Read Online The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up by Jacob M. Appel - Free Book Online

Meanwhile, the air-conditioner hummed in the window box and pigeons thrashed about on the ledge. From the street rose the muffled honking of taxicabs. Cassandra glowered at him, drawing her thick eyebrows together, toying with her heart-shaped silver locket; the ornament reminded him that she really was just a young girl—with her own young girl’s music and young girl’s parties and young girl’s lack of perspective. Without accepting or rejecting Arnold’s terms, she pressed the record button on the cassette player.
    “Can you tell me how this all happened?” she asked. “Was it something you’d been planning for a long time or was it more of a spontaneous protest?”
    “I didn’t intend it to be a protest. I just didn’t want to stand up.”
    “But
why
? Were you protesting the war, Mr. Brinkman? Or the performance of a religious song at a secular event?”
    The answer was both. And a whole lot more. In hindsight, he wanted his protest to have been directed at anything and everything—against all of the perversions of justice that passed for decency. But how could he explain this to a young woman who insisted upon boilerplate answers in black-and-white? “I was protesting against the mistreatment of Native Americans,” he said decisively. “Wounded Knee, the reservation system, Leonard Peltier.”
    The girl looked up, her appetite whetted.
    “I’m also quite upset about slavery,” continued Arnold. “And rural poverty, and the lack of national health insurance, and the imprisonment of Lisl Auman. Then there’s the invasion of Panama, and the bombing of North Vietnam, and the entire Spanish-American War. I’m disturbed that they tore down Penn Station, and that gay couples can’t adopt children in Texas, and that Washington D.C. isn’t a state. Not to mention what happened to Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys and the Rosenbergs. Especially Ethel. Then there’s the two million people in prison—probably half of whom didn’t do anything wrong, only nobody knows which half anymore—while all the people who actually belong in prison are enjoying liquidlunches on Wall Street and in the Pentagon. You want to know what I’m protesting? I’m protesting the Salem Witch trials and the blacklisting of Dalton Trumbo and every goddam time Lenny Bruce got arrested. I’m still mad that they stopped delivering mail twice a day, and that Roosevelt dumped Wallace for Truman, and that McGovern dumped Eagleton, and that Victoria Hager dumped me for a football player in the eleventh grade. Son of a bitch! And I’m enraged that Ronald Reagan became President for playing best supporting actor to a monkey while Orson Welles didn’t even win a goddam Academy Award. But what I find most frustrating in this Bible-thumping , gun-slinging, sexually-repressed, intellectually-stunted and utterly backwards country of ours is that you can no longer send live plants through the mail. Shall I go on?”
    “No,” said Cassandra. “Don’t bother.”
    She snapped off her tape recorder and stuffed it into her bag.
    “I can’t believe I trusted you,” she added. “You’re a total asshole.”
    “What’s the problem?”
    “You’re the problem, Arnold Brinkman. I did you a favour and now you’re making fun of me. I thought we had a deal.”
    “I’m sorry,” answered Arnold. “I shouldn’t have agreed to an interview. You want me to connect what Idid to the larger events of the world—to make me into the Rosa Parks of anti-Americanism—while the reality is that I was hot, and tired, and I had to go to the bathroom.”
    “That’s a real awesome story,” Cassandra answered bitterly. “Man sticks tongue out because his bladder is full.”
    “See my point? There really is no story.”
    The girl examined him closely; she wiped her eyes with her fingers. “What am I supposed to tell my editor?”
    “I don’t know,” answered Arnold. “Anything you want. Tell him your paper is too conservative for