Out Of Propriety, I Left “And Gleeful, Legislation-Twisting Racist Homophobe” Out Of The Main Headline, And Placed It Here Instead Because I Have Class.
(CBS) Jesse Helms, the five-term Republican Senator from North Carolina, has died. He was 86.
Helms died in Raleigh at 1:15 this morning, according to the Jesse Helms Center in Wingate, North Carolina.
Helms built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during his decades in Congress.
CBS News correspondent Bob Fuss called Helms a politician who knew no middle ground, one of the most conservative men to ever sit in the Senate - and proud of it. Bigger than life in his native North Carolina, he sometimes seemed that way to his political enemies in Washington, too.
Born in Monroe, N.C. in 1921, Helms worked as a reporter and a Navy recruiter before entering politics after World War II, when he worked for North Carolina Senator Willis Smith in Washington.
He returned to Raleigh where he won a seat on the city council, but became best known when he joined Capitol Broadcasting Company, the owner of WRAL (which is now a CBS affiliate), in 1960.
Over the next decade, Helms offered editorial messages, broadcast after the nightly newscasts, which were decidedly ideological - in one, he proposed building a wall around UNC-Chapel Hill (which he dubbed "the University of Negroes and Communists") to contain its "liberal" influence.
The CBS News obit is being a bit kind, seeing as how Helms was one of the network's air personalities ironically enough, during its halcyon, muck-raking “Age of Murrow”. So, let me be blunt here, in my obit of Mr. Helms.
Condolences to his family and survivors who did not share his twisted vision. Because you simply can't pick your family. Good or bad, they are who they are. They're human beings with feelings, regardless oft-times of your transgressions. So again...condolences to those decent members of Mr. Helms' family.
I will not be so sanguine about the late Senator, though.
Helms' and his fellow travelers racist demagoguery drove more Black folk from North Carolina than GM, Ford and Chrysler vehicles combined. My mother, father and at least eight other uncles and aunts ran like runaway slaves from that intentionally racially backward-ized state during Helms' media heyday of 1960 to his Senate Tenure beginning in 1972 and at least a decade into it.
He giddily meant the million or so African Americans in the state, and the twenty-nine million outside his state in the greater United States nothing but ill will and used his legislative cudgel to beat them down every single chance he got. There is no redeeming feature in my eyes to remember him with. Unlike several undeniably talented bigots who strode the last century like colossi—the likes of a Leni Rifenstahl or a D.W. Griffith—genuinely evil-enabling people who still boasted world and culture changing talents, Helms was not talented. Nor was he particularly smart. What he was, was dogged, and vicious—and he applied that doggedness and viciousness to the task of promoting White Supremacy for the better part of half a century. If he had a talent, it was in the application of his personal racial animus in writing and voting for oppressive legislation that denied people of color their so-called inalienable rights. He damn sure managed to somehow make inalienable, “alienable”, so in that respect alone perhaps—in his blunt-trauma-to-the-skull harshness—he was a “talent”. But then...Charlie Manson clearly evidenced a proficient “talent” for psychotic murder, so take that for what it's worth.
Helms left this mortal coil early this morning of The Fourth Of July, Two-thousand and eight, and I could not help but note the brutal irony of that “timing”.
He passed away on Independence Day...a holiday celebrating this country's finally breaking the shackles of a brutal tyranny, while he himself worked his entire life towards the unjust shackling of the freedoms, dreams, aspirations and in many cases, the actual legs and arms of some thirty million African Americans.
Something to note there.
And it happened THIS YEAR, in 2008...so let me say this—I actually wish Helms had hung on to life just a bit longer. Never mind the suffering or pain. I truly wish he'd managed to hang on through a bit of 2009. Not because I cared for him in any way, but for the same reason I wish William F. Buckley and other bigoted, recently-departed retrogrades had stuck around, too.
I wanted to hear the rolling thunder of a million indigestion-sparked, racist gut-rumbles led by Helms' on the day their worst nightmare ever came to pass—namely the extreme likelihood of a Black person being elected to the highest office in the land. Commander-in-Chief. President of The United States of America.
I wanted to hear the half-inch thick rubber band “snap” of an inflexible mind like his giving way under the inexorable push of progress. And have the banshee howl of “Noooooooooooooooo!” be the last thing said as the tattered wraiths from “Ghost” rose from the earth and dragged his wretched soul below.
To hear the cement-mixer-full-of-boulders grinding noise of a thousand Klaverns worth of teeth—gnashing and breaking from rough friction, and maybe Helms' own cheap dentures shattering like a stale fortune cookie under grinding pressure from the unspeakable thing's happening.
But alas, I will not. And for that alone about him, I am sad.
I pray in that steamy place beyond where he has gone to, the words of Frederick Douglass are blasted at him full-volume from a massive, vintage boom-box on an endless loop—with Public Enemy's “Fight The Power” instrumental in the background:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
Those words were for the likes of you, Jesse Helms. You.
Now, you are gone...and the world spins on without you and advances past the boulderous roadblocks you pushed into place.
I shall shed not a single tear. Nor will those who truly cherish the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.
Be on your way, Senator.
Beyond that, A Very Happy Fourth Of July, all.
There's more...
“Cause The Brother Is Madder Than Mad At The Fact That's Corrupt Like A Senator”
And our long national discussion on bitterness continues...
ANNOUNCER VOICE OVER: Last week on “Bitterness” we heard:
“And bitterness is an ugly thing indeed. It twists you. It curdles your soul and hardens your heart. It deadens the eyes and rots your relationships. It will drive you to say and do things that a clear-minded person wouldn't dare. Senator Obama's statement about what bitterness brings echoes like a brick ricocheting down an elevator shaft. People will cling to polarizing things as a way to express their frustrations.”
In the Fall of 2006, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut—(and the “I” stands not for “independent” but rather, “In It For My Got-damned Self”) you will ruefully recall, found himself in the race of his life for the Nutmeg State Senate seat against the “Netroots”-backed newcomer Ned Lamont. We all remember “Holy Joe's” whiny, bleating pleas to Dems in the state and beyond to put aside their huge objections to his Lon Chaney-esque transformation (or bandages-removed revealing...) into a Yankee-accented “Zell-wolf”, thanks his open embrace of the WORST elements of President Bush's most damaging, and anti-progresive policy endeavors.
It was as if he was asking for “a humble”, or a pass basically, on his one-time drift—now a headlong rush—into Lower Wingnuttia. 'Allow me this thing...this one thing as I ride off on my saggy-backed, cross-eyed mule into the political sunset' was pretty much his sad call to political comrades and Connecticut's voters. And when those Nutmegger voters rejected his selfish request in the Democratic primary, along with the nascent and table-upsetting left blogosphere, a slow curdling that had been happening inside Lieberman went into hyperspeed. He would abandon the Dermocratic party he claimed to be a member of (but for years had been sneakily jail-shanking whenever he got the chance) in a fit of rejection-fueled pique, and selfishly, willfully, and spitefully hamstring the party's thread-thin Senate majority with a so-called “Independent” general election run post-his Dem primary defeat.
Wa all know to our eternal regret how it turned out. With the aid of the GOP and more than a few DLC knuckle-dragger buddies in the Senate, he would win re-election, kind of caucus with the Dems (to hold onto some power as part of a slim majority), but because of his newfound 'freelancing fossil' status, have carte blanché to pal around with his choice of whatever wingnut he wanted and nad-kick the Dems publicly while voting out of caucus on specifically anti-GOP pieces of legislation.
What has happened since then is a textbook lesson on the “Altered States” dysmorphia that bitterness can wreak on a public servant. Lieberman is supremely aware that this is his last go-round as a Senator. His craven power-playing from '06 notwithstanding, his constituents are now experienceing “New Coke” levels of vocal buyer's remorse. Except there's no “old” formula for him to go back to as he's trashed it utterly—and in that old formula, he was no liberal firebrand to begin with. The political ground has shifted under his orthopedic-shoe clad feet. His victory in '06 was a last burp of major-state, old-school DLC acceptance before the projectile voiding of all of that thanks to the influence of internet activism and the result of nausea from too many poilitcos who should have known better enabling the 7 1/2 years of the failed Bush presidency. He's been disninvited from varfious key caucus strategy sessions as it's pretty much known that he will go back to his GOP pals and drop Sacajawea dollars—fuck dimes—on the discussions. And as he's no longer considered a power-broker on the party's PR / talking head / prestige front lines, this spoiled, spiteful, sanctimonious, hypocritical and mean-spirited attention whore has opted to go out in a blaze of glory—standing alongside the Republican standard-bearer as a pathetic human crutch, should he stumble. (And oh how he has.)
He is effectively, the guy at work who's been there forever, not really doing very much of note, who has gotten wind that he...is...done. There is no department to move him to as the company is changing drastically. His ineffectiveness and long-time non-team playerism has been noted and figured into the decision.
So what does this embittered, political, human out-take from “Office Space” do?
He “trashes” the place. He does the political equivalent of maliciously wiping his computer of necessary company files, Then tries to do the same to his co-horts' 'puters. He willfully inserts a nasty virus to infect everyone's terminals. Squirts Krazy Glue™ in the printers, sets fire to the copy paper room, and makes toxic pots of coffee with ammonia instead of water. He clogs the toilets after-hours, unplugs the refrigrator and takes a dump in the conference room and hides the evidence so it'll reek for hours, if not days—and no one can find it.
That's what he's doing as he “works out the string” when he stands with McCain and disses his one-time party. And the worst thing he does is rent himself out as an attack chihuahua against the Democratic party's presidential candidates, as he did this past week when he went into his bag of smeary tricks with his mealy-mouthed concern-trolling about ties between Hamas and the presumptive nominee Barack Obama. Via Talking Points Memo:
“It was only a matter of time, really. If you ever doubted that Joe Lieberman would be using what's left of his "Independent Democrat" credentials to legitimize the GOP's bogus "Hamas endorsed Obama" attack, here he is on CNN doing just that...
When Wolf Blitzer pointed out that Obama also labels Hamas a terrorist organization, making his position the same as McCain's, Lieberman said, "that's true," adding that Obama "clearly doesn't support any of the values and goals of Hamas."
Then, with depressing predictability, came the inevitable caveat:”
“But the fact that the spokesperson for Hamas would say they would welcome the election of Senator Obama really does raise the question, "Why?"
And it suggests the difference between these two candidates.”
That was exceptionally shady shit from the wrinkled nad-faced little hit man. In that droning, faux-gravitas tone of his, he farted out the ugly spectre of “Oh nooooooes! Beware the Black dude with the funny name! He iz down with the terra-iztz I will remind you about once every seventeen seconds!” He's taking up that mantle to allow his fellow bed-wetting fear-o-con™ plausible deniability to say, “Hey, my friend! I didn't say that. Joe Lieberman, member of the Dems Senate Caucus did. So it must really mean something! Now excuse me as I go yell at clouds.” But even the craven little Lieber-bot knows he has as much of a real, listening constituency as a field mouse in a bobcat's den.
No. I take that back. He does have a constituency. A small number of fear-addled, single-issue, small “r” moder-racists™, and of course, the rope-belted, foot-slapping mob who cheer him on one minute and then would dance like they were on “Soul Train” the second Lieberman and everyone like him God forbid were to disappear from the face of the earth, as that would herald a prophesied paradise where a glowing Jim Caviezel hands out candy apples and fat-ass tax cuts. Praise the Lord and pass the xenophobia!
This is all he has left.
Say what you will about Senator Clinton's noxious doings of late as a result of bitterness (and boy, there have been some doozies), at the very least, and being fair—her creepy deeds can at least be traced to some core sense of abandonment and a feeling (justified or not) of having been “wronged”. People once steadfast in her corner walking away. Whether just to try something different, or out of upset with intransigence on her part over important issues, I can empathize with her having angry feelings about her change in status. Lieberman on the other hand abandoned his party, and is angry that they will not continue to support him—as if he's accumulated a cache of “asshole points” over the years that would allow him in his puke-green, pre-storm sunset years to be as big of a retrograde jerk as he pleases and not see any repercussions for it.
Senator Clinton is the paramour now spurned, who after years of companionship is angry that things seem to be over. And if in the end she can't get what she feels she deserve for her service, she'll do what she can to get what she can, even if the getting is a bit unseemly. Lieberman is the flighty, annoying not-so-significant other who walked away on his own accord, but still wants an allowance. And access to the house. And car. And wants to fuck everyone you hate, but wants you to cuddle and tell him how much you love him. And when you don't—he'll try to screw things up for you at work, will put out rumors about you and sneak by at night to key your car. Just a nasty piece of work.
His bitterness (“This Time...It's Personal”) is the sequel that is so much worse than the original. It has absolutely twisted him into a grotesque caricature of what he was—which quite honestly wasn't all that great to begin with, and I fairly thirst—and know I'm not alone—for an increased Senate majority that would enable him to lose his chairmanships, cushy committee seats, his sprawling office that goes with all of that, and be relegated to legislative “armpit” status. I want him in the fucking basement of the Russell Senate Office building. Next to the boiler and a supply closet of foul smelling, toxic solvents. Not even an office. A cube. In fact, a crappy, bile-green half-cube to be shared with whoever maintains the building's sewer traps and that person's work equipment.
And spare us please, the droning “But I marched with Dr.Martin Luther King” drivel. Again, a symbolic “good deed” in the past does NOT accumulate one an allotment of down-the-road “asshole points” to be used for those moments when you want to throw ostensible comrades-in-arms (however weakly you've locked arms in the past) under the Goddamned bulldozer. The hell with your progressive “moment”. I prefer to let a lifetime of deeds stand as the measuring stick. And Lieberman has spent the last ten years or so committing a slew of anti-progressive acts and jail-shanking people he should have been supporting, or at least been fair with. (Remember, he became a Senator via a vicious, right wing-financed campaign against then sitting Senator Lowell Weicker) Chuck Heston also marched with Dr. King, but it is his final years incarnation, of ugly, retrograde opinioneering and championing that many see him in the harsh light of. Lieberman's bitterness over the Dems not being cool with his hard rightward swing and his naked perfidy in taking down his “fellow” Dems shows through in his spiteful, nyah-nyah-ing daily acts of subterfuge and outright hostility.
There is bitterness you may grudgingly forgive, and there is bitterness you fight a son-of-a-bitch over. Lieberman's is the latter. And I won't be satisfied until he is politically headwhipped so much that when three fingers are held before him and he's asked “How many?”, he says “Mallomars”. You want to call it a purge? A litmus test? Fine. Call it that. I say this—A “friend” who keeps kicking you in the nuts, not softly and for play, but to cause pain and help out an enemy—is not your fucking friend. And that person should be dealt with accordingly. Screw his pious mewlings about “feelings”, and “history”.
That person needs to be punished. End of story.
And for all this talk of “Dr. King, who I marched with...” I think that a lout like “Short Ride” Joe would probably make even the non-violent MLK have the occasional fantasy of cracking him across his lying, evil-enabling lips. He wouldn't actually do it. But bad people sometimes make you think bad things about them.
Me? I have no such scruples. And a rap in the grille would be getting off easy from me. Besides...why sully your hands when a well-and-swiftly placed Size 12 will do?
Now we hear that ABC tracked down the pro-Hillary looney who ABC cut to, in order for her to ask why Obama spits on the flag doesn't wear a flag pin.
If you add up the Disney/ABC News Path to 9/11 with this clearly contrived debate about Pastor Wright, Flag Pins, Bosnian Snipers, a bunch of Hannity questions, faked questioners. You have a right wing group of executives at ABC News who are the second coming of Clear Channel Communications.
In addition to the Fox News ban the candidates somewhat adhere to, we need to add a ABC News ban. Fuck ABC News.
I am tired of these right wing jackasses trying to impose their vision of the GOP's Amerikkka on everybody else. Enough.
For a moment, I ask you to take a look at the following pair of photographs.
2004 Campaign Season—George Bush and Senator John McCain
2008 Campaign Season—Richard Mellon Scaife and Senator Hillary Clinton
There is the saying that “Politics makes for strange bedfellows”. The truth in that statement is undisputable. We've seen that cast into stark relief with the odd collegiallity in congress where seeming polar opposites on policy find themselves paired up in pushing through important legislation.
That I get.
But I posted those two pictures above for a reason—pertaining to something I do NOT get and see no reason TO get. And that something is a craven embrace of a vicious, double-dealing, sworn enemy of all you stand for in the misguided belief that that is okay to do so if it will get you ahead personally.
We have run that McCain/Bush photo here more than a few times, as did Steve whenever the idea of a person's selling his or her soul for mere self-aggarndizement came up. That picture is meant to be stomach turning, much like the infamous Lieberman/Bush “Kiss” pic, which signaled to all where “Short Ride” Joe's allegiances had settled once and for all. We used it in the “What Price The Quest” post where the “dangerous flaws” in one John McCain were documented..
Those words?
It is here, during the primary season of that 2000 Presidential election that McCain would again find his lifelong quest for respect thwarted and his very soul—his service, his patriotism, his sanity, and his family ripped to shreds by his GOP opponent George W. Bush, and the Republican hierarchy who came to dislike him for not toeing the line 100% with its conservative values.
They trashed him for abandoning veterans on POW/MIA issues and having ”come home from Vietnam and forgotten about us.”—using a trotted-out, and sketchy veterans activist to deliver the brutal message.
They then smashed him as a traitor, using his torture-obtained statement in Vietnam as a weapon against him.
And then, they attacked his family—push-polling , faxing, flyering all of South Carolina, a key primary state with rumors of his being insane (due to his POW ordeal) wife's being a drug addict, and his having fathered a Black child out of wedlock—a brutal, but effective lie playing on his having adopted a non-white daughter from Bangladesh.
His campaign would never recover from that assault and Bush would triumph in that election—with a bit of help from the Supreme Court, voting irregularities and some bused-in hooligans in Florida. And as a terror-addled populace and war-crazed GOP rallied around the fear-mongering Bush—amplifying his power many times over, and freezing out any sort of “Maverick” opposition, something terrible happened to John McCain.
------------------------------------------
The man and operation that dragged his patriotism and military service through the mud, slagged his wife, abused his child as a campaign weapon and play to racism, and then...effectively called him insane he was now practically fellating...for a bit of blessing for future considerations in that infamous “quest”. A trade of one's core integrity, a heaping scoopful of innate self-respect—handed over to the man and machine that tried to destroy him.
We excoriated McCain for that awful backtracking and sucking up to Bush after those intensely personal attacks on him in South Carolina in 2000...where Bush's team put out all manner of vicious rumors about him...
They called his wife a crackhead.
Said McCain was insane.
Hissed and whispered about him having sired an illegitimate “Black” baby.
And called him a “traitor” for his forced statements during his Vietnam imprisonment.
After all that, when McCain sold his soul and embraced the snickering little twerp who signed off on all that sh*t-slinging—literally EMBRACING HIM—
...we all said “What the f*ck?”
Flash forward four years to that second picture—the one of Senator Clinton sitting there at the editorial board meeting of The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review...with one Richard Mellon Scaife, the “paper's” publisher seated at her right hand, looking to the uninformed eye to be a simple objective questioner.
But we have an in-formed eye, don't we people?
We know that Scaife used his millions during Bill Clinton's presidency to finance The Arkansas Project, the nakedly partisan investigative arm of the Scaife-backed “American Spectator” magazine as well as his chain of knuckle-dragging newspapers. We know that he backed the fomenting of such swill as “TrooperGate” (The Paula Jones “scandal”), the stale-air yammering that was “Whitewater” (where Clinton confidant Susan McDougal was unlawfully and spitefully jailed), and yes, the ultimate bit of lunacy—the pushing of the “armadillo-shell-as-hat-to-protect-from-cosmic-rays-beamed-by-aliens” level of crackpottery in the “investifations” of Vince Foster's suicide. Scaife's well-paid minions pushed the idea that the Clintons were involved in Foster's death and actually participated in it, weaving tales of infidelity, outright murder, corpse-moving and spawned half-assed CSI wannabes into commencing their own loopy investigations that wound up having the desired effect that the President's enemies managed to get these crackpot issues debated in congress.
Can we forget Indiana Repuglican Rep. Dan Burton playing a 28-cent Gil Grissom as he shot bullets into a melon to prove the Foster death a homicide at Clintonian hands?
Should we forget Scaife-funded lunatic and word-salad tosser Chris Ruddy and his book “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster” and his equally loopy theories about former Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's taking a slug to the head before having his plane crashed to cover up the seedy “murder”? How Scaife so loved those two reportorial bits of excellence that he then invested millions to start NewsMax in 1998 and installed Ruddy as said company's editor-in-chief?
And dare we exclude the millions upon millions the GOP-led congress spent investigating these Scaife-pushed claims of Arkansan evil—to where Ken Starr was even involved, looking into the shit that Scaife kicked up—including the Foster craziness that he had to issue official statements on them?
That's the “Reader's Digest” version. The in-depth dope can be found at various sources whose level of detail and dirt-digging expertise will probably leave you with your lower jaw firmly basement-dropped. Suffice it to say that Richard Mellon Scaife was the power behind an attempt to run an end-around on electoral politics, subvert the constitution, and utterly destroy a President solely because he dared re-rail a plan for Republicans Reich's lasting “a thousand years”.
And that makes that picture of Sen. Clinton sitting and chatting so fucking calmly—amiably even, with the venal Scaife so difficult to take. It is bad enough that there is an apparent cozying up to this snake who WAS THE FINANCIAL BACKER OF THE “VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY” SHE DECRIED, who worked like hell against Democrats in 2000, 2004 (aiding mightily in the “Swift-Boating” of John Kerry), and 2006. It sets my teeth on edge just thinking about it. But in attempting to be fair, maybe you say “Hey, it's an editorial board right? You have to meet with these people sometimes to get your message out...maybe charm 'em and turn 'em. Use 'em to knock an opponent down a peg or two.”
You try to give that benefit of the doubt. Maybe my enemy's changed. Mellowed. Grown up a little bit.
And then less than 48 hours later, you see an exceptionally nasty editorial mugging of a leading—perhaps the leading progressive in that very paper and it is apparent that NOTHING HAS CHANGED AT ALL...NOTHING.
“Former Vice President Al Gore says on tonight's "60 Minutes" that those who doubt man's role in global warming are akin to those who once thought the Earth was flat or think the moon landings were staged. Of course, the world should take Internet inventor Al Gore, the fella with a serious "sigh" problem, about as seriously as it would Professor Ludwig von Drake, the nutty professor from Disney's Donald Duck cartoons. It's pretty difficult to have less credibility than a cartoon character, but Gore pulls it off.”
That...is the Richard Mellon Scaife mantra as it always has been. Trash Democrats using the tiredest, lamest, hoariest tropes and spin possible. Damage the party. That is who he is and what he does. There has been no post-traumatic event values change alá Alabama's repentant racist Gov. George Wallace or a wizened reconsideration of one's past evils like West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. You don't have to like the men—but you can acknowledge that they may have indeed “made a change”.
There has been NO SUCH CHANGE in Scaife. He's the same guy. With the same agenda. Just an evil-minded creep hedging a bet and running a game.
Sorry, but that's all there is to it.
His people went to a batch of the old 2000-vintage smears on Al Gore—who isn't even running—and went way out of their way to “nad-kick” him for what? Gore's being proven right? Having the last laugh? Winning a battle the right wing looks foolish in fighting?
This troglodyte's raison d'être is simple. Damage progressive causes and people in general. Take them down and take them out. Senator Clinton could almost...almost have gotten a pass on her breaking bread with this scoundrel were it not for his immediate and pathological showing of his true self yet again a mere day-and-a-half after their meeting. He's not even a “useful” idiot. He's just...an idiot.
Cuddling up to him and his brand of progressive-damaging demagoguery is unconscionable—especially when you need only look at the man's awful track record, still being laid out as I type these words.
In my fantasy-world, that Scaife/Clinton meeting was the ultimate “Sistah Souljah” moment, where she snuggles up to him all sweetness and light and then instead of breaking bread with him, breaks a Goddamn chair over his head—figuratively, of course.
But it didn't go down like that. There was talk of how “fun” it was and what an “adventure”the visit turned out to be. A lot of word-swallowing and tongue-biting in front of the man who called you a crook, a thief and a murderer and had never apologized for those accusations long after having had them disproven. The rough words unfortunately are reserved for more seemingly unlikely targets.
This man IS NOT a friend to anyone with a “D” in front of his or her name, no matter how he portrays himself or what one may opportunistically think of him. I don't think we've been wrong in our view of him as an arch-villain of epic proportions for the last fifteen years.The gratuitous Gore slam this weekend says it all.
It reminds me of an incident in my youth. Late one night, my father got a call from an employee about another employee's having called complaining about her spouse's abusing her. It was known around the job that this woman was catching hell from her husband all the time. Shades covering facial bruises. Mystery “sick” days. Bruises, welts and swells constantly showing up on this person. My dad spoke to her about getting some help several times and her getting away from his brute, and when he got this call about a particularly bad beating, he called a few male “friends” and went to her house to help her out.
The “friends” job? To straighten “Hands-On Hubby” out. Daddy's job? To spirit her away to safe environs. I rode with daddy (to help her get a bunch of her stuff out of there) and this woman and the co-worker who called. And as we drove the bruised victim to a relative's house for sanctuary I remember her going on and on emotionally about how yes, her abuser had indeed been beating her senseless, but we didn't understand how good to her he was “when he was good”.
I sat next to Daddy in the passenger seat as his hands ground into the steering wheel, his teeth squeaking as they gritted back and forth and his jaw clenching as this human punching bag tried to justify the black and blues marring her face. After one particularly loony statement, daddy looked hard in the rear-view mirror at her and tersely said...
“You know...just 'cause the devil puts down his pitchfork every once in a while—that doesn't make his ass an angel.”
I looked in my own rear-view mirror at her and saw her mouth open to say...something to rebut that statement...and then her mouth closed. Her eyes sank and shoulders slumped. She looked out the rear passenger-side window and I remember seeing the streetlight reflections playing off her tear-stained and fist-scarred face.
“Just 'cause the devil puts down his pitchfork every once in a while—that doesn't make his ass an angel.”
Forgive? Okay. That's your choice. It may make life more livable. But Forget? Forget? Absolutely not. You put yourself in harm's way pooh-poohing the evil of those who seek to destroy you.
I'd like to think Senator Clinton would know this already—in fact, I'm sure she does—but I'm going to say it anyway. To remind her of the facts in the event that a bout of amnesia has temporarily stricken her and to let her know if no such malady has befallen her, that we remember who this man is, what he does, and will hold no truck with this ugly opportunistic cuddle.
You equivocate on this enemy-embrace chicanery at your own damned peril.
End. Of. Story.
UPDATE: Or not quite the End. Of. Story. I elevate this from the comments because it so eloquently encapsulates why Scaife isn't someone progressives should have any reason to be all “bygones be bygones” with. From our ironically-named, but brilliant “Mr. Stoopid”:
The awful shit he (Scaife—Ed. note) helped foment in the 1990's did not just happen to Bill and Hillary Clinton. It happened to this country as a whole. Strike that. It was perpetrated upon this country as a whole.
While half our political class was chasing leads to indict the President and First Lady for murder/drug dealing/fraud/extramarital oral sodomy, and the other half was busily defending and shielding the good the administration had accomplished from that imbecilic shitstorm, real problems were ignored and allowed to fester.
Scaife is more than emblematic of what's wrong with this country: He's the nitrous in the Right Wing Loony Racer's tank. When he kicked into action, the stupidest, meanest, most destructive elements of what we now call political life in this country were elevated to positions of prominence. Ann Coulter is Scaifenstein's monster. And not the only one.
Pearls. Canapés. Botox and Bold Type—The “Heathers” and “Harveys” RULE!
(INSTALLMENT TWO OF A TWO PART SERIES—THE NY / D.C. POWER PLAY)
“Daddy...what's a Tidal Basin?”
That was the question I asked my father in the Autumn of the year that Richard Nixon mixed his last pitcher of Manhattans and flew away like some ungainly, wounded duck .
Why would an eleven-year-old kid ask his father a question like that?
Because the big news story at the time was all about the powerful Congressman Wilbur Mills' getting busted by the D.C. Police one night near Washington's Tidal Basin with a bodacious stripper alliteratively, and perfectly named Fanne Foxe. Who I might add, jumped into this mythical “Tidal Basin” to escape Five-O's clutches after a scuffle with a drunken Mills in his limousine.
The married Mills's getting caught out there so publicly was just another ugly incident in a scandal-rocked D.C. that year, but I just had to know—to quench my dirt-detail curiosity—just what the hell a Tidal Basin actually was.
“Well...I assume it's got something to do with the water in the area or something, but I'm not sure. You know what?” Daddy said, “Let's find out.”
With that, he called his friend Leon who lived in D.C. and worked for the city, and asked him. “Hey Lee—I know this is a weird question, but _____ wants to know...you know about the whatchacallit--the Tidal Basin down there? Yeah, uh...what is it exactly? Uh-huh. Uh-huh! Hmmmm. Hey, I'm a' let you tell the boy himself. Here son, talk to your Uncle Leon.”
And Leon just broke it down. “There's a river down here, the Potomac--”
“The one they say George Washington threw a silver dollar across.”, I replied.
“Yeah.”, Leon replied. “Right. Whatever they say. Anyway, the Tidal Basin's like a ...little dam that controls the water level down here, 'cause we got parts of the city above sea level and some parts that's below it. And when the tide changes, you know...goes up and down? The Tidal Basin helps keep things in check. That's why they built it. Okay? You got it, little man?”
“Yes sir”.
“Okay.” Leon replied. “Now put your Daddy back on.”
I did, and I heard Leon ask my father why I wanted to know about the Tidal Basin. My father told him. “He just wanted to know what the place was where Wilbur Mills got jammed up.” Daddy waited a beat and followed up with a chuckle, “What the hell was he doing in the Goddamn Tidal Basin in the first place?”
I heard Leon, as clear as a bell on the other end of the line loudly laugh out the words “Fucking up. That's what.”
I bring this up because it highlights something about what Washington D.C. has LONG been about. In my pre-teen and much of my teen years, the little place its connected denizens reverently consider “The Village”, was little more than a writhing, Medusa-head of poisonous scandals. And me, a geeky, news-obsessed kid from Harlem was not alone in my deep interest in the seemingly once-a-fortnight release of fresh ugliness.
It had gotten to the point where the scandal culture was being commented on in the hit songs of the day. Lamont Dozier's “Fish Ain't Bitin'” was all about Watergate and mistrust of a corrupt government. Stevie Wonder's “You Haven't Done Nothin'” tackled the same—directly and with even more venom. Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes “Wake Up Everybody” checked off the event in Teddy's trail-out vamp. You could even buy LPs of the Watergate testimony at your local record store. My parents and lots of other kids' parents sure did.
We had seen in the span of three toilet-swirling years, the leak of the incriminating Pentagon Papers, and the fall of the Vice-President Spiro Agnew. The nation's Attorney General was brought up on charges of obstructing justice and would later be convicted of conspiracy. A...”Saturday Night Massacre” had taken place in D.C. where the President panicked and fired damn near everybody investigating his criminality. We learned about the CIA's unconstitutional intelligence abuses and their direct implication in gross misdeeds against the people. A mass of highly-placed Presidential aides had been indicted and convicted...and of course, the President himself had been forced to resign in abject shame.
The country breathed and sweat Beltway sleaze every single day for years. The greater land beyond the Beltway was just an annex of its rotting capital, where all news seemed to emanate from. We had become for all intents and purposes, The United States of Scandal-erica.
If you were of age to comprehend then, you remember the madness. If you weren't...go ask somebody who was, and watch 'em go “Wheeeeeeeeeeew!’ once they start telling you about it.
FLASH FORWARD FIFTEEN YEARS—The Mid 90's. A friend who knew of my Watergate history penchant and shared in it as well, sent me a copy of a then-new biography of Ben Bradlee, the editor of the administration-breaking Washington Post of those halcyon years. You may remember the movie portrayal of Bradlee by Jason Robards in “All The President's Men—alongside Redford's and Hoffmann's Woodward and Bernstein respectively. Those three men and the roles they played in breaking the government-shaking Watergate story moved a lot of people towards journalism as a career. That's how influential they were. It also turned these men into “stars” in their own rights. Bradlee was a hero to many, so that bio of his was a particularly hot one to read.
I read it and was mesmerized by his life story—that of an old-school newspaperman, a WW2 veteran of Guadalcanal, Saipan and other Pacific war-theater hell holes. Jet-setting as a press attaché in post-war Paris! All of this before ever managing a second of the era of Watergate drama. Macho, gruff, smarts and derring-do—his life story was a 20th century American masculinity fable writ large.
But the segment that stood out as odd in the book—wrench-in-the-gears clunky and plain, old incongruous was the brief chapter and a half handling his extramarital affair with the Post's D.C. “party” writer Sally Quinn. Where much of the book was detailed and rather self-effacing, this stretch dealing with his falling out of love with his wife and in with Quinn, was sketchy and vague. What I will always remember about it though, is the picture of Quinn from the early 70's that ran in the book. It was of a then early-thirtied Quinn in the Post's newsroom. She playfully looked at the lens, big, Jackie-O glasses on her face, framed by a mane of silken, blonde hair—with her mouth puckered in an exaggerated “mmmmwaaah!” kiss for the snapper of the pic.
She was a cutie. A “hottie” actually, in the still staid environs of a newspaper's city room. She was 20 years Bradlee's junior, and a comer in the biz at the time, doing her “artcles” at the Post, doing a morning (failed) gig on CBS, and evidently doing Ben Bradlee as well. I didn't really begrudge him “hittin' that” as I just chalked the dalliance up to my youthful and still pretty chauvinistic view of a powerful man's simple quenching of his considerable appetites. Dr. King had done it. Adam Clayton Powell, too. But they'd done so much! And hey, Bradlee was the man at the tiller for the Watergate exposé. Plus, he did wind up eventually marrying the kiss-blowing, newsroom hottie.
I kind of gave him a pass. Many of us did.
FLASH FORWARD THREE YEARS—The Clinton Impeachment.
It was an odd experience being in Washington D.C. during the raw winter of 1998-99 when the Clinton Impeachment buzz was at its peak. I got there during the third week of December, and stayed through the holidays until early January. Why? I was the “significant other” of an opera singer and had a month of vacation time to burn off. She was in town for a series of concerts and wanted me there with her.
A pretty diva is a hard person to say no to. And I didn't.
While she was in rehearsal most days, I found myself cooling my heels all over town. I went to the Frederick Douglass Home in Anacostia, or hung out many afternoons at Wilson's Soul Food on the Howard University campus. Checked out the Smithsonian, too. But mostly, I found myself padding about a monstrous apartment an out-of-town opera singer let my diva stay in while he was out of the country on an overseas gig. That's how they do the accommodations thing in opera circles. You either get an out-of-town singer's place (they always are), or a local opera patron puts you up at their toney digs. I was hanging a lot in that big duplex or at a patron's home to schmooze on the diva girlfriend's behalf—but the one thing that was a constant during a large part of that heel-cooling was hearing NPR's gavel-to-gavel, coverage of the soap-opera-esque impeachment hearings and trial.
It was in a word, surreal. It's one thing to hear about a major Washington scandal from hundreds or thousands of miles away, but to be there as it goes from zygote, to in-utero fetus, to a squalling, teething and undiapered, wildly shitting infant is a whole other animal entirely. Everywhere I went, and as it was so dominant—where I was staying too—all I heard was that coverage, presented in high-brinksmanship style by NPR with capsule bios of who was speaking when. You came to choose sides—who to boo, and who to hiss. Fist-pumps for Sheila Jackson-Lee and Barney Frank, a gruff elbow-swat and thrusted fuck-finger for the unctuous Hutchinson brothers. I was at a patron's house when during the NPR capsule bio for James Sensenbrenner the on-air personality mentioned his being an heir to the Kimberley-Clark paper fortune. But during the hearing recess call-ins, a listener bluntly elaborated on it, mentioning Sensenbrenner's being the “Kotex” heir. I chuckled internally at the revelation, but gasp and swoon! That patron I was with was soooooo upset about that rough description of the man's fortune that she was immediately on the phone a minute later, huffing and puffing madly to a peer about the brutal audio infraction.
“Why would they say something like that?”
Something like...the truth? Oh, well.
I remember being in a sub shop in a Columbia Heights when the announcement of the House's voting “yes” on impeachment came down. Two middle-aged Black men looking up at the stereo speaker as the news came over said in monotone unison, “Bullllllll-shit.”
There was a dichotomy. The city's Black majority population—at least the folks I found myself with, were dismissive of the whole impeachment exercise. It was as those two men described it—“Bullllllll-shit.” Not worth discussing as serious...until you actually started discussing it, and people 'round the way were of one mind about it—“This is a waste.”, and “Railroaded!” were two lines I heard a lot.
It was also the first time I'd heard the phrase “Playa Hater” used heavily as a part of street vernacular. Clinton's enemies were all apparently... “Playa Haters”. At the dowmtown dance club D.C. Live, a mammoth, multi-floored disco in an old department store shell, The Notorious B.I.G.'s “Playa Hater” was dedicated that New Year Eve's night to all the “suckas out there hatin' on the President”. A loud whoop rose from an enthusiastic, agreeing crowd of revelers.
Now, cross-town, where the new-money, Kennedy Center doyennes cooled their sensible heels, they didn't like discussing the scandal at all. They listened to the coverage, but did so without comment generally. Just shakes of heavily-lacquered hair and lots of baleful sighs. It was a walking death for these women, mostly. An un-discussible blighting of the fragile “all-that-they-held-dear”. The one thing I do remember them being a bit wound up about was the week that Joe Lieberman jail-shanked Clinton and sided with the GOP.
“I thought they were friends!”, one fur-collared harrumpher harrumphed.
Strange time, indeed.
FLASH FORWARD TO NOW—Potential Clinton Redux
Sometimes you know...you have to have lived a great, big 'ol chunk of life, with all of its various experiences to be able to grasp a single situation you may come across late in that life. And then, when you think back on it...a lot of small, seemingly unconnected moments link together in an explanatory chain when you look hard at that confusing “single situation”. But miracle of miracles, you find yourself able to analyze those smaller moments better—separately as individual events, and then as interconnected points along a continuum that add up to a greater sum.
I look now at the huffy and defensive reactions from within the Beltway today to the possibility of another Clinton presidency, as well as their general peckishness these days at anything that upsets their carefully balanced PR applecart of nouveau mannered-ness and so-called propriety—and I laugh my “at-home-in-Anacostia” ass right on off.
Because all that I've seen before, and experienced about “The Village” before, gives utter lie to this newfound “Well, I never-ism”.
Not only have they, but they've done far, far worse. Let's go back to that little run-down of the town's scandaleriffic heyday:
“We had seen in the span of three toilet-swirling years, the leak of the incriminating Pentagon Papers, and the fall of the Vice-President Spiro Agnew. The nation's Attorney General was brought up on charges of obstructing justice and would later be convicted of conspiracy. A “Saturday Night Massacre” had taken place in D.C. where the President panicked and fired damn near everybody investigating his criminality. We learned about the CIA's unconstitutional intelligence abuses and their direct implication in gross misdeeds against the people. A mass of highly-placed Presidential aides had been indicted and convicted...and of course, the President himself had been forced to resign in abject shame.”.
I left out the spectacles of the AG's wife Martha Mitchell—the Thorazined “Deep Throat” of the gossip set, putting everybody's shit in the street at the height of Watergate-a-rama, and the release of the crude, damning Nixon tapes where we found out about his seething hatred of Jews...and Blacks...and anybody his paranoia led him to believe did, would, or potentially could cross him.
How can today's fur-collared members of the smart set even compare the age of Clinton One, and its relatively mild set of scandals—most of 'em utterly manufactured, to that republic-shuddering, constitution-shredding, total government crisis of '72 through '76?
We pivoted from a Disney-fied, candy-coated D.C. fairy-land where the mid-day TV soap-operas were pre-empted for coverage of the wedding of the President's daughter Tricia—as if it were some royal fantasy come true...to the train-wreck spectacle not long after that of said President on TV, sweating and railing “I am not a crook!”, as all of his friends and flunkies later wound up pre-empting mid-day TV soap operas themselves...with coverage of their trials before the House and Senate.
D.C. was a joke. A long, nasty Aristocrats-quality joke, peppered with lots of groan-inducing, mini set-pieces.
“What did the President know and when did he know it?”
“18-minute gap”
“Dirty Tricks Squad”
“Tidal Basin Bombshell”
“Enemies List”
“Vietnamization”
“Slush Fund”
“I do not recollect“/“I cannot recall”/“Expletive Deleted”
But somehow, a lied-about, messy blow-job and the hypocritical furor over it trumps that partial laundry listing of unbroken, almost daily slime? Apparently so, according to the grievously offended in. D.C. who would whine like this
“This is our town,” says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Democrat to forcefully condemn the president's behavior. “We spend our lives involved in talking about, dealing with, working in government. It has reminded everybody what matters to them. You are embarrassed about what Bill Clinton's behavior says about the White House, the presidency, the government in general.”
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Muffie Cabot, who as Muffie Brandon (ed. from LM: MUFFIE?!) served as social secretary to President and Nancy Reagan, regards the scene with despair. “This is a demoralized little village,” she says. “People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They're so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn't quite as sordid as this.”
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“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it's not his place.“
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“We all live together, we have a sense of community, there's a small-town quality here. We all understand we do certain things, we make certain compromises. But when you have gone over the line, you won't bring others into it. That is a cardinal rule of the village. You don't foul the nest.”
All of this spluttering, Harriet Olesen dudgeon is a real hoot when you look at who its main purveyors is.
The compiler of all that (and more) bile against Bill Clinton is none other than the now-all-growed-up, no talent newsroom hottie who did exactly what Monica Lewisnky did to one of the most powerful married men in Washingtoon, D.C., Ben Bradlee.
I'm talking about the aforementioned Sally Fucking (and I do mean fucking) Quinn. It was she, in the Washington Post in the month before I got down there and rubbed against her pals' liver-spotted shoulders, who wrote that now-especially screamingly laughable hit-piece.
A mere twenty years before, she was the young woman chafing her knees on cheap Beltway industrial carpeting for a married D.C. power-broker. She was there during the years-long hell of Watergate, and Wilbur Mills, and the tawdry Elizabeth Ray/Wayne Hays scandal. (Hays had ironically driven Harlem's beloved Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. from Congress on a trumped-up corruption charge almost ten years before) The self-righteous, spastically-clawing debu-cat was there in town when Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife and officially ditched her while she underwent a chemo treatment, and when House Speaker Bob Livingston who so excoriated Clinton over Lewinsky and howled for his resignation would one month later (and I was in town and had a blast when the story broke) have to step down as he was revealed to have macked about while married, too.
Quinn was there for all of it, and participated in it, but...as D.C.'s social/power elite was changing generationally, a vacuum was forming. The old guard gate-keepers and party-tossers and society matrons were dying off. Many had been driven into the shadows, uncomfortable with the ostentatious glee they once celebrated in. That new, forced austerity would bounce back a bit under the Reagan/Old Hollywood regime's ascension, but it was the last gasp of that generation. The breech would re-open and into it would step, a new guard, and a new generation. The wives of that new generation would lead the “Village's” return to the Camelot they remembered from old Life and Look clippings and newsreel packages via the fearsome power of the canapé, tiramisu, and mighty champagne-glass pyramid. This “New Power Generation” consisted of society wives like NBC's Andrea Mitchell—the “better” half of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Maureen Orth—life-partner of the snippy, pumpkin-headed pundit Tim Russert, Sheri Annis—spouse of the execrable media watchpup Howard Kurtz. And of course...Mrs. Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee herself—Sally Quinn.
Time for a mordant chuckle. Here's something that didn't make the cut for Bradlee's bio. It's the rundown of how The Flighty Quinn got her job at The Post:
Quinn began as a reporter for the Washington Post with very little experience: reportedly called by Ben Bradlee after a report of her pajama party (ed. LM— A pajama party? WTF'ing F?) in celebration of the election to congress of Barry Goldwater, Jr., the job interview included the following exchange:
"Can you show me something you've written?" asked Managing Editor Benjamin Bradlee. "I've never written anything," admitted Quinn. Pause. "Well," said Bradlee, "nobody's perfect”.
Cute, isn't it? And really quite telling. You've got to give Quinn credit. She didn't just fuck the married guy. She took him away for herself. She got the job. And she tore after the validation via social prestige like a meth-ed up pit bull loose in a butcher store. From mere courtesan to Chief Justice of the court of opinion in record time!
She became “Queen of the NEW Village” and worked hard at re-establishing that internal, party-centric power-elite that had so eroded over the years. Sparks fairly flew as the Hors d'oevre trays clattered with world-rebuilding activity. Hard work, not because of Clinton, mind you—but in reality because of all the awful and ugly scandals that had come to define the city over the previous two decades. Quinn was to be Head-“Heather” of this ascendant boomer-elite set—never mind her actual tarnished D.C. pedigree. That was years ago, and as noted—she'd gotten her man—unlike Monica, some added prestige, and even gotten the beautiful, historic Laird-Dunlop House in Georgetown. And lord, but homegirl knew how to throw a bangin' jam. In spite of her original sin in access to power, she was “In Like Flynn”...or Quinn as it were.
A nasty side-effect of that ascension to power was that anyone who didn't genuflect to her newfound royal heatherness was a fucking Philistine to be slain with an ass-kisser's jawbone.
Thus began the new age of Party-sanship. It seems that when the Clintons came to “The Village”, they weren't necessarily all about knocking back highballs with “Muffie” and “Tish” and “Mo” and “Sally”. They didn't do it, and not enough of the people they brought into D.C. did either. They built their own treehouse. Their own club. This sacrilege could not be countenanced.
According to society sources, Sally invited Hillary to a luncheon when the Clintons came to town in 1993. Sally stocked her guest list with her best buddies and prepared to usher the first lady into the capital's social whirl. Apparently, Hillary didn't accept. Miffed, Sally wrote a catty piece in the Post about Mrs. Clinton. Hillary made sure that Quinn rarely made it into the White House dinners or social events.
In return, Sally started talking trash about Hillary to her buddies, and her animus became a staple of the social scene. "There's just something about her that pisses people off," Quinn is quoted as saying in a New Yorker article about Hillary.
“They will not be ignored!”
With that, the “war” was on. These people, who scratched and clawed and swallowed all manner of viscous bodily fluids to get where they were did not appreciate being a bypassed rung on the D,C. power ladder. Relegate them to the societal dustbin? Render their phoney-baloney status to just that? All they got was a “harrumph” from the Clintons and the wonk wave that swept into town...and they didn't like it. Outsiders and worst of all, hillbillies—had come into their midst and didn't fall down on their knees before them Horrors! And worse, they instead set out to charm the rabble in places like Anacostia and too many dusky cities beyond. So for that shunned, wounded elite, it would be a two-pronged attack—the ink-stained and “Sunday Talk” husbands would attack through their biased punditry, and the wives would complete the pincers move with their iron-fisted control of the social set in town.
And that's what you see now. The keening of Matthews, and Russert and their wives again in Vanity Fair in recent months. It is a big, fat, leaden shot across the bows for all who now aspire to power in “their town”.
Attention must be paid.
Dues to them as well, thank you.
Because though the world changes around them, as it de-centralizes from archaic little hubs like “The Village”, they've worked too hard, and invested in way too many ball gowns, and rhinestone encrusted masks, tuxes, and tea sets to let it all just...go like that.
But what is this place, really?
Is it the twin-setted and J.Press-ed soiree central...or is it a figment? A hopelessly internalized, delusionary “Camelot Of The Mind”? This “shining” city is a land where a racist President Woodrow Wilson lay physically and mentally enfeebled for months on end while a compliant press looked the other way as his wife and others ran the country by proxy—deceiving us all. It is where FDR, and Eisenhower, and Kennedy and Johnson all took on lovers for years at a time and neglected their wives as the society set curtsy-ed, Brandy Alexander-ed and appetizer-nibbled the salaciousness away.
This “shining” city.
It is where Nixon drank himself into dangerous afternoon rages and verbally and emotionally abused his wife. It is a place where Congressmen routinely hid their mistresses in plain sight on the government payroll as typewriter-challenged aides and assistants.
Call it a “Camelot of the Mind”, because what else would you call a city where the population is majority Black, and poor because it is starved of necessary revenue by its wealthiest residents and workers? A “Camelot of the Mind” because the city's biggest “business”—The Federal Government pays not a dime in property tax on the 30% of District real estate it owns, and thus leaves the city proper to be financed primarily by the poor and middle class.
A poor and middle class who are not allowed to be represented in Congress by any precious “Villagers”.
A city surveyed and laid out in large part by a brilliant, freed Black man, Benjamin Banneker in 1791, and so heavily “melanated” census-wise that it is known as variously as “Dark Country” and “Chocolate City”, but you'd never know it if you went by the exclusionary “Villagers” who claim the best of it as their personal patrician playground.
This “shining” city.
A fiction. A daydream. A mindfuck—needed to make the “Villagers” feel better about themselves. A psychically gated community, sealed off by a fear of everyone outside finding out that the residents of it lie, and cheat and steal and fuck just like everybody else—in spite of their precious, elitist status. And God forbid an outsider...a Jed and Jethro and Granny should come to “town” and move in, upsetting all the apoplectic Drysdales, and worse—charming the oughtta-know-better Miss Hathaways. Bespoiling the air with their vittle-smells, and critters and rough accents. Smells, critters and accents the real city they live in understands, and the greater country around said city easily embraces.
Look upon them again...these “Villagers”.
All fur, frozen smiles, flattened foreheads, frosted tips, and of course, freshened cocktails.
Ah, America.
Sometimes I think of the phrase, “The Village”, and the 2004 M. Night Shyamalan movie of the same name, “The Village” comes to mind. Ninety-five percent of that film takes place in an insular, rigid, Victorian-era enclave, where the residents live in abject terror of what lies beyond the woods cocooning their community as well as the creatures of the woods itself.
If you don't want to know how the movie ends, please stop here.
For you, the brave, O. Henry-addicted souls who have gone forward, let it be known that Shyamalan's “The Village” ends with the “reveal” that this archaic hamlet is actually just a bunch of time-warped crazies who've effectively sealed themselves off from modern 21st Century America.
But then...you knew that about them already. Didn't you?
Thoreau said, “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it”.
Nice sentiment, that. How about we see that Thoreau...and maybe raise it one P-Funk...and a Gil-Scott Heron?
(INSTALLMENT ONE OF A TWO PART SERIES—THE NY / D.C. POWER PLAY)
It was a particularly soul-deadening day at work a couple of weeks back—one of several in a row, and I took the better part of its evening catching up on clerical and household things I'd let slide over about ten days. In so doing, I gulped a heaping cup of coffee and wound up jumpily awake until an ungodly enough hour to catch the third (Why?) showing of Chris Matthews' “Hardball” program. Within minutes of viewing, a prediction I made earlier in the week pretty much came to pass—that Matthews would try to find a way during his broadcast to spin attention away from the burgeoning Giuliani/Kerik/Regan/FOX scandal and onto his own private “Moriarty”, Hillary Clinton. The barking little devil spent three-quarters of his show fuming and spitting at his guests in an obvious snit about where the day's news cycle was headed in spite of his anti-Clinton/Democratic dervishing. But much to his evident chagrin, he couldn't avoid dealing with the latent, newsworthy ugliness that the Giuliani “Hide-the-Moolah” story was building all by itself.
He had a panel on discussing the matter—on his terms, which ended up being a sneering “Is this a one day story?” bleat (Hope! Hope!! Hope!), and a huffy “Why does this matter?” (Answer: ”Because I'd rather it didn't—it might hurt Ruuuuuuuu-deeeeeeee!”)
The respondents featured the usual suspects—Salon's Joan Walsh, The Times's Bob Herbert, and one of the GOP's latest models off the pundit assembly line—from the compact, wet-behind-the-ears, dweeb-boy coupe series, one Matthew Continetti.
CONTINETTI: ...She won‘t say which executive made this threat to her. She won‘t say what‘s on those tapes, if these tapes really exist. On the other hand, it gives you a preview of what a Giuliani presidency may be like, because all of these characters are going to come out of the New York woodwork if he‘s president and it will be the soap opera that was New York while he was mayor, except transferred onto a national stage.
MATTHEWS: You mean he‘s consorting with the wrong types.
CONTINETTI: Well, those are the types that live in New York. Only in New York.
MATTHEWS: Come on.
WALSH: I grew up in New York. I‘m not going to let you do that.
MATTHEWS: You don‘t have to hang out with Bernie Kerik and Judith Regan.
WALSH: I didn‘t hang out with Bernie Kerik growing up. There are a lot of good New Yorkers, Matt. Come on.
HERBERT: Those are the types that consorted with Rudy Giuliani.
WALSH: I‘ll give you that.
Now, it's pretty clear what Continetti was trying to do there from the think-tank/hothouse perch he sits on in his crisp, little “John-John” suit. It was a bit of the “Villager” mentality leaping forth reflexively, where the natural defense mechanism is to whomp anyone from those 400 miles up I-95 as an out-of-the-mainstream crazy . He and many of his “Born-or-Bred-in -the-Beltway” types have a bit of an aversion to those pushy, honking Noo-Yawkahs big-footing around the ol' cherry blossoms down there. But the little wingnut “Waldo” look-alike did prompt a bit of a discussion on the show as it ended, and got me to thinking about that whole idea of “the New York woodwork”—“those types that live in New York”, and just how a bunch like Rudy Giuliani, Bernie Kerik and Judith Regan managed to come to power and then congeal as a “crew”—like some mid-lifed, ersatz “St. Elmo's Fire” clique.
It's a legitimate issue to consider...because as a lifelong New Yorker, of a certain age and “experience”—thinking about the ascension of a slime-coated local like Rudy, and by extension, his equally creepy peeps, is a chance to take a hard, clear look at how we got here—with this totally compromised troika of New Yorkers dominating so much of the political stage thanks to their back room low-jinks and chicanery. They are hardly the people we locals want starring in an “I Love New York” tourism ad. Proof of that lay in Rudy's polling in his own backyard as of today against a Republican opponent living 3000 miles away. Arizona Senator John McCain's kicks his veneers back into his gullet by 15 points.
Yet, here Rudy stands. Albeit round-heeled, wading into the swamps, beaches and velour mouse-ears of Florida. A corner-backed rat who's going to hiss and scratch til the rake finally comes down on his neck there or maybe a touch beyond. By the numbers, he shouldn't be a factor. But somehow he retains his propper-uppers and patrons—spinners and shills. People shrilly claiming “He hasn't been beaten yet!” A factor somehow still. Dragging Kerik and Regan along with him and the caca-stained mattress they share. Improbably...reppin' hard for the town in every slimy, barrel-bottomed way imaginable.
“How did we get here?” How did they manage to become our ugly, national ambassadors? Are they really...New York?
In a sad way...yes.
But there's a reason for it, and to understand that reason, a little bit of history is in order.
The New York of today is in no way related to the New York of a mere thirty years ago. The city today is a shimmering hologram of a place—candy-colored, sleek and buffed—hardly the sweet/savory stew of a town it was in the 70's. That New York was an amazing place. Brusque, bold, and bawdy. Bright, bewitching, and beautiful. It pulsed, no—it throbbed where it now whooshes. A crazyquilt mix of high and low and rich and poor that now seems quaint since the post-80's re-stratification of the populace. It was NOT all good. But God help me, the good of then would be the phenomenal of now. It was the beginning of the end of the era of Noblesse Oblige—where the old-school wealthy in the city felt obligated to give back in ways that actually helped out everyone. You had The Fresh Air Fund established for inner-city kids to go to summer camps featuring grass and trees instead of glass-flecked asphalt and lampposts. Local-bred athletes like the late tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis gave local children free tennis lessons for weeks at a time in city parks every year. Picked up a nice chopping forehand from him, I did. You had a spot called “The Box” on West 48th Street—a black walled, free music space in the heart of the musical instrument district where you could walk in off the street and catch Jaco Pastorius, a Kenny Burrell or Anthony Jackson, or if you really got lucky, a Miles Davis jamming—for no charge.
It was also the Disco era—where Black folks, White folks, Latin folks and anyone else who could halfway hit the two and the four could shake their asses together at the big clubs in town—54, Xenon, The Loft and The Red Parrot to name just a few. And a lot of the rich and connected found themselves shaking ass right next to the much-less rich, but effortlessly hip at places like these. Ultimately by osmosis, hip and cool became the coin of the realm. Damn near everybody had it. My man Ray G. who sold cheap-ass shoes at the old Flagg Brothers store on Jamaica Avenue was a Goddamned star at trendy Xenon when he strolled in sporting his black Quiana shirt and seamless french-cut bells from Benhil. He danced a wicked Latin Hustle with our crew, and with the women who rolled up in the tint-windowed Fleetwoods, swaddled in furs and reeking of old and sometimes ancient money. We partied with them...and everybody hung because they were cool. Cool with who they were, to be precise—a silky debutante from West End Avenue, a Latin dude from St. Albans who sold cheap shoes 'round the way, but was savvy and sharp and quick on his feet, or with a smile and a quip...or even an underage high-school kid from Hollis who could dance a little, and whose teacher knew a bartender there and somehow got him past the velvet rope.
It was a time and a place where it was fabulous and shady and so wonderfully unpredictable that sometimes it felt like your heart would just explode with anticipation while standing still on line to get in.
All you had to do to enjoy it was to simply be yourself and let go of all the silly shit. You worked or went to school all day, and then on the nights and weekends, you released and sampled the varied earthly delights laid out before you. It was a carnal, sensual place, with a million things to light your nerves as if they were fuses, and we reveled in every little “explosion” we could set off.
Well...not all of us, exactly. You see, there were those for whom “Fun City” was anything but. The ones who couldn't find “the two and the four” if you spotted them the one and the fucking three. An entire secondary culture of folks who were simply uncomfortable in their own skins and thanks to that, didn't get those “Fun City” outlets for release. They shook their heads ruefully at you on the trains on Saturday morning—you coming home from a night out and a diner breakfast in your sweat-loosened best gear, and they themselves headed into town to exchange those five pairs of Gold Toe socks, because horrors!—they got them home and realized they were more charcoal gray than heather gray. They didn't like seeing my boy Ray G. squinting in the blazing morning sun as he made his way down spoiled Jillian's steps on West End Avenue. “Fuck! That scone thing I just had was pretty good!”, he mused as he looked back at Jillian's steps—and laughed, “Ha!”, about the tasty orange juice she squeezed from the gleaming Oster juicer in that sun-dappled kitchen so Goddamned big that it echoed.
He “Ha!”-ed again as he went down the street, past “The Uncomfortables” who glared at him as they trundled on to doctor's visits or to trains to see elderly aunts and uncles just beyond the bridges and tunnels.
“The Uncomfortables”. They didn't like all that citified mingling and class-mixing. These were the boomers born from the late forties to the late fifties who hailed from insular little “Bunker-lands” all over town and it's outskirts, but didn't dig on the frenetic, big-city fun like some of their contemporaries who hung tough in town did. No, these were the folks who absorbed every slur, every stereotype and trope mom and dad would angrily spit at the TV during those sense-offending episodes of “I-Spy!” or “The Mod Squad”. These were the kids who didn't understand Woodstock because mom and dad had firmly inculcated in them that oh-so-sensible mantra “Who wants to get grass and mud stains on your new chinos from Alexanders anyway?” Giuliani, born in '44, Kerik in '55, and Regan in '53 are of that stock—Giuliani,a socially-malaldroit, outer borough dweeb reviled even by the local kids, Kerik,a bridge-and-tunneler of sketchy upbringing who just wanted out, and lastly Regan,another bridge-and-tunneler who never “got” the city and avoided it her entire adolescent and young adult life.
All three of 'em were in their twenties and early thirties during these halcyon days (and nights) of fun and expression in NYC. Most other folks their age were sipping the bacchanal wine and supping at the vibrant smorgasbord of city life. But not this un-merry band of outsiders. They didn't get it, they couldn't get it, and thus—didn't want it.
And the “not wanting it” didn't just go for themselves...but years later it was manifested in their mass bartending of frosty, cold hater-ade—for everybody.
So, they wonked around in their early jobs, immersing themselves as they didn't seem to have a lot of friends in general, and of course, even fewer with any semblance of that easy-in-one-own's-skin “cool”. Their crowd, what there was of it—didn't club, or for that matter even lightly sample the town's other, non-debaucherous charms. They played it safe—settling down as best they could with whoever they could, because misery doesn't just love love company—it thirsts for it.
And then...a miracle happened. For them that is. The 80's happened, to be precise. There was that sudden glut of easy money for little doings as ushered in by the patron saint of skating by—Ronald Wilson Reagan. Suddenly, that downpour of dough hit folks who weren't Astors and Vanderbilts by birth, but now aspired to be via superficial trappings. It was the age of Boesky, big, padded shoulders, and Bret Easton Ellis—whose “American Psycho” was misread as a cool book about a misunderstood guy by the boys and girls its characters mirrored, instead of as the scathing indictment of the viral amorality and nouveau-riche greed gone mad from the Battery to the “barrier” at 110th and Central Park South.
Oh, it went topsy-turvy and the outcasts looked on with glee, because they knew...Goddamn, how they knew, just what was coming.
Dropping like flies were the patrician Lindsey-ites—well-meaning but oftentimes muddled in the minutiae of governance in a difficult city. CUNY, the City University System went from free to fee-ed as a “fuck them, it's about me” vibe rippled through every aspect of what once made the city a more sharing, caring place to live. And as soon as the admission-eligible citizens became majority minority—mean...was in. The once-mighty, benevolent old-money powers would age out, and their heirs—what few there were—just didn't hold the same opinion of good, ol' “Noblesse Oblige”. They simply lived off grandmama's and grandpapa's stiill-considerable money and abdicated their thrones of altruism. It created a vacuum, and into it stepped the new-money outsiders. No more giving away of libraries and railroad terminals and the like. Now it was mints on every overpriced hotel pillow as some sort of twisted “charity” from the symbols of the city's new, ascendant, ugly power-elite—“The Queen of Mean”, hotelier Leona Helmsley. And right next to her, squeezed out in the same time-frame, her squalling, fraternal twin in gleeful, ostentatious bastardry, one Donald Trump.
Oh yes...wasn't that a time. Self-centered meanness swept the country like a consumptive, gas-sprayed wildfire. Who shot that scoundrel J.R. Ewing? It was now cool to care about an unrepentant, evil creep. The new paradigm was that we didn't want him gone. America wanted to see him BACK and wanted to continue reveling in watching him do people dirty. But the truth is that the New York distillation of the new, raging “mean” was a rare and potent bottling indeed—hard to the taste, and dry to the mouth. And it's giddy, newly-monied vintners stomped out huge vats of it—while also drinking it up and staggering about, acting the fool towards all they came across— from then until now. It was merely one of the most destructive power-benders ever seen in this country.
When the angry graffitti and its matching cry went up from many folks—“Die Yuppie Scum!”, it wasn't just about the class warfare issue those it was directed at simplified it into. It was a desperate yelp against a thuggish coarsening of relations in the city. All of that “money for nothing, and the chicks for free” affected its beneficiaries badly. Where once the old high and low co-existed somewhat, the new breed with their new money and status walled themselves off in an attempt to define a new class structure—a new high and low where the two would never meet. A new New York that would harken back to a “classic” version of the city seen through a distorted lens of nostalgia.
The lust was for the neat, and perfect New York of “The Thin Man”, and Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies—of luxé and the tux. Toney digs, exclusive parties, and throwback cocktails—and of course, a good cigar. The problem was, this crowd didn't want to ever inadvertently stumble across any examples of that annoying, real, old New York.
What to do? What to do?
Say hello to “The Outsiders”.
The enforcers—the thug-wonks who toiled quietly for years behind the scenes in the city's bureaucracy and on the periphery of the cultural landscape—the city's new shapers turned to these people who as noted, viscerally hated the live-wire New York that they didn't understand, to bring the place to heel.
Hard-core prosecutors like Rudy.
Head-busting cops like Bernie.
And on the cultural front, gatekeepers like the Reagan-worshipping Regan.
But these “Outsiders” had a personal agenda of their own, too. You see, where their yuppie enablers misread Ellis's “American Psycho” into seeing its protagonist as a conflicted hero, The “Outsiders” picked up on a different book—Robert Caro's The Power Broker. That book detailed the malevolent application of bureaucratic power (over a span of 40 years!) by New York's “Master Builder” Robert Moses, and his “my way or the highway” (pun unintentional) style in dealing with the most vulnerable and powerless of the populace. The “Outsiders” misread—or perhaps more likely, selectively read the book's indictment of Moses' ways as an administrative “how-to” primer on getting things done. Moses (Robert) was the great paterfamilia figure of governmental ruthlessness, exhibiting the same sneering disdain for those he didn't and didn't want to understand.
Get along. Get out. Fuck your feelings. Fuck protocol. IT'S OUR TIME!
And payback would be a bitch. The “Outsiders” would exact revenge, hyper-criminalizing everything. “Annoying” squeegee-man were jailed, protests against mayoral policy were effectively banned at City Hall, and street-vendors may as well have been knife-chucking assassins. But most telling were those nightclubs—those discos that The “Outsiders” could never fathom and thus hated, many of those places were not surprisingly legislated right out of existence. The vehicle for the smackdown? Merely the little-enforced noise abatement laws now-perfect for smiting those loud, raucous reminders of that painful time on the outs.
Out Of Propriety, I Left “And Gleeful, Legislation-Twisting Racist Homophobe” Out Of The Main Headline, And Placed It Here Instead Because I Have Class.
