A Colossal Wreck (11 page)

J. Edgar Hoover used the gossip columnist Walter Winchell to out Commies. Gossip usually has a repressive function in the mainstream press, which is why outing has to remain a subterranean, countercultural activity. Yet even in the counterculture, or at the level of the off-beat and unofficial, gossip always has the twin function of being liberating—letting the sunlight in—and repressive, in the sense of exposing the personal and the private, naming names and hurting people. Gossip represents visible fault lines at the social surface, reflecting subterranean, gradual shifts in our social attitudes. Although the liberating and repressive functions are both at work, given the structure of media ownership and control, the repressive function is usually dominant.

November 6

It’s all over, thank God. The American People took one last lingering look at the options, breathed the deepest of sighs, and mostly decided to stay at home. The stay-at-homes always win.

One big factor militating in Clinton’s favor was something virtually unmentioned: the end of the cold war. For almost half a century this was all-important. A president had to demonstrate he could defend the Republic by all means necessary, including nuclear obliteration of the planet. If the Soviet Union had existed in 1992 George Bush would have been reelected.

By 1991 it was all over and America was ready for a draft-dodger in the White House. Dickie Morris’s genius was to stick the Republicans with all their truly unpopular causes (assault weapons, abortion ban, end to affirmative action) and co-opt all the rest for Bill Clinton. It worked like a dream. As for Bill, I along with thirty million Americans of Irish descent liked what he did for Gerry Adams.

November 13

It’s just like the man said: vote for the lesser of two evils and you get both. Or, vote for Clinton and you get the other one free. Hardly had the polls closed before Clinton was saying that he’s likely to appoint the man—Dole—he’d spent the previous six months reviling to be in charge of a bipartisan commission to re-evaluate Medicare—a program he’d spent the previous six months hollering that Dole would destroy. And people wonder why the citizenry is cynical! The whole point of democracy is
not
to have bipartisan government.

Goodbye to the “soccer moms,” altogether the silliest confection of the entire campaign. In the end the soccer moms, deemed Clinton’s secret weapon, voted for him
less
than other female cohorts. Biggest enthusiasts for the man from Hope were elderly widows and young single mothers, far too frazzled to care about soccer. Judging from the ones I know, the soccer moms voted for Nader. What next? Across the past three elections the press has given us Joe Sixpack, the Reagan Democrat, the Angry White Male and most recently, the Soccer Mom. Aging Boomers?

In Humboldt County about 20 percent of the voters went either for Perot or Nader. In Mendocino the percentage was a bit higher. In a straw poll of 2,000 high school kids in Humboldt, over 25 percent went for a third party candidate, which is a comfort.

There’s not much to console oneself with otherwise. Large portions of the nation’s affairs are now being run by three men from Alaska. Appropriations, the powerful committee that Hatfield used to run, will now be under the sway of Ted Stevens, who really would drill through his mother if he thought there was oil in substrates below her coffin. Energy policy is under the sway of Alaska’s junior Senator, Frank Murkowski. In the House natural resources are overseen by Rep. Don Young, a former trapper and riverboat captain whose congressional office resembles a cheap Ketchikan taxidermy, its wall covered with the skins of Alaskan grizzlies, the lacquered corpses of king salmon and severed heads of Roosevelt elk and Sitka black-tailed deer.

Young does have a certain charm. Animal rights advocate Mary Tyler Moore once read a poem about the cruelty of steeljaw leghold traps before the Merchant Marine subcommittee, on which Young was serving. Accompanying Moore was Cleveland Amory, who periodically inserted a pencil into a trap, causing it to snap shut. The moment was highly charged and Young, as a hunter, trapper and taxidermist, realized dramatic action was required to turn the tide. His solution was to place his hand in a trap he had brought along and then begin calmly to question a witness as though nothing unusual had occurred. “I never told anyone, but it hurt like hell,” Young later confided to a congressional aide.

November 14

Goodbye, Larry. The only incumbent US Senator turned out of office was … yes, you’ve guessed it, Larry Pressler of South Dakota. I claim the victory. He went down by about 5,000 votes, against the trend in the state, where Republicans mostly carried the day. Before I traveled to Sioux Falls at the invitation of Jim Abourezk (Pressler’s predecessor in the Senate), Larry was running even with Tim Johnson.
After my slurs on his character his standing briefly rose, as Dakotans made a show of standing by their man, then sank steadily as solidarity was overwhelmed by rank prejudice. I am responsible for the Democratic majority in the Senate. Take that, you work-within-the-system types!

November 20

In the early 1970s Mobil decided to fight back against the consumer lobby denouncing it for price gouging in the wake of the oil shocks of 1973. The company’s boss, William Tavoulareas, and his Vice-President for public relationships, Herb Schmertz, decided to capture just the sort of middle and upper income support sought by Texaco thirty years earlier with opera sponsorship.

Schmertz did this by successfully placing Mobil commercials on public television, while simultaneously winning for himself the reputation of being the most munificent patron of culture since Lorenzo de’ Medici. He managed this amazing feat by getting Mobil to sponsor Masterpiece Theater on PBS. Schmertz, the patron, and Stan Calderwood of the PBS station WGBH in Boston, the original object of his patronage, deserve credit for turning public television into the prime corporate showcase.

Indeed, many of America’s cultural furbishments turn out to be the gifts of oilmen deeming it necessary to daub perfume on their profit statements.

After minions of John D. Rockefeller caused state troopers in Colorado to incinerate striking miners, their wives and children in the Ludlow massacre of 1914, Rockefeller hired a journalist, Ivy Lee, to improve his abysmal public standing. Lee threw himself inventively into the task. Young John D. Rockefeller Jr. was dispatched to Colorado to mix with the miners and project concern. Soon the press was praising the common touch of this plutocrat mingling with the ordinary folk. Meanwhile Lee told John D. Sr. to lavish a few of his millions on charitable projects and to give dimes to children. Soon the old robber’s name was practically synonymous with the philanthropic impulse.

It seems to work … and then it all falls apart. Just when a gratified citizenry is listening to Texaco’s operas or goggling at Mobil’s Masterpiece Theater or rambling through some Rockefeller-endowed museum, it all goes wrong. A tanker runs aground. The price of gas shoots up. And then the people remember what they never really forgot: they hate Big Oil.

November 21

As Warren Christopher packs his files and prepares to quit the State Department, one man in particular exults and cries Good Riddance. He is Kinsey Marable, purveyor of rare books at an excellent bookstore by that name situated at 1525 Wisconsin Avenue, in Washington, DC.

When Christopher became Secretary of State in the far-off dawn of the Clinton era, he was granted a Secret Service bodyguard. Christopher’s Georgetown house stands on Volta Place, which runs off Wisconsin. From Marable’s bookstore one can look up Volta Place, though the view is partially obscured by a fine old maple tree directly outside Marable’s premises.

Reviewing security arrangements for Christopher the Secret Service concluded that a potential assassin could clamber up into the leafy maple, seclude himself amidst its foliage and then, at leisure, take a potshot at the Secretary of State as he emerged from his house. So they mutilated the tree, sawing off its branches. The maple promptly began to die, and with each leaf it shed the fury of Kinsey Marable waxed ever more fierce.

He phoned the State Department. He wrote harsh letters to Christopher, pointing out the needless amputation of the maple. Finally, last Hallowe’en, he dressed up in a short skirt, applied makeup, clapped a blousy wig on his head and teetered up to Christopher’s front door on high heels. He rang the bell and the bodyguard opened the door.

“I’m here,” shrilled Marable. “Mr. Christopher sent for me because his wife is out of town.” “Mr. Christopher is out,” the bodyguard snarled, and slammed the door. It’s Marable’s hope that stories of
Christopher’s closet queendom will soon circulate inside the Beltway, doing harm to the reputation of the pinstriped lawyer.

December 2

Sir James Goldsmith made millions by getting out of the stock market in 1987 because he thought it was going to be announced that mosquitoes could carry AIDS. He thought this would cause worldwide panic and the stock market would collapse. Many a tycoon’s reputation for omniscience rest on faulty data.

Back in the fall of 1987, there were indeed fears on this score. I wrote on August 22 of that year, a time when I was living in Key West: “People are worried about getting AIDS from mosquitoes. I’ve not heard of any authoritative conclusion either way. Watching the possibly lethal bugs buzz about makes one realize how people felt about mosquito noises in the heyday of yellow fever. I read somewhere recently that between 1819 and 1839 the British army had a death rate of 483 per thousand men on station in Sierra Leone.” Those lucky enough to possess a copy of
The Golden Age Is in Us
will find this entry on page five. I phoned my old friend Edward Jay Epstein that same day in August 1987 and told him the fears of Key West. Since Ed was a boon companion of Goldsmith’s he passed the word along and the tycoon acted with all due dispatch.

1997

January 3

I see the word “underclass” a lot. On the issue of poverty here’s a bracing quote from Thomas Carlyle:

One of the ominous characteristics of this reforming age, the Custom of addressing “
The Poor
,” as a permanent Class, assumed to consist ordinarily of the same individuals. Just as in Jamaica I might address myself to “
the Negroes
.” Now if this have a sound foundation in the fact, it assuredly marks a most deplorable State of Society. The Ideal of a Government is that which under the existing circumstances most effectually affords Security of the Possessors, Facility to the Acquirers, and
Hope
to all. Poverty, whatever can justify the designation of “the Poor” ought to be a transitional state—a state to which no man ought to admit himself to belong, tho’ he may find himself
in
it because he is passing
thro’
it, in the effort to leave it. Poor men we must always have, till the Redemption is fulfilled, but
The Poor
, as consisting of the
same
individuals! O this is a sore accusation against any society! And to address an Individual as having
his
interest merged in his character as one of
the Poor
, his
abiding
interest! … The Poor can have, ought to have, one interest only—
viz
, to cease to be
poor
. But to call the man who by labor maintains himself under
human
conditions and comforts, who by labor procures himself what is needful for him and his essential affections a Pauper—to
designate
the sum total of such Laborers
the Poor
! O if this be not a foul misuse of words, if there be a ground in fact for it, it is in the same proportion a dire impeachment of both Church and State, such as would warrant a Revolution. For that Country must have a Canker at the Core.

January 15

Day of Repentance: The Salem witch trials took place in the spring of 1692. Ten girls, aged nine to seventeen, had met that winter in the house of Samuel Parris, pastor of the Salem Village Church. After learning palmistry and other crafts from Tituba, Parris’s West Indian slave, they accused Tituba and two old women of bewitching them.

Hysteria spread rapidly. The trials began and when they were done, nineteen had been hanged and one pressed to death for refusing to plead.

Four years passed, then the colonial legislative body of Massachusetts adopted a resolution calling for a Day of Repentance and fasting in memory of the victims. The bill was drafted by Judge Samuel Sewall, who had presided in the Salem trials, and who invoked “the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments.”

This week there’s an echo ceremony in Salem, exactly 300 years after the first Day of Repentance. It’s been organized by Carol Hopkins of San Diego, who sat on a grand jury in that city a few years ago and realized the dreadful injustices being inflicted on innocent people in the “Satanic abuse hysteria” sweeping the country in the 1980s and the 1990s. Present in Salem this week are many of the people thrown into prison on the say-so of tots whose testimony was coerced and perverted by “therapists,” social workers and mountebanks.

Bobby Fijnje will be there. He was held without bail in Florida for over a year when he was in his early teens, on the say-so of Janet Reno, at that time the state attorney of Dade County. Fijnje was ultimately acquitted as were others railroaded by Reno in her “crusade” against child abusers which gave her a national reputation. Kelly Michaels will be there. So will Peggy and Ray Buckey, victims of the infamous McMartin proceeding, the longest and most expensive trial in US history.