Schuyler/Vidal on the Way It Was

I admit that our Presidents have very little to do. The Congress governs--and does most of the stealing.

The horsecar swayed and rattled down Fifth Avenue. At the car's center a small potbellied stove gave off insufficient heat, and mephitic fumes. On the floor was straw as Insulation. My fellow passengers were mostly men, mostly bearded, mostly potbellied like the stove. In fact, saving the desperate poor, everyone in New York is overweight: it seems to be the style.

Americans have always lived entirely in the present, and this generation is no different from mine except that now there is more of a past for them to ignore.

It is especially pitiable to watch the eyes of the ladies grow round with greed as pheasants and lobsters, sorbets and desserts, are presented to them. Even those who do not betray their appetite by staring, who continue to talk with animation of other subjects, give themselves away when, without warning, a polite and cultivated syllable will suddenly drown in an excess of saliva. Yet it is a reckless woman who dares take more than a small slice of some favorite dish, for should she eat as much as she likes, she will simply faint dead away, as the corsets they wear this season are of tightest whalebone.

By the time the orchestra was silent, the presidential party was seated and a bishop was on his feet, speaking at awful length, as bishops will. This holy man favoured peace, commerce and God, in that order.

The party is now assembling that platform on which the eventual nominee must stand or run or fall or whatever. The issue that most grips me is monogamy for Utah. Many otherwise quite sane politicians become livid at the mention of the Mormons, a curious sect recently invented by a "prophet" and confined for the most part to the Utah desert, where Mormon women live in harems and breed incontinently. They sound very nice to me, if overly energetic.

All summer long the country has been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention incessant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago.

Mark Twain takes very seriously what the press says about him. Obviously, this is the price one must pay for his kind of popularity; yet there is not a popular newspaper in the United States which an intelligent man need take seriously on any subject.

The section of lawn separated from the White House by this new extension of Pennsylvania Avenue is now known as Lafayette Park, at whose center stands not a statue of Lafayette--that would be too logical--but one of Andrew Jackson astride his horse. I was pleased to see that the Capitol is at last finished.

I have always found it strange that a nation whose prosperity is based entirely upon cheap immigrant labour should be so unrelentingly xenophobic.

The last eight weeks of a presidential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point of view of learning who stole what from whom.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.