Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [181]
“People magazine?” somebody within hearing distance of the podium quipped.
Breaking off his and Mr. Reagan's address in midstream to extemporaneously contend with a rippling outbreak of druggy giggles from one section of the room Mr. Carter grimly intoned: “I see there are some of you who think this is funny. Well, I am as fond of a good joke as the next fellow. For instance, why did the chicken cross the road?”
He waited. Complete silence throughout the nation. Though not a few found themselves thinking, If only, if only he comes through just this one time, shit, I’d vote for a man who could tell a good joke on network TV and get people to laugh without cue cards… maybe there's still hope, maybe he's got some sass to burn after all… a pinch of pepsin in the cornea … a regular guy who knows his way around… yeah, that’d be nice…
Suddenly the nation's TV screens went red. Many thought it was a Red Alert, something they had heard about so often over the years that they were absolutely helpless, buffaloed when it came to dealing with such an eventuality… camp silhouettes of bomb shelter openings … the last time they watched Dr. Strangelove on the late late show… forget it. What it was was the back of Rosalynn Carter's red alpaca sweater, and what the whole nation heard her whispering urgently to their ostensible leader in that moment was: “Jimmy, what do you think you’re doing?… This isn’t the Playboy interview—”
“Wish it was,” drawled Jim the Prez. “That was fun, even if it did get me in trouble.”
“Well, it's not and the sooner you realize that what is happening at any given moment is just exactly that and not some rerun of a four-year-old prime-time hit the better…. No matter what the punch line of that joke might be, there's bound to be people out there gonna be offended by it. God, haven’t you learned anything?! Look at Ronald Reagan: do you see him telling jokes?”
“That's ‘cause he don’ know any.”
“Yes, but he speaks very seriously and it strengthens his campaign as long as he doesn’t ad-lib. Same goes for you. Christ, we’ve got the best writers in the country working on this stuff: Vonnegut, Pynchon, Irving, Doctorow! By election day you’ll be certified folklore! Dan’l Boone!”
“Rather be Grizzly Adams,” replied Jimmy dreamily. “He gots modern conveniences. I ain’t livin’ in no wickiup … less o’ course the National Mood ‘n’ the People git ta callin’ for it… hell what these damn people don’t realize is, I’d eat cowshit just to make ‘em happy, if that's what it takes to make ‘em happy…”
“But that's just the point! They don’t want you to eat cowshit! They want you to get the hostages back! They want you to get the economy moving upwards again! They want you to act like a LEADER! Even if you keep on doin’ nothin’, even if it's all just empty gestures, tears ‘n’ flapdoodle, makes no difference at all, just motion, motion, motion, that's what they wanna see! Look at JFK! Didn’t do shit ‘cept the Bay of Pigs! A tadpole of a president! Course he died just in time! But when he did nothing, he did it with such élan! Such style! Such savoir faire! That nobody noticed! Nobody! Anywhere in the world! You had a shot at that! And you blew it! Remember all those pix in Newsweek back in ‘76, you jogging along the seashore with your damn hound muddlin’ along beside you? What in the hell did you think that was all about? Glamour! And remember when you first got into office, all the columns in the magazines