Like you, I have watched, these past six years, the Democrats, over and over and over again, collapse when confronted by George W. Bush. Like you, I have heard these Democrats say, every time, as they raced past in headlong retreat, that they were just "keeping our powder dry" for more propitious moments in which to strike blows against the Empire.
Some months ago it hit me: damn, that must be a helluva lot of powder they've got stored up by now. Stored . . . somewhere. But where, I wondered, was it? And was there any chance that, say, more hardy souls might get their hands on it?
Tonight, tipped off by Gore Vidal, I found the powder. Sure enough: all dry as a bone. Stored in massive vaults, hidden away in sub-basement warrens snaking under The Smithsonian Institution. I have seen it, people. And let me tell you: there must be more powder down there than was expended in the Revolutionary War.
Come, below the fold, to see what I have seen.
Vidal, who knows the Smithsonian as well as any man alive, smuggled me into the place through a disused entrance to the Castle. We then descended into the Smithsonian's vast and interconnected basements. Finally, at the very lowest level, Vidal wryly nodded towards a dusty glass display case bearing pickled skins; pushing the case aside, I uncovered a low doorway, opening onto steep spiral stairs leading down into darkness.
As Vidal shuffled back upstairs--he'd already seen it all, he said, and many times before--I tentatively began my descent.
After what seemed an age, lights suddenly snapped on, and, blinking into the sudden brightness, I beheld at the bottom of the stairs a man I recognized as a prominent Democratic consultant.
"Who are you?" he snapped.
"I'm from the DLC," I lied. "I've come to check on the powder."
"Of course," he nodded. "The FISA thing. I suppose they're rending their garments up there again, those people in the Nutroots. Don't they understand what would have happened if we hadn't given the president everything he asked for, and there'd been an attack on this country while we were on August recess in the south of France?"
He shook his head. "It takes months to make those sorts of reservations--and we would have had to rush right back!"
I'd reached the bottom of the steps.
"Wait a minute!" he suddenly shouted. "You forgot to give the password!"
A password! Christ! What could it be? Triangles Are Our God? Ricky Lee Rector? Midnight Basketball? Billions For Perpetual Corporate Welfare, But Not One Red Cent For An Actual Human Being?
Then I realized I had it.
"'Better to die like a dog,'" I recited, "'than to live like a lion."
"You know it!" he beamed. "Come along."
I followed him into a vast vaulted corridor that seemed to have no end; on either side, set into bedrock, were massive steel doors: there seemed to be dozens. And dozens. And dozens . . . .
"First time here?" he asked. "Yes," I managed. "Okay then," he said briskly, "full tour."
With a grunt he shoved aside the doors to the first vault. There I beheld a massive mound of powder, formed in the shape of the White House, rising at least thirty feet into the air.
"Our election fraud powder," he said. "For use in case the Republicans ever try to steal an election."
"In case?" I stammered. "Uh, in 2000--"
"Now, now" he cautioned, "the Supreme Court said what was what that year: can't disagree: nation of laws and all that. Who cares that those newspaper people counted the actual votes?" He waved a hand dismissively. "We didn't have any trouble with Gore, thank God--he just moped off and grew a beard. But Jesse Jackson and those Congressional Black Caucus people--they wanted to use this powder in the streets--can you imagine that? The '60s all over again--and you know where that got us." He rolled his eyes theatrically, then smiled mischievously. "Fortunately, someone leaked that story about Jackson and his love child on the eve of the inauguration: and that was the end of that. Till then, though, it was a trial, let me tell you, trying to keep those people out of here.
"Edwards tried to get in this place the very night of the 2004 election, if you can believe it. Of course we drove him right out. Kerry, he was like Gore--without the beard, of course." He frowned. "Later, though, Kerry kept coming around, scratching to get in here. He's all over the place down here, now, pesky as a rat--you'll see.
"It's true we do dole out a tiny, tiny, bit of this powder, now and again, to the voting-machine critics. But not too much." He winked. "After all, our own contributors may want to get into the voting-machine business someday, eh?"
The doors slammed shut.
"Next," he grunted, shoving aside a second set of doors, "you'll see our September 11 powder." And there it stood: powder in rubble-gray, formed into a 1/5th-scale replica of the Pentagon.
"What are you keeping this powder dry for?" I asked.
"In case George Bush goes on live television, cradling a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels in one arm, the other arm wrapped around a slobbering Dick Cheney, the both of them shouting and giggling: 'We did it! We did it! At least we knew about it! Hoped for it! Ignored it! Neener-neener-neener!' Then, you just watch, by gumby--this powder'll burn like the Reichstag!"
"That's absurd," I said. "Couldn't you use some of it for something a little less extreme? For, say, really questioning why so many pre-9/11 warning signs were missed?"
"No go," he said firmly." We try that, and the Republicans just start foaming CLINTON! PENIS! CLINTON! PENIS! CLINTON! PENIS! Comes out a wash. Besides, the Republicans have been saying for sixty years that Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen. And how many elections have they won in that time?"
"Almost all of them," I offered.
He squinted up at me. "Where did you say you were from, again?"
"The DLC." I flashed him the Winnie Churchill "Victory" gang-sign. "Triangles Are Our God," I recited.
"Right." He seemed satsified, turned to shut the doors.
"If Rudy 'The Ferret' Giuliani," I persisted, "gets the 2008 Republican nomination, won't you at least use some of that powder to point out that many firefighters died on 9/11 because of his screwups, that he helped cover up health problems at the twin-towers site, that he shamelessly raked in millions as a 9/11 'motivational speaker'?"
"Why would we do that?" he replied, puzzled, as the doors clanged shut. "That would be going negative. You know that never works."
"This vault we have the most trouble with," he said, swinging wide the doors to an enormous room filled with blood-red powder molded into a ninety-foot-high statue of Saddam Hussein. "The dry powder for Iraq.
"In the early days," he explained, "Dean was the worst--he was in here scooping it up as fast as we could dry it. Nowadays it's Kerry and Feingold--that lot--who we can't keep out of here. Worse than mice in a granary, those two! Couple of damn powder-pilferers! We've even chained-out pit bulls here: doesn't matter. They keep coming back."
He shook his head sorrowfully. "Kerry, of all people, should know better. It was the Democratic Congress refusing to fund the Vietnam War that lost the war, you know. That and the media, of course. Still, it's we Democrats who get the blame. Just listen to any Fox anchor--they'll tell you."
"Are you out of your mind?" I snapped. "The Vietnam War was lost because in a post-colonial world no nation of any decent size or population is going to be successfully occupied by anybody. The Russians learned that in Afghanistan, and so will we. We're learning it every day in Iraq."
"You sound like Kerry," he sneered, "and look what happened to him. Look: if we defund, every soldier will be left naked in the desert, without any guns or armor or even undershorts, left perched on top of a ceaseless Fox crawl that says DEMOCRATS LEFT ME HERE TO DIE. Or what happens if some Muslim bombs a Wal-Mart in Muskogee and leaves behind a sign that says 'I Wuz Frum Iraq and Osama Sed To Do It.'? We must support the troops!" Savagely he thumped his fist into his palm. "We must protect the Homeland! We must not appear soft on killing and bombing and stabbing and choking! Why do you think Hillary's blithering about nukes, and Obama's bellowing about raiding Pakistan? The only way for Democrats to win is to threaten to bomb and invade more countries than the Republicans! You don't hear Romney or McCain threatening to rain down nukes or swarm like ants across Pakistan, do you? See: we've got the Repugs on the run! Don't you understand: if we don't threaten to kill people in order to win the election, how can we insure peace once we've won?"
I had no answer to that.
The next vault contained burnt, black powder in the form of the infamous image of the hooded Iraqi standing atop the electrocution box. "This is our torture and habeas corpus powder," the consultant said.
"And what is it being saved for?" I asked.
"For when Harry Reid is arrested, held without charges, flown to a prison in Syria, waterboarded, and denied access to a lawyer."
"You're going to wait until they come after Harry Reid?"
"Well, no," he admitted. "If they strip Steny Hoyer naked, hose him down with freezing water, and then force him to listen to Public Enemy at top volume, we'll probably burn some for him."
"How about for the people at Guantanamo?" I ventured
"'The worst of the worst'?" he snapped. "Not on your life. That's what judges are for: torture, renditions, lawyers, wiretaps, Constitution-shmonstitution, all that malarky--that's their job: to take the heat off us. That's what they're there for.
"I know, I know: there's no proof any of these people are really 'the worst of the worst'--but what if they are? It'd be just like those Republican rat bastards to sneak one or two real baddies in with the 600 innocents, just waiting for us to burn our powder raising a big stink; then they'd shake these people right in our faces, and poof: there goes South Dakota! It's just not worth the risk. I'm not jeopardizing my summer house in the Hamptons for some 15-year-old from some country whose name I can't even spell.
"At least--thank God--these Nutrooters didn't care about habeas corpus earlier. What a mess if they'd been howling about it when Clinton was savaging habeas with AEDPA. Of course the Clinton assault only affected Americans; the Bush attack on habeas destroys it for everyone in the world, not just Americans." He laughed bitterly. "And people say there's no difference between the Democrats and Republicans."
The doors to the next vault were electrified; the consultant had to disable the power field before he could swing them open. Inside was white powder formed into a 100-foot-high replica of the head of Richard Nixon.
"The impeachment powder," he beamed. "And boy, are we ready! Just as soon as Pat Fitzgerald brings us a blue dress with Bush's semen on it, all this powder, far as the eye can see, it goes up like a rocket!"
"I don't think Barbara allows George to emit semen," I offered. "It might cause wastage of her beautiful mind."
"Well then tis a pity," he said wistfully. "We've piled up so much of it, too."
"Maybe you could use some on the attorney general," I tried.
"You mean Gonzales?" He looked stricken. "The Mexican? You must be out of your mind! We already turned back Estrada--wasn't that enough? That alone might have cost us the 2004 election!"
He snorted dismissively. "We can't go around impeaching Hispanics simply because they're corrupt, incompetent, and have committed more federal crimes than Clyde Barrow.
"Hispanics are the coming demographic!" the pol ejaculated.
There were more vaults--many more--with more powder--much more--but I had grown weary, and but stumbled and mumbled through the remainder of the tour, while words from, oddly enough, two Polish writers scrolled desultorily through my head:
An American friend of ours, Joanna, who had visited Poland, wrote us a card after her return to the States: "Everybody here asks about everything, but nobody listens to the answers."
[I]t occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what any one knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.
I was awakened from my waking doze only at the end of the tour, to the realization that the consultant was rudely shaking me by the arm, demanding money.
"Two thousand dollars!" he was shrieking. "Nobody gets out of here without writing a check for two thousand dollars!"
"What are you talking about?" I managed.
"It's the price of the tour," he replied, withdrawing his hand, fighting to bring his breathing back to normal.
As I reached for my checkbook (how was he to know the account was now closed?), he smiled winningly. "After all," he said, "it costs a lot, keeping all this powder dry."
That it do.