“A PERCEPTION is a terrible thing to waste” is the motto of the Robert Torricelli College of Liberal Artifice, where students major in time-warping so they can give eyewitness accounts of humanity’s long history of bigotry without being constrained by chronological realities.
The Torricelli method does not involve stretching the truth, merely stretching one’s mortal coil over eternity and walking across it without a net. The Great Torricelli, who is 46, recently demonstrated his technique when he recalled the pain and humiliation he felt in 1951 when, having just progressed from being a gleam in his father’s eye to being a mass of unviable tissue, he watched the Senate hearings on organized crime and heard ethnic slurs against Italians. “It is among the first memories I have of government of the United States, and probably the first hearing of the United States Senate I ever witnessed,” he said. “It was only on a flickering television screen, but I will never forget it, and even if I tried, my family would never allow me.”
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