The Cat in the Hat for President

by Robert Coover

  “Some laws are no!

  Some laws are yes!

  All flaws are good

  For bus-i-ness!

  Some laws are may!

  Some laws are must!

  The Manikin Way:

  In God we rust!”

  Or he’d carry that “government of the people” jazz out to “until the people, down the people, between the people, across the people, past the people, into the people, round the people, beyond the people, since the people,” and so on to “government up the people.” That always brought the house down, but I wonder if the Cat ever knew why. I mean, he just didn’t seem to have that kind of mind. If he had any mind at all.

  Clark was convinced the Opponent was mad. And therefore his party was mad. And in fact any nation that could seriously consider for President a man who, for example, in Paterson and Cleveland promised vast federal programs “to liberate our great cities, once and for all, from misery, suffering, and despair,” and in Phoenix and Mobile championed states’ rights and reduced taxes, and embraced the local governors, was ipso facto a crazed and stricken society. His pet phrase was “biologically dysfunctional.” As far as I was concerned, it only showed Clark knew a lot less about people and politics than he liked to think. It even bothered him that the Opponent was a Mason, kept dogs, went to baseball games, taught Sunday School, watched TV, and played golf, especially when he learned that the Opponent didn’t especially like to play golf.

  It’s true, the Opponent made a pretty bad showing against the Cat, even blew his wig a couple times, but what would you do if you stood to address your fellow party members at a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner and discovered it was nothing but a stable full of braying polkadotted donkeys wearing Cat Hats? What would you do if you got into a nationally televised VIP Golf Tournament and found yourself up against a silly Cat in a floppy Hat who swished eight-foot-long rubbery clubs at skittery golf balls with eyes and noses and got holes-in-one, while your own clubs oddly weighed a ton all of a sudden and kept sticking into the ground and taking root? What would your comeback be if, while addressing a national convention of the American Legion on the primacy of patriotism, your clothes suddenly fell off you (“defoliation,” my friend Sam quipped in a speech in Minneapolis), leaving you diapered in Old Glory, noticeably soiled? What the Opponent said was: “This is an outrage!” And indeed it was.

  The Cat’s first encounter with the Opponent set the pace for the entire campaign, as long as the Opponent lasted anyway. The Opponent’s party had selected the American eagle as its election-year symbol to go along with the Mr. America idea, and the Cat arrived flapping in on one, a huge, shaggy, cross-eyed, baldheaded beast, surely the dumbest bird I’ve ever seen. The Opponent had just finished lifting his right hand and saying, “With God’s help and yours . . .” when the whole apparition descended upon him. The bird, clutching a popgun and a jar of olives in its claws, landed square on its face, tumbling pell-mell across the stage with the Cat in the Hat, knocking over the lectern, upending lights and cameras, smearing the Opponent’s TV makeup, shitting frantically on everything and everybody, and sending olives bounding around the place like pinballs. The bird stumbled clumsily to its feet in a tangle of wires, yuk-yukking giddily, shot itself in the eye with the popgun, and staggered around the stage, trampling right over the bewildered Opponent. The Cat leaped up to conduct the orchestra in playing the National Anthem backwards, the stupid eagle clucking raucously like an old hen through the whole performance and holding up a sign that read: Make America Safe for Democracy! The Opponent, besmeared, trampled, splattered with eagle shit, staggered desperately to the microphone to call a halt to the travesty, but when he grabbed hold of it, it turned into Ned dressed up like Liberty. “RAPE!” he/she shrieked, and four burly cops rushed onstage to haul off, kicking and bawling like a baby, Mr. America.

  Needless to say, the Opponent’s poll ratings fell off pretty sharply after that. Under his picture in the papers the next day: Can’t Cat-chup! The press was having a field day and the Cat seemed to have the election in the bag. The Feline in the Felt, they called him, Tom in the Tam, the Magic Mouser, King Kitten, the Tabby in the Topper, the Peerless Puss, the Magnifi-Cat, the Chief Exekitty. They loved him, couldn’t get enough, ran whole special editions on the trips he took them on. A lot of it was due simply to the power of sensationalism—who’d ever done what he was doing?—but also, I had to admit it, we were all hungry for some good fun, tired of war and all our private miseries, sick of the old clichés, the bomb scare and the no exits, in the mood for extravagance and whimsy (“Tom-foolery,” the press labeled it); there was a long-repressed bellylaugh rumbling deep in the collective gut, and the Cat was loosing it. Clark called it a kind of exorcism, and I had to agree. “We’ll rid you yet, Mr. Brown, of all those troublesome ‘vectors,’“ he added, and since against all logic and my own instincts, we were winning, I only grinned and supposed it might be so.

  Frankly, I still couldn’t grasp the Cat’s success, and my acceptance of it was something like a leap of faith. I’d watched the American people vote for several decades, and though I was beginning to get a feel of their almost hysterical delight in what Clark called “freedom,” I still couldn’t see them soberly pulling that lever for the Cat in the Hat, come November. Nevertheless, I had come along some since the Convention. I’d even bought myself a red-and-white striped tie. The middle of a frenetic Convention hall floor is an awkward place from which to look out on the world, which is probably why, from there, I was sure we were making a big mistake. I just couldn’t imagine those people out there getting excited about that zany Cat. A Convention hall is like a lot of mirrors: you’re looking at yourself looking out at them looking in at you looking at yourself, and so on, until finally there aren’t any lookers or objects, just looking itself, which is to say, nothing at all. “Our catechumen in catoptrics,” Clark once jokingly called me, and he had his point. Then, once the campaign had actually begun, I began to pick up new sounds, new signs, new motions. Yes, the Cat was touching something, some forgotten nerve, and something was happening. Testimonials were coming in. Not just from nuts, but also from plain Americans—grocers, housewives, doctors, carpenters. They liked the Cat. They were going to bat for him. They believed in him. They wanted him to go to Russia and China as soon as he was elected and talk to the people there. Where could you buy a set of those rubbery golf clubs? Was the clean-up machine patented?

  “Be careful, Mr. Brown,” Clark cautioned me when I talked about the testimonials. “There are no plain Americans. And there’s much more yet to happen.”

  “Listen, Clark, don’t screw things up now. I mean it. This can be something great, but we’re not there yet.”

  “No, that’s true, Mr. Brown. And neither are you.”

  I let it pass. I was feeling too good. An election I couldn’t win, and somehow we were winning it. In fact, I got a lot of compliments about it. I came to understand that the whole nation was in a defeatist mood, just like our party, so that our Convention was like a microcosmic image, a preview, of what was now happening across the country. As for the magic, well, an age of wild scientific leaps is well-conditioned to accept amazements. I’m sure everybody, just like me, expected to find out later how it was all done. Some new formula, no doubt, that nobody would understand but everybody could accept.

  Though not as funny maybe, the Cat’s most devastating act came during his and the Opponent’s first—and last—nationally televised debate. The Opponent appeared, wearing his familiar smalltown brown fedora, and began to speak of his pioneer grandfathers, one a blacksmith, the other a prairie preacher. The Cat suddenly interrupted: “Off with your hat, please!” The hat flew off, and under it was found to be a banker’s bowler. The Opponent, as though unaware of what was happening, continued his speech without a pause, but now he was talking about investment credits, the threat of peace and depressio
n, and “dynamic” solutions to “the problems of inventory.” “Off with your hat, please!” said the Cat in the Hat. The bowler flew off and there was a biretta. Now it was “soldiers of Christ” and “the Prince of Peace” and the menace of “atheistic materialism” and “families that pray together—” which got interrupted again by the Cat’s command. Off flew the biretta, revealing a wide-banded golfer’s straw, and the Opponent switched abruptly from Christian pieties to lockerroom banter and a really awful story about a guy with piles. This was followed by a miner’s helmet, a fraternity pledge cap, a periwig, a pith hat, a yarmulke, a football helmet, beret, ten-gallon hat, mortarboard, earmuffs, Marine general’s cap, nightcap, morion, a half-collapsed beaver, a black billycock, a cowl, a crown, a feather, a flower. The Opponent rattled on insanely, now a jungle fighter, now a hippie, next a cop hollering for law and order, then a farmer shooting pigs, a sociologist discussing the “territorial imperative,” a dry-goods salesman trying to make out in the big city. At last it was all running together in one mad gibberish of sound, hats flying off his head like a string of rockets, until—suddenly—he seemed to swallow his tongue; off flew the last hat, a dunce cap, revealing: the Cat’s Hat, of course. In the sudden silence, he reached up and pinched it. ME-YOU! It convulsed the house, ended the debate, all but ended the campaign. The Opponent sat there in the Hat, giggling idiotically, squeezing it spasmodically. There was, in fact, talk afterward about committing him to an institution, which would have caused a terrific international scandal, but the Cat generously undertook his reconstruction, beginning all over with the ABC’s and a bunch of other letters the Cat had thought up. The Opponent, in turn, simply retired from the public scene. This was about the end of September. A poll then revealed the Cat was assured of roughly 87 percent of the vote. The other 13 percent was uncommitted. It looked to be an electoral college whitewash.

  In retrospect, I realize that, although the Opponent got shot down mainly by the Cat, the Cat’s own complementary rise was mainly the work of people like Sam and Ned and Joe. And myself, if you don’t mind. Not only did the Cat’s acts insist on a lot of interpreting (“Well, what the Cat’s trying to say, you see, is that things aren’t always what they seem, life is unpredictable, and so to thine own self be true, because you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not . . . yes, that’s right, now you’re getting it . . .”), but after suffering through a couple of his spectacles, people simply needed the reassurance of other normal human beings around them, even if Clark was right, and we were all really out of our minds. Ned and Joe, in fact, virtually ignored the Cat after the Convention, running their own show quite apart from him, at least as much as they could; you couldn’t always depend on the Cat staying away. I sometimes wondered if those two guys really had the faintest idea who or what their candidate was, but I have to admit, I needed the familiar as much as anyone else, and so found comfort in their traditional barnstorm tactics. Ned operated mainly in the Midwest, Joe in the South and Southwest, though they often reenacted their Convention soft-shoe routines together.

  My job, as I saw it, was to keep the party regulars in line, and given the Cat’s irreverent antics, they were pretty nervous, so it was a fulltime job. He projected all our Chicago ward bosses right through the Planetarium dome one evening, for example, and kept them in orbit for seven days before soft-landing them in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Sierra Nevada, where, every time they asked how to get to Chicago, a Zen master would slap their faces or dump bowls of porridge on their heads. Two of them came back with flowers in their hair, but the rest of them, quite naturally, wanted to quit. I reminded them that the Cat was sweeping the country, that that very stunt in fact had added another three percent to the Cat’s advantage, that this was no time to get off the winning team, and I even, with great difficulty, managed to get Honorary Astronaut medals for them. They stayed.

  But it was Sam, more than any of us, who carried Clark’s special message to the world—deflected, of course, through a professional politician’s caution, but for that, the easier to swallow. While Clark argued that our national inertia was the impermissible product of praxis, for example, Sam merely suggested that we needn’t suppose the status quo was necessarily either natural or ordained by God, but, since we were free men, we could try to make life into something fresh and new and beautiful. Clark wanted an immediate total-population recognition of the full spectrum of personal and social options; Sam indicated ways we might improve things on earth by working together. He did well, especially in the East and Northwest, and on college campuses. I began to see him as our Presidential candidate four years from now. I was still thinking in those terms. In fact, I confess, I found myself wishing more than once that he was our candidate right now, and not merely running for the Vice-Presidency.

  One night, between stops in an airport bar in Albuquerque, Sam going one way and me the other, I asked him: “Well, how’s it gonna feel to be Vice President?”

  “What?”

  “Vice President. You ‘re running for Vice President, you know.”

  He smiled. “I don’t know if I’m running for anything, Sooth. Sometimes it seems like what it’s all about is the running itself.”

  “I know what you mean. The trouble with the democratic process is that the campaigns are too much fun, the jobs themselves too goddamn boring. Those two years I spent in Congress were the worst years of my life.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant. I mean, I think the Cat is carrying us out past ordinary space-time notions, out to something new where these old ways of identifying ourselves will seem sad and empty.”

  “I’ve had that feeling, too, Sam. Sometimes I think there aren’t going to be any actual elections in November, that instead this goddamn thing is going to just keep on expanding and expanding, until taking an actual vote is going to be about as meaningful as pausing to pick a flower in a stampede.”

  “Are you worried about it, Sooth?”

  “Goddamn right. It scares the hell out of me to think of no elections four years from now and eight years from now, just like I’m scared to die. I’m a coward, Sam. Pussy-lanimous Brown. There’s one for your fucking Cat.”

  Sam laughed. “Sooth, you’re still holding back, you’re still not with us. Come on, jump in, something’s happening, something great!”

  “I wonder if the Opponent would agree with you there.”

  “Sure he would! He does!”

  “His wife doesn’t.”

  “Sooth, it hurts to heal. Give her time. We’ve been living in a shutdown world. We’re opening it up. It’s worth it.”

  “You’ve been hanging around old Clark too much. Listen, he’s a bright boy, but he’s all mixed up about the psyche. He thinks you can do anything with it, that it’s essentially empty and formless, you just have to realize it and presto! a new world. Well, people with psyches like that aren’t the people I know. I don’t even know newborn babies like that. I’ll tell you what the human constant is, Sam, and you should know it as well as I, it’s that big fat immovable mass, the old muddle-of-the-roaders, most of them programmed the wrong way from birth, all of them stuck to the earth with hungers and sex grabs, scared to die or even get hurt, encumbered with defects and damages, and essentially inert even when they look like they’re moving.” They’d called Sam’s plane in the middle of my harangue, and I ended up shouting it at him past the gates. “And, listen, Sam, take it easy! Don’t get overcommitted! When this Cat thing’s over, you’re it! You hear? You’re it, Sam! Don’t get screwed up!”

  The next night, Sam appeared on television. Sam was good on television, had just the right soft-sell manner. But that night the Cat showed up. It wasn’t the first time. He was nearly as hard on us as he was on the Opponent. You could never be sure he entirely understood we were on his side. Sam knew what to do when the Cat turned up: he just g
ot out of the silly bastard’s way. Ned and Joe and some of the others weren’t always so smart and usually ended up paying the consequences, suffering the whole course of sleight-of-mind exhibitions with the rest of the hapless populace. This night, the Cat went so far as to leap past Sam and bounce out of every television set in the nation, dragging with him the whole kit and caboodle of commercial TV: spies, cowboys, comics, pitchmen, sobsisters, cops, preachers, aviators, gumshoes, crooners, talking animals, quarterbacks, and panelists, the whole daffy lot parading through all the bedrooms, living rooms, dens, and bars of the country, shooting it up, wisecracking, blowing whistles, asking irrelevant questions, beating people up. It was pretty unsettling, and a lot of sets got turned off for a while after that.

  At the time, of course, I didn’t know about everybody else getting it, too. I thought it was just me he was after. I thought maybe he’d found out about that conversation I’d had with Sam in Albuquerque. I was in a hotel in Zanesville, Ohio. The set in my room was an old one, and I had a hard time focusing Sam in. He kept splitting off diagonally. But I’d finally got it adjusted and had just settled back in an armchair with a cold drink, had my shoes off and was rubbing my toes, when—wham!—there was the Cat leaping out of there, followed by a hockey team from Montreal, a daisy chain of elephants out of a documentary on India, a boxcar of dead American G.I.’s, plus three motorcycle cops, a chorus line, the Olympic swimming team, a mean kid in a toy fire engine, three unwed mothers, and a used-car salesman. A lot more came, but I didn’t see them, because a stagecoach and horses rolled right down a mountainside into the room and over me. When I came to, I found myself stripped naked, right down to my fuzzy pot belly and old pale thighs, surrounded by a horde of teenyboppers from a danceband show, the audience from a panel game, and the entire membership of the Mickey Mouse Club, and being poked in the privates by a TV medic. “Hmmm,” he was saying solemnly, “looks like we’ll have to operate.” “Hey! Cut that out!” I hollered. “You’re nothing but an actor!” And for some goddamn reason they all laughed at that till they cried.