Libra - Don Delillo [128]
This is the man, ladies and gentlemen, who climbed the base of the Confederate monument in Oxford, Miss., to rally thousands against the integration of the university. The man who so-called led an insurrection, wearing his proud gray Stetson. Oh it was something. Four hundred federal marshals, five hundred state and local police, helicopters, jeeps, fire engines, three thousand National Guardsmen, tear gas blowing through the streets, burning cars, rocks flying everywhere, and birdshot, and sniper fire, two men dead, countless wounded, a couple of hundred arrested, military trucks full of regular army, sixteen thousand combat troops massed against a few thousand students and country boys and patriots of the South, and here is the object and source and cause of the whole thing, one gloomy nigger with a hanky in his face to keep the tear gas from making him cry.
Bring your flag, your tent and your skillet.
That’s the main thing Ted actually said. Like a Boy Scout saga, a couple of days in the wholesome outdoors.
To his left was another basket, this one filled with news stories clipped by an aide. Here is Ted filing for election in the Democratic race for governor, a primary in which the Control Apparatus will see to it that he finishes sixth out of six candidates, which is dead last by any reckoning. Here he is with dear mother Charlotte outside a hearing room in Oxford with the leaves rustling down from the sweet gums and maples. This is when they tried to justify putting him in a mental ward with a bunch of gap-tooth idiots. The Apparatus in its grimmest stage, right out of the communist handbook, trying to put a decorated vet in the rubber room. This is what the general is up against, ladies and gentlemen, fellow patriots, loyal Birchers, members of the White Citizens Council, Boy Scouts, Christians, Mother dear.
In the Old Senate Caucus Room they asked him to name the members of the Real Control Apparatus. This is like naming particles in the air, naming molecules or cells. The Apparatus is precisely what we can’t see or name. We can’t measure it, gentlemen, or take its photograph. It is the mystery we can’t get hold of, the plot we can’t uncover. This doesn’t mean there are no plotters. They are elected officials of our government, Cabinet members, philanthropists, men who know each other by secret signs, who work in the shadows to control our lives.
But he didn’t say these things. He mumbled and groaned in the crowded room, then punched a reporter in the face.
I sometimes am confused. We are dealing with tragedies of speech, tragedies of the human body. There are forces we can’t comprehend.
He put out one cigarette, lit another. He got tired early now. It was a lingering effect of Operation Midnight Ride, the series of one-night stands in Louisville, Nashville, Amarillo, his journey to arouse the heartland, to get them to listen, St. Louis, Indianapolis, etc., and he was still recovering. Beatniks came to picket, the most godawful bunch of Castro look-alikes anybody ever saw.
It is time to go down and liquidate the scourge which has descended on the island of Cuba.
It tired him and got to him, plain wore him out. Those deadly hotel rooms where he was never more totally alone and bare of comfort. I sometimes am confused and lost, ready to give in to lonely despair, tired of shuffling and dodging what I know and feel. Think of those uncombed boys in baggy jeans, sign-carriers, who shout dirty words into the night. They are soft beneath the drifting Cuban hair. Hotels. This is where the switch takes place, where he is a stranger who mind-wanders into the midst of the other side, only following what he’s always felt.
Some people think a nigra is a sunburnt white.
He had a better time when he was running in the Texas primary. The crowds were rollicking. They were chanting and singing crowds, hopeful people, not the worn souls, of Midnight Ride. He scratched out numbers, added up tax dollars, but what he thought about were flags waving in halls across the