Ask How You Can Help America

By Crispin Sartwell

"What can I do this week to destroy Kerry?" I asked my wife this morning, the thoughtful look of a future MacArthur fellow creasing my brow.

"Why is that the question?" she replied (she's a Democrat). "Why not ask how you can help America?"

Sometimes it takes the directness and innocence of a simpleton to point the way to the deepest truths.

For shame, I thought to myself. I have used my miraculous gift of communication to tear America down, when I could use it to inspire and persuade, to make things better and better until we live in a utopia that stretches ecstatically from Crawford to Kennebunkport, from the city of Duck to the city of Compton.

And yet the childlike words of a simple soul - "how can you help America?" - led me into real confusion.

If I were going to help America, America would have to be the sort of thing that could be helped, and I'd have to have some ideas about what would make America better. Sadly, neither of these circumstances obtains.

But perhaps more significantly, I'd have to know how to persuade Americans to do things. Too bad I don't have some anthrax or hexogene at my disposal. No problem is so severe that it can't be solved by violence.

But all I have is the pure artistic power of my prose: that supple, waif-like thing, that dancer in the ballet of intellect.

To be honest, I've always been a belaborer of the rhetorical bludgeon. My persuasive strategy is to insult the reader and ridicule anyone who disagrees with me as a vicious fool and a liar. In this approach, you go right upside the reader's head, hoping to stun her into compliance and, failing that, to render her unconscious. If that doesn't work, you go back and get a bigger club.

And yet, this destructive impulse is precisely what I am now trying to transcend.

Perhaps it is better to engage the reader in rational debate, to apply the tools of logic and social science to create a reasoned consensus about the problems that confront us, to approach the reader in a posture of respect, as a rational creature who will yield to the better argument.

Hahahaha! Only joshing.

Then I started to reflect: what actually gets me to do things? What makes me pick up my socks or stop after eleven beers? And then it struck me, like lightning strikes a golfer, electrocuting him with the truth.

The mother of my children had the real secret all along.

America, let me ask you a question. Do you have any idea how hard I work around here? Are you even aware of all the things I do for you, America? Who drives you to the movies? Who washes your underwear? Who tucks you in at night and reads you a story? Me, that's who.

And this is the thanks I get? P Diddy? The Houston Metroplex? The Windows operating system? Maxim? PBS? The Los Angeles Lakers? Bush vs Kerry?

Really. I don't want much. I just want you to try. Actually, an apology would be nice. Or the occasional "thank you."

Is that so much to ask?

Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "Six Names of Beauty" (Routledge, 2004).