We’ve spent a lot of time with the grown-ups; some of you would rather have been out there with the kids, inhaling hot air instead of drinking blackberry wine, watching Obama on the 4-inch screen instead of under the 72-inch spectacle.
When last seen, Steve Wright
was having the best of both worlds, glass in hand and Mary Jane in mind. Steve
is a man now, free of his family, even though living at home. He’s a college
man. Nobody messes with a college man, especially if he’s living at
home. Nobody gives him a curfew, nobody expects him home for dinner, nobody
asks him where he‘s going, or where he’s been.
Nobody mentions that he
smokes marijuana in his room. (A lot of kids’ parents smoked the dreaded weed. By
now a lot of kids’ grandparents have been on the cool end of a joint.)
Steve is an agreeable young
man – always has been. No reason not to be, is what he figured. Which didn’t
mean that he let people push him around. He didn’t hide his opinions, but he
didn’t shout them out, either. His father did enough of that. Wayne Wright. Poor
Dad, saddled with a name like that. Steve was grateful that he wasn’t named
Cart, or Wheel. And he wondered what a Wayne was, but had never asked, or
looked it up.
You don’t know what any of
our people look like. You know what they think, which of course, is the only
thing that matters.
The hell you say. You know
better than that. Looks are important. They’re the first impression the outside
world has of you.
Let’s take a look at Steve –
get an outsider’s prospective. An upstanding young man. Even now, in the
student lounge, Steve stands out among his slouchy contemporaries. No baggy
pants, no shapeless T; khakis that fit his little ass, and a starched white
shirt. Steve is efficient; he doesn’t want to waste time picking out his
clothes. He has a drawer of identical pants and another of identical shirts.
The shirts are the real thing; he’s been watching Mad Men since he was twelve
and admired Don Draper’s drawer full of folded shirts. He drops his off to be
laundered and pays the tab himself; he’s always had some job or other. He
leaves his loosely waved brown hair longish – well, longish for now – it curls
around his ears. And it looks damn good. He’s attractive in a wholesome,
harmless way.
Other people think so too. Here
comes one of them. Steve is taking a course in, of all things, government, and
Brittany Becker is the adjunct grader. She’s a straggly blonde, thin, a
starving graduate student at NYU where she didn’t get a teaching assistantship,
so she’s working here.
“Hi. You’re Steve, right?”
she says, and rattles a newspaper in front of him. “Have you seen this?”
No, he hasn‘t seen anything. He
got up, got dressed, and came right here. “It’s an Op Ed. Guess who wrote it.” She
playfully hides the paper behind her back. She wants him to guess.
“Obama,” he says. She shakes
her smiling head.
He takes a few more obvious
guesses, making her happier each time, until she says, “Putin.”
Putin? He tries to see around
her back, and catches enough of a sight to know it’s the New York Times. She
whips it out, and shoves the folded page under his nose
“Yeah,” she says. “The leader
of the unfree world telling off the leader of the free world for telling
Americans they’re exceptional people. But that’s not what American exceptionalism
is. The people are free. That is exceptional, and because of that, America does
exceptional things, like free people in other countries from tyrants.”
Steve takes a page from his
mother’s playbook. “Then we move in and take over. Like in Iraq.”
“We don’t take over. We try to get the country back on its feet. We didn’t take anything from Iraq. Just body bags and bills.”
She squints at him. “You’re
not anti-American, are you?” she asks. Now who’s going to say “Yes” to that?
“Of course not,” he says.
“You want to hear a big joke?
‘American Exceptionalism’ is a Communist phrase, and all this has happened
before. Stalin – you’re heard of him? Stalin dressed down the American
Communist party leader for thinking that America was an exception to Marxist
philosophy, because it had so much going for it that it could actually leave
its people free. And now just like Stalin, Putin is laying into Obama for the
same thing. He’s treating Obama like his underling, telling him it’s dangerous
to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional.
“You’re not calling Obama a
Communist, are you?” Steve asks.
“Oh, not me,” she says, “not
me. Here’s who’s calling him a Communist.” She thrusts the paper into his
hands, Putin side up, and leaves Steve holding the rag.
