Who Let the Dogs In? (21 page)

Incidentally, journalist Lars-Erik Nelson rather uncharitably noted that aside from impeachment, the Rs’ major legislative accomplishment of 1998 was renaming Washington National Airport after Ronald Reagan.

The latest wrinkle in right-wing spin is to claim that this is not a political phenom at all but rather the final battle in some culture war that I didn’t know was going on. I have my doubts about this culture war—can you be in one and not know it? Did our side actually vote for Flynt as our standard bearer? What is our side?

My last effort to grasp what the right wing is on about here was reading Robert Bork’s latest book—an experience so horrifying that I have not yet recovered and cannot bear to read any more in the genre. If Bork was the beginning of the political-culture war, as is sometimes claimed (“payback for Bork” being an occasionally heard battle cry), all I can say is: I didn’t know it was war at the time, but I’m sure glad I was on the right side.

An alternative theory is that the culture war dates back to the 1960s, and this is where I get totally lost reading right-wing cultural interpretations. The old joke is that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there. I was there, and I can remember it.

I remember the decade as being about the Peace Corps, the civil-rights movement, and the anti-war movement. As Margo Adler writes in her memoir of the period, it was quite possible to be an activist in the sixties and miss sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in their entirety. “We Shall Overcome” remains the song of the decade for many.

That is, until 1968, the year of assassinations, when it all turned very, very dark.

I could be wrong, but I still think the berserker element of the 1960s was largely the consequence of Vietnam—the drugs, the craziness, the sense that the world made no sense because that war certainly made no sense. And that war was not the fault of those who fought it or opposed it. Your famous World War II generation presented that little gift to us: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Long time passing.

Another right-wing interpretation of the sixties is the bizarre notion that black rage was fomented by white liberal social programs. Bill Kristol has been alone among right-wing intellectuals, I believe, in consistently and gracefully conceding that liberals were right about civil rights and that conservatives (a word often synonymous with “racist” in those years) were wrong. That’s most generous of him, but I think it leaves a wrong impression (a bit like that odd film
Mississippi Burning
) that somehow white people were the key players in the civil-rights movement.

It was a movement of, by, and for black Americans; those few whites who took part—and there were mighty few of us in the South—were just bit players. As Taylor Branch’s wonderful King biography and many other books make clear, the whites in power, whether they reacted for good or ill at the time, were just reacting—reacting to one of the most astonishing, beautiful, and spontaneous uprisings for justice the world has ever seen.

The movement split in ’64, when Stokely Carmichael’s “Burn, baby, burn” stood in contrast to “We shall overcome someday.” But to blame that on anything that white liberals did is ludicrous. Race riots had been part of American history for one hundred years; they were not unusual before the civil-rights movement, and the roots of the rage underlying them are obvious.

These silly books blaming the sixties for various social evils are pathetically truncated in their viewpoint. Were there symptoms of decline in black family structure? According to anthropologists, the black family is one of the most durable social structures in history; it survived both slavery and Jim Crow and finally was visibly damaged only by the Depression, which of course fell more harshly on blacks. Incidentally, the Depression had the same effect on white families—those who yearn for hard times to bring us together might keep that in mind.

Was there an increase in sexual activity outside marriage in the sixties? If so, don’t you think it had more to do with the invention of the birth control pill than with “permissive attitudes”?

Don’t get me started. But perhaps what I object to most is the use of war as a metaphor for political differences. That way lies folly and worse. Call it a spirited discussion, a disagreement, or an all-out slinging match, but don’t call it war. That’s how you get murdered abortion doctors and bombed buildings in Oklahoma.

January 1999

Let’s All Play Hunt the Hypocrites

T
HERE
’S A BEAUT OF
a media story happening right in front of our eyes, and if you want to have a good time, you can start tracking this one yourself. The game is called “Hunt the Hypocrites,” or “What’s Wrong with This Picture?”

A few weeks ago, I kept running into civilians (nonjournalists) who all had the same question: Why isn’t this Newt Gingrich story a bigger deal?

The story, in case you missed it (and you may well have), is that the former Speaker of the House is getting a divorce because he has been having an affair with a much younger woman. I think that story got exactly the play it deserved—almost none.

Gingrich seems to be a spent cartridge as a politician. All that speculation about whether he would run for president is long gone—no more
Time
magazine Man of the Year, no more “defender of civilization” or lectures on how liberal policies cause moral decay in America. However, Gingrich is still huge on the fund-raising circuit. Since he left office in January, he has raised $1.3 million for his new political action committee. So he is still a public figure to some extent, and under the new rules of journalism, his private life is a story.

Of course, there is the oddball angle to the story. It turns out that Gingrich was having this long-running affair with the much younger woman all during the time the government of the United States all but came to a crashing halt over Monica Lewinsky.

This is the man who promised that Republican leadership would “improve the moral climate of the country.” So this presents us with an epochal moment in the history of hypocrisy. As Gingrich led the Republicans in full hue and cry concerning the moral sleaze, the sordid tawdriness, the unbearable, brazen shameless conduct of Bill Clinton, he was having something more than a flingette himself. We could be looking at a new world record for being two-faced.

But note the deafening silence from the media. It’s the same problem they have dealing with George W. Bush and drugs. (I am proceeding on the new media premise that he must have done coke because he sure as hell would have denied it by now if he hadn’t. I like these new journalism rules—it’s so much easier than having to go dig up evidence.)

And of course, Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard instead of having to go to Vietnam because of who his father was. How bright do you have to be to figure that out? As cartoonist Ben Sargent put it: “Find me a rich, Yale-educated congressman’s son in 1968 who DIDN’T get help staying out of the draft—now THAT would be a story.”

Note the astounding difference between the way the media covered Hillary Clinton’s interview in
Talk
magazine—the one in which she did NOT excuse her husband’s infidelity—and a far more interesting piece in the same issue of the same magazine about Bush, in which he cruelly mimics an imaginary plea for life from the executed Karla Faye Tucker.

Acres of air time on Mrs. Clinton’s supposed effort to excuse her husband, hours of tutting and judgmental commentary and psychological parsing of the Clinton marriage; almost nothing (honorable exception to George Will) on the appalling vulgarity of W. Bush.

And then there is the even messier problem of Dubya’s business dealings.

You thought Whitewater was a story? Wait’ll you read this one. Where’s Kenneth Starr now that we need him? And yet, you notice, the media reaction to all this is curiously . . . muted. Gone are the full-scale scrums of yesteryear, when packs of baying reporters surrounded Bill Clinton, the badgering about the draft, the screaming front-page tabloid headlines, the saturation television coverage. So what’s the deal?

Two things.

One, the media have been so hideously unfair to Clinton that they are now in an incredible box. They can’t savage this nice, young Bush boy the way they did Clinton, or the sheer ugliness and unfairness of it will turn everyone against the media, not against Bush. On the other hand, if they dismiss Bush’s “youthful indiscretions” as he wants them to, they abandon all hope of appearing even-handed.

Numero two-o, what’s missing here is the right-wing echo chamber and amplification system. There is a fascinating study in the spring issue of
The Public Eye,
put out by Political Research Associates in Boston, of the right-wing media chain that often starts with some story or nonstory dug up by an outfit funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

But before we get ourselves off into “vast right-wing conspiracy” territory, may I make a suggestion? Both the media and the nation will be spared enormous travail if we stop pretending that politicians are here to provide moral leadership. That way, we won’t have to listen to little Georgie Bush, the frat boy, lecture us all about responsibility and purpose and family values and moral uplift and chastity and abstinence and all the rest of it. Instead, we can sit down and try to figure out whether he’s smart enough to run the country.

You want moral leadership? Try the clergy. It’s their job.

September 1999

Off Your Duff

H
ERE
’S A STORY FOR
all you nonvoters who won’t have anything to do with politics because it doesn’t make any difference to you who wins.

A few weeks ago, I lost my prescription sunglasses. Can’t do without ’em in Texas. I went out to the jiffy optical place to order a new pair. Nope, they said, no can do—the prescription for your eyeglasses is too old.

I see just fine with the glasses I have now, but it had been in the neighborhood of five years since I’d last had my eyes checked, so whatthehey, I toddle off for an eye exam. Turns out that no change in the prescription is needed, so they ask why I came in. Oh yeah, reports the ophthalmologist, they passed a new law: You can’t get glasses made on any prescription that’s more than a year old.

I have to admit, that little piece of special interest legislation went right by me. I don’t even want to think about the lobbying on that one, but rest assured that our legislators did this for our own good, because we should have annual eye exams even if we’re seeing fine, and you can bet that the campaign contributions track so well on this one that we can see ’em without glasses.

So I’m out 110 bucks even before paying for new glasses. I look forward to a frequent reoccurrence of this happy event, since I either lose a pair or the dog chews one up at least once a year. Even if you have health insurance, yours may not cover the standard eye exam unless you’ve purchased separate vision insurance.