On Narrating Stephen King Sound Effects

The third book in Stephen King’s four-novella collection “Different Seasons,” is “Fall From Innocence” (“The Body”), upon which the 1986 movie “Stand by Me,” starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Cory Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, and Kiefer Sutherland was based. It is both a delight and a challenge for a 68-year-old narrator. 

Preparation for the effects was simple enough: I was 13 once, I buddied around with other 13-year-old boys doing things best left to the mists of history, and I lived through 1960. That was the foundation for channeling the voices of all the teenagers in the third book of the quartet I am narrating for Learning Ally.

While voicing the boys was like taking a trip back in time, playing with King’s sound effects was pure pleasure. King gives the voice actor plenty of direction for most of the effects, leaving some of the noises to the narrator’s (and readers) imaginations. Here are just four examples of sound effects I worked on during the narration of “Fall From Innocence."

First, Teddy Duchamp’s weird laugh:

“Gordie’s out, ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door,” Teddy bugled, and then gave out with his patented Teddy Duchamp laugh— Eeee-eee-eee, like a rusty nail being slowly hauled out of a rotten board. Well, he was weird; we all knew it."

Second, the blast of a .45 pistol, unexpectedly loaded when Godie Lachance pulls the trigger in an alleyway:

“I finally took the gun. I liked the heavy way it sat there in my hand. I could see myself as Steve Carella of the 87th Squad, going after that guy The Heckler or maybe covering Meyer Meyer or Kling while they broke into a desperate junkie’s sleazy apartment. I sighted on one of the smelly trashcans and squeezed the trigger. KA-BLAM!  The gun bucked in my hand. Fire licked from the end. It felt as if my wrist had just been broken. My heart vaulted nimbly into the back of my mouth and crouched there, trembling.

”

Third, the sound a junkyard chainlink fence makes when a furious guard dog hits the fence at a full-on run:

“The whole fence made a low, musical sound as the chain-link was not just driven back against the posts but sort of stretched back. It was like a zither note— yimmmmmmmm. A strangled yawp came out of Chopper’s mouth, both eyes came up blank and he did a totally amazing reverse snap-roll, landing on his back with a solid thump that sent dust puffing up around him.”

Fourth, the sounds of terrified boys racing down a high trestle over a river as a diesel train bears down on them, closing on them with inexorable speed and deadliness, horn wailing:

“I kept waiting for the trestle to start shaking under my feet. When that happened, it would be right behind us. “GO FASTER, VERN! FAAASTER!” “Oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd AWWWWWWW-SHEEEEYIT!” The freight’s electric horn suddenly spanked the air into a hundred pieces with one long loud blast, making everything you ever saw in a movie or a comic book or one of your own daydreams fly apart, letting you know what both the heroes and the cowards really heard when death flew at them: WHHHHHHHONNNNNNNK! WHHHHHHHHONNNN-NNNNK! And then Chris was below us and to the right, and Teddy was behind him, his glasses flashing back arcs of sunlight, and they were both mouthing a single word and the word was jump! but the train had sucked all the blood out of the word, leaving only its shape in their mouths. The trestle began to shake as the train charged across it. We jumped.”

Seriously, when you get the description of a laugh, (“Eeee-eee-eee, like a rusty nail being slowly hauled out of a rotten board,”) or a dog hitting a chainlink fence (“It was like a zither note— yimmmmmmmm.”), or the jammed-together screams of boys about to be squashed (“Oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd AWWWWWWW-SHEEEEYIT!”) by an oncoming, horn-wailing diesel (WHHHHHHHONNNNNNNK! WHHHHHHHHONNNN-NNNNK!), you just know that part of the recording is going to be flat out fun. 

A Fox Tale

Just as I was about to go downstairs to the Dungeon for a few hours of recording a book for Learning Ally, Carolyn whispered to me, "Jim...look in the back." 

I turned around, went to the sunroom, and through one of the windows saw one of the local foxes walking across the yard, not far from the wood pile.

He was a little grungy looking, but otherwise he seemed to be in a rather it's-a-pretty-sunny-day-for-a-stroll-through-the-Moore's-backyard mood. 

He found a spot to his liking and curled up on the lawn for a little nap. Just lying in the late-April-morning sun, on a warm, rain-washed patch of lawn. He'd rouse from time to time, yawn, peer up at the sun-bright sky, listen to local sounds, then put his head back down and snooze.

After maybe ten minutes of self-imposed quiet time, the fox uncurled, stretched in a long, languorous, arcing pose, still unhurried, and then trotted off to a path behind the forsythia and was gone.

I did take quite a few pictures through the glass as the fox dozed, but the wonder of having this wild animal just carving out a few minutes of quiet time for itself--no fear, no feral alertness at least for the moment--was more than simple pictures will show. 

Gosh, I love when that happens.

Voicing Two Monsters: Narrating the Unspeakable

In a few months, probably in the fall of this year, a student working to overcome his or her dyslexia or wanting to listen to a book due to a visual impairment or blindness, will select from a special audiobook catalogue Stephen King’s four-novella work, Different Seasons. The student will sit down and begin listening to me narrating King’s four short stories: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (Hope Springs Eternal); Apt Pupil (Summer of Corruption); The Body (Fall From Innocence); and The Breathing Method (A Winter’s Tale). The dyslexic student who chooses the audiobook will also have a hard copy of the book to match what he or she sees with the narrated audio. The non-profit organization for which I am one of many volunteer readers, is organized specifically to produce audiobooks for just this purpose. You will not find this version of Different Seasons in my Audible collection. In a way, I’m glad. But that’s to be explained momentarily.  

It will take several days, maybe a week or more, for the student to get through the entire audiobook, which comes in at around 20 hours of narration. They may know that three of the novellas were made into movies: The Shawshank Redemption (1994); Apt Pupil (1998); and Stand by Me (from The Body, 1986). The student may even have seen one or more of the films on Netflix—I’m betting it’s The Shawshank Redemption, with Morgan Freeman as the story’s narrator. If so, he or she will be disappointed to find that my voice is hardly that of Freeman’s, but that’s not for a lack of my trying; it’s only that the character in the book is not a Morgan Freeman type.

Having completed Shawshank, the student will cue up the next story, Apt Pupil. I have had discussions with the non-profit’s leadership about this moment, and how the audiobook should come with some warning and, perhaps, an age-restriction. It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that just this one Stephen King story merit’s such caution when most of what King is known for virtually shrieks, moans, cries, sobs, and growls some sort of horror or depravity of the human condition. Though his stories’ endings usually resolve themselves with rehabilitated characters, or acts of redemption, Apt Pupil gets there all-too-horribly, painfully, darkly, and, of course, gruesomely. And it does so through the conversations of two monsters—Kurt Dussander, an aging Nazi concentration camp commandant, and Todd Bowden, a California-handsome teenage boy (aging from 13 to 17 across the arc of the story) who cannot breathe deeply enough of the fetid fumes of the gas chambers and killing fields of the death camps.

When I accepted the assignment to narrate the novellas, I was familiar with two of the four—Rita Hayworth and Shawshank and the The Body—and I’d grabbed enough snatches of The Winter’s Tale to know its plotline. But, I’d not read, or seen, Apt Pupil, and I had no idea how much it would affect me, and take me back to a place in my own very young life where inhumanity reared up before me and left an indelible impression that would stain the memories of my childhood for the next sixty years.

Let me share with you a passage from a memoir I’ve been struggling with for more than 20 years. This particular narrative happened when I was nine, an Air Force brat living in Wiesbaden, Germany, not long after WW II, during the 1950s occupation by the American military. 

Next to our on-base family quarters was a tall stone wall bordering a narrow country road on the German side. There was a black-ribbed iron gate in the wall that closed off the road in front of my house from access to the country road on the other side. The gate was secured by heavy hinges to two flat-topped stone pillars that my friends and I would sometimes scramble up on in order to watch the farmers in the neighboring fields. The country road below us was used by the local German populace to walk from a small community to a bus stop about a quarter-mile down from the gate.  I will let the memoir, through my family nickname, Chris, take over from here.

“Steve Dunnan sat on the gate pillar looking down on the subject of his taunts: a young German school boy who was trying hard to ignore the epithets hurled his way.  I can picture the boy even today, more than a half-a-century later. In this, my memory is clear.  He was thin and frail, in the way small trees in deep winter are delicate and vulnerable. A few books were pressed, protected, tight against his right side by his upper arm. His red lips were pursed, damming up his anger and fear; his sunken eyes – made darker under yellow-white eyebrows – would not meet ours, but I could see a fire in them that I did not interpret until many years later as rage against his father’s shame.  His straw-textured blond hair was harshly cut and did little to soften the effect of the featureless, malnourished skin pulled taut across his forehead and cheeks.  The young German’s spindly legs seemed embarrassingly exposed by too-large lederhosen that had probably been passed down from father to son to brother. He wore leather sandals and dark green knee socks. His hands were jammed into his pants pockets.

“Don’t you know you’re a loser, Kraut kid?  My daddy probably dropped bombs all over your stupid little town. Whad’ya think ‘a that, huh?”  Steve leaned forward in preparation to launch a hawked-up wad of sputum in the German’s direction.

“Steve, don’t you dare!”  I shouted.  “Your dad will whip you if he finds out you did that, and you know it.”

“Yeah? And who’s gonna tell him, huh?” Steve spun around to me, his face reddening, his eyes flashing.  “Neither one of us is supposed to be up here, so you’re not gonna tell.” Dunnan held my gaze for a moment, then he turned back toward the target of his fury, but the German had moved quickly down the sidewalk out of spitting range of the boy on the pillar.

“Damn you, Chris!  I had him in my sights and I’d ‘a got him good, too.”

Steve jumped down from the wall into my yard and turned to look up at me, disgust undisguised on his face. “These Heini Krauts ought’a watch where they’re walkin’, is all I gotta say. One day I’m gonna catch one of ‘em alone and then we’ll see. Yeah.”

I watched Steve walk away, his swagger of false bravado looking silly on a nine-year-old, but, at the same time, it was a swagger he got from his dad and from countless other men in uniform who populated Wiesbaden and hundreds of other American bases. It was a disconcerting gait of unquestioned moral authority, treading carelessly across a country laced with raw nerves, a country that had barely ten years earlier countenanced the dispatch of more than six million men, women, and children into kilns, gas-spewing showers, and self-dug graves of inhumanity.

As a painfully shy kid, I was unable to square my feeling of fear of boys like Steve with my desire to remain in their company. Only time and distance taught me that I needed their approval because I was terrified of their scorn. And of what value is that in this account? If the nine-year-old me could not face the mirror of my conscience, letting courage slip out of my control, I was as good as ceding my whole moral being to others to abuse. That abuse would continue to dog me until I learned to take back that which others sought to squander. But, that is another story.

This narrative from the nine-year-old me bubbled up totally unbidden as I began to read Stephen King’s story of Kurt Dussander—“the Blood-Fiend of Patin,” as he was called—and Todd Bowden, the Southern California junior high school student. Because I spent four very formative years in Germany, learning and speaking German as only military kids do, the accent was always hovering around in my brain, waiting for some excuse to come out. Children in peripatetic families—particularly military families—adapt quickly, like chameleons, to their surroundings. I’m a Virginian now (born in DC, but a native Virginian for nearly 50 years), but I’ve lived in Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, California, and Germany. Kids like me can drawl or smear or crisp-up their accents to fit in as quickly as possible. During my first read-through of King’s book, I could feel the accent, could hear Dussander’s German delivery, sometimes old and soft and Americanized, sometimes harsh, strident, precise and demanding as it would have been as Unterkommandant Dussander, relentlessly drawing death into Patin’s Final Solution machinery.

But how was I going to give him his voice…not his accent, but his voice? Could I say with the right emotion what he said in his long conversations with Todd, the young suburban all-American kid who wanted to hear everything about the death camps…everything! There is dialogue between the two of them…and dream sequences…I won’t write down here that caused me to stand up from the microphone and take deep breaths—you can read it, or listen to in other audiobooks. Typical King scenes that in any other story of his would have been less gut-punching (not any less powerful, but less viscerally impactful, if that makes any sense). There is a scene with Todd and a bluejay…no. Not for here. But I read it, and read it with King’s sure authority; and then I left the Dungeon and took a walk.

Dussander, though. He was a toughie to voice from start to finish because I needed to be him without becoming him and losing my way in the dialogue changes.

Here is 78-year-old Dussander telling 15-year-old Todd about a new death gas, PEGASUS, that Dussander was encouraged by his superiors to use in the death chamber at Patin.

“They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My men . . . they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them, either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that— it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling sound. The laughing.”

I did not read this as Colonel Klink of Hogan’s Heroes. I read it as the aged Unterkommandant Dussander, now just a chain-smoking, cheap-bourbon-drinking, fading old man in a faded Los Angeles suburb, hiding from the Nazi hunters as German-American Arthur Denker until he was discovered by the relentlessly curious Todd Bowden. When I narrated such a scene—and there were several—I leaned into the mic with a sort of tenderness that I would use to get you to lean into me as I told a fascinating story. It was creepy.

The actual diction, the pronunciations, varied with the Dussander’s emotions and with the plot itself. Not all German is clipped, just as not all Southern accents are drawly and imprecise. Dussander’s “the” might end up being “zuh,” or his “would” morphed from a hard W to a softer, almost V-ish “vuhd,” as in “I vuhd nefer fohrget zuh zound zehy made,” in the above sample.

However, there has to be greater clarity when narrating a book for a dyslexic who is listening and following along on a printed page. The goal in such cases is to be true to the emotion and the likelihood of a character’s delivery being imprecise at certain times in the story.

There was a particular moment in the book when King has two characters speaking German, but the text itself is American-English. King tells the reader that German is being spoken, so I read the English with enough of a German accent to give the dyslexic reader the flavor of the dialogue. One of the characters is new to the plot, and is an Israeli Nazi hunter, but King only says he speaks German to Dussander. With no further guidance from the author—and without trying to apply any sort of German-Jewish-Yiddish accent to the character—I just went with a generic German. Improvisation even with accents is permissible in narration.

Sometimes I would give Dussander a tired, smoothed-over accent, particularly when he had just woken up and was in his robe, shuffling around his kitchen, and had not yet put in his dentures. Sometimes I would clip and punch-up his German, when he was irritated at Todd (often) or when he was stressing a point to be made quite clear to the boy. 

On one occasion, Dussander is drunk, and his German slurs and takes on a more heavily pronounced tone. From time to time, as when Dussander meets Todd’s parents, or when, in a key sequence, he meets with Todd’s guidance counselor, I refined his accent, hid it away a bit more behind his careful English enunciation. But always he was German, and whether he was drunk and slurring his speech, or shouting and livid, or caressingly smooth, or proudly defiant, I imagined myself inside his skin, inside his head, and went there for whatever accent was waiting for me.

And then there was Todd Bowden. How to narrate a kid who is a monster, a 13-year-old who revels in inhumane stories of gore and depravity—who blackmails Dussander into describing the camps in exquisite detail?

Here is Todd, early in the story, pressing Dussander for…well…read for yourself:

Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. “Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall into them. The . . .” His tongue came out and wetted his lips. “The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.” Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. “You are a monster,” he said softly. Todd sniffed. “According to the books I read for my report, you’re the monster, Mr. Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh boy.”

Again, how does a 67-year-old narrator with memories of what being 13 was like in suburban America at about the same time as the book, give this monstrous kid a voice? Todd called on me to be the bullies that once beat me up on a regular basis, while still maintaining the appearance of being just one more carefree middle-class kid in Southern California.

But King’s cue is that Todd is a junior high schooler, and who among us hasn’t thought-at least at some point, be honest now—of junior high school as a hellish place we never want to visit again? I worked to get inside Todd’s head and relive that time in my life when the demons and dragons of uncertainty, shyness, sexual imprecision, clumsiness, vocal pitch rearrangements, and all the other awkward traits nestled in my hormone-drenched, gangly, unquiet body.  Yes, I had a pretty good childhood…if you put all that stuff aside. For Todd, I put all that stuff front and center, and gave his demons and dragons their voices.

As I said earlier, Stephen King’s evil characters often meet their comeuppance, and so it was with Todd. Dussander’s stories, and Todd’s increasingly ghoulish deeds, begin to invade the boy’s dreams, and I took pleasure as a narrator in torturing Todd in this nightmare sequence:

In another dream he [Todd] wore an SS uniform. His jackboots were shined to a mirrorlike reflecting surface. The death’s-head insignia and the lightning-bolts glittered. But he was standing in the middle of Santo Donato Boulevard and everyone was looking at him. They began to point. Some of them began to laugh. Others looked shocked, angry, or revolted. In this dream an old car came to a squalling, creaky halt and Dussander peered out at him, a Dussander who looked two hundred years old and nearly mummified, his skin a yellowed scroll. “I know you!” the dream-Dussander proclaimed shrilly. He looked around at the spectators and then back to Todd. “You were in charge at Patin! Look, everybody! This is The Blood-Fiend of Patin! Himmler’s ‘Efficiency Expert’! I denounce you, murderer! I denounce you, butcher! I denounce you, killer of infants! I denounce you!”

In this example, I gave Dussander full command of his German accent…an accent of concentration camp nightmares.

Not until close to the end of the story was I able to rid myself of Kurt Dussander and to wash him off and let his remnants gurgle down the Dungeon drain. 

Todd took just a bit longer. 

But they are both gone now, and it’s on to the third of the quartet—The Body, the coming-of-age story of a band of teenage boys in search of something outside themselves.

More is Needed to Oust Assad

Tomahawk Missile Launch from the USS Porter   Photo: www.navy;mil

When innocent Syrians—men, women, children and babies—were killed or horribly wounded while they slept by exploding barrel bombs filled with sarin, chlorine, or other utterly inhumane chemicals on the orders of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, it is understandable, viscerally, why any peace-seeking leader would want to punish Assad quickly and decisively. President Trump, by reacting too precipitously, and with insufficient force, did not achieve the goal I had hoped he—or his predecessor Barack Obama in 2013—should have achieved.

Assad, who acts with unconcealed confidence that no one will challenge him or intervene on behalf of his victims, continues to sneer with impunity at the United States and our allies who, once again, were unable to bring the full force of united global anger to bear on such a despicable tyrant. The failure was a result of not having the collective will to end the fight by hitting Assad himself, and hitting him with such a punishing blow, that he would never rise again. An example from my youth informs me of what it takes to bring down a bully.

In 1962, I was living on an Air Force base west of Lincoln, Nebraska. I was a scrawny 13-year-old, in no way wise to, or prepared for, the world of a junior high school to which the base kids were bussed every day. At the school, a band of street-smart town kids whose leader, a swaggering 14-year-old boy, singled me out as an object to be bullied. The group of toughs would wait for me to come down the front steps of the school at the end of the day, on my way to the air base bus that shuttled the military kids back home. The band’s leader would grab me and pull me to the side of the steps, hit me once or twice and demand whatever money I had left from my lunch allowance. Of course, I gave it to him. My bus-waiting base companions stood by, possibly sympathetic, but certainly not sympathetic enough to step in on my behalf. Sometimes, the bully would just hit me because he could. Surrounded by his circle of thugs, I rarely made a move to fight back — I simply didn’t know how, and I doubted anyone would help me even if I tried.

After a few weeks of being a punching bag for a school-yard criminal, I began to show some bruising that long-sleeved shirts or pajamas couldn’t hide. A swollen and purplish mark on my face finally caught my father’s attention, and after a few minutes of beating around the bush, I came clean and confessed my weakness. My father, who was at the time the air base commander, and well-respected by the town leaders, did something I had not expected. He did not call the school; he did not try to find out who the bully was. He taught me to fight back.

In a few short lessons, my dad showed me the simplest, most effective way to deliver a punch to the face, and he reinforced the lesson with one mantra: “Hit first, hit fast, hit hard.” He said he’d learned the same thing while a cadet at West Point, and because he didn’t like boxing, he’d figured out how to end a match quickly so that he wouldn’t have to pound or be pounded for any unnecessary rounds. He also told me that I shouldn’t expect any of my friends to come to my aid — not because they didn’t like me, but because they were too afraid, at that age, to do anything. I would be on my own. “You have to hit him in the face with all you’ve got in that first punch,” my father said. “He will only stop if he is really hurt, and you won’t hurt him enough if you hit anyplace else.” His last piece of advice has stuck with me for 50 years: “Don’t drag it out. Just get it over with.”

I’ve given this episode of my life a lot of thought as an adult, watching bullying nations and tyrants intimidate and rob and cheat defenseless nation’s and vulnerable populations. Rwanda comes to mind, Pol Pot comes to mind, Idi Amin and so many other bullies and their scandalous scenes of horror and depredations come to mind. And Bashar al Assad and Vladimir Putin come to mind. And what else comes to mind is that rarely do nations who outwardly proclaim righteous indignation act with sufficient clarity of anger and concentration of energy to put a period on the end of a bully’s reign of terror.

A few days later, as I left the school to catch the bus, I saw the mean gang waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. I was still their scrawny target, and my base pals began to distance themselves from me. The bully stepped forward, putting himself between me and the bus stop. I cannot remember a single thought that prefaced my action, but I suppose weeks of being terrorized came to a boil. In one flashing moment I punched cleanly into the bully’s face and he went down like a 100-pound bag of sand. Not a one of his followers made any attempt to fight me.

Nothing more was done or said. I got on the bus. None of my base friends commented or displayed any kind of support or relief. My dad took it as fact and I went on with being a 13-year-old. The bully never approached me again.

Striking one of Assad’s air bases was not enough. It was barely a body blow, and he knows it. It might have felt good to give the order to send off those missiles, but they were not aimed at the right target. Mr. Trump, it is up to each nation, each community of nations, to stop being afraid and act quickly, powerfully, and decisively. If you must go it alone, so be it; if other nation’s will stand with you, even better. But, take this from someone who’s been on the other end of a bully’s fist: You must hit his face, you must hit it hard and with all you’ve got. Don’t drag it out.

If you do that, Putin will not help Assad stand up again.

Trump's White House: The New Idiocracy

Last November, the Electoral College (not to be confused with the majority of voters—which of itself should not be confused with the majority of eligible voters) didn’t elect a new president; they elected a new paradigm of “Rule by Fools,” otherwise known as an idiocracy. They put into the Executive Office a model of buffoonery based on a self-promoting caricature of an immoral fool with money, a fool who so believed in himself and in his ability to obfuscate, cheat, deny, lie, and bully his way into power that he actually did it with the witting and unwitting help of millions of other fools. In so doing, he and his enablers remade the presidency into a paradigm of an idiocracy, predicted in a 2005 film of the same name by Bevis and Butthead creator Mike Judge.

In an interview with the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley in January 2016, Judge recalled the moment he was struck by Idiocracy’s concept after witnessing two women fighting and swearing in front of their kids at Disneyland.  “And this was in 2001, so then I started thinking about 2001 [the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi movie],” he explained. "What if instead of this pristine high-tech world that [Kubrick] had envisioned, what if it was just like The Jerry Springer Show and giant Walmarts, and what if that had been the movie made in the ’60s? So I thought that’s what I would do. And a lot of it was kinda based on stuff that was already happening.”

The Telegraph’s Stanley noted, with dead-on prescience 11 months in advance of the election, the salient consistency of Trump’s modus operandi. “He’s a snake oil salesman. They’ve always existed, always will. In American mythology, it’s the guy who rides into town with the promise that he can cure all ills with an ointment that only requires a little faith to work and 12 instalments of $19.99. The sad fact is that snake oil only sells if there’s a market for it. That implies that a significant number of consumers are suckers.”

At the core of every myth or legend there are some events or characters—sketches or shadows in their own time—that take on an aura of legitimacy as a willing or desperate or delusional public embraces what they want to see while discarding that which makes them uncomfortable. Truth is usually the first discomfiting aspect to be ditched. And so it was last November.

The truth behind Trump’s rise to idiocracy was pitched out a window of Trump Tower as surely as Russian attorney Nikolai Gorokhov was thrown out of the window of his fourth floor apartment last month in Moscow before he was set to testify on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s longtime foe Sergei Magnitsky. Like Putin, Trump has no problem dispatching Truth with extreme prejudice, as long as he can get someone else to do the dirty work.

As one example, here’s a portion of the transcript of a discussion this Sunday morning (April 2) between ABC News’ Martha Raddatz and U.S Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, that illustrates Trump’s willingness to put his toadies out in front of major issues, detaching himself from any real policy positions. The italics are mine:

RADDATZ: “You really think that you and President Trump are saying the same things? Let me tell you one thing President Trump recently said. He defended Putin after Fox News' Bill O'Reilly called him a killer, saying there are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?

So, how does the U.S. maintain its role as the moral conscience of the world, to use your words this week, if the president won't condemn what's happening inside Russia?”

HALEY: “Well, Martha, this is what I can tell you, the president has not once called me and said don't beat up on Russia, has not once called me and told me what to say, has not once...”

RADDATZ: “But he isn't beating up on Russia. Should he be beating up on Russia, again?”

HALEY: “I am. I am beating up on Russia...”

RADDATZ: “So he doesn't need to?”

HALEY: “Well, it's -- of course, he's got a lot of things he's doing. But he is not stopping me from beating up on Russia. He's not stopping me from talking about the pressure that China needs to be putting on North Korea. He's not stopping me on how we're working together to defeat ISIS.

Right now, General Mattis and I are working on peacekeeping reforms and stability with those issues. So, the president has not disagreed with one thing I've said. And that means he supports everything that I'm saying. And I'm going along with everything that I know this administration believes in.”

RADDATZ: “You know, you take over the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council this month. And let me read some things you say you want.

You say you want to emphasize the role of human rights, that you intend to challenge members, not just to talk the talk, but walk the walk. Russia is going to be at that table having supported Syria's President Assad in killing Syrian civilians, what you have called war crimes. Putin has jailed and killed dissidents in his own country. You talk tough. But again, doesn't President Trump have to start talking tough?”

HALEY: “He has his people talking tough. And that's what we're doing is right now we're saying whatever we need to say. Look, he's the president. He can say what he wants whenever he wants…”

In the Beatles song, The Fool on the Hill, the fool was the smart one, seeing with the eyes in his head the motion of the sun due to the spinning of the Earth. In Trump’s idiocracy (which recently employed a fool from the Hill, Devin Nunes), the spinning is happening from the press room podium and in the soundbites of a cabinet filled with willing fools. 

Idiocracy: the new paradigm.