Inner Tube: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

wanted to please.
    It was in general a time for euphemism, of a withdrawal from fact as from an open grave. There was great outcry over negativism in the news. The populace was battered by candor and innovation and they were tired. They had no interest in narrowing the credibility gap. They did not wish to be notified on the black-bordered cover of a national magazine that God was dead. They didn’t want their dinners spoiled by the nightly recitation of body counts, by images of angry milling dissenters in the street. Be gentle, they begged. Tell about the self-made millionaires, and kids who don’t take drugs.
    Network executives exchanged worried memos, then came out into the open rumbling about professional integrity and the free flow of information, their neatly barbered heads held high. The public’s right to know was sacrosanct and they would defend it to the very last rating point. Few were owning up, but the heart of the matter was the power to decide what was Important. The old milk factory as colonial fort.
    Like the time I was waiting on the corner for the cross-town bus, overheard these two studs from the documentary division:
    “What I said was, ‘You want me to recut the interview to make it sound that way, I can do it, but take my name off the credits.’”
    “Did he freak out?”
    “Nah, just gave me the line about this is bigger than both of us and locked himself in his office.”
    “Running scared.”
    “So who isn’t?”
    The weight of Policy bore down on all and sundry, making their movements wobbly, creasing their foreheads. Instead of “How about lunch?” people would say, “Let’s have a dialogue.” They clustered like blowflies at the edges of the newsroom to discuss detachment and accountability Voices were sometimes choked, sometimes grave. They compared measurements of cultural drift and electorate mood. They gestured with their hands and said things like “Morality cannot be legislated” and “Well, sometimes, guys, we can get a little insular.” Early one morning, not twenty feet from my desk, two reporters interviewed each other for a Sunday think piece.
    On one point wide agreement was reached: that the decade was of pivotal significance—that through turbulence and upheaval we were living a kind of instant history. How quaint that now seems, the earnest belief that all the noise amounted to something more.
    Myself, I took to chalking slogans on the Cronkite blackboard:
    THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE
    FOLLOW PACKAGE DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY AND DO NOT EXCEED THE RECOMMENDED DOSE
    But slogans, you know, are the easiest things. The best I could do was share a little bourbon in paper cups with the uptown women who came to clean the offices at night. In one way or another, we were all fools.

9
    C ONSIDER THE HEDGEHOG, WHOSE stiff, spiny hairs discourage attack. Often, before eating a toad, it chews the amphibian’s poison gland, lathering itself with toxic froth and augmenting its defenses. An efficient mechanism for an efficient mammal nicely placed in its niche.
    Consider the overevolved creature whose most dangerous enemies come from within. Imagine the first useless panic, the first nightmare, the first crushing turn of anomie. Ten thousand generations later, all we can do is palliate. Misery abhors a vacuum and history is a list of sedatives; from animism to humanism to Haldol.
    We choose our own methods for treating grief and fear. Superstitions and pharmaceuticals have their cost, and confession is too cheap. Brutality is circular and flight inevitably leaks. But there is a folk remedy as simple as the hedgehog, something more valuable in the institutional dayroom, the widower’s autumnal parlor, than any drug or counselor’s bromide. It is television.
    I had a friend in New York named Chris Bruno. His father, a hotel man, kept trying to give him large sums and he kept refusing. Not that Chris had an overdrawn sense of his own integrity; only that the entailments of wealth