Mind of an Outlaw (67 page)
Authors: Norman Mailer
So he filled the sound of the word “Quayle” with whalebone.
Four years ago, Dan Quayle and I teamed up and I told him then, speaking from some personal experience, that the job of vice president was a real character builder, and I was not exaggerating. But look, this guy stood there and in the face of those unfair critics he never wavered. And he simply told the truth and let the chips fall where they may. And he said we need families to stick together and fathers to stick around, and he is right.
So when the establishment in Washington hears about this, they get all uptight about it, about him; they
gripe about it—but folks in the real world understand, and they nod their head, and he has been a super vice president and he will be for another four years.
This was George right off the cuff, and his minutes at the podium turned into an event. The convention came to life. Our president was no longer wan, defensive, and intrinsically confined by abortion, health care, AIDS, drugs, and Saddamn still alive, not to speak of the economy (that subtly nauseated offbeat stomach of the nation); no, this was the George who could win any battle against any Democratic foe any time because he knew the American people and what they cared about and what they laughed about. It was autointoxication for sure, but then mountains are climbed by just these will-to-win guys.
I couldn’t help but notice an interview my opponent gave to the
USA Today
last week. It was absolutely incredible.… He talked about how he’s already planning his transition, figuring out who should be deputy assistant undersecretary in every Washington agency … and I half expected, when I went over to the Oval Office, to find him over there measuring the drapes. Well, let me say as the first shot out of the barrel, I have a message for him. Put those drapes on hold; it is going to be curtain time for that ticket. And I mean it.
Yes, curtains. The other guy played the saxophone, and everyone knows what that instrument is attempting to convey. It’s just a blither-blather of illicit sex and farts.
For nine months the other side has had a one-way conversation with the American people and now it’s our turn—and they have called our great country a mockery and sounded the saxophone of change, and that sound sure sounds familiar. They say they want to shake up Washington, but they oppose limiting the terms of congressmen and that’s a change, just changing the subject.
By evening, back in the Astrodome, the same delegates who had sat in despond all morning were ready for fun and more oratorical brimstone. The word was out. The president believed he could win. So the Astrodome was quick with laughter at each assault on Bill Clinton. “You know something,” said Kay Bailey Hutchison, state treasurer of Texas, a tall handsome lady with a humorous scorn in her voice reminiscent of Ann Richards, governor of Texas, as she spoke of Bill Clinton, “I think he did inhale.” The delegates took vastly to that idea.
Then came Senator Alan K. Simpson from Wyoming, mean as rawhide, lantern-jawed as Popeye. His manner suggested the serious pleasure to be found in tapping into the jugular; the delegates confirmed his premise. Simpson would remind America that Clinton’s only reason for not fleeing America while the war in Vietnam happened to be on was that he did not wish to lose his “political viability.” Contumely rested in those two words. “How many other times,” jeered Simpson, “did you sell your political soul to maintain your political viability?… How are you going to pay the bill, Bill?”
Then came the first large event on Monday night in the Astrodome—Pat Buchanan’s speech. Trounced repeatedly in the Republican primaries by Bush, having to contend with the full weight of the Republican establishment in state after state, and succeeding nowhere after the early good showing in New Hampshire, Buchanan had managed nonetheless to amass three million votes. Half of them must have been as hard-core in their conservatism as Buchanan himself. Since he had also brought a heart attack on himself following such expenditures of energy, Buchanan could speak with the gravitas gained from reconnoitering early mortality.
Unlike the majority of speakers who strode up to the pale and massive podium of the Astrodome only to be overwhelmed by the caverns and hollows of volume in that huge and amplified space, he did not get into the trap of bellowing out his lines. Most speakers had a tendency to exercise hortatory rights—to yell louder as one lost more and more of one’s audience. So they sounded cranky as their applause lines failed to elicit large
response. All bad orations, whether by actors or politicians, have this in common: the speaker becomes exactly equal to his text—there is no human space between, no subtext to give resonance to the difference between the person and what he is saying.
Buchanan possessed a good deal of subtext. He was pleasant-faced and, in the beginning, mild-voiced, and no audience can fail to hang on every word of a killer speaker when he is pleasant-faced. So they took in each phrase and cheered with happiness at nearly every applause line. Patrick Buchanan was off to a fine start.
Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden where twenty thousand radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists—in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.
The convention was happy enough by now to reveal a curious side of itself. Conservatives might form the vitally motivated core, but these delegates were a far cry from the conservatives of 1964, who had been a group so openly hostile toward the media that after the first day, many a reporter did not venture out again onto the hate-filled floor of the Cow Palace in San Francisco.
Now, however, it was more like a TV game. The delegates booed references to the media with grins, not scowls. They were part of a TV audience, after all; you grin, you do not scowl. Besides, they were curious—these were real media people of the sort you can see asking questions on TV. To be around them, therefore, was to be anointed into the other church, the new fold, television.
Indeed, not until Buchanan began to talk about Hillary Clinton did an ugly underside to his speech begin to emerge:
Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that twelve-year-olds should
have a right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery—and life on an Indian reservation. Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
We can allow her to do that. In 1979 she wrote the article to which Buchanan was referring. Here is the passage:
Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others [which] will significantly affect the child’s future should not be made unilaterally by parents. Children should have a right to be permitted to decide their own future if they are competent.… In all but the most extreme cases, such questions should be resolved by the families, not the courts.… I prefer that intervention … should he limited to decisions that could have long-term and possibly irreparable effects if they were not resolved.
Buchanan, having paused for the cheers he received, went on with the attack.
George Bush was seventeen when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school class, walked down to the recruiting office, and signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific War. And Mr. Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s turn came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft. Which of these two men has won the moral authority to call on Americans to put their lives at risk? I suggest, respectfully, it is the patriot and war hero, Navy Lt. JG George Herbert Walker Bush.
By his own scale of measure, Buchanan also lacked moral authority. He, too, had not served in the Armed Forces. Nonetheless, Buchanan had inner sanction. He laid down a gauntlet:
My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about what we believe, what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be—as was the cold war itself.
If he had kept to that, one could have applauded him from across the cultural divide, for he had performed the obligatory task of the serious politician—he had defined the nature of the conflict. The fact that his voice had begun to wear down into a hoarse whisper made him only more effective in his peroration. Each of his words now seemed to insist on a private physical toll; so suffering, he spoke to a sentiment that no other politician of either party would have dared to come close to uttering in public:
Friends, in these wonderful twenty-five weeks [of campaigning] the saddest days were the days of the bloody riot in L.A., worst in our history. But even out of that awful tragedy can come a message of hope.
Hours after the violence ended I visited the Army compound in south L.A. where an officer of the 18th Cavalry that had come to rescue the city introduced me to two of his troopers. They could not have been twenty years old. He told them to recount their story.
They had come into Los Angeles late on the second day; and they walked up a dark street where a mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage.
Greater love than this no man hath than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were nineteen-year-old
boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as they took back the streets of Los Angeles block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.
God bless you, and God bless America.
The public relations successes of Grenada and Panama must have emboldened Buchanan to believe that when it came down to it, Americans would concern themselves no more over the demolition of Harlem than with the disruption of any other Third World or Caribbean country. So, he was drawing his own line in the sand. If it took martial law, barbed wire, camps of detention, and Pentagon management of the media, then, by God, fellow Republicans, is that not a comfortable price to pay for walking carefree again on the street? The temptation would go deep for many an American. Would one care to see the results of a confidential poll on just this point? Inner-city unrest, however, would hardly be solved by his solution. For a religious man, Buchanan did not seem to comprehend that freedom which is obtained for a majority by amputating the rights of a minority leaves a slough of bad conscience, and so offers no more balance to heaven than to the streets.
Besides, his facts were off. The black and angry mob in South Central Los Angeles had not been about to attack the old black folks’ home: no, as the Associated Press reported it, the National Guard had been slow to arrive. Following Buchanan on Monday night would come Ronald Reagan. With a few cuts, his text could have been delivered by many a senior Democratic statesman (if, indeed, there are any left besides Jimmy Carter). It was as if Reagan was looking to attain the eminence that is above politics.
In my life’s journey over these past eight decades, I have seen the human race through a period of unparalleled tumult and triumph. I have seen the birth of Communism and the death of Communism. I have witnessed the bloody futility of two world wars, Korea, Vietnam,
and the Persian Gulf. I have seen television grow from a parlor novelty to become the most powerful vehicle of communication in history. As a boy I saw streets filled with model-Ts; as a man I have met men who walked on the moon …
Yet tonight is not a time to look backward. For while I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans I live for the future. So this evening, for just a few minutes, I hope you will let me talk about a country that is forever young. This powerful sense of energy has made America synonymous for opportunity the world over. And after generations of struggle, America is the moral force that defeated Communism and all those who would put the human soul itself into bondage.
So it went. He gave credit to the Republicans for ending the cold war: he chided the Democrats. “Our liberal friends,” he called them. What got liberals most upset were “two simple words: Evil Empire.” Though Reagan’s popularity was great in this hall, it was smaller outside. He had spoken of the “Evil Empire” too often, and now we were left with the bill. Part of the profound confusion that hung over the political atmosphere of America this election year is that we had gotten ourselves in so much debt under Ronald Reagan. If he had come into office promising to cut taxes, balance the budget, and beef up the military so that it could defeat the Evil Empire, the dire fact was that our debt had expanded from $1 trillion in the time of Jimmy Carter to $4 trillion now ($4 trillion, we can remind ourselves, is 4 million separate sums of $1 million each); yes, the truth was he had spent it not to fight, but to bankrupt the Russians. We did not wage a holy war so much as a battle of U.S. versus Soviet military disbursements, and it had been needless. Once, under Stalin, the USSR had been a charnel house for human rights, but the monstrosities of the ’50s had ebbed by the ’70s into a dull and daily oppression, a moribund economy, a corrupt bureaucracy, a cynical leadership, and no capacity whatever, no matter how large the vastly inefficient Soviet armies, to succeed
at world conquest. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan came to presidential office, the Evil Empire had been reduced to an immense Third World collection of backward nations incapable of defeating even one other Third World country like Afghanistan. So we had spent our trillions in the holy crusade of a Pentagon buildup against an enemy whose psychic and economic wherewithal was already collapsed within, and had pursued Communism into little countries, and wrecked their jerry-built tropical economies even as we were wearing out what was left of the Soviets’, but it all cost us twenty times more than it had to. Our grandchildren would pay the bill.