Sometime after Pat Cipollone’s closed-door testimony before the select committee—remember that?!—I dream I’m in a makeshift meeting of my university’s senate, off-campus and ad hoc. We’re all crammed into someone’s living room, mismatched chairs and sofas, pillows on the floor. There is no gentlelady from Wyoming, no without objection or I yield. The dream lacks any filigree of Robert’s Rules. Voices blear and bellow but above the din, I can hear my partner Dave, so maybe, I think, this living room is ours. The thought isn’t comforting, though, and I’m slumped in a beanbag chair just like the one I slept in at my friend Jessica’s slumber party back in the early 70s. Her family’s home seemed vaguely upscale—Danish bent-wood furniture with a touch of chrome and faux-animal-print. Ours was older, three blocks from the red-brick armory where the Ohio National Guard stayed in the days right after they shot those students at Kent State, and I wasn’t allowed to leave the yard, and the campus where both our fathers taught abruptly closed. I remember July 1974, watching the impeachment hearings on our black-and-white TV. Even then (I was 12), I thought, oh, that’s how you do it, listening to the gentleman from Maine, Bill Cohen, laying out the charges (specifically, he said each time, specifically—a cataract of facts) while apologists for Nixon shammed and stalled. —Will the gentleman yield? —I will not yield. Jessica’s mother was a nurse in WWII; her father’s family—some of them—were Jews who fled before it was too late. In the dream, Dave’s voice is shouting, “I challenge the debate. I challenge the debate.” Is he calling the question? What is the motion on the floor? I twist a little but I can’t get up from my throw-back-Thursday, chill-out chair.
In living memory, we say until the oldest who could once share images from childhood has gone, and history thereafter. And here, as clear as day, is Cipollone, the blue-suited silence when he locked gaze with his lawyer, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, the unanswered question left suspended—“What about the president?”—three one-thousand, four—.
Elizabeth Dodd is an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at Kansas State University. She has team-taught courses with scientists, philosophers, and historians and has led students on trips to South America and closer-to-home, in the tallgrass prairie and along the Platte River. With Derek Sheffield and Simmons Buntin, she is co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. She’s the author of six books, including Horizon’s Lens and In the Mind’s Eye, both from University of Nebraska Press.
Read two other Letters to America by Elizabeth Dodd: “Witness the Present Mexican War” (February 12, 2019) and “Letter to America” (July 20, 2017).
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header image courtesy Adobe Photoshop. Photo of Elizabeth Dodd by Simmons Buntin.
