Misanthrope's Corner - thoughts on presidential election - Brief Article

National Review, Nov 20, 2000 by Florence King

I am up that famous creek without a paddle. The deadline for this column falls two weeks before the election, but by the time you read it you will know who won. Now I know how the author of "The Lady or the Tiger?" felt. He solved his problem by ending the story just before the door opened, but I can't create suspense because you know something that I don't. The only way I can write around the last days of the autumn of our discontent is to let my mind range over political loose ends and see what I can tie up-i.e., free association.

I use "mind" advisedly. Yesterday they found me downtown, wandering around muttering, "If Al Gore wins, the only prescription drug I want is a cyanide capsule." A nice policeman brought me home. I calmed down for a while but I lost it again when I turned on American Movie Classics.

You know Al Gore has gotten to you when you're watching Psycho and all you can think about is what you wouldn't give for that high-flow shower head. No wonder Janet Leigh didn't hear the old lady come in. The water was rushing and cascading down on her in a deafening roar. So much water was jetting out so fast and furious that her blood washed right down the drain while she was still alive. Those were the good old days when showers worked faster than arteries, but now Leigh would empty before the tub did and Al Gore would take credit for it.

I never realized how monstrous Gore was until the debates. One reason for my delayed reaction is the obsession with Bill Clinton that has consumed conservatives for seven years, making the care and feeding of additional obsessions not only unnecessary but impossible. I was also sidetracked by the new female politics. Women are now expected to assess candidates according to which husband they remind us of, ex or current, but being a spinster automatically disqualified me for membership in the Wronged Caucus, encouraging my natural tendency to swim against the tide until I developed a mental block against considering the possibility that there had been any Al Gores in my life.

But suddenly, during the first debate, the mists of time parted and I found one. I hadn't thought about him for years. Not that I had forgotten him-no mental block could produce that degree of amnesia-but until that moment I had never made the connection between him and Al Gore.

It was 1955. Some of my sorority sisters cooked up a trip to an amusement park. They were all going steady but I wasn't, so they set about getting me a blind date. There was a consultation, then somebody said, "I hear he's really brainy. He'll be perfect for Flo."

He was so handsome it was hard to believe he was a blind date, but even harder to believe was the way he had dressed for a night on the midway. The other boys wore slacks and sports shirts but he wore a cream linen suit, white shirt and tie, fluted monogrammed handkerchief in his breast pocket, black-and-white laced wingtips, and a hat-a hat hat with a snap brim, colored band, and creased crown, made of soft summer straw.

He did all the things you do at amusement parks, but he did them differently. At the shooting gallery he pulled a plain handkerchief out of his pants pocket and draped it over his shoulder under the gun butt. At the test of strength he did limbering-up exercises, squatting and stretching his fingers like a concert pianist, until the crowd tittered. Tall and very well-built, he rang the bell, but he had made such an ass of himself that he came off as the 90-pound weakling instead of Charles Atlas. He reversed everything; it was as if he preferred the negative to the photograph.

When he bought cotton candy for us I held my breath, afraid he would ask for a knife and fork. At the merry-go-round, which he called a "carousel," he bypassed the prancing, proud-maned steeds and steered me over to a pair of ostriches, lifting me up onto the inside one. It was reversal time again: Nobody ever rode the ostriches. They were for "drips" and "squares," but now I was on one-sidesaddle.

He mounted the other and launched into an explanation of how a carousel works. It consisted of the usual stuff women have to listen to-gears, axles, valves, rotation-but soon a glottal tension crept into his voice, and with it a different vocabulary. What intrigued him about carousels, he said, was that on the surface all was sweetness and innocence, but "underneath" and "down below" and "in the darkness" under the revolving platform were "the bowels of the machine."

He pointed to the hole in the ostrich's neck that was sliding up and down on the brass pole, and said, "In and out, in and out, in and out."

Suddenly, he handed me his hat, pulled out another handkerchief, and jackknifed sideways until his head projected out over the platform's edge. He vomited quickly, wiped his mouth, and then sat up straight on his ostrich. Seconds later he did it again, stretching himself out like a trick rider until his body was parallel to the platform. It was bend, heave, wipe, resume seat; the cleanest, best-timed, most thoroughly calibrated barf I ever saw.