Long Time Leaving (57 page)

B
ill Clinton of Arkansas and Jimmy Carter of Georgia are vying to out-dove each other in Haiti. Forrest Gump of Alabama has become a national hero for his imbecilic
sweetness.

Bull Connor must be turning over in his grave. “Which, as far as that goes, is fine with me. Connor of Alabama made a national name for himself by sicking dogs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators. But Bear Bryant of Arkasas and Alabama must be turn, turn, turning, too. The Bear got his name by
wrestling
a bear. He drove country boys to ferocious glory in football. “Whither Dixie virility now?

In the 1960s, when I was embarking upon white Southern manhood, just about all the nationally prominent Southern white men aside from the Bear (whose charges didn't use cattle prods) were identified with hapless, violent, dumb-ass resistance to peace and love. Lester Maddox of Georgia and Ross Barnett of Mississippi stood firm and stupid against integration. President Lyndon Johnson of Texas and General “William “Westmoreland of South Carolina escalated the war in Vietnam to the point of destroy-this-village-to-save-it insanity.

Yet now, in the nineties, Southern white guys in the public eye exemplify extraordinary aversion to bloodshed. Not only do they go out of their way to avoid killing anybody, they can't even bear to drive a hard bargain. Clinton sent Carter and his fellow Georgian Sam Nunn down to Haiti to arrange for the gentlest possible armed intervention, and they came up with a deal that catered to the dictator's wife. Carter was apparently swept off his feet by Mrs. General Cedras. She struck the former leader of the free world as being so slender, attractive, and basically such a good old girl, he couldn't find it in his heart to demand that her husband get out of Haiti.

Even that was too invasive for Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia (a man who served his wife with divorce papers the day after she underwent cancer surgery). Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, voted against the Gulf “War.
^*
Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, is accused by Northerners of being too protective of Mother Earth.

And that bizarre cinematic figure Forrest Gump is leading people to believe that success comes naturally—in football, war, entrepre-neurship, sexual and racial relations, and even parenthood—through simple-minded (not the same, apparently, as dumb-ass) niceness. All of these white men are Southern. And Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern aren't. And none of today's male country singers look like they would just as soon shoot you (or drink themselves to death) as look at you (or at themselves).

Will
bubba
become a synonym for
peacenik?
Will some such term as
pinkneck
enter common parlance? Will people come to believe that the Rebel yell was
“I feeeeeel your pai-ai-ai-ainnnnnnn”?
What is the percentage in being an
agreeable, enlightened
Southern white man, like me, if all the old boys with the highest profiles are so egregiously benign that they make me want to go around saying, “Life …is …lak …a …box of …chock-lits. Sometimes …you reach in …and …find a dawg turd”?

“They're all in touch with their female side!” cried Doug Marlette, the white North Carolinian Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, when I asked him what he made of all this. “It's that New Age kind of thing. It's all backward! Clinton is always hugging people. Jimmy Carter was always saying, ‘I love you.’ Talking like girls—that kind of personal stuff. Carter started it. Remember when he got chased off the water by a rabbit? …Southern guys used to be the primitives, and they're getting away from it. I said this in
my book Faux Bubba:
Their wives used to have two first names, now they've got two last names. Betty Sue became Rodham-Clinton. Meanwhile, Minnesotans—Robert Bly,
Iron John,
all that—are getting in touch with their inner Bull Connor.”

“And how did the world
learn
about Robert Bly, and Joseph Campbell, the mythology guy?” Marlette went on. “On public television. From Bill Moyers. All these guys—Moyers, Clinton, Carter, Gore—are Southern Baptists. My theory is, they grew up with all this hymn singing and foot washing, then got intellectualized out of it, and now they miss it. So they find a pop, secular way of expressing their religion. In the process, they've all become Bobbittized. Whereas Minnesota guys grow up in whine country; they're trying to
find
their dicks, through their heads— they're talking about emotions, looking for the love scene in
Deliverance.
Which came out in the early seventies, along with Carter and Bly.”

In other words, Southern white guys are moving away from the
stereotype, because it was so out of fashion in the sixties, and non-Southern white guys have moved toward it so embarrassingly that the good-ol’-badass image is doubly mocked. Rush Limbaugh is like Dom DeLuise trying to do George “Wallace—I want to say, “Hey, I've heard all this shit before, in its original form.”

And what is going on at the Citadel? Faulkner is trying to get in. Not William but Shannon: a woman. And what is the key objection leveled against this one small step toward heterosexualization of the cadet corps? According to Susan Faludi in
The New Yorker,
the fear is that this tough-as-nails military school will be spoiled if a woman is added to the mix, because then the guys won't be able to get naked together and cry. I'm not saying Faludi is what you could call a primary source here (projection, thy name is, sometimes, woman) but still: Feh.

I'll tell you what, I am getting tired of blushing for my people. Some years ago, Pat Conroy—the Citadel-educated, Citadel-bashing Southern novelist—and I were on a Memphis television show with another Southern novelist, Mary Lee Settle. One of the frustrations of being a Southern woman, she said, was that ever since the South lost the “War Between the States, Southern men have been (in various, by no means always straightforward, ways)
apologizing
all the time.

The host of the show turned to Conroy and me. All we could think of to say was, spontaneously, in unison:

“We're sorry, Mary Lee.”

As a matter of fact, Southern white guys have a lot in common with women, in general. Take the case of Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson case. She popped up on Court TV looking the way you'd think a male prosecutor would: mean. People didn't like it. So she took counsel from image consultants and started doing her hair differently, wearing softer fabrics, smiling, and talking about her children and her grocery shopping. “Whereupon the press started referring to her with terms like
girlishly
and
giggled
and
motherization.
“At times,” wrote
The New York Times,
“Ms. Clark lurched between her new and former self.”

Maybe there's no way us gals and good old boys can win. So we might as well lurch forward. The pendulum may jerk us back, but for now my boys are in the front lines of sweetness and light, and I'm damned if I'm sorry. Damned if I'm not, too, probably, but what the hell,
chaaarge.
Let's
be hard-nosed, balls-out
softies.

I'm proud of the way we went into Haiti. Especially compared to the way George Bush, that eminently un-Southern faux-Texan, went into Panama and Kuwait. In Panama, we blew up a lot of the wrong people and
didn't improve anything after all. And we might not have had to wreak such destruction in the Gulf if we hadn't built up Saddam's armaments and then led him to believe that we wouldn't object to his expanding his borders. In Haiti, we seem actually to be isolating thugs, jerking them around, and (as the saying goes) making Christians out of them.
^*
And we're actually on the side of a downtrodden majority for a change.

As Alabama football fans are wont to exclaim, “Rolllll Tide!”

(Note: If I do say so myself, I wrote the above
before
the
Times,
even, started admitting that the Haitian venture was looking downright effective—and before Clinton decisively confronted Saddam at the Kuwait border with a preemptive, therefore bloodless, show of force. Then too, in case things start taking turns for the worse on those fronts, let me say that I wrote the above before things started taking turns for the worse.)
^†

I have a soft spot in my heart for Haiti, as it happens, because I got nonviolently—even
lawyerlessly—
divorced there. Back in 1972, my first wife, Ellen, and I had worked out an amicable parting with no disagreements over property or custody. Then we went to a lawyer. In Brooklyn, where we lived. Here's what he told us:

“Your best bet is physical cruelty.”

So we went to Haiti. A Haitian travel agent drew up our separation agreement, and after we straightened out the typo that seemed to provide that no one Ellen might marry in the future would be entitled to adopt me, we never referred to it again. For the same amount of money that the Brooklyn lawyer would have charged to finagle a divorce justified by imaginary battering, she and I and our two children were able to go to Port-au-Prince together during Carnival. I stood in line a while at some official's office and told him that my wife and I were incompatible
He gave me a nicely embossed decree. We four broken-homers embarked on a successful joint-custody venture by swimming at the hotel, eating a nice French dinner, and observing Mardi Gras in the streets with a lot of cheerful, brightly dressed folks drinking quite passable local dollar-a-bottle rum. It wasn't a frolicsome occasion for us; it was, after all, a divorce. But it reassured the children in some measure, and it made me feel an affinity with a populace that was able to put the best possible face on misery.

Furthermore, I can't help identifying with Carter and Clinton, heirs of the civil rights movement. In the sixties, people of my ethnic and genderal stripe saw hard-nosed white authorities bamboozled by nonviolence, and we learned various lessons. Liberal journalists like Marlette and me learned to make fun of white authorities. The Ku Klux Klan learned to demonstrate quasi-peacefully, to attract angry counter-protest, and to assert its First Amendment rights. Carter, Clinton, and other progressive Southern politicians learned that Jesus was far more likely to want them for a sunbeam, and the national electorate to want them for president, if they came on as unbullyish as possible.

And as I write this, Americans are doing to the thugs of Port-au-Prince what too seldom got done to Southern white thugs during the sixties. We are flat kicking their ass. Some of these Haitian military “attachés” broke up a peaceful demonstration and, according to
The New York Times,
“found a cage of doves the protesters had planned to release over the Caribbean in memory of people drowned trying to flee” and “bit the heads off the doves and threw their bodies in the street.”

But a couple of days later, American soldiers, again according to the
Times,
“were grabbing the gunmen, sometimes wrestling them roughly to the ground,” and “Haitians crowded around, reaching up to slap and shake [our boys’] hands, shouting: ‘Good job! Good work! Thank you!
Merci!’
”

I just hope Carter doesn't meet those dove biters’ wives. As some Southern politician—I think it was old “Kissin Jim” Folsom, ex-governor of Alabama—once said: “Women has always been the weakness of us leaders.” But hey, as long as we're tromping the bad guys, what's wrong with being in touch with their women's female sides? Maybe we can get Mrs. Cedras a no-fault divorce and a role in
Forrest Gump II.

I
don't care what anybody says, Paula Jones would be a good-looking woman if it weren't for her nose. I saw her on TV recently, in a replay of an up-close-and-personal interview. No, her voice was not becoming, nor her mind, but she seemed to have pretty skin, and her mouth was actually pretty—under soft questioning she didn't have that harsh defensive grimace you often see in press photos of her. Even in those photos, she might not look so sour if it weren't for that pickle. Furthermore, I happened to run into an old copy of
Penthouse
recently, and there she was with next to no clothes on. And hey. I know people-naming no names—who have
bought drinks
for worse-looking women. Several drinks.
In vain.
The
Penthouse
shots were provided, I believe, by a venal ex-boyfriend. The president would not have done her that way.

I stress the above because—all moral, legal, mental, and political questions aside, for the moment—I am tired of hearing national commentators assert that Bill Clinton, as far as looks go, has terrible taste. The last time I saw Gennifer Flowers in closeup on TV she was as eyecatching—and let's face it, this is saying something—as a mature Donna Rice. And how about that Miss America? Or Miss Arkansas, anyway. Eat your heart out, Kenneth Starr.