The Eye You See With by Robert Stone

Author:Robert Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

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Off the convention floor there were a few swell parties. One was thrown at the Fairmont Hotel by the National Rifle Association, a luncheon with free booze. From the very beginning of the convention, a certain coldness had been in evidence between the working press and the convening Republicans. At the NRA party, this mutual lack of appreciation occasionally threatened to bear fruit. The electronic media had stashed their equipment in the center of the hired ballroom, and the resultant mountain of hardware served as a rallying point for the reporters. From within the laager, a newsman might proceed in reasonable safety to the bar and then, fortified, venture forth in search of a survivalist troglodyte who might be baited into grunting threats and imprecations against decent folk.

In fact there were no camouflage suits to be seen at the NRA’s party, the celebrants being, on the whole, better dressed than the press. But though the scene was mainly good-natured, there were volcanic domes of anger over which the crust sat lightly. Among the angriest were the several divines the NRA seemed to have assembled. There was a priest of the old school with a face that would have looked a lot more appetizing on a plate with parsley and horseradish than it did on the front of his head. There was an intense young man in a yarmulke who seemed ready to cast the first stone. I asked the priest if he was a member of the association, a question that reduced him to inchoate rage. He eyed my press pass as if it were a turd or a squirting boutonniere. He was not a member. Before long he was at the podium telling jokes, and I got the feeling that he and I went back a long way together and it was time to go.

The religious dimension was not overlooked in New Orleans. On Tuesday morning, Jerry Falwell spoke to a student symposium on the Tulane campus on the subject of the Moral Majority. Falwell was dapper, brisk, and genial. He allowed that the folly of the Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggart had “hurt the cause of Christ.” He said he found the fall of the Bakkers unremarkable; he had been detecting a materialist element in their theology for a long time. In response to a question, he hinted, as he has several times lately, that he was about to undertake a program of civil disobedience. He compared Roe v. Wade with the Dred Scott decision. He sounded less like the leader of any “majority” than like the organizer of a major pressure group setting out to make trouble for the misguided.

Generally the convention was short on conflict. One of its minor dramas was the public fall of Falwell’s fellow preacher Pat Robertson. Robertson’s camp had harbored the only organized disgruntlement left alive by convention time. Over the course of the year his delegates in states such as Michigan and Georgia managed to threaten the seamless fabric of Republican good fellowship.

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