Long Time Leaving (60 page)

Maybe we should get over it. Some of our children—not mine, by God—regard yellow-dogism as quaint. They can understand, they say with more than a touch of condescension, how we might draw such a line, having come of age way back during the civil rights movement, but they are ready to be colorblind and to get in on Nasdaq heaven. They want to opt out of Social Security, on the grounds that they aren't going to get a good return on it—and they don't want to hear it when we tell them it's
our
generation's return they'd be opting out of. They don't feel strongly enough about religion, one way or the other, to see why Pat Robertson puts our teeth on edge.

Then, too, black voters— especially those who have already had all the affirmative action they need, and those who don't think they'll ever get enough—are often quoted as saying that they won't be taken for granted by the Democrats. (That way they can justify either aspiring to Republican officialdom themselves or not voting at all.) There's not much point in being a yellow-dog Democrat if you can't count on voting with black people. I have always gone along with the great majority of black voters, except when Jesse Jackson was seeking the Democratic nomination. You might conclude, then, that my philosophy is to vote with black people unless it means voting for a black person. (What if Colin Powell had got the Republican nomination? Well, he didn't. For Republicans, Colin Powell is like Marlene Dietrich for a lifelong bachelor I talked to once: he'd have married
her,
if she'd been available.) My defense is that Jesse Jackson is more valuable—almost anybody is more valuable—in some other capacity than that of wooing the swing vote.

Swing low, sweet candidate. It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing: all those trendy people in the middle who go back and forth between Democrat and Republican. As if every four years you could swing between being a dog person and a cat person. I'm not saying you can't like dogs and cats both, because I do myself. (Just today my heart went out to a cat I saw trying to take a walk with two people and a dog—the cat would scurry along behind, and then the dog would turn and sneer at him, and then the cat would pretend he wasn't interested. Cats see they can't hang with other species, so they become cat-centric; I can respect that, and I can respect Republicans.) But surely you've got
to prefer
either cats or dogs. What the swing vote wants is a dog that is enough like a cat, or vice versa.

Every candidate courts those swingers, and chases big-interest money, so why should I cling to those cani-felines who are nominally the party of Jefferson and Jackson? I favor mixed-breed
dogs.
However close a Republican comes to looking like man's best friend, you can always hear him purring. It could be, though, that my caninity needs remixing.

There are conservative Democratic congressmen who vote with the Republicans and call themselves blue-dog Democrats. My term for them is
Republicans.
But maybe I could see my way clear to becoming some other kind of dogged Democrat.

Green-dog Democrat:
Would vote for a dog over a Republican but only if the dog is an environmentalist.

Purple-dog Democrat:
Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog only if he has a flair for rhetoric.

Bird-dog Democrat:
Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog only if he can make a good point.

Red-dog Democrat:
Would vote for a dog who makes sudden unexpected attacks on Republican quarterbacks.

Seeing-eye-dog Democrat:
Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if he has vision.

Junkyard-dog Democrat:
Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if he's mean enough.

Three-dog-night Democrat:
Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if he has lots of fur and it's cold enough.

Bitch Democrat:
Would vote for a Republican-opposing dog if she's mean enough.

Feist Democrat:
Would vote for Ross Perot if he were a Democrat.

But I'm going to be some kind of Democrat. Some day Democrats may have catered to the black vote to the point that there are lots of black Republicans, and that will be a kind of progress. Some day Republicans may realize that gay is a human thing to be, and they will leave their hats on. If I live until that day, I'll see who has room in their tent for an old yellow dog.

S
trange to have had a president who cites as one of his signal achievements his acquittal. But maybe Bill Clinton was sent from heaven to preserve us from those who would present themselves as unimpeachable.

He hath lied to the American people!
Remember that? Well, I guess they didn't actually say “hath.” But that's what they meant. Every time I heard this pronouncement, I tried to picture this American People. A soiled dove, righteous in her vengeance? A toddler staring open-mouthed at one of its parents as the other rages, “You do not love Baby!”?

The American people like being lied to. Hence Ronald Reagan. But even for a president who is not a professional actor, misrepresentation is part of the job. Commentators who do not bear this in mind are like critics in the audience shouting, “Tell us what you
really
think” at any actor who is trying to bring off a drama.

Commentators—part of whose job, to be sure, is to point out lies—
ought for the sake of intellectual honesty to bear in mind that it is easier to be right than president.

I'm
right—although not everyone will agree, and not many people (I won't go so far as to concede that I care how many) will care. I am
trying
to be right, secure in the knowledge that if I am, or if I'm not, people will little note nor long remember. When a president says something, it is a form of high-stakes marketing. The president is betting that a majority, or at least a plurality (or, for the moment, just certain target groups) will agree, and he wants everyone (though he hopes certain nontarget groups aren't paying close enough attention) to care. Not only is a president's life not his own, neither is his integrity. That is to say, he is less like the strawmen of punditry than like people in business or other areas of real life: richly imbued with conscious and unconscious ulteriority. It makes no more sense to wax indignant about a president's telling lies than about a wrestler's faking falls. Well, that analogy may be too pejorative. Let's say it makes no more sense to wax indignant about a president's lying than about “trick photography” in the movies. Well, that analogy may not be pejorative enough. At any rate, the media tend to judge politicians, favorably or unfavorably, by a Platonic ideal that is easier to apply than to justify. If we thought of a president less as a role model than as a character in fiction, we would see him more clearly. Clinton may not have had great character, but he has been one.

Voters—part of whose job, to be sure, is to hold certain truths as self-evident—ought to bear in mind for the sake of civic responsibility that politics is relative. As Henny Youngman would say when asked, “How's your wife?”: “Compared to what?”

Presented with two ruthless, pandering white men who believe expressly in God and necessarily in Mammon, and each of whom is bound to be overcompensating drastically for something in his childhood, we ought to vote for whichever one strikes us as marginally more likely, by dint of personal verve or just party affiliation, to slow down or to speed up the nation's drift toward wherever we fear or hope it is heading. We should, of course, harbor the expectation that he will surprise us (by
us
is meant the decent minority within his plurality) by doing something courageous, that is to say, something decent but unpopular—it being
his
problem that most of us (by
us
is meant the body politic as a whole) are, by definition, more likely to vote against him next time because he did it. We must resist the temptation to dismiss all candidates for president as beneath us. Otherwise we'd never forgive ourselves for voting for any of them. We must compare them not to ourselves but to each other. One of them is always less deeply beneath
us. If there is a third-party candidate for whom we would rather vote than either of them, we should vote for our second choice. Third-party candidates have the luxury of being relatively unpopular. If you are going to vote for one of those, because he or she is
right,
you might as well vote for yourself.

We can't help but realize during campaigns that politicians are relative to each other. After the election, however, we begin to consider the winner as someone who is, or who we want to make clear is absolutely not, an extension of our ideal selves. It astonished me to hear men of the world rigidly denounce Bill Clinton for yielding to temptations of the flesh (not that I condone it), and women of the world just as rigidly denounce Hillary Clinton for remaining married to him (not that I would have held it against her, myself, if she had dumped the son of a bitch, except wouldn't it have been awfully quixotic of her, to divorce a man who didn't even own a house?), until I realized that these were husbands trying to make it clear to their wives (and congressmen, to their idealized constituents) that
they
would never mess around with an intern (neither would I), and wives trying to make it clear to their husbands that
they
wouldn't tolerate it.

The only way a president can survive and stay focused long enough to get anything done is to be robustly relativist himself. Relativism is his Teflon. (Those swing voters who preferred George W. Bush over Al Gore did so, I would say, because they made out Bush's back to be more like a duck's.) Reagan and Clinton, each in his different way, managed to keep us from getting his goat. Reagan would say, when asked whether he wanted to go into outer space, “Some people think I've been out there for years.” Clinton would emerge from his Starr-chamber grilling to tell staffers that he rather liked Kenneth Starr, wanted to invite him to sleep over in the White House sometime. Each man, we might say, managed to pull off a cable presidency in a major-network market. Reagan's was the Bible Network, Clinton's HBO. I'll take Clinton's.

Part of a president's job, to be sure, is to amount to more than
just
Teflon. But did you see the pictures of Clinton in Hanoi, dwarfed physically but by no means psychologically by a monumental bust of Ho Chi Minh? There he stood, who in his youth wiggled out of a military obligation—smiling like the very essence of handsome Americanism and paying honor to the soldiers on both sides of “the conflict we call the Vietnam War and you call the American War”? Call it effrontery, but what if Lyndon Johnson had had something approaching that sense of perspective?

At a dinner party back during the campaign of 1992, I was speaking up
for Bill Clinton on a faute de mieux basis when someone at the table exclaimed, “Don't you want a president who
believes in something?”
“What I said was “No.” If I'd been as quick-witted as I tend to deplore a president's not being, I'd have said what occurred to me later: “No, I want a president who caters, effectively and constructively, to the right people.” I believe Clinton came relatively close, under the circumstances, to doing that. I also want a president—and here I may approach absolutism—who outslicks the Right. So I tend to agree with Bill Clinton that one of his signal achievements was his acquittal.

W
orst-case scenario: faith-based judicial system. Does this automatically mean,
wooo-ooo,
Inquisition? Hardly. This administration has invited a
diversity
of believers to have faith in it. On certain charges, a Rasta court could be a blessing. Or a Mormon one. And even if we draw an evangelical venue, it's our
sin
that's condemned, not us, so why get our nose out of joint?

Let's review. “We voted for Gore. And it didn't work out. And not one single tank was sighted in one single street. How many countries’ defense establishments, if any had tanks half as snazzy as ours, would resist the temptation to bring some out just to see if they work? And yet when fresh-faced incoming vice-presidential employees sat down, aglow, at their new Old Executive Office Building computer terminals, what did they find? Out-transitioning vandals had …done things …to the
Ws
on the keyboards. As if that weren't enough, they had left graffiti saying …what?

“REDRUM”? “HELTER-SKELTER”? “OLD POOPY REPUBLICANS ARE NOT MULTICULTURAL”?

“We don't know, exactly. The new administration has graciously respected the public's and Matt Drudge's right to use their imagination. But according to one newspaper account, “The destruction was so vast that a telecommunications staffer with more than a quarter-century of service was seen sobbing near his office one night.”

Also, okay, the Clintons stole furniture.

“When they
had
to know full well, Mr. and Ms. Political Genius, duh, no
way
they had it wired with the Supreme Court.

So. Now we realize what kind of clueless smarty-pants hooligans our extorted tax dollars were lining the pockets of. And yet …some of us still seem to be hanging back from a freely proffered era of Republican good feeling.

What are we afraid of?

Let's say our new attorney general
does
tend to break the ice by asking, “Do you have the same sexual preference as most men?” Don't forget, this administration has a sense of humor. Ever hear of something called a straight line? Could be, the AG wants us to come right back at him, with some kind of too-snarky liberalesque one-liner that we clearly don't really mean:

“I'll say! And the funny thing is, I used to
be
a man.”

“Not really, but it's better than nothing.”

“Now that Tom and Nicole have split?”

“I should say so! But I'm married.”

“In detention, or out?”

“As long as it's furtive and anonymous, I'm your huckleberry.”