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    The Great Dysmorphia
    The Great Dysmorphia
    The Great Dysmorphia
    Ebook71 pages1 hour

    The Great Dysmorphia

    By Stephen Markley

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    About this ebook

    Norman Mailer. Hunter S. Thompson. David Foster Wallace.

    All Stephen Markley ever wanted was a reason to use their names in a book blurb.

    In November 2011, the nascent author and journalist attended a Republican presidential primary debate in Rochester, Michigan, wishing to see first-hand one of the most outlandish, jaw-dropping, eye-brow-raising primaries in American political history. The author of “Publish This Book” took his seat in the media filing center, set up his laptop, and uncapped the complimentary tin of M&Ms. Then he ate a bunch of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

    After that, things — obviously — got weird.

    From a verbal sparring match with the chaste being that resides behind Rick Santorum’s sail-shaped nose to an encounter with bodyguards the size of Lone Star State cattle to a sweat-streaked, hair-tearing freak-out in a gymnasium shower stall, his experience inside the carnival theater of Election 2012’s most memorable presidential debate will make you laugh, cry, dream, and despair. What Markley brought back from that debate is an essay not only about a political party and a presidential election but an entire rotten generation of policy perfidy and economic magical thinking — a report from an ideological faction with a demonstrated disconnect from reality that even Gore Vidal could not begin to appreciate. You know, unless he was on shrooms.

    A perfect storm of youth and passion, recklessness and imagination, “The Great Dysmorphia” will take its place in the annals of unconventional, unbridled, uncensored, totally f***ing bizarre American campaign literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateAug 16, 2012
    ISBN9781623096533
    The Great Dysmorphia
    Author

    Stephen Markley

    Stephen Markley is the acclaimed author of Ohio, which NPR called a “masterpiece.” A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Markley’s other books include the memoir Publish This Book and the travelogue Tales of Iceland.

    Read more from Stephen Markley

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      Book preview

      The Great Dysmorphia - Stephen Markley

      bitches

      I pride myself on being one of the few people in the country (likely the only one, but I don’t want to make assumptions) who has stood in front of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and tried to make sense of his particular brand of resentment and victimization politics while sweating waterfalls from all the psilocybin he — me, not Santorum — has eaten. As I tried to scribble his responses on my notepad and make sense of his views on education, which were as acutely loathsome to me as just about everything else Santorum believes, I kept missing parts because I couldn’t take my eyes off the grotesque amounts of makeup they put on these guys for debates.

      It doesn’t operate as an effective market, said the last candidate standing on the post-debate spin zone floor.

      But don’t basic economics tell us over and over again that investing in education is a fool-proof way to encourage growth? That and, like, investing in infrastructure. I was perturbed by the number of times I inserted like into sentences when talking to a presidential candidate.

      That’s the liberal solution, said Santorum. Throw money at it —

      But what about, like, the GI Bill or —

      Throw money at it, and it’ll just go away. Well, guess what: The American people are sick of the government taking their money to throw away on big programs.

      One might quibble that loaning money to young people for college or investing in public universities could be described as throwing it away, but my focus had briefly drifted from the argument at hand to a sociological epiphany about this man: The frustrated, erratic movements of his hands, the weak chin drooping into a turkey gullet, the beak of a nose most resembling a ship’s sail or some kind of eroded prehistoric rock formation from Arches National Park, his Hair Cuttery styling that’s a perfect replica of a College Republican circa 1967 (at which point even they had given up battling contraception), the openly condescending nasal exhortations, the sweater vest that he didn’t wear now but would soon become his trademark. Rick Santorum was a high school junior varsity basketball coach from a 15,000-resident Midwestern town. The American people were his 16-year-old kids sitting on the locker room benches at halftime, down by 14 points, as he patiently tried to explain why Satan enjoys and encourages their failure to box out and rebound. I saw all this as clear as day: Santorum, coach of the Muskingam Muskrats or Terranceville Titans, had somehow managed to step through a wormhole and come out in another universe as a presidential contender.

      I blinked because psilocybin makes you blink to get the weird out of your brain.

      ***

      It happened like this: I procured a media pass to the November 10, 2011, Republican presidential debate at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., mostly because I wanted a front-row seat to at least one of these reality-show spectacles during the weirdest, wildest, most eyebrow-raising primary race in modern American history. I’d also recently bought some psychedelic mushrooms because I am friends with that kind of element. The buddy who’d sold them to me had asked me how many I needed.

      Two, I texted him.

      You should really get 3, he texted back.

      Good idea. Can’t believe I didn’t think of that, I replied.

      So I ended up with an extra one and decided to bring it with me from Chicago to eat just before I started covering the presidential debate.

      [Non-Hallucinatory, Post-Narrative Aside #1: It’s helpful to explain the chemistry here so as to better understand how psychedelic drugs fracture and reanimate your mind and why this is both useful and awesome. Mushrooms contain psilocybin, which, once inside the body, is converted into the pharmacologically active compound psilocin in what the science people call a dephosphorylation reaction. The psilocin is then oxidized by the enzyme hydroxyindole oxidase, producing a funny little compound called ortho-quinone. This in turn undergoes an electron transfer, creating wacky biochemical effects upon the central nervous system. Shrooms are much milder than their cousin LSD and tend to last only three to eight hours rather than 36 or whatever the sweet merciful fuck happened when I visited my sister in Brighton. Effects differ for each individual, but most people experience visual perception alterations, especially when it comes to lighting, colors, or images that can warp or shift in unexpected ways. More importantly, psilocybin acts upon your emotional and/or spiritual perception. A government-funded double-blind John Hopkins study of 36 college-educated adults with no history of drug use found that 79% reported increased well-being and happiness two months after ingestion with symptoms of depression or anxiety in complete retreat. Many in the field think that psilocybin will one day be regularly prescribed to treat depression. Personally, I feel as though its greater attribute is it allows you to see around bullshit. The veil of the world is peeled back momentarily, and you understand things in a way you feel like you should always understand them but don’t because for some reason we condition our consciousnesses to primarily recognize and engage bullshit. Now you can understand why a Republican debate would be the perfect place to get down on this.]

      Covering is kind of a stretch, though, since no editor had assigned this to me and I was just using my credentials as a columnist for

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