Free Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? by Robert Coover

Quaker college and a team called the Poets, who drilled it into him every day: “You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing.” Such maxims either blew right by him or else they shot straight to his center, riveting in, becoming part of the very nuts and bolts of his oddly indurate and at the same time transparent mechanism. He was a walking parody of Marx’s definition of consciousness, a cartoon image of the Social Product, probably the only man in recent history with what could be called a naked superego.
    â€œIf he’s a bit demented,” Simon liked to say in his uninspired way, “well, he’s only a mirror image of the insane nation that created him,” but though there was a germ of truth in that, it was a simpleminded truth. Just like Marx’s famous dictum: an overstatement in the heat of historical debate against ossified orthodoxies. Sure, we’re all crazy, and society often as not—as the lowest common denominator of our collective craziness—reinforces our silliest quirks, but between our cells and the informing universe (the dimensions are awesome, and not only in space) there’s a lot of action. Words, like pebbles in a brook, create eddies and murmurings, but they’re not the stream itself. Dogmatic epigrams like Simon’s just dam up the brook and send it flowing elsewhere.
    He came up with a much more interesting remark, quite spontaneously, that night Gus tackled my stove. While cleaning up the debris and putting the stove back together again (we’d got Gus back to playacting again, easing him gradually away from the heat and excitement of football by having him perform from a play he’d apparently written himself called The Little Accident , in which he’d played the part of a football player at Whittier College), I related what I knew by then about his past, the football, the girls, his timetables, the early decisions, and I tossed out a thought that had come to me earlier: “What if that’s what we mean by ‘growing up’? I mean, coming to a decision, suddenly or slowly, consciously or unconsciously, to step out of the explosion at large and accept some kind of structure you can work in, some arbitrary configuration—your own invention or borrowed from others—that allows you to reduce time to something merely functional: a material you can cut up and construct memories with…”
    â€œYou mean, what if ‘growing up’ and ‘going nuts’ are the same thing?” Leo asked.
    â€œWell, if they are,” Simon said, “then—as of right now—they aren’t anymore.”
    This, coming from Simon, so surprised us that we all applauded. Gus assumed, of course, that we were clapping for him—didn’t all the world?—and he lifted both fists above his head and flashed a frozen smile. We got into a heated argument after that about Leo’s desire to use Gus in the coming confrontation in South Chicago, Jesse and I arguing against the cynical manipulation of idiots as a form of exploitation and ultimately dangerous to the cause (what if one of them took over?), Leo, O.B., and Simon arguing variously for the impossibility of any action without “manipulation,” the sheer entertainment value of the thing (this was O.B., who has walked so long at the edge of some brink or other that he’s forgotten to care anymore whether he drops off or not—though reviewed as “cries of protest,” his novels are really about suicide and how to enjoy it), and the paradox that in any revolution those rebelling against the society have been warped by it.
    â€œAnd anyway,” Leo said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to get hurt. Now that U.S. Steel has seen the light, these little assholes like Girdler will have to cave in, too. But we’ve got to stand firm, and we can use Gus here as a kind of symbol.