Right about as I thought this, I reached the point in the story where the girl junkie in question, unhelpfully named Summer, sets her sights on a young man she finds in a college library. Stenson wrote:

He laughed and leaned back in his chair and they were easy like that, all of the college boys. Like I fit some sort of fantasy for them, a girl in distress stumbling into their lives, a girl with a large backpack and dreads who did drugs and you could see their minds work, all of them the same, the little vision of getting high with me and fucking me and sending me on my way the next morning.

Just like that, I knew I’d been bamboozled. Stenson could write. The rest of the story sailed past and I found hardly a single occasion to complain, which is, for Super Hot Profs, a legitimate cause for despair.

Ah well, I thought. Maybe this kid can only write from the point of view of girl junkies.

But no. A few months ago, I got my hands on an advance copy of Stenson’s debut novel, Fiend, told, for the record, by a male meth addict who must do battle with zombies to win back his ex. I had trouble putting it down. My wife kept saying, “Honey, can you put the book down. Our son is on fire.” And I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna. But we’re just at the part where the chuckling zombies go after the love interest.” Then I’d walk into a wall.

You get the point.

It was clearly time to diagnose the sickness…

***

The Rumpus: Knowing that it would be impossible to share with our readers even a fraction of the things you learned studying with me, instead take some time to comment on my wardrobe.

Peter Stenson: The first time I saw you was at a reading at the Denver AWP. You were rocking a pair of ripped jeans circa 1994, and a flannel that you no doubt lost your virginity wearing (you strike me as the kind of guy who leaves on a random article of clothing during those times). My first thought was: Who the fuck is this asshole?

Rumpus: I think this a lot. Go on.

Stenson: At the Tin House Writer’s Retreat, your wardrobe was rather memorable, if only because you never changed: jeans, a Springsteen bandana, and a tank top that was flirting dangerously with being a cut-off. And for some reason, I remember you as being barefoot.

Rumpus: I was also pregnant, though that’s neither here nor there. Let’s proceed. You write about drugs. A lot, and vividly. Tell us just how proud your mother is of this.

Stenson: Being that my mother has worked for a Presbyterian church her entire life, and recently finished up seminary school, I think it’s safe to say very.

Last week, my grandfather was in the hospital. My mom told me she hoped he passed away before Fiend came out. I’m pretty sure she was joking, but it was one of those jokes your wife drops when you’re not fooling anyone with your comb-over.

Rumpus: As I mentioned in my pre-interview legal memo, the use of the phrase “comb-over” is strictly forbidden.

Stenson: Right. But look, in all seriousness, my mom’s, like, my biggest fan. She’s always asking to read my stories. The best compliment she ever gave me was for this story where there’s a young man at the business-end of a cardboard box-turned-glory hole. She said, “It’s like I was right there with him, especially with the detail about the butter popcorn smell.” I figured that I’d done something right. And that maybe my father doesn’t pay heed to the “cleanliness is next to godliness” adage.

Rumpus: Because I know you’ve never actually done a single drug in your life, tell us what inspired Fiend.

Stenson: Pretty much a youth spent doing narcotics. That, and AMC.

There was this time when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I kind of ran away to San Francisco because I was in love and thought I was a hippie. I’d been kicked out of school and my girlfriend was blowing her college “friend,” and I tried to cut out my soul with a shard of glass in an Econo Lodge room off of Mission. Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire.

It was New Year’s Eve, post-concert, and I was trying to find my girlfriend in some hotel downtown (probably getting her rug burn on with said college friend). The entire lobby was full of tour kids completely spun/smacky-tabbed/dosed—

Rumpus: I don’t know these words. My drug vocabulary is kind of stuck on “bong.” But I’ll assume you mean these young people had taken more serious drugs.

Stenson: Right. And they were all shuffling around looking like a bunch of…dead motherfuckers. I felt a certain solidarity with these kids. I’d be full of shit if I told you I came up with the idea for Fiend right then and there twelve years ago, but this memory has never left me. I’m sure this will brush up against melodrama, but there was something about the quiet panic in each of our faces, the searching and desperation, that freaked me the fuck out. I think Fiend is somehow born out of that memory.

And AMC.

Rumpus: I appear to have been misquoted in my blurb of Fiend. As I recall, I wrote “Peter Stenson is a sick bastard,” which became “Peter Stenson is the bastard child of Cormac McCarthy and George Romero.” As a sick bastard, what sick bastard writers do you like to read?

Stenson: Pretty much all the usual suspects: Denis Johnson, Dennis Cooper, A.M. Homes, Burroughs, Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell. I enjoy Donald Ray Pollack. I’m not sure how much of a sick bastard Ben Fountain is, but I loved Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk (still confused how that cheerleader came without so much as a dry hump). I like the Rumpus crew (you, Roxane, Cheryl, Stephen, et al.). And there’s nobody who writes better prose than Cormac.

Rumpus: It’s the Apocalypse Showdown: Meth-Heads vs. Zombies. Who wins?

Stenson: That’s a tough one, for sure. Regarding cognitive reasoning, you’ve got a very slight advantage for tweakers. Strength goes to zombies. Numbers (outside of the Southwest) favor the walking dead. Both have teeth ground down to dark nubs. Same with limps and sore spots of open flesh vulnerable to infection. When it’s time to get well, junkies are about the most resourceful motherfuckers to ever inhabit the earth, which goes a long way. But when it comes down to it, a tweaker will pound your mother with your last rubber and then help you look for it, which is why, when everything goes to shit, they, the tweakers, will fuck everything up amongst themselves, zombies or no zombies.

But both groups don’t have a chance versus the bath-salt abusers.

Rumpus: Hard to argue with your reasoning. Last question: do you ever freak yourself out, man?

Stenson: Only when I share what I’m actually thinking. Or when I think about my newborn daughter coming across a copy of Fiend in some forgotten box.

It’s kind of funny you ask this because I’ve been thinking about this very thing recently. I just finished writing a novel about severed dicks and DPs and Tea Party politics—like 300 pages of pretty much those topics alone—and it freaked me out enough that I made a ghost folder on my computer to save it in. Something about this one feels like a little too much…

But fuck it. I can’t help how I think. I’m drawn to drug use and emasculating sex and broken people doing whatever they possibly can to keep on going. This is what makes me excited. This is why I read and write. I think my shit might come out a little more vulgar and dark than most because I came of age in a time when all of us kids in the suburbs blared Slim Shady from our windows; a decade when our family Dells were glacier-slow with virus-riddled pornography; an age when somebody figured out how to add the methyl compound to amphetamines by distilling allergy medication.

Or maybe this is what I tell myself when I’m freaked out in order to feel a little less like a sick bastard.

***

Featured image of Peter Stenson © by Robbie Lane.

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Brian Sousa was not that student. Brian was pretty much the opposite of that student. He was one of those students where you just think to yourself: man, I hope Subway is hiring. It’s not that Brian was dumb. He was just, shall we say, distracted.

I was skeptical (to put it mildly) when I learned that Brian had decided to pursue writing, and not terribly hopeful when his new book, Almost Gone, arrived on my doorstep.

Rather than pursue a traditional bildungsroman, the novel offers a kaleidoscopic investigation of the immigrant experience, deftly weaving the stories of four generations of Portuguese-Americans, young and old, mostly working-class, haunted by the past even as they seek to build a future. The prose, like the characters, is spare and elegant, moving without ever dipping into sentiment. It was a shock to read—the best kind of shock.

So there’s the bona fides. Let’s do this thing…

***

The Rumpus: Please tell the readers what grade you received in my class, and why.

Brian Sousa: You gave me a B-, after warning me I’d probably get a lower grade if I didn’t fucking revise my shit. I told you that my thesis (a creative nonfiction book on traveling in Australia, that I’m not sure anyone will ever want to read) was sucking up too much of my time, and you informed me that you were writing a book too, and that was no excuse. “Gotta get the writing done,” you said, which I find myself saying to my students now.

You also ordered us to buy Playboy, because your story had just come out in it, and right after class I went to 7-11 and bought it, and then my girlfriend came home and found me intently reading it, as the story was funny and sad and hypersexual, and made me want to write. I told her it was my homework. She did not believe me and may have broken up with me.

Rumpus: When you say “order,” I think you mean “begged.”

Sousa: Right.

You gave me a B- because you thought I was a slacker. And to be honest, I was. You know, I knew we were gonna do this interview so I e-mailed my old buddy Ben Ritzo, who was in the class with me, to ask him what he remembered. Ben and I would get five-shot, espresso-laced iced coffees and skateboard to your class all jacked-up on caffeine.

This is what he said: “We were shitheads—me especially—I just remember showing up like forty-five minutes late with no writing utensil, and carrying on full-volume conversations while Almond was trying to teach… And laughing my ass off…it was probably my favorite class….tell him I’m sorry, and thanks for not failing me!”

Then he said: “Dude, I’m actually shocked he still talks to you…”

So, based on the evidence, I guess I should be pretty happy with a B-. Put it this way: I don’t think, right now, I would want to have my twenty-one-year-old self in my own class. I would probably want to punch myself in the face.

Rumpus: Almost Gone manages to tell the immigrant story in a new way. Was that your intent from the start?

Sousa: Not my intent, but if it does approach that, then I’m stoked. My grandfather was born in Portugal, and my father spent time there as a kid, but I didn’t set out to write anything other than a set of stories that are linked together and hopefully draw in the reader. The book began as a single story about a Portuguese-American man, Nuno, who was obsessed with a younger woman. Turned out, in the next story, that his son had a similar attraction. Then I just started writing about other characters and over time, the entire family climbed out, claiming their own chapters, and the grandson, Scott, emerged as an indirect protagonist.

I didn’t set out to write an immigrant story, but I was able to close my eyes and revisit places and scenes from my childhood, so that helped. The more I got into it, the more I realized that a lot of fiction that focuses on immigrants is only about memorializing the past. I’d rather use the culture of assimilation as an origin of character and conflict; as a point to move forward from, rather than backward.

Rumpus:
 Do you identify as a “Portuguese-American writer,” or a writer who happens to be Portuguese-American?

Sousa: The second one, but I’m happy being called either. I’m actually just really stoked to have anyone call me a writer. I’ve debated that idea for a long time, and never know what to say when people ask what I do. I’ve been called a barback, a parking lot attendant, a snowboard instructor, a student, musician, starving artist…but now, with the book out, I think I can finally say that I’m a writer. So I’ve got that going for me. Still a starving artist, though.

We’ve all got stories to tell, and unique perspectives. I would say that our families and backgrounds definitely color the stories we make up, and that my dad being Portuguese has influenced mine. But at least half of the stuff that I write has nothing to do with Portugal, or Cristiano Ronaldo.

Rumpus:

 In the chapter “Jerusalem,” you write: “I close my eyes tightly and watch the colors. Someone told me in college that the red splotches that you see are actually your own blood, flowing beneath your eyelids. It was one of those stoned conversations that I don’t remember much of.” Do you really not remember the conversation? Because my recollection is that we got into some very deep shit.

Sousa: We did indeed get into some deep, deep shit. I thought that was you who told me that! Is that why you “resigned” from BC? That was one hell of a workshop. Were you practicing Rastafarianism at the time? It seemed like it. Maybe this is why, when I looked back at my transcript to find the grade you gave me, entire classes seem to have disappeared from my memory.

Rumpus: How has your family reacted to the book?

Sousa: This brings up something funny that’s been happening to me lately:

My sister: This book is good but dark. And, you know, we had a pretty idyllic childhood…

Me: But…this is fiction. I made it up.

Sister: I think you need to remind Mom that this is not you.

Me: But…it’s all lies. That’s what I do now. I lie for money.

Elsewhere…

My friend’s dad: But how does Brian know so much about domestic abuse?

My cousin: Why are you so well-versed in snorting painkillers?

Me: But…this…is…fiction!

Rumpus: There’s a rumor out there that you’re going to resign from BC if I’m invited as a graduation speaker. True?

Sousa: Can adjuncts actually “resign?” I don’t think they let us. They tell us when we can leave, maybe, or show us the way out. Actually, I wish you’d resigned in protest of Tommy Thompson speaking at my graduation in 2001. That was a nightmare. I’m glad I fell asleep.

I actually tell your resignation story to my students all the time. Some are inspired, some are indifferent, and the other day, one woman said, “Well, that’s a little extreme!” I think you scared the J. Crew right out of her! So, there you are. You are now officially extreme. In all seriousness, those Jesuits need to be shaken up every once in a while. Man, do I get freaked out by that tiny Jesus in every classroom, just staring down at me. I just want to say, “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” and send the old carpenter on his way.

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I was deeply impressed when I read his first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena, which managed to capture the rhythms of village life in World War II era Italy. His follow-up, The Saint of Lost Things, tracked his heroine Maddalena Grasso as she sought to make a life in America with husband Antonio. It was an intimate and wrenching examination of the immigrant experience. His new book, All This Talk of Love, finds the now-sprawling Grasso clan in millennial American, where Maddalena and Antonio are left to grapple with their ambivalent legacies: a pack of fractious offspring, the cruelties of fate, and a haunted past with which they must finally reckon.

It is, in my view, an American masterpiece, a tenderly ruthless examination of the bonds of family, the ways in which love perseveres in the midst of insoluble grief and complex regrets. I read the book in a kind of frenzy, feeling all the while that exquisite stab of envy that overtakes us when we feel our own talents eclipsed, and our hearts enlarged. How had my friend managed to cut so deeply into the hearts of his people?

The Rumpus sat down with Chris to find out.

***

Rumpus: You’ve spent more than a decade tracking the Grasso family across 60 years. Did you know what you were getting into when you started A Kiss from Maddalena or did it just evolve?

Chris Castellani: When I started what became A Kiss from Maddalena in 1999, my goal was to cover at least three generations of the Piccinelli-Grasso clan in one fat novel, taking a character loosely based on my mother from her birthplace e in an Italian village in the early 1930s, through World War II, an arranged marriage, her journey across the Atlantic, immigrant life in the U.S., her relationships with her children and grandchildren, a return to Italy, and whatever her life would look like beyond the millennium. I’d just come from an English Literature PhD program, where I’d fallen in love with thick 19th Century tomes with multiple storylines that told the entire history of a city, a region, and/or a way of life; I wanted to do for the Lazio/Abruzzo region of Italy – where my parents were born — what Hardy did for his fictional Wessex. Oh, and I’d also read A Hundred Years of Solitude a few too many times and thought such a masterpiece was a reasonable model for a twenty-something who’d never written a novel or even finished a successful short story.

What happened instead: I got to page 400, and I’d covered only two years of Maddalena’s life. She’d just made it onto the boat. Turns out I had zero talent for the kind of expansive writing that my plan required – the sort that Jeff Eugenides pulled off so beautifully in Middlesex, which was published around the same time and remains the book I wish I’d been able to write.

So I decided to play to my supposed strengths and divide the saga into three representative parts, each of which would cover a shorter but more intense period of time in Maddalena’s and other characters’ lives. The Synechdocal Approach, I called it, if only so I could finally use a term I’d learned in grad school.

Rumpus: One of the major achievements of your trilogy is to strip away the sentimentality that’s grown up around the “immigrant experience.” You manage to convey the abiding sense of dislocation and despair that lives beneath the aspirational blather. Is this something you did consciously, or is it just the story as you know it?

Castellani: It was definitely a conscious goal in each of my books to avoid sentimentality at all costs while remaining true to the emotional lives of the characters, who are each, in their own way, passionate melodramatic Italians. This was a hard line to toe because the stories I wanted to tell all focused on family and romantic love, and it’s hard to avoid at least appearing sentimental when you are in that “domestic” sphere. I’d become frustrated with the many one-dimensional depictions of Italians in the media (including books), and I wanted my books to feature complex and challenging characters with deep inner lives and struggles.

I understand the need for, and even the enjoyment of, books designed primarily to celebrate or prettify or wax nostalgic about the so-called immigrant experience, but I don’t find those books nourishing. They don’t give me what I ask from literature, which is, as you recently put it, to “bring us deep enough into the minds and hearts and souls of others to make us feel less alone with ourselves.”

Italians in particular are seen as either benign and child-like (the sweet old nonna with her meatballs), menacing mobsters, or hyper-sexualized housewives and gigolos; the kind of nourishment I’m looking for doesn’t lie in any of these stereotypes.

Around this time, someone usually asks me about The Sopranos. That debate’s now quite dated, but I’ll just say that, on balance, I was a big fan of the show and greatly admired its explorations of the characters’ inner lives. The mob stuff always struck me as little more than a vehicle for those explorations. I still think of the heartbreaking loneliness on the face of Carmela Soprano during that lingering shot on her slumped over with her bags outside Meadow’s dorm room; that sort of moment is what I tried to capture and contextualize in my books.

Rumpus: As you know, I’m a big fan of your first two novels. But I was blown away by how much deeper this final installment cuts. The psychological and emotional depth is astonishing. Did it feel different to write from the others?

Castellani: First of all, thank you. That’s the highest compliment I could receive, especially coming from you. All This Talk of Love did indeed feel different to write. First off, the subject matter (the death of a child, the sorrows of aging and disease) was much more difficult and emotionally wrenching than what I dealt with in my first two novels. This, too, was a conscious decision, in that I really tried to “write to my fears,” as Dorothy Allison advises writers to do. I had to step away from the book for weeks at a time because the subject matter was just too close, or too “possible.”

Rumpus: I know I shouldn’t do this, but as a friend and admirer of yours, I kept wondering how much of the plot comes from family history. Can you talk a little about this? The pluses and perils, I guess I mean.

Castellani: It’s a fair question. Anyone who knows me or my family will see aspects of us reflected in each of the novels. And there are, of course, some literal similarities: my parents did grow up in a small Italian village and emigrate to Wilmington, DE after World War II; my immediate family does include two brothers and a sister of roughly the same ages as the characters in All This Talk of Love; like Frankie, I attended graduate school in English Literature at a Boston-area university. In addition, I’ve liberally borrowed themes that have echoed through our family for generations, as well as the cadence of my parents’ broken English in Maddalena’s and Antonio’s dialogue.

The obvious plus here is that I’ve had the context and the relatively solid ground on which to build these novels. When I struggled for a plot point or a character trait, I turned first to someone I knew, considered what she or he might have felt or done, and that consideration gave me a form of access. But, in every single case – and this I want to make very clear – I changed something fundamental to the character or to the story as a way of distinguishing it from its referent. I did this not only out of discretion and artistic integrity and in deference to the imagination, but, selfishly, to keep myself from getting bored. I had no interest in retelling a tale that had already been lived, either by myself or any member of my family. This is hard for people to believe, especially when, for example, they read a description of Maddalena and it sounds exactly like my mother; she may by the source of inspiration, but she is not Maddalena. The same with every other character in the book, including that pretentious Mamma’s boy grad student who reminds some people of the author…

Rumpus: Maybe what I’m trying to ask is how tough was it to write this installment, which takes the Grasso family into the present.

Castellani: Well, the first two books were historical (1940s Italy in Maddalena, 1950s U.S. in The Saint of Lost Things), so the jump to 1999 was very jarring. I missed the objectivity that time and distance brought me. I realized that you have to deal with a lot of baggage when you write about your own era, that it’s harder to separate what is actually compelling from what is interesting simply because it mattered to you at the time. Also, the details you have to work with seem thin and ephemeral and lackluster compared to the cool and surprising and rich details you can uncover while researching another era.

But what made it especially tough was that, because this was the last time I would write about this family, I was very conscious that I was saying goodbye to them. I think that’s why one of the major themes that emerged was letting go of the people you love. Every character deals with this issue: Prima needs to let her sons grow up; Maddalena has to face people she shut out long ago; Antonio has to let go of the guilt he’s always carried for the death of his youngest son; and Frankie has to find a way to grow up without his parents.

Without question, that’s why this book took almost twice as long to write as The Saint of Lost Things. I didn’t want to say goodbye, and yet I knew I had to. And I wanted to give them a proper send-off. I was also conscious that there might be readers out there who’d read the first two books, already knew Maddalena and Antonio, and didn’t need me to re-introduce them. It was helpful, actually, that they were now in their seventies and eighties; I was excited to find out how and if they’d changed since 1953, and I was excited to explore how each of their children might understand them differently.

I think that’s actually what draws me to family stories: the various roles we each play with each member of our families, and how different they can be from who we are with our friends and partners and lovers. I’m endlessly fascinated by how we navigate these family dynamics; they are the dramas each of us live out day after day, often in ways we don’t even realize.

Rumpus: How has your family reacted to the various books, this one in particular?

Castellani: I don’t come from a family of readers – in fact, my parents are unable to read the books in English, and they have not yet been translated into Italian – but everyone seems to understand the commitment and concentration it takes to produce novels. They’ve been incredibly supportive from the beginning, even as reviewers and friends have insisted on identifying them as the characters in the books, and even as those characters haven’t come off in the most positive light.

We are a fevered and often fractious bunch – constantly arguing over issues big and small, in each other’s business at all times, wildly emotional, and passionately devoted to each other. We are fiercely loyal to each other, practice radical acceptance and inclusion, but that doesn’t mean we don’t make each other suffer or feel guilty or that we don’t drive each other completely crazy. That is very much true of the Grassos.

This won’t ruin the ending of All This Talk of Love for anyone who hasn’t read it, but I want to say that, in the original ending, the Grasso family falls apart completely and scatters. Again, I was writing to my fears as well as taking inspiration from the dissolution of the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude. My agent at the time, Mary Evans, balked. “This is a family that stays together,” she said. And she was right. The same, I think, I hope, can be said of the Castellanis.

Rumpus: Is it true that you, like Frankie Grasso, talk to your parents every night?

Castellani: Yes. Just like my father did. In fact, I’ve never gone more than two days without speaking with them, even while on trips around the world. And this was before cell phones! (Note: I don’t imply this is a healthy way to live. But my relationship with my parents is among the greatest gifts of my life.)

Rumpus: Can you talk a little about how in God’s name you wrote these books while also running Grub Street?

Castellani: I wrote in the mornings, often in cafes, on the way to the office. I gave myself a daily word minimum, usually 750. I tried to save revision for the weekends, when I had more consecutive hours to string together. Pages accumulated this way, miraculously. And, in many cases because of Grub Street, I could call on wonderful readers who’d offer feedback and help.

In the meantime, Grub Street grew into one of the leading literary arts centers in the country, with over 600 programs each year. My work with the organization has been less of a distraction than an inspiration, connecting me with an incredible community of talented writers and devoted readers. The two types of work feed each other. I haven’t hit the bestseller list, but I consider myself one of the luckiest writers in the world, and this is mainly because of Grub Street.

Rumpus: What’s next?

Castellani: All I can say is that I’m working on another historical novel that takes place both in Italy and the U.S., but has nothing to do with the Grasso family. I’ve done most of the necessary research, and once the book tour for All This Talk of Love is finished, I’ll be back at those daily word minimums hoping for another miracle.

***

Author photo by wowe.

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2. Because human beings are never more alive to their own hope and shame and fear than when they are naked and aroused, and because the same must therefore be true of our characters, who are nothing more than poorly disguised versions of ourselves.

3. Because I’m really tired of seeing sex used to sell SUVs and underarm deodorant and crappy light beer, rather than being portrayed as a natural and sometimes even holy human endeavor.

4. Because I have accumulated over the years such a tremendous surplus of sexual humiliation that it seems stingy of me not to re-gift some it to my readers.

5. Because I happen to agree with Freud’s naughtiest disciple, Wilhelm Reich, who argued that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, which pretty much rules out the Tea Party as a true political revolution because, boy, is that a movement that needs to get laid.

6. Because I am now married with two small children and thus writing about sex often constitutes the closest I get to having sex.

7. Because President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did have sexual relations, and while I could care less about the big phony scandal that story became, I am interested in the sweet and deranged version of love that passed between them. Aren’t you?

8. Because I’m really tired of having to listen to well-meaning religious folk misquoting God about how the rest of us should use our genitals.

9. Because both my parents are psychoanalysts – and despite what you are all now thinking, which is basically, Wow, you must be a really crazy person, which is a very interesting thought for you to have, by the way, and something we might want to talk about a bit later in the session – the one lesson my parents managed to impart, as I lay those many afternoons on the analytic couch that was, in fact, the only piece of furniture in our living room, is that our libidinal drives are not some bright new user option, but an essential part of our beings, an inborn riot of wants and counter wants that we can never control entirely. And because, as a writer, I’m interested in the loss of control, in the danger of forbidden thought and feeling, it strikes me as utterly foolish – just from a practical perspective – not to write about sex. Why skip over the part almost guaranteed to teach you something new about yourself?

10. Because I’m tired of living in a culture that allows children to fire make-believe glocks but freaks out at the first sign of a naked boob.

11. I just really love being able to write off lube as a business expense.

12. Because our best writing resides in the senses, and sex invokes all five of our senses—at least if you’re doing it right.

13. Because, though I watch pornography, and am terrifically involved with it for about two and a half minutes, I am most often made sad by pornography. Not simply because it involves the self-exploitation of people who probably have suffered a good deal of misfortune, and not simply because porn stars can perform in manners that often seem like physiological, geometrical, and even gravitational impossibilities (and thus make me feel like the abject sexual nebbish I surely am) but because porn stars are actors being paid, most often, to simulate pleasure. They drain sex of its single most intimate aspect: the vulnerabilities that bring us to the act in the first place, the drama of our imperfect bodies as we seek to make a communion of our desires.

14. Because I believe literature’s central purpose is not to pretend we don’t have bodies and their consequent needs, but to make us feel less alone with these needs.

15. Because the Puritans themselves were—don’t kid yourselves—total horndogs who wanted nothing more than to tear off those black robes and suffer a spiritual crisis. And because when I write about sex I am writing, ultimately, about a dream that begins with the Puritans: that we the people of this violent and troubled kingdom will at last forgive ourselves the lust and loneliness the reddens our blood, and will seek a final remedy in the warm temple of one another’s bodies. Who’s with me?

***

This Manifesto is part of a set of six tiny books called Writs of Passion. They are adult material, stories and essays that have appeared in Tin House, The Normal School, Playboy, Best American Erotica, etc., but are too dirty for prime-time. The covers fit together like a puzzle to form a gorgeous image, created by my DIY partner in crime Brian Stauffer. Limited edition, available until Valentine’s Day.

To order, send $25 per set via Paypal (sbalmond AT earthlink.net) or send an email to stevealmondjoy AT gmail.com.

***

“Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto” originally appeared in The Normal School, Spring 2012.

Art by Brian Stauffer.

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• “Attention Is the First and Final Act of Love”
• Writs of Passion
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A young Asian woman with a scone was holding forth. “They said on their own website that it cost 79 but I got here and suddenly it’s $1.20 and there’s like ten left, all in gross colors. I told the sales lady, ‘It was 79 on the website’ and she was like, ‘I don’t know anything about that, honey.’” The guy across the table stared at her from beneath a gelled shingle of hair, listening in that super empathic manner suggesting these two had yet to fuck.

At the next table, an older couple was berating their teenage son for his tardy appearance. He kept claiming his car had stalled on the way, an excuse not even he seemed to believe.

The woman making coffee was keening about the new device she wanted, only the Apple Store opened while she was on her shift, of course, so she had to ask her friend who worked at Pier One, but he couldn’t do it because he had his own stuff to buy, so she was going to have to ask her mom, who would probably mess it up and buy her, like, the Nano Four.

After a time, these voices began to merge. They composed a kind of seething national chorus. I will never get what I deserve.

And who was I to complain about their complaint? I say the same thing all the time.

***

It was a particular moment in time, in the suburbs of central Connecticut, where nearly all public discourse happens in a Starbuck’s or a Bertucci’s, in an Anne Taylor or a Pier One, where the Brownian motion of civic life is contained within white-trimmed malls.

I’d landed here on Black Friday, a newly minted “holiday” devoted to the sacred rites of shopping, to transitioning Americans from the corporeal gluttony of Thanksgiving to the retail gluttony of Christmas.

I should have been in a library, but I didn’t know where to find a library in central Connecticut.

I kept trying to think about the election, but I couldn’t get back there. It seemed ages ago. Instead, I thought of this line from The White Album, Didion’s long sad strange poem about how we let the Sixties slip through our fingers:

It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure…

 ***

Why does my heart operate like this? Why, in the face of good news, does it seize upon portents of ruin?

Are you like this, too?

How long did it take you to relocate your anxieties about the election to the rest of your life?

I gave myself about three hours. At last, I thought. Democracy has served as an instrument of moral progress. Americans have disavowed the use of selfishness and bigotry as political tools. Paul Ryan can now return to his given role as the star of an infomercial for a workout regimen that makes you poop gold.

Then Palestinians and Israelis started killing one another again and congressional leaders launched into their horseshit soliloquies about the sanctity of tax cuts and the same old huckster pundits were back in their pancake makeup, while the corporate money slunk back to the drawing board, in pursuit of more efficient ways to poison our common sense.

By the next day, the election had begun to feel like a stopgap, like some terrible disaster – not averted or vanquished, but delayed. And then even less. Like a diversion from the real business of America: the frantic effort to buy off our loneliness.

***

It’s more complicated than that, though.

I spent Election Day in the town where I’d grown up. I’d come to give a lecture and to visit my mom, who had just endured the removal of several internal organs, her second such surgery in the past five years. “It’s alright, Stevie,” she told me. “I wasn’t using them anyway.”

So I watched the returns with my folks on either side of me. The numbers came in from New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; my dad and I began to feel the woozy flush of pessimists proved wrong.

But my mom wasn’t getting it. She stared at the blizzard of data washing across the screen, then glanced down at her belly, at the wound there. I could see, just for a second, how frightened she was.

By which I mean of course how frightened I was.

My dad clicked over to Fox, so as to witness Karl Rove confronting the voters of Ohio. But even this spectacle couldn’t distract him from the real story in that room. He wanted my mom to snap out of it, to act like his wife again, not some addled patient in danger of drifting off to the other side.

***

I watched Romney deliver his gracious concession speech at an airport bar, then caught the rest on a red-eye back to Boston, a hundred little blue screens aglow as our plane zoomed over the black mountains below. We landed at dawn and there was my own little family waiting for me at the airport, my beautiful tired wife and my tender shrieking children.

I should have fallen to my knees in gratitude. I should have found a God to thank. But I picked a fight with my wife instead, because she had the audacity to fall ill and to expect me to take care of her, when I was the one with the sick mother, the maybe dying mother, and anyway at the bottom of it all I wanted her, my wife, to become my mother, young and forever healthy, which isn’t fair, but is.

***

I was still in the Starbucks, still trying to figure out what to say about the election. It was barely a fortnight ago, but the squalls of Black Friday had blown me off course. I kept hearing the voices of those b-list actors from Dawn of the Dead, George Romero’s 1978 paean to zombie consumerism.

“What are they doing?” the blond says, of the blue-faced goons staggering around the mall. “Why do they come here?”

“Some kind of instinct,” her guy says. “Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

***

My mother took part in the Civil Rights movement and was one of half a dozen women in her class at Yale Medical School and she raised three troubled sons and wrote two remarkable books and read every novel Charles Dickens wrote, most of them several times, and she has cared for her patients with great compassion and taken far too much shit over the years from my dad and me and my brothers. She deserved, and deserves, better.

And I guess that’s what I feel about the election, when I dig to the bottom of it.

It is my hope that Obama will become far more radical in defense of the common good; that he will suggest to Republicans, for instance, a return to the top tax rate of the Eisenhower era (91 percent). I would love to see him campaign for a constitutional amendment banning all private money from political races. I would love to see him empower scientists to solve our climate change crisis. And so on and so on.

***

But none of that will keep my mother alive forever. Or me. Or you.

The final crisis is always personal: how do we fight back against what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of the real,” which I take to mean those anxieties that keep us apart from our souls. (I’m not sure I’m even getting that right. It’s based on something I heard Matthew Zapruder say far more eloquently.)

Maybe that’s what I was feeling in that Starbucks: the pressure of the real. Maybe I was afraid that it was too late for America, that election night 2012 would go down as little more than a twitch of conscience in the twilight of a wasteful empire, the fundamental malaise was too deep, the distractions too profitable, we would remain zombies to the end, unwilling to stanch our profligacy, to face the burdens of our historical moment, devoted instead to the spiritually empty pursuit of sensation.

Or maybe that was my fear talking. Maybe the pressure of the real can mean something else: that we love some people so much (and are therefore so afraid of losing them) that we have to create vessels of beauty to contain our terror. That our politicians fail us and the cherished among us die but that love and imagination, as commemorated in our words and our deeds, survive. That these human gestures form the invisible thread that binds the mighty to the meek, the wicked to the good, the living to the dead.

Maybe this can be taken as our proper work for the next four years: summoning the faith to see our nation as partly ruined, full of delusion and wrath, and still to wish for, and work for, and believe in, its resurrection.

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“Hey Almond!”

This was a guy I’ll call Trent, a hockey player from a wealthy Long Island family. He knew I hated Reagan. “Ronnie won!” he bellowed. “He got 500 points. The other guy got, like, three points. Three fucking points! How’s that feel, loser?”

The other guy was Senator Walter Mondale. He is perhaps the last presidential candidate to have run a truly liberal campaign. At its center was his support for the Equal Rights Amendment and a nuclear freeze. He also made the terrible mistake of announcing his intention to raise taxes to close the massive budget deficit Reagan’s tax cuts had created. “Let’s tell the truth,” he said. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

But the reason I still remember this moment is because I could see, for the first time I’m afraid, that the world didn’t share my idealistic conception of politics. To Trent, the election was sport, nothing more and nothing less, an event by which to register his own sense of power in the world. He couldn’t have told you what Reagan or Mondale stood for, what they wished to accomplish. He just knew Reagan made him feel like a winner.

And this was important to Trent because buried just beneath his macho posturing was a crushing insecurity. He was a lousy hockey player, a benchwarmer, and his girlfriend was cheating on him and nobody much liked him. He reminded me of Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby—that long sad poem about American desire and ruin. Like Tom, Trent was a guy with a “cruel body … forever seeking the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”

Anyway, there he was down the hall, drunk, fresh from an election night party at his frat house, where had no doubt been the butt of jokes about his inadequacies as an athlete and a man, and I had come along at just the right moment.

“Hey Almond,” he said. “Hey Stevie. Come on now.” He stumbled towards me and said, almost tenderly, “Your guy lost because nobody liked him.”

***

If history gets the final word, President Barack Obama will be counted as a moderate technocrat who spent either one, or two, terms in office digging the country out of a recession caused by greed, extracting us from two costly and foolish wars, and restoring America’s standing in the world.

He wasn’t the visionary that many folks thought they were electing, but he got some important stuff done in the face of a congress whose proudly broadcast goal was to make sure he didn’t get re-elected.

It is a testament to the moral deficits of the modern Fourth Estate that reporters and editors would tolerate such monstrous cynicism. Still more remarkable is the fact that the members of the editorial board of newspapers such as the Des Moines Register endorsed Mitt Romney specifically because they believe he can work with Congress. (These editors—without even realizing it, I suspect—are the reason the GOP has chosen to pursue gridlock over genuine legislative effort. They will continue to do so long as there are editors and citizens stupid enough to reward them.)

As for Willard Mitt Romney, he is the candidate the modern Republican Party was bound to nominate: an upscale salesman with an algorithm where his soul should be. He is a man whose core beliefs about the world—corporations are people, my friend … I’m not concerned about the very poor … my job is not to worry about those people—represent the ultimate ascendance of special interests over human ones.

By some measures at least, his campaign has been remarkably transparent. Staffers have been quite open about their willingness to lie, and shift positions to suit the political moment. The first debate confirmed the wisdom of this approach. Romney was hailed as a brilliant tactician.

In other crucial respects, the Romney campaign has been cloaked in secrecy. Despite his vast wealth, he refused to release more than two years of his tax returns, or the names of his biggest fundraising “bundlers.” And the vast majority of the dishonest ads run on his behalf were funded by the dark money of Citizens United.

Romney has spent most of his campaign obscuring, distorting, or just plain lying about what he hopes to do in office. Even his most ardent supporters know, to a degree that is both unprecedented and terrifying, almost nothing about his policies.

Most of them know in their hearts that he’s a dishonest man. But they’ll vote for him anyway. They are voting, in this sense, for their own cynicism.

***

As I write this, most statistical models suggest that Obama will be re-elected. But it’s a close race, and one that has been marked by a consistent Republican effort to disenfranchise voters who are economically and culturally at risk.

What I fear—in some sense more than a Romney victory—is a scenario in which the democratic intentions of the electoral process break down, as they did in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio). Can you imagine how horrible that fight would be for our entire country?

I’m not trying to be an alarmist. I’m merely reacting to what we already know: that early voting hours have been dramatically reduced in states controlled by Republicans, such as Florida and Ohio, that lines have been long, that ballots have already been discounted, that Republican officials are, even as I write this, making nakedly partisan efforts to disenfranchise voters, that polling places have been overrun by combative advocates.

In essence, the GOP is seeking to apply their approach to governance—obstruct progress than excoriate the process—to the election itself.

***

It is hard to overstate the degree of cynicism at play here: If you can’t win based on your policies, lie about them. If that doesn’t work, make sure those who support your opponent can’t vote. Confuse them. Inconvenience them. Scare them.

If there’s a single reason for you, the reader, to spend the next 36 hours working for Obama’s reelection, it is this: if you don’t, you leave the fate of the country in the hands of people who don’t believe in fair elections.

To quote the country’s paper of record, The New York Times: “Even now, many Republicans are assembling teams to intimidate voters at polling places, to demand photo ID where none is required, and to cast doubt on voting machines or counting systems whose results do not go their way.”

My advice is to urge everyone you know to vote, especially friends and relatives in swing states. Put the touch on people. Write personalized emails. Make calls, especially to folks who may not consider themselves “political.” Volunteer at a phone bank. Think of it as an investment: a few hours upfront in the hopes you won’t spend the next four years in anguish. It’s a pretty good deal, when you do the math.

***

As for the voters in swing states, and the Obama campaign, and those who consider themselves professional journalists: the goal has to be to preempt the sort of debacle that marked 2000 and 2004.

In those cases, most Americans never witnessed voter disenfranchisement directly. But today, most citizens carry with them a powerful tool: phones with the capacity to take pictures and video.

It is my unsolicited advice that some fair-minded tech genius set up a website (right now) that allows voters to upload pictures and videos, if their right to vote is abrogated—either by a polling official, or simply because a polling place closed before they could vote. Snap up a domain name such as IWasDeniedMyVote2012.org [Editor's Note (via a comment below): In fact, such a site does exist: http://www.videothevote.org/].

If you’re a legal voter who wants desperately to cast a ballot, but you can’t afford to wait four hours to vote because you’ll get fired and you have a family to support, take a video of yourself at your overcrowded polling place. Tell your story.

If you’re a voter in Ohio or Florida or Pennsylvania who is waiting in line and it becomes apparent that you’re not going to get to cast a vote before your polling place closes, make a video and explain what’s happening. Don’t just give up and leave.

You can’t prove voter disenfranchisement ex-post facto. You need to show people what it means in real time, in moving pictures, so they can see the injustice.

Then make sure that these videos are immediately transmitted to reporters at local television stations and newspapers. This is the only way Republican governors such as Rick Scott and John Kasich will be compelled to extend voting hours—if the media pressures becomes great enough to overwhelm their partisan motives.

Every legal voter who wants to cast a ballot tomorrow should be granted that right. Period. Any official whose actions oppose this goal should be considered a traitor to this country’s founding principles, and labeled as such by our Fourth Estate.

***

Mature democracies don’t have their leaders appointed by judges. They choose them in fair and open elections. That one party no longer abides by this belief should be a cause not just for outrage but despair. How did we get here?

It is my own view that powerful and moneyed forces have aligned themselves to bring us to this point, to obscure the threats that imperil our species, to turn us against each other and against our own interests.

I think here, again, of Gatsby.

Fitzgerald writes: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

But it’s too easy for us to sit around and blame the Koch brothers and the rest of the corporate boogiemen for the fact that neither of the candidates said a word about global warming.

Ultimately, though, we’re responsible for our own democracy. If we’re not prepared to become active—at the local, state, and national level—if we’re not prepared to assert our own agenda, to change our own lifestyles, if we want simply to feel morally superior to the zealots on the right, to drive our cars and eat our organic salads and seek absolution via Stewart and Colbert, if we choose convenience over genuine political action, we have only ourselves to blame for the dysfunction of our political system.

The forces of money and power don’t go away on their own. You can’t reason with them, or joke them out of existence. Conservative candidates and pundits, supported by corporate interests, have worked diligently over the past 30 years to push our country to the right. And they’ve succeeded because progressives have yet to push back.

In this sense, our work doesn’t end on Wednesday morning. Whether or Obama wins or loses, the 2012 campaign should serve as a wake-up call to those citizens who allowed themselves to believe that hope and change was something they could simply vote for.

That’s not how democracy operates. You have to do the work. If you’re not willing to, there are plenty of other citizens who will.

Onward, together.

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The left and right in this country are growing more isolated—and therefore alienated—from one another. Ask yourself: How many of my friends/acquaintances hail from across the aisle?

I felt it was important for Rumpus readers to hear what conservatives have to say for themselves. So I spent the past month interviewing a bunch, some in person (I found Angela, for instance, in the Denver airport, highlighting a Glenn Beck book), and some on-line.  I apologize to them in advance for my severe editing and slight reordering. My goal was to capture the gist of what they had to say, not to argue with them. I’ve added brief editor’s notes with factual clarifications when necessary.

***

Angela, a financial analyst, lives in Eagle River, a small city outside Anchorage.

WiG: What does “conservative” mean to you?

Angela: Family, religion, and less government.

WiG: How do you get your news?

Angela: Fox News. I’m a semi-regular viewer.

WiG: Are you following the election coverage?

Angela: Not really. All they do is throw mud at each other.

WiG: Are you familiar with the platforms of either party?

Angela: Not really.

WiG: How do you know what the candidates intend to do?

Angela: It’s whatever I hear on those shows, and I might look something up on the Internet.

WiG: On what sites?

Angela: None in particular.

WiG: What gives you confidence that Mitt Romney will be a good president?

Angela: I’m concerned about the jobs, and preserving traditional values, and our foreign policy, protecting ourselves. I think it’s horrible what happened to the ambassador [in Libya].

WiG: Do you feel President Obama was responsible for that?

Angela: Of course. He said it was over a stupid video. And he didn’t put extra protection on the embassy even though it was the anniversary of September 11^th.

WiG: What do you know about Romney’s specific plans to create jobs?

Angela: [Shrugs]

WiG: What do you know about his tax plan?

Angela: [Shrugs]

WiG: What do you like about Romney?

Angela: His religion. I’m Pentacostal, so I don’t agree with his views, but he seems to have more traditional values than Obama.

WiG: In what specific ways are his views more traditional?

Angela: [No response]

***

John, a father of two, works as a manager at Safelite, the auto glass company, and lives in Ohio. Both his parents were both teachers, but he was “politically clueless” until college, where he became a Reagan supporter. He was offended to hear people in a bar cheering because the President had been shot. He’s also troubled by paying too much in taxes, as he feels the government is a bad steward of his money.

John: I consider myself a conservative, probably a little more libertarian than Republican. The term to me means rugged individualism, pursuit (not guarantee) of happiness, and the freedom to be the biggest success or fuck-up I want to be.

WiG: I, too, remember Reagan being shot. I’m shocked people were cheering. Have Obama’s calls for political civility impressed you?

John: The president’s calls for civility are essentially a political inoculation against the same. Same as when Warren Buffett says he doesn’t pay enough taxes. When Rush calls Sandra Fluke a “slut” or when Bill Maher calls Laura Ingraham a “cunt,” that’s going too far. Politics is a blood sport and you play to win period.

WiG: Given your debt concerns, do you support measures such as closing loopholes for giant oil corporations? Or for millionaires?

John: Loopholes for corporations is kind of a straw man for me. Who owns these giant companies? In most cases it’s you and me with our mutual funds. If we tax these folks they will pass that cost back to the consumer, raising prices and making the business environment more difficult. For millionaires, you could do it, but they will lawyer up and figure out a way to not do it.

Romney’s recent dumbfuck move by saying that 47% don’t pay taxes is untrue. It’s 49%. When Obama says that “we are asking people to pay their fair share,” there is really nothing fair about it, because 86% of all income taxes are paid by the top 25% of income earners.

[Editor’s note: this statistic is accurate, and reflects national income distribution. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the top one percent of American households possess 34.5% of our national wealth. The top ten percent possess 74.5%. The bottom 50% possess 1.1% of our wealth.]

John: …As for entitlement programs, both Social Security and Medicare are set up badly, a weird blend of capitalism and socialism that will only end badly. I believe there are folks that genuinely need assistance. I believe there are a ton of folks who are scamming.

WiG: What do you mean by “folks scamming”? Are there non-partisan studies about such practices? I ask because the argument for limited government seems to assume widespread incompetence or malfeasance. As with “voter fraud” claims, the integrity of this argument resides in the evidence of such abuse.

John: I don’t have a study, but from a few sites found info that the federal government made improper payments of around $125 billion last year. I think that whoever is president should tighten that shit up immediately. Maybe “tons of people scamming” is urban legend, or I could just be plain wrong … I think Romney is counting on Reagan’s model of lowering taxes, revenues to the feds increase, folks start new businesses and hire more folks who pay taxes. Yep, trickle down, but it worked.

[Editor’s note: “Reagan’s model of lowering taxes” did not increase revenues. It increased the national debt by 186 percent over his two terms.]

John: I think Romney is some “Ozzie and Harriet” type corporate weenie, that the country needs desperately at this time. He seems adult and not cool, but a fixer of sorts and I would like to see him in there. My core values translate to them in getting the debt under control, reforming entitlements to get people working, creating an environment where business can flourish, and him making polygamy the law of the land. Just joking, one wife is enough.

WiG: What do you mean by “reforming entitlements to get people working”?

John: I mean put the work portion back in “workfare.” I think on your side it’s a sign of pride that we have 53 million people on food stamps. If people need it, I’m good with it. That number horrifies me, I want people to win and win big and buy a yacht.

[Editor’s note: The claim that Obama sought to strip the work requirement from welfare is untrue.]

***

Jack is a senior editor at a small public relations company in northern New Jersey, and is gay.

Jack: Mitt Romney isn’t the Reagan that at least half the country would like. But I argue that we don’t need another Reagan—that example was given to us already. All we need to do is imitate it … By the usual and accepted measures of economic health, Obama’s strategy of more government intervention, regulation, and top-down economic control has been a failure. The growth rate has limped along at about 2.2%. No recovery period in recent history has seen growth this weak. The unemployment rate has persisted at or above 8% for about three-and-a-half years running, which is also extraordinary for a recovery period.

WiG: Given that our economy was shedding 700,000 jobs a month when he took office, what measures should Obama have taken?

Jack: I don’t believe he could have done anything about that particular problem at the time…

WiG: In your view, how and why did the economic meltdown of 2007 occur?

Jack: Contrary to the narrative that was pushed on us, “deregulation” was hardly the culprit. We can trace the problems back to Federal Housing Authority and HUD regulations, and the even more pernicious Community Reinvestment Act. The deregulation which followed was only at the margins … Of course, the emotionally satisfying explanation is that the whole mess was caused by Wall Street greed.

WiG: What should a President do when the economy he inherits is slumping? It sounds like you feel government should do as little as possible, and allow the free market to call the shots. Is that accurate?

Jack: In a perfect world, yes, that would be accurate. But we didn’t have a free market in the first place. There is no way a free-market solution was going to work in a decidedly unfree market environment…

As for my philosophical objection, the government cannot “create jobs,” nor can it “put people back to work.” These are not functions of the government as outlined in its charter, and the idea makes no sense in the first place. I want all politicians to stop claiming otherwise.

WiG: This morning, me and my kids walked past the elementary school they’ll go to, which is being rebuilt. There were about 25 guys working on the re-build, which was funded by taxpayers like myself. How is this not government creating jobs?

Jack: You answered your own question. Those jobs are funded by you, not the government. The government is merely the means by which your money is diverted to that project. Now building a school is of course a good and useful thing. But such a project does not represent an expansion of the economy—the resources used to build the school were diverted from another part of the economy. In fact, there are instances where rebuilding a school may not be the best use of resources. Believe it or not, there are times when it is more useful to renovate a chain of go-go bars, or build a new Wal-Mart.

WiG: Can you talk about your stances on social issues?

Jack: After the freakshow that was the DNC convention, I am quite honestly worn out by all the angry estrogen. But I will talk briefly about abortion. I was informed by a grad-school colleague of mine that until I have a uterus, I don’t have a right to an opinion about abortion (never mind the fact that I am thoroughly pro-choice). The stridency of these broads cannot possibly be making them many friends.

WiG: What do you mean by “angry estrogen”?

Jack: I prefer to let your readers chew on that one.

WiG: Honestly, Jack, you clearly pride yourself on being intelligent and precise, so what are you saying here?

Jack: …Sandra Fluke exemplified both the angry as well as freakish aspects of the DNC convention. She delivered her speech with a very large and secure safety net cast by her (extremely angry) handlers, as is always the case when she speaks publicly. Ms. Fluke was described by President Obama as “one tough and poised young lady.” He wisely left out the adjective “smart.” Insultingly, Ms. Fluke was foisted on us as some kind of intellectual powerhouse, an eloquent voice against the forces of white male patriarchy. Yet when Rush Limbaugh called her a rude name, suddenly she became this delicate little creature who was being bullied, and all rallied to her and cradled her precious little head and told her that Rush is, well, he’s just a big meanie. There, there now, child—it’s OK, Uncle Barack is on the phone, sweetpea.

… As for gun control, I am as staunch a supporter of the Second Amendment as I am of the First. The Left would have us remain as sitting ducks, relying on “Hate Crimes Legislation” to protect us from homophobes (or any other type of thug). I can’t imagine anything more “self-loathing” than that. While I am not actively against such legislation, I claim the right to arm and defend myself. I am convinced that if Matthew Shepard had carried a gun, he’d be walking among us today. As my friends at Pink Pistols say, “Armed gays don’t get bashed.”

… I won’t allow my blood to be spilled all for the sake of some vague, contradictory, and bossy opinions that others hold about “the common good.”

WiG: You believe Matthew Shepard would still be alive if he’d carried a gun. So was he a victim because he allowed himself to be? Given that we all might be victims of violent crime, should everyone carry a gun? Would this decrease, in your view, gun violence?

Jack: No, I don’t blame Shepard for his own death. But the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is of little benefit to either of those gentlemen now. I don’t argue that people should or shouldn’t arm themselves. It’s a decision that each individual will make for himself.

WiG: Do conservatives respect your sexual orientation? How do they express this respect? Is it in their policies toward homosexuals? Can you be specific?

Jack: Most conservatives I interact with respect and agree with my political point of view. As for sexual orientation, my mission on the Right is not to alert them to the virtues of hot man-on-man action. Of course many of them raise an eyebrow at my sexual orientation and romantic proclivities. But once we have a discussion about John Locke, the Rule of Law, the Founding fathers, the Constitution of the United States, and F.A. Hayek, I have made a friend for life. (A hearty laugh at Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s expense never hurts, either.)

This is a discussion that is impossible to have with a Liberal. It begins and ends with the same not-very-original charge that I am like a Jewish guard at Auschwitz and do I realize that the Republican party hates me?

I have never received hate mail nor have I ever been the recipient of personal invective from a conservative. The totality of vitriol comes from the Left. A recent example of gay Leftist hatred came courtesy of the ever-repulsive Dan Savage. He called GoProud “house faggots for the GOP.” We point out to Savage that it’s better to be a house faggot for the Right than a field faggot for the Left. Who has a better shot at cutting the master’s throat while he slumbers? My money is on the house faggot.

***

Jack’s making a particular kind of joke here—one with violent undertones. It speaks to what John said earlier: that politics is “a blood sport.”

My intention was to allow conservatives to speak for themselves. I interviewed a bunch, and chose three voices that struck me as representative. My not-so-secret hope was to dig beneath the binary dogma—to unearth the hopes that might unite us. I was after solace.

That I failed, and so abjectly, should occasion any number of emotions. At the bottom of them all is helplessness.

No there is no way for me to reach these folks: Angela who regards “politics” as some vague source of paranoia, John, with his friendly need to make sure nobody unworthy gets their hands on his dough, and least of all Jack, for whom politics is an arena to strut his intellect and externalize his self-loathing.

But politics isn’t about projecting your pathologies into the public arena, and it’s not about hurting people. Its essential mission is to enact morality in the world, to make the rules by which we care for everyone, not just ourselves. What matters isn’t who “wins,” but to what human effect? Is the greater cause of justice advanced? Is opportunity expanded? Is the suffering of our citizens reduced?

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Issues of military experience mattered, because Bush had launched two wars in the wake of 9/11, neither of which was going well. The central historical curiosity of that election is how Kerry’s service—he won a silver star, a bronze star, and three purple hearts—became a liability.

Kerry lost the election, if barely, for one simple reason: because he never turned to Bush during any of their three debates, looked him in the eye, and said, “With all due respect, Mr. President, you wouldn’t be so reckless about sending our young men into battle if you’d ever been under enemy fire yourself. But you haven’t been, sir. While I was in the Mekong Delta getting shot at and wounded, you were in Alabama working on a political campaign for one of your father’s pals. That’s not a political attack, Mr. President. It’s history.”

***

If Barack Obama loses his re-election bid in a few weeks it will be because he failed to confront Mitt Romney in the same manner, face to face, about his relentless and brazen lies to the American people.

Men born of wealth—like Bush and Romney—feel entitled to bullying the truth, and their opponents. It’s how they their mask their insecurity, and conceal their panic. Obama, a bi-racial kid raised without money, got ahead by avoiding conflict. In most contexts, this would be an attribute. But modern presidential campaigns are filtered by pundits, and decided by voters, who think very little about policy. They go with their gut. They go with the guy who seems like a winner, the guy who has made an ally of his aggression.

Because tomorrow’s debate is town-hall style, Obama will have to empathize with those in the audience, and attend to their questions. But voters at home, the ones still open to voting for him, need Obama to take the fight to Romney, to speak with urgency and moral force. He needs to have lines of attack prepared for particular topics, and those attacks need to tell a larger story.

The story is simple—Mitt Romney is a salesman. The grin, the swell suit, the sunny promises of moderation are a pitch intended to hide what you’re really buying: a shameless oligarch.

***

The overarching message:

Governor Romney has been running for office for twenty years now, and the only core position he holds is that he deserves to be President. Everything else depends on who he’s talking to. When he’s talking to rich fundraisers behind closed doors, and he thinks nobody else is listening, he says 47 percent of Americans are dependent on the government and can’t take responsibility for their lives. When he gets caught, he says, “Oh gosh, I didn’t mean that.” Now he’s for the middle class. During the Republican primary, Governor Romney promised to cut taxes for the one percent. In Denver, he swore up and down he wouldn’t do that. He used to be a moderate conservative. Then he was a severe conservative. Used to be pro-choice, now he’s pro-life. Used to be for his own health care plan, now he’s against it. Used to be against regulation, now he’s for it. Just shake the etch-a-sketch and presto chango: a new Mitt Romney. When reporters point out his ads are full of lies, his staff says—this is an actual quote—“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

That’s not leadership, Governor Romney. It’s salesmanship.

***

On Romney’s tax plan:

Governor Romney is constantly reminding us that there are six studies that prove his plan to cut $5 trillion in taxes—cuts skewed toward the wealthy—won’t raise the deficit. Six studies. Sounds pretty impressive, right? Until you read the fine print. Those studies are blogs and editorials written by conservatives. That’s how he defines a “study.” By those standards, I guess Governor Romney himself is the author of a rather famous study, the one entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” That’s the study about how we should have just let our auto industry fail. The only legitimate study of his tax plan revealed what common sense should tell you: if you give massive tax cuts to rich folks, middle-class families are going to have to pay it. That’s how it always is with Governor Romney. The sales pitch sounds great – until you look at the fine print.

***

On health care:

Governor Romney wants to turn Medicare, one of the most successful programs in our history, into a voucher program. Period. He likes to promise seniors he won’t touch their benefits. But that’s only because his voucher system doesn’t kick in for a few years. Like any good salesman, he’s put his political liability on layaway. But in the mean time he’s going to gut Medicaid programs for seniors and sick children. He says his plan will allow folks with pre-existing conditions to get insurance. It won’t. Five minutes after our last debate ended, his staff had to admit that was a lie. He says he’ll repeal Obamacare and let states come up with their health care laws. But that’s impossible—because the federal government actually subsidized most of his state’s health care plan. Those are the facts. Governor Romney knows those are the facts. His only hope is that voters won’t read the fine print on his health care plans, because if they do, it will make them sick.

***

On foreign policy:

For the last couple of weeks, Governor Romney has been running around shooting off his mouth on foreign policy—which is odd, given that he has no foreign policy experience. Actually, check that. He did visit England and manage to insult our closest ally. Then he tried to score cheap political points while our citizens were under attack in Libya, and he’s still trying to exploit that tragedy for political gain. Americans have seen this kind of bluster before. It’s what got us into two wars. My foreign policy isn’t about bluster. It’s about results. Under my watch, we’ve ended the war in Iraq, we’re winding down in Afghanistan, and we’ve decimated Al Qeada. Like President Bush, Governor Romney didn’t believe bringing Osama Bin Laden to justice was a high priority. I did.

Being Commander-in-Chief isn’t like being a candidate, Governor. You can’t just sit in a comfy armchair trying to win the next news cycle. You have to sit in the Oval Office and make the tough calls. Tough talk isn’t a doctrine. It’s another form of salesmanship.

***

On character:

Governor Romney has been running for president for years now and he’s made lots of promises: to cut taxes and reduce the debt and save Medicare and create twelve million jobs. After all this time, he can’t even tell you what’s in his tax plan. These aren’t serious proposals. They’re sales pitches.

Here’s what we do know about Governor Romney: he was born into wealth and made millions in private equity. His company closed down plants in America and shipped jobs overseas. He believes corporations are people. He makes more than $20 million per year on investments and pays a lower tax rate than an occupational therapist. He has a Swiss bank account and a tax shelter in the Cayman Islands. Despite being the richest citizen ever to run for President, he refuses to release more than two years of his tax returns, though his own father set the precedent as a candidate of releasing a dozen returns.

Governor Romney is a good businessman. He knows how to close a deal. But America isn’t a business. The job of the President isn’t to maximize profits for the folks at the top. It’s to maximize opportunity for all our citizens. The Governor is eager to talk about how much he cares for the middle class, because he thinks this will get him elected. But look at how he’s spent his life. Those are his values. Boil away the sales pitches and he’s for a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy.

***

The riffs above amount to less than ten minutes of talking. Obama will still have time to set out his own agenda, and say “um” a lot. But what’s precious in these debates—what turned the race against him last time—is the chance to project strength. It’s incredibly sad that such an attitude should have to prevail in a mature democracy. It speaks to the moral poverty of our Fourth Estate, and our electorate. But that’s where we are.

If Obama wants another four years, he has to find a way to fight against his instincts, and take a salesman out to the woodshed.

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It was clear to him that he needed to project empathy, and a genuine concern for the “middle class,” and he did so relentlessly.

2.  The frantic “all the pressure’s on Mitt!” narrative was complete bullshit.

Romney had acquired such an awful reputation by Wednesday night that most viewers half expected him to pull an impoverished infant from beneath his podium and consume it onstage. He was supposed to be awkward, disingenuous, and snide. This made his performance striking: he played against type. Give Romney credit, here: he recognized that the “debate” was a piece of theater. He knew that his target audience was independent, low-information voters and he presented himself to them as an earnest moderate who just wanted to rouse the country from its torpor.

3. The absence of moral and factual oversight benefits the guy with the smaller conscience.

To come off as moderate, Romney had to lie. He had to say that his tax plan doesn’t cut taxes for rich guys and doesn’t cost five-trillion dollars. He had to promise that he’ll keep the Affordable Care Act’s most popular provisions, and that he’ll eliminate only the bad regulations on Wall Street. These claims are demonstrably false.

But because there is no mechanism in place to punish candidates for lying—a moderator empowered to correct them, say, or a Fourth Estate willing to treat veracity the central measure of an argument’s merit—he got away with it.

4. Obama was not inept; he was just himself.

Within a minute of the debate’s conclusion, the Arbitron zombies on CNN had managed to describe Obama as “listless” and “angry.” He didn’t want to be there. Blah-blah-blah.

But Obama played to type. He’s a ruminative guy who can summon rhetorical grandeur when he has time to prepare a speech. But he lacks the ability, or willingness, to speak with moral force in live settings. His intellect hasn’t been honed into bullet points by a thousand business presentations. He’s not especially articulate, or forceful. He refuses to call someone who is lying to his face a liar.

To put it in literary terms: he’s a lousy narrator. He can’t spontaneously locate heroism or villainy. He’s a text book, not a novel.

5. The voters don’t want a text book this year.

Last time around, the economy was hemorrhaging. (Or at least the press was hemorrhaging about the economy, which may be the same thing.) Obama’s thoughtful reserve was seen as a virtue, especially weighed against the doddering histrionics of John McCain and his soap opera co-star. As a fiscal strategy, the GOP playbook of soaking the rich and deregulating industry was failing before the public’s eyes.

But four years is a long time in a nation as distracted as America. The recovery has been slow. The systematic economic inequalities initiated by Ronald Reagan and enthusiastically supported by every Republican since (aside from Mitt Romney, who is, as of last night, a compassionate conservative, just like George W. Bush) has left most Americans in a state of impatient grievance.

6. Reality is harder to defend than fantasy.

Obama isn’t just running for office. He’s in office. He has to make decisions, not just promises. He has a record. Whatever problems the country has—whether he caused them or not—they officially belong to him. It doesn’t matter that he took over an economy in free fall, or that Republicans have obstructed him at every turn. To the voters just tuning in, Romney only has to make the case that America is still sick, and that he has the right medicine.

So how’s that for irony? Mitt Romney: the hope and change candidate.

7. Obama will lose if he doesn’t step up.

There’s an old saying in poker: lose early, win late. The GOP ticket has mostly lost thus far. They have been mocked and dismissed and excoriated. This makes Romney’s reinvention that much more compelling: it’s an unexpected wrinkle, a comeback story. The media will spend far more time focused on this notion than whether Romney was telling the truth, because these races are, in the end, major products launches for them. A dirty race is desirable, in fact, just so long as it’s close.

But hey, newsflash: this thing is close. And it’s going to get closer.

The President can no longer afford to sit back and let Team Romney trip over its wingtips. He’s going to have to sharpen his rhetoric. He’s going to have to become a more compelling narrator.

Mitt Romney is no dope. He’s got half a billion dollars to make his case, and some of the most despicable ad men in the business.

Obama knows what he’s up against now.

Do you?

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We went downstairs and found a young woman named Lupe, a friend of a friend, who lived just across the border in Juarez. My girlfriend had mentioned some time back that she had some extra clothes, and Lupe stood for a minute or so trying to work up the nerve to ask for them. A little girl, one of Lupe’s four children, peeked out from behind her legs.

Lupe worked at a maquiladora in Juarez, sorting American coupons as I recall, and as a day maid in El Paso. She and her children lived well below the U.S. poverty line.

I’m not trying to ennoble her. I have no real idea whether she was a good person or a bad person, whatever that means. I only know that she was an extremely poor person, with four children, and she was working hard and not making enough to provide for them and so she was here, on the sidewalk, trying not to appear to be begging in front of one of her children.

Then it got worse.

This blob of white liquid landed on her head. Splat. None of us could understand what was happening. For a second, I thought she’d been shot and I was seeing her brain matter. Then I looked up. A pair of fat pigeons was perched above her on the phone wires. We stood there in excruciating silence. The little girl said nothing. Her eyes were dark and unsurprised. She was about the age of my daughter, about six.

There is no moral to this story. It is something that happened in El Paso many years ago, and that I have been unable to forget.

***

I can remember, also, the view from the porch of that apartment, which was of the Rio Grande, and the colonias of Juarez, where families built houses out of cardboard and old tires and collected water in steel barrels and pirated electricity.

At dawn, the day maids like Lupe would wade across the Rio Grande—a river so dirty American children were not allowed near it—with plastic bags on their heads. They would scramble up the concrete embankment to the American side and pull their dry work clothes out of these plastic bags and change into them while also trying to hide their exposed flesh. Sometimes it was cold and they shivered. Sometimes a green INS van would show up and chase them through the low desert scrub.

I could watch all this from my balcony, as I sipped coffee.

***

I remember, also, covering a wildcat strike by the young Mexican men who were bused up to the fields of New Mexico to pick the tasty green chilies we enjoyed eating so much. It was brutal labor. The fumes from the chilies caused their nasal membranes to swell. The pickers were paid by the bucket. I believe they were on strike because they wanted 37 cents per bucket, not 35 cents.

The buses left before dawn, to insure ten hours in the fields. Most of the workers slept in the shadow of the International Bridge, curled like question marks on cardboard mats.

***

I am not speaking here about the character of these people. I am speaking about what little I knew of their material circumstances. I don’t think they regarded their lives with pity or contempt. I think, for the most part, they just lived their lives and did the work necessary to support themselves and their families.

I found this work remarkably arduous and humiliating. But that’s only because I was born into privilege. It’s my hang-up.

***

Most Americans who travel overseas suffer the same hang-up. It’s what Mitt Romney felt when he saw all those young women working at that Chinese factory he once considered buying. There’s a kind of awe in his voice as he describes how hard these women work, for how little money, under circumstances most Americans would consider slave labor.

Romney sees the story as a kind of inspirational morality tale about capitalism: this is how the poor should behave. They should be grateful for any opportunity to better themselves. “This is an amazing land and what we have is unique and fortunately it is so special we are sharing it with the world.”

The real problem with America isn’t that we have too many poor people but that our poor are insufficiently grateful.

***

That, in a nutshell, is Romney’s pitch—not just to the swells eating $50,000 chicken breasts; to all of us.

***

One of the great wonders of the conservative movement is how effectively they’ve constructed this inverted narrative in which the rich are victims, and the poor are perpetrators. They’ve managed to convince tens of millions of decent Americans—many of them poor—to ignore any evidence that contradicts this worldview.

You can jump up and down and scream, ‘Hey, the Americans who don’t pay income tax are dirt poor, or serve in the military, or are aged!’ Or, ‘Listen, the top ten percent of our country controls 75 percent of our wealth, while the bottom half controls 1.1 percent!’ These are factual statements.

But they don’t register.

The reality conservatives cling to resides in their hearts. The poor wind up poor not because they lack access to opportunity—to good education and good jobs—or because they lose their jobs, or get sick, but because they’re parasites. The rich are rich not because they were born that way, not because they’ve rigged the system in their favor, or because they’re ruthless or unethical, but because they’re braver and more noble than the rest of us.

***

More and more, I’m convinced that this mindset is psychologically protective. It’s how citizens in a nation of unprecedented abundance justify our own inaction, our entitlement, our sloth. It’s how we make it okay to eat gourmet meals while other human beings are starving. It’s how we transmute our guilt into rage.

Conservatives take the lead. But most of the rest of us go along. We don’t take to the streets to demand an end to greed in our time. We drive hybrids and complain to each other. This allows us to feel superior without putting much at risk. It’s a cozy arrangement. The Romneys of the world provide cover for our own moral negligence.

***

But still. I have to believe that there must have been some part of Mitt Romney who walked through that factory and saw more than “favorable labor costs,” who looked around and thought: Gosh, these young women are the same age as my sons. What if my sons were born in this country? What if the most they could hope for in life was a slightly larger apartment on the edge of some blighted Chinese landscape?

I have to believe this because Mitt Romney isn’t a robot. He’s a human being. He’s a father.

***

Sometimes, at night, I close my eyes and I’m back on that sidewalk in El Paso. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just there. And there’s Lupe. She’s come to beg for clothes. Her hair is suddenly covered in bird shit, as if the pigeons themselves know the order of things. But they don’t. It’s just dumb luck. It’s mean luck. Lupe is standing there. Her daughter is behind her, looking up. There’s nothing I can do about it. She’s still there. She’s still the same age as my daughter.

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