Who Let the Dogs In? (24 page)

What could Gore mean by “powerful special interests”?

They missed the drug industry’s continuing rip-off of the public above and beyond the already wretched pricing system by sneaking drug-patent extensions through Congress, never noticed the insurance industry spending $10 million to kill health-care proposals, didn’t see the corporate tax write-off for obscene executive salaries, haven’t wondered why a $1-an-hour increase in the minimum wage can’t get through Congress, and never saw the Forest Service subsidizing logging roads for the timber industry.

So, why in the world is Gore trying to incite “class warfare”?

By the way, I’m fascinated by the fact that Dubya far outpolls Gore among men. One guy played football, went to Vietnam, and is notoriously emotionally distant. The other guy was a cheerleader who got into a National Guard unit through family influence, lost money in the oil business, traded Sammy Sosa, and is now sliding through a presidential race on his charm. Do I not get American men, or what?

I JUST
finished with nine months of treatment for cancer. First they poison you, then they mutilate you, then they burn you. I’ve had more fun. And when it’s over you’re so glad, you’re grateful to absolutely everyone. And I am.

The trouble is, I’m not a better person. I was in great hopes that confronting my own mortality would make me deeper, more thoughtful. Many lovely people sent books on how to find a deeper spiritual meaning in life. My response was, “Oh hell, I can’t go on a spiritual journey—I’m constipated.”

Being sick actually narrows your world, I’m afraid—makes you focus more on yourself. Maybe when it’s over and you don’t feel like crud all the time, then your spirit soars.

I vomited in the office, couldn’t sleep, lost fifty pounds. I don’t recommend the diet. I was like, help, I’m flunking cancer.

Of course, I laughed a lot—who could not laugh? I got my first hair a few weeks ago. It came in right next to my mouth—that little mustache I’ve always hated. That God—what a sense of humor!

Cancer is good for priorities. Traffic, for one thing, is not worth getting upset about. As my pal Spike Gillespie says, you look at those fools honking, getting steamed, cutting in front of you, and you just think: “Hey, it’s not a malignant tumor, you know?”

Despite my request, untold numbers of people wrote wonderful cards, notes, letters. My friends sent funny stuff by e-mail. I’d save it up, and about once a month when I couldn’t sleep at 3
A.M.
, I’d be sitting in front of the computer, laughing and laughing. And I’m most grateful of all to the women who went out and got mammograms. It’s going to take me longer to write all the thank-you notes than it took to get over cancer.

Cancer is not easy, it is not pleasant, and given a choice, I would just as soon have skipped it. But I now know what all survivors know, and I am grateful. So grateful.

October 2000

Credit Where It’s Due

T
HE
TIME HAS COME
to bid farewell to President William Jefferson Clinton. Been a lot of wasted time and wasted talent these eight years. The politics of personal destruction. A level of vituperation so intense and so stupid that it shut down the federal government twice.

And through it all came the Unsinkable Clinton, ever bobbing up again cheerfully in a fashion that maddened his enemies. As near as I can tell after eight years, the man gets up every single day in a state of cheerful anticipation, ready to set about whatever’s on the plate.

We have never once seen him in a temper or a sulk or being vindictive or holding a grudge. Closest we ever saw to an upset Bill Clinton was right after we had watched him discussing the most intimate details of his private life for four hours on national television, and to this good day I have no idea what public purpose was served by that exercise in humiliation.

But I continue to be amazed by the man’s good manners.

When Clinton arrived in Washington, there were two untouchable lobbies: the National Rifle Association and the tobacco industry. They are not untouchable today. This is not the result of inevitable social change; it is the result of real political leadership by Clinton and many others.

Clinton is a master incrementalist—he gets a little bit done, then a little bit more, then a little bit more. Because he knows and cares about the details of policy, he has often gone back and fixed or improved things that were initially passed in unsatisfactory form.

The two great failures of his administration are the domestic wealth gap and Russia.

We are now facing a destabilized nuclear power many times more dangerous than the former Soviet Union. Life expectancy in Russia is crashing, 75 percent of the people live in poverty, health care is a disaster, and the country is being run by gangsters pretending to be capitalists.

There will eventually be a terrible price for all this misery—and the country still has thousands of deteriorating nuclear weapons. Its early warning system is in such disarray that last summer the Russians came within a hair of nuking a Swedish weather balloon.

The first thing that George W. Bush might usefully do is spend a few billion rebuilding the Russian DEW line. By expanding NATO, bombing Serbia, and horsing around with the oil pipeline on Russia’s southern border, we have managed to hit every paranoid button that the Russians possess—and if there is one clear strain in the Russian worldview over the centuries, it is paranoia. Further talk of putting the Baltic republics in NATO is frankly nuts.

In this country, we still have trickle-down economics, but mighty little is trickling down. Although it is not Clinton’s fault, Congress becomes ever more the tool of corporate special interests. Because Clinton is such an enthusiastic free-trader, the tendency toward gigantism continues—mammoth, international corporations with more wealth than most governments and subject to only one imperative: higher profits.

Meanwhile, I don’t think you can argue that we are better off today than we were eight years ago, despite the long boom. Even after wages in the lowest quartile finally, finally started to go up, it wasn’t enough in constant dollars even to get people back to their standard of living thirty years ago.

The Wall Street Journal
headlined last week: “Raw Deals—Companies Quietly Use Mergers and Spin-offs to Cut Worker Benefits.” Duh.

The wealth gap is worse than ever, and the mechanisms slowly and painfully created to check capitalism—government regulation, lawsuits, and unions—have all been eaten away.

I grant you, it would have been worse without Clinton, especially his expansion of the earned income tax credit. Goodness only knows what Newt Gingrich and his merry crew would have done without Clinton there to outplay them at every turn. That was a masterly political performance and a real joy to watch—too bad the media missed it because they were so focused on Monicagate.

As for Clinton’s private life, even though it’s none of my business, I think we had a right to expect him to keep it zipped for eight years. Shame on him.

But having to listen to the likes of Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, and Newt Gingrich lecture Clinton on personal morality took shamelessness to new heights. What a bizarre hypocrisy festival that was. I wound up preferring Clinton to his enemies.

The Clinton-haters have been an odd and troubling part of these past eight years. In
The Hunting of the President,
Gene Lyons and Joe Conason traced most of it back to a sorry posse of old enemies in Arkansas.

The distressing part was how so much of that baloney got picked up by Establishment media and taken seriously. We wasted years on Whitewater. Some of it, I believe, has nothing to do with the Clintons but is simply a reflection of the viciousness of their enemies.

Clinton probably has as much sheer political talent as any player I’ve ever watched. But he got dealt a very odd hand as president, perhaps aptly compared to that of Andrew Johnson.

At least he never whined in public. It is commonplace to say that the Clintons led others into trouble and then left them to hang; actually, it can be argued that they were singularly ill-served themselves by those who had cause to be loyal to them.

It seems to me that most of the media have a very odd take on the Clintons. You look at all those “scandals,” and there is no there there. It’s nonsense.

Clinton was smart, able, articulate, graceful, and humorous, and he busted his tail for a Middle Eastern peace and a lot of other important things, some of which he didn’t get. Life will be duller once Elvis has left the building.

December 2000

Is Texas America?

W
ELL
, SHEESH. I DON’T
know whether to warn you that because George Dubya Bush is president the whole damn country is about to be turned into Texas (a singularly horrible fate: as the country song has it: “Lubbock on Everythang”) or if I should try to stand up for us and convince the rest of the country we’re not all that insane.

Truth is, I’ve spent much of my life trying, unsuccessfully, to explode the myths about Texas. One attempts to explain—with all good will, historical evidence, nasty statistics, and just a bow of recognition to our racism—that Texas is not
The Alamo
starring John Wayne. We’re not
Giant,
we ain’t a John Ford western. The first real Texan I ever saw on TV was
King of the Hill
’s Boomhauer, the guy who’s always drinking beer and you can’t understand a word he says.

So, how come trying to explode myths about Texas always winds up reinforcing them? After all these years, I do not think it is my fault. The fact is, it’s a damned peculiar place. Given all the horseshit, there’s bound to be a pony in here somewhere. Just by trying to be honest about it, one accidentally underlines its sheer strangeness.