One of the Candidates
When he raises his hand
like a fifth-grade asskisser, yet proudly,
to the moderator’s “OK, which of you up there
*doesn’t believe in evolution?”; when he fluidly
sidesteps the question, “Can a non-Christian
be an American?” (“Everyone is so *oversensitive
nowadays”); whenever, in fact, he smiles,
at ease and guileless, I grasp something
I hadn’t before, despite everything: they
*believe. It isn’t pretext; they cherish
each a small hard tumor of belief.
Their adulteries, closeted blow-jobs, cross-dressing
and embezzlements, the figure their illogic
cuts in the world, the *fact of the world, only
confirm them in their faith. And, more
significantly, they admire each other
for that faith and its contradictions. We
don’t. Admire ourselves, I mean. The charming
prof who hurriedly wordily mumbles
and flees when he meets one of them, the dogged
signer of emailed petitions, the lifelong
soldier of health or Gaia with her singsong
whine, the hopeless principled
lawyer, the bitter self-shocking writer merely
assume each other, feel no joy
when they meet. How right young conservatives are
to feel they are young, with their thoughtless élan!
Yet putting reason aside, we
might sense we have something in common
with supporters of that Governor: a knot
of faith in the gut, which ought to bind
reality but won’t. If they should ever
surrender to us among ruins,
our guns held easily at our sides,
the pits already dug and the camps built,
an officer-preacher of theirs might sigh
at his doom and, weary of slogans, say
that choices are finally up to God.
We will not greet his words or mood,
however, with satisfaction, hearing only
a fart in the sealed room.
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