Mind of an Outlaw (68 page)

The American public, however, had been as attracted to Reagan’s scenarios as he was. So our vision of an Evil Empire did not vanish altogether until the fall of Communism itself. Then the fraud was out. Evil Empires, like dragons, slaughter millions in their last throes, but Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union went over to capitalism peacefully. Blood did not run in the streets. Caught in the middle of a long sleep, the American mind began to ask itself: Were we taken? Had there been, for a long time, something phony about the cold war? It might be that Ronald Reagan was the last person in America to realize that he had not won such a conflict, but had merely extended it.

With the conclusion of Reagan’s speech, the first convention evening came to a close, and Bush’s strategy could begin to be seen. In all of this long day with its double session, Clinton had been attacked scores of times, the nation had been celebrated, the Bush administration had been glorified, pro-life had been affirmed, and legal abortion denied. That conservative movement which had sought to get the government off the backs of the American people had now put its foot into the womb of the American woman. Yet, with all the rhetoric, not a new word, nor a new idea, had been brought forth on the economy. The overall strategy was clear. In court, if you have a weak case and can argue neither the facts nor the law, dedicate yourself to arousing the emotions of the jury.

If Clinton was going to base his campaign on improving the weak state of the economy, which certainly handed him the facts,
then Bush would look to dig deep into the mother lode of American politics—patriotism. Since the Republicans had been mining such ore since the Second World War, the question was whether the vein had been played out. All the same, Bush could only try. What with his hardest campaign workers coming from the religious right, he could hardly debate in the center; his would have to be the war between the Patriots and the Bureaucratic Managers, between the warriors and the hedonists (read: faggots, feminists, lawyers, media).

In preparation, therefore, the president dropped in Tuesday morning at the Hamilton Middle School to observe a class of students who were giving a karate demonstration. In honor of the occasion, Chuck Norris, founder of “Kick Drugs Out of America” and the martial arts virtuoso of numberless blood-drenched films, a quiet, gentle fellow, Chuck Norris—he could afford to be!—presented a white karate jacket and an honorary black belt to the president who in turn called Chuck a “point of light.” One down, 999 to go!

That Tuesday night at the convention, Newt Gingrich, the House minority whip who had exposed the House Bank scandal (and had then been embarrassed by the number, twenty-two, of his own overdrawn checks), was up at the podium declaring that the Democrats were trying to sell America “a multicultural nihilistic hedonism that is inherently destructive of a healthy society.” He had his backing. On cue, delegates were holding up placards that read “If Hillary can’t trust him, how can we?” and a marijuana leaf showed up on a poster with the caption, “Bill Clinton’s smoking gun.”

Nonetheless, the strategy worked but minimally on the second night. Jack Kemp spoke with reasonable effectiveness and Phil Gramm put his audience to sleep with the keynote speech. The theme for the third day, Wednesday, was Family Values, and it was introduced in the Republican Gala at noon. Four thousand wealthy Republicans, paying $1,000 each, came to lunch at the George Brown Convention Center in Downtown Houston (largest edge-city of them all), and in the huge main room, as large as a football field, and therefore commodious enough for four
hundred tables, the gentry of Texas and a few country clubs beyond had congregated in support of the president and First Lady, who, after notables had been seated at the dais, entered the festivities in a mock railroad train called the American Eagle Express, a black and gold behemoth of a toy locomotive about the size of a large stagecoach. On the rear platform of the observation car it pulled were standing the Bushes and Quayles, and in their wake walked the Secret Service, as alert on this occasion as attack dogs. All considered, it was a hairy maneuver: the facsimile of a train choo-chooed and whistled gaily as it trundled through the aisles along the luncheon floor, but it left the president and his wife wholly exposed as they smiled and nodded and occasionally reached out to shake hands with friends on either side.

Standing near the locomotive as it crawled by, one had a fair look at Barbara Bush, who was immensely animated and appeared capable of taking in a formidable amount of information at once. Her eyes scanned every face within ten feet of her, and she did not miss a dear acquaintance or those who were at this hour somewhat less than friends, the smallest movements of her eyes and lips indicating a welcome across the gap, or a small reminder that things between were not altogether in order. To bestow warmth or display rectification in one’s greetings suggests command of that spectrum of recognition that usually belongs to royals. On reflection, that was no surprise. Barbara Bush did not look like a First Lady so much as like a woman who could be Queen of England, and that did little for George standing beside her, since his absolute trimness of figure, reminiscent of George VI, could also bring to mind King George’s older brother, the former Prince of Wales, Edward, the old dear haunted poof who married Wallis Simpson, although George Bush, God knows, was no way a poof, but possessed the genuine steel (no matter how he might be cursed with that mild face and mild voice, and—said the Democrats—his mild brain!). Nonetheless, it was a moment to recall—Barbara Bush, as the Queen of America, or, better yet, our queen mother.

Entered the chow in chuck wagons, pushed along by teenagers
in cowhand and cowgirl outfits, the boys leaning on the heavy wagons with all their strength, while the girls, obviously not liberated, were taking it easy. And the gathering of four thousand, whose least costly denominator when it came to dress was the Neiman-Marcus boutique, was delighted by such campy re-creation of chuck-wagon roots, but of course, as was true so often of Republican promises, the wagons were but symbols for the food to come; the real grub came out later, carried by other files of cowhands and cowgirls toting stacks of round plastic plates and plastic covers with fried chicken and fritters within.

After a series of short remarks offering thanksgiving to those who had brought off this $4 million fund-raiser, Dan Quayle got up to speak. It was interesting to see him in such a venue. Feeling himself among friends, he was relaxed and not unhumorous, much in contrast to his situation on Monday night at the Astrodome when he had sat in a guest box listening to Buchanan and Reagan while photographers never ceased clicking away. Under those circumstances, it had been possible to notice that a part of his unique appearance, always so off-putting in spite of his good looks, could be due to the fact that his head was strikingly small. He also looked waxlike, but indeed, under the circumstances, who would not? To be obliged to sit for ten or fifteen minutes, then another twenty minutes, and permit not one vague or errant expression to cross one’s face on penalty of having it immortalized in the papers the next day, meant that he could neither smile nor groan sympathetically at what Buchanan or Reagan said, but had to content himself with a tasteful clapping of his hands for fear that any grin or grimace allowed to slip out would reveal some leering depth within. If he had not been the epitome of a rich man’s son, or, in his case, grandson, a simulacrum for president of the wealthiest house on fraternity row, one could even have felt something like sympathy for him.

Bush came to the podium as a very large American flag was unrolled behind him, and he gave a short zippy set of remarks full of one-liners: “I think the train beats the bus,” and “You’re gonna love Barbara’s speech tonight,” or “I am proud and honored
to have Dan Quayle on my side.” He spoke of Clinton’s drapes and George Bush’s curtains for that minority who had not heard it before. He told the crowd that one out of two delegates at the Democratic convention was “on a government payroll.” He also flattered his people:

There was a photographers’ platform erected fifteen feet above the floor and a hundred feet from the podium, and it was jammed with echelons of TV cameras, perhaps so many as forty or fifty; crowded in was a second host of still cameras. Out of this intensely compressed workforce, a voice shouted, “Bullshit!”

Later, the heckler was reported as saying, “What are you going to do about AIDS?” but that was later. The first muffled sound was “Bullshit,” and everyone at the lunch froze for an instant as if everyone belonged again to one American family and was passing through the hour when Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been killed, and Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford wounded and shot at. Like all families who put together a fragile composure after the death of someone who inhabited the center of the home and circle, it was as if the air went pale.

“Bullshit,” came another voice, “what are you going to do about AIDS?” and by then, security was up on the platform manhandling the malefactors, who proved to be two wan young men with the telltale pallor of the disease, their hair cut in a punkrock clump, and sores on their faces; now they were hustled
down the stairs from the photographers’ platform and out the exit.

Bush picked up his discourse, but he was shaken—how could he not be? The moment one will be assassinated must become one of the hundred entrenched expectations in every public leader’s life—unlike other crises, there is not much to prepare for; the angle of attack is never known. In the aftermath, Bush started to make a sour joke—with all else, he felt sour—“This is a crazy year when they can get credentials for this,” he muttered, but other voices started up on the photographers’ platform (“What are you going to do about AIDS?”), and now several of the new hecklers—second wave of the plan—waved condoms at the boutique crowd there for lunch, and security whammed and slammed the second group of hecklers down from the platform and out of the room, while Bush came up fast with a few figures on what his administration was spending on AIDS—one cannot be a major politician without having a statistics tape in one’s head—and then he added, the room now feeling at last restored, “In my line of work lately, this seems normal. If anyone else has anything they would like to say while we are all standing …”

He went on. He told his audience that he was working on his acceptance speech. “To be honest, I can tell you that I have a few butterflies … but you can count on this, I look forward to this fight. I can feel it building in my blood.”

It was the presence of AIDS that would build in the Astrodome that night, however, and not far from everyone’s blood. Mary Fisher, a slim, blond, and undeniably lovely young lady with a delicacy of feature and a poignancy of manner, proceeded to give the Republican address on AIDS not long after prime time commenced. If a casting director had searched for a fine actress unlikely ever to have contact with the virus, he would have selected Mary Fisher if she had been an actress, but she was not. She was in a rare category, a Republican princess; her father, Max Fisher, eighty-four years old and reputedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, had been a major fund-raiser for the party since the early days of Richard Nixon. Mary Fisher could speak of Georgette and Robert Mosbacher and Gerald and Betty Ford
as her friends; indeed, the women were weeping and the men were wiping their eyes as she spoke. Before she was done, the Astrodome floor would be awash. She was not only lovely, but innocent, after all; she had caught the disease from her ex-husband before they separated. Now presumably, she would die and have to say farewell to her sons Max and Zachary, four and two.

The Democratic convention had heard from a man and a woman, Elizabeth Glaser, who was HIV-positive, and Bob Hattoy, with AIDS, and their speeches had similarly affected the Democrats’ convention. There had been accusations that not enough had been done by the Bush administration to fight against AIDS, and Bill Clinton had declared that such a fight would be one of the central issues in his campaign.

Mary Fisher was the Republican answer, then, to Democrats, and she was effective beyond measure. Outside their gates, across the bordering street beyond the Astrodome, in a weed-filled vacant lot now named the Astrodomain and renamed Queer Village by the protesters themselves, there had been a riot on Monday night. A half dozen arrests and a number of beatings had been handed out “professionally” by the police after a few of the one thousand protesters had put up effigies of George Bush, set them afire, and then had begun smashing wooden police barricades to feast the fire. The police had charged in on horse and foot and a helicopter shook the sky overhead as chants of doggerel came up from the protesters. “A hundred fifty thousand dead,” they began, “Off with George Bush’s head!” and “Burn, baby, burn!” They cried to the effigy, “We’re queer and we’re here.” One protester announced, “This shows how far we mean to take our anger,” but then the anger was as bottomless as the rage that victims feel against hurricanes and earthquakes. “We’re all innocent. Do you want to see me die?” had shouted one AIDS activist to Senator Alfonse D’Amato in a Houston church when D’Amato made the mistake of remarking on the tragedy of AIDS when it took the lives of innocent children. “What about us?” someone shouted back. “We’re also innocent and we’re going to die.”

Well, they were innocent or they were guilty. It was the intolerable and unspoken question at the heart of AIDS. Many a Republican was harboring ugly thoughts. AIDS, went the whisper, stood for Anal Injection—Dirty Sex! Out in Oregon a movement was commencing against the gay nation. The Oregon Citizens’ Alliance had sent out mass mailings that said, “Homosexual men on average ingest the fecal material of twenty-three different men per year,” which, if a particularly roto-rooter way of stating that the average homosexual had twenty-three lovers a year, also posed the riddle of how the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance ever obtained their statistic. But the anxiety of homosexuals, borne in private for who knows how many centuries, was now inflamed by the enigma of nature. Was excrement a side-product of nature, offensive to some, as the Democrats would doubtless have argued, or was Satan in everyone’s shit? Which, in turn, was a way of saying that the Devil was present more often in homosexual than in heterosexual encounters—exactly the question that blazed on the divide. We are dying, said the victims of AIDS, and you have no mercy. Are you cold to our pain because we are the Devil’s spawn?—beware, then, for we will haunt you. That was the question. Was the gay nation guilty or innocent, victims or devils, damned by Jehovah or to be comforted by Christ? Were such acts shameful or natural? The wheel of obsessive and unanswerable questions went round and round, and gay rage came up from the bottomless funnels of the vortex. Was their illness for cause in a world of immutable principles? Or was it the absurdity of a badly designed natural system that had not provided for safe sex short of the damnable deadhead odor of a condom?