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------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- His size made Zach Hoover a target that was hard to miss. He was frequently home sick, and once the joke went around that he'd been cooked and eaten by the football team. He was regularly called blubber butt, fat ass, and the great white whale, but his real name was worse. 'The Hoover sucks' was written on the walls of the boy's lavatory. Junior high was a long ordeal for Zach. ------- He knew it wasn't his fault. He tried to be sociable, but no normal child needs a pimply three hundred pounder for a friend. His intelligence earned him little respect even from his teachers, who found his presence a disruption and an embarrassment. ------- Zach's despairing mother just let him eat. He often sat up late into the night, munching potato chips and reading. ------- Reading was Zach's life. At Boone County Consolidated Library the circulation librarian would frown when he approached her desk with a dozen books, no more than three on any subject as required. ------- "You can't read all those in two weeks, sonny," she'd say. Zach would just look at the floor until the woman sniffed and began to stamp the slips -- whomp, whomp, whomp. Zach stuttered badly and rarely spoke. ------- The Hoover's life marginally improved in high school. His tormentors found better things to do, and he made a friend. One day early in his junior year the girl ahead of him in the lunch line dropped her book. The sound echoed from the bare walls of the cafeteria. Zach looked down at the heavy volume for a moment and found the courage to kneel and pick it up. There was scattered applause, and someone hollered, "Go Hoove!" ------- "Thank you," said the red-faced girl. She was tall and thin with lank brown hair. ------- Zach had read Moby Dick the summer before, lying in a saggy hammock stretched between two apple trees on his grandfather's farm. ------- "D-d-do you l-like M-m-mo...?" ------- "Lou," she said. "Call me Lou." ------- Zach had a surprisingly warm smile. He and Lou ate their sloppy joes together and talked about the books they'd read. ------- Zach made a few other friends. He studied hard and earned all A's. He saw no clear future for himself, but he was reasonably content. ------- He discovered an unexpected talent as well. He was in the office one morning during his senior year when the class president failed to appear to read the notices over the public address system. The assistant principal, who was the school's disciplinarian, handed the microphone to Zach. ------- Zach turned to the school secretary in mute appeal. She was a kind woman and one of his few supporters, but she looked away. ------- "This is Z-Z-Zach," he began in a strangled voice, holding the microphone in both hands, "b-b-bringing you the m-m-m-m-morning notices." The secretary cringed with embarrassment for him. ------- Zach paused for several agonizing seconds. He drew a breath, and somewhere deep inside him a connection was made. A voice that had never been heard in Boone County High began to pour from the speakers. It was resonant and pure, and it filled its audience with a disturbing joy. ------- Conversations stopped. Students and teachers were hypnotized by Zach’s rendition of plans for a pep rally and a meeting of the science club. They joined with fervor in the school prayer. Silence continued long after Zach's ‘amen’ had faded to a pregnant electronic eeeeeeen. He wasn't asked to read the notices again. He continued to stutter in ordinary speech. ------- ------- With nothing to offer but good grades, Zach failed to impress the best Eastern colleges and had to accept a scholarship at the state university. This was a big school, however, with a good science program, and if there was anything Zach had learned from his teachers, it was that his education was largely up to him. He majored in both history and biology, and he made A's in every subject except ROTC, where his leadership ability was rated low. ------- Lou came with him to the university. Zach joined the least prestigious fraternity on campus, the one which provided a haven for outcasts like himself. After two years of experiencing Zach's kindness and generosity, his brothers voted him their president. ------- Lou encouraged Zach to attend the local Presbyterian church. Zach's Sunday school lessons delighted the children and impressed the church elders. He'd read the bible when he was sixteen, as he’d read Melville and Dickens, and Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had a remarkable memory and could quote scripture better than most clergymen. ------- Zach and Lou made a few good friends and led a quietly satisfactory social life. Zach began to foresee a future for himself in bio-medical research. ------- ------- The death of Zach's father threatened his modestly idyllic existence. Zach comforted his grieving mother and offered to leave the university and get a job, but she insisted that he finish school. ------- Zach already shelved books in the Library for as many hours as was allowed. There were few other jobs in a rural community whose only industry was the university, but he found work on a dairy farm. Lou shared her allowance, and Zach ate less. He continued to earn A's, and lost weight, but the cows began to wear him down. ------- "Do something with your voice," Lou said. She'd felt its power. Zach went to their pastor and was given a recommendation to a local bible-centered radio station. He impressed the manager by repeating a long passage from Isaiah and extemporizing a folksy homily. By the time Zach received his bachelor's degree with highest honors, his voice was being heard across the bible belt. ------- Zach and Lou decided to marry and to delay their plans for graduate school so that Zach could accept the offer of a well-paid job at a radio station in Chicago. Zach had not gained back the weight he’d lost during their lean months, and he and Lou looked marginally respectable as they drove away in Zach's mother's old Chevrolet to spend their honeymoon reading and eating at a cottage in the Wisconsin Dells. ------- ------- WRAG's specialty was paranoia. This was a new concept for Zach, who had fully understood the reasons for his own unpopularity as a child. ------- “Think of it as entertainment,” the station manager said. So Zach put his skills to work. His knowledge of politics and economics was encyclopedic. His intelligence and humor could clothe the most pathetic cause in quasi respectability. ------- Zach Talk became syndicated and quickly gained a national audience. The program attracted liberal scorn, but Zach's reports were fair and thoroughly researched, and the elegance of his speech overpowered all opposition. There was nothing controversial about Zach himself. He was a church-going teetotaler who was happily married to his high school sweetheart. He had graduated with honors from a respectable university, and he took care of his widowed mother. ------- Zach began to interview the major conservative figures of the day. He treated scholars and crackpots with equal courtesy, and his well-crafted questions showed each at his best. No candidate for public office, however shallow or absurd, failed to improve his chances by an appearance with Zach, although each found himself slightly changed by the experience. Skinheads and neo-Nazis became briefly expansive and amusing, and leading Klansmen showed flashes of rationality as, often for the first time, they bared their full beliefs to the listening public. Zach took on his liberal critics and demolished them in polite debate. ------- Zach attacked government arrogance and waste with informed and effective scorn. He pilloried the merely politically correct and skewered penthouse liberals with their own incautious rhetoric. He spoke straightforwardly of guns and churches, small farmers, and the military-industrial complex. His salary increased accordingly, and he had to rent a safe-deposit box to hold anonymous cash donations. ------- ------- With his enthusiastic followers now numbering in the millions, Zach was asked to be a speaker at the Republican convention. There was no orator in the country who could match him, and although some of the activists he interviewed were far more extreme than the party platform, Zach seemed always able to calm them and to tailor their performance to the needs of the occasion. ------- The leaders spoke of a calculated risk, but in truth they had little choice. The Hooverites formed the largest block of voters in the party. There was even a movement to draft Zach himself, which he quietly forestalled. ------- ------- When the night arrived, Zach looked out at the wildly cheering crowd that filled the convention hall and smiled as he waved his audience to silence. He began his address by invoking the libertarian ideals of the founding fathers, the industry and independence, and pride and values that had made the nation great. He quoted Jefferson and read passages from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and made the two-centuries-old words come alive for thirty million listeners, including the awkward notion that all men are created equal. ------- The party officials began to relax. Zach was successfully anointing their tired leadership with the holy oil of his graceful oratory and boosting the greatness of the electorate who would put their ideals into practice in the voting booth. With five minutes to go, the chairman began to wonder how Zach would reach a suitable conclusion. ------- "In closing," Zach continued, "I would like to invoke the spirit of our two greatest Republican presidents." The crowd roared, and the chairman raised his eyebrows. Eisenhower? Surely not Hoover? ------- "Abraham Lincoln,” Zach continued, “is revered for his moral leadership in a time of crisis. He held the country together in the face of armed rebellion, and he extended the blessing of liberty to all Americans." The surprised leader of the Conservative Black Caucus cheered, and there was a full minute of dutiful applause. ------- "Theodore Roosevelt is remembered for the bravery of the charge up San Juan Hill and for his wise counsel to the nation to speak softly and carry a big stick." Zach pointed towards the flag which hung behind the stage, and there was more enthusiastic cheering. With seconds to go, he motioned for silence. ------- "There was another Theodore Roosevelt as well," he continued. "Teddy Roosevelt was a conservationist who understood that wilderness is necessary for the survival of the human soul and a social reformer who sought a square deal for the workers and a graduated income tax by which the strong could help the weak. He fought for the regulation of unprincipled big business and the abolition of child labor. ------- "Theodore Roosevelt...," Zach's voice rose, "spoke the single most important political statement ever made in this country. I want to leave you with his words and to ask you to carry them before you like a banner as this campaign goes forward." He looked out at the sea of expectant faces. ------- "Teddy Roosevelt," he continued, "said that this great land of ours will not be good for even one of us until it is good for all of us. It must be a home not only for the strong and brave but also for the poor and weak, a good land for every citizen of every race and creed. ------- "I call on you now, as you choose a candidate for the office of President of the United States, to cherish above all other goals this vision of a true commonwealth, of an America for all Americans." ------- Zach and Lou could still hear the applause as they climbed into their limousine outside the convention hall. Zach resigned from WRAG the following morning, and they left Chicago to spend the summer on Cape Cod, where Lou had rented a cottage in her maiden name. ------- ------- They started graduate school the following September. Although he was busy with his studies, Zach followed the presidential campaign with interest. On Election Day, he and Lou went together to the poling place. ------- Zach was amused to see in the paper that there had been many write-in votes for an unspecified ‘Hoover’, and he smiled broadly when he read the winner's victory speech. The obligatory reference to an America for all Americans was still carried, although less like a battle standard than like a cross. ------- Zach wished he could remember where exactly in Teddy's works he’d read the words. Perhaps it was just as well that no one had asked. 8 August 07 |