The Crazy Years

by Spider Robinson

  As far as they were concerned, the show was over. The star had already performed, and this blockage at the door was just some temporary screw-up. They made no attempt to keep silent—didn’t even bother keeping their voices down. Some shouted, the better to be heard over that guy up onstage nattering on about carpenters and tinkers. Cigarettes were lit, some containing tobacco; raucous laughter rose above the general hubbub.

  Tim soldiered on. He finished his first song, to a smattering of applause, watched the doors open and a flood of people race to escape his music. He began another song, watched more chattering crowds form at his left and right as he sang and then flee the moment they were allowed to. He started a third tune; same result…

  He stopped in mid-song, unslung his guitar, leaned closer to the mike said, very softly, “How would you like it if somebody pissed in your canteen?” and left. Some folks didn’t even notice.

  But they sure noticed when an avenging angel swept down from the bleachers, trailing blonde hair like fire. Ms. Mitchell sprang onstage, grabbed the mike and for the next five solid minutes she cursed that crowd. We were barbarians, pigs, reptile excrement; she profoundly regretted having performed for us, and would tell every act she knew not to come here because we didn’t deserve to hear music; she maligned us and our relatives and ancestors until she ran out of breath and stormed offstage. Leaving behind hundreds of baffled people…and a handful like me, cheering even louder than they had for her songs.

  Mr. Hardin cut that tour short and went back to heroin. His performance at Woodstock the following year was cut from the movie. It took him another ten horrid years to die, at thirty-nine. At his final gig in 1979, they say he played one song—Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia”—over and over, until he cleared the place. I mourn his loss still and urge you to hunt his work on the Net.

  But I’ve been waiting ever since for a chance to thank the first Canadian I ever met for her magnificent rudeness—not to mention her astonishing command of invective—and now I’ve finally got it done. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, Ms. Mitchell, I am yours to command.

  Pull Up a Soapbox

  Hail on the Chief

  FIRST PRINTED APRIL 1998

  THE LATE JOHN BRUNNER’S classic non-novel Stand on Zanzibar depicts a near-future world driven mad by a combination of overpopulation and runaway technology. One memorable recurring character is a drug burnout named Bennie Noakes, permanently skulled on powerful psychedelics, who spends his life in front of the tube watching the news channel, shaking his head and murmuring over and over, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” I’ve often felt like Bennie as I watched my own TV news. Surely I must have been hallucinating what I saw and heard.

  Could OJ Simpson really have told an interviewer he’s getting more sex now than he did when he was married, and then pretended to knife her with a banana on-camera? Can it possibly be true that the state of Texas—Texas!—now forbids condemned prisoners a cigarette before their execution, to protect their health? Did the Belgians really let Dutroux escape?

  And did the entire American population really all simultaneously develop a psychotic fascination with their president’s penis?

  At the time I emigrated from the US, many Americans believed the president to be a crook and held him responsible for the protraction of a bloody and unjust war—and to be sure, I occasionally heard private ribald speculations about his sex life. But the New York Times did not print them. Walter Cronkite did not quote them. It would have been inconceivable. Unpopular as that man was, when he spoke unexpectedly to antiwar protesters at the Lincoln Memorial one night, every one of them addressed him as “Mr. President”—nobody called him Tricky Dick to his face. Americans may disrespect the man…but they respect the office. Things couldn’t have changed that much in a mere twenty-five years: somehow I’ve been dosed with powerful drugs, and that whole Zippergate thing was a lunatic fantasy I had. Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!

  Well, wait a minute. A memory has just surfaced. Once again I am broiling in the Florida sun…

  It was during the first Bush administration. Having been Toastmaster for the fiftieth World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, I’d had the great good fortune to meet a NASA official who kindly gifted me with a VIP pass to attend a space shuttle launch—a childhood dream come true. When the big day dawned, thousands of stationary vehicles full of sightseers blocked the highway leading to the spaceport—but thanks to our magic piece of paper, my friends and wife and I passed them all on the shoulder, cleared the checkpoint, drove over the causeway and joined the elite line of perhaps a hundred cars full of citizens privileged to watch the launch a mere mile or so away from the pad. We were not surprised that the line moved slowly—official vehicles had urgent use for the same road—but we were somewhat dismayed when it stopped altogether. And stayed stopped.

  The sun beat down. Air-conditioners overheated their engines. People stepped out into murderous heat to ask each other the obvious question, to which no answer was forthcoming. Fifteen minutes passed, very slowly. Up the road in the opposite direction came a motorcycle cop with a bullhorn; he drove past us very slowly, ignoring all pleas and gestures, braying, “REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES” over and over. Our vehicles were by now solar ovens. A million years went by…mosquitoes gorged…sunblock ran down our necks…children cried…tempers began to climb…the damn launch was only fifteen minutes away, now—and suddenly, all became clear.

  Coming toward us on the opposite side of the road at twenty kilometers an hour, shimmering in the heat, a vision: a flotilla of black stretch limousines. A phalanx of motorcycle cops with automatic weapons. Chase-cars full of shooters in suits and black shades fore and aft. The truth began to dawn. Sure enough, as the second limo came even with us, five meters away, its tinted rear windows powered down, and there they were. Identical robotic waves, identical ghastly smiles, like terrible twin parodies of the Queen. Danforth and Marilyn Quayle.

  Mr. Quayle’s duties as vice president had included direct responsibility for America’s space program. Three months away from leaving office, he had decided to pay his first visit ever to NASA turf while they still had to let him in. We all realized we’d been kept broiling in the sun so the Secret Service could make absolutely sure there wasn’t an alligator with an Uzi in one of the drainage ditches beside the road.

  And as the motorcade crawled past, and Mr. Quayle waved and smiled—I swear to you—all of us in that lineup gave him the Trudeau Salute.

  (The Secret Service did not shoot us. The cops did not pistolwhip us. I didn’t see anybody photograph us or our license plates. Nobody seemed to notice. Least of all the Quayles: their smiles never faltered, their waving hands never trembled.)

  The motorcade passed, traffic started up and we were in time to see the Endeavour lift, the fiftieth shuttle launch ever, an experience too profoundly moving and awesome to convey in words. If anyone had told me, back in the 1950s when I started reading science fiction, that one day I would see a spaceship take off with my own eyes…well, I’d have found it hard to imagine. But if they’d told me that on the same day I would see hundreds of Americans loyal enough to have VIP access to government property all publicly give the vice president of the United States the finger, I’d have flatly refused to believe it.

  Plot a curve. Start with the Johnson administration, when it became acceptable to publicly call the president a baby killer. Place another data point at Watergate. Another for the years during which the president was clearly senile. Enter a fourth point representing the event I just described. Extend the curve…

  I take it back. Maybe I haven’t been dosed with drugs: perhaps the whole Zippergate thing actually did happen, and Ken Starr is a real person. In that case, maybe I’m not taking enough drugs.

  There Are No Good Bushwhackers

  FIRST PRINTED MARCH 1999

  I LONG AGO LOST THE LAST SHRED of hope that I will ever in my life be offered anyone or anything in politics to r
oot for. But I have clung to the idea that it might be possible to sort out which, of the two or three bands of brigands seeking my consent to be mugged at any given time, I most urgently needed to be against.

  But these are the Crazy Years. All bets are off. Lately, every time I think I’ve identified who it is I’m most against…his enemies do something so spectacularly sleazy that I feel forced to defend the son of a bitch.

  There is a memorable moment in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in which Butch, about to battle to the death with a mastodon named Harvey Logan, suggests they define the rules. Logan stares at him in awe and contempt. “Rules?” he bellows. “In a knife-fight? No rules! Peep.” The last syllable, of course, is occasioned by the unexpected impact of Butch’s boot into his crotch. The most stupid and homicidal thug soon learns that it is good to have rules—even in a knife-fight. Politicians and pundits used to be that smart…but not anymore.

  The most egregious example was the carnival to the south a few years ago, where Mr. Clinton’s enemies insisted on keeping their fangs sunk in his flesh with the mindless tenacity of the pit bulls so many of them chanced to resemble, and without even a plausible surface appearance of any interest in the truth. Consider, for instance, a column by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe entitled “Rape? Sounds like our guy.” Taking his headline from that fount of thoughtful analysis, Newsweek’s “Conventional Wisdom” box (a short feature of satirical one-liners), Mr. Jacoby reprised every allegation of Clintonian sexual misconduct that years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars have failed to substantiate, as if they were facts; he ignored the only existing hard evidence of the president’s sexual behavior; and he concluded that Juanita Broaddrick’s recent utterly unsupported and highly suspicious allegation of a twenty-one-year-old rape by Mr. Clinton must be true. “Sounds like our guy.” Other commentators have made the same point, in just those astounding words.

  Forget the fundamental unfairness of condemning someone because he “sounds like our guy.” (Black? In a white neighborhood? With money in his pockets? Sounds like our guy.) What about common sense? Mr. Jacoby quotes Mrs. Broaddrick’s explanation for why she came forward now, of all times—“I didn’t want my granddaughters and nieces when they’re twenty-one years old to turn to me and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell what this man did to you?’”—and apparently he fails to notice that it makes absolutely no sense: they now will have to ask her just that question, and could not possibly have done so if she’d kept silent.

  Forget that too. Think instead about what we actually know: the Bill that Monica described to Baba Wawa. That man may be a fool, may be a simp…but could he conceivably be a predatory rapist, who uses sex to establish power? He was fifteen months into their affair before he had an orgasm, for God’s sake—long after she’d had several. By her vivid account, she had to more or less drag him into things, and did so eagerly. The kind of man described by Mrs. Broaddrick, Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, who gets his jollies from coercion, from resistance, from force, could not plausibly have been interested in, or vulnerable to, a compliant and dangerously uncontrollable little volunteer like Ms. Lewinsky. He just doesn’t fit the profile. It doesn’t sound remotely like our guy.

  Yes, he’s an admitted liar. But many Christians are unaware that the Bible nowhere forbids lying. What the Ten Commandments do forbid, specifically, is only a carefully limited kind of lying—the very kind Mr. Clinton’s enemies appear to excel at: bearing false witness against others.

  It drives me crazy to be forced to defend Mr. Clinton, as I am not one of his fans. His positions on space, the Internet and Free Trade, among others, strike me as particularly wrongheaded and dangerous. But his enemies leave me little choice.

  Similarly, and closer to home, I have strong reasons to dislike BC Premier Glen Clark. His administration’s spectacular mishandling of the Fast Ferry project may yet have me commuting via water-wings. Yet I am so appalled by the sleaziness of recent actions by his enemies that I may feel forced to support him in the next election.

  The recent pointless raid on Mr. Clark’s home, which just happened to end up on TV by (it says here) incredible chance and astute reporting, stinketh like a mackerel in the moonlight. Mrs. Clark says when she opened the door and saw Mounties and cameras, she assumed her husband was dead; for that alone, someone should be horsewhipped. After they left, Mr. Clark himself noticed they’d somehow overlooked the documents they had nominally come to seize and delivered them himself. (Sounds like a crook to me!) Those who were frightened by the film Wag the Dog can relax: politicians just aren’t that slick. Their frame-ups are much clumsier than Hollywood’s.

  I have doubts as to Mr. Clark’s wisdom and competence—but I will take an incompetent idiot over a bushwhacker any day. If his enemies are unwilling to fight fair, they must be wrong.

  Partisan politics has become so psychotic an arena as to effectively disenfranchise all voters, leaving a thoughtful citizen with absolutely no sensible way to influence his country’s destiny. At this point, I almost don’t care who wins: I just want them all to put away the knives. Once we all accept knife-fighting as legitimate political discourse, the next step is gunfights. Ask someone from El Salvador or Bosnia or Rwanda what that’s like.

  The Opposite of a Great Lie

  FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 2000

  THE GREAT PHYSICIST Niels Bohr said that there exist what he called Great Truths. How you know them, he said, is that the opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsehood—but paradoxically, the opposite of a Great Truth is another great truth.

  An easily-grasped example might be the classic metaphilosophical observation, “Love stinks.” Few will argue, yet the flipside is equally self-evident: sometimes love smells quite intoxicating. “Life sucks.” Sure. And rather well, if you’re lucky.

  Other Great Truths that spring readily to mind include “Civilization is a good thing,” “You can’t live with ’em,” “Music is universal” (how many raga, samisen, klezmer, oud or didgeridu CDs do you listen to regularly?), “Life is hilarious” or Mr. Spock’s famous, “The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.”

  Being a scientist, Dr. Bohr had an eye for Truth. It may never have occurred to him—who had survived World War II—that just as there are Great Truths, there also exist Great Lies.

  I would like to talk about one particular recent Great Lie, even though it’s both a comparatively trivial one and a pathetic failure—because I think it illumines something more dangerous to civilization than bullets or bombs.

  On September 2, 2000, I received an e-mail from Claire O’Leary, wife of the excellent sf writer Patrick O’Leary. She’d just gotten one of those multiply-reforwarded e-mail jokes that now infest the Internet and thought I would find it of interest. It consisted of a long list of incredibly stupid things said by Vice President Al Gore, with dates and attributions—and there’s no denying they were hilarious. Anyone with a sense of humor who saw them would hit the “forward” button and spam her entire address list almost by reflex. Here are just a few examples, personal favorites:

  “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” “We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.”

  “We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.”

  “One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared.’”

  “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”

  Well, sir, I did indeed find all those funny quotes fascinating, and Claire and I exchanged several letters about them.

  Now we jump ahead over two months, to November. An e-mail arrived from a Toronto friend, ace wordsmith Eric Posner—and almost at once an identical message from Linda Richards, co-creator of the outstanding book review website www.januarymagazine.com. They were both forwarding another of those viruslike e-mail joke collections, which they thought I’d enjoy, and indeed I found it as hilarious as the one Cla
ire had sent.

  Precisely as hilarious.

  That’s because it was—almost—precisely the same message. The only small change was that in this version, all those magnificently mindless quotes were attributed to Governor George W. Bush.

  “It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.”

  “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”

  “Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.”

  “I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.”

  ————————

  And we’re not even up to the punchline, yet.

  The reason Claire, Eric and Linda all knew I’d love what they were sending me is that they’d all just read my novel Callahan’s Key one month before Claire received the first dumb-quotes e-mail. Every one of my book’s nineteen chapters happens to begin with a quote. Each is marked by outstanding stupidity tempered with invincible ignorance. I personally researched the authenticity, provenance and date of each quote, with some care, and I promise you that every damn one of them first entered history through the mouth of J. Danforth Quayle.

  You guessed it: every one of the new disputed Gore/Bush quotes is actually a recycled Quayle quote.

  The irony gets thick on the ground, here. Mr. Quayle, for those who’ve succeeded in forgetting him, was vice president during the administration of a Republican named Bush. Now partisans of a different, scrubbier Bush seek to palm off Big Dan’s legendary malapropisms and misstatements as those of their Democratic opponent, also a vice president.