S & M with Bill and Hill

Amidst the gossip chatter about the CNN Republican debate incident in which a Hillary plant managed to put a question about gays in the military to the assembled yahoo candidates, it’s time to remember that the true villain of this shameful situation is none other than the ambitious First Husband himself. If Clinton had had the Trumanesque stones to say, Hey, I’m the decider here—for which GWB wins his few deserved points—we would have a non-discriminating armed forces.

Clinton could have pulled in all his top brass for a public ball-busting and said: Sit down and shut up. No one in the military will be asked or bothered about their sexual business in uniform or out, and that will happen because I said so. Any questions? You in the back don’t like it? Okay, retire, and go complain about it on Fox because the issue is now CLOSED. Defy me, and I’ll carve you another bunghole.

That would have caused a mass panty-knot-tying among a lot of hard-ons in the services, kind of like what happens when you try to integrate schools in Little Rock or do other difficult but ethically imperative things. (BTW, that fuss happened anyway.) Then it would have died down, and today no one would remember what all the brouhaha was about.

Instead, we get weaselly, waffly non-positions from the other Clinton about how that was maybe not so nice and maybe all we could manage at the time and maybe should be changed and maybe we’ll think about it once we get back to Pennsylvania Avenue. Hillary has shown zero inclination to break with Clintonoid-style triangulation on this and pretty much every other topic, and Barack meanwhile goes dancing with a screaming homophobe while vote-whoring through South Carolina. Don’t expect equality in the military under these people.

Nature/Unnature

The gingko tree at the bottom of Isham Park, a spooky creature with vast, horizontal arms, keeps me posted on the seasons. It finally felled all its leaves this week, papering the path to the 207th Street subway station in the space of a few hours. In the autumn it goes from brilliant yellow to barren in a single day with the first strong breeze, as if an internal bolt suddenly came loose.

Summer lingered into November in New York this year, and although one freak event does not a globally-warmed planet make, it is disconcerting to see so many of the leaves on the other trees drop to the ground with most of their chlorophyll still intact. The fall colors this season were green, pale green and burnt green rather than the usual russets and golds. Without the bracing cold snaps of October nor hoar-frost on the pumpkin, the trees didn’t seem to register that time for hibernation was nigh. They’ll do fine anyway, no doubt, and it is comforting to know their descendants or mutant versions thereof will still be standing in Isham Park long after ours are living in stalactite caves and dining on bats.

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Meanwhile, Wall Street should consider going on lithium carbonate right away. Every day either we’re heading into recession—sell!!—or the Fed is going to soften monetary policy soon—buy!! The speculators must be having a field day and justifying their $14,000-a-week salaries, the average gross pay for financiers these days, according to one of the magazines. No wonder hamburgers are so overpriced around here.

Now that our economy has been stripped of the manufacture of actual products and runs instead on the process of selling one another houses with money borrowed from China, it’s hard to understand how injecting still more debased dollars is going to help. All eyes are now fixed on the mighty consumer in hopes he and she will once again overspend foolishly and save the day, undeterred by three-buck gas and thousand-dollar dental visits.

“Iranian-backed Shiite militia”

I heard this phrase on the local New York news station in reference to a bomb attack, and it set off a whole belfry-full of alarms. It immediately conjured the 1970s civil war in Angola about which the U.S. news media couldn’t formulate two sentences without identifying one side as the ‘Cuban-led Soviet-backed’ forces. It was as if the networks had all been through a Baghwan Sri Rashneesh mantra training. They never called the other side the ‘apartheid-led, U.S.-backed UNITA’, which it was, because that would have been giving away the game.

Having assembled a perfectly Manichaean set of players, the white hats versus the black hats, it was easy to subtly justify the U.S. meddling on the side of the extremely dubious Jonas Savimbi and the UNITA ‘forces’. Had they been the bad guys, the papers would have called them ‘marxist insurgents’ or ‘guerrillas’ or today ‘terrorists’. I remember the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett telling a roomful of us about his time covering that war and once reading over the shoulder of the guy from Newsweek whose editor had cabled him, ‘Not interested in UNITA atrocities.’ The fix was in.

I raise this turn of phrase for two reasons: first, the claim, attributed to U.S. military sources, sounded bogus as hell because the bomb had just gone off. How on earth could anyone pretend to know who had set off the thing so soon? That made it sound like fitting the facts around the pre-established narrative, and we certainly do have some precedent for that practice in Mr Bush’s war.

Secondly, laying anything bad that happens at the feet of the bad guys du jour, i.e. the Iranians, is not only a good way to distract attention from the ongoing nightmare but also fits the disturbing rumors about an imminent attack on Iran. I’m going to be listening for more references to the ‘Iranian-backed Shiite militia’ to see if the trope becomes standard fare, which might be significant. I won’t repeat the many learned expositions of why it’s a perfectly meaningless and quite stupid formulation, nor how Bush’s bumbling policy has created a huge triumph for the Iranians. But we’d be naïve to think he’s incapable of making things worse.

Guess Who

Okay, parlor game: who will be the nominees of the two parties, and who will win the presidency next November?

I was at a New Year’s Eve party in 1979 when we played this game and tape recorded our answers so that we couldn’t rewrite the predictions later. Results? not one of us thought Ronald Reagan would be president a year or so later, but he was. Whatever happens in 2008 will look perfectly logical and inevitable once we’ve lived through it, so it’s interesting to see what we’re expecting now. Here’s the non-scientific poll of my Thanksgiving co-diners, which surprised me greatly.

Of the seven people at the dinner, five thought Giuliani would win the nomination and go on to beat Hillary Clinton in the election. Not one of them was pleased with this prospect, but one by one they told stories about Aunt Agnes or sister-in-law Jane who are concerned about (1) their safety from terrorism and (2) ‘supporting our troops,’ including at least one close relative in Iraq per family. Fear and militarism continue to sway the thinking out in the heartland, they said. Their hearts were for Richardson, Thompson or Kucinic, their confidence in Hillary as the most competent. But their reluctant predictions favored Rudolph.

This consensus against the likelihood of a Democratic victory is pretty startling. What else do the Bushites have to do to people? It’s a frightening commentary on the slavish masochism of our culture that the Republicans can bankrupt us, lie to us, systematically undermine our safety net, wreck civil protections and lead us into a failed war and still be a credible political force, just by intoning ‘911!’ every other sentence. But that’s what war does and no doubt a big reason why it’s so perennially popular.

P.S. One intrepid seer went out on a limb and said Huckabee would stun the pack in Iowa and go on to take the nod for the Republicans. I'm not sure this person really believed what he was saying, but he found all the current front-runners unimaginable. Perhaps it was a psychological defense mechanism at work.

A Backward Glance

Quiz time: who is speaking?

‘All of us for years have been defending the presidential prerogative and regarding the Congress as a drag on policy. It is evident now that this delight in a strong presidency was based on the fact that strong presidents in American history have pursued policies of which one has approved. We are now confronted by the anomaly of a strong president using these arguments to pursue a course which can lead only to disaster. It is very hard to see how the Congress can restrain the presidential drive toward the enlargement of the war. Voting against military appropriations is both humanly and politically self-defeating. The only hope is to organize a broad political movement.’

Here’s a hint: the excerpt is from a personal journal written in 1967.

The author: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., confidante of the Kennedy and later the Johnson White House [reprinted in the New York Review of Books, Oct 11, 2007].

Even more revealing is an anecdote about a dinner with Hubert Humphrey when dissidents like Schlesinger were trying to get the vice president to stake out an independent position on the Vietnam war and pressure Johnson to change course. Humphrey, said Schlesinger, echoed the official line about ‘aggressive Chinese communism’ and evidenced a ‘dismaying lack of concern over the human wreckage’ caused by Johnson’s war policy. Sound like anyone you know?

The difference is that back then the seeds of a ‘broad political movement’ to end the war had germinated, and substantial popular opposition already had burst the confining bonds of the Democratic Party. Even so, it took another six years to bring the war to a close even though the deaths were not two dozen American soldiers a week but a couple hundred. Given the weakness of its contemporary counterpart, I would give the Iraq adventure a good ten more years, perhaps twelve, spanning both Democratic and Republican presidencies, before it is brought to its ignominious close.

As the Athenians learned to their dismay 2500 years ago, it’s easy to send the troops off to conquest in faraway lands, but far harder to get them back again in one piece and impossible to unspend the squandered treasure. The hen does not resume her egg.

Calleigh's Law

A sign that the CSI franchise is well into its decadent phase is its increasingly desperate focus on the private lives of the main characters, who were never central to the shows’ appeal. I gather that someone in Hollywood cribbed the idea from the various true-crime series on the Discovery Channel like “Medical Detectives” and “The New Detectives,” whose high-tech analysis of neat clues against the backdrop of human baseness and criminality made them irresistible. The cheesy set-ups, wooden acting, phony reconstructions and interviews with charmingly oddball lab technicians gave the original cable shows a gritty verité that the fictionalized version could never hope to pull off.

Instead, CSI turned the goofy, backroom dirt-comber nerds, Luminol sprayers and DNA salvagers into glamorpusses with centerfold bodies, and that’s okay because it’s a show, after all. And they added space-age toys that turned these golden youths into magicians, along with souped-up plots that got increasingly baroque and then formulaically weird as the seasons rolled by. But the kiss of death was planted when we started to hear about the bombshell lady cops’ childhood traumas and dysfunctional boyfriends. Now the shows are morphing into kitsch and are doomed to join Law & Order in TNT rerun eternity sooner rather than later.

But it was surreal to see the beginning of last night’s episode with Calleigh the steely avenger on CSI: Miami facing disciplinary proceedings for a clear case of self-defense while simultaneously watching the non-stop parade of real cops shooting real people on the New York local newscasts. The incidents are endless lately, and their plots look depressingly formulaic too: NYPD officers blast away; young, black males lie dead on the street. Some of the cases look more ambiguous than others, but the cumulative effect is a sense that Giuliani is still mayor and that the police force has a free hand to fire at anything that moves.

TV cops are portrayed as well-meaning types who get hit with unfair criticism while just doing their jobs. [To be fair I suppose ‘The Shield’ counts as an exception.] I once wrote for a tabloid detective magazine about a murder, and the editor instructed me to ‘always make the cops look good.’ I understand the need for morality plays in which Good triumphs over Evil. But we need nuance and justice, too, not just cozy cliché, both in art and especially in life.

Could it be. . . Satan?

I have hesitated to make fun of Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue raising his arms to the Most High on the steps of the capitol to ask for drought relief out of fear of offending any thrones, powers, dominions or archangels, i.e. the beings known to be partial to suburban strip malls and most likely to heed his prayer. However, I am wondering if in case there is a sudden weird dip in temperature leading to a hailstorm or if tempest-like winds blow in from the Atlantic whether Georgians will reach the obvious conclusion that Governor Perdue is consorting with Satanic forces.

This might be occurring even if he is unaware of it. After all, many old Bolsheviks were found by Stalin to have been cooperating with saboteurs, Whites, kulaks and all sorts of nefarious fifth-columnists for years without even realizing it. He was wise enough to allow them to confess, so that the workers' state could correct the dangerous tendencies these turncoats unwittingly had caused. I think if there is a hailstorm or even just a continuation of the drought that leaves Atlanta bone-dry and drinking its own peepee that Perdue should be led by the appropriate representatives of Jesus Christ to don sackcloth and ashes and publicly repent, perhaps through voluntary crucifixion on the statehouse lawn. I mean, one can’t be too careful when dealing with the wrath of the Holy Spirit.