Philip Roth - Our Gang

Quickly now to the White House, and the latest bulletin from the Bilge Secretary.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a few more facts for you now about the President’s hip, including the x-ray I promised earlier. This gentleman in white that you see beside me in his surgical gloves, gown and mask is probably the foremost authority on the left-hip in the world. Doctor, will you comment on this x-ray of the President’s left hip for the members of the press. I’ll hold it for you so you don’t dirty your gloves.”

“Thank you, Blurb. Ladies and gentlemen, there is just no doubt about it in my mind. This is a left hip.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Any questions?”

“Blurb, the report from Walter Reed is that the President has been assassinated. Stuffed naked into a baggie and drowned.”

“Gentlemen, let’s try to keep to the subject. The doctor here has flown in from Minnesota right in the middle of an operation on a left hip, to verify this X-ray for you. I don’t think we want to keep him longer than we have to..Yes?”

“Doctor, can you be absolutely sure that the left hip is the President’s?”

“Of course I can.”

“How, Sir?”

“Because that’s what the Bilge Secretary said it was. Why would he give me a picture of a hip and say it was the President’s if it wasn’t?” ( Laughter from the Press Corps )

“—the gadflies, the go-go girls, the geldings, the gibbons, the gonadless, the gonorrheacarriers—” We interrupt the Vice President’s address to i I is National Association for the Advancement of Color Slides to switch you to our correspondents around the country.

First, Morton Momentous in Chicago:

“Here in the Windy City the mood is one of incredulity, of shock, of utter disbelief. So stunned are the people of this great Middle Western metropolis that they seem totally unable to respond to the bulletins from Washington that have come to them over radio and television. And so from the Gold Coast to Skid Row, from the fashionable suburbs of the North to the squalid ghettos of the South, the scene is much the same: people going about their ordinary, everyday affairs as though nothing had happened. Not even the flags have been lowered to half-staff, but continue to flutter high in the breeze, even as they did before the news reached this grief-stricken city of the terrible fate that has befallen our leader. Trick E. Dixon is dead, cruelly and bizarrely murdered, a martyr to the unborn the world round — and it is more than the mind or spirit of Chicago can accept or understand. And so throughout this great city, life, in a manner of speaking, goes on — much as you see it directly behind me here in the world famous Loop. Shoppers rushing to and fro. The din of traffic continuous. Restaurants jammed. Streetcars and busses packed. Yes, the frantic, mindless scurrying of a big city at the rush hour. It is almost as though the people here in Chicago are afraid to turn for a single second from the ordinary routine of an ordinary day, to face this ghastly tragedy. This is Morton Momentous from a stunned, incredulous Chicago.”

We take you now to Los Angeles and correspondent Peter Pious.

“If the people in the streets of Chicago are incredulous, you can well imagine the mood of the ordinary man in the pool here in Trick E. Dixon’s native state. In Chicago they are simply unable to respond; here it is even more heartrending. The Californians I have spoken withor tried to speak with — are like nothing so much as small children who have been confronted with an event far beyond their emotional range of response. All they can do when they learn the tragic news that Trick E. Dixon has been found stuffed in a baggie is giggle. To be sure, there are the proverbial California wisecracks, but by and large it is giggling such as one might hear from perplexed and bewildered children that remains in one’s ears, long after the giggler himself has dived off the high board or driven away in his sports car. For this is Trick E. Dixon’s state and these are Trick E. Dixon’s people. Here he is not just the President, here he is a friend and a neighbor, one of them, a healthy child of the sunlight, of the beaches and the blue Pacific, a wan who embodied all the robustness and grandeur of America’s golden state. And now that golden child of the Golden West is gone; and Californians can only giggle to suppress their sobs and hide their tears. Peter Pious in Los Angeles.” Next, Ike Ironic, in New York City.

“No one ever believed that Trick E. Dixon was beloved in New York City. Yes, he lived here once, in this fashionable Fifth Avenue apartment building directly behind me. But few ever considered him a resident of this city so much as a refugee from Washington, biding his time to return to public office. Nor did New Yorkers seem much impressed when he assumed the powers of the Presidency in 1969. But now he is gone, and all at once the very deep affection, the love, if you will, for their former neighbor, is everywhere apparent. Of course, you have to know New Yorkers to be able to penetrate the outer shell of cynicism and see the love beneath. You had to look, but you saw it today, here in New York: in the seeming boredom and indifference of a bus driver; in the impatience of a salesgirl; in the anger over nothing of a taxi driver; in the weariness of the homebound workers packed into the subway; in the blank gaze of the drunks along the Bowery; in the haughtiness of a dowager refusing to curb her dog on the fashionable Upper East Side. You had to look, but there it was, love for Trick E. Dixon… Only now he is gone, gone before they could, with their boredom and indifference and impatience and anger and exhaustion and blankness and haughtiness, express to him all they felt so deeply in their hearts. Yes, the bitter irony is this: he had to die in a baggie, before New Yorkers could tender him that hard-won love that would have meant so much to him. But then it is a day of bitter ironies. Ike Ironic from grief-stricken and, perhaps, guilt ridden Fifth Avenue in the city of New York, where he lived like a stranger, but has died like a long-lost son.”

Reports coming in from around the nation confirm those you have just heard from our correspondents in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, reports of people too stunned or heartbroken to be able to respond with the conventional tears or words of sorrow to the news of President Dixon’s assassination. No, the ordinary signs of grief are clearly not sufficient to express the emotion that they feel at this hour, and so they pretend for the time being that it simply has not happened; or they giggle with embarrassment and disbelief; or they attempt to hide beneath a gruff exterior, the deep love for a fallen leader that smolders away within. And what of the madman who perpetrated this deed? For that story, we return you to the headquarters of the FBI in Washington.

“That’s right, we’re pretty sure now it was a madman who perpetrated this deed.”

“And the Scouts? The knife? The Louisville Slugger?”

“Oh, we’re not ruling out any of the hard evidence. I’m talking now about the brains behind the whole thing. More accurately, the lack of brains. You see, that’s really our number one clue everything else aside, this was a pretty stupid thing to do to the President. There he is, the President, and they do a stupid thing like this. Now if this is somebody’s idea of a practical joke, well, I for one don’t consider it funny. You’re not just stuffing anybody into a baggie, you’re stuffing the President of the United States. What about the dignity of his office? If you have no respect for the man, what about the office? That’s what really gravels me, personally. I mean, what do you think the enemies of democracy would think if they saw the President of the United States all curled up naked like that. Well, I’ll tell you what they’d think: they couldn’t be happier. That’s just the kind of propaganda they love to use to brainwash people and make Communists out of them.”