Philip Roth: Our Gang

TRICKY: I don’t understand it. How can these youngsters be saying what they are saying about me? How can they be chanting those slogans, waving those signs — about me? Gentlemen, by all reports they are growing more surly and audacious by the hour. By morning we may have on our hands the most incredible upheaval in history: a revolution by the Boy Scouts of America! ( In an attempt to calm himself, and become confident and decisive, he puts on his helmet )

Now it was one thing when those Vietnam soreheads came down here to the Capitol to turn their medals in. Everyone knew they were just a bunch of malcontents who had lost arms and legs and so on, and so had nothing better to do with their time than hobble around feeling sorry for themselves. Of course they couldn’t be objective about the war — half of them were in wheelchairs because of it. But what we have now isn’t just a mob of ingrates — these are the Boy Scouts! And don’t you think for one moment that the American people are going to sit idly by when a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout, climbs to the top of the Capitol steps and calls the President of the United States “a dirty old man.” Let there be no mistake about it, if we do not deal with these angry Scouts as coolly and confidently and decisively as I dealt with Khrushchev in that kitchen, by tomorrow I will be the first President in American history to be even more hated and despised than Lyin’ B. Johnson. Gentlemen, you can go to war without Congressional consent, you can ruin the economy and trample on the Bill of Rights, but you just do not violate the moral code of the Boy Scouts of America and expect to be reelected to the highest office in the land!

And yet when I made that speech at San Dementia, it all seemed so… so perfectly and, if I may say so, so brilliantly, innocuous. Five minutes later I didn’t even remember what it was I’d endorsed. That my political opponents could now be so desperate to oust me from power so disrespectful, not simply of me, but of the august office of the Presidency, to take those few utterly harmless and totally meaningless words that I spoke that day, and turn them into this monstrous lie!

Gentlemen, I am no newcomer to the ugly game of, politics. I have seen all kinds of chicanery and deceit in my day — falsification, misquotation, distortion, embellishment, ‘and, of course, outright suppression of the truth. Nor am I what you would call a babe-in-the-woods when it comes to the techniques of character assassination. Years ago I looked on in disgust and horror when they crucified Senator Joseph McCatastrophy just because he kept changing his mind as to the number of Communists there were in the State Department. I saw what they did only recently to judge Carswell. I saw what they did to judge Haynsworth. Why, just last month look what they tried to do to Secretary Lard, when he held up that phony piece of pipe before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and said it was from Laos instead of Vietnam. Five miles away — and they’re ready to hang him for it!

But, I must admit, never in my long career of dealing with falsehood have I come upon a lie so treacherous and Machiavellian as this one my enemies are trying to pass off about me… What did I say? Let’s look at the record. I said nothing! Absolutely nothing! I came out for “the rights of the unborn.” I mean if ever there was a line of hokum, that was it. Sheer humbug! And as if it wasn’t clear enough what I was up to, I even tacked on, “as recognized in principles expounded by the United Nations.” By the United Nations. Now what more could I possibly have said to make the whole thing any more inane? Maybe I was supposed to have told them “as recognized in principles expounded by the American Automobile, Association.” Maybe I should have given the whole speech in Pig Latin, and made funny faces while I was at it! Maybe I should have come out to make the statement in a clown’s costume! But I did not do that — because I refuse to talk down to the American public. I refuse to pull my punches. I refuse to believe that the people of this great nation are incapable of recognizing the most outrageous kind of hypocrisy or sniffing out the most blatant contradictions imaginable… And yet this, this is my reward, for my faith in America. The Boy Scouts of America screaming to the TV cameras that Trick E. Dixon favors sexual intercourse. Favors fornication between people!

POLITICAL COACH: Of course, as of now, it’s still only the Boy Scouts, Mr. President.

TRICKY: Today the Boy Scouts ( here he sinks down onto the bench before the blackboard, barely restraining a sob ) — tomorrow the world!… And what about my wife — what is she going to think? What if she starts to believe it? What about my children? WHAT ABOUT THE VOTERS!

SPIRITUAL COACH: Here, here, Mr. President. I sympathize with your chagrin, particularly as it relates to your fine family. But, frankly, I do not believe that the American people who see you on TV, any more than those who know you at firsthand, are going to be taken in by such a blatant fabrication. If ever a man, in his every word and deed, his every movement and gesture, his glance, his sneer, his very smile, put the lie to such a slanderous accusation as this one, it is you.

TRICKY ( visibly moved ): Reverend, I thank you for that tribute. Surely I have tried to give no indication whatsoever to the people of this country that I even know what sexual intercourse is. Futhermore, I have instructed my family that they must under no circumstances allow it to appear that any of us have ever in our lives been. infected by desire or lust, or, for that matter, an appetite for anything at all, outside of political power. This may sound immodest of me, but I happen to pride myself on the fact that if it weren’t for my perspiring so on television, the American people would probably have no way in the world of telling that under my clothes I am flesh. And, of course you all know, as a result of a decision I reached here during a lonely vigil in the locker room only a few nights ago, this disorder will very shortly be corrected when I enter Walter Reed Hospital to undergo a secret operation for the surgical removal of the sweat glands from my upper lip. You see, gentlemen, that is how dedicated I am to dissociating myself from anything remotely resembling a human body. But now to accuse me of this! As though to be for the rights of the unborn was prima facie evidence — that is, evidence sufficient to establish a fact, or to raise a presumption of fact… that’s what we lawyers mean by that phrase… as you know, before entering the White House I was a lawyer, and so I know phrases like that… as though that were prima facie evidence that I was also in favor of the process by which the unborn come into existence in the first place. To accuse me, because of a perfectly innocuous statement like that, of encouraging people to have intercourse in order that they should have unborn, in order that those unborn should have these rights — that don’t even exist! And that I wouldn’t care about, even if they did! How could I? Here I am, President of the United States and Leader of the Free World, working and slaving with every fiber of my being, night and day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for the sole purpose of getting myself reelected — where would I find the time to worry about the rights of anything? Haven’t they any idea what this job is all about? The whole thing is so patently absurd! And yet there are those Boy Scouts, in uniform, marching in the streets of the nation’s capital and those signs:

GO BACK TO CALIFORNIA,

SENSUALIST, WHERE YOU BELONG

POWER TO THE PENIS? NEVER!

REPRESSION — LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!

SPIRITUAL COACH ( solemnly, taking the arm of the shaken President ): Mr. President, forgive them, they know not what their signs say.