A handful of political scribblers like Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy and Lyndon Johnson were turning
millions
of Americans and Southeast Asians into throwaway characters in an international Megafarce. And
still
nobody could stop them. Strong families like mine kept fighting for a family identity, and strong characters like my brothers and sisters still struggled to come of age in nonfarcical ways. But our lives were being violated, trivialized, and in tens of thousands of cases terminated by the trite machinations of these sickeningly powerful men.

This was when the resistance finally began. Haying nothing to lose and the autonomy and integrity of our lives to regain, several million upstarts like myself began fighting fire with fire by launching little farce-missiles right back at Washington, D.C. And though for a while our efforts didn’t help much politically, they were immediately therapeutic literarily—because as long as we defied the feds with light hearts, as long as we protested with humor, we were doing our puny but honest best to wrestle the sword of farce away from these humorless enemies of peace and art and pound it back into the purely literary plowshare that Aristophanes, Apuleius, Shakespeare and Company intended it to be. True, terms like “Pentacong” and “Richard Outhaus Nixon” and dramas like
Hats
were a far cry from Aristophanes. But they weren’t that far from Swift. And subtlety didn’t pierce the armor of these antiliterary oafs anyway. Only numbers pierced them—because dollars and votes both travel in numbers. So we poured into the streets and ROTC buildings and deans’ offices in hordes, fighting the Megafarce with a billion theatrical or literary farces of our own.

The Left has a marvelous ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
.

—Abbie Hoffman

B
ut every performer—even the guerrilla farce-artist—needs to maintain an ability to stop performing. The respite, the inner recess, may be the only real difference between vocation and obsession. I needed, all student rabble-rousers needed to know how to stop being witty and rhetorical, how to be a plain private person who cared about other private people, and how to speak unadorned, unmanipulative sentences simply because they were true. I desperately needed a place to take off my anarchical makeup and stop posturing and gesturing. And I had no such place. What I had instead were fame and sex.

Regarding the fame:

One spring day in 1968, while walking the two miles from my house to the campus, I was recognized and greeted by name, wave, peace sign or nod exactly 207 times. I know because I counted. I counted because it made me giddy with bliss. By the time I got to class I figured I’d single-handedly be calling a halt to that troublesome little ’Nam thing any day now. Only in retrospect, only
years
later, did it occur to me that I had looked directly at every one of those 207 passersby and tried to say or do something at least mildly witty for every one of them—and not out of politeness, not out of friendliness, but only to be sure that they recognized me again next time! Talk about compulsion! Talk about a dog pissing on posts!

By 1969, thanks to years of diligent post-pissing, I was known around the U district as “the Hippie Churchill,” a nickname I took as a compliment. But it was almost too perfect—because a caricature of a great orator is exactly what I’d become. Even when I tried to be serious my tours de force came off as mere parodies of “great speeches.” But attempts at seriousness were rare. I didn’t know how to stop a war. All I knew was how to make people with similar politics laugh. That’s why more and more of my great public outcries became cartoonish farces as verbally violent toward their perceived ideological enemies as the Saturday-morning cartoons are violent to Elmer Fudd or Sylvester when they threaten the happiness of Bugs or Tweety Bird. And the odd thing was, none of my cronies seemed to recognize the cartoon element. Virtually
everything that came out of my mouth in 1969 was imbued with the sketchiness and shallowness of caricature, but with the exceptions of Natasha (whose eyes I avoided), Dr. Gurtzner (whose class I dropped) and Peter and Kade (with whom I’d stopped corresponding), everybody seemed to take me for a cogent thinker, a zany but genuine new brand of American social reformer, and even “a legend in my own time.”