This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 10, 2011 - In September 1936, Cosmopolitan magazine published Ernest Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Like most of Papa's work, this piece deals with unresolved issues of virility set in dark psychological landscapes. It is, of course, remarkably well written.
The story finds the title character and his wife, Margot, on safari in Africa with a professional hunter named Wilson. During the first day's hunt, Macomber panics when confronted by a wounded lion only to be saved by the dispassionate, ice-blooded pro. Thoroughly embarrassed in front of the hunting party, Macomber stirs from a restless sleep that night to find Margot returning from Wilson's tent under circumstances that would not play well in divorce court.
The cuckolded husband redeems himself by excelling the following day. Exercising his new-found grasp of manhood, he ultimately confronts a charging buffalo, felling the lethal beast at the last possible moment. As he does so, Margot fires from the car behind him and sends a round through the back of Macomber's head.
The reader is left to decide whether Margot's shot was a misguided effort to defend her husband or the calculated murder of an emancipated male by the mistress who formerly controlled him. In either event, the meaning of the title was not that Macomber's life was both short and happy, but rather that the happy portion of his life was short.
I'd intended to borrow on Hemingway's title to discuss the presidential candidacy of Herman Cain. My take on the matter was going to be that Cain enjoyed a short happy life as America's latest political curiosity until he was excoriated by the merciless scrutiny that such limelight inevitably brings. It was to be an object lesson of sorts about the theory that people willing to subject themselves to the process necessary to acquire the modern presidency are probably unfit to hold the office.
That was the idea, at any rate, until Margot Macomber returned in the persona of Rachael Maddow. While researching Cain online, I encountered Maddow's assertion that his campaign is, in fact, an exercise in performance art -- or what in simpler times, we referred to as a practical joke.
Maddow is an unabashedly leftist news commentator for MSNBC, which is notorious as a fertile cable TV hatchery for liberal eggheads. But unlike most ideologues left or right, she seems to have resisted the temptation to substitute bias for brains. During the aftermath of last spring's devastating earthquake in Japan, for instance, she offered a layman's tutorial on the workings of a nuclear power plant that better explained the situation than did any rival news source I encountered.
Now she's back arguing that the current leader in the race for the Republican presidential nomination is intentionally perpetrating a hoax on a clueless public. Though her premise is improbable, she makes her case with meticulous attention to detail.
Item: Cain cites Abraham Lincoln when observing, "You don't help the poor by hurting the rich." The problem here is that there is no record of the Great Liberator saying any such thing. This comment is usually attributed to a speech made in 1916 by the Rev. William Boetcker who headed the anti-trade unionist Citizens' Industrial Alliance.
Item: In his prepared remarks at the end of the first round of debates in Iowa, Cain dabbles in verse: "A poet once said, 'Life can be a challenge, life can seem impossible, but it's never easy when there's so much on the line'." The poet here turns out to be none other than Donna Summer and the occasion of her eloquence was the theme song for the children's animated feature, "Pokemon: The Movie 2000."
Item: The intellectual authorship of Cain's celebrated 9-9-9 tax plan has always been something of a mystery. After initially refusing to identify his economic brain trust, he later credited a financial planner he knows for coming up with the idea.
Turns out the controversial proposal debuted in the video game, SimCity, in which players attempt to manage a virtual municipality funded at the 9-9-9 tax rate. The winner of the contest is the player who takes the longest to go bankrupt.
Item: When questioned about the durability of his campaign effort, Cain explained that like Haagen-Dazs black walnut, he was here to stay. Unfortunately, the ice cream maker had discontinued production of that flavor prior to his comment.
Limitations of space preclude a detailed discussion of the former pizza executive's foreign policy agenda. Suffice it to observe that he seeks to prevent Red China from obtaining nuclear weapons -- a policy objective that will necessitate the invention of a time machine because that country detonated its first nuclear device 47 years ago. He also would resolve the Palestinian claim of a "Right to Return" through negotiation, although he freely admits he has no idea of what the issue entails.
Add to the above proliferating allegations of sexual harassment and it becomes impossible to determine whether Cain is merely an engaging amateur woefully unprepared for the national spotlight or a devilishly clever con man pulling our collective leg. In either event, the fact that we can't tell the difference probably means the joke's on us.
M.W. Guzy is a retired St. Louis cop who currently works for the city Sheriff's Department. His column appears weekly in the Beacon.