Island of the cannibal Republicans

Lesser has never been married, although he says he has a lady friend with whom he spends quality time. "Only one word you need to know to keep a woman happy and that is 'yes,'" he says. "Whatever it is: Yes." The topic of women leads him to his next literary project: the secret sexual diary of a 13-year-old girl living at the end of the 21st century. He seems genuinely shocked when I suggest that the idea of a man in his 60s writing such a thing might strike people as perverse, even unsavory. "Oh it's nothing like that," he says. I refrain from asking him what it is like.

Lesser is wearing an oversize Grateful Dead T-shirt and very short shorts from which his skinny legs protrude like pale carrots. He assumes a sphinxlike demeanor atop his Battlestar Galactica bedspread as he traces the Bush administration's policies back to Plymouth Rock. "Puritans," he exclaims. "George Bush is a direct descendant of the Puritans. You see, on one level the compassionate Republican is compassionate, he takes care of his family, he may take care of his community in the limited sense. But Puritans have always believed that God has given them the truth and that the truth is singular. There are believers and heretics and nothing in between. This means that really good guys who pray and clean their fingernails and pay their taxes also want to burn witches. Bush has put more people to death in Texas than any other governor in history. And that's why I -- I mean Thanatos -- had to write this book. It is only through comic exaggeration that you can begin to see the true absurdity."

When Swift published "A Modest Proposal" in 1729 it was an instant sensation. By using the language of the English lords to take the logic of oppression to its illogical extreme, Swift demonstrated the bankruptcy of the system as well as highlighting the desperate plight of the Irish. But Swift was already an influential writer and politician, and also a genius. There is little chance that "The Compassionate Republican's Guide to Mastering the Art of Human Cookery" will show the Bush administration the error of its ways, despite its recipes.

But who can predict what effect Lesser, and the countless other New Yorkers who plan to protest, will have on the visiting Republicans? After all, convention officials and city authorities can prepare for banners hung from scaffolding, for screaming protesters and even for the possibility of terrorism. But they can't prepare for New Yorkers. They can't prepare for Robert Lesser, someone who should have been squashed years ago by Adam Smith's invisible hand of commerce but who has popped up laughing. Someone who says proudly: "I got a whole closet full of unpublished manuscripts. Yes, I'm one of those types."

I leave Lesser to his robots and manuscripts and find myself blinking in the brightness of a New York afternoon. What will the Puritans make of New York -- of eight million people each going in different directions? Maybe the city itself is the most effective challenge to the idea of singular truth. As I walk down Lexington Avenue, the words of another New Yorker come to mind. "Do I contradict myself?" Walt Whitman asked in "Song of Myself." "Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

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