Who Let the Dogs In? (33 page)

When he was seventy years old, some fool called him a communist, so Henry B. decked the guy. At the time, Henry B. claimed that although he was provoked, he had still acted in a restrained manner. “If I had acted out of passion, that fellow would still not be able to eat chalupas.”

Henry B. once observed of a long-ago bit of political correctness that someone calling himself “Latin American” was just “a Mexican with a poll tax.” As high-flown as his rhetoric could be—Senator Phil Gramm once called him “the old blowhard”—it was often laced with mordant humor. He was always being outspent in his campaigns and would tell his supporters, “You can drink his beer and eat his tamales, but when you go to the polls, vote for Gonzalez!”

As you look back on his career, what’s astonishing is how principled, consistent, and right he was. In his thirty-seven years in Congress, he lived entirely on his salary and refused to take contributions from the special interests affected by the committees on which he served, including all his years as chairman of the Banking Committee.

The man never sold out to anyone, from his early service on the San Antonio City Council—where he fought to desegregate public swimming pools—to the great stand on the hate bills in the Senate, through the thirty-seven years in Congress.

He was right about deregulating the S&Ls—he was one of a handful who opposed that lobby-engineered disaster. He was right about Mexican banks not being strong enough for NAFTA.

He was right about Ronald Reagan’s HUD secretary’s misusing his office. Because Henry B. had long been a champion of public housing, he saw the department being twisted. It took Henry C.—i.e., Cisneros—several years to untwist it.

Henry B. told us how often PAC money turned our own representatives against us. He warned us about the concentration of power in ever-larger banks.

Henry B. was a powerful man for a long time. But he never forgot where he came from and what it was like. His best friend’s mother went blind from hand-sewing baby clothes at five cents a piece.

Dugger told a story of him that I cannot forget.

Henry B.’s parents were from Durango, but he was born in San Antonio. He started haunting the public library when he was eight, but when he started junior high, his accent was still so thick that they made fun of him.

He had read that Demosthenes of Athens developed his oratory by shouting at the sea with pebbles in his mouth. So Henry B. would read Thomas Carlyle aloud with pebbles in his mouth “until Poppa thought I was nuts and told me to stop.”

He had a friend correct his enunciation as he read Robert Louis Stevenson. And on some nights, his sisters and brothers would creep up to his bedroom window and watch him declaiming to a mirror, and then they would run off giggling.

November 2000

Shrub-watch

E
VERY
NOW AND
again Shrub W. Bush will stop you faster than pullin’ on the whoa reins. You can go along for long periods thinkin’ to yourself, “Don’t agree with him about dog, but he seems like an amiable fellow.” And then he says something that sort of makes your teeth hurt.

One time W. got to describin’ the first time he ran for office—the Boy Bush was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in 1978 out in West Texas—George Mahon’s old seat, district runs from Lubbock to Midland/Odessa to hell and gone. Dubya allowed the race had startled his friends: “They were a little confused about why I was doing this, but at that time, Jimmy Carter was president, and he was trying to control natural gas prices, and I felt the United States was headed toward European-style socialism.”

So there you are, trying to envision the very Baptist Brother Carter as a “European-style socialist.” Well, Carter does build homes for poor folk without charging, and if that doesn’t prove it, what would? Besides, West Texas oilmen, of which W. was one at the time, think everyone to the left of Trent Lott is a socialist. Reminds me of a story. One time in those very same years the ineffable Good Time Charlie Wilson and Bob Krueger, a Shakespeare scholar last seen in a political ad imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger—two of the finest minds the Peculiar State has ever sent to Congress—cooked up a scheme to deregulate the price of natural gas in such a way that everybody in West Texas would get stinking rich and all you Yankees would have to pay through the nose. They were delicately tap-dancing this masterpiece of reverse socialism through the Commerce Committee one afternoon by the time-tested ploy of sending everyone to sleep (the ploy works best right after lunch) with excruciatingly boring testimony. Wilson swears every Yankee on the committee was snoring when, to his horror, the late Jim Collins, a Dallas Republican, came to and caught the fatal words
gas prices.

“Gas prices?! Gas prices?!” shrieked Collins, waking up all the napping Yankees. “We wouldn’t have gas prices this high if it weren’t for all this school busing. It’s school busing, busing all these Nigras and all these little white children for integration, that’s what’s driving up gas prices!” And he was off on an anti-busing rant that would not quit. By this time, both Wilson and Krueger were on their hands and knees under the table trying to unplug Collins’ mike, but it was too late. The Yankees promptly voted to squelch deregulation of natural gas under the impression that they were carrying on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Collins is the man who once moved me, in the days when I wrote for
The Dallas Times Herald,
to observe, “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”

Probably the best known of the “whoa” moments with W. Bush comes from an interview with Tucker Carlson printed in
Talk
magazine, concerning the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Bush has now signed more than one hundred warrants of execution, but, as you may recall, the born-again Tucker drew attention both for being female and for having an extensive prison ministry.

Tucker also reported that the exchange mimicked by Bush never took place; Bush made it up.

Well, that was a moment.

Another came during one of Bush’s rare appearances on a Sunday chat show. (Ann Richards used to call him “the phantom candidate”; political reporters on his national campaign say he is “in the bubble,” rarely let out for an unscripted performance.) Tim Russert asked Bush who on the Supreme Court he most admired. “Scalia,” said Bush promptly. And after a second’s thought, “and Clarence Thomas.”

He sure can pick ’em. If you are a heavy-duty right-winger, as opposed to the moderate, compassionate conservative, Scalia is a good pick. First-rate mind, hideous politics. But no one covering the Court, regardless of politics, has ever chosen Clarence Thomas as a standout. The best I’ve ever seen written about him, by people who consider Scalia a great justice, is that he’s adequate. Everyone else, including those of no noticeable ideological persuasion, considers “adequate” far too kind.

Thomas, of course, was W.’s daddy’s pick. I don’t do Siggie Freud myself, being completely unqualified. I leave that to such great minds as Gail Sheehy. But W. does have a daddy problem. Pretty much the entire record of his life is daddy, but it’s not his fault. His name is not George W. Smith: What the hell was he supposed to do? Be a big enough fool to throw it all away? Nevertheless, it does sometimes trap him into ridiculous positions.

Twice in the past few weeks we’ve seen Bush, as we so rarely do, outside the bubble in “debate” with fellow Republican candidates. Myself, I think mah fellow pundits have been entirely too polite. In the first Republican debate in New Hampshire, Bush was, at best, “adequate.” In the Arizona debate, he was just bloody awful. Call a spade a spade, troops. If you will pardon a personal note here, I was in hospital, facing a delayed surgical proceeding, during the entire hour-and-a-half debate, and by the end of it, I was screaming, “Put me under the knife! I can’t take any more!”

A note here for those of you who will be following “Shrub-watch” in the coming weeks. I am a Texan, and we are notoriously soft on our own: I drew the line at Phil Gramm (who wouldn’t?), but I can still give a lecture on the virtues of John Connally (when he was a Democrat) on occasion. Texas liberals (screw you, it’s not an oxymoron) are persons of large political tolerance. I may intervene from time to time to explain certain political/cultural phenomena—such as why W. Bush keeps leaning into people and touching them—but I plan to limit myself mostly to the geopolitical terrain with which I am most familiar. I know what kind of governor this guy has been—if you expect him to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk.

January 2000

Gems of Opacity

Y
OU
MAY THINK A
person would bring up the subject of political rhetoric in our day only to dis it, to mourn the decline of the once-noble art, to compare the puny babble of our modern pipsqueaks to the magnificent cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Churchill, and so lament anew. Not me.