GayDay
A Short Story
Concyclopedia
In 2045, an increasingly progressive Congress seemed on the verge of passing the Educational Curriculum Conformity Act, which was billed as a logical extension to the much maligned “No Child Left Behind” act from the equally maligned George Walker Bush administration. As was its predecessor, the ECCA was criticized as another federal power grab at the expense of the local school systems; and so it was. But, like the first program, the real danger lay in the details.
Among the most odious was a series of tests targeted at third and fourth graders concerning sexual and ethnic identification. The whitewashed explanation was that the federal educational consultants wanted to know what segment of a population they identified with as children so they could correlate those numbers with the same information garnered at the end of high school or college. It would also, they explained, better prepare the educational system for the needs of the younger students.
Of course, every single thinking person paying attention saw this for what it was almost immediately—a chance for the Usual Suspects to encourage acceptance of ‘alternative sexual expression’ among small children far too young to decide such questions for themselves. The same could be concluded for the questions on ethnicity, but this giant red flag of the previous decades was now dwarfed in the public imagination by the horrifying notion of young Johnny attending school in a ballerina costume.
Like many other bad ideas, this was considered Dead On Arrival by conservative legislators all over America. But, like many other bad ideas, this bill had support from the teacher’s unions, the media arm of the Progressive party, almost all the traditional media corporations, the American Psychiatric Association and most of the elected representatives of the east coast and the People’s Republic of California.
********************
Doctor Roger Poole was customarily early for his meeting with the White House Chief of Staff. It was a beautiful spring day, all the cherry blossoms were out in force and there was just enough of a breeze to make a brisk walk a perfect recreation.
His appointment was for 11:30 AM and he got there at 11:10 AM. Every visit to the White House involved extra layers of security and ever more tedious levels of protocol, so leaving some time for identification and metal detection was only prudent. Being a United States Senator, he did not begrudge the White House personnel their security routines. He himself was well regarded in his state of Kentucky, but had been the object of several physical attacks over just a single term in office. With every passing year, the public’s distrust and often intense dislike of any federal government employee grew by leaps and bounds. And the unique career of the White House Chief of Staff was a perfect illustration of how things had ended up this way.
Miss Natalie Nu was arguably the smartest, and probably the most powerful, Chief of Staff in White House history. Yet she was the managerial head of an administration more corrupt and out of touch with the American people than any in history, Watergate and Teapot Dome included. It was indeed a mark of her efficiency that President Joseph Hunt Byron had escaped impeachment thus far. But that efficiency was not serving the country as a whole. He should have been polling at around fifteen percent in popular approval, but his Chief of Staff was keeping him afloat by her own clear mastery of the White House agenda. It was, to an observer like Poole, not a healthy agenda, but she was executing it well.
She was just leaving her office when Dr. Poole arrived. When he opened the big walnut door to her immense office, what looked like an entire bus full of various aides were being brushed aside in her wake. Every one of them wanted something from her every moment of the day, so there was no particularly good time to leave. Just as well to just walk out on all of them with as little ceremony as possible.
“I know we have an appointment, Dr. Poole,” Miss Nu said through her usual pleasant smile as she rushed to the door. “But my hairdresser just found a block in her schedule for me.” She was slim and energetic and very pretty too, in the exotic way that only Asian women could affect. He stepped out of the way as she passed.
“Your hairdresser?” Poole asked, mystified, following her out the door.
“She’s very busy,” Miss Nu explained.
“I see.”
“You’re welcome to come along.” She offered.
“Why would I want to visit your hairdresser?” Poole tried not to sound abrupt, but no doubt some pique was showing through his normally polite demeanor.
She turned around abruptly at the White House door. “Because we have an appointment.”
********************
Poole, Roger, MD. Born: Bowling Green, KY, 2005
United States Senator (Kentucky, Libertarian), Medical Doctor
Poole is a conservative who campaigns against Big Government and chronic overspending. He is “pro-family” and is generally regarded as being suspicious of government-mandated health care, like the COVID vaccine. As a physician, he is suspicious of gender-identity issues focusing on young children and was the standard bearer for the opposition against the ECCA (Educational Curriculum Conformity Act) bill in 2045.
********************
Poole followed her down the White House stairs and onto the sidewalk. Against those massive stairs she looked like a child. She wore a simple white knit dress with small colored stones around her neck. She recalled a Beijing Vogue cover; a porcelain doll against a soft background of Virginia aquia sandstone .
“Are you walking to your hairdresser?” Poole wondered.
“Yes. It’s only a block or two. Traffic is terrible today and the parade is just starting.”
“Parade?”
“Don’t you have a calendar on your phone, Doctor?”
“I have an appointment book. That’s why I’m here.”
“It’s GayDay!”
“Gay Day?”
“June First,” Miss Nu explained. “The first day of Gay Pride Month.”
“Oh, please.” He chuckled sourly.
“I take it you’re not a fan.”
“I’m a medical doctor,” Poole explained. “I’m not a fan of gender dysphoria.”
“Just so you know, that term is considered pejorative these days.”
“So is ‘lung cancer’. Nobody wants to hear it. But there it is.”
Miss Nu stopped on the sidewalk.
“Have you heard of an organization called ’S.C.A.’?”
“‘Society for Creative Anachronism’? The people who dress like it’s the Middle Ages?”
“They wear armor and joust on horseback and all that. It all seems like a lot of fun. But, at the end of the afternoon of play, they put their pants back on and go home.”
“So you don’t like my pants?” He looked down past his admittedly ten year old black leather belt.
“I’m suggesting that one can admire the past, and one can even revisit it, but sooner or later it is time to return to the present and deal with what is, not necessarily what we’d like it to be.”
“You’re going to be late for your appointment,” Poole pointed out.
Miss Nu resumed walking.
“You still haven’t told me why you wanted to talk.”
“I wanted to discuss this ECCA bill,”
“Why?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Which parts don’t you like?”
“I don’t like any of it.”
“Why are we discussing it then?”
“I thought we could compromise in some way.”
“You don’t like any of the bill. I like all of it. What’s there to compromise?”
“You can’t pass the bill as it is.”
“You haven’t seen the bill as it is.”
“I just finished reading it last night.”
“We finished a revision on Thursday.”
“You mean I didn’t read the actual bill we’re voting on?”
“Nobody has. Except me. And maybe the Congressman who wrote it.”
“You can’t do that!”
“We just did.”
“That’s illegal!”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Miss Nu said.
But she was a lawyer who’d graduated at the top of her class at Harvard. As a medical doctor, he’d learned to take the word of specialists.
********************
WHO.COM
Nu, Natalie. Born: Boston, MA, 2018
Communications Director, White House, 2043
Chief of Staff, White House, 2045
Nu is an attorney and graduate of Harvard Law School. She is author of several articles in the law review; among them “Death of the Republican Party. Why Daddy Can’t Listen”, a piece that received enthusiastic reviews among the progressives. She is known for her persistent application of modern management principles at the White House, even while actual presidential leadership seems noticeably lacking.
********************
Hairakiri was on 14th Street Northwest, just a couple of minutes from the White House by car. It looked like a hollowed out Washington restaurant with too many mirrors and overly aggressive lighting. There were thirteen workstations and five tables for manicures. Every styling chair and table was filled except one.
All the stylists were Chinese. There was one Korean girl at a manicure table. That was their version of Affirmative Action.
Ella Fitzgerald was singing a Cole Porter song from speakers Poole didn’t see. It sounded too good for the radio.
“When love comes in
And takes you for a spin,
Ooh-la-la-la, c'est magnifique!”
“The bill is going before the House tomorrow,” he resumed as Miss Nu was seated on the high padded chair.
“And they’ll have the completed bill.”
“And it will still be voted down.”
“You mean the old bill would be voted down,” Miss Nu corrected. “Yes. But the new bill contains one hundred and forty billion dollars in infrastructure improvement projects that will be doled out to the states who accept the bill without delay.”
“A hundred forty…”
“You represent one of the poorest states in the country,” Miss Nu explained. “With your signature, your citizens can put two and a half billion in the bank by next weekend.”
“That’s very generous,” Poole said. “But I can already tell you—“
“You won’t sign,” Miss Nu anticipated. “Yes. I know. Six of your friends probably won’t either.”
“Six?”
“Two will probably abstain,” Miss Nu said, squinting as the stylist sprayed water on her forehead. “Just like last time.”
“Last time?”
“‘No Child Left Behind’. The old George Bush bill. It was a gigantic federal power grab just like this one. Yet your party bought it, hook, line and sinker.”
“Before my time,”
“I know you wouldn’t have voted for it. I don’t necessarily think consistency is a virtue, but, if it is, you are a model of it.”
“The other side of the coin being…”
“You’re predictable,” Miss Nu finished his thought, evidently beginning to enjoy the conversation. “Achilles had just one bad heel. You have two.”
“What’s the other one?”
“You style yourself a ‘fighter’,” Miss Nu answered. “And you are. Any time you see something you consider wrong—as defined by your narrow Bible-belt lexicon of evils—you almost instantly attack it. Since so many of those wrongs are endorsed by a great majority of your colleagues, however, this tendency has effectively reduced you to a party of One.”
“The Book of Romans asks: ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’”
Miss Nu looked pained. Obviously, the Bible was not recommended reading among modern Progressives.
“Next time you’re in the Senate chamber, Look around you, Doctor,” Miss Nu advised. “Ask yourself if History hasn’t already answered that question.”
Dr. Poole found a chair next to a coffee table full what appeared to be recent magazines and sat back with a fresh copy of Architectural Digest, comforting himself with the melodies of Cole Porter, as the stylist’s questions about Miss Nu’s hair dominated her attention. Her hair was long, straight, jet black with simple bangs in the traditional Chinese style. You wouldn’t think there was a lot to discuss, but Poole saw that he’d presumed too much. This simple trim, done at the last minute in the middle of an emergency, was the subject of a lengthy conversation. In Chinese, of course.
If he’d wanted to evolve a metaphor from this exchange, he could have likened the incomprehensible conversation with his attempts to understand Miss Nu’s political viewpoint. She was obviously brilliant and well versed in her job. He’d read her papers, listened to her press consultations and heard her defend some of her positions, but her thinking could only be understood in context. You had to be a progressive wing nut, you had to spend your whole life in Washington and you had to be colorblind to the beauty of American tradition.
This was a troubling conversation in several ways. In the Senate, Poole was mostly surrounded by people who had less understanding of government, and much less common sense, than he did. In his former practice as a medical doctor, he was accustomed to being consulted as an authority on many health subjects. Today, however, he had apparently met a worthy adversary. She was younger than him, but could easily reach back forty years to a bill that few even remembered. She had already practically guaranteed her ECCA passing, and she’d clearly drawn the strategic parallels between this bill and the Bush bill.
How this one piece of legislation was worth a hundred and forty billion dollars he didn’t know, but in this era of pure-inflation money, both the White House and the Congress had gotten accustomed to throwing around these impossible numbers, blindly assuming that their great-grandchildren would somehow show up to pay off the loan.
As a doctor who remembered the COVID scare of the twenties, he could only imagine the damage APA support of this new bill could mean. Certainly, follow-up interviews by shrinks to determine why eight year old Johnny insisted on identifying as a boy. That was probably the least of it. During COVID, the psychiatrists had stopped just short of labelling every vaccination-resistant person on the planet a sociopath. Right before that, they stopped using Gender Identity Disorder as a diagnosis, so that all the suicidal men wearing dresses and drowning their sorrows in drugs would stop seeking medical treatment. Truly, the American Psychiatric Association really needed a new theme for their next convention:
‘Physician Heal Thyself’
He found himself overhearing a bit of conversation and laughed to himself. His sister would really like this place, Poole thought. Up until she got to the cash register, at least. Girls still paid thirty bucks for a good haircut in Bowling Green. Miss Nu probably left that as a tip in this place.
Two Chinese stylists sat down on either side of him. They both wore plain white hairstylist dresses, stylishly short and snug. Maybe they were uniforms, maybe the girls were twins and liked to dress alike, but either way they looked like a million dollars in Yuan and smelled like the Emperor’s harem.
“I am Mei,” the girl on his left said, smiling with what seemed like unusually penetrating eyes.
“I am Lei,” the girl in his right said, in a way that seemed almost choreographed. Clearly neither was from anywhere around here, though their diction was fine.
“I’m Roger,” he shook each hand gently. “I’m pleased to meet you both.” He was a real southern gentleman and didn’t mind risking a little gallantry in the face of possible censure from a particularly progressive female.
“We know you, Doctor Poole,”Mei said. “We see you on the television. Miss Nu and the President enjoy discussing you often.”
Poole lifted a brow. “I’m going to assume that not everything you’ve heard about me is complimentary.”
They both laughed discreetly.
“Miss Nu is a smart girl,” Mei said. “But she doesn’t like straight white guys. Especially conservatives from the south.”
“I never said that!” Miss Nu denied from her chair across the room.
“While we are exactly the opposite,” Lei said. “We love heterosexual conservative doctors from Dixie. In fact, it is our plan to produce many babies for handsome conservatives from the south.”
“Don’t listen to these gold-diggers, Doctor,” Miss Nu objected. “They’re hustlers looking for green cards.”
“I am a citizen, you little Trotskyite,” Mei answered back. They were clearly the best of friends.
“Okay, I’m looking for a green card, “Lei admitted. “But I’m buying one from a reputable street vendor like any other honest resident of Washington DC.”
“Your friends are adorable, Miss Nu,” Poole laughed. “Why can’t you be more like them?”
“Because I have a brain larger than a grape,” Miss Nu answered. “And I have the sense not to trust southern conservatives. You all remember what happened with Lindsey Graham.”
Lei and Mei both nodded. “But he was sooo cute,” Mei said.
Miss Nu pointed out: “I’m surprised you haven’t recruited more young Chinese women,” Doctor Poole. They don’t like the President, they don’t like gays, and they don’t much care for American blacks either.”
“I don’t like Gay Parades for the same reason I don’t like Hells Angels conventions,” Poole explained. “People tend to act up. And who says I don’t like blacks?”
“Weren’t you against the Voting Rights Act?” Miss Nu recalled.
“I pointed out a provision in the act that many legislators and jurists other than myself regarded as unconstitutional. Despite the inevitable Progressive spin, It was a states’ rights issue and had nothing to do with race.”
“Pardon our spin,” Miss Nu explained. “It’s just that when people criticize the Voting Rights Act, they inevitably sound like racists.”
“Because what makes you a racist in our modern media is not that you said something biased about race, but that you brought up the subject at all.”
“Excuse me,” Miss Nu insisted. “But if you undermine the foundations of equal rights for people of color, it invariably sounds like you’re undermining the foundations of equal rights for people of color.”
“I love it when southern men talk about the Constitution,” Lei said. “It makes me feel like lying naked on Kentucky Derby Day in a big green hammock with a mint julep in my hand and Scott Joplin on the old gramophone.”
“What a coincidence,” Mei said. “Me too.”
Miss Nu interrupted her stylist. “Will you two shut up and leave the Senator alone?”
“You should come by some time and see my hammock,” Mei smiled at Poole as she walked back to her chair slowly.
Lei whispered in his ear as she left. “It’s my hammock.”
Poole felt a little lonely after seeing them go. A public figure couldn’t afford to respond to every invitation, but that hammock thing did sound interesting.
By the time the hair salon had finished with Miss Nu, GayDay was well underway.
Doctor Poole and Miss Nu watched from the street corner outside the hair salon as the parade passed by. So far, it was pretty colorful.
The drum majorettes were at the head of the strange line. All of them could throw a baton, and, fortunately, most of them had shaved their legs.
The Federation of Gay Guys led out with a fife and drum corps.
“F.A.G.G.?” Poole formed the acronym as he read their banner. “Cute.”
Fortunately, this was not San Francisco (yet) and MetroPol had let them know in advance about the dress code. Namely, that everybody had to wear clothes. The drummers didn’t seem to be wearing much but drums, but Poole had no desire to visually verify that. The fife players wore revolutionary war-style jackets and kilts.
Miss Nu scowled: “Please don’t consider this a license to spread the name around your pool hall in Bugtussle.”
“Doctors in Dixie don’t play pool.”
They actually had an organization of gay restaurant workers. Their very official-looking red banner read:
“Cooks, Waiters & Epicureans Employed in Restaurants.”
“CWEER?” Poole read. “At least some of these guys have a sense of humor.”
Their group was one of the larger assemblies, featuring a float with a small model of a kitchen and people dressed in white chefs hats. They all wore white hats and a lot of them had red numbers. There were at least a few branches evidently. Doctor Poole had never thought much about it, but there were a lot of gays in the restaurant industry. Their group took up a large part of a block.
Naturally, some of them just had to push the envelope. The “Gay American Army” wore camouflage tops but practically nothing on the bottom. They carried water pistols and cans of whipped cream. Poole wasn’t familiar enough with the culture to guess the theme, but as an army these pink-haired college cupcakes inspired little confidence.
He was evidently leaving in the nick of time. The next group to present itself was called “DIKES”, “Dames Into Kinky and Excessive Sex”. To say they were a motley looking crew was like saying Normandy Beach was a bad place to vacation in 1944. Very few of them looked like what Poole would recognize as a Dame, but the rest of the description was probably accurate.
“I think I’ve probably seen all I want to see of this,” Poole said.
“Time for lunch anyway.” Miss Nu decided.
“I’ll walk you back.”
“My favorite lunch place is almost across the street.”
“I’ve already taken up the half hour you pencilled in for me.”
“That was business.” She led the way down H Street. “This is lunch.”
The Coke and Brie was an upscale coffee shop converted into a big moderately priced restaurant (by Washington standards) with a big brick patio, huge horseshoe bar and a balcony. It seated seven hundred and fifty patrons, featured a flame-broiled burger for five bucks and actually manufactured its own brand of cola.
The place was full, but a passing bartender instantly dropped what he was doing to clear a recently evacuated table for two.
“Rank Hath Its Privileges”, Poole thought.
“I should go to lunch with you more often,” Poole said.
“Kyle just arrived from Milwaukee a month ago,” Miss Nu explained. “He wouldn’t know me from Eve if I weren’t an investor in this restaurant and happened to be here when he was hired.”
Two waiters in white and black brought tall glasses of cola and a plate of crackers with soft cheese.
“I’ll have the special,” Miss Nu told the waiter with the cola. “Please give my friend the house burger.”
She pushed open a soda straw from its wrapper and sipped the soda. “I know you’re not much of a drinker, Doctor. So I thought you’d enjoy the house cola.”
Poole’s eyes went wide at the first sip.
“I’ve honestly never tasted anything like that.” he exclaimed, feeling like he’d just woken up from a long nap.
“Everybody says that,” Miss Nu smiled.
“What is it?”
“I shouldn’t be telling house secrets. But it’s the original Coca-Cola recipe from the late eighteen hundreds.”
“That would be difficult to get,” Poole pointed out. “The original recipe actually contained a small amount of cocaine.”
“Yes,” Miss Nu smiled, taking another discreet gulp. “And this is an exact replica.”
Poole stopped sipping. “Cocaine is illegal.”
“In the United States,” Miss Nu said.
“We’re in the United States, last time I looked.”
“No you’re not. You’re in the District of Columbia.”
“Don’t the drug laws apply?”
“Only if the Congress specifies.”
“When Congress passes a law, doesn’t it automatically apply to the District of Columbia?”
“No.”
“Well that’s news to me.”
“It’s news to all of you.” Miss Nu said.
“I know you went to Harvard Law School—“
“I didn’t learn this from Harvard,” Miss Nu said. “I learned it from the Jesuits at Georgetown. They were there when the district was created, even before President Washington’s Freemason friends showed up to create the city plan.”
“Somehow, when you hear ‘Jesuits’ and ‘Freemasons’ in one sentence, the story never turns out well.” Poole pointed out, filing these tidbits away in a corner of his mind for further study.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Miss Nu said. “But I won’t dump on the poor Jesuits today. After all they’ve done for the gay movement.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Proportionally, there are more gays in the Jesuits than in Provincetown or San Francisco. For the last thirty years, Jesuits have been big into LGBTQ outreach.”
“Really.” Poole considered. “Doesn’t the Pope have something to say about all this?”
“Not Ex Cathedra,” Miss Nu explained. “It’s LGBTQ on the QT, as it were.”
Poole sat back admiringly. “They seemed such a stoic bunch back in the day.”
“They come to this restaurant all the time,” she said. “One of them dresses like a nun sometimes.”
“I guess I don’t get around much,” Poole admitted.
“But I digress,” She sipped her cola. “Speaking of straws… We were talking about cocaine.”
“Yeah. Cocaine is really hard to get even for hospitals,” Poole said. “Even if they let you put it in cola, where would you buy it?”
“Thanks to the labors of the Coca-Cola lobbyists back in the day, there is one company in America that is allowed to import coca leaves.”
“But don’t they have to take the cocaine out of the leaves?”
“Yes. Every year they’re left with a quarter billion dollars worth of cocaine.” Miss Nu smiled.. “Which, of course, they promptly incinerate!”
They both laughed
“As a doctor, you are aware that cocaine’s euphoric effects last only fifteen minutes to a half hour,” she said. “Considering the small amount of cocaine involved in this cola, and the lack of troubling statistics collected when Coca-Cola was originally released, you could argue that this crowd is much safer drinking this cola than having a beer or mixed drink at the bar.”
“You could argue that,” Poole agreed. “But you could not argue that, given a daily supply of beer and cocaine, the beer drinkers would be worse off after a month of use.”
“You style yourself a Libertarian?”
“More or less,” Poole said.
“Pick your poison, Doc,” she concluded, hoisting her glass.
He held up his in affirmation.
The waiter arrived with two plates. Poole took the burger. A real burger for under five bucks could not be ignored, and this one telegraphed its presence all the way from the kitchen. He was already biting into it before it reached the table.
“This is what I never understood about you Bible-belt types,” Miss Nu admitted. “You have spent the last two hundred years keeping people away from pleasant pastimes they really seem to enjoy. Yet, when we have an opinion about vaccination, suddenly we’re the ‘Nanny State’.”
“As a legislator, if I could rescind every law concerning recreational drug use and prostitution, I’d do it in a heartbeat. As a doctor, however, I’m concerned that not everyone can exercise informed consent in these areas.”
Poole noted that the burger was superior, and the cola did nothing to suppress the appetite. So much for his medical school lecture on stimulant abuse.
“As an amateur student of history,” Miss Nu said. “I can tell you that a clinical definition of ‘informed consent’ cannot be achieved by a majority of the population alive today regarding almost any subject found in a book of science, medicine or technology.”
“And that’s where the ‘Nanny State’ comes in.”
“Exactly,” Miss Nu admitted. “We are both Libertarians at heart—probably for different reasons. I am a self-centered person who really doesn’t care what anyone else does as long as their conduct doesn’t negatively affect me. You are one of those throwbacks to the Lincoln era that believes in some impossibly huge principle like your ‘duty to your fellow man’.”
“I don’t know that I’m so rare.”
“You’re a Polaroid picture in the rear view mirror, Doctor Poole.” It was a harsh thing to say, but Miss Nu delivered it with a wistful smile. “Talking to you is like a visit to Sturbridge Village. A while ago, I promised your Chinese fan club back at the salon I’d be bringing you in one day so they could see what America used to look like before the invention of steam power.”
“This seems a popular theme among you one-worlders,” Poole pointed out. “If adherence to tradition is such a horrible vice, why is your only response derision? If it’s such a serious malady, why not develop a vaccine? After all, no sense engaging in a public debate when a mindless panic will do just as well.”
Miss Nu sat back in her chair. “I understand that, to you, being perceived as an anachronism is a badge of honor.”
“Perhaps that would be overstating it a bit.”
“It’s the thesis of your political party,” Miss Nu said. “The older the better. You started your political career as part of a movement to return to the 1950’s. Now, you seem to be trying to make everyone forget the twentieth century ever happened.”
“If you’re talking about World War Two, the Federal Reserve, Gay Rights, Hate Speech, Bill Clinton and the Patriot Act, yeah, sure. Who needed the twentieth century?”
“Growth is not necessarily always pleasant.”
“Marriage is down. Divorce is up. School attendance is down, urban crime is up. Trust in government is way down. Government spending is way up. Which part of this picture looks like ‘Growth’?”
“Yes. Ozzie and Harriet are dead, and everybody’s finally received Thomas Jefferson’s warning about giving their Congressmen a checkbook. The question is: Are we ready to give up indoor plumbing and the airplane because human evolution is sometimes messy?”
“Nothing that’s happened in the last hundred years looks like ‘evolution’ to me—except maybe the polio vaccine and the four minute mile. And both of those happened in the fifties.”
“Not to get personal, Doctor Poole, but this sounds personal.”
“If you lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky, like I do, you’d hear the same thing every day of your life.”
“You should travel more.”
“Tell that to my dad,” Poole smiled. “He thinks I’m becoming too cosmopolitan.”
Miss Nu giggled at the thought. And he started to realize just how much of a dinosaur he seemed to her.
The young man who was tending bar walked by their table. She wagged a finger and he pulled up a chair.
“This is Jason, everybody’s favorite bartender,” she said to Poole. “He’s presently attending George Washington University.”
“What are you studying, Jason?” Poole wondered.
“I’m studying how to be rich.”
“In any particular field?”
“In this field. The restaurant business. I’m going to own eight of these bars in ten years.”
“What are you going to do with eight bars?”
“I’m going to hire eight guys like me, put them in charge of one and then move to Santa Monica.”
“Why Santa Monica?”
“Very high concentration of student debt among women under thirty.”
“So?”
“So, they’ll legalize prostitution in the next five years.”
“I’m not following you.”
“What would be the quickest way a college girl could dig her way out of debt?”
Poole winced a little. “You’re going to be a pimp?”
“I’m going to be the biggest pimp in the United States! And I’ll add a few hotels to the bars.”
“Why stop there? I hear cocaine will be legal in California by then.”
“I’m way ahead of you. I’ve got a few friends in Columbia who can drop me off a pound off every few days.”
“Poole laughed out loud. “You’re serious, right?”
“Well, maybe eleven ounces. But once it’s legal, I can buy a bleepin’ pharmacy.”
“The ultimate Epicurean fantasy.”
“Eper—what?”
“Epicurus. The Greek philosopher.”
“Sorry. I’ve never been to doctor school.”
“Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re going to make so much money tending bar that you’ll own eight giant restaurants in ten years. You’ll buy a hotel and fill it with young prostitutes, cocaine and probably every other available pharmaceutical, and your clients will pay you thousands of dollars a day. In the meantime, what are you going to be doing?”
“I’ll own a quarter mile of beachfront property in Santa Monica.”
“And what will you do with it?”
“You already heard me tell you the part about owning two hundred college girls and pounds of cocaine, right?”
Poole clapped his hands in awe. “What does your dad have to say about your plan? Is he in the restaurant business too?”
“My dad’s an attorney for Monsanto.”
“Hence, your very nuanced corporate ethics.” Poole thought.
“Thank you, Jason, “Miss Nu said. The young man smiled his best high school yearbook smile. Any day he was asked to give his elevator pitch to a pair of wealthy potential investors was a very good day.
“Always my pleasure,” Jason said, and meant it.
“Charming,” Poole said sourly.
“You wouldn’t have understood what I was trying to say until I introduced you,” Miss Nu said.
“You’re going to warn me that we’ve doomed an entire generation to lives of vapid hedonism and egocentric depravity?”
“I thought you might want to know.”
“You’re right. I don’t get out enough.”
“It’s likely that somebody in your party will suggest a run for national office. If that ever happens, you’re going to have to adjust your perceptions of your target audience.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll become a more effective communicator if I can learn to speak to people like Jason?”
“No.” Miss Nu said.
“You mean there’s no chance I can learn to talk to any audience outside of Kentucky?”
“You only absorbed half the lesson of Jason.”
“There’s more?”
“A doctor with a classical education in arts and science can afford to laugh at Jason’s lack of depth and his complete disinterest in the Greek philosophers, but there’s one more thing you should know. If he comes to me with a proposal in a year, I’ll give him the money for a new restaurant. He’s got his eye on the prize and doesn’t need to quote Plato to pull the customers in the door. He’s going to be the new face of the Fortune 500, whether we like it or not.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Honestly, I’m not thrilled with the idea either, but on the other hand there’s plenty of time for Aristotle after you’ve bought your hotel full of college girls and coke.”
“If you’re still alive by then.”
“There’s always that. But the good news about people like Jason is that he has no political ideology—at least not one he can identify. Out of all the voting blocks we can identify in this part of the country, he would be the most persuadable.”
“A daunting premise,” Poole considered.
“Now, just think how completely unprepared you’d be during this theoretical moment. When an issue like this ECCA hits the media you’re going to talk about all the ways it undermines the American family.”
“Of course.”
“You’ve just had a brief conversation with a twenty two year old bartender whose life goal is to pimp college girls and sell legal cocaine from a barstool at luxury hotels. Is it really wise to begin your pitch with how my party’s legislation undermines the American family?”
“I yield your point. In the unlikely event I run for national office, I think I’ll rely on media consultants like yourself to tailor my message for the hedonistic restauranteur vote,” Poole agreed. “Maybe I won’t have to say anything at all. Since, whether you have your votes sewn up or not, your support for this ridiculous legislation will be handing my side a giant propaganda victory which speaks for itself. Because this bill attacks not one, not two, but six fundamental American values. Not only does it take control of your child’s education away from his mother and father, it attacks his sexual identity before puberty, before he’s even aware there’s a question. It assumes, based on no data whatsoever, that a faceless bureaucrat in Washington knows better than you what your child should learn, and what he should think. It gives a bunch of government head-shrinkers the right to invade your child’s privacy while imposing the cost of federal regulation and data gathering on the local population, even as it denies the citizenry any benefit from the supposed research. “
“Don’t hold back, Doctor Poole,” Miss Nu said, looking up at him as he scowled across the table. “Tell us what you really think.”
“I have not begun to enumerate the hateful and totalitarian elements of this ill-conceived legislation. First of all it’s unconstitutional to the core.”
‘I’m a lawyer.”
“By definition, an enemy of the constitution.” He folded his arms on the table.
“I could resent that.”
“But you won’t because you know that the reason you became a lawyer is to make the law work for you and your clients. Not so you could simply follow it blindly like the rest of the huddled masses.”
“Well, you could say the same thing about medical doctors.”
“Of course you could,” Poole agreed. “The difference being is that doctors have to obey the rules of biology whether they like them or not. Lawyers can chose to ignore entire amendments, up to half the bill of rights, if they happen to be sharing a courtroom with a judge that shares their collectivist ideology.”
“Collectivist?”
“Historically, the Gay Agenda is associated with the Socialist Left. Understandably so, since Socialism is founded on the assumption that the nuclear family is insufficient as protection for the citizenry and that laws based on a free market are inherently discriminatory.”
Miss Nu folded her arms on her side of the table. “That is a gigantic piece of generalization.”
“Politics is a long, winding series of generalizations that, when handled properly, can lead to truth. Thus, I will ask your forgiveness in advance when I label you and your colleagues in the press as flaming Socialists. A charge you will hear repeated every day on the news till you come to the table and we start to dissect the true motives behind this ECCA.”
“I forgive you,” she said with some grudging admiration. He was indeed a creature of another time; not necessarily to be emulated but at least admired. “If only because I am going to call you far worse. You have always been a Civil War artifact who represented sections of the electorate that often deserved to be forgotten. But you can’t really think you can form a real alliance with antiquarians who don’t even believe gays should vote.”
“Your characterization not mine,” Poole said. “I don’t particularly care if they vote or not. I do care if they vote as queers, just like I care if straight people vote as straight. What difference should it make? And, if it does make a difference, are straights wrong to wonder why and how? If I’m afraid of your constituents as a voting faction, isn’t it because you told me to be?”
“You’re admitting that your campaign against the ECCA will be based on fear and xenophobia!” She drained the last of her coke and slid the glass aside.
“All I’m asking for is for you third world progressive types to give us regular Americans a break,” Poole asked. “We’ve already let the Sodomites into our televisions and movies, now into our elections. All we’re asking is to keep them out of our educational system.”
“What are we supposed to do with these kids?”
“The kids should all come to school,” Poole said. “But they should leave their hobbies at home.”
“Being trans isn’t a hobby.” Miss Nu slid her chair forward and her voice pitched up a bit.
“Listen, this goes for teachers too. If you like to dress up as Wonder Woman or invite the new neighbors over for an ayahuasca party, that’s okay with me. I just don’t think the classroom is an appropriate place for displaying all our idiosyncrasies.”
“You sound like Herbert Hoover.”
Poole leaned in. “I like Herbert Hoover.”
“You’re like a politician frozen in ice in the nineteen forties. Like Captain America. Only not as tall.”
“He’s not as conservative in his dress as I would like. But I could get along with Captain America. ”
“So, our course is clear. I’m going to hammer you in the press as an out-of-touch southern Bible Belt redneck who’s still fighting the Civil War.”
“I can accept that,” Poole nodded. “While I will castigate you and your friends as Sodomite Commies with marching orders from the cupcake aristocrats in the EU and the propaganda head-shrinkers in Beijing.”
“If you must employ quasi-historical parallels in your insulting terminology, can’t you try something from outside the Bible Belt for once? ‘Sodomite’ sounds so judgmental.”
Poole pushed his shoulders up by his elbows. “It’s supposed to be judgmental! The whole city of Sodom was burned to the ground by fire from Heaven! How judgmental is that?”
Miss Nu stared. “Why can’t we be ‘Phrygian’ Commies? Phrygia had a lot of Gays in the cult of Cybele. How about ‘Florentine’ Commies? Florence was a homosexual hotspot back in the day.”
“On second thought, maybe Communist Sodomites would be more descriptive. No point in painting Free-Market Sodomites with the same brush.”
“So you’d prefer ‘Xenophobic Redneck’ over ‘Rednecked Xenophobe’?”
“I think so. My red neck is a more easily identifiable marker. And ‘xenophobia’ is technically a fear of foreigners. I can live with people from Thailand or Germany, no problem. It’s nuts from Washington and California I have issues with.”
“You’re going to lose this vote by eighty votes, minimum, in the Senate. Don’t you think you’ll be showing yourself an ineffective legislator?”
“If I vote in the Senate against horrible legislation whose only purpose is to pander to minority groups, I suppose I’m showing myself to be a Senator who doesn’t like horrible, pandering legislation.”
“You’ll be one of six states that don’t get their cut of the federal dollars I promised. Don’t you think somebody in one of those states is going to wonder why they couldn’t get one of those high-paying construction jobs?”
“Maybe. If they were from San Francisco, they’d rather slip on a tutu and line up for your blood money than keep their masculinity and work at McDonalds. But it looks like most of them care about their families enough to keep them away from you and the White House feminization corps.”
“Really? Your hillbilly lifestyle is so important to you that you’d start a culture war over some imagined attempt to make your boys wear dresses?”
“Tell you what. Keep your psychiatrists out of our schools and I’ll show you how quick a Kentucky boy will take your inflation money.”
“But that’s the whole point of the bill!”
“Now you’re talking truth! All that talk of ‘Uniform Educational Standards’ is all fluff. George Bush did all that, and made a flaming mess of it, forty years ago. All the Twinkies in Georgetown care about is getting the Gender Gestapo into the classroom so the eight year old boys have to defend their right to be boys.”
Miss Nu chided herself for her unintended honesty. But it had probably been obvious to him the moment he saw the bill.
“I suppose there’s no convincing you.”
“But you knew that before you invited me here. Why’d you waste your whole lunch hour on me?”
She stood and picked up her purse.
“I like you.”
Poole smiled and stood as well. “Feelin’s mutual, Ma’am.”
She tucked in her chair. “Shall we reconvene—let’s say, next Thursday around one-ish?”
“I’ll be there.” He ate the last cracker from the cheese plate.
She turned to the front window and her white dress almost sparkled in the afternoon light. “You must agree not to be offended at what I say about you in the Washington Post tomorrow.”
“Whatever it is, it will be a minor offense compared to what I say about you in the National Review on Tuesday.”
She walked past him as he held the door to the street. “You going to use that ‘Sodomite Commie’ line?”
“You have to admit, it has a ring to it.”
“It’s so…Joe McCarthy.”
“Seemed to work for him.”
The two walked down the sidewalk back to the White House and talked about the beautiful weather, the gorgeous cherry blossoms, the soft breeze and celebrated the sharing of the best-kept secret in Washington DC: That friends could disagree—often passionately—and still be friends; that everybody in this town could lie and steal and cheat all day, and life yet persisted in being uncompromisingly beautiful.