I was twenty-one years old and taking freshman composition, because I’d gotten a late start in college. I probably wouldn’t have gone to college at all if I hadn’t lost my left arm in a car accident at the age of nineteen. I would have been either a guitarist in a death-metal band or a gunner in the marines. But the accident had changed all of that, and now I was playing catch-up, trying desperately to absorb all that I hadn’t learned in high school, which was a lot.
One of the assignments for the composition class was to read Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and then write our own satirical essay. I wrote a political satire with David Duke as the central figure. For those who don’t remember, Duke was a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who held a seat in the Louisiana State Legislature. When I was in college in 1991, he was close to winning the state’s gubernatorial race. I’d gone to hear him speak on campus, and it had reminded me of footage I’d seen in history class of a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. The crowd of Duke supporters numbered in the thousands. I drank too much cheap vodka and woke up later on the floor of my bedroom with a light blue David Duke sticker on my shirt.
