Banned from Public Radio
To my Menckens:
H. L., the greatest American newspaperman of the twentieth century, who revealed the secrets of Clintonism more than fifty years ago: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it . . . good and hard.”
And my eldest son, Mencken Powell Graham, who showed up just in time to see all the fun.
This book simply would not have been possible without the help of:
Amy, John, Noel, Stephanie, Margaret and the other publishers and editors who have shown tremendously poor judgment by publishing my work;
Randall, who gave me my first job in talk radio and has been trying unsuccessfully to get me to shut up ever since;
Colin at Warner Books, who, along with Richard, Mary, Pete, Janna, Oran, and (especially) J. Mark, offered timely advice on the contents herein;
John, my fellow curmudgeon, who got this whole mess started with the seemingly innocent comment “Hey, you ever thought about writing a book?”;
But most of all, my wife, Jennifer, aka “the Warden,” a wonderful mother, a skilled copyeditor, an outstanding grammarian, and one hot [deleted on final edit].
This book is entirely their fault. Like the president, I accept no responsibility whatsoever.
God, I’m going to miss him.
I, Michael Graham, a southern-born, right-wing, pro-life, school-choice, Second Amendment, abstinence-based, laissez-faire, Laffer-curve, let-them-eat-cake Reagan Republican of the first order, would be willing to suspend the Constitution just to keep Bill Clinton around.
In 1992, when Clinton and his saxophone burst on the American scene, I proudly cast my vote against him. Now that the Clinton show is tentatively scheduled to close January 20, 2001 (with this guy, you never know), I can hardly bear to see him go.
For starters, he’s not Al Gore. Al Gore—who combines the politics of Ralph Nader with the ethics of Richard Nixon—has all the venal ambition and grating self-righteousness of Bill Clinton, but none of the offsetting charm.
Watching Al Gore campaign for president is like watching a teenage boy trying to get laid: He’s working so hard, and he wants it so bad, but you’re not sure anybody’s going to enjoy it much if he actually gets the chance.
With President Clinton, it’s the opposite: You know you’re going to enjoy it; you’re just not sure you should.
I’ve enjoyed the Clinton presidency thoroughly, and for so many different reasons. It’s been great for me economically, and I don’t mean that in the Clinton “I single-handedly rescued the economy from Ronald Reagan’s eight straight years of economic growth” sense of the phrase. I literally owe my career (such as it is) as a former political operative and current columnist and radio talk show host to the Clinton administration. And I am confident there are thousands of other Americans (Internet gossips, IRS investigators, chastity belt manufacturers) who can say the same thing.
What better time to be in the business of political conversation than when the hottest media star in the nation lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? How lucky am I to have a president who turns me into a successful humorist every time I merely quote him accurately?
And Bill Clinton single-handedly made me a radio talk show host. My first night on the air was the same night the Washington Post broke the Monica story.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa. . . .
Before Bill Clinton, talk show hosts spent hours trying to find ways to make the inner workings of democracy interesting to the average American. My first week in talk radio, my listeners and I spent hours trying to find polite ways to describe what Monica Lewinsky was doing under the president’s desk (first runner-up, “face time”; winner, “hailing the little chief”).
Bill Clinton forever answered the question “How do you get Americans engaged in their political system?” Answer: Drop your pants!
My fellow conservatives and I have had a great time pounding the president over his cigar-handling antics. But I don’t think my fellow conservatives fully appreciate how much Bill Clinton has done for our cause.
I remember a conversation back in the Reagan years, when I was living in New York City. I was talking to a moderate NYC Democrat (he was a Marxist) about why I distrusted government. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely! The government that governs best governs least! Fight the power!”
He was unimpressed. “Government isn’t any worse than big business or anyone else,” he insisted. “I’ve never seen politicians act as corrupt or selfish or power-hungry as you keep saying they do.”
I hope he’s been paying attention.
We conservatives should thank Bill Clinton for demonstrating in real life the kind of shameless, petty abuses of power that before we could only describe. Never again will mainstream Americans be able to say, “No president would ever do that!” Think about it: Can you imagine anything, literally anything, that this president would not do for the sake of his own political success?
I have written, in print and for broad publication, that if it would help him achieve his political ends, Bill Clinton would announce tomorrow that he is a lesbian.
I further maintain that 43 percent of the American voting public would believe him.
In the past, I might have written columns warning of a president’s theoretical use of the FBI and the IRS to pursue his enemies, or a parody of a president so desperate for campaign funds that he invited agents of Communist China over for tea, or a tribute to George Orwell suggesting that some politicians might not be sure of the definition of the word is.
Before President Clinton, all this would have been comedy. Today, it is history.
One last, personal note: Bill Clinton has had a real impact on my marriage. One can only speculate how many husbands of Arkansas state employees can make that same claim.
Like most men in their thirties, I’ve cavalierly spouted the nostrum “All men are pigs.” And for the most part, we are. But there is, deep inside us, some notion of—for lack of a better phrase—pig pride.
Do I know guys who’ve engaged in extramarital knee grabbing? Do I know bosses who give their attractive female assistants a few laps around the desk whenever possible? Of course. I know men like these because I know men.
But part of that view of manhood is the attendant sense of shame. The guys who break their vows and get caught understand that they are the bad guys. They’re ashamed of themselves, ashamed of what they’ve done and, most of all, ashamed of shaming their families.
If I were President Clinton and I had been caught playing Hide the Cuban with the office help—added to all the other lecheries now on the public record—there would have been no Starr investigation or impeachment proceedings or eye-rolling defenses by Jim Carville.
I would have been gone. Forget the law, as Monica’s ex-attorney might say. I would not have had the ego and arrogance to shame my family and show up for work the next day.
I know people make mistakes, and I am certainly not perfect. Knowing the way life goes, I fully anticipate reading the headline “South Carolina Commentator Caught with Goat in Cheap Motel” sometime after the publication of this book.
But I can say with all honesty that I have a deeper sense of the value of commitment and a clearer understanding of the importance of my family thanks to Bill Clinton. Name another politician you can say that about.
After eight years of Bill Clinton, the credibility of government is lower, my personal income is higher and my family is stronger than ever. Plus, I know seventeen new euphemisms for oral sex.
Damn, I am going to miss this guy.
January 1994
One year ago, the same week William Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as head of our national family, I became a father. I’m not sure which one of us was more nervous, but there were probably more pictures taken of me than of him that week.
While the president stood in the chilling January wind and delivered his inaugural address, I paced across a cold hospital floor with my newly delivered son, Mencken. As the president prayed for wisdom and strength to lead our nation, I prayed, too . . . prayed I wouldn’t drop him, that the odor seeping from his diaper was just gas, that he wouldn’t grow up to appear on a TV talk show (“Psycho killers and the parents who raise them—next on Jerry Springer”).
As is the case with President Clinton, most of the credit for my achievement must go to the dogged determination of my wife, who was promoting my rise to fatherhood by dumping her birth control products down the toilet while I wasn’t looking.
Behind every great man . . .
Also like the president, I was an unlikely nominee for my new leadership position. I had no previous experience, and I was hardly the consensus candidate of my wife’s family. Then there was the character issue. I have none. I am notoriously irresponsible, immature and negligent. I once had a Chia Pet taken into protective custody by the SPCA.
Add to that my lifelong dislike of children. I have always found their sounds, their voices, their very presence unbearable. Like W. C. Fields, I have long been admired for my hatred of dogs and babies: “Children,” I used to note, “should be steamed, not heard. And served with drawn butter.”
Were it not for my innate Bobbittophobia, I would have had a vasectomy long ago.
A poll of friends and family would have put the odds of my becoming a father about the same as those of Michael Jackson being named spokesman for Underoos. Or of an unknown Arkansas politico with an aversion to military service and a taste for coed slumber parties becoming commander in chief.
Nevertheless, in our first year, President Clinton and I approached the daunting tasks at hand with enthusiasm, if not competence. While the White House struggled to put together a cabinet, I discovered I had an ex officio child-rearing “kitchen cabinet” consisting of every female relative and/or co-worker my wife has ever known. While the president was distancing himself from long-forgotten fiascos such as Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, I was trying to figure out how to get their tax-free nannies to move to South Carolina.
And as the president signed the Family Leave Bill, guaranteeing all loving parents the right to stay home with the little one, my wife was screaming, “If you think I’m staying trapped in this house with that twenty-decibel drool machine, you’re out of your mind!”
As the president’s poll numbers dropped, so did my confidence. Maybe I wasn’t the right man for the job. With household deficits rising due to the sudden surge in spending by the Department of Diapers and Bizarre Rash Ointments, I barely managed to push through my own budget proposal. Victory was ensured only after a hefty increase in the Anyone Who Has Worn the Same Smock for Nine Months Deserves All the New Clothes She Wants Fund.
But we stumbled forward, Clinton and me. Through the hot summer and the fading fall, the president and I refused to quit. Sure, there were embarrassing moments for both of us—fortunately, I don’t have Janet “Fireball” Reno to answer for.
President Clinton pushed past Ross Perot to get NAFTA, and I got Mencken to sleep through the night, proving we could both effectively handle baldish, goofy-looking whiners with big ears. Then came GATT and big fourth-quarter growth numbers and drinking from a cup and my first solo baby bath (no fatalities), and at the end of year one, it looks like things are turning around.
Are they? Who knows? The economy and children are both very resilient. It could be that they would flourish with or without our guidance. They are also very fickle, and the healthy growth of a well-fed youngster can quickly turn into the pitiful cry of a croupy child. We can only hope for the best.
So happy birthday, Mencken Graham, and congratulations on your first year, Mr. President. I was with you all the way.
Oh, and have you heard about the terrible twos?
February 1996
In a few days, I will be as old as Jesus.
Our Lord and Savior survived thirty-three years on this accursed sphere before the locals finally did him in (an ever-present reminder of why I oppose the death penalty, by the way). And this week I will turn thirty-three, which I’ve just discovered is the Age.
There is, I believe, for each of us, the one birthday we truly dread. It is the year by which we should have arrived, the date after which there can be no beginnings. It is a boundary marked in our biological clocks, the beginning of the end.
According to Hallmark card mythology, the c’est fini season is forty. You see it almost every day in the paper. The gang at the office chips in for a surprise ad on your fortieth birthday. You wake up in a foul mood, open the sports section and there’s a quarter-page print of your high school yearbook photo—an Opie look-alike with “Lordy, lordy, look who’s forty!” in large type underneath.
If any of my so-called friends ever did this to me, by the way, I’d give them a thorough prostate exam with the Sunday Parade section.
What’s interesting is how most of the people I know who’ve hit forty seem to have taken it in stride. Most of them tell me that the thirtieth birthday was tougher, or that sixty looks rough. The forties actually get pretty good reviews from survivors, some of whom even say life begins there. H. L. Mencken said, “The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.”
I can hardly wait.
Forty has gotten bad press because it serves as the portal of middle age, when you’ve supposedly reached the apogee of your lifeline and have fewer miles out your windshield than in your rearview mirror.
But since when is forty middle age? How many people do you know who make it to eighty? Unless your last name is Thurmond, middle age hits most of us in our mid- to late thirties . . . which means it’s sneaking up on me right now.
But I don’t see a connection between the Age and the end. Indeed, I’ve known people who have hit the Age as old as sixty and as young as sixteen. It’s not death we fear—it’s inconsequence. The bad year is the year when you believe you should have arrived but didn’t.
See, I have a notion in the cramped closets of my psyche that by the age of thirty-three, a young man (or woman) should have done something significant: climbed a mountain, made a million, died on a cross for the sins of the world.
Nothing major, just something to solidify one’s career track.
For me, it’s thirty-three. But I’ve heard college students sit at a bar and berate themselves: “I’m twenty-one, and what have I done with my life?” Telling them the answer (they drank beer, partied and learned all the lyrics to the Brady Bunch theme song) doesn’t seem to help. Get out the Geritol; it’s already too late.
As the dreaded day drifts closer, so do my own questions. What have I accomplished? Have I finally grown up? How did I turn out this way, and whom can I sue?
In fact, I’ve actually done one of the things I swore I would do before thirty-three: I wrote a book. Interestingly, it didn’t happen until late last year, just under the wire. I’ve wondered if the pressure of my self-programmed deadline helped me to finally cut through the psychobabble and get it done. If so, then perhaps this Day of Doom isn’t such a bad thing.
But I still dread it. This is the first time since I got rid of my fake ID from high school that I’ve been an age that I didn’t want other people to know. I’m old enough now for my age to begin morphing in my mind from a specific numeral to a euphemistic range—the early thirties, or thirty-something. It is the beginning of self-deception. It is the beginning of the end.
My best friend in high school once told me that the saddest day of his life was graduation. We went to a small rural school where he was a big fish in the small redneck pond. The supply of non-chew-consuming males was unusually small, which artificially inflated his market price among his female peers. All through high school, my friend was popular, admired and as close to the top of the social food chain as he was likely to get. And he knew it.
And, he now admits, his life has never crested as high since. He’s not miserable; in fact, he’s got a nice life—good job, an attractive wife, some kids. He’s doing fine, really.
Just don’t play Springsteen’s “Glory Days” around him unless you’ve got a box of Kleenex and a six-pack.
As for my own encounter with the Age, well, I can’t imagine sitting around next week going, “Oh, if only I were thirty-two again.” I assume I’ll swim through this silly, emotional eddy and get on with life. Okay, so I haven’t composed an opera or been found in flagrante delicto with the Swedish bikini team. Chances are my birthday will never be a recognized state holiday. But hey—I can handle it. I’m a big boy.
Now, where did I put that Springsteen tape?
March 1996
From the news wires: A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled Monday against a woman who protested when local authorities seized a car owned by her and her husband after he had sex in it with a prostitute.
Tina Bennis argued that confiscation of the 1977 Pontiac under a Michigan nuisance abatement law violated her constitutional right to due process and represented an unconstitutional taking of her property. But the high court, in a 5–4 opinion by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, upheld the forfeiture as constitutional.
* * *
It must have been the phone call from hell.
“Tina? Tina, honey, it’s me. . . . Yeah, I’m down at the police station—no, no, I’m okay, uh, well . . . I’m kind of under arrest. . . . What for? Um, well, for soliciting a hooker . . . Honey! Honey, calm down.
“It’s all just a misunderstanding, I swear. I pulled over to give a young lady some directions and she got in our car to look at a map and, um, her contact lens popped out and landed on my zipper and, well, naturally she didn’t want it to get all dried out, so she picked it up with her tongue. . . .
“Honey, please stop screaming. We can talk about this later. Just come pick me up. Whaddaya mean, I have the car? Oh, yeah. Our car. Honey, you’re not going to believe this. . . .”
Tina Bennis has the dubious distinction of going down in history (unlike her husband’s new friend, who did so in a Pontiac) with her name on a Supreme Court case that I believe will long be referenced in American law schools. Like Roe, Plessy and Dred Scott, Bennis’ name will be forever linked to a really stupid Supreme Court decision.
Now, stupid conclusions by the U.S. Supreme Court are nothing new. These are the same bozos who declared the death penalty unconstitutional despite the fact that capital punishment is specifically mentioned in the Constitution itself.
The Supreme Court is in the habit of making up the law as it goes along, and most of its off-the-cuff lawmaking you should, as a good American, feel free to ignore. But this time you need to pay attention.
You should pay particular attention if you are a casual drug user, occasional overdrinker or a client of your neighborhood “sex professionals” (as they are known in federally funded research studies). More and more law enforcement agencies want to take away your stuff if you are caught being naughty in any of the aforementioned manners, and the Supreme Court of the United States says it’s fine with them.
Indeed, you don’t even have to be a crook. You just have to let someone naughty use your car or crash on your couch, and you, too, could soon see your home auctioned off to the local sheriff.
That’s what happened to Bennis. She and her husband bought a car together for $600. He later used that car without her knowledge to cruise for “pretty women”—the cash-in-advance kind. She didn’t participate in the crime, but she lost her only means of transportation because she recklessly allowed her husband to drive under the influence of testosterone.
Knowing she would likely never get her car back, all Bennis asked for was her share of the confiscated value: $300. Sounds reasonable. After all, what did she do wrong, other than marry a loser?
Sorry, Tina, says the Supreme Court. Tough luck. Hasta la vista, baby. Tina’s psychic powers should have revealed that her husband had something burning a hole in his pocket besides that twenty bucks, and she should have stopped him. Because she didn’t, Tina Bennis is taking the bus.
What does this mean for you, dear reader? Let’s say an old high school buddy comes through town and spends the night at your house. He’s upstairs smokin’ a doobie, and the cops kick in the door. Find a warm grate, pal; you’re on the street.
I’m deadly serious. The Supreme Court has ruled that the state can confiscate your property anytime—without due process—if your stuff is used in a crime. If drugs are involved, they don’t even have to prove an actual crime! They can seize property suspected of being used in a drug crime, then force you to come to court and prove that it wasn’t.
I have no personal experience with illicit drugs whatsoever (I snorted some Midol once; not much of a buzz, but once a month I have a flashback) and have no sympathy for the hemp crowd. But if I have to choose between a society overrun by horny, stoned street cruisers or nine jack-booted justices ready to seize my property if I eat a poppy seed bagel, I’ll take the passionate potheads. They are less of a risk to my liberty.
And if I’m ever driving through Detroit, Tina Bennis can always get a lift from me. She tried to do us all a favor by taking this case to the Supreme Court to protect us from dumb cops and dumber laws. Unfortunately, as Lenny Bruce observed, “in the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.”
April 1996
I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
—Groucho Marx
As a hot-blooded evangelical teenager in the South, I grew up hating Catholics.
Interestingly, now that I am an infidel condemned to eternal damnation, I find that I hold the Catholic Church in high regard. Being the preferred faith of a practicing social Darwinist may not spin the Pope’s beanie, but it is true nevertheless.
Of the many elements of Catholicism I admire (a clergy that can drink me under the table being but one), I am particularly enamored with its advocacy of discrimination.
I realize that in the Age of Clinton, the only remaining evil is the sin of calling one’s neighbor a sinner. I further acknowledge that the Catholic Church is hardly alone among organized religions in condemning heretics such as myself to an eternity in Satan’s crockpot.
But it is only Catholicism that is under siege by sinners demanding to be let in.
Hardly a week goes by without some homosexual group flinging condoms at the neighborhood cathedral because the Church won’t let Larry, Darryl and Darryl get married. Then there is the annual media hoohaw when some loose-cannon former bishop ordains a married priest, or a female priest, or even priests married to fellow priests—all of whom insist that they are, in fact, good Catholics.
The most recent action is in Italy, where the Vatican is actively opposing gay rights legislation in upcoming elections.
“It’s anti-gay racism pure and simple,” said Franco Grillini, an Italian homosexual activist and my nominee for this year’s Dan Quayle Word Master Award. What’s next—anti-vegetarian sexism?
The papists, much to their credit, are unmoved. Despite public pressure, they maintain that homosexuality is a sin. Amid whining from Shannon Faulkner wanna-bes, they forbid female priests and continue their single-gender policies. In short, with the raging winds of egalitarianism and political correctness buffeting it from all sides, the Catholic Church calmly states that it is right and we are wrong. Period.
Now, that’s what I call a religion.
Are they right? Who knows. The point is that they truly believe what they preach and, to their credit, act like it. Who wants some weaselly religion where the rules are made up from week to week based on public opinion polls, where people sit around deciding what’s right and wrong based on what feels good?
That’s not a church. That’s the Democratic National Committee.
The entire theory of metaphysics is that there is knowledge beyond our physical senses. If you truly believe this, then no amount of science or reasoning can (or should) sway you in the least. True believers look down upon the protesting heathens and laugh.
Laughing aside, that’s what’s happening right now in Nebraska. A Roman Catholic bishop there is giving his members until May 15 to drop their memberships in groups such as Planned Parenthood, which openly promotes abortion, and the Hemlock Society, a proponent of euthanasia.
Folks, we’re not talking about sneaking a sloppy joe on Good Friday—these are pretty big issues. Action by the Church seems hardly a surprise.
But it is, especially to Randy Moody, a Catholic who serves on the board of Planned Parenthood of Lincoln, Nebraska. “I challenge them to excommunicate me,” he said. “This may end up in some court if they would proceed to do that.”
Yeah! What right does the church have to tell you how to live your life? Who does the Pope think he is, anyway?
To which court Moody might petition remains unknown. Indeed, the question illuminates the core issue that Catholic protesters seem unable to grasp. There is no court. It’s God. It’s the Bible. That’s the deal. There is no ambiguity in the Holy Scriptures on cheatin,’ stealin’ or two-man interior decoratin.’ If you don’t like the Catholic deal, then try another one, Hindu or Mormon or Amway.
Trust me, no matter how bizarre your thinking or irrational your beliefs, there is someone out there with an offering plate and a cable TV show who will welcome you with open arms.
The whole notion of protesting, suing and assaulting your own religion is inherently nonsensical. If you don’t agree with massive chunks of Catholic doctrine, why would you want to be Catholic? If you are pro-abortion and pro-suicide, if you want women clergy and think homosexuality is just fine with the Big Man (Person) upstairs, if you don’t think the Bible is true and don’t like the Pope’s new album, then why not just leave? Just turn Methodist or join the National Organization for Women and get on with your life!
One day the lawyers will figure out some way to force the Catholic Church to abide by the same admissions standards currently used at public universities. When that day comes, the pews will be awash in barely literate (but nonjudgmental) parishioners all hoping St. Peter grades on the curve. But until then, this southern boy is cheering for the Whore of Babylon all the way.
January 1996
Robert “Bubba” Walenski has long been one of the most popular teachers at Dennis-Yarmouth (Massachusetts) Regional High School.
Bubba is “a freewheeling teacher who let students call him by his first name and taught poetry with rock music,” according to the Associated Press. Locals describe him as “a typical sixties prodigy” and “a nice guy that all the kids liked.” Indeed, students literally line up for his Musical Poetry class to study lyrics by rock stars such as Jim Morrison.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: Bubba Walenski makes dirty movies, too.
About a hundred of them in his career as a pornographer, according to the Boston Globe. Then again, what do you expect from the one guy in the state of Massachusetts whose nickname is “Bubba”?
I used the word career, but porn was merely an avocation. Bubba’s true life’s work is the twenty years he’s spent as a high school English teacher.
The skin flicks, well, they’re just to pump up his income. Teachers often work second jobs in the summer, and as an instructor of literature, it makes perfect sense for Bubba to be drawn to the arts. That his films appear on video store shelves next to Nancy and Her Naughty Nurses or On Golden Blonde is merely a sign of our society’s puritan and parochial attitude toward the avant-garde.
If you could only see things from Bubba’s angle—that angle being (in one video, at least) from the vantage point of a woman’s buttocks as Walenski sucked her toes and commented wryly, “Boys will be boys!” Bubba would know. He hangs out with them at a public school every day.
As you might expect, Bubba—the literary pioneer that he is—has suffered for his art. When a local reporter sniffed out his cinematic sideline, Bubba was promptly suspended from his teaching job by the school superintendent.
This punitive action sparked an equal and opposite reaction from the usual suspects. The teachers’ union (which would demand Charles Manson’s release if he had tenure) called Walenski “a very well-respected member of our profession.” A former student told the local papers, “I don’t think they should fire him. . . . I don’t think he was a pervert.”
What the minimum pervert requirements might be in Massachusetts, I can’t say, but producing a hundred porno videos in your spare time is going to raise a few eyebrows, even in Barney Frank country. The school administration thinks teachers ought to set some kind of example and claims that educators should uphold some vague set of standards. Even a few parents were less than enthusiastic about their daughters spending an hour a day in close quarters with “butt-rubbin’ Bubba.”
However muddled the community reaction, the students of Dennis-Yarmouth High spoke clearly, loudly and with one voice: “Bring back Bubba!” Signs to this effect hung from trees and school buildings as students protested his dismissal. Young people packed a news conference to show their support and bemoan the small-minded notion that Bubba displayed “conduct unbecoming a teacher.”
“We love Bubba!” the students shouted. One high school girl told reporters: “It’s all crazy. It’s really hard for kids to find teachers they like.”
She has a point. I’ve never met Bubba Walenski, but I bet he is the most popular educator in the entire state of Massachusetts. And why wouldn’t he be? A hippie high school teacher who goes by “Bubba,” plays rock music in class and makes porno movies? This guy is a sophomore’s dream come true!
It’s always been this way. There are those teachers who “make learning fun,” who leave their Shakespeare texts unread and rent the Kenneth Branagh video instead. They eschew lectures, turning their classes into rap sessions à la Oprah Winfrey or, if possible, Jerry Springer. These are the teachers students love.
Then there are those instructors who insist that their students actually learn. These are the teachers who leave the television off, who refuse to spend any class time at all on the lyric development of Snoop Doggy Dogg.
They regularly find rotten eggs in their desk drawers.
Firing Bubba from his teaching job because of how he spends his weekends may be unconstitutional, but he should be fired nonetheless. There is no doubt that he is guilty of conduct unbecoming a teacher.
In a nation where high-schoolers think logarithms are used in reggae music and believe the Vietnam War was ended by protestors led by Tom Cruise, any teacher who wastes class time on the nuances of “Light My Fire” should be summarily dismissed. Any teacher who is popular with his students should be thoroughly investigated.
If they are male, over forty and have a ponytail, they should be shot on sight.
No one in America wants to admit this, but learning is hard. It is boring. It is tedious. Being competent is the reward, and learning is the investment. Teachers who make teaching fun are as useful as preachers who make hell happy or surgeons who make stitches loose.
Feminist sociologists claim that pornography is inherently damaging to society. But if Bubba Walenski must be loved by someone, I would prefer it be by paid professionals on camera, not public-school kids in the classroom. He’ll do less damage to society that way.
February 1996
My grandfather is an FDR, JFK, AFL-CIO, yellow-dog Democrat. His politics were born in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, hardened under fire on the battlefields of France and set in stone during the postwar labor movement.
And he likes Pat Buchanan.
My grandfather agrees with Pat on all the big stuff. A longtime union activist in southern California, he thinks we make it too easy to import foreign goods and export American jobs. He thinks it’s ridiculous that America can’t control its own borders, and while living in Los Angeles, he saw firsthand the real-life effects of illegal immigration on wages, taxes and crime. On social issues, Grandpa is less doctrinaire than Patrick J., but the idea that he—an Okie who fought West Coast bigotry as a youth—would have to stand in a quota line to get a job is unthinkable.
Oh, there’s much about Pat Buchanan he doesn’t like, particularly the part where Pat calls himself a Republican (a word my grandfather rarely utters unless preceded by a prayerful invocation of God’s damnation). But even though his motto is “Better RIP than GOP,” my grandfather believes Pat Buchanan has some worthwhile ideas. Buchanan is addressing issues my grandpa cares about; he’s promoting a vision of America my grandfather can understand and, in many cases, support.
Imagine my grandfather’s surprise to discover he has become a Nazi.
Now, my grandpa knows Nazis. He saw quite a few of them in World War II—mostly down the barrel of a rifle. Listening to the Chernobylic reaction to Pat Buchanan coming from the media mainstream, Grandpa has begun to wonder if the panzers aren’t pushing toward our borders at this very minute.
In the past two weeks, Pat Buchanan has been called every insulting label I’ve ever heard used to describe a politician: Hitler, racist, sexist, fascist, anarchist, and—believe it or not—liberal. The editorial page panic is so complete that a newspaper labeling him “Mussolini made in America” seemed to be softening its position. Columnists are rolling through a veritable right-wing Roget’s of famous dictators, from “Patrick Pinochet” to “the Idi Amin of the American right.”
These labels—hilarious in their hysteria but angering in their arrogance—are applied with equal venom by Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. Even limp-wristed commentators who once lacked the courage to denounce Louis Farrakhan have suddenly grown cultural cojones. They’ve filled their public comments with language violent enough to start a fistfight at an Amish wedding.
Watching, reading and listening is my grandfather.
He listens as Buchanan’s immigration policy is described as “fascist,” and wonders why. After all, Pat Buchanan opposes illegal immigration (do his detractors support it?) and wants to temporarily end legal immigration. We currently have limited immigration, by the way, under a plan enforced by the Clinton administration. So where’s the editorial cartoon of a goose-stepping Hillary?
Now, you may not agree with Buchanan’s approach (I don’t), but how is it racist? It’s not like Pat wants to end immigration for everyone except Norwegian virgins or members of the Von Trapp family. His plan affects England and Ireland the same as Ethiopia and India. He may be right, he may be wrong. But a Nazi?
And, my grandfather wants to know, what is so evil about Buchanan’s trade policy? Once again, Buchanan’s plan is nothing novel. He believes America should have a deal with developed nations such as Canada, Germany and Japan that’s different from the one we have with lesser-developed, lower-wage nations such as Mexico, Poland and China. This is radical? This is extreme?
If so, then Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are extremists. We already have a byzantine collection of tariffs, quotas and trade incentives that differ from country to country. If Buchanan were proposing to trade only with “our Aryan brothers” or if he wanted to ban trade with any nation whose name started with a B, I would understand the anger.
I am a devout free-trader who thinks Pat’s policies would be an economic disaster, but I’m not mad at him about it, any more than I’m mad at Ralph Nader or Ross Perot. The intemperance, intolerance and downright nastiness of the attack on Buchanan is mystifying.
It is also dangerous. The double-barreled media attack on Pat Buchanan spreads its shot onto the earnest Americans who hear Buchanan giving voice to the questions and concerns they struggle with every day. These are people like my grandfather, people who—like Buchanan—may be right or wrong, but who are asking serious questions about our nation’s future. Their questions are inspired not by hate but by concern, concern about a future they don’t understand.
The single-minded destruction of Buchanan will send a message to them as well, a message that they must remain silent, that their ideas are not allowed in our national discussion.
No, my grandfather will never vote Republican—sorry, Pat. But will he bother to vote at all? Why should he, when an entire agenda of issues he cares about are pushed off the table as “fascist”?
What he has seen during this campaign is a demonstration of the unity of purpose of the American media-political complex, a small but elite group of national figures who will defend at any cost their unchallenged status as rulers of the national conversation. They demand conformity of ideas, subservience of individuality and unquestioning submission to their party philosophy. The unorthodox, including Patrick J. Buchanan, cannot merely be challenged—it must be destroyed.
That’s funny. The Nazis used to do the same thing.
January 1995
Two years ago, the same week William Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as head of our national family, I became a father. One year later, I wrote a column, “Clinton and Me,” in which I noted the frightening similarities in our enthusiastic but inept efforts to execute the duties of our new offices. I ended my article with a lighthearted reference to “the terrible twos.”
Ha, ha.
If it helps, Mr. President, there is an American who had an even bumpier ride in 1994 than you did.
Sure, we got off to a good start. Like the president, I had the Big Mo coming into the new year, and I thought 1994 was going to be pretty good. The Comeback Kid had health care all but wrapped up in Washington, while my wife and I had reached agreement on a socially progressive budget, with heavy subsidies of such vital programs as the Tanning Salon Entitlement and Aid to Moms Who Might Eat Their Young If You Don’t Get a Sitter Friday Night.
My wife, like yours, Mr. President, took a high-profile role in my administration as well, particularly on the divisive social issue of child discipline. Unfortunately, the resulting plan resembled the HillaryCare scheme in that it worked great until you actually used it. When, for example, my son Mencken discovered his ability to “express himself” through the destruction of property and unorthodox distribution of bodily wastes (we suspect he received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts), my wife and I were completely unprepared.
She suddenly revealed a hidden liberal agenda, fighting my efforts at discipline and adding her maiden name to all family correspondence. Meanwhile, I clung to my more conservative principles and advocated a Singaporean model of social justice: beating the kid’s brains in.
This division in our leadership left an opening for Mencken, who, like the House Republicans, was a master of exploiting weakness. When I discovered him standing over the commode holding the cord of my electric razor (the rest had been Roto-Rootered), he rushed past me and into the sympathetic arms of his mother. When he sensed she was on the verge of violence, he whipped up a few crocodile tears and clung to my leg. It was transparent political rhetoric, but somehow I couldn’t resist.
It was Gerber gridlock, pure and simple.
Eventually, it became clear that my son considered my commands mere suggestions, and not particularly worthwhile suggestions at that. If I said, “Put it down,” he picked it up. If I said, “Go left,” he went right. My administration was rudderless, drifting. My message wasn’t penetrating.
Everyone had suggestions as to how we should repair our damaged public image, though we never went as far as you, Mr. President, inviting a psychic and motivational speaker to the White House. I was urged by my father to govern from the right (“Spare the rod and spoil the child! You got to beat some sense into ’em”). My mother counseled a more liberal approach (“He’s just a baby—he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Besides, you can always get another cat”).
Then came the disastrous autumn. Kooks were shooting at the White House, and I was robbed at gunpoint in my driveway. Our poll numbers were plummeting, our wives were on the warpath, and just when it seemed it couldn’t get any worse . . . whammo! A chubby-cheeked interloper suddenly stole the limelight and began pushing a radical program of infantile self-promotion.
Newt, meet Alex.
Actually, it’s Alexandra. For the second time in less than twenty months, my wife and I had a baby—the ultimate October surprise.
And talk about dominating the media! Talk about hogging the camera! Like Speaker Gingrich, little Alex can’t belch without making headlines. I’m trying to get the family focused on long-term issues (like the need for my wife to be sterilized) and instead the baby-hungry paparazzi spend all day with their heads in the crib, observing every move of my new House leader.
In fact, listening to your pleading tones this past year, Mr. President, I heard a frighteningly familiar sound: the whining voice of a man realizing that no one is paying any attention to what he is saying. Our vocabulary in this second year of parenthood has consisted largely of sighs of frustration and occasional bursts of anger. Meanwhile, no one was listening.
Well, Mr. President, no one said this would be easy. And, in fact, there have been some fun moments . . . well, for me, anyway. I have heard it said that being president is the most demanding, frustrating, punishing job in the world, that every president was abused, unappreciated and generally worn plumb out. Yet they all agree that it was the most rewarding part of their careers.
After two years as a father, I know the feeling. Happy birthday, Mencken, and good luck again, Mr. President.
Once again, we’re going to need it.
July 1996
As Bill Clinton’s picayune presidency continues to shrink, his poll numbers expand to nearly gargantuan proportions.
Meanwhile, Americans nostalgic for leadership watch in dismay as President Clinton moves easily from meaningless promises of the impossible (“We shall bring this terrorism to an end”) to breathless pronouncements over the irrelevant (“We shall have a new 911 phone system”). New York Times writer Maureen Dowd has dubbed Clinton “President Pothole.” She notes with great insight that the president’s reelection agenda more closely resembles that of someone running for alderman than the platform of someone who wants to be leader of the free world.
Listening to the effluvia floating from the White House, one would never know that there are American troops in Bosnia or that our nation’s economic expansion is one of the slowest since World War II. What care we if our schools are failing or if the president’s drug policy is to get drugs off the streets and into the White House?
But if you’re worried about little Johnny watching too much Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, President Clinton is on the job.
On Monday, President Clinton announced a “landmark” agreement with television broadcasters to air at least three hours a week of educational programs for children. Try to imagine George Washington reaching an agreement with colonial newspapers to print more high-quality cartoons, and the decline of the modern presidency comes clearly into focus.
But this is what big-government liberals do when the era of big government is over. For Bill Clinton, big government is dead, but Big Brother is alive and well.
This is the president who signed into law a measure censoring the Internet so tightly that testimony from lawsuits in which he is personally involved may not be legally transmitted on the Web. This is the president who insists that media moguls stop spreading violence and indecency in the entertainment industry but who smiles as they spread more than $450,000 into his various campaign coffers.
And this is the president who wants the federal government to regulate the content of commercial television programs to make sure they’re “good.” Yikes!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Pat Robertson lose his race for the White House?
The theory of big-L liberalism (the Clintons’ brand) is that people ought to be good, and if they won’t, the government should make them. So if those bad ol’ TV networks don’t put enough educational programs on the air, the government will force them to do it by threatening to take away their licenses.
There, that was easy. Now, what about those publishers who don’t print enough Clinton-friendly novels?
President Clinton and the Niceness Nazis would have a point if the problem were the lack of good shows. But in fact there are just as many quality kids’ shows as kids will stand, and that ain’t many.
Mandating three hours a week of good children’s television (when you figure out what that is, please call the FCC) only solves the picayune problem of broadcasting government-approved programs. Getting young citizens to sit still and watch them is the real trick.
We already have a government-run TV network with twenty-four hours of official, government-sanctioned programming every day. Much of it is for children, real quality stuff such as Barney and Teletubbies.
What’s worse is that the problem of trashy TV and the decline of family fare is one the market has already solved. New family-friendly TV networks are springing up on cable, satellite networks, the Internet and everywhere else. TV networks love bragging about “family hour” and the unwatchable, whitewashed drivel they are producing for it.
Just a note to the Clintons: The secret to programming TV isn’t ranting—it’s ratings.
The reaction of the general public to annoying initiatives such as the president’s is usually a shrug: “So it won’t make kids’ TV any better, so what? What harm can it do?”
And if you don’t count little things like poking holes in the First Amendment or destroying the liberty of a few individual TV station owners, you’re right. The costs are small, the effects negligible.
Just about the right size, in fact, for an incredible shrinking president.
June 1996
Caricatured as Hillary’s New Age Svengali, Jean Houston offers myths and mantras that may seem strange, but are right in the baby-boom mainstream.
—Newsweek
There was a moment during the Filegate hearings when the head of security in the White House personnel office announced that he had never actually been hired, and I looked up from the TV set and thought: “Yes, there is a God.”
In these heady days, with Clinton apparatchiks waking each morning intent upon humiliating themselves on national television, it is tempting to believe that a divine hand is guiding their ill fortune. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that mere mortals are capable of this level of incompetence without help from the Great Beyond.
Alas, I am an infidel and must lay the daily sins of stupidity at the feet of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. Watching these two obviously intelligent and politically savvy operators immolate themselves in their own hubris is not a pleasant sight, even for a right-wing wacko like me. I would like to believe there is some divine purpose to their incompetence, but I cannot in good conscience blame God for the Clinton White House.
He didn’t vote for them—we did.
Instead of thinking of the presidential buffoons as God’s punishment, I think of them as the natural result of democracy. Looking around at America, it seems we have precisely the First Family that we deserve.
The Clintons live in the paradoxes that plague the American character: They are simultaneously ethically flaccid and morally rigid, finding easy ways to work around their own ethics while stridently demanding good clean livin’ from the rest of us.
The Clintons are also wildly ambitious, yet unrelenting in their pursuit of public policies to punish those who achieve. And—the most annoying paradox to me personally—Bill and Hillary Clinton are both thoroughly secular and untiringly religious.
For a couple of world-weary baby boomers, President and Mrs. Clinton have a breathtakingly metaphysical naiveté: They’ll believe in just about anything—even themselves.
It’s been interesting to watch the GLUMs (godless liberal media types) cover the story of “Hillary’s Rasputin,” Dr. Jean Houston. Reporters who have never had a kind word for any religious sensibilities trumpet Mrs. Clinton’s “deeply held Methodist faith”—demonstrating at once their willingness to suck up to the First Lady and their complete lack of knowledge concerning modern-day Methodism.
A Methodist service inspires all the religious fervor of a Rotary Club luncheon—the only difference being that the Rotarians occasionally read from the Bible. A devout Methodist is almost as hard to imagine as a Quaker terrorist.
At the same time, the press has gone to great lengths to note that Mrs. Clinton’s meetings with the self-declared “doctor” (she reportedly lied on her resume about having a doctorate from Columbia University) were not séances or spiritualism. “Dr.” Houston is not a psychic, but rather a “sacred psychologist,” we are told pointedly.
The conclusion being that while Mrs. Clinton is devoutly religious and imbued with the sacred, it’s not like she actually believes in God.
In America, the land of Sally Jessy Raphael and TV psychics, this all makes perfect sense. Why condemn Hillary Clinton for doing the White House equivalent of calling Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network?
And I agree. Mrs. Clinton is no more stupid for hanging out with Jean Houston, sacred psychologist, than you and I are for getting a reading from Madame Zelda, psychic chiropractor.
Perhaps you think it’s unfair to compare Houston to a spiritualist when she says she doesn’t do séances. Once again, I agree. Indeed, the most disturbing part of Mrs. Clinton’s “journey of faith” is that there is none.
If Mrs. Clinton were having truly spiritual experiences—achieving nirvana, speaking in tongues, running a backhoe over the cast of Friends—there would be some faithfulness on her part to respect. But there is no spirit in Mrs. Clinton’s spirituality.
For old-time Methodists, seeking God meant going to church and praying to the Risen Lord; for Hillary Clinton, it means hiring a sacred psychologist and talking to Eleanor Roosevelt.
This sort of faux religious experimentation is the metaphysical version of “I didn’t inhale.” It is typical of people who feel they ought to believe in something because believing in something is nice, but they don’t want to be, you know, weird about it. In the end, they have just enough nonrational tenets to believe that you should stop sinning, but not enough faith to believe that they should, too.
In other words, they are hypocrites. The result of this sort of religion without faith is always hypocrisy. Thus we have a White House that can support partial-birth abortions but violently attacks tobacco, an administration that thinks nothing of poking through your FBI file but maintains its position as the first ever to refuse to release the president’s medical files.
So whether it’s Jean Houston, Tony Robbins or the Reverend Al Sharpton, the news from the White House this week is much the same as it was last week: It is a place where anything can happen . . . if you’re willing to believe in anything.
March 1996
I’m no James Carville, but it seems to me that two things a candidate for president never wants to do are
Alan Keyes has done both in the same week.
Last Sunday, police officers had to forcibly remove Keyes from an Atlanta TV station that was hosting a presidential debate to which he was not invited. “As Martin Luther King went to jail in order to secure my right to participate, I go to jail in order to exercise that right,” Keyes bellowed as he was led away. “My only crime is that I am qualified to be president!”
Three days earlier, Keyes launched a hunger strike to protest his exclusion from a debate in Columbia, South Carolina. “I shall take in neither food nor drink,” he intoned biblically, “until my ideas and my campaign are taken seriously.”
I’m afraid Keyes is going to get very hungry.
While the voters have declined to take his campaign seriously, Alan Keyes continues to liven up the 1996 presidential race. He has an amazing effect on Republican audiences, particularly down South. Mixing a conservative, anti-government diatribe with a heavy dose of brimstone, Alan Keyes is the perfect speaker for any group of guilty white Republicans (how redundant is that?) in need of a good spanking.
He preaches that America is a spiritual wasteland, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, and abortion is the great moral crisis of our day . . . though not so great as to cause Keyes to skip a meal over it. Indeed, as far as I can discover, Alan Keyes has never gone hungry, been jailed or received so much as a jaywalking ticket in his tireless fight against abortion.
So much for great moral crises.
But there is a bigger issue raised by the embarrassingly goofy candidacy of Alan Keyes and the serious treatment he’s receiving from the media. The fact is, Alan Keyes is getting away with this nonsense because he is black.
The Keyes candidacy is yet another example of the media’s condescending attitude toward black people. Accepted norms of behavior and the otherwise sacrosanct rules of journalism are all cast overboard in the presence of any prominent yet stupid person who happens to be black.
For example, Keyes wasn’t the only presidential candidate excluded from recent debates. Established political figures seeking the presidency, such as Senator Richard Lugar (R.-Insomnia), were also left out of the same events—but without hunger strikes or hissy fits. They may not be happy, but they’re behaving.
Now, try to imagine the media reaction if Bob “B-1” Dornan (R.-Rush Limbaugh’s Lap) had been arrested at a debate site and started invoking the name of Martin Luther King. The comedy of it alone would make the story big news, maybe landing it on the front page. But for Alan Keyes? Buried with the obits.
Keyes’ behavior is shameful and juvenile. He should be publicly mocked at every turn. Instead, interviewers nod compassionately while he spouts more incoherent gibberish. He’s being held to a different standard because wimpy liberal types—in their heart of hearts—don’t believe black people are capable of measuring up to reasonable standards of behavior.
An even more glaring example is Louis Farrakhan, who even if he dropped the “dirty Jews” talk would still be one of the most moronic national figures of our day. I was particularly impressed when he went to Nigeria to urge the citizenry to be more supportive of the brutal military dictatorship currently oppressing them.
Try to imagine a white politician touring South Africa to support apartheid or a Hispanic American cruising Chile with Pinochet. They would be universally denounced. But Minister Farrakhan is given a bye. “He doesn’t know any better,” nervous editorialists tut-tut. “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.”
No. It’s a stupid thing. I do understand. Stupidity knows no racial or ethnic bounds. Stupidity can afflict us all—rich or poor, black or white, straight or gay. Pretending that dumb actions by black people are reasonable isn’t compassion; it’s racism of a most pernicious sort.
One last note on the media and race: A friend of mine got into trouble a few years ago when he hired an unemployed black fisherman to run in a Republican primary election. It was a cynical ploy to increase white turnout, and it didn’t work.
But what did work was the media condescension factor. The “candidate,” who was not even registered to vote when he entered the race, could barely read and write and was utterly unfamiliar with the office he had been hired to seek. However, a reporter tracked him down and interviewed him—no mean feat given the gentleman’s lack of correct grammar and limited vocabulary.
But instead of an exposé of a clearly incompetent candidate, the reporter repaired the grammar, developed some sentence fragments into policy statements and cranked out a thirty-column-inch story that dressed up this bozo like a statesman. Fortunately for the democratic process, nobody read the article, and the candidate lost.
Somewhere there’s a voter trying to make an honest judgment about the candidates who has no idea how loony Alan Keyes is because no one will tell him. If he knew, he would never give the candidate his vote.
A sandwich, maybe . . .
May 1996
Jermaine O’Neal is a South Carolina basketball phenom, a born superstar who combines the two attributes vital to success in professional sports: overactive glands and underachieving intellect. After spending four years mopping the floor with his high school counterparts, Jermaine made headlines when he decided to skip college and head straight to the NBA—and the accompanying multimillion-dollar contract.
The young man’s decision sparked heated debate, around the NBA and at local cocktail parties, over the question of whether or not it is good/wise/moral for a young man such as Jermaine O’Neal to miss the tremendous opportunities offered by America’s institutions of higher learning. Can mere money compare to the exquisite experience of undergraduate life in the halls of academe?
As a successful college graduate and former master’s degree candidate, I can answer with complete confidence: “Jermaine! Take the cash!”
I make this suggestion with no thought of O’Neal’s ability to succeed in the pros. I have no idea and even less interest. If someone wants to pay this adenoidally advanced young man a billion dollars to sit on the bench and wear inflatable sneakers, I say, “Congratulations!”
What does rattle my cage is the underlying notion about college that drives this argument. “There is something wrong,” says the San Jose Mercury News, “when young men decide against an all-expenses-paid college education for the chance to grab the wealth and stardom of pro basketball.”
“Tut-tut,” cluck the callers on local talk radio. “How can this poor young man be allowed to set aside his education to pursue a quick buck? Shame, shame!”
How about “yank, yank”?
The premise put forward by the do-gooders is that everyone who can go to college should. They are wrong on two points:
O’Neal’s leapfrog over the NCAA and onto the big-league hardwoods was inspired not by ambition but by ineptitude. He would like to play a year or two in the NBA minor-league system (read: college basketball) but can’t get into a real school, that is, one without the word technical in its name. O’Neal just doesn’t have the grades.
To be eligible for a Division I school, O’Neal would have to add 100 points to his best SAT score of 830—an unlikely event for a young man who missed his last SAT exam because he couldn’t find the right building!
Attention, Harvard! Do you have this guy’s home phone number?
I don’t mean to pick on O’Neal—really, I don’t. I feel sorry for him because he is hitting his head against America’s wall of hypocrisy on higher education. If O’Neal were a carpenter, a cook or a chiropractor, he would be welcome to practice his profession without spending more than an afternoon in his local library.
But because he is an athlete, he must endure four years of crib sheets and curved grades to prove he is worthy of his profession. He is required to waste four years of his economic life on a pursuit he has already demonstrated he has no interest in whatsoever—developing his brain.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone has the interest or ability for astronomy or calculus. Not everyone belongs in college at all. Indeed, America was built by men and women who had nothing more than a moderate education but were blessed with good sense and willingness to work.
The result of encouraging unwilling or incompetent students into our colleges is easy to measure. Sit down this week with one of our freshly minted college grads, and after an hour of conversation, try to figure out what he or she actually got for that $40,000 in tuition besides a future of dodging phone calls from the student loan Nazis.
The real question, the obvious question, is never asked, namely, “What are all these people doing in college in the first place?” The fact is, half of today’s students are as out of place in college as Michael Jackson would be at a school for wayward boys.
As a former grad student at a certain public university in Columbia, South Carolina (no names, but its initials are USC), I spent time, up close, with the pride of the Confederacy. While some students are intelligent, motivated and determined to get an education, many simply have no idea what the purpose of their college career is, except that it somehow involves the keg in their dorm.
I once met a student in her early twenties who had $50,000 in student loans and was still years away from getting her degree. Her major was holistic anthropology with a minor in tarot cards or some such blather, so her economic outlook was exceedingly dim. Had she borrowed the fifty grand and built a house, she would at least be unemployed with a roof over her head. Instead, it’s as though she dropped a wad in Vegas and hopes to find a job for a “people person” at 25K per annum before Guido gets her home address.
She never belonged in college, and neither does Jermaine O’Neal. Indeed, there are only three legitimate reasons to spend major bucks for college: to get a job, to get married or to get an education. In that order.
For certain fields—biology, engineering, political correctness storm trooping—college is essentially a tech school. For such students, the only difference between a university and Clyde’s School of Chiropractic and Auto Diesel Mechanics is that Clyde doesn’t force you to waste time in courses such as New Age Elizabethan Poetry or Erotic Photography as Rococo Art.
As for marriage, this may be the single most useful service to society performed by institutions of higher education. Thanks to extremely liberal admissions standards at most universities (“Can you spell SAT? You’re in!”), the gene pool is tremendously mixed. Plumbers’ sons and bank presidents’ daughters are flung together with abandon, often at a period in life when their hormones are taking no prisoners. This is one reason why class envy has never taken hold in America. Junior may not have the brains to achieve greatness, but thanks to our national coeducational policy, he can marry it.
People who claim they are in college just to get a good education are always lying. Run into one of these at a kegger and you’ll hear, “Just getting an education makes me a better person, more well-rounded, more competitive. I’m really proud of my degree in transactional Sumerian psychology—say, doesn’t your dad work at the Highway Department? Think he could get me in?”
Meanwhile, the students who are seriously committed to learning something—clearly a minority—are shafted by the current lowest-common-denominator system. Classes move slowly while the professor tries to explain to basketball players and bimbettes that cosines aren’t what your dad gives the bank so you can get a lower car payment.
In the early 1990s I found myself, through a circumstance too painful to recall, trapped in a 100-level philosophy class. On our first exam, with a modicum of preparation, several classmates and I scored a 95. After the curve was applied, we discovered that a 35 was a B and an 18 was a C. More amazing was the idiot sitting in front of me who complained that the class was too hard. His test score: an 8.
You say that’s typical undergraduate work, that grad school is different? Then come meet the doctor of education candidate who has a master’s from NYU and cannot read. In her thirties and with kids when I met her, she hadn’t worked in years—though she said she was certified to teach (not English, I prayed, after listening to her bludgeon the language into submission). She literally could not read her financial aid form or answer simple questions such as “What year did you graduate?” Yet here she was, waiting for another $12,000 in taxpayer payoffs. And she got it.
The cost of education is spiraling ever upward for one reason: demand. Too many people—make that stupid people—are going to college when they should be going to a trade school, in apprentice programs, or trying multilevel marketing. The only way to get these students through the most meager courses is grade inflation, which means the value of every degree declines, which means you need another degree to indicate academic excellence, which means more people going to grad school, which means more doctorates, et cetera, et cetera.
The solution? Stop sending the Jermaine O’Neals of the world to college, and make it tougher, not easier, for everyone else.
President Clinton’s tax increase/deficit reduction/budget balancing/the deficit still goes up a trillion bucks/ha-ha plan included a federal direct lending program, which will make it easier for young people to take out loans they can’t afford to take classes they don’t want for a degree they can’t use.
Now that’s what I call compassion.
If you think I’m being too rough on college students, sit down and talk with a few. After your headache goes away, write me and apologize. If you don’t know how to write, call your local financial aid office and tell them you’re an education major at an American university. Your check is in the mail.
July 1996
As the mystery surrounding the crash of TWA flight 800 continues, one nagging question comes to my mind again and again: Where was Stone Philips when the plane went down?
My suspicions drift toward Stone not because he has the second dumbest name in contemporary broadcasting (Wolf Blitzer still holds a commanding lead), but because he works for Dateline NBC. Dateline has two strikes against it: First, it has a penchant for blowing things up to create news (just ask General Motors), and second, it’s on NBC—also known as the Nightly Body Count network.
NBC is absolutely obsessed with death. This realization came to me as I was watching their coverage of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which, as of press time, features more dead people per frame than a driver’s ed training film.
It must be some Clinton administration mandate for the media to feel people’s pain. Virtually every event, seemingly every athlete, is profiled by NBC in context of a related death, some of them recent and some not: swimmers who just lost a parent, a Greco-Roman wrestler whose brother died in a car accident. For the producers at NBC Sports, the most competitive events aren’t track and field or gymnastics, but Olympic bucket kicking and 100-meter freestyle grave digging.
If you’ve watched even a few token minutes of the Coca-Cola 100 (as the Games are known in Atlanta), you must know what I’m talking about. The cameras are live at the track or in the arena, the athletes are waiting for the gun, then suddenly the theme to Love Story begins, and we segue to a taped shot of an Olympian walking pensively along a lonely road.
“When she goes for the gold later today, Suzy Shaumberg of Oakbrook, Illinois, won’t just be shooting at clay pigeons,” Bob Costas intones in a funereal hush. “She’ll also be firing rounds of remorse from a tragic air rifle accident that claimed the life of her half sister Molly just three years ago.”
Then comes the close-up of the brave, teary-eyed athlete talking about her loved one as home footage of the deceased is superimposed across the screen.
Apparently, for NBC the tension of a teenager doing back flips on a balance beam before a television audience of one billion people isn’t quite enough. They need pathos. They need anguish.
They need a corpse.
The TWA tragedy gave us two hundred of them just weeks before the Olympics, and NBC is determined to work each one into a special report. Every tenuous connection between the human horror off Long Island and the media horror show in Atlanta is highlighted, pulled to the breaking point: “Here we are with Olympic diver John McDougal. . . . John, are you haunted by the fact that you yourself once flew on a 747 early in your training?”
Sports reporters hang like ectoplasm on the lives of these athletes, who have already faced almost unimaginable trials just to get to the Olympics. Most of these kids have trained for years, even decades, competing in round after round of qualifiers at the local, state and national levels. Their participation in the Games is proof that these young athletes can do very well something that is very hard, and they can do it over and over again.
They get to the Olympics only to be besieged by microphone-waving media morticians pushing them to “release their pain” about some personal tragedy, real or imagined. I keep waiting for one of the athletes to just explode. It would have to be an American, because the other athletes (with the possible exception of the French) are too polite.
And the other nations’ athletes are largely spared this experience, because they’re foreigners and who cares if they die, anyway? (Once again with the possible exception of the French.)
I pray that before the Olympics are over, some high-strung athlete will turn to an NBC reporter and say: “Shut up! Just shut up! Yes, my coach’s manicurist died last Thursday on the way to the Games! And yes, no American has won a medal in this event without a manicured coach in a non-boycotted Olympics since the Berlin Games of 1936, and yes, I’m a little worried right now. Wouldn’t you be a little nervous if two-thirds of the world’s population was watching you dive seventy-five feet into crystal clear water wearing nothing but a Speedo on live television? Now get off my back, you microphone-waving moron, before I shove Willard’s hairpiece up your ———!”
In their melodramatic attempts to humanize the already painfully human stories of the Olympics, NBC is succeeding only in marginalizing these stories. Just as films such as Independence Day lose all the emotive power of death by killing virtually everyone, the nonstop pseudo-tragedies of overblown media coverage destroy the power of the true human dramas it touches.
It is a destruction far more tragic than the events themselves—the death of our sensibility toward death. Stone Philips and a busload of dynamite couldn’t do as much damage, not even in prime time.
March 1996
Where we’re coming from, we totally understand the dire needs of commercial cinema. We know that until the audiences walk into the theater, you’re really nobody.
—India’s leading movie director, Shekhar Kapur, explaining the success of Asian directors in Hollywood
I don’t know what the current rate of unemployment is for black males, but it is too high by one. Someone has got to find a job for Jesse Jackson.
Idle hands are the devil’s playground, and when there isn’t a Democratic presidential primary to grandstand or restaurant chain to shake down, the Reverend Jackson falls prey to mischievous demons. He starts seeing things: a reasonable side to Louis Farrakhan, an efficient city government in Washington, D.C., and a racist regime at Hollywood and Vine.
Yes, Hollywood is a stronghold of the Aryan Nation and the Klan, says Jackson, because not enough Academy Award nominees are black. Then again, quite a few nominees are Jewish, but hey, maybe the Hollywood Klan is more progressive than their branch offices in the rural South. Anyway, Jackson knows racism (and a mega media opportunity) when he sees it, and the right reverend is going to get Tinseltown to see the light.
His Oscar-night effort, entitled “Lights, Camera, Affirmative Action” (ouch!), involved an unenthusiastic handful of marchers gathered around Jackson outside the Hollywood studios of KABC, the Los Angeles affiliate broadcasting the Oscars. Jackson was, as usual, simultaneously articulate and overreaching: “[There is] racial exclusion, cultural distortion, lack of employment opportunities, lack of positions of authority. . . . It doesn’t stand to reason that if you are forced to the back of the bus, you will go to the bus company’s annual picnic and act like you’re happy,” Jackson said.
His supporters were even more direct, carrying placards saying Same Slavemaster, Different Plantation.
Well, excuse me if I’m not ready to declare war on southern California and march on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Maybe it’s because I’m from South Carolina and get to see real-life racism up close and personal, the kind of racism that gets black college students dragged out of their cars and beaten by overzealous highway patrolmen.
Or maybe it’s because I spent Oscar night listening to Whoopi Goldberg’s monologue, Quincy Jones’ music, Oprah Winfrey shamelessly sucking up, and Will Smith stumbling over his lines.
Or maybe, just maybe, the tired cry of racism has come so many times from the self-appointed shepherds of black America that even liberals and journalists are beginning to have second thoughts.
In choosing Hollywood as his target, Jesse Jackson has done more than just alienate his base (i.e., guilty white people with more money than brains). He has chosen the one field in which affirmative action, aka quotas, will never be effective—the entertainment industry.
No amount of civil rights legislation could force people to sit through Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn, and no amount of secret racist plotting by the Anti-Defamation League and the John Birchers could keep Americans from flocking to Beverly Hills Cop. (It took two sequels to do that.)
The entertainment industry is the ultimate merit-pay system. How much you are worth is directly proportional to how much people will pay to see you. No quotas, no weighted admissions system, no “excellence through diversity.” Whoever puts the most butts in the most seats wins. Period.
Quotas don’t work in industries where individual performance matters. Jackson’s race-based bean counting is better suited for fields where mediocrity is a career advantage.
Thus, Jackson and his gang have had great success in the bureaucracies of academia and corporate America, where losers of all races are easy to hide. But where do you hide an underachiever on a basketball team or a tennis court? Where do you hide your unqualified quota hires on a Broadway stage?
I will concede to the Reverend Jackson (and anyone else) that the Academy Awards themselves are not merit-based. They are, largely, a joke. This year’s debacle—no Best Picture nominations for Nixon or 12 Monkeys but one for a pig movie—is typical for the intellectual lightweights who are members of the so-called Academy.
But the Academy Awards aren’t a joke because of racism; they’re a joke because of the pedestrian mores of the Academy members themselves.
Whoopi Goldberg’s Oscar, for example, came not from her starring role in The Color Purple but from her phoned-in performance in a cheesy romance called Ghost. It was, however, a cheesy romance that made a whole lot of money, and that’s how to get the Academy’s attention.
But if Jackson manages to convince the “Academics” who hand out the Oscars to set aside a certain number of nominations for minority actors, more power to him. Indeed, in a spirit of cooperation, I would like to make the first nomination in such a special category, Best Black Actor of 1995: O.J. Simpson.
And Jesse Jackson thinks black actors can’t get a break in L.A.
October 1996
This is a tragic day for America when Negro agitators, spurred on by communist enticements to promote racial strife, can cause the United States Senate to be steamrollered into passing the worst, most unreasonable and unconstitutional legislation that has ever been considered by the Congress.
—Strom Thurmond, on passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
On a recent trip to Chicago, a friend was driving me past a cemetery on the North Side, and I noticed the top of the wall was lined with barbed wire.
“Let me guess,” I told him with a laugh. “You only do that in election years. Slowing them down on their way to the polls, right?”
My friend, a proud native of America’s most corrupt political city, responded angrily: “What? Are you saying no dead people ever vote in South Carolina?”
“Are you kidding?” I shot back. “Dead people don’t vote in our elections—they run in them! Hell, they even win!”
And so the laughable corruption of Chicago and the hilarious stupidity of South Carolina converged for a brief, shining moment in this otherwise humorless election year. With the presidential race turning into a blowout of Atlanta Braves–esque proportions, the pathetic farce of the eighth Strom Thurmond U.S. Senate campaign is a much-needed seventh-inning stretch.
All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and places of recreation.
—Strom Thurmond, 1948
Like all farces, the ending is both outrageous and predictable. That Strom Thurmond is going to be reelected in a landslide goes without saying. In any election, particularly in South Carolina, one of the most dependable predictors of Election Day behavior is to ask yourself: “Is there any candidate for public office who is so incompetent or embarrassing that to vote for him would require a overwhelming display of ignorance or stupidity?” When you’ve found such a candidate, bet the farm. You’ve got yourself a sure winner.
Such a candidate is Strom Thurmond. It’s hard to imagine a more unpleasant convergence of gross personal incompetence and vile political philosophy. Most political consultants would kill to run against either a ninety-four-year-old drooler who can’t stay awake through a committee hearing or an icon of racism who filibustered for twenty-four hours to keep “darkies” out of public restaurants. In a race against Strom Thurmond, you get both!
And yet Strom Thurmond’s opponents—in the primary and general elections—have made little headway against the Great Methuselah. Why?
Because most political campaigns are arguments about what is best for you, the voter. “Elect me,” the candidates claim, “and I will make you richer, happier, stronger, faster.” There is no such argument for voting for Strom Thurmond. It is impossible for the Thurmond camp to argue that their candidate is going to do anything about crime or taxes or teenage pregnancy, because it is impossible to argue he is going to do anything at all.
They’re left with campaign slogans like “Strom Thurmond: Getting Out of Bed for Over 94% of a Century!” or “Strom: He’ll Probably Show Up!”
I have done more for black people than any other person in the nation, North or South.
—Strom Thurmond
Indeed, the notion that Strom Thurmond is a senator is purely delusional, a delusion the good senator clings to desperately. He is no more familiar with the force structure of the armed services (whose Senate committee he chairs) than he is with the lyrics of “The Macarena.”
Despite these truths, the senator is a lock on Election Day. Another reason for his certain success is that the people covering this race are giving Senator Thurmond a bye. No one takes him seriously as a senator. When opponents point out his poor record protecting South Carolina jobs (we lost more jobs to military base closings than any state in the Union), reporters simply yawn, “Of course he’s incompetent. He’s ninety-three years old!” When opponents run TV ads pointing out that he’s too old, reporters write, “Desperate challengers make issue of Thurmond’s age, ignore substance!”
It’s the ultimate political strategy: presumed incompetence. And it works.
Much has been made, by the way, of TV ads (one of which I wrote) talking about Thurmond’s age. Polling seems to indicate that viewers of all ages react violently against them. Pundits say this backlash is an indicator that South Carolinians think making age an issue is unfair.
In fact, this is backward. Targeting Thurmond’s obvious physical inability is too fair. As H. L. Mencken noted, “Any man can bear injustice. What stings is justice.” The voters of South Carolina are going to vote for Thurmond, they know it is obviously foolish and indefensible, and the more clearly you point out the obvious, the angrier they get.
Hooray for Strom Thurmond. . . . Southern men stand up for themselves, for their friends and for their families. And Thurmond’s a southern man.
—South Carolina GOP chairman Henry McMaster after Thurmond shoved a USAir flight attendant
Like the drunkard stumbling toward his waiting car or the secretary pulling into the parking space outside her married boss’ motel room, the last thing these people want to hear is reason. They’re going to vote for Thurmond, even if they have to follow him to the graveyard to do it.
One day—and I sincerely hope it is in the distant future—J. Strom Thurmond will finally succumb to his own mortality. I trust he will be remembered for the whole man: his racism, his heroism, his selfless commitment to public service, his selfish refusal to relinquish the political spotlight. But if Senator Thurmond were to honestly write his own epitaph, I believe his gravestone would read Jes’ One Mo’ Term!
My other prediction: He would win in a landslide.
August 1996
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
—W. C. Fields
President Bill Clinton, the Houdini of American politics, has done the impossible: He’s gotten me excited about voting for Bob Dole.
I have never, ever voted for Bob Dole. Not in ’88, not this year, not ever. It has been a point of personal pride, for Bob Dole is one of the most repulsive Republicans in contemporary America. He brings together the grand political vision of George Bush and the warmth of human spirit of Richard Nixon. He is, in short, everything I revile about Republican politics.
But I will vote for him on November 5, and I will do so with pride. Which is a statement that cannot be made by any American voting to reelect President Clinton, a candidate whose supporters can only feel shame.
Now, shame is not necessarily a sufficient reason to change your vote. I voted for George Bush in 1992, and at the time I was very ashamed to do so. But I was willing to acknowledge my shame, to acknowledge that President Bush had done nothing to earn my (or any other rational conservative’s) vote.
But while I wasn’t too thrilled about voting for the worst Republican president since William Howard Taft, it is beyond my ability to imagine myself voting for the worst president since George H. Bush: William Jefferson Clinton.
President Clinton is, quite simply, a man without shame. There is no lie so obvious, no posturing so political, no insincere emotional display so nauseating that he will refrain from throwing his entire 250 pounds of self-righteous egomania into it. There are no limits to his self-deception, no borders to his buffoonery. And in the long litany of scams, shams and flimflams being run out of the White House these days, none demonstrates so clearly the shamelessness of the Clintons as Filegate.
Filegate began when the Clinton administration put longtime Democratic hack Craig Livingstone in charge of White House personnel security despite the fact that his only prior security experience involved Hillary-watch duty outside a gently rocking state patrol car in a Little Rock parking lot.
Livingstone, unsurprisingly, chose another Democratic hanger-on, Anthony Marceca, as his assistant. Their job was to review the security status of people who would be regularly roaming the Clinton White House. In doing so, they requested the personal FBI files of a number of American citizens (around eight hundred or so)—all Republicans. (“Here’s a White House request for the file on Reagan, Ronald W. Hmmm . . . I wonder what cabinet post he’s up for.”)
Why this sudden surge of bipartisanship in the Clinton White House? And how were these political hacks able to get these sensitive files using nothing more than unsigned form letters?
Now, unsigned requests for secret FBI documents would normally be ignored . . . at least, I hope so. If not, then you and I could send over a blind request for Elvis’ files and wrap up this whole JFK/Jimmy Hoffa thing in a weekend. So why then would the FBI even honor these anonymous file requests from the Clintons in the first place?
Because another Clinton political hack, Louis Freeh, is in charge of the FBI. Boing!
If that were the end of it—a president violates the privacy rights of hundreds of political opponents in an apparent attempt to gain political advantage—I would just laugh it off as the usual political sleaze. But the president will have none of that. His policy is to deny not only that anyone in his White House has done any wrong, but that it is unimaginable that the morally superior inhabitants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would possibly do anything so . . . so . . . (ooh) political.
So when the president’s spokesman was first asked if Livingstone was a political operative, the answer was no. The next day the answer was yes, but only after about a million newspapers reported that Livingstone had worked on numerous campaigns, including President Clinton’s.
Then when Republicans began to suggest that a political operative might want political files for political reasons (another wild GOP conspiracy theory), the White House attorney said no, because “my own investigation of the files controversy found there is nothing to indicate that there is a political motivation behind this.”
Now that’s reassuring.
But the final insult to us all was when the Clinton administration tried to blame the mess on previous presidents. The Clinton stooges argued that FBI files have been obtained this way for thirty years, and any other president could have done the same thing.
Which is the perfect time to note that they didn’t. No other president—not Reagan when the Democrats had the Congress, not LBJ when Vietnam was red hot, not Carter when he was about to get his electoral brains beaten in—was willing to use the federal police force as his personal private eye for potential political dirt.
There is something these other presidents had that President Clinton does not: shame. They may not have had much, but for presidents as revered as Kennedy and as reviled as Nixon, there was a line out there somewhere they would not cross: a deed too foul, a demand too great, something they wouldn’t do to be reelected.
We cannot honestly count Bill Clinton among these men.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of things Bob Dole won’t do to get elected (like figure out why he wants to be president). And that is the reason he’s got my vote.
September 1997
The basic game of photographer and quarry will not essentially change . . . the stars want the media, when they want them. That won’t stop.
—Chris Steele-Perkins, Parisian photography agent
The day after the wreck, I was asked by a reporter if I knew Prince Charles’ last name. “Stuart?” I guessed. “Something royal. I don’t know. . . . Tudor? Windsor? Montague? Capulet?” Such is my ignorance on all matters royal.
I am told the royal wedding that gave the world Prince Charles and Princess Diana was viewed by three-quarters of a billion people in seventy-six countries, but I must have been watching Jeopardy at the time. Indeed, a Botswanan sheepherder could clean my game show clock if Alex Trebek called out, “Lifestyles of the British Monarchy for five hundred!”
A week ago, everything I knew about the royals could fit on the back of Dan Quayle’s resume. Today, I know more about Lady Di than I do about my own mother, whether I like it or not.
I cannot recall the last media feeding frenzy as all-consuming as the death of Her Divorceship. I was headed from New York to Philly the night of the wreck, spinning through the radio dial looking for traffic and weather reports. Forget it. My dashboard had become “All Di, all the time! We’ve got Di dead on the eights: eight, eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-eight after the hour! Give us twenty-two minutes, and we’ll give you the princess . . . dead!”
My local paper was even worse. The daily comes out with four sections: world news, local news, sports and the wimpy lifestyle/arts section. The Monday after Di’s death—I swear this is true—my local yokel Di-wouldn’t-come-to-this-town-on-a-bet newspaper had nothing but Di on the front page of three of the four sections: nothing else! Not a single non-Di story anywhere on the front except in the sports section, where Di was relegated to page three.
Why? What am I missing? I’m sorry, folks, but your fascination with the royal family completely escapes me. And I am particularly bewildered by your irrational connection to the white-trash wonder of the world, Lady Di.
Every news story is filled with quotes from maudlin members of the great unwashed, weeping for the People’s Princess (a notion as internally consistent as that of the beloved despot). “It’s like we’ve lost one of our own political figures,” said Joni Van Vliet, eighteen, of Bend, Oregon, proving in one fell swoop that
And I mean anything. Newsrooms across America, desperate to localize Di’s death, had their reporters scouring the streets for anything remotely related to the British Isles. Ordering an English muffin at a sidewalk cafe could get you five minutes on the local news. My favorite was the news radio station whose reporter made a mad dash Sunday morning to the local Anglican church. (“Hey, aren’t they the Church of England? Grab your mike and let’s roll!”)
And it worked. In such Anglophilic enclaves as Germantown, Pennsylvania, and Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the locals choked, sighed and sobbed on cue over the shocking death of this beautiful and tragic hero who meant so much to us all.
Watching Americans react to the media coverage of Princess Di’s death is a lot like watching the audience in the Tony-n-Tina’s Wedding–type plays that are all the rage off-Broadway. In these plays, the audience members are supposed to be family members attending the wedding or bar mitzvah or whatever, and they are expected to interact with the professionals in the show.
So too with the average citizen when the TV camera comes on: People know they are supposed to be upset because, well, everyone else seems upset, so why not just play along?
If the newspapers say Lady Di’s a tragic figure, then she’s a tragic figure—though the tragedy of a life that began in aristocracy, blossomed at Buckingham Palace and ended in the backseat of a millionaire’s Mercedes escapes me.
Clearly, Diana’s death is a tragedy—every death is. But how can anyone use the word tragedy to describe Diana’s life?
She got divorced, sure. So do 50 percent of all married Americans, but how many of them get out with $26.5 million in cash and $600,000 a year in walking-around money?
Yes, Lady Di had bulimia and was depressed—but why? Because her husband was doinking around? That’s the sad tale of every country-western song on the jukebox, and besides, so was she. One reason royal-watchers were enthusiastic about her relationship with Dodi was that Di was finally dating somebody single.
Sure, Diana had an overbearing mother-in-law and her every haircut was on the cover of a tabloid, but if a life of Swiss finishing schools, fantastic wealth and a castle filled with servants is tragic, then I say, “Hey, Alex! I’ll take Tragedy for twenty-seven million!”
But pointing out these obvious facts is not part of the game that the tabloids, their mainstream press allies and the millions of mall-coifed females who finance them want to play. The Star puts Diana on the cover because the working girls and hausfraus who buy it want to see it. NBC News wants a piece of that Oprah demographic, so Tom Brokaw pretends that it’s news, too. Hey—you gotta put something between the commercials, right?
There was a time when newsrooms were run by people who made judgments about what ought to be news, not what people would pay to read. That era ended long ago, and its death was reaffirmed when “legitimate” news organizations began using the tabloids to break stories so that they could put Dick Morris and Gennifer Flowers on their front pages, too.
Now that the paparazzi are under fire, news editors are pretending they never heard of them: “Why, we would never run those awful photos in our paper . . . until someone else does, anyway.”
It’s all part of the game. I’ll take complete irrelevance and crocodile tears for whatever they’re worth. Today they look like a sure winner.
September 1997
Two wire reports appeared on the same day:
Accepting the Nobel in the name of the “unwanted, unloved and uncared for,” Mother Teresa wore the same $1 white sari that she had adopted to identify herself with the poor when she founded her order, Missionaries of Charity. Wherever people needed comfort, she was there: among the hungry in Ethiopia, the radiation victims at Chernobyl, the rubble of Armenia’s earthquake, in the squalid townships of South Africa. One day in 1948, she found a woman “half eaten up by maggots and rats” lying in the street in front of a Calcutta hospital, and sat with the woman until she died.
Seventy percent of viewers polled by the tabloid TV show American Journal said Princess Diana should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work.
There is a God, and he is laughing.
He has played cosmic paparazzo, using a flashbulb irony to catch the entire human race at its most petty, pompous and self-deluded. And most of you didn’t even smile.
My theory is that Mother Teresa, who had been in ill health for years, was originally slated to become lead soprano in the Choir Invisible months ago. But God, who loves nothing more than a good joke, booked her on the celestial equivalent of USAir to ensure a late departure. Thanks to His immaculate sense of comic timing, Mother Teresa roared to heaven right over Di-Fest, like a low-flying 747 drowning out the wailing below.
The trouble is, Americans have become deaf to irony. Everyone who got up at four in the morning to watch the funeral, who wore out TV remotes clicking from one prime-time special to the next, who thought Princess Diana’s demise received an appropriate level of press coverage—these people don’t realize they’ve just been had.
It’s a gag, a joke, folks—and you’re it. As the kids say: You are so busted!
Oh, you thought you were safe, indulging in the shameless excess of the Royal Death, playing along with this real-life edition of Oprah meets Dallas. After all, wasn’t everyone else playing along, too?
You felt free to say aloud that Lady Di deserves sainthood—after all, hadn’t she once shaken hands with an AIDS patient? And one wearing polyester at the time, too? (Ooh!)
And Diana sacrificed so much happiness to raise those two fine sons (though not quite enough to stay in an unhappy marriage), despite the daily hardships she faced: living in a castle, being a multimillionaire, having a staff of full-time nannies, finding time to pick up the latest from Armani . . .
“How does a single mother do it?” you wondered aloud.
So you wept along, obsessed along, played along, rationalizing it all by saying that Princess Di deserved the wave of overwrought media mourning. She was unique. There was no one else like her.
Then . . . wham! The cosmic cream pie. The so-called tragedy of Di’s life was put in instant perspective when compared to the life of Mother Teresa. The celebrity-struck goons who whooped up Di’s occasional visit to an elementary school sounded painfully boorish as the media quietly reported the life’s work of a woman who founded leper colonies.
If all the self-indulgent, Elton John–esque tears shed for Diana Spencer—whose celebrated accomplishments amounted to giving other people’s money to charity and breaking up a couple of marriages—could have been shed for Mother Teresa, the Saint of the Gutter herself would have been embarrassed.
Watching them shed for the Saint of Saks Fifth Avenue was almost unbearable.
I will confess enough personal naïveté about the human condition to expect that Mother Teresa’s death might slow down the national Di-gasm, or at least reduce it to low moanings.
Silly me. In most media outlets, Mother Teresa was the second lead, bumped by more pressing news involving which color socks Prince William would wear while following the royal hearse.
Jehovah’s joke went right over our heads. We are all lost in the era of Oprah: We demand crying queens, people’s princesses, and mob-fearing monarchs who genuflect before the readers of the National Enquirer.
The true nobility of a life such as Mother Teresa’s means nothing to us. When was she ever on the cover of Vogue? How many naughty phone calls did she make from Buckingham Palace? When did she ever auction off an old dress for charity, and what would she get for it, anyway—a buck?
Diana Spencer had a higher calling. Many believe she was the only hope of saving the British monarchy, quite a feat given that Britain has been ruled by a parliament for a while now. Others believe she was the most beautiful woman in the world—a claim that might seem true in England—but a casual glance through Cosmopolitan puts that notion to rest.
But Diana’s true higher calling was to be the first martyr of the Oprah era, the first celebrity to die whose entire celebrity was self-contained. Diana was famous simply for being famous.
And Mother Teresa? It was once believed that a lifetime of sacrifice for others would be rewarded with honor at your death and beyond. I cannot speak for the hereafter, but our children—watching the difference in reaction to the death of a plastic pop icon and a true humanitarian—can see clearly what we treasure more.
September 1997
On April 19, 1993, government agents raided a Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, killing about eighty men, women and children and leaving just one survivor: Janet Reno.
How this spectacled incompetent kept her job after perhaps the single worst law enforcement debacle in American history is a mystery. You usually have to be a member of the teachers’ union to be this incompetent and not get fired for it.
As attorney general, Janet Reno is part of a long line of “bad babes” serving in the Clinton administration. Hazel O’Leary, the soon-to-be-indicted head of the Department of Energy, was flying herself around the world on a luxury tour jet. She has since been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
And when the surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, wasn’t promoting masturbation in our middle schools, she was doing her part to keep Bill Clinton in the same back pages of the history books as the Harding or Polk administrations.
Add to this Janet Reno. Attorney General Reno is supposed to be the watchdog in the government, making sure everyone plays by the rules. While her physical appearance may enhance the watchdog image, in fact the Clintons have walked over her like a cheap rug. And she lies there and takes it. Consider the record.
The Clintons take office and immediately order all of the U.S. attorneys to be sacked—including the one investigating Whitewater—and Janet Reno obediently passes out the pink slips. No questions, no complaints.
The Clintons get their hands on the FBI files of eight hundred political opponents, and Janet Reno can’t find anything worth prosecuting. A group of Americans are unprotected while their government passes around their FBI files like a bottle of Boone’s Farm at a high school party, and Janet Reno doesn’t lift a finger.
Documents subpoenaed by law enforcement for two years mysteriously reappear in the White House, practically on Hillary Clinton’s nightstand, and Janet Reno mutters something about how “things like that always turn up in the last place you look.”
And now we have Buddhist monks with prosecutorial immunity. Try running that one through your First Amendment Rights-O-Meter.
During the 1996 campaign, Al Gore visited a Buddhist temple in California filled with devotees who had taken a vow of poverty. Miraculously (hey, they’re monks), the impoverished acolytes were able to scrape together a few hundred grand for Vice President Gore.
When it was discovered that this group of impoverished monks were laundering money for the Democratic National Committee, Al Gore did what politicians do: He lied. He claimed he didn’t know the event was a fund-raiser, even though his staff covered his desk with more disclaimers than a pack of cigarettes.
The problem isn’t Al Gore’s lying. That’s his job. The problem is when the chief law enforcement officer lets him get away with it. Janet Reno’s refusal to name a special prosecutor to investigate the White House fund-raising scandal is a new low, even by Washington standards. We know there was money laundering, we know Gore has lied about his conduct, we know that he solicited money on government property—just by watching CNN.
Janet Reno is such a poor prosecutor that her crack investigative team had to find out that Al Gore was raising money for himself inside the Oval Office by reading about it in the morning paper.
She’s a watchdog who won’t bark, a bloodhound who won’t tree. Janet Reno is a disgrace, and she should go.
Now, many of you are already yawning: “Who cares if the law was broken? So Clinton-Gore are dishonest—oh, that’s a news flash.” You are right, of course. The American people, taken as a whole, couldn’t care less about the rule of law. They want justice and revenge served up on Court TV. If it doesn’t involve homicide or hanky-panky, the people just won’t care.
That’s why it is particularly important to have a law enforcement officer who does care, especially when no one else does. Being obnoxious in defense of the law is no vice.
When the Hillary hounds start baying that these campaign laws are minor (these are the same whiners who want to execute people guilty of unauthorized smoking), someone needs to look them in the eye and say, “The law is the law—change it, don’t break it.”
Think, for example, of the 55 mph speed limit. Fifty-five on the interstate was about as easy to enforce as the six-inch rule at a Catholic-school dance. Should our sheriffs have had the policy of letting their buddies off the hook because nobody liked the law?
No, we want the law enforced. We also want our political leaders to change the laws that don’t work. If campaign finance laws need to be reformed (I certainly think so), then get Congress to change the law. Only Janet Reno could argue with a straight face that the Clinton administration supports tough new campaign laws when they were unwilling to obey the old lax ones.
Janet Reno’s scorched-earth policy of incompetence and cronyism continues long after Waco. It is long past time for the Congress to impeach her and bring it to an end.
August 1997
My mom’s just going to have to take me shopping.
—A New Mexico high-schooler, sporting spiked hair and a dog collar, sent home for violating a new statewide school dress code
Once upon a time, the last refuge of the scoundrel was patriotism. Today it is day care.
Whenever some elected official or self-proclaimed public advocate is about to seize a chunk of my personal liberty or spare change (usually both), they inevitably justify this abuse as a social necessity “for the children.” Like battered wives of a bygone era, we are urged to suffer silently for the sake of the kids.
Well, with two screaming brats of my own, I prefer to do my suffering at home, thanks just the same. So when the smoking Nazis or the Internet nannies lobby me to join their children’s crusades, I politely tell them: “I gave at the ovum.”
Pro-child public policy is almost inevitably a disaster. It was the motivating force behind the single most stupid piece of legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress (and that’s no small feat): Prohibition.
Believe it or not, youngsters, in 1920 a majority of Americans voted to make it illegal to manufacture or sell alcohol in these United States. How did that happen?
Historians have many theories (mine being that most people were too drunk at the time to know what they were voting for), but without a doubt one primary motivation was to protect children from the evils of demon rum.
The American electorate decided it wasn’t fair that some kids had dads who couldn’t hold their liquor, who drank up the milk money and neglected their fatherly duties. To protect these unfortunate offspring, the people of America—never too thrilled with the idea of individual liberty to begin with—took away the freedom to drink from every responsible adult in our land.
Our nation promptly got hammered by the giddy effects of the law of unintended consequences.
While alcohol consumption did decline, perhaps by as much as a third, much of the nation was overwhelmed by bootlegging, lawlessness, and gangland violence. A new criminal class was created that was far more dangerous than a drunken dad stumbling home from the local pub.
Prohibition failed as a policy, but it succeeded in raising a national question that remains unanswered: How bad do you let things get in your neighbor’s house before you kick down the door?
After all, Prohibition may have been a bad solution, but drunkenness was a very real problem. In communities across America, children with loving fathers who helped them with their schoolwork lived next door to dead-drunk dads who came home every night and kicked anything under three feet tall.
This inequity in the quality of parents continues today. Take our young friend in New Mexico who was sent home from school because Mom didn’t put her in a regulation dog collar. This spike-haired student probably sits across the aisle from some Mormon classmate dressed in Osmond-Wear, whose mom makes her drink eight glasses of milk a day and sends her to bed before the family viewing hour is over. Is this fair? One kid’s being groomed for great success, and the other’s being checked for fleas—is that right?
Yes, actually, it is.
It is only fair that kids with concerned, involved parents have better lives than kids who don’t. If you spend the night before the algebra test reviewing logarithms with your little Einstein and I spend it teaching Junior the drum solo from “Innagaddadavida,” there should be a difference in the outcome. That’s only fair.
This is the equity of inequity, the justice of injustice. Sure, we all wish every child could have Donna Reed and Mr. Rogers for parents, but all too often they get, well . . . us.
Dress codes, curfews, taxpayer-funded day care—these are inherently unfair attempts to level the playing field between good parents and bad. Look around at the adults you know and the parents they have, and you’ll agree that most of us get the parents we deserve.
Most, but not all. I may tend toward libertarianism, but I have no problem with the government taking kids out of homes where they are starved, abused or exposed to Howard Stern. We have to draw the line somewhere.
For example, there was the horrible death of Christina Corrigan, the seven-hundred-pound thirteen-year-old so obese she couldn’t get up and go to the bathroom. Young Christina spent her days lying on a sheet in front of the television and eating herself to death. “Christina demanded food and I usually gave in”—that’s what her mother told the police after her daughter died of heart failure in the living room.
“It took six people to roll Christina’s body onto a sheet of canvas and drag it to the coroner’s wagon,” the AP reported. And you have to wonder if any of the six ever turned to the mother and said, “Two words, lady—Jenny Craig!”
This child didn’t eat herself to death—she was fed to death. If you’re too fat to make it to the bathroom, chances are you won’t be jogging down to the corner grocery, either. If you’re so big you can’t get up and feed yourself, you are, by definition, on a diet—the Somalia diet. And unless you can lure a passing cat onto the hibachi, you’re going to lose weight.
I believe Christina’s mother is the model for the new child-first movement. As a mom, she was willing to suffer continuously—working full time and taking care of an unnecessarily immobile daughter. But she wasn’t strong enough to put her daughter through the relatively mild pangs of a Big Mac attack.
Most American children could use a bit more suffering, a bit more social policy neglect.
And more parents could use a good stiff drink.
September 1997
President Clinton has been criticized, and rightly so, for the cut-rate quality of his cabinet members. Reno, Shalala, Reich—they all have an off-the-rack quality about them, even in their appearance. The whole bunch looks like they fell out of the irregular bin at T. J. Maxx.
However, one cabinet member who certainly fits this description has somehow escaped harsh scrutiny: South Carolina’s former governor and the current U.S. Secretary of Education, Dick Riley.
Given the Palmetto State’s horrible school system, choosing a former South Carolina governor to head the Education Department is like naming Dennis Rodman president of the Southern Baptist Convention. This is doubly true for Dick Riley, whose term began with South Carolina dead last in education and ended with a huge education tax increase . . . and South Carolina dead last in education.
Whatever it was President Clinton saw in our governor, it managed to escape the poor suckers stuck in South Carolina’s crummy school system.
A point of personal privilege: Bill Clinton has a thing for failed South Carolina politicos. For example, before Clinton chose him to head the Democratic National Committee and Chinese Money Laundromat, Don Fowler was state chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. When Fowler took over the state party, Democrats controlled eight of the nine constitutional offices and had a 4–2 majority in our congressional delegation. When Fowler left to join Clinton’s team, the Republicans held eight of the nine Constitutional offices and had a 4–2 majority in Congress.
Speaking for Republicans everywhere: Don Fowler is my kind of Democrat!
Anyway, the appointment of Dick Riley to the Department of Education has been frequently overlooked, perhaps because the Department of Education is so overlookable. Less than 10 percent of public education spending is federal, and most of that is either for kids of military families or for special education.
Nevertheless, Secretary Riley loves nothing more than to pontificate on the state of education in America, and he was recently back in the Palmetto State to discuss pedagogy in all its aspects.
His first, and most surprising, pronunciamento was that “South Carolina is ready for a new renaissance” in education.
Not to split hairs with America’s top educator, but before one can have a renaissance, don’t you have to have a naissance? If South Carolina ever enjoyed a golden age of intellectual achievement in our public schools, I must have slept in that day. Given my home state’s academic tradition of viewing books as a good way to get the fire nice and hot before you add the cross, what era of enlightenment is Secretary Riley urging us to return to? The invention of the cotton gin? The invention of the wheel?
Riley made this comment at a meeting of the National Association of State Boards of Education on Kiawah Island, where attending bureaucrats strolled our lovely Low Country beaches thanks to the generosity of taxpayers back home. The bureaucrats running America’s failing education system may have had cushy surroundings, but Riley’s speech contained tough words and harsh criticism.
Not of them, of course. No, the harsh words were for me.
Not by name, but I am a proponent of school choice, and as such I apparently have upset the secretary: “I am most distressed by some of the overheated rhetoric some are using to mischaracterize public education today, usually when they are promoting the silver bullet solution of vouchers,” Riley said.
“When they talk and talk and talk about vouchers, they’re not interested in constructive criticism of our schools, how we can make them better and improve them. They continually demean public education. They belittle our children, our parents and our teachers. I tell you, I am tired of it,” he said.
Secretary Riley’s comments have caused me to amend one of the world’s most famous maxims: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t tell the difference get to run the schools.”
As a graduate of South Carolina’s public schools and an observer of its current graduates, I can’t imagine how it is possible to mischaracterize public education in any way that would be worse than the truth. The only way to overheat the rhetoric regarding Riley’s government-run school system would be to accuse teachers of secretly administering lobotomies to unsuspecting students.
Given the pathetic state of South Carolina schools, why is Secretary Riley angry that parents are looking for alternatives? Riley says that people like me, who believe parents should be able to pick the best school for their individual children, “belittle our children, our parents.” This is clearly backward. The only reason to deny children and parents the right to choose is because you think they are too stupid to pick the right schools.
Secretary Riley’s logic is sloppy, his arguments flawed, his conclusions disingenuous. If that doesn’t make him an ideal member of the Clinton cabinet, I can’t imagine what would.
November 1997
If nothing else, the Clintons certainly keep American politics entertaining. First fund-raising coffees, then sleep-overs, and now home movies! It’s like having Uncle Darryl and Aunt Vergie running our federal government, except that President Clinton rarely wanders into the front yard in his boxers to pick up the morning paper.
Life in the White House has been so ridiculous for so long, events that once would have stopped the presses are now buried in the back pages of the paper. Months ago, when Hillary Clinton’s long-lost billing records appeared on her nightstand two years after they had been subpoenaed, eyebrows were raised.
Today, videotapes long sought by the courts miraculously spring from the world’s best-monitored monitoring system, and no one bats an eye. “Uh, we just kinda found ’em under the sofa” is the White House explanation for how videos of presidential fund-raisers remained conveniently undiscovered until well after the 1996 election.
To which I reply: Are you kidding? Ever since the Oval Office recording system brought Nixon down, you can’t get an unauthorized piece of Scotch tape into the White House. But you couldn’t find a stack of presidential videos?
This lame excuse turned laughable when paid White House stooge Lanny Davis insisted that the military-run White House Communications Agency, which made the tapes, couldn’t find them in computer archive searches because nobody thought to look under the heading Coffees.
“Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?” Janet Reno must be saying to herself.
* * *
Janet Reno is far more clever at finding ways to avoid prosecuting the president’s friends than she is at finding evidence with which to indict them. President Clinton is also better at demanding stronger campaign finance laws than he is at obeying the ones we have today.
And, despite what you see on the nightly news, there is an enforceable campaign finance law in place. But don’t take my word for it. Just ask Robert B. Maloney.
Bob Maloney is a former Smith Barney broker who laundered money for his brother’s 1994 congressional campaign. He did this by asking friends to write checks to his brother and then personally reimbursing them for the money donated. Nineteen people wrote checks for some $39,000, all of which Maloney made good out of his own pocket.
What happened to Bob Maloney? He was indicted this week and faces a maximum of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine on each of the seventeen misdemeanor counts filed against him.
But somehow, the same law that reaches Bob Maloney doesn’t quite extend to the leaders of the free world. Al Gore’s famous fund-raiser at a Buddhist monastery in California (motto: “You can turn your vow of poverty into cold, hard cash”) was an identical money-laundering scheme.
The record is clear and undisputed: Penniless monks handed over thousands of other’s people dollars, and they got checks back from big-dollar donors who were breaking the law. But while Bob Maloney sits in stir, Al Gore is still raising money.
Interestingly, Gore’s case is actually a stronger one for prosecutors because there is a specific law prohibiting political fund-raising at religious institutions. But these laws didn’t stop the Clinton-Gore money machine.
And how bizarre is it to watch lefty Hillary-types attacking the Promise Keepers for the mere possibility of mixing religion and politics, while they continue to defend Al Gore and his confirmed political activity at a temple of worship?
This is what I mean by the complete lack of integrity. Their hypocrisy and self-serving self-righteousness seem to pervade the entire government. The fact that Bill Clinton and Al Gore are, as people, wholly corrupt isn’t as disturbing to me as the corrupting influence they are having on the people around them.
Even the normal bureaucratic functions of government, which inadvertently promote individual liberty through incompetence and inefficiency, have broken down altogether. It doesn’t necessarily bother me that the FBI is so inefficient that it can’t find home movies of White House fund-raisers. What bothers me is that this same FBI was conveniently just competent enough to hand over their background files on Clinton’s enemies.
This double standard of justice is the new twist to old-fashioned political corruption added by the Clinton administration. It’s one thing if Janet Reno takes a laissez-faire attitude toward all fund-raising violations. It’s something else altogether when the Bob Maloneys of the world go to jail and the Al Gores go to the Democratic National Convention.
January 1998
Writing about a fast-breaking news story such as the Clinton White House intern scandal for a weekly publication is inherently dangerous. In the days between my writing and your reading, virtually anything could happen in this roller-coaster ride of a presidency, and it probably will. However, I can make one statement today with absolute confidence: By the time you read this, the Clinton presidency will be over.
I can make this assertion because, in fact, the Clinton presidency is already over. Yes, he may still be sitting in the office, trying to inconspicuously sneak peeks into the blouses of mail room staffers, but Bill Clinton’s tenure as president is finished.
A man who has been caught having sex in the White House with a twenty-one-year-old employee and lying about it under oath simply cannot be president. The media won’t let him, and neither will the people of America.
“Aha,” Clinton apologists violently assert, “but he hasn’t been caught. Nothing has been proven!” And it may never be “proven”—the key word in Mrs. Clinton’s Today show hatchet job on Kenneth Starr—because the president’s defenders are not using the usual standard of reasonable doubt. They are instead using the newly developed O.J. Simpson standard of “possible doubt.”
Is it possible that aliens beamed down to Earth, put on O.J.’s socks and then murdered his wife? Theoretically, yes. But every reasonable person knows that O.J. Simpson is a murderer and that President Clinton had sex with a twenty-one-year-old intern. There is no room for reasonable doubt.
The clincher for me, by the way, was the revelation that the president had called Lewinsky at home. Do you have any idea how hard it is for the president of the United States to make a phone call? As a general rule, presidents are only allowed to call people who can blow things up or (in a new twist added by this president) write very large checks to the Democratic National Committee. So until someone steps forward with proof that Monica Lewinsky had a sack of cash from Charlie Trie or a thermonuclear device hidden in her sock drawer, we can all rest assured that she and the president had a sexual relationship.
Why else would a married, middle-aged man call a twenty-one-year-old girl? Phone chess?
The Clintonistas will no doubt continue to slander Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp, et cetera, et cetera, but to no avail. By his own actions, the president has ended his service, because there are at least three things a person must be able to do to be president, and Bill Clinton can no longer do them.
The first is communicate with the nation. A president must have the ability to hold a press conference with other heads of state that doesn’t invoke puns on the phrase “head of state.” He must also be able to make a simple public statement, such as “I never had sexual relations with that woman,” without having every member of the press corps whip out a thesaurus and begin speculating about what he really meant.
This president is in the bizarre situation of having to explain his explanations because of his well-established ability to slip through invisible loopholes. Remember: He still believes that he did not lie when he denied having an affair with Gennifer Flowers even though he had sex with her. And I hesitate to even repeat the theories on the president’s contorted view of sexuality, which allows him to deny Lewinsky’s charges. As of today, Clinton’s defense can best be summarized by that classic argument of trailer-park lawyering, “Eatin’ ain’t cheatin.’”
Another essential presidential task is the ability to declare war. Constitutionally, no one else in America can do so, and politically, President Clinton cannot do so. Why? Because our nation will not follow into war a man whose public policy would then be described as “killing our sons and screwing our daughters.”
Finally, the Clinton presidency is over because, as much as I love a good laugh, no person can withstand the avalanche of ridicule this pathetic putz has pulled down upon his own head. Americans have a tacit understanding with their elected officials: “Go ahead, take the perks, hire a personal stenographer to sit in your lap, send a little government gravy to your golf buddies from the old law firm, that’s fine. Just don’t embarrass me. Don’t make me feel humiliated that I voted for you.”
President Clinton has broken the deal. Every public statement he makes from now on will be somebody’s punch line. Soon the joke will get old, and President Clinton will lose every politician’s most important asset: the ability to entertain.
And we the people will give President Clinton the hook. He may still have the desk, but he won’t have the job.
The fact is, with all the Clintonistas screaming that “this isn’t Watergate,” President Clinton passed the Watergate standard long ago. Obstruction of justice? Why do you think President Clinton’s friends paid Webb Hubbell more money to stay in jail and keep his mouth shut than he could earn as a private attorney?
Perjury and obstruction of justice? This is a White House where subpoenaed documents mysteriously appear on the First Lady’s nightstand, where long-sought videotapes of presidential fund-raisers with Chinese arms dealers are suddenly “discovered” after the 1996 election.
Abuse of power? In both Travelgate and Filegate, the FBI was used to punish political enemies of the president: The White House travel office director was wrongly indicted (and later acquitted) by the Clinton Justice Department, and I trust we all remember Craig Livingstone, the “useful galoot” whom no one will admit to having hired but who somehow was able to compile the supposedly confidential FBI files of hundreds of Republicans.
The president’s problem today is not that he has violated the Nixon standard—that’s old news. No, the president’s in trouble because he finally broke the Oprah barrier, because he is engaged in a scandal that stupid people can understand.
It’s a safe bet in politics that when you become a potential guest for Jerry Springer (“My Lesbian Wife Ordered Our New Dog to Eat Subpoenaed Documents!”), your presidency is over.
Once again, I am writing in the very midst of the thrashing storm. By the time you’ve read this, it may have already blown over. If, for example, the president has the courage to do the right thing, he will formally resign from office, and he will do so in the next few days.
Then again, if Bill Clinton were a man of personal integrity and courage, my column this week would be about the Super Bowl.
February 1998
There’s never been anything like it.
—President Bill Clinton on the trial of O.J. Simpson, 1994
Until now.
William Jefferson Clinton has become the Orenthal James Simpson of American politics: Everyone knows he did it; we’re just watching to see if he can get away with it.
Will he? If he does, he will have successfully walked a path hewn through the American justice system by pioneers such as Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro just three years ago. In fact, a review of the two cases, taken directly from news reports, shows that President Clinton and O.J. Simpson are sharing virtually the same defense strategies. Legally speaking, it looks like a case of having been separated at birth.
THE O.J./CLINTON DEFENSE STRATEGIES
Deny, Deny, Deny
I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.
—President Clinton
Absolutely, 100 percent not guilty.
—O.J. Simpson
“It’s a Conspiracy”
After Judge Ito blocks all but two of L.A. detective Mark Fuhrman’s racial slurs from testimony, defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran accuses Ito of being part of a police conspiracy to frame Simpson.
First Lady Hillary Clinton claims Monica Lewinsky is part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to frame her husband.
Cochran calls the prosecution’s introduction of O.J.’s wife-beating into testimony a “clear and orchestrated attempt to influence public opinion.”
Referring to the activities of Ken Starr’s office, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart says, “It seems to be an orchestrated campaign of misinformation.”
Cochran threatens to call an ex-FBI agent who testified in the World Trade Center bombing case that he had been forced to doctor evidence. The agent had no connection whatsoever with the Simpson case.
White House aids tell Newsweek—without offering evidence—that the “talking points” document that corroborates Lewinsky’s taped account is fabricated.
“Hey, Nobody’s Perfect”
He, like all of us, has made mistakes. Of course, we know that only one perfect person has ever walked the earth.
—Johnnie Cochran
One aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Clinton particularly was buoyed by scriptural referrals offered by ministers supporting the president. The references included Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” and John 8, in which Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
“I’m the Victim of a Powerful Prosecutor”
Cochran complains that the prosecutors have more resources than the defense, though prosecution lawyers earned $45 per hour while the Dream Team members were making $650–$700 per hour.
Clinton defenders claim Ken Starr’s office has spent $30 million (or $40 million or $50 million, depending on which day you ask) as part of a partisan campaign to get the president after years of failing to prove the original Whitewater allegations.
Defense expert Frederic Rieders, who told jurors a patently lame story about blood possibly being planted on O.J.’s socks, responds to cross-examination by attacking the prosecution: “I’ve been pestered by the prosecution from hell to breakfast.”
White House aides accuse Starr’s investigators of using inappropriate and possibly illegal tactics to pressure potential witnesses.
“You Can’t Trust My Accusers”
Cochran points out several times that Detective Tom Lange lives in Simi Valley—the white suburb where LAPD officers had recently been found not guilty in connection with the Rodney King beating—implying that this raises issues about his character.
Clinton defenders frequently note that Linda Tripp was part of the Bush administration and is a friend of a right-wing book agent who once worked for Richard Nixon.
Defense attorneys maintain they will not play the race card, then denounce Detective Fuhrman as a white supremacist who planted evidence to frame Simpson.
Despite assurances from White House spokeswoman Ann Lewis that the administration would not attack Lewinsky’s character, a White House aide calls reporters to offer information about Monica’s sexual past, her weight problems and what the aide said was her nickname—“the Stalker.” She was known as a flirt who wore her skirts too short and was “a little bit weird.”
“You’ll Never Prove It”
Before being arrested, O.J. spent several days at the home of his friend Robert Kardashian, discussing his troubles. When O.J. escaped the police and fled for Mexico in his infamous white Bronco, Kardashian then paid the fees required to become reinstated as an attorney in California, thus allowing him to invoke privilege and avoid testifying against his friend regarding their pre-arrest conversations.
President Clinton is considering invoking executive privilege to keep attorneys in the White House from testifying against him.
When police tried to get documents regarding O.J.’s wife-beating from the defendant’s office, they were blocked by the defense. When the officers returned later, O.J.’s assistant had shredded them.
The White House has refused to release copies of entry logs and phone records that could confirm that Lewinsky met with the president privately after December 25, which would mean he had committed perjury. (No report on whether or not they’ve been shredded yet.)
Forensic expert Henry Lee, who went on to dispute much of the prosecution’s blood evidence, was at Kardashian’s house with O.J. and A. C. Cowlings the night before O.J.’s attempted escape.
President Clinton met alone with Monica Lewinsky on December 28, just before she turned in her sworn deposition attempting to deny her affair with the president.
“I Really Want to Tell My Story . . .”
The majority view on the defense team is that Simpson should testify. O.J. wants to testify, too.
—Johnny Cochran
President Clinton acknowledged there were legitimate questions about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and that “the American people have a right to get answers. I want to do that. I’d like for you have more rather than less, sooner rather than later.”
“. . . But I Won’t”
O.J. Simpson never took the stand in his own defense.
“I’m honoring the rules of the investigation” by refusing to provide details of his relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton said. A spokesperson later acknowledged that there were no rules prohibiting the president from explaining his relationship with Monica, other than the rules of common sense.
Neither O.J. Simpson’s attorneys nor the president’s representatives mentioned the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
February 1998
The voice that joyously leapt at me from the phone was very familiar. But the words took me by surprise. “Michael, this Clinton sex thing—isn’t it great?”
It was a friend of mine, a college buddy now finishing his med school residency. Years after college, we still talked frequently, but I couldn’t recall ever hearing him utter a single sentence about politics, even though I work as a political consultant. Bright, entertaining, informed, sure—but as far as I could tell, he didn’t know the difference between Richard Nixon and Richard Dawson.
President Clinton had changed all that. “Are you following this Monica story?” he went on excitedly. “It is absolutely amazing!”
But when I asked him when he had joined me in the ranks of Clinton-bashers, he stopped me cold. “Clinton-basher? No, no, Michael. I’m not bashing the president. He’s going to get away with it, and I think it’s wonderful!”
I didn’t want to sound like Bill Bennett thumping on a copy of The Book of Virtues, but I found it difficult to share his enthusiasm. I told him the silver lining around the public’s current celebration of presidential perjury had not yet caught my eye.
“Are you kidding me, Michael? This Clinton guy is a godsend! Here we are, you and I, a couple of guys in our mid- to late thirties, with middle age staring us coldly in the face. And the president of the United States has just made it okay for older guys to screw around with younger women! We are on the verge of a new sexual revolution, and with you and me as the target demographic! And I say it’s about damn time.
“Think about it this way,” he went on. “Guys our age missed the 1960s free love movement. We missed the permissive 1970s, too. When we finally hit the sexual dance floor, so did the AIDS virus. We’re the generation who had to deal with HIV before we even got around to heavy petting. I thought we were doomed. And now we’re the Clinton Generation! Is America a great country or what?”
I started to explain that the story was far from over, that there were more political peaks and valleys ahead, but he stopped me.
“Michael, when the boat’s a-rockin,’ don’t start knockin’! Why fight it? Women’s attitudes have completely changed, almost overnight. There are a bunch of feminists where I work who just last week were ready to turn a lingering glance into a lawsuit. I went to work yesterday, and they’ve decided it’s okay to be a dirty old man! Medical interns who used to be a harassment filing waiting to happen now eye me with a look of expectation.
“We’re on a teeter-totter, with President Clinton on one side and every moral conclusion of the history of Western civilization on the other, and Bill’s winning! You the man, Bill! You the man!”
I tried again to argue that the president might, in fact, pay a political price when the facts reveal—as they almost certainly will—that he did have sex with his twenty-one-year-old intern and lied about it, but my friend laughed in my face.
“You think the nation’s moral character is going to bring Bill Clinton down? Michael, you’ve got it backward! Instead of demanding he rise to our level, virtually every college-educated woman I know is ready to drop down to his! And buddy, I mean ‘drop down’ in a very literal sense.”
My doctor-in-training was on a roll. “And I ask you, Michael, who are we to judge? Hey, he’s the president; I’m a resident. Besides, instead of condemning his failings, you and I should cheer him on. We’re going to be the big winners. A few more years of President Clinton, and Woody Allen can get elected pope!
“In fact,” he continued, “that’s why I called. On behalf of every middle-aged married man—and those of us headed for middle age and probably marriage in the all-too-near future—I want to start a Draft Clinton movement and elect the president to another term. Can you help me?”
I pointed out that if he was serious, he first needed to change the name of his movement. After all, the last time someone tried to draft Bill Clinton, he fled to Europe. I also noted that the United States Constitution prohibits presidents from serving more than two terms.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he answered. “And fifty-year-old married men aren’t supposed to fondle the office help, either. Michael, you’re still thinking under the old paradigm. Don’t you understand? Aren’t you paying attention? The president of the United States met privately with a witness who had been subpoenaed to testify against him. Afterward she changes her story and lies under oath. Then his pals get her a high-paying job for which she is clearly not qualified . . . and nobody cares! It’s a whole new world!”
He had a point. I suppose President Clinton could claim that he had never actually served his first term. You know, he could say someone else had been president from 1993 to 1997, and all the videotape and news stories about him in Oval Office were Republican fabrications.
“Now you’re thinking with your Clinton!” he shouted. “That’s it. He can look right in the camera and tell the American people: ‘I never served as president before 1996—these allegations are false.’ Hell, no one even has to believe him! We all want Bill to be president—the American people couldn’t care less about the facts. And Hillary can say that anyone who disagrees is part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.”
There might even be a legal loophole, I went on. The president could claim he was never officially sworn in the first time. He could say that when they administered the oath of office in 1993, he thought it was a federal deposition and so he lied.
“Now you’ve got it. Look, I gotta go. A couple of young coeds have asked me to give them some career advice, and, being the sensitive, gregarious guy I am, I’m heading over to counsel them in a friend’s Jacuzzi. But if anyone can figure out how we can get President Clinton elected for a third term, you can.
“Just remember: If you give the American people a choice between the integrity of the U.S. Constitution or a sycophantic politician who appeals to our lowest, neediest elements of human nature and will tell us whatever we want to hear—we’ll be in like Flynn! Life is good, my friend!”
And then he hung up, another idealistic American inspired to action by President Clinton.
January 1998
I am famous. I achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy his whole life to accomplish.
—Sirhan Sirhan, after assassinating RFK in 1968
It is ironic that both Michael Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan are famous for precisely the same two reasons: a lifetime of accomplishments by Robert Kennedy, and a single, shameful act of their own.
Sirhan Sirhan has no identity outside his relationship to RFK. In 1968, in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel, Sirhan took his place in the hall of eternal infamy. Up to that moment, he was as unknown to the average American as your run-of-the-mill busboy, sewer worker or vice president of the United States.
The same could be said of the recently self-bludgeoned Michael Kennedy, one of the hundreds of nameless, faceless Kennedys who thrive in the cold, amoral environs of New England. One year ago, Michael Kennedy’s death on an Aspen ski slope would have been minor news—a one-paragraph brief tucked away in the holiday newspapers next to other unread stories such as “Locations for Recycling Your Christmas Tree” and “Celebrating Ramadan in the American South.”
Just one year later, NBC News literally interrupted this program to tell us that Michael had George-of-the-Jungled himself to that great Kennedy compound in the sky. The networks dusted off their Di-Cams to broadcast his funeral live, with hushed commentary about Caroline Kennedy’s clothes. Weekend talk shows gave nonstop analysis, going so far as to find women in Massachusetts who had not been propositioned by a Kennedy, drunk or sober. Even in our local papers, Michael Kennedy’s funeral made the same number of front-page appearances as Mother Teresa’s.
Why the change? How did Michael Kennedy go from minor media memo to front-page mega-event?
Because Michael Kennedy was a child molester.
That’s it. That is the only difference between the Michael Kennedy of New Year’s Eve 1996 and the man whose funeral aired live this week.
One year ago, he was a Kennedy, one of the ten surviving children of RFK. One year ago, he was head of a nonprofit corporation providing heating fuel to poor people.
And one year ago, Michael Kennedy was the “extraordinarily effective” campaign manager now eulogized by Democratic hack Mary Anne Marsh, who gushed: “He won every race he ever managed, which is more than most people can say in this business.” Not to speak ill of the dead, but getting Kennedys elected in Massachusetts is about as impressive as getting rednecks elected in South Carolina.
And Michael Kennedy’s campaign record was not without blemish. In August, his brother Joe Kennedy withdrew from the Massachusetts governor’s race, in part because campaign manager Michael was caught helping the baby-sitter with some of the more hands-on portions of her biology homework.
In the world of Democratic political consultants, nailing your fourteen-year-old neighbor may or may not be as tacky as hiring a toe-sucking prostitute, but even Dick Morris’ clients weren’t driven out of public service.
Regardless, none of these accomplishments, real or imagined, was significant enough to generate a mini tidal wave of media reaction. Michael Kennedy was on your TV screen for an entire week because—and only because—he seduced a child, because there were political consequences to that seduction and because he died while the story was still hot.
This heat may well be genuine. Besides the generic Kennedy fame, there is a resonance to any tale in which women are treated shabbily by a Kennedy—though given their track record, the baby-sitter should count herself lucky she made it home alive.
And it would be unrealistic to deny the cultural chord struck when a young, handsome Kennedy is felled in his prime. This chord turned to a choir when the image of touch football was added (though I have to put football on skis at the same level of stupidity as skeet shooting in the round).
Regardless, it is the case that the pre-statutory-rape Michael Kennedy was a man of ability and accomplishment; his business successes and eleemosynary efforts would have made for a glowing eulogy and perhaps even allowed him to slip by St. Peter unnoticed.
But they would never have gotten him on Larry King Live.
This is the only “big news” of the tragically dumb death of Michael Kennedy—that in today’s America, a lifetime of accomplishment is worth less than a moment of infamy. The era of accomplishment—of Edison, Ford, Eisenhower and, yes, Kennedy (Joe junior and JFK, that is)—has been utterly usurped by the cult of celebrity, focusing on the Dianas, the Oprahs, the O.J.s and the current crop of second-rate Kennedys with their oafish activities.
In the America of Bill Clinton, the coin of the realm is celebrity, period. News directors have no interest in the notion that one story is, in and of itself, important or trivial. These former newsmen are in the entertainment industry, and if ten million overweight women in trailer parks will stay up late to watch Princess Di’s hairdresser give Richard Simmons a perm, then Dan Rather had better grab his comb, because he’ll be broadcasting live from Ye Olde Beauty Shoppe during sweeps week.
Successful businessmen who start churches in Africa, provide warm homes for the poor and raise money for AIDS patients are not news. Kennedys who abuse drugs and sleep with underage girls are. And on slow holiday weekends, they make the front page.
March 1998
I read all these dead white men and I’m tired of it. I think there is so much racism in this country because we don’t understand each other.
—San Francisco high school senior Duc Nim
Thank God for racism.
Reading the papers, I once again see how much Americans count on racism, real or imagined, to solve life’s little problems. From the endemic failure of our state-run school system to the personal failures of incompetent individuals, racism is the grease that keeps our society running . . . in place.
Take, for example, the recent front-page brouhaha in Allendale County, South Carolina.
Allendale County has the kind of school system that makes the old Soviet Union look efficient and market-friendly. Residents there are more likely to have dropped out of high school before finishing the ninth grade than are residents of any other county in South Carolina. According to the newspaper The State, “Allendale’s students are performing so badly that the state recently declared the school district impaired. Last spring, when 33 of Allendale’s brightest students took Advanced Placement exams to earn college credit for their high school work, not one passed.”
Then came the onslaught of media coverage, reporting that Allendale County’s school system is a racial powder keg with a burning fuse: A black school board member pulls a knife on one of his white counterparts; he is removed from office, which sparks protests from black residents. A white principal suspends a black student for leading a school assembly in the singing of the black national anthem; student walkouts and accusations of racism force the principal to resign.
Thus we see the immense power of the insidious forces of racism in South Carolina: Racial tension drove a school-board member and a principal out of their jobs in the Allendale school system at a time when the school’s own lousy performance could not.
Years of academic failure and wasted resources were taken in stride by the folks of Allendale. No protests, no student marches, no shouts of “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Why do our test scores blow?” But the minute a white principal punishes a black student for breaking the rules (school policy prohibits racially divisive symbols such as the Confederate flag, the black national anthem and Strom Thurmond), suddenly the community is mobilized for change.
The same is true across the state as well. South Carolina ranks at or near the bottom in every objective measure of educational performance. When polled, voters rank education as the most important issue facing our state, four times more important than taxes or crime.
But our public discourse rarely gets past the issue of race. Racists, on the left and right, claim that our state does poorly because we have so many black students. It’s a never-ending conflict, but who is the winner? Why, the idiots running the schools, of course!
Think about the teachers responsible for Allendale’s thirty-three “advanced placement” students who couldn’t pass a blood test. In a rational world, they would be out looking for work right now. But nobody is holding them responsible for the quality of their work. Instead, black parents blame illiterate students on the insidious effects of “the Man keeping us down,” while white parents, both liberal and conservative, write off their black neighbors as uneducable.
The same thing is happening at the national level, too. The same week that American high school kids tied with Cyprus for last place in math and science testing, the San Francisco school board was debating what the Associated Press called “strict quotas for non-white reading by San Francisco’s high school students.” The current reading list, with all that Shakespeare and Twain and stuff, is full of infamous “dead white males.”
The argument offered by self-proclaimed anti-racists is that little Johnny (or Juan or Chen) can’t understand Chaucer because Chaucer was a white guy. If Chaucer had been the Queen Latifah of the Middle Ages, American kids would be the literacy leaders of the free world, not the last-place losers they are today.
Does any rational person take this argument seriously? Of course not. But by deflecting the discourse toward race, the school boards managing our terrible schools are off the hook. Oakland has Ebonics, San Fran has “attack the Man,” and our kids have the reading skills of the Sri Lankan 4-H club. What would the NEA, the San Francisco school board and the South Carolina education department do without racism?
By the way, the kids have figured this stuff out. One West Coast student who demanded Shakespeare be replaced by Shaquille O’Neal said: “I’ll tell you what Chaucer means—it means subtitles required.”
Yep, that readin’ and writin’ stuff sure is hard!
The big joke in all of this is that racism serves precisely the same purposes for these kids once they escape our classrooms. In Allendale County, rednecks complain that the reason they are making $4.50 an hour shoveling manure is because affirmative action has taken all the good jobs—not because they can’t add past their fingers or read the joke section of Playboy without a tutor.
In the same county, a young black woman’s plight—traveling eighty miles a day to earn $5.75 an hour cleaning hotel rooms—is blamed on racism, not on the fact that she dropped out of high school when she was fifteen to have the first of two children out of wedlock.
If it weren’t for racism, these people would have to hold themselves responsible for their lives. Without racism, our schools and teachers would be blamed for failing our students. Without racism, all of us, white and black, would face the prospect that we are leading the lives we deserve.
So, on behalf of every American, I say, “Thank God for racism!” The alternative is too horrible to imagine.
April 1998
Forget the law. Forget the facts. The will of the people, Mr. Starr, the will of the people.
—William Ginsberg, attorney for Monica Lewinsky
Los Angeles, summer 2002—Legal observers and movie industry watchers emitted gasps of surprise and sighs of relief today when Hollywood megastar Leonardo DiCaprio walked out of his cell in the Los Angeles County Jail, a free man. News of the film star’s release sparked a rally on Wall Street, led by Warner Brothers stock, which rose an astonishing 235 percent on news that the jailed teen idol would soon return to the set of the long-awaited sequel Titanic III: Voyage of the Terminator.
A clearly relieved DiCaprio was greeted with hugs from co-stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kate Winslet as he left the Los Angeles County Courthouse where Judge Lance Ito (brought out of retirement for this high-profile case) had released him. Moments earlier, prosecutors had dropped the first-degree murder charges against him due to “a lack of public support for continued action.”
“Your honor, the people have spoken. We will abide by their wishes,” Los Angeles prosecutors told the judge, referring to recent polls indicating that nearly 73 percent of all Americans wanted the popular film star released regardless of his guilt or innocence.
The prosecutors’ decision caught many legal experts off guard, given the seemingly overwhelming evidence pointing toward DiCaprio. The victim was Los Angeles film critic Kenneth Turan, whose caustic criticism of the still-unfinished Titanic III and its cast appeared in print the morning of his death. Evidence included the infamous “bloody ship,” a cast-iron replica of the Titanic used to bludgeon Turan to death; videotape from parking lot surveillance cameras showing DiCaprio leaving the scene covered in what appeared to be blood; and DiCaprio’s own confession to his new girlfriend, Madonna, which she repeated in sworn testimony (Madonna and DiCaprio were married soon after her affidavit was released, in what some legal observers viewed as an attempt to prevent her from testifying against her new husband).
Despite the evidence, however, prosecutors were reluctant from the beginning to prosecute this case. One investigator told Variety: “I have a thirteen-year-old daughter who won’t even talk to me!”
“This is the vindication my client has been seeking,” said DiCaprio’s attorney, William Ginsberg. “We knew the American people would never sit back and let these mad-dog prosecutors hound a beloved figure like DiCaprio for years on end. Someone needed to tell these prosecutors to get a life. Don’t they know that if shooting isn’t finished this summer, the film will never make a release date in time for the Oscars?”
Reaction to the prosecutors’ decision was split down ideological lines. Conservatives—clearly shaken by their increasing unpopularity—were relatively quiet. Former Republican vice presidential nominee Pat Buchanan denounced the action from his secret bunker somewhere in Utah: “There used to be something called the rule of law in this country. Now, these kids beat you to death, and if they can get a movie deal, they walk! DiCaprio—what is he, anyway, some kinda wop?”
DiCaprio supporters such as Geraldo Rivera and Larry King called the decision a triumph for democracy. “Our investigation revealed that many of the Los Angeles police officers were wearing the same style of uniform as the officers in the O.J. Simpson case. One of them had even met Mark Furhman. This was a witch hunt from the beginning,” Rivera said.
Some legal scholars have expressed concerns about the emerging legal theory of “popular nullification” first espoused by U.S. senator Hillary Rodham (former wife of President Clinton) in a 2001 appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, all direct evidence of obstruction of justice—including taped conversations, documents and sworn testimony by more than a dozen witnesses—was set aside by Congress after what Speaker of the House Mary Bono jokingly referred to as the “Seventy Percent Amendment to the Constitution—when your approval ratings are that high, you can get away with murder. Hell, I’d kill someone for those numbers myself!”
DiCaprio carefully avoided any indication that he was gloating, expressing his condolences to the family of the movie critic “if, in fact, Mr. Turan was actually killed”—a veiled reference to the “vast anti-Hollywood conspiracy” theory floated by Titanic III’s producer, James Cameron, in a recent appearance on the Today show. DiCaprio also shook hands with some of the thousands of teenage girls who held vigil outside the county jail.
“You have proven that while you may not understand what goes on in a courtroom, you can still influence it. I love you all!” DiCaprio told the gathered throng, several of whom were clubbed violently to prevent them from reaching the smiling star.
When asked if she was bothered by the fact that DiCaprio had possibly committed murder but would not even be required to appear before a jury, one fan told reporters, “I mean, like, you know, like, people die and stuff, right? I mean, like, are you going to ruin, like, his entire career just because he maybe made one mistake? I mean, like, who’s going to make Titanic IV?”
“Some of the old-fashioned types may not like it, but the people run this country—with or without the law,” Ginsberg told attorneys as he lunched with his law partner, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and the president’s fiancée, Playmate model Bambi Thumper. “Nobody’s perfect, and imperfect people can’t expect everyone to play by the rules, even when they make the rules, right, Mr. President?”
Clinton declined comment.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio announced that he would “get back to the job the people freed me to do—make another great box-office smash of a movie that will make everybody feel better about themselves.
“And I bet we’ll get pretty damn good reviews, too.”
March 1998
Clinton approval ratings among women have been in the high 60s and holding despite intense publicity about womanizing allegations.
—Pew Research Center pollster Andrew Kohut
This is what Susan B. Anthony marched for?
American women, who have only been voting for about seventy-five years, are by their own behavior casting doubt on the value of universal suffrage. After years of damaging, demeaning and now indisputable evidence that President Clinton is a shameless boor who couldn’t keep his pants on in a nunnery, America’s female voters remain his strongest supporters.
It could be that the president’s policies—defending partial-birth abortion, advocating school uniforms, restricting right turns on red lights—are of such vital interest to women that they must forgive him any oafish action, no matter how vile. If you are one of these women, I have a simple request: Please burn your voter registration card immediately.
It is rare indeed to hear a woman base her defense of the president on his female-friendly accomplishments. This is because President Clinton has no accomplishments—feminist or otherwise—to champion. We all know the cost of the Clinton presidency: He has turned the office itself into a joke, corrupted the criminal justice system, shredded the rules of campaign financing, brought locker-room language to the nightly news and landed literally hundreds of people either in jail, in debt or in the unemployment line—most of them his one-time friends.
Sure, we all know what the Clinton presidency costs. The question is, what did we get for our money? Did we use a coupon, and is it too late to return it?
And if we’re doing a little comparison shopping, ladies, what is it you want from this president that is worth the price of silence in the face of his shamelessness? What policy has he successfully championed, what liberty has he tirelessly defended that is worth the cost we all agree he has inflicted upon our nation?
There are none. His greatest achievements, balancing the budget and reforming welfare, were policies he tirelessly opposed and repeatedly vetoed until the Republicans won the Congress. President Clinton taking credit for the Contract with America is like the airport baggage handler announcing he has successfully landed the plane.
But women still view him as their best friend in public office, their knight in . . . well, if not shining armor, then only slightly stained armor. This is one reason I, as a man, am so offended by women’s stiff-kneed defense of President Cretin as a typical American male.
My God, what must they think of the rest of us?
And yet, whatever they think of us men, Clinton’s female voters think even less of his women. Kate Michelman, pro-abortion extreminatrix, actually said of Paula Jones, “It is unrealistic for anyone to think that groups like NARAL and other women’s rights groups are going to jump on board when she [Jones] was being promoted and bankrolled by groups that hold extreme anti-women views.”
In other words, President Clinton can fondle all the pro-lifers he wants.
Even more fascinating are the catty, class-related observations about Kathleen Willey coming from members of the American women’s movement. Paula and Gennifer couldn’t get a “poor dear” from their fellow females. Meanwhile, University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles O. Jones noted that Kathleen Willey’s status in politics and society “means that more attention is going to be paid to her. More women will pay attention for the combination of who she is and the nature of the act.”
Once again, the message from the left is clear: Bop all the big-hair types you want, Mr. President—we’ll make more!
Not that the well-bred Willey is getting a completely free ride from the sisterhood. I am amazed at the number of women who have commented that, because of her offer to bring the president chicken soup, she should have known that their “flirtatious” relationship would result in an aggressive session of federal frisking at the Oval Office.
There is a mentality among some of America’s most intelligent women that it is incumbent upon every female who approaches the president to do so with a whip-and-chair attitude. The subtext is that unless you walk into the White House prepared to beat back the attacks of the First Fondler, you are asking for trouble.
No one will ever accuse American women in the late twentieth century of not being intellectually flexible. But ladies, are you really prepared to replace the glass ceiling with the “ass ceiling”? Do you truly believe that for low-income women to move up in the world, their slacks should come down?
The unbending support of American women for one of the most cretinous, shameless and personally destructive womanizers to enter the public arena raises legitimate suspicions among men, suspicions we have long harbored about the distaff double standard. You whine and complain about us regular-Joe types, who forget birthdays, let dishes pile up in the sink and don’t understand how you could possibly sit through Titanic the first time, much less go back. To you, we are insensitive louts who just don’t get it.
But at the same time, you welcome our pants-free president with open arms of understanding and compassion. As long as he “feels your pain,” he’s welcome to feel up everything else of yours along the way.
The typical husband glances at a passing thong, and you blame him. Bill Clinton reaches into an employee’s underwear, and you blame her!
What do women want? Only their president knows for sure.
February 1998
Consider the events of the day:
Grim-faced Republicans trod stoically beneath the dark cloud of rising presidential polls. Democrats laugh nervously at their victory over scandal but hold their breath every time a newscaster uses the phrase “oral briefing.” The media provide a spectacle of self-flagellation, whipping themselves for the public cynicism they have inspired.
And me? I am overcome by joy.
Washington is in turmoil, but I arise each morning with a spring in my step. Commentators wring their hands, but I pass the day with a whistle and a smile. The media ask, “What hath Geraldo wrought?” but in the evening, as I log off the Drudge Report and climb into bed, the news of the world lulls me into a peaceful slumber.
I, once imbued with social annoyance, find myself unusually sanguine: Even my kicks at the odd passing cat are insincere.
It’s not just the cynic’s joy of having my lowest expectations for my fellow citizens confirmed beyond contradiction, though that is a nice bonus. No, I am enjoying the endorphin-like rush of having been dealt an inside straight when everyone at the table is bluffing, the thrill of victory one feels on a blind date when your escort reveals that she was once a sorority girl.
Everything’s goin’ my way.
We are at a unique confluence of political forces—right and left, local and national—that seem designed to convince the citizenry that government is run by and for buffoons, that laws are made to be broken by the same people who write them, and that perhaps, just perhaps, the best thing for our nation would be for good men to do nothing and let the idiots fend for themselves.
In a word, freedom—the happy coincidence of a complete collapse of the government’s moral and social authority. And as a card-carrying member of the libertarian wing of the GOP, I couldn’t be happier.
Historically, the two blunt instruments governments have used to beat down individual liberty have been morality (people should not be allowed to be naughty) and security (if we leave you alone, you might hurt yourself). Because people are reluctant to publicly oppose morality and because they privately suspect that, in fact, they are too stupid to prosper on their own, the fight for freedom has almost always been a losing proposition.
Not anymore.
Today, in the glorious Clinton era, the notion of government-inspired morality seems as quaint as a Just Say No bumper sticker. The idea of President Clinton proposing an expansion of government based on our nation’s “moral duty” is as unimaginable as a call by this president for a day of national chastity.
When a nation has such low regard for government and the people who run it—even the ones they approve of (79 percent and climbing)—the masses are unlikely to give it new things to do. President Clinton’s strategy of staying in office long after he has become a laughingstock is successfully demeaning the power of every elected office in the land.
And I say, “Hooray!” Newt Gingrich couldn’t do this much damage to the federal government with a SCUD missile.
At the same time, how can a public that sets its moral bar low enough to accommodate President Limbo seriously demand the enforcement of laws against vices such as drugs, prostitution or gambling? Can you explain to a high school civics class why it’s okay for the president of the United States to pay off a twenty-one-year-old for her “services” with a $40,000 job at Revlon but a crime for Joe Blow to pay her $40 for the same “job” performed in the back of his Buick?
President Clinton has single-handedly removed the government’s moral authority on any public issue. Liberty wins round one. Meanwhile, back home in South Carolina, there is a sea change regarding the issue of security, of whether or not people should be allowed to be stupid without government interference. Thanks to advocates of video poker, the answer is yes.
The quasi-legal video poker industry has exploded across my home state of South Carolina. With its popularity has come a rise in libertarian thinking. Rednecks who support capital punishment for flag burners and a constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage have suddenly discovered Ayn Rand. Elected officials have begun articulating the once unspeakable sentiment that if freedom allows some people to fall through the cracks and to their own doom, that is not sufficient reason to restrict it. Folks, for South Carolina, this is practically a revolution!
True, liquor by the drink is still illegal in the Palmetto State and some blue laws still linger, but the end is near. Once people in power announce their willingness to allow self-destructive behavior, the question quickly moves from “Should Bubba be in a bar Saturday night?” to “What right does the state have to keep him out?”
Events in Washington, D.C., and Columbia, South Carolina, are together landing a one-two punch on the power of government. The fiercely partisan, win-at-all-costs defense of President Clinton is based on the assumption that government has no moral authority to maintain. The money-driven defense of video poker is premised on the belief that government has no hapless citizenry to protect.
The result is citizens who have begun to ask the question “Then what is government for?” From the people who run said government, the answer comes ringing back: “To keep us in power! Now give us your money and go away!”
An open-eyed citizenry is bad news for the institutions of government, but good news for those of us who always believed that individual liberty was more important than these institutions to begin with.
As that great political theorist Mae West once said of marriage, “It’s a great institution; I’m just not ready to be institutionalized.”
July 1998
Dear Hil—
Left this note on the dining room table next to the latest report on child immunization rates from the Department of Health and Human Services. Figured you would see it there first—plus I never feel comfortable leaving documents up in our room. Who knows when they’ll reappear? Ha, ha!
I signed that card you picked out for Chelsea and had the new Secret Service guy drop it in the mail. At least, I told him to. These new guys Bruce Lindsey hired for me since that whole executive privilege thing came up, why, they’re so hard of hearing, I can’t tell if they know what I’m asking ’em to do half the time.
Oh, and don’t bother having lunch brought in today. I’m going to be downstairs getting videotaped. No need to come down and watch—it’s just the usual testimony. You know, that old “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but” routine. Boy, isn’t it lucky we both went to law school? That sure paid off for us—with or without those Whitewater checks!
Just kidding. Anyway, I know you’re busy taking the villages and raising the children right now, but there are a couple of things I need to let you know about before that out-of-control, right-wing nut job Starr shows up with his video cameras.
Baby, you and I know that those vicious Republicans will stop at nothing to destroy the political principles that I have stood for all of my life. Some ideals are too important to compromise, like opposing the balanced budg . . . I mean protecting the safety net of welfar . . . uh, like nationalizing health ca . . . Well, Hillary, I don’t have to tell you how important these principles are.
That’s why the morning you went on the Today show and stood up against the vast right-wing conspiracy was one of the proudest days of my life. I believe we turned a corner that morning, as a nation and as a couple. In a way, you and I have come to represent all of America.
Hillary, I believe you represent the idealistic desires of the American people to use government power to improve and direct the lives of everyday citizens by redistributing wealth, ensuring justice and ending undesirable behavior. Meanwhile, my presidency represents what the government actually does to people once it gets all that power.
And polls indicate that most people like it, especially women.
Because we represent so much to so many, our enemies are determined to tear us apart. But we’ve always come out okay when we stick together. It’s like that time in college when you found me naked in the pool with those girls from the swim team. You immediately wanted to jump to conclusions, but I swear, baby, if I hadn’t torn off my clothes and jumped in to help them, those two girls would not be alive to serve as senior staffers in the Commerce Department today.
I’ll never forget how hurt I was when you left me and started dating that poli sci major from Boston. I was crushed. But eventually we got back together, and history proves it was for the best. Without you, I would never have become the proud husband and father I am, and I seriously doubt that poli sci grad would have made you America’s greatest First Lady—in fact, I don’t think she’s ever run for public office, has she?
The point is, we’ve got to stick together. In the next few days, you’re going to hear a few things that might upset you. You might hear about some DNA samples on a cocktail dress. You might hear that I have slightly modified some of my testimony from that deposition in the Paula Jones case. You may hear something about games of Princess Warrior and Thunder King at a late-night Oval Office party . . . (No, wait! You haven’t heard that! Just skip it—it’s nothing.)
Honey, I swear I can explain this whole Monica mess. Like the stains on that dress, for example. We all know that when she stormed out of the White House because I would not give in to her feminine wiles, that Lewinsky woman went straight to the Pentagon. Well, if you’re a buddy of Linda Tripp and you’re part of the conspiracy, how hard would it be to get a sample of my bodily essence from that top-secret file they keep on every president? (Didn’t I tell you about that? Why, they’ve still got bucketfuls of the stuff from JFK. Some top-secret cloning project. Very X-Files.)
I know sometimes you’re tempted to doubt me, baby, but you’ve got to remember why we’re sticking together in the face of these false charges. These lies have one purpose only: to bring down my presidency and with it its most important legacy, namely, the protection from future prosecution we both enjoy. (By the way, did you ever get the real paperwork from the commodities deal a while back?)
Hillary, I’m prepared to stand with you, to trust you when you tell me that I am mistaken about your orders to “fire those lazy bastards” in the Travel Office. I believe you when you tell me that those papers in my bureau for two years weren’t under subpoena. I am absolutely ready to testify that it was not you who sent that “useful galoot” Craig what’s-his-name to pick up every FBI file that wasn’t nailed down.
I swear, honey—I believe every word you say. All I’m asking is that you do the same.
Gotta run, baby!
Your Bill
P.S. There’s some cold chicken in the icebox. Don’t wait up!
July 1998
The president of the United States just made the most amazing four-minute speech in American history, putting his final mark on the White House intern scandal. While political junkies and Sunday talk show geeks like me are wallowing happily in the bottomless swamp of Clinton commentary, those of you with actual lives have been giving Monica Mania the casual attention it deserves. Instead of tossing my two cents’ worth into the endless stream of talking heads, I offer this primer on the speech in the hope that you regular Joes and Josephines can discover the joy of writing your own intern sex jokes in the privacy of your own homes.
THE SPEECH
Length of speech: 4 minutes, 5 seconds.
Amount of time the president spent explaining his relationship with Monica Lewinsky: 1 minute, 40 seconds.
Amount of time the president spent attacking Ken Starr: 2 minutes, 25 seconds.
Amount of time since the scandal broke that the president and his agents have spent falsely attacking Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and the vast right-wing conspiracy: 218 days.
Purpose of the speech: To save his presidency by apologizing to the American people for denying—under oath and also on television—that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
Number of times in the president’s apology he actually used the words apology or apologize: None.
Number of times he used the word sorry: None.
Number of times the president used the words lied, cheated or ashamed: None, none and are you kidding?
What did the president actually apologize for? Good question. The closest statement to an apology was: “I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.”
Didn’t he apologize for having sex with a twenty-one-year-old intern in the Oval Office? Not exactly.
Okay, how many times did he admit to having sex with Monica? He didn’t give a number, but Monica has testified that if you include the time they sneaked into the Lincoln Bedroom for a quick “staff meeting” . . .
No, I meant how many times in his speech did he mention their sexual relationship? None.
How many times did he use the word sex? None.
So did he admit they had sex or didn’t he? He said, “I did have a relationship with Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” That’s it.
Well, a relationship that is “not appropriate” could mean anything. He could have been talking dirty to her, the way Clarence Thomas did to Anita Hill, or he could have been trying to get her signed up in some multilevel marketing program. How do we know that the president really had sex with Monica Lewinsky? This is “Clinton for Dummies,” not “Clinton for Complete and Utter Morons.”
How did the president look? Remarkably bruise-free, given the fact that he spent most of the weekend with Hillary. Commentators described him as “wooden” (Slate), as “more defiant then contrite” (Washington Post) and as still having “a nice butt” (Time magazine’s Nina Burleigh).
The president’s lawyer told reporters that the president testified “completely and truthfully” to the criminal grand jury before he gave the speech. Is that right? No. The president flatly refused to answer several questions, so he didn’t testify completely. We will have to wait to find out about the “truthfully” part.
But he must have told the truth! Surely this man, more than any other, has learned his lesson about lying. He would never lie again, right? Actually, no. In fact, the president lied in his speech.
What? He lied on TV Monday night? ’Fraid so.
About what? It’s kind of complicated. When the president was accused of sexual harassment by Paula Jones, he was ordered by the Supreme Court to testify under oath. In this testimony, he was asked if he had had sex with Monica Lewinsky. The court was using a definition of “sexual relations” that was explicit—the stimulation of the genitalia, buttocks, inner thigh, et cetera. Using that definition, the president said no. He claimed he had never had sexual relations with Monica. On TV Monday night, he said that while this testimony was “legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.”
How could his sworn statement be accurate when he has supposedly acknowledged that she was “hailing the little chief”? Only if you believe his argument that while she may have been having sex with him, he wasn’t having sex with her. You know, “eatin’ ain’t cheatin.’” Unless you agree with this statement, then the president is still lying.
So what does that mean? What it means is that the Farrelly brothers’ presidency is still in trouble. Ken Starr is almost certain to recommend impeachment, there will be hearings, Monica will have to testify before Congress exactly how she got the Executive Emollient on her dress, and so on. In other words, the speech didn’t do any good at all.
Wasn’t there any good news? Sure—ABC went right back to Monday Night Football. At least somebody is keeping a sense of perspective.
July 1998
The Republicans aren’t serious about [teen smoking]. They don’t propose real children’s smoking reduction targets backed by strong penalties. And there are no significant restrictions on the ability of tobacco companies to market their deadly wares to kids.
—Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt,
June 23, 1998
All 10 committee Democrats opposed a bill making it a federal crime for anyone other than a girl’s parent or guardian to evade laws in her home state that require parental consent or notification for an abortion by escorting the girl to a state that doesn’t impose those requirements.
—Associated Press, June 24, 1998
Larry was a loser. A twenty-one-year-old dropout who drifted between jobs, he hung out with the few high-schoolers he could find still listening to Metallica. One of those outcast kids was Nancy, a fifteen-year-old whose strict parents would not let her listen to rock music at home. Nancy discovered Black Sabbath from her worldly friend Larry; then he taught her to smoke. Eventually, he taught her the secrets of amore.
“Oh, God, Larry—I’m pregnant!” Nancy screamed at him one day. “You told me it couldn’t happen if I was on top!”
“And you believed me? . . . Anyway, you’ll just have to have an abortion. Uh, you got any money, baby?”
“An abortion? Oh, no, Larry—I’ve always been taught that was wrong. I mean, my mom would kill me . . . and besides, Allison told me you have to have your parents’ permission.”
When Larry finally got the nerve to call Planned Parenthood (from a pay phone in case they traced the call), he was told, “This is a parental consent state,” and was asked if he would like to write a letter of protest to his congressman. Eventually he found the number for an abortion clinic in a neighboring state. He shoved a handful of quarters in the pay phone and made the long-distance call.
“No problem,” he was told. Amazingly, Larry discovered that all Nancy had to do was show up with the money early one morning, and by that afternoon she would be done—no questions asked.
“Is this a great country or what?” Larry said to himself as he took a hopeful poke into the change slot on the pay phone.
Between some day work Larry picked up at a warehouse loading dock and a little money Nancy had tucked away, it only took a week to raise the few hundred dollars for the procedure. He and Nancy didn’t talk much during that week. Once Nancy tried to talk to him about how he felt, whether he thought abortion was wrong or not, but he just mumbled something about how “women ought to have rights” and then refused to talk about it.
One morning before her classes started, Larry’s beat-up Firebird pulled up outside Nancy’s high school and she jumped in. They drove a couple of hours, mostly in silence. Though it was interstate most of the way, Larry compulsively referred to a map he had carefully marked using directions he had been given by the clinic. When they reached the squat gray building, Larry circled a few times, scanning the parking lot for trouble. Inwardly, he was terrified that there would be some kind of protest, with police and TV cameras on the scene. He was afraid that if a bunch of Christians started screaming, “Baby killer,” Nancy might back out and he would be in big trouble. Fortunately, the parking lot was quiet.
He pulled up to the building, but at the opposite end from the clinic door. “I’ll be back to pick you up around four o’clock, okay?”
Nancy stared at him dumbly. “You mean . . . you mean you aren’t even going to go in? You’re just going to drop me off and drive away?” She burst into tears.
Larry looked around nervously. He thought he saw a face peer out of a nearby window. He reached for a cigarette, but he was out.
“Look, uh, I’m out of smokes. Let’s get a pack and talk about it—really. Uh, it’ll be okay. Really.”
Larry found a convenience store. He left the car running and went in while Nancy sat in the front seat, her head leaning out of the open window. He bought a pack of Marlboros and walked outside. He tore open the pack and lit one, letting the soothing smoke fill his pounding chest.
Larry walked around the car and stood next to Nancy. She looked up, and suddenly he noticed how young she was. He did something he had seen in a movie. He put another cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Then he took it out and handed it to Nancy. She smiled weakly. Maybe everything would be okay.
“Freeze!” someone shouted, and Larry felt his cheek smash against the windshield. Nancy screamed.
“Don’t move! Police!” came another shout. Suddenly they were surrounded by blue lights and uniforms.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Nancy cried. She looked at Larry, whose face had been dragged off the windshield and was now being pressed against the hood of the car by a hefty policewoman.
“Would you look at this?” the officer growled. “This scumbag is twenty-one, and that girl . . . well . . .” She glanced pityingly at Nancy. “What is she, fourteen or fifteen? It’s disgusting.”
“How did you know?” Larry gasped through clenched teeth.
“We’ve had this place staked out for weeks,” another officer told him. “We knew you punks were sneaking across state lines trying to evade the law. Don’t you know what you’re doing to this girl? Don’t you have any morals at all?”
“But the woman at the clinic said the abortion was legal,” Larry moaned.
“Abortion? Who said anything about abortion? We’re talking about these!” The officer waved the pack of Marlboros dramatically in front of Nancy’s face.
“Be careful!” the policewoman snapped. “That’s evidence.”
“Oh, you’re right.” The officer glared at Larry. “You disgust me. Driving an underage girl across state lines—and without her parents’ knowledge, I bet—then buying her cigarettes. I hope they throw the book at you, you repulsive child-killer.”
As they loaded Larry into a squad car and watched the tow truck drag away the Firebird (“We confiscate cars from tobacco dealers in this state”), the policewoman shook her head sadly. There sat Nancy, sobbing on the curb outside the convenience store. “Hey, Sarge—what about her? Didn’t he say she was going over to the clinic?”
The officer in charge thought for a moment. “Give her a ride over there and put her on a bus afterward. After all, she’s really the victim here.”
May 1998
Authorities originally wanted to pursue Jackson’s case as a felony. The charges were downgraded because the paper clip did not inflict serious harm.
—From an Associated Press story on seventeen-year-old Clint Jackson, who was arrested and jailed after using a rubber band to shoot a paper clip at a schoolmate
One of the most difficult notions for Americans to grasp is the idea of the irremediable, the unfixable: those unpleasant conditions faced each day that are not solvable problems but rather eternal facts of life, such as stupidity, apathy, and professional wrestling. Americans are the ever-hopeful offspring of Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. We are confident that if we just put our shoulders to the wheel, we can roll over any problems in our way.
This uniquely American trait showed itself last week when a renegade student shot up the school cafeteria in Springfield, Oregon. Kipland Kinkel’s irrational violence at Springfield High inspired yet another round of hand-wringing and calls to action in our public schools. As the mayor of Springfield put it at a funeral for one of the victims, “For Ben’s memory, and for his family, we simply must do something.”
What that something is has not been determined. There have been a few calls from the usual suspects for more gun control, nicer videos, et cetera, et cetera, but nothing has engendered significant support. One personal observation: A sure way to reduce the amount of youth violence is to stop giving children names like “Kip Kinkel.” Stick some unlucky teenager with a moniker like that and you might as well hand him a rifle and point him toward the nearest clock tower.
Beyond that minor suggestion, I have nothing else to offer as a solution to the problem of teen violence other than swift prosecution and eternal vigilance. But this is unacceptable to many of my fellow Americans, because neither of these actions will guarantee that other children won’t be shot in the future. In fact, I would bet that they almost certainly will. But that is no reason to “do something.”
When concerned Americans attempt to eliminate the eternal problem of children behaving badly, it is their custom to find solutions that stop children from behaving at all. A few examples:
We all want schools to be free of drugs, right? Well, in pursuing this laudable goal, schools have recently taken to suspending students for
And we certainly want our children to spend their school day free from the fear of violence. But as a result,
Schools fighting “hate crimes” have
And, finally, schools are fighting “troubled youths” by having our friend Clint Jackson arrested and jailed for shooting a paper clip with a rubber band, and by having an Ohio boy serve thirty days in the slammer for letting the air out of the bus tires at his school.
In each one of these incidents, the punishments are perversely excessive compared to the so-called crimes. I can understand a school wanting to teach that drawing booklets with racially offensive jokes is a bad thing to do, but so is trashing the First Amendment. And while every mother in America may be genetically predisposed to assume that a flying paper clip will eventually put somebody’s eye out, until it does, should the shooter be thrown in the slammer?
C’mon, people, this is America. We didn’t even make O.J. go to jail, for cryin’ out loud. But we’re sending little Johnny to the joint for having a slingshot?
I will concede that one way to keep children from saying things we don’t like is to censor them. One way to prevent shootings would be to confiscate all guns. One way to prevent kids from disrupting class is to force them to wear uniforms and not allow them to express their opinions, even on a book bag. And I have no doubt that capital punishment for practical jokes will make April 1 a less disruptive day in our public schools.
Such actions would make America a tidier, quieter and more orderly place. But who would want to live there?
There is no benefit in ridiculously restrictive rules or in their mindless obedience. We certainly should be distressed by the youth violence we’ve seen, but we must not heighten these tragedies further with a tragic reduction in our freedom from which we might never recover.
What I suggest is a healthy dose of anger aimed at the sick children who have fired the shots, an insistence that they be punished severely, and the acknowledgment that, no matter how hard we try, sometimes people do bad things.
July 1998
If you had told the old gang back in Pelion, South Carolina, that Horace King had an idea worth $15 million, we would have laughed ourselves silly. And yet that’s exactly what a jury just decided.
I speak from personal experience when I mention Horace “Exalted Cyclops” King, state leader of the Ku Klux Klan and a resident of the rural South Carolina community where I grew up. Two of his sons, Vernon and Alan, went to school with me, to little noticeable effect. We didn’t pal around (they seemed uncomfortable with people who conjugated their own verbs), and I wouldn’t recall them at all if it weren’t for their family’s extracurricular activity—promoting Klan rallies.
Every so often, a white van with a loudspeaker on top and a Confederate flag on the side would cruise up and down our road inviting us to a “big pro-America rally, tonight! All white public invited.” Later that evening, as my family headed to Wednesday-night Bible study, we would spot the motley bunch in the woods, huddled around some tattered, burning totem while Horace King yelled at them. It looked like a ragged remnant from the Lost Tribe of the Great White Trash, or a cast of extras from a Kevin Costner flick.
There is a perverse irony in the notion of an anti-intellectual buffoon such as Horace King being prosecuted for his (for lack of a better word) philosophy. It’s as though President Clinton were indicted for excessive modesty. But that’s exactly what happened.
King’s $15 million idea is that white people are superior to black people, that black people are evil and that white people who associate with black people are (don’t try the spell-checker on this one) “wiggers.” In a civil trial brought against the Klan by a black church that had been set ablaze, the arsonists claimed they were driven to crime by the persuasive powers of Horace King and these racist ideas.
We can argue as to whether these ideas are persuasive, but we can all agree that, pathetic attempts at vocabulary building aside, King’s ideas are not original. No, they have been heard all too often before.
Indeed, is there any southerner, white or black, who hasn’t been exposed to the bizarre rationalizations of the Exalted Cyclops and his ilk?
Trust me: Horace King has never had a thought—original or otherwise—in that thick redneck skull of his. So why does he owe $15 million to the thought police? What is his crime other than, perhaps, plagiarism?
Shouldn’t we prosecute the person who originally taught Horace King the secret Klan handshake? Isn’t whoever put the Klan philosophy in King’s head the real culprit?
One problem: The person stupid enough to believe in the Klan is probably too stupid to think up his own ideas. He probably got it from someone else, who learned it from his daddy, et cetera, et cetera. If we follow the trail long enough, we’ll end up prosecuting Nathan Bedford Forrest, who is very dead (and, we can only hope, very warm).
This is the problem with prosecuting ideas. They are so hard to pin down. The Clintonistas may view this as a personal failing of mine, but I’d be a lot more comfortable if we just prosecuted people for their actions and left their ideas alone.
Does that mean words can never be prosecuted? Of course not. Defamation and libel are still actionable, and it’s still a crime to yell “Library card!” in a crowded Klan meeting. But is Horace King directly responsible for the behavior of others who are stupid enough to believe his uninformed rantings? It’s one thing if he drove the two boys to the church and loaned them money for the gasoline. But if he just announced his hatred of black churches and his desire to see them burn, is that enough?
If you answer, “Yes, fry the racist bum!” then you must also prosecute preachers who speak out against abortion clinics, black congressmen who label their Republican counterparts Nazis, and, of course, Al Gore, whose hate-filled tome Earth in the Balance graced the bookshelf of the deadly Unabomber. To fail to do so is to fail your own principles.
I am far less principled than the fine members of the jury in this church-burning case, who have declared thoughts to be deeds and words to be actions. I would have taken the coward’s way out by only holding people responsible for their own actions. I would have sided with those weak-willed “wiggers” who see the freedom to speak as more important than the ability to shut up morons like Horace King.
No, I do not have the courage of those jurors who feel confident in their ability to determine which ideas are good and which are bad and to use the power of the courts to punish people whose ideas are just too unpopular to be allowed. I also don’t share their confidence that they will be able to defend themselves should their ideas become unpopular one day.
The price of their courageous attempt at thought control is $15 million, give or take a constitutional amendment or two. Personally, when it comes to judging the mental efforts of Horace King, I wouldn’t give you, or his prosecutors, 15 cents.
June 1998
My wife, whose bloodline runs a deep South Carolina blue, owns a T-shirt that reads WE DON’T CARE HOW THE HELL YOU DO IT UP NORTH. This fashion choice from an otherwise demure flower of Dixie is but one more bit of evidence that, as northerners have long suspected, southern gentility ends at the Mason-Dixon line.
Interestingly, while we southerners may deny any interest in how Yankees get things done, we spend an awful lot of time and money to mimic them. Take bagels—please.
Take them back up North or out West or wherever you brought them from. The one thing we do not need in the South is another white, flavorless breakfast starch. If I wanted to spend my mornings choking down lumps of tough, indigestible dough, I would ask my wife to make biscuits again.
Bagels are an example of distinctly northern dining, like a bowl of clam chowder in New England or a bullet in the skull in New York’s Little Italy. But though they are about as southern as a subway token, travel around our state and in every strip mall and every grocery store—even in the hallowed southern aisles of the Winn-Dixie—you will find bagels.
And not just any bagels, either. Spreading like kudzu across South Carolina are shops such as New York Bagel and its competitor, Big Apple Bagel—which is likely to be around the corner from Manhattan Bagel.
I know that South Carolina is a popular retirement destination for you disillusioned Yankees fleeing the wrecked Rust Belt cities you helped destroy, but my God, people—didn’t you leave anything behind? The New York state of mind is seizing control of our entire economy, and I’m not just talking delis.
Here in South Carolina we’ve got New York City Pizza, New York Life Insurance (don’t they need a lot more of this than we do?) and, of course, New York Carpet World. Without leaving our borders, I can buy a suit at New Yorker Men’s Fashions, pick up a hot new frock for my favorite gal at the New York Boutique, get my hair done at New York Stylists and while away the evening at Manhattan’s Nite Life.
And if that’s not enough, Charlestonians can go to something called New York Moods, where, I assume from the name, cheerful southerners can get an attitudinal adjustment. I have even written them a new motto: “Turn your Jethro into a jerk!”
I am more sensitive than most to this new War of Northern Aggression because I just spent a year in Westchester County, New York. I can tell you firsthand that there is still plenty of northern aggression to go around. Ask a waitress in a New York restaurant if they have grits, and you might as well take out your teeth, strap on your banjo and start squealing like a pig.
“Grits?” one particularly parochial hash slinger barked at me last summer. “Wazzamattawitchoo? Weahdoyootinkyouare, anyway? Weahyoofum? Hey, Joey! Dis guy wants ta know if we got grits!”
Well, I showed her. I hitched up my overalls, stuck my John Deere hat on my head and stomped my bare feet outta there.
Having lived on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, I have noticed a strange double standard. When we southerners travel to the North and ask the locals to accommodate our cultural tastes—grits, barbecue, inbreeding—they react with indignation. “Wazzamattawitchoo? You people are weird!”
Conversely, when northerners traveling in the South find their ethnic needs occasionally unmet, their response is: “Wazzamattawitchoo? You people are weird.” No matter which direction you take, the blame winds up here in the South. And I believe we southerners, beneath the weight of our regional inferiority complex, tacitly accept the blame.
Southerners are the ultimate Upper West Side wanna-bes. We’re closet carpetbaggers who believe in our hearts that we should emulate our big-city betters, with no expectation that they will return the compliment.
Consider the list of self-described “New York” businesses here in the bosom of Beauregard country. We southerners would drive past a sign down here reading New York Style Sex Club (Visit the Marv Albert Room) and not blink an eye. But the entire time I lived in New York, I never saw a sign for Carolina Carpet World or Dixie Hair Styles. No Palmetto Boutiques or South Carolina Moods, either.
And what’s more, I didn’t expect them. It seemed perfectly natural to me that New York tastes would be accommodated down South but that southern tastes would disappear in northern climes.
Southern scholars such as C. Vann Woodward and John Shelton Reed place the blame on our native obsequiousness, which, they claim, is a result of our losing the War. (If you have to ask which war, please move back up North now.) Having lost our nation’s only military intramural scrimmage, a southerner’s tendency is to defer to our northern neighbors.
Maybe. Another, more pragmatic view was best expressed by my uncle Teenyboy: “Damn, there’s a lot of Yankees! And them Catholic ones breed like rabbits.” In other words, the North’s demographic advantage means that, over time, our unique southern culture is doomed.
Whatever the cause, I believe it is time for defenders of southern heritage to respond in kind. Southerners must be legally recognized as a minority group and extended special protections. The federal government should implement a quota system setting aside road construction funds to build mustard-based barbecue joints along New York expressways.
National Endowment of the Arts funds could be used to foist Charlie Daniels on unsuspecting New Yorkers. We could even ask the World Trade Organization to impose a swap: For every bagel we eat, a Yankee has to eat a chitlin.
That’ll show ’em.
My wife and I were decrying the decline of the South over drinks just the other day. She was drinking a Manhattan, and I had ordered a Long Island iced tea. The name of the restaurant: Broadway at the Beach.
“Bartender!” I yelped. “Two mint juleps—before it’s too late!”