by Philip Roth
But as for this other matter, I assure you, this administration does not intend to sit idly by and do nothing while American women are being kicked in the stomach by a bunch of violent five-month-olds. Now by and large, and I cannot emphasize this enough, our American unborn are as wonderful a group of unborn as you can find anywhere. But there are these violent few that the Vice President has characterized, and I don’t think unjustly, in his own impassioned rhetoric, as “troublemakers” and “malcontents”—and the Attorney General has been instructed by me to take the appropriate action against them.
MR. DARING: If I may, sir, what sort of action will that be? Will there be arrests made of violent fetuses? And if so, how exactly will this be carried out?
TRICKY: I think I can safely say, Mr. Daring, that we have the finest law enforcement agencies in the world. I am quite sure that Attorney General Malicious can solve whatever procedural problems may arise. Mr. Respectful.
MR. RESPECTFUL: Mr. President, with all the grave national and international problems that press continually upon you, can you tell us why you have decided to devote yourself to this previously neglected issue of fetal rights? You seem pretty fired up on this issue, sir—why is that?
TRICKY: Because, Mr. Respectful, I will not tolerate injustice in any area of our national life. Because ours is a just society, not merely for the rich and the privileged, but for the most powerless among us as well. You know, you hear a lot these days about Black Power and Female Power, Power this and Power that. But what about Prenatal Power? Don’t they have rights too, membranes though they may be? I for one think they do, and I intend to fight for them. Mr. Shrewd.
MR. SHREWD: As you must know, Mr. President, there are those who contend that you are guided in this matter solely by political considerations. Can you comment on that?
TRICKY: Well, Mr. Shrewd, I suppose that is their cynical way of describing my plan to introduce a proposed constitutional amendment that would extend the vote to the unborn in time for the ’72 elections.
MR. SHREWD: I believe that is what they have in mind, sir. They contend that by extending the vote to the unborn you will neutralize the gains that may accrue to the Democratic Party by the voting age having been lowered to eighteen. They say your strategists have concluded that even if you should lose the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old vote, you can still win a second term if you are able to carry the South, the state of California, and the embryos and fetuses from coast to coast. Is there any truth to this “political” analysis of your sudden interest in Prenatal Power?
TRICKY: Mr. Shrewd, I’d like to leave that to you—and to our television viewers—to judge, by answering your question in a somewhat personal manner. I assure you I am conversant with the opinions of the experts. Many of them are men whom I respect, and surely they have the right to say whatever they like, though of course one always hopes it will be in the national interest… But let me remind you, and all Americans, because this is a fact that seems somehow to have been overlooked in this whole debate: I am no Johnny-come-lately to the problem of the rights of the unborn. The simple fact of the matter, and it is in the record for all to see, is that I myself was once unborn, in the great state of California. Of course, you wouldn’t always know this from what you see on television or read in the papers (impish endearing smile) that some of you gentlemen write for, but it happens nonetheless to be the truth. (Back to serious business) I was an unborn Quaker, as a matter of fact.
And let me remind you—since it seems necessary to do so, in the face of the vicious and mindless attacks upon him—Vice President What’s-his-name was also unborn once, an unborn Greek-American, and proud to have been one. We were just talking about that this morning, how he was once an unborn Greek-American, and all that has meant to him. And so too was Secretary Lard unborn and so was Secretary Codger unborn, and the Attorney General—why, I could go right on down through my cabinet and point out to you one fine man after another who was once unborn. Even Secretary Fickle, with whom as you know I had my differences of opinion, was unborn when he was here with us on the team.
And if you look among the leadership of the Republican Party in the House and the Senate, you will find men who long before their election to public office were unborn in just about every region of this country, on farms, in industrial cities, in small towns the length and breadth of this great republic. My own wife was once unborn. As you may recall, my children were both unborn.
So when they say that Dixon has turned to the issue of the unborn just for the sake of the votes … well, I ask only that you consider this list of the previously unborn with whom I am associated in both public and private life, and decide for yourself. In fact, I think you are going to find, Mr. Shrewd, with each passing day, people around this country coming to realize that in this administration the fetuses and embryos of America have at last found their voice. Miss Charmin’, I believe you had your eyebrows raised.
MISS CHARMIN’: I was just going to say, sir, that of course President Lyin’ B. Johnson was unborn, too, before he came to the White House—and he was a Democrat. Could you comment on that?
TRICKY: Miss Charmin’, I would be the first to applaud my predecessor in this high office for having been unborn. I have no doubt that he was an outstanding fetus down there in Texas before he came into public life. I am not claiming that my administration is the first in history to be cognizant of the issue of fetal rights. I am saying that we intend to do something about them. Mr. Practical.
MR. PRACTICAL: Mr. President, I’d like to ask you to comment upon the scientific problems entailed in bringing the vote to the unborn.
TRICKY: Well, of course, Mr. Practical, you have hit the nail right on the head with the word “scientific.” This is a scientific problem of staggering proportions—let’s make no mistake about it. Moreover, I fully expect there are those who are going to say in tomorrow’s papers that it is impossible, unfeasible, a utopian dream, and so on. But as you remember, when President Charisma came before the Congress in 1961, and announced that this country would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, there were many who were ready to label him an impossible dreamer, too. But we did it. With American know-how and American teamwork, we did it. And so too do I have every confidence that our scientific and technological people are going to dedicate themselves to bringing the vote to the unborn—and not before the decade is out either, but before November of 1972.
MR. PRACTICAL: Can you give us some idea, sir, how much a crash program like this will cost?
TRICKY: Mr. Practical, I will be submitting a proposed budget to the Congress within the next ten days, but let me say this: you cannot achieve greatness without sacrifice. The program of research and development such as my scientific advisers have outlined cannot be bought “cheap.” After all, what we are talking about here is nothing less than the fundamental principle of democracy: the vote. I cannot believe that the members of the Congress of the United States are going to play party politics when it comes to taking a step like this, which will be an advance not only for our nation, but for all mankind.
You just cannot imagine, for instance, the impact that this is going to have on the people in the under-developed countries. There are the Russians and the Chinese, who don’t even allow adults to vote, and here we are in America, investing billions and billions of the taxpayers’ dollars in a scientific project designed to extend the franchise to people who cannot see or talk or hear or even think, in the ordinary sense of the word. It would be a tragic irony indeed, and as telling a sign as I can imagine of national confusion and even hypocrisy, if we were willing to send our boys to fight and die in far-off lands so that defenseless peoples might have the right to choose the kinds of government they want in free elections, and then we were to turn around here at home and continue to deny that very same right to an entire segment of our population, just because they happen to live on the placenta or in the uterus, instead of New York City. Mr. Catch-Me-in-a-Contradicti
on.
MR. CATCH-ME-IN-A-CONTRADICTION: Mr. President, what startles me is that up until today you have been characterized, and not unwillingly, I think, as someone who, if he is not completely out of touch with the styles and ideas of the young, has certainly been skeptical of their wisdom. Doesn’t this constitute, if I may use the word, a radical about-face, coming out now for the rights of those who are not simply “young” but actually in the gestation period?
TRICKY: Well, I am glad you raised that point, because I think it shows once and for all just how flexible I am, and how I am always willing to listen and respond to an appeal from any minority group, no matter how powerless, just so long as it is reasonable, and is not accompanied by violence and foul language and throwing paint. If ever there was proof that you don’t have to camp on the White House lawn to get the President’s attention away from a football game, I think it is in the example of these little organisms. I tell you, they have really impressed me with their silent dignity and politeness. I only hope that all Americans will come to be as proud of our unborn as I am.
MR. FASCINATED: Mr. President, I am fascinated by the technological aspect. Can you give us just an inkling of how exactly the unborn will go about casting their ballots? I’m particularly fascinated by these embryos on the placenta, who haven’t even developed nervous systems yet, let alone limbs such as we use in an ordinary voting machine.
TRICKY: Well, first off, let me remind you that nothing in our Constitution denies a man the right to vote just because he is physically handicapped. That isn’t the kind of country we have here. We have many wonderful handicapped people in this country, but of course, they’re not “news” the way the demonstrators are.
MR. FASCINATED: I wasn’t suggesting, sir, that just because these embryos don’t have central nervous systems they should be denied the right to vote—I was thinking again of the fantastic mechanics of it. How, for instance, will the embryos be able to weigh the issues and make intelligent choices from among the candidates, if they are not able to read the newspapers or watch the news on television?
TRICKY: Well, it seems to me that you have actually touched upon the very strongest claim that the unborn have for enfranchisement, and why it is such a crime they have been denied the vote for so long. Here, at long last, we have a great bloc of voters who simply are not going to be taken in by the lopsided and distorted versions of the truth that are presented to the American public through the various media. Mr. Reasonable.
MR. REASONABLE: But how then will they make up their minds, or their yolks, or their nuclei, or whatever it is they have in there, Mr. President? It might seem to some that they are going to be absolutely innocent of whatever may be at stake in the election.
TRICKY: Innocent they will be, Mr. Reasonable—but now let me ask you, and all our television viewers, too, a question: what’s wrong with a little innocence? We’ve had the foul language, we’ve had the cynicism, we’ve had the masochism and the breast-beating—maybe a big dose of innocence is just what this country needs to be great again.
MR. REASONABLE: More innocence, Mr. President?
TRICKY: Mr. Reasonable, if I have to choose between the rioting and the upheaval and the strife and the discontent on the one hand, and more innocence on the other, I think I will choose the innocence. Mr. Hardnose.
MR. HARDNOSE: In the event, Mr. President, that all this does come to pass by the 72 elections, what gives you reason to believe that the enfranchised embryos and fetuses will vote for you over your Democratic opponent? And what about Governor Wallow? Do you think that if he should run again, he would significantly cut into your share of the fetuses, particularly in the South?
TRICKY: Let me put it this way, Mr. Hardnose: I have the utmost respect for Governor George Wallow of Alabama, as I do for Senator Hubert Hollow of Minnesota. They are both able men, and they speak with great conviction, I am sure, in behalf of the extreme right and the extreme left. But the fact is that I have never heard either of these gentlemen, for all their extremism, raise their voices in behalf of America’s most disadvantaged group of all, the unborn.
Consequently, I would be less than candid if I didn’t say that when election time rolls around, of course the embryos and fetuses of this country are likely to remember just who it was that struggled in their behalf, while others were addressing themselves to the more popular and fashionable issues of the day. I think they will remember who it was that devoted himself, in the midst of a war abroad and racial crisis at home, to making this country a fit place for the unborn to dwell in pride.
My only hope is that whatever I am able to accomplish in their behalf while I hold this office will someday contribute to a world in which everybody, regardless of race, creed, or color, will be unborn. I guess if I have a dream, that is it. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
MR. ASSLICK: Thank you, Mr. President.
3
Tricky Has Another Crisis;
or, The Skull Session
Tricky is dressed in the football uniform he wore during his four years on the bench at Prissier College. It is still as spanking new as the day it was issued to him some forty years ago, despite the fact that when he finds himself at night so perplexed and anguished by the burdens of the Presidency as to be unable to fall off to sleep, he frequently rises from his bed and steals down through the White House to the blast-proof underground locker room (built under his direction to specifications furnished by the Baltimore Colts and the Atomic Energy Commission) and “suits up” as though for “the big game” against Prissier’s “traditional rival.” And invariably, as during the Cambodian incursion and the Kent State killings, simply to don shoulder guards, cleats and helmet, to draw the snug football pants up over his leather athletic supporter and then to turn his back to the mirror and catch a peek over his big shoulders at the number on his back, is enough to restore his faith in the course of action he has taken in behalf of two hundred million Americans. Indeed, even in the midst of the most incredible international blunders and domestic catastrophes, he has till now, with the aid of his football uniform, and a good war movie, been able to live up to his own description of the true leader in Six Hundred Crises as “cool, confident and decisive” “What is essential in such situations,” he wrote there, summarizing what he had learned about leadership from the riots inspired by his 1958 visit, as Vice President, to Caracas, “is not so much ‘bravery’ in the face of danger as the ability to think ‘selfiessly’—to blank out any thought of personal fear by concentrating completely on how to meet the danger.”
But tonight not even barking signals at the full-length mirror and pretending to fade back, arm cocked, to spot a downfield receiver (while being charged by the opposing line) has he been able to blank out thoughts of personal fear; and as for thinking “selflessly,” he has not been making much headway in that department either. Having run plays before the mirror for two full hours—having completed eighty-seven out of one hundred attempted forward passes for a total of two thousand six hundred and ten yards gained in the air in one night (a White House record)—he is nonetheless unable to concentrate on how to meet the danger before him, and so has decided to awaken his closest advisers and summon them to the underground locker room for what is known in football parlance as a “skull session.”
At the door to the White House, each has been issued a uniform by a Secret Service agent, disguised, but for a shoulder holster, as an ordinary locker room attendant in sweat pants, sneakers and T-shirt stenciled “Property of the White House.” Now, seated on benches before the big blackboard, the “coaches” listen carefully as Tricky, with his helmet in his hands, describes to them the crisis he is having trouble being entirely selfless about.
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 mos
t 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. Everybody 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!
