Now and Yesterday Read Online Free Page B

Victorian dollhouse, a collection of antique Japanese pots; on a table nearby was a draft manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, mounted under a Plexiglas cube. While most folks in the room were chattering away about things like Broadway openings, beach houses, and skin treatments, some were focused on a TV newscast flickering from a screen tucked into a bookshelf, showing the fleshy, college-boy face of Henderson McCaw, the nation’s newest demagogue. It was a broadcast that had been promoted for days in the media. A radio-talk-show-host-turned-TV-personality-and-populist-hero, McCaw had recently emerged a self-appointed champion of what he called “America’s God-given right to listen to itself.” He was interviewing a newly elected conservative senator from the Midwest, a former beauty queen who was rumored to be considering a run for the presidency.
    â€œI don’t mind using the word ‘abomination’ to describe same-sex marriage, because that’s what I think it is,” said the senator.
    â€œAnd that’s why we love ya,” said McCaw. “You tell it like it is.” He smiled and lit up the screen with a parody of cheer that seemed as needy as it was undergrad.
    Not that McCaw was stupid or unsophisticated. His quick rise to prominence proved he was anything but. Somehow, more effectively than anyone else since McCarthy, McCaw had been able to exploit that enduring strain of the American psyche that is sometimes truly revolutionary, sometimes merely cranky—a strain that seeks always to get some real or imagined oppressor off the backs of decent people. He claimed several million followers and had begun appearing at rallies that were more revivalist than political in feel. “Shove it!” was McCaw’s take on anything established, though the last thing he and his people seemed to call for was systemic thinking about social or economic realities, or careful analysis of exactly what to shove, and where, and how far, and why. McCaw’s power was to mobilize a single emotion: the nostalgia for a simpler America that was either long gone or never existed. And that was more than sophisticated—it was priestly.
    â€œAnd you go all the way, don’t you, Senator?” said McCaw. “You want to roll back civil unions and the legal benefits that go with them.”
    â€œThat’s right, Henderson, and for the same reason,” said the senator. “I just feel—well, you know a lot of us feel—that we have to take America back.” Some of the guests in Jonathan’s library booed, in a light, party-friendly way.
    The senator was wearing a red suit; McCaw was in dark blue. Behind them, through a large window, across a body of water, was the Statue of Liberty. The interview was apparently being televised from a makeshift studio or visitors’ center on Ellis Island or somewhere in New Jersey.
    â€œWhat does that mean, ‘Take America back’?” declared one of the guests, a gray-haired lawyer in a suit and bow tie whose name Peter couldn’t remember. “Take it back from whom, from what?” Some of the others laughed. “From the present day? From a nation of 320 million people? Why not take America back to the Stone Age?” More laughter. Then the lawyer turned to his partner who, like him, was wearing a bow tie. “It sounds like what hawks used to say about Vietnam: ‘Bomb them back to the Stone Age!’ ”
    The lawyer saw that Peter had overheard this last remark.
    â€œRight?” he said. “What a dope.”
    Peter smiled back.
    â€œYou’re right,” said Peter. “But he is a dope with an audience. He’s reaching people.”
    â€œWith pure ignorance,” said the lawyer.
    â€œWell, yeah. But ignorance is real, sadly,” said Peter. “It’s powerful.”
    â€œLook at him,” continued the lawyer. “Where is that, Liberty State