Island of the cannibal Republicans

One New York writer welcomes GOP delegates with a self-published Swiftian satire -- recipes included!

By David Womack

Aug 30, 2004 | Among the varied delicacies New York will offer Republican guests is a book titled "The Compassionate Republican's Guide to Mastering the Art of Human Cookery." It was originally meant to be sold, along with hot dogs, from a cart at Broadway and 27th Street. (That arrangement has fallen through, but it can be mail-ordered from Amazon and Powell's.) The self-published book is an updated version of Jonathan Swift's famous satire "A Modest Proposal," in which Swift suggests that, as a cure for poverty in Ireland, that the Irish eat their children. In typical New York fashion, author Robert Lesser has done Swift one better. In response to the voracious appetites of the Bush administration, Lesser has expanded the menu to contain recipes for everything from sautéed Hillary Clinton to fricassee of homeless. Recipes, as Lesser points out, were conspicuously absent from the original.

Like Swift, Lesser sees humor as the only rational response to an irrational political situation. "You see, politics has become so bitter," he says, implying that calling the Republicans cannibals has somehow elevated the discourse. "Well," he says, "I think it's funny."

The 71-year-old Lesser anticipates that the book will be a great success, if not with the delegates themselves then with the legions of protesters also expected to descend on the city. Lesser's motivation, however, was not primarily financial. "I did not want to write this book," he begins. "I had to write this book. It's a very mysterious process. All of a sudden I am captured by a character and I am carried away, just carried away by it. It is a very spiritual experience for someone who is not religious." In this case, Lesser's muse (and narrator) is a 107-year-old Republican named Thanatos. Thanatos has an impressive knowledge of literature and science but, especially towards the end of the text, gets a little sloppy with spelling and grammar. "I didn't expect people to read that far," Lesser admits.

Lesser has a lot riding on the success of the book. It cost him $5,000 to publish -- a significant amount of money for someone whose primary occupation is collecting robots and comic book covers. Before turning to satire, he wrote two coffee-table books on comic and pulp art, and his collections of robots, space toys and pulp posters have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Lesser says of his unusual career, "When I finished my master's degree at the University of Chicago they wanted to get me a job so I could pay off my student loans. I was horrified. 'A job?' I said. 'But I have ideals.'"

Looking around Lesser's apartment, I suspect that he has spent a lot of time alone with his ideals. The only space to move in the cavelike two-bedroom is about six inches on either side of his single bed and desk. The rest of the space is filled floor to ceiling with tin robots, posters and little tableaux he has constructed using plastic action figures.

Next Page: His next project: The "sexual diary" of a 13-year-old girl. But it's not perverted!

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