Robert Coover's "A Political Fable" (1980/1968)

 Eureka! If there's one work of fiction about American politics crying out for rediscovery in the age of Trump—to help explain our present mess to us (and I use the term advisedly)—I believe I may have just found it. It comes from the oeuvre of Robert Coover—a postmodern novelist known for his rather surrealistic takes on 20th century public figures, making full-throated use of some typical postmodern techniques of pastiche and juxtaposition along the way—all of which appear in the present "novel." 

This, however, is not among his best-known works, and thus it was a new name to me when I spotted it on the high shelf in a used book store in Providence, Rhode Island (the city where Coover made his career). I am referring to his A Political Fable—published in book form 40 years ago, after first appearing as a 1968 short story, "The Cat in the Hat for President."

Now, that original title goes a bit further toward giving the joke away. The book is exactly what it sounds like—an account of the Dr. Seuss character's bid for the presidency—and, in this respect, one of the more daring trials of the limits of fair-use law that I have come across in the annals of literary fiction. And while yes, this book is about the Cat in the Hat—and while yes, it is a pamphlet-sized squib clocking in at 88 pages that can be read in an afternoon—I would nonetheless insist it has more to tell us about the Trump presidency than any more hefty and less self-consciously ironic volume. 

So close are the parallels, so prescient the text, in fact, that I had to periodically shake my head to remember that this was written in 1968 and 1980; election years like ours, but ones from the vantage point of which its creator could not have known anything about the form our politics would take sixteen and then again twenty years later. Either Coover is a genius-prophet, or the fundamental absurdities and temptations of our national politics do not in fact change over time as much as we think. 

Our story is told from the perspective of a career political operative—someone who has developed a reputation for acumen and foresight in predicting the outcomes of electoral politics—a process he believes to be informed not by ideologies, but by a system of chaotic "vectors" in the American collective psyche that must be sensed as much as analyzed. 

Understanding politics the way he does, our narrator believes he has the next two elections sown up. This time around, he will run a conventional "middle of the road" candidate, and lose to the popular and nearly unbeatable incumbent; but this loss will position him nicely for a victory four years later. 

This veteran of the party machine is forced to doubt his grasp on the American political pulse, however, when a bomb-throwing collection of "young turks" in the party sabotage his carefully stage-managed party Convention by introducing a highly atypical candidate: none other than the world's most famous mess-making, magic-working, fully nude (apart from gloves and hat) anthropomorphic cat. 

Our party operative regards this as a sick joke. Why make a laughing stock of the party and cost themselves so much credibility in the public's eyes? So he wonders, at least, until he is brought around by Clark—a character named for a mysterious entity in Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish—and who operates as the Steve Bannon of the narrative—a creepy crawly from the slimy reaches of the political spectrum—a lonely man whose alienation and rage he seeks to pass on to a society full of ordinary people with families trying to survive—a man who nurses fantasies of "total revolution." 

Much as Bannon saw the purpose of Trump's 2016 run as an act of creative destruction, so Clark maintains that America is secretly clamoring for the Cat in the Hat to upend everything as we've known it. "[M]ess-making is a prerequisite to creation," he cries, "All new worlds are built upon the ruins of the old." Our narrator asks him to explain what the Cat has to do with revolution. To this Clark replies, as one might have said of Trump in 2016, he "is funny. And dramatic. We have a terrible need for the extraordinary." 

Our political operative narrator is still unconvinced. Don't people fear change? he thinks. Don't they hanker for comfort and routine? He has been around the circuit more than once in American politics. He knows that people will always settle in the end for what he calls the "muddle-of-the-roader" who prizes inertia over upheaval. 

But Clark is convinced the people long for adventure more than stasis, even if it comes at the cost of catastrophe (no pun intended). In putting the Cat up for election, one could say he is seeking to implement D.H. Lawrence's proposal to fight "a revolution for fun." Why? Not for any particular purpose, but simply because, as Lawrence wrote, "it would be fun to upset the apple-cart/and see which way the apples would go a-rolling." 

That's what the Cat is doing. That's what Trump was doing, in the eyes of his supporters. Here, at last, is someone who makes light of all the tiresome norms! Someone who doesn't take it all so miserably seriously! Someone who will put the spark of life into all those stuffed-shirts in the military and the press and the House and Senate, with their familiar platitudes and their phoned-in speeches. 

But isn't it a bit dangerous to have someone in high office who has no respect for norms, for institutions—indeed for our hallowed democratic process itself? This is the question our party operative asks and answers to himself ("Dangerous he was," he concludes). In this he speaks for all of us who had any trepidations around Trump, including those Republicans who thought in 2016 that perhaps their party ought to go with a more conventional choice, if they wanted to stand a chance in the general election. 

To this, the Cat-backers in Coover's book reply just as Steve Bannon and Corey Lewandowski and the others did to the Republican party's Trump-skeptics. "He's something of a nut," one of them tells the narrator. "[...] or at least that's the way he chooses to come on. Yet it's a charismatic kind of zaniness[...] He's funny. He's captivating." And later the narrator is forced to concede that much: "we were all hungry for some good fun [...] there was a long-repressed belly-laugh rumbling deep in the collective gut, and the Cat was loosing it."

Although in another place our narrator acknowledges, it was never clear the Cat himself was in on the joke. On many occasions, it seemed that perhaps he was not kidding. Was not even in possession of his faculties. "That always brought the house down," says the narrator of one of the Cat's jokes, "but I wonder if the Cat ever knew why. I mean, he just didn't seem to have that kind of mind. If he had any mind at all."

These are the doubts our moderate and sensible career Republicans—the senators and suchlike—always entertain about Trump. But, as in Trump's case, they are able to formulate excuses for his behavior—and thereby for their own complicity. He didn't really mean it, they say. He's just a bit rough around the edges. "Oh, we were quick to rationalize it," says Coover's narrator, "give the world at large a happy line."

Much as the Trump insiders liked to put it back in 2016. Whenever they were asked by their less sanguine colleagues whether this time their candidate had not perhaps gone too far—calling for a ban on an entire religious minority, mocking captured U.S. prisoners of war, defending torture—the Trump team always fired back with a simple response: "Let Trump be Trump." And from the perspective of electoral politics—if not of morality, decency, or humanity—they were right. 

Oh, and then there are the Cat in the Hat's slogans. "I can lead it all by myself!" says the Cat. (Sound a bit like "I alone can fix it"?) "Make America Safe for Democracy" reads one of the Cat's signs. (Does that ring any bells?)

As the Cat goes along violating one norm after another, leaving one messy disaster after another in his wake, people keep wondering how he could possibly be electable. And yet his poll numbers only increase! This perhaps, is the secret of all fascism, all totalitarianism, all political evil. People don't seek it out because they fear death—they rush toward it because they find it exhilarating. 

This is the Clark theory of politics. The Steve Bannon theory. "“We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks [...] It will be as exciting as the 1930s." Bannon is said to have remarked upon one occasion. "We are weary of war," says Clark—in words that could have been lifted from a Bannon-authored speech—"we are weary of the misery under our supposed prosperity, weary of dullness and routine, weary of all the old ideas, weary of all the masks we wear, the roles we play, the foolish games we sustain. The Cat cuts through all this."

So it is with all violent revolutionists, who are fine to destroy an entire society for the sake of achieving an intellectual frisson. I am reminded of a scene in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, in which the protagonist confronts his Bolshevik commissar captor with a litany of the crimes of the regime. Has the Stalinist state not bulldozed whole villages, he asks, uprooted whole peoples in the name of collectivization? Has it not slaughtered millions, devastated livelihoods, visited the countryside and the people like a plague? 

And the commissar's reply to all this is, in so many words, exactly! He says: "Don't you find it wonderful? Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history? We are tearing off the old skin of mankind and giving it a new one. That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves." 

This is the Clark response. This is the Bannon response. The theory is not that Trump or the Cat in the Hat has come to improve our lives, but to destroy them. He comes not to bring peace, but with a sword. Coursing beneath the Trump phenomenon is a factor that we are not prepared to account for in the conventional theories of politics—the death wish. The Freudian thanatic urge writ large. As a Nazi collaborationist describes it in Klaus Mann's Mephisto: "I am hungry for doomed adventure, for the depths, for the experience of extreme situations [...] We are going to experience all this, believe me. We are going to be gorged with horror. And, as far as I am concerned, it can never be too horrifying." Clark could not have said it better, in making the case for his Cat in the Hat. Nor Bannon in 2016.

People wanted death and destruction, and we got it. Pandemic disease and mass unemployment. We were tired of the same-old same-old prosperity and hegemony and ease. So we sought a change, and ever since we have been in a spiraling cascade of disaster. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre"—a mass danse macabre.

And so at last the death wish comes full circle. The Cat in the Hat is finally flayed alive by his own followers, in Coover's story. And Trump is today hospitalized with the same disease that he spent months suggesting was not real, was not a threat—the same disease that he refused to guard against by something as simple as wearing a mask— even as it ravaged whole communities. 

I do not wish this suffering on Trump. I only have to think for half a second about what it would mean to choke to death on a ventilator to realize I would never wish that fate on anyone—not my worst enemy, not the worst person to ever live. It may be true that Trump has through his negligence condemned thousands of other people to this fate, but I do not believe in the principle of retribution. I do believe in the golden rule: and if I would not want people wishing death on me because they hate my politics and what I stand for, I must not do the same to others. 

But there is a question of whether people who bring destruction into the world inevitably invite it back upon themselves in some form. Whether people who think everything can be overturned, who think that democracy and human rights are just jokes, who think that you don't need to respect the most basic principles of decency and fairness and equal treatment in society, even as president, because everything is just a laugh riot anyway—whether people like that will not eventually find that there are indeed consequences for their actions. That deeds yield results, even if they rejected the idea. That political stability and relative peace are not given for all time and therefore are not to be taken for granted. 

A fable, perhaps, and like all fables, true of our time, true of every time. Be wary of the man who promises death. He will deliver it. Be wary of those who say that destruction is fun. You cannot expect that the destruction will only come for other people, and never for oneself. You cannot expect to violate and disregard the rights of religious minorities and asylum-seekers and refugees and Trans people for the sake of a laugh, for the sake of being "politically incorrect," because you think it will be amusing to do so. You cannot expect that the fun only will be yours, and none of the destruction. To quote Lawrence again, you may say "post me nihil," but he warns: "perhaps, my dears, nihil will come along and hit you on the head."