Who knows if it’s still the case, but in the 1970s a parent could make some relatively easy money by offering up her kid for medical experiments. My mother, for example, through her friend Sally Nashelsky, an adjunct psych prof at City College, enrolled me into any number of tests. One involved hypnotism. Even before the experiment, I was wary of the practice. On the one hand, as a child of the American school system, I’d learned the communists might use it to overthrow the country. On the other, as a child of an ex-con Haight Ashbury semi-recovering junkie, I knew the capitalists used it to sell all manner of things not good for the soul.
Plus, I suspected I was especially vulnerable to its powers. Early in elementary school, at an evening program featuring, among other performers, a magician who coughed up fish, I was plucked from the audience and asked to sit in a folding chair in the center of the stage, facing the crowd. I wanted, instinctively, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what would be asked of me, to do well. When the performer told me to close my eyes, I closed my eyes. When he said, “Think of the place you feel safest,” I thought of the place I felt safest. When he asked me to count down from ten to one, slowly, breathing easily, I did as he said, measuring each breath. The auditorium, I remember, was hushed, expectant. This was the era of ESP and est, of Jim Jones and UFOs, and of course the aftermath of Watergate. The people hungered for transformation. In the air around me, my eyes closed, I sensed a great excitement building, and I wanted to please. I would do anything the performer asked.
Then, out from the silence, just after I’d said, on my methodical countdown, “three,” and was about to say “two,” a great roar rang out and I felt myself doused with a liquid that smelled like cherries and everyone in the whole teeming place was laughing and catcalling and I didn’t know what was happening except that I was soaking wet and that things had taken a quite unexpected, terrible turn. I still don’t know for sure the exact joke that was played on me, but I like now to think its theme concerned the dangers of naivete, or of blind belief. It’s possible, of course, maybe even probable, that there was no intended theme at all, that it was just the ’70s and no one thought twice about humiliating a child in order to get a laugh. Whatever the case, the joke exposed me: I was one whose nature was to do as I was told. Or, maybe more kindly, I wanted desperately to believe.
It was, then, little surprise when my mother informed me, after debriefing with the experimental hypnotist, that I was indeed very freakin’ susceptible to brainwashing. Low hanging fruit, I was, for the Moonies and the Krishnas. I could tell my mother was embarrassed. One crime she used to commit was to write bad checks while dressed as a nun. She married a guy who’d done years for running guns and cooking speed. So while it’s true she loved me best of all the people she ever knew, still, the thought that her son believed without question the bullshit of this world rankled her.
(One argument we’d have regularly during my high school years, when it was just her and me—in an apartment not a block away, as a matter of fact, from a Krishna-owned bakery—concerned The Dukes of Hazzard. My mother maintained that CBS hypnotized people into watching that show. I’d say something like, “That makes no sense, Mom. People can watch whatever they want. People like The Dukes of Hazzard.” Her argument was unencumbered by statistics or philosophy or even any cultural or political theory. “Just watch the show, P.B.,” she’d say. “Watch the show and tell me anyone would watch that shit on purpose.”)
So when I felt sorrow for Ronald Reagan, looking so forlorn with Nancy on that backstage couch, after losing the ‘76 Republican nomination, I couldn’t admit it to my mother. I kept the feeling to myself, in fact, for a good three-and-a-half decades, so embarrassed was I of it.
But I asked a question in my last post: what if I manufactured in my head, post-event, the footage that generated the sorrow, and, if so, why would I do such thing? Why would I fabricate, in my own mind, documentary evidence to validate an emotion?
I asked the question because despite a good bit of searching, and despite plenty of film and photographic imagery readily available on the Internet from the ‘76 Republican convention, I can’t find anything showing Ron and Nancy together on a couch. I appear to have made up the evidence of his pain; I created a lie that allowed me to justify my favorable feelings towards him. I did it unconsciously. What if, then, there were something about me, something over which I had no or little control, that drew me to him?
Maybe my impulses weren’t so humanistic, after all. I mean, I’ve spent these past two posts arguing, at least implicitly, for my own humanity. Despite my hatred of all Reagan stood for, I’ve claimed, I still couldn’t help feeling for him as a human being. I got even cuter by admitting how embarrassed I was by my own humanity. But what if I convoluted all this merely to justify my kinship with him? What if I really found attractive, somewhere way deep down, what The Gipper stood for, and just couldn’t bring myself to admit it?
All this is particularly worrying because I’ve had similar feelings recently about Donald Trump. This is not a thing I’m proud of, I assure you. For the record, I find Trump abhorrent, a racist, vengeful menace. I could write until tomorrow, without once stopping for a smoke or a drink, and not identify half the ways of his evil. But there I was, alone with my carbonated water and peanuts in the pitch-black-dark-but-for-the-glow-of-the-TV living room, kids and companion having long since abandoned me for bed, screaming “Bully!” at Marco Rubio.
Now let’s be clear: Marco Rubio is an asshole of the highest order, a sycophant, a pernicious liar, a man who turns on his own benefactors, for Godssakes, when it helps him get ahead. But compared to Trump, Rubio’s a trifling thing, a housefly. Still, there I was, feeling, as Trump reddened and sputtered and gripped his podium, all the sorrow I’d felt for Reagan those decades back. Trump was, at that moment, an unhappy old (white?) man, unable to be who he wanted to be. And—most terrifying—I felt his pain.
Next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mexico City, The Donald on the couch.