A Colossal Wreck (27 page)

But we are no longer amidst the fevers of the cold war. And though the Pentagon has wanly tried to foment a budget-boosting campaign to suggest that China represents a fearsome military threat, it has not been taken with any great seriousness. The exaggerations of Chinese might are simply too egregious.

So, in these post-cold war years, Wen Ho Lee did have his sturdy defenders. Some were government officials evidently appalled by the
Times’
campaign. Some commentators, most notably Lars-Erik Nelson of the
New York Daily News
, were scathing about the case against Wen Ho Lee. In July of 1999 the
New York Review of Books
published a long piece by Nelson which explicitly criticized the witch-hunt and noted the malign role of the
New York Times
. Nelson pointed out how many of the supposedly filched “secrets” had been publicly available for years. By September of 1999 the
New York Times
had evidently entertained sufficient disquiet to publish a long piece by William Broad which decorously—though without any explicit finger-pointing—undermined the premises of Risen and Gerth’s articles.

None of this helped Wen Ho Lee escape terrifying FBI interrogations in which an agent flourished the threat of execution. He was kept in solitary, allowed to exercise one hour a day while shackled, kept in a constantly lit cell.

Even near the end, when it was plain that the government’s case was falling apart, US Attorney General Janet Reno’s prosecutors successfully contested efforts to have Wen Ho Lee released on bail. And when Judge Parker finally threw out almost the entire case the prosecutors continued to insist, as has Reno, that their conduct had been appropriate throughout.

The
New York Times
, without whose agency Wen Ho Lee would never have spent a day in a prison cell, perhaps not even have lost his job, is now with consummate effrontery urging an investigation of the bungled prosecution.

In an extraordinary breach of conventional decorum the President of the United States has criticized his own Attorney General for the way Wen Ho Lee has been maltreated. Yet the editors of the
New York Times
can admit no wrong. Risen and Gerth are not required to offer reflections on the outcome of the affair.

When the forgeries of Richard Pigott, described in the 1911 edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
as “a needy and disreputable Irish journalist,” against Parnell were exposed, he fled to Madrid and there blew out his brains. The London
Times
required years to efface the shame of its gullibility. Would that the
New York Times
was required to admit equivalent error. But it won’t. Next year it will no doubt preen amid whatever Pulitzer awards are put its way by the jury of its friends. This is no-fault journalism.

September 24

Newt Gingrich had the first take on George W.’s pick for veep: “Dick Cheney is even more conservative than me.” Leave it to the Bush crowd to allow the Democrats to resurrect Gingrich once more in their campaign ads. Of course, Newt has always been misclassified by the political taxonomists as a conservative. Underneath the bluster, Gingrich is a closet neoliberal and a technophile, fully marinated in the argot of third-wavism and cyberspeak. It’s not surprising that he and Al Gore (frequent dining companions during their days in the House) are both disciples of Alvin Toffler and Carl Sagan and share the belief that getting urban America wired up to the internet is a fast-track out of poverty.

November 2

A political culture is under siege. Hear the panic as the waters pour into Atlantis.

Jesse Jackson cries out that “Our very lives are at stake.” Paul Wellstone quavers that George W. Bush will “repeal the twentieth century.” Martin Peretz, owner of the Gore-loving
New Republic
, writes furiously that “Naderism represents the emotional
satisfaction of the American left at the expense of the social and economic satisfaction of women, blacks, gays, and poor people in America.”

Somewhere in the third week of October the Gore crowd woke up to the clear and awful thought that they might not make it, that maybe it wasn’t their time any more and that the man to blame is Ralph Nader. Gore had bombed in the debates. The Greens had organized a whole string of Nader super-rallies across the northern half of the country from Seattle and Portland, through the upper Midwest to New York. In Minnesota Nader was polling over ten percent on some counts. In Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine, maybe even California, Nader could make enough of a dent to put Bush over the top.

And so the Get-Ralph campaign began in earnest.

I’ve always seen Ralph as our Robespierre, having to make do with class-action suits instead of the guillotine. Years ago the late Jim Goode, at that time editor of
Penthouse
, used to look across the piles of pin-ups with a shudder of distaste (he was gay) and snarl at me, “Alex, is your hate pure?” “Yes, Jim.” Ralph’s hate is pure. He’d no doubt prefer to be running at over 30 percent, but short of that, the privilege of being able to influence the race in at least six states is exactly what Nader had been waiting for all along: the power to remind the Democratic Party it can’t take for granted the progressive slice of the country.

Even if the Nader/Green run vanishes off the margin of history by the end of the year it still will have given many young folk a taste for the excitements of radical political organizing. People carry such hours and days with them for the rest of their lives, as the inspiring leaven in our business-as-usual loaf.

November 9

Yes, Nader didn’t break 5 percent nationally, but he should feel great, and so should the Greens who voted for him. Their message to the Democrats is clear. Address our issues, or you’ll pay the same penalty next time around. Nader should draw up a short list of Green
non-negotiable issues and nail it to the doors of the Democratic National Committee.

By all means credit Nader, but of course Gore has only himself to blame. He’s a product of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose pro-business stance was designed to regain the South for the Democrats. Look at the map. Bush swept the entire South, with the possible exception of Florida. Gore’s electoral votes came from the two coasts and the old industrial Midwest. The states Gore did win mostly came courtesy of labor and blacks.

Take Tennessee, where voters know Gore best. He would have won the election if he’d carried his home state. Gore is good with liberals earning $100,000–$200,000. He can barely talk to rural people, and he made another fatal somersault, reversing his position on handguns after telling Tennessee voters for years that he was solid on the gun issue. Guns were a big factor in Ohio and West Virginia too. As for Nader holding the country to ransom, what’s wrong with a hostage taker with a national backing of 2.7 million people? The election came alive because of Nader.

December 13

On the one hand the calls for “closure,” “finality” and national unity. On the other, Justice John Paul Stevens’s bitter summation: “In the interest of finality, however, the majority [of the US Supreme Court] effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent, and are therefore legal votes under [Florida] state law, but were for some reason rejected by the ballot-counting machines … Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.”

Part 2

2001

January 18

JoAnn was recently traveling in a limo from Baltimore to a town in West Virginia and fell into conversation with the driver, who related some of his ferryings to and fro of various bigwigs. One of these was Hillary Clinton. “An ornery woman,” the driver commented. “And what a mouth on her!”

The driver went on to describe an occasion on which he was driving the First Lady and a couple of her female friends through a poor area of Washington, DC. They passed a beggar, and as they did so the First Lady expressed her disgust for the mendicant, adding “He wouldn’t be a bum if he had a piece of ass.” The driver was able to shed no light on how or why she had arrived at this conclusion, stunned as he was by the coarse nature of her observations. Then they passed two young black women with babies. “There go two welfare cases. They make me sick. They’re too lazy to work,” said Senator Clinton, champion of mothers and children everywhere.

January 28

Attending the annual
Texas Monthly
bash, George W. was asked what he and Bill Clinton had talked about in their White House photo op. George W. described how he had asked Clinton why Al Gore was taking his defeat with such poor grace. “It’s been eight years,” Clinton
genially replied, “and we still haven’t figured out Al.” Bill added hastily: “But he’s been a great Vice-President.”

February 5

Oklahomans are selective in their grief after a mass killing. They took about eighty years even to make official acknowledgement of the scores of dead blacks slaughtered in the Tulsa race riots, while fiercely denying reparations. Nor is the Oklahoma City site a simple memorial. Funded by us taxpayers it offers an Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. But if Oklahomans refuse to confront McVeigh’s motives and rationale, what credentials can their Institute have for any preventive strategies?

There’s something ghoulish about the way Oklahomans are remembering their 168, from the repellent architecture and commemorative furniture of the site, to the icky blather about “survivors” and “closure,” to the nature of this supposed “closure,” focused on killing more people (whether those on death row for whose denial of habeas corpus rights they fiercely lobbied in the passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act), or McVeigh, whose jury they entertained as though it was a victorious football team, and whose execution they have been drawing lots to attend.

There are plenty of references in the Memorial literature to Oklahoma City as part of the American heartland. From that heartland have gone forth across the world Oklahoma lads who have, in government service, dropped bombs, gone on terror missions like Bob Kerrey’s, participated in dreadful campaigns of extermination. Now, if they were to visit the Memorial, would not a survivor of one of those missions, a Vietnamese or a Salvadoran say, perhaps feel that some expression of empathy with other acts of terror was in order? Face it, there are plenty of “survivors” around the world, bereft of their parents, brothers, sisters, kids, because some Oklahoman kitted out in one of the national uniforms pressed the button, pulled the trigger, lit the fuse.

But no, the Memorial specifically offers a definition derived from USC Title II Section 265 F(A) of terrorism as “politically motivated
violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups … Note definition excludes irrational acts, purely criminal and economic activities or acts committed by nation states.”

McVeigh made some of these points, and to say that he has the better of the argument with the Oklahoma Memorial is not in the least to apologize for what I described as his evil act, it’s to say that the Memorial offered me kitsch rather than dignified and considered sorrow.

February 15

Bill Clinton now proposes to establish an office in Harlem, on 125th Street, scarce more than a few stone throws away from where Gore delivers homilies to journalism students in Columbia University. Each has found his appropriate setting: the defeated veep pouring banalities about journalism and politics into the ears of ambitious high fliers already sending their résumés and clips to the
New York Times
; Clinton the moral reprobate fleeing a blizzard of criticism for auctioning a pardon to a billionaire crook by setting up shop among the poorer folk, rolling out a real-estate boom in the area.

February 18

Late last week a senior pollster in Clinton’s inner circle spotted a journalistic acquaintance in a Georgetown supermarket and pinned him against his shopping cart with a vibrant diatribe against Gore.

How, the pollster hissed, can we explain that Gore was unable to run on the Clinton economy, unable to mention millions of jobs created through the Clinton ’90s? She answered her own question. Because to do so would have meant mentioning Clinton’s name and Gore couldn’t bring himself to do that.

Why not? The answer, the pollster said, went far back before the Lewinsky affair that so troubled Al and Tipper. It seems that Al has always felt that it was he who actually won the 1992 election, bailing Bill out of all his problems over draft-dodging and Gennifer Flowers. Through Clinton’s two terms Al’s conviction that he rather than Bill
should by rights by sitting in the Oval Office throbbed painfully in his psyche. Result: he never spoke to the boss and couldn’t bear to ask him to help in those last desperate campaign days.

March 3

A few weeks ago I found myself at a small theater in SoHo, attending what had been billed to me as a recreation of Weimar and the world of Sally Bowles. This same Sally Bowles, as first created in a short story by Christopher Isherwood, then in
I Am a Camera
, a stage version that transmuted into
Cabaret
, was based on Jean Ross, my father’s second wife, a charming woman. Naturally, I’ve always taken an interest in the fictional versions of her time in Berlin.

The production in SoHo turned out to have nothing to do with Berlin and everything to do with Giuliani, since the strippers ousted from gainful employment in their usual premises were regrouping under the banner of Art. In fact it was a big relief not to listen to pastiche songs in the manner of Kurt Weill. It was the occasion of the much-heralded snow storm that menaced New York the day of George Bush’s inauguration, so the audience of six was heavily outnumbered by the strippers. The acts were okay, though not particularly rousing. The star of the evening didn’t take off so much as a petticoat, being a magician who, since we’re on the subject of Weill, looked slightly like Lotte Lenya in her cameo appearance as the KGB officer in
From Russia With Love
. She ogled the sparse audience gloriously as she bumbled her way through her tricks.