Voom indeed! – Cannonball Read 17

This isn’t very good of a novella, but it is really funny and interesting and prescient in its way. For one thing, this was written in 1968 as a kind of farcical tale of desperate Democrat operatives looking for a way to subvert the obvious momentum of Nixon in the wake of RFK’s assassination. And so they nominate the indecipherable Cat in the Hat.

And somehow Robert Coover invented Donald Trump years before the would-be shithead was still just dreaming of racially discriminating housing and sexually assaulting women and lying his way into a brain-numbing oblivion.

So anyway, enjoy the quotes below before we all die.

““But who is surviving, Mr. Brown? We are engaged in brutal wars, we live in the shadow of thermonuclear world-death, we continue to exist by virtue of dead forms, cut off from all life, from all being, as much murderers as survivors . . . and

then we all die anyway.” I stared at Clark. He was intense, assertive, ugly. He radiated concern and en- gagement. And he knew too much about loneliness. “Say, listen, Clark, tell me: do you have a single goddamn friend in the world?” “Certainly, Mr. Brown. You.” I was sorry I had asked. “You’re not quitting, are you?” I sighed. I was close to it that night. “No, but, nutty or not, I’d sure as hell like to win this election.” “Who says we won’t?” “Well, I tell you, it’d sure help if you could get the Cat to act just a little more . . . well . . . normal.” “

”

My job, as I saw it, was to keep the party regulars in line, and given the Cat’s irreverent antics, they were pretty nervous, so it was a fulltime job. He projected all our Chicago ward bosses right through the Planetarium dome one evening, for

example, and kept them in orbit for seven days before soft-landing them in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Sierra Nevada, where, every time they asked how to get to Chicago, a Zen master would slap their faces or dump bowls of porridge on their heads. Two of them came back with flowers in their hair, but the rest of them, quite naturally, wanted to quit. I reminded them that the Cat was sweeping the country, that that very stunt in fact had added another three percent to the Cat’s advantage, that this was no time to get off the winning team, and I even, with great difficulty, managed to get Honorary Astronaut medals for them. They stayed. “

(Photo: https://library.wustl.edu/harmonizing-disharmonious-robert-coover-mlc-part/)