As if content really mattered here, I said.
He nodded vigorously, still chewing. It matters less in this instance than most, he said. At the same time, because the differences between the candidates are so negligible, so superficial, the ads, the quality of the ads, is really all that matters. And when you take into account that every public appearance, speeches, conventions, whatever, is all so heavily scripted, it amounts to advertising as well. You could make the argument that people are really electing the makers of the ads.
We were sitting in that little breakfast alcove up on the fourth floor. It was about six forty-five in the morning.
You should run, I said.
He laughed. Why not? he said. It makes perfect sense.
But I could tell he was joking. Mal just isn’t that comfortable in the limelight.
* * *
SO I FLEW out to Spokane; and when I got there, the CultureTrust defendants refused to see me. Their lawyer was more polite; he called my hotel room with addresses, times, room numbers so that I could at least attend the opening day of the trial. A quick jury selection, he said, then state’s witnesses probably right after lunch. His name was Bill Farber, he was right around my age, and I was kind of touched, actually, by his excessive friendliness; I got the sense that he didn’t meet a lot of people in Spokane who came from the outside world, and he was reluctant to let me go. He had been just two months out of Penn law school, in his first job as an associate with some white-shoe firm in Philadelphia, when his parents were killed in a car crash. He took a three-week leave from the firm to return home to Spokane and take care of affairs, make arrangements to sell the house, et cetera. That was five years ago.
Spokane is another one of those cities where you might as well be anywhere. Starbucks, the Gap, some sort of ugly new convention center — it all looks like some sort of traveling exhibition that might pack up and move on the day after you do. And yet if you were to jump in your car in the middle of downtown Spokane and drive twenty-five miles in any direction, you’d be so deep in the woods as to be pretty much off the grid: in fact, you’re not too far at all there from the Idaho border, militia country, Unabomber country. Bill Farber offered me a tour of the Spokane River Valley after court was adjourned for the day; though I was sorry to hurt his feelings, my mind was on the business at hand, and so I begged off.
Even the courthouse looked like it had been put together after a recent trip to Home Depot, what with the dropped plasterboard ceilings and shadowless fluorescent lighting. There were six or eight people scattered along the benches behind the rail; one young woman held a notepad. If she was indeed a reporter, I just hoped Bill in his gregariousness wouldn’t tell her who I was. The judge was a thin, imposing woman of late middle age, with sparse, teased white hair, and she sat on a riser beneath the seal of the State of Washington, facing me across the heads of the lawyers and the two defendants.
They were older than I had expected; the one named Liebau is fifty-five if he’s a day. They wore tweed jackets and looked the part, as I’m sure their lawyer had the good sense to hope, of endearingly eccentric college professors.
The judge brought in eighteen prospective jurors and announced she expected to cull from that small group the whole jury of twelve, plus two alternates, in time for lunch. Everything went without a hitch for the first eight people: what’s your name, where do you work, do you have any connection with the advertising business, a few other questions, and done. Seven of them were empaneled on the spot, and the eighth was excused by the judge on the grounds, as he announced with near-belligerence, that he had irritable bowel syndrome.
The woman in the gallery I assumed was the reporter had her pen between her teeth. Across the aisle from me a man who looked like he could have been Liebau’s younger, more successful brother had his knees up against the bench in front of him and his mouth open, sound asleep.
Then the ninth citizen questioned, a guy wearing jeans with a crease ironed into them, who looked to be about forty and said he was a dog obedience trainer, said something about how he vaguely remembered having heard of this case on the local news, but he hadn’t formed an opinion about it; in a spirit of cooperation he volunteered that he hadn’t paid much attention at the time and couldn’t recall any of the details. Jack Gradison, the second defendant, scribbled a note on a legal pad and pushed it toward Farber, who was doing the questioning from his seat. The lawyer ignored it and asked the juror how long he had lived in the Spokane area.
All my life, the dog trainer said.
Gradison tapped loudly on the pad with his index finger. Calmly, as if he just needed a stretch, Farber stood up and walked away from him, toward the jury box, buttoning his jacket as he went.
Mr Pope, do you have any relatives who –
Ask him, Gradison said. Every face in the room turned toward him. Farber, though he had been stopped mid-question, kept his cool. After a considered pause he turned to the judge and said, Your honor, may I have a moment to –
Ask him! Gradison yelled.
The judge’s first response was to put on, with a matronly sort of sternness, a pair of glasses. Mr Gradison, she said, I’m afraid I’ll have to warn you not –
Turn off your TV! Gradison shouted at the jury box. Turn it off!
You might have thought Farber would go over at this point and put a hand on his client’s shoulder or something; but for reasons best known to himself, the lawyer stayed where he was, leaning with one elbow on the jury box, watching this meltdown with an air of worldly disappointment. Everyone who had been dozing a minute before in the small, overlit courtroom — the handful of spectators, the locals called to jury duty, even the fat old bailiff who was still seated but now had his hand on his gun — had his head up, alert, like a hound. Something out of the ordinary was happening.
Wake up! Gradison shouted at the jury, red in the face. Wake up! Death is coming for us all! Take responsibility for your own life, your own thoughts! Don’t let them tell you what’s beautiful! Snap out of it! Take a look at the work you’re doing!
I was surprised they let him go on in this vein for as long as they did, but when he climbed up on top of the defense table, that was the end of that. The bailiff spoke into a walkie-talkie and almost instantly three guards banged through the door behind me. They pulled the middle-aged man on to the floor and cuffed his hands behind his back, as he continued to shout. One of them finally put his hand over Gradison’s mouth. At some point I looked at the defense table and saw the other defendant, Liebau, still in his chair. He was laughing.
The judge called the lawyers into chambers and emerged about two minutes later to announce that all jurors present, even those already questioned and empaneled, were hereby excused. The case was continued until the following Tuesday, when jury selection would start all over again, this time with Mr Gradison in restraints, if necessary.
The next morning I went down to the hotel lobby and borrowed from the desk clerk his copy of that day’s Spokane paper. A three-paragraph story was buried on page A7. Outburst Postpones Ad Vandals’ Trial. I went back upstairs, sat on my bed with the laptop, and searched the various wire-service sites on the net for an hour: nothing. So I checked out and went to the airport. I took the puddle-jumper to San Francisco and the red-eye from there to Washington. It was nearly two o’clock by the time I got back to Palladio.