Chuck Grassley’s Postmodern Tweet-Lit Phenom: ‘Assume Deer Dead’

Senator Charles “Chuck" “I now h v an iphone" Grassley (R-Xanadu) just loves him someTwitter. And he tweets with all the Nrg a man can bring to the task. But a true artist knows that he must grow. He must test his limits. There is a limit (140 gigawatts) to just how many insanely cryptic abbreviations a creator can get away with before it all becomes stale, even, dare we say it, banal. So rather than yet another story of taking a “pixtur" with “3 SixPak voleybal(jay'steam)," the man is branching out. He's dabbled in engineering. He's experimented with observational comedy. And now, he is exploring the frontiers of avant-garde narrative:  

“Assume Deer Dead." It's practically a Chuck Palahniuk novel all in itself. It is awesome and manly and essentialist, man battling for his place in the universe, with success, in darkness. It is an “Easy Rider" for today. It is an epic in the making — we're thinking Paul Verhoeven should direct. If this tweet has not been optioned and a screenplay greenlit by the end of the weekend, then Hollywood truly is the stinking cesspit of creative imbecility that John Nolte says it is.

It is not merely one senator's speculation about the outcome of an encounter between car and beast. Nay: It is literature itself:

• Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Senator Carlos Hierbalia was to remember that distant evening when he and Federico hit a deer. He assumed the deer had died. The internet was so recent that many things lacked hashtags, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

• We were just outside of Dyersville on the edge of the prairie when the deer died. I remember saying something like “I think that deer's dead; maybe you should drive…." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge deer, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Des Moines. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

• It was neither déjà vu, presque vu nor jamais vu. It was possible that none of what the Senator thought had taken place, really had taken place, that he was dealing with an aberration of memory rather than of perception, that he never really had thought he had seen what he now thought he once did think he had seen, that his impression now that he once had thought so was merely the illusion of and illusion, and that he was only now imagining that he had ever once assumed he had seen a naked deer sitting in a tree at the cemetery.

• Along twenty Iowa hiways, The only moving thing Was the flying carcass of a deer.

• If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where Fred and I hit the deer, and how I fixed the lousy fender, and how fast we were going that night, and all that Bambi kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

• As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a deceased ungulate.

• The deer was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The account of his death was Tweeted by the hand that held the steering-wheel. Grassley Tweeted it: and Grassley's name was good in the Senate, for anything he chose to put his hand to. The old deer was as dead as a door-nail.

• Listn: Sen. Grassley hz come unstck in time. Assumes deer dead. So it goz.

 
  This is just to say

I hit the deer that was

grazing

too close to the side

of the road

and which

you were probably

hoping

would gambol through

the woods

Forgive me

It was incredible

So loud

and so thumpy

• Grassley believed in the “Follow" button, the digital future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will drive faster, pull out our fender farther…. And one fine morning – So we beat on, deer against the traffic, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

[ Twitter/ #assumedeerdead ]