When my wife and I arrived in New York City one blisteringly hot August we were able to register in time to vote in the general election. In the letter below to my wife's cousin, Sarah, a woman our age who lived and studied music in Boston, I mention that I plan on casting my vote for Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. But I don't think I did. I think I voted the Socialist Party ticket for president.
Dukakis ended up winning in New York but was trounced nationwide by George H.W. Bush. That election is mostly remembered for a series of sound bites from the debates (Lloyd Bentsen's "Senator, You're No Jack Kennedy" disintegration of a bumbling Dan Quayle and Dukakis' bloodless response to the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife, Kitty) as well as two devastatingly effective ads run by the Bush campaign: the tank ad, and the Willie Horton ad. But what is not generally remembered about this race is that Dukakis enjoyed an enormous lead in the polls after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, something like 21 points, which he proceeded to squander thanks to a series of gaffes.
Lee Atwater directed a shrewd campaign for Bush I. Yes, the tank and Willie Horton ads were ruthlessly effective, but so too was an ad that featured black-and-white stills of gas lines and Hippies protesting and hostages in Tehran blindfolded. The message was "Do want to go back to the social chaos of the 1970s?" The answer from the masses in the fall of 1988 was overwhelming "No." Dukakis was the last Democrat to run for president as an unabashed liberal. Today the social chaos of the 1970s is looking pretty good.
The letter is mostly an analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952), one of my favorite novels at the time, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye (1982). Sarah loved Wise Blood too. The last paragraph reveals a flirtation that Sarah and I carried on. Though it was never consummated, today I find it regrettable; proof of a confused young man bound for decades of moil and suffering.
Autumn 1988
We didn't make it up, but almost. We got on 95 North and after about eight miles the front end starting shaking and sliding like Anchorage back in '64. So I balanced the scale and decided against a 40-mph voyage to Boston. Tomorrow I have the day off to cast a losing ballot for your political pater. I'll take the stallion in for a grease job and an evaluation. Hopefully the ball joints aren't totally shot; if they are, I'm looking at a pretty penny.
Right before we left for Boston to see you we were throwing a bunch of stuff in a duffel bag, and I remembered your copy of Flannery O'Connor. I tossed it in . . . but we never went. So here I was with Sarah's unearthed O'Connor. -- I decided to re-read WISE BLOOD. And I did, and I think I got a little closer to the bottom of that dark swamp deep space which is the twenty-four-old mind that built that story. I used to grind this ax, on my first reading, that Haze was the best man, the best man on earth; a man shrouded everything else in the story; a man who every woman wanted because he was, plain and simple, a man. And, if you notice, this is true: Every woman in the story does want Haze, every single one. Hazel Motes is just about as incredible as you can get. But this time around I didn't notice Haze that much. I saw him more as a worker, a part player, albeit a big part, but a worker nonetheless . Enoch Emery is the one who breathed in my ear. He's "wise blood" (the one who always mentions it); he's the one who guards Eden's gate (a guard at the zoo gate); he's the man who gives names to all the animals. He's the one who steals the new jesus. And he is the one who is taken up by God. But I don't know what the fuck Flannery is trying to say in all of this -- that the world is part Enoch? Part stinking intuitive child? A shit-assed brat that is always right, but always nasty and unacceptable?
I like my first reading better because it made sense. I don't know what the second one means, something dark and deep like Satan and the ocean between the continents and smoking crack. In the end, the story ends with Haze and his pure selfless vision. Flannery wants the man, the hero -- Hazel, who wished his heart was the world and dies like Christ. Enoch is too far out in left field, the black dog panting silently in the bleachers. And I remember that your favorite memory was the image of Enoch in the putty rain brushing up against store fronts, his umbrella inside out, the new jesus crumpled in a brown paper bag on his arm.
I had a dream of the two of us, you and me, in a room, under a microscope; it was wild and okay; it reminded me of Haze.
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