by Jane Haddam
“No,” Delmore said, looking stiff.
“Because the Rockefellers are just as stupid as they are. So are the Vanderbilts. So are the Cabots and the Lodges and the Goulds. That’s one thing I learned in prep school. There are two kinds of people at places like Taft—poor kids with brains, and rich kids who can’t think their way out of paper bags.”
“Bill Gates,” Delmore said tentatively.
“If Bill Gates had had any talent, he would have stayed at Harvard and gone into physics. I’m going to have to do something about this. I’m going to have to do it soon.”
Delmore cleared his throat and sat down in the only other chair in the room besides the one Jig himself was sitting in. Jig liked students to stand when they came to see him. Lately, Jig preferred not to have students come to see him.
Delmore’s bulk didn’t quite fit between the chair’s arms. It oozed out the open spaces at the sides.
“The thing I think you have to worry about,” he said carefully, “isn’t the university, but the Department of Justice. The Patriot Act. They could be coming for you that way. They could charge you with anything they wanted to, and you couldn’t really fight back. They could arrest you and not tell anybody where you were, or let you see a lawyer.”
“Do you really think they could do that?” Jig said. “I’m not exactly Joe Six-pack off the street. You don’t think that would be huge news?”
“Well, um, yes, maybe, but the news organizations are in the hands of repressive capitalism. They support the Administration and its efforts to criminalize dissent. In the context of reactionary hegemonic discourse—”
“I’ve told you, Delmore, no hegemonic discourse.”
“It’s the best available language to describe—”
“It’s not the best available language for anything. It’s window dressing meant to make banal ideas sound profound. The country is run by a horde of capitalist shits. Given the chance to get away with it, they behave as what they are. No hegemonic discourse required.”
“But they own the language. They make it impossible for us even to think of dissenting, because they control—”
“Have they made it impossible for you to even think of dissenting?”
“I was thinking of ordinary people. People who haven’t been trained to deconstruct … to deconstruct …”
“What?”
“Reactionary hegemonic discourse,” Delmore said.
Jig sighed. “You’d depress me less if I thought you knew what it meant,” he said, “but that’s impossible, because nobody really knows what it means any more. How any of you expect to have any effect at all on the general public is beyond me. You go into a bar in South Philly and start talking about reactionary hegemonic discourse, and you’ll be lucky to get out to the street alive, assuming they pay any attention to you at all.”
“But that’s just it,” Delmore said, sliding to the edge of his chair. “They’ve been brainwashed. They’ve been dumbed down by advertising and infotainment. They’re addicted to media schlock. If we can pull them out of that, if we can break the spell and show them—”
“What? That NASCAR is for stupid people and they’ve really wanted to be listening to the London Philharmonic instead of Garth Brooks all along?”
“The high art tradition is a culture trap,” Delmore said. “It exists to make ordinary people feel bad about themselves. The first step progressives have to take if they’re going to advance the cause of social justice is to validate the cultural instincts of working people.”
“Right. Give the Nobel in Literature to J. K. Rowling.”
“Magic is a culture trap, too,” Delmore said. “It—”
But Jig had turned away. He had had to turn away. He was about to burst out laughing. He looked out the window onto the small, cramped quad that looked as uninviting as the brutal weather that enveloped it. He was sixty-two years old. His best days of scientific work were behind him. Science was a young man’s medium. Mathematicians were washed up by the time they were forty. Physicists rarely lasted past fifty. He was at that part of his life when he was supposed to do something else, and he was being stymied by a man who ran to fat and stale ideas like a racehorse running to a finish line. The only difference was that the racehorse would at least be beautiful, and Drew Harrigan was not.
“The thing is,” Jig said, not turning around, “we’ve got a window of opportunity. He’s going to be in rehab how much longer? A month, forty days, something like that. So for another month or forty days, there are no more hour-long screeds on radio about how I’m selling out the American government and the American people, how I’m Benedict Arnold—except he never says Benedict Arnold, did you notice that? He either doesn’t know the reference or he doesn’t think his listeners will. How I’m a traitor and a Communist.”
“You are a Communist,” Delmore said. “All decent people are Communists at heart.”
“He means a member of the Communist Party, which I most certainly am not. I don’t join parties. I haven’t even joined the Greens. The question is how to shut him up. It would be a very good thing for me if he’d go to jail.”
“I don’t believe he will go to jail,” Delmore said. “He’s too useful to the special interests that run this country. That run this world. He keeps the masses content and focused in the wrong direction.”
“At the moment, he’s keeping the masses focused on me,” Jig said. “Or maybe not at the moment. Up until the moment before this one. And when he comes out of rehab, you know what he’s going to do. He’s going to blame all this on a plot by Communists and liberals and left-wing nuts. Which he seems to think are all the same thing.”
“He’s going to push it all off onto that handyman of his. Sherman Markey.”
“He’s trying very hard.”
“You know he will. They’ll put Markey in jail for being a dealer and let Harrigan off with probation or something. He’ll never go to jail.”
“Didn’t I hear that Markey was suing him?”
“Through the Justice Project, yeah. They do good work, but they’re a little too middle of the road. I think progressive organizations hurt themselves when they temper their message to appeal to what they think is the mainstream, because I don’t think the mainstream is really the mainstream. People aren’t going to take you seriously if you don’t stick to your principles.”
The quad looked dead and empty. Jig was tired of looking at it. He turned back and saw that Delmore was now more off his chair than on it. Sometimes he didn’t understand why people like Delmore went on living. He understood Joe Six-pack. Joe Six-pack liked what he liked and was satisfied with it. Delmore was half one thing and half another, intelligent but not quite intelligent enough, erudite but not quite erudite enough, cultivated but not quite cultivated enough. No wonder he went in for “progressive” politics. It was the only place on campus where he wouldn’t expose himself as a mistake on the part of the committee on admissions.
This was not someplace he wanted to go.
He picked up a few of the things on his desk: a graphing calculator; a snow globe with a miniature plastic replica of the Cathedral of Notre Dame inside it; a copy of his book, Selling Suicide. It wasn’t that Drew Harrigan was calling him a traitor that was the problem. It was the other things he was saying, the things about contacts with Al Qaeda, about aiding and abetting Islamic cells on campus and in the city, about money laundered and money sent. It was a laundry list of things that could easily become criminal charges under the right circumstances. They were well on their way to the right circumstances. Jig Tyler wasn’t Delmore Krantz. He could see the writing on the wall and the look in the eye of the Dean, who remembered McCarthy but had his own skin to save first.
It was cold out there and it was going to get colder. If the news these days proved anything, it was that it was easy as hell for an innocent man to die in the electric chair.
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