Well, one thing that's for sure, the statue of Peggy Noonan will be repaired. Peggy Noonan what? Yes, her, the famous Wall Street Journal columnist. She's going to appear in Chapter whatever, we lost count, in Chapter 33 ("The Doorbell Rings"), where John and Alex will make a pivotal walk along the beach; Alex will talk about his depression, for the first time, and they are going to have sex, in the dunes, yet again, but before we arrive at the beach we actually have to get there:
We've arrived at the head of Beach Avenue, which ends right on the beach. There are no free parking spaces left, despite the early hour. We circle around the gigantic statue of Peggy Noonan, the famous columnist, a gift of the Republican Club to its hometown, and find a space right in front of the Tourist Office hundred yards up the road. I explain about Maurice, the exchange with Torquay, his ambitions as a playwright. "How long is it," he [Alex] says, "that we met, three days?" I have to count. We walk back to the beach, past the Noonan statue, which, in its better days, had an endless voice loop about George DoubleYou, him of the Freedom Fries, taken from one of her famous columns, educating tourists and natives about the 43rd president (“Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man”), but some mechanical failure had silenced the sculpture quite some time ago, and the repair work had been delayed for unclear reasons.
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| Peggy Noonan statue in Georgia Beach |
We’ve rounded the corner of Nick’s restaurant and are heading south on the beach. A long stretch of crystal-white sand extends past Dewey Beach and runs for more than five miles along the outer banks to the northern mouth of Simons River. It’s surely one of the finest beaches of the East Coast. The sea breeze is picking up already—the land of Georgia heating up, the warming air rising, cooler air hastening in from the sea in replacement. We're walking past the gay beach section, which is still empty. This is where we met, in the no-man's land between the beach and the dunes of the cruising area. I want to say something about the dunes, then think better of it. He, too, casts a furtive glance at the location of our first encounter.
So the statue will be repaired, and the voice loop will be replaced by a new one, this one from the famous column of the famous columnist dated, what, dated 5 November 2012, the day before the American presidential elections, in which she contests the absurd idea that Obama could win the elections, and writes, inter alia:
Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us. [...] A few weeks ago I saw the president and the governor at the Al Smith dinner, and both were beautiful specimens in their white ties and tails, and both worked the dais. But sitting there listening to the jokes and speeches, the archbishop of New York sitting between them, Obama looked like a young challenger—flinty, not so comfortable. He was distracted, and his smiles seemed forced. He looked like a man who’d just seen some bad internal polling.
Romney's crowd sizes are pretty big. Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio.
And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.
Trust the washed-up scriptwriter, he'll find a fitting quote from Noonan's column for the statue's reactivated voice loop, he may even use the entire text, since there's something else: we'll make the statue turn, rotate, on its vertical axis, just like the fabled golden larger-than-life likeness of President Brftzerk, the beloved Father Of Kasachstan, and we'll make sure that the voice loop stays in sync with the rotation, so that she'll speak the same words to the same segments of the wind rose, always, and when she is facing Nick's restaurant, she'll possibly be pronouncing: And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones.
Hold it, Michael, we hear you say. The Fest is in mid-July, and the column is from November. There's a continuity problem. Don't worry, we'll ask Jack Horn to activate his nuclear time machine, travel to November and bring the Noonan piece back (Chapter 44, "A surgical strike into semantic space"):
"I'd thought you just reach into your..." I point at the reality around us, "...into your reserves and produce the required amount of visual technology
"Yeah," he says, "with your familiarity of my reserves, why don't you try yourself." He gestures at a heap of intertwined cables clinging to some defunct electronic equipment, the heap at least two feet high, a catcam or two could easily idle inside. But then he reaches for his remote control, flips another screen to life, and a close-up of the barn’s interior drifts across the screen. He flips a third screen, and a different perspective of the same clutter appears. He points in the air. "All catcams are all in use. Think of lavatories on an airplane.”
“You really need this?”
“On orders from Homeland Security. It's an electronic bracelet. I'm on parole since I built a nuclear time machine."
"They believe in time machines?"
"They believe in everything, just to cover their ass."
What else? Well, you know us. We'll have vampires, and some sort of pageant, and an election of Miss (or King) Vampire, since it'll be the Georgia Beach Fest, the third week in July, always themed, and this year the fun will coincide with the most dire prophesies (From Chapter, wait, we lost count again, Chapter 32 ("The humble worm C. Elegans)):
I'm on the Coastal Highway again, driving home without Alex. Some new billboards have gone up, or changed their tune—right, next week is Georgia Beach Week, the so-so attempt of the local business community to replicate Woodstock, or Burning Man, in order to put our town on the map by means of a local festival. It’s always themed, the Week of Festive Profits, and this year it’s, right, it’s vampires. I forgot. So men and women with extreme fangs have replaced the dental paste bill-board-wise, the undead appearing right next to the fresh, ever-reborn face of the mayor. I'm behind as usual, I haven't even seen the latest installment of the Twilight saga. I'll have to ask Luke about this and fetch some food anyhow since I want my father to die exactly at the right moment, i.e., not now.
[John enters Luke's Convenience Store, talks to Luke]
“The Week is coming up, with vampires. Your work?”
“I’m a tiny cogwheel in the larger machinery of meaning,” he replies, “I’m not even a member of the Country Club, but yes, sure, the Mayor asks for ideas, I answer his call. Alerted them to a fortuitous coincidence. You’ve heard of the End-of-the-World?”
“Who hasn’t.”
“No, I mean next week.”
“Really?”
“Last time was in May last year, right?”
“But that didn’t go through.”
“A regrettable error in the calculations.”
“They should have hired Alex,” I say somewhat self-centeredly, Luke doesn’t even know him.
“Well, they hired Babette Bienpensant.”
“Never heard of.”
“She’s some professor at the Metaphysical University, and she predicts the End for next week.”
“Cool.”
“Cool, isn’t it. Vampires and Rapture, dovetails neatly.”
“You’re more on the vampire end, I guess.”
“No, no, I’m broad-minded, have a look.” He points across the main aisle at a row of life-sized sex toys, inflatable puppets, blown-up already, the vulvas invitingly opened for business.
“So?” I say.
“I’ll have them fitted with a timer and dressed in neighborhood wear, you know, the clothes that people typically wear when they get raptured. And then, poom, I don’t know yet when exactly, Professor Bienpensant hasn’t finished her calculations yet, poom, the timer goes off, they disinflate, pooff. They look almost real, you know, empty clothes, neatly aligned on the couch, the empty puppet inside practically invisible. Neat, isn’t it?”
“Cool,” I repeat myself. “You think they sell?”
“I know what you think,” he says, “but people are not stupid. They are useful, these toys, they are re-inflatable. Rapture fun is a nice pretext to purchase one. The wife cannot complain.”
And you know what? Babette is the sister of our house artist(e), the famous wielder of Photoshop filters, Bob Bienpensant.
(We started this post because we had a clip nicely dovetailing with the election drama, namely Hitler losing the election in unadulterated Romney fashion (one of these HitlerRant parodies), but copyright trouble interfered in the meantime and Youtube felt obliged to cancel the clip. Sorry.)
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