Clinton & Me

by Michael Graham

  Then comes the close-up of the brave, teary-eyed athlete talking about her loved one as home footage of the deceased is superimposed across the screen.

  Apparently, for NBC the tension of a teenager doing back flips on a balance beam before a television audience of one billion people isn’t quite enough. They need pathos. They need anguish.

  They need a corpse.

  The TWA tragedy gave us two hundred of them just weeks before the Olympics, and NBC is determined to work each one into a special report. Every tenuous connection between the human horror off Long Island and the media horror show in Atlanta is highlighted, pulled to the breaking point: “Here we are with Olympic diver John McDougal. . . . John, are you haunted by the fact that you yourself once flew on a 747 early in your training?”

  Sports reporters hang like ectoplasm on the lives of these athletes, who have already faced almost unimaginable trials just to get to the Olympics. Most of these kids have trained for years, even decades, competing in round after round of qualifiers at the local, state and national levels. Their participation in the Games is proof that these young athletes can do very well something that is very hard, and they can do it over and over again.

  They get to the Olympics only to be besieged by microphone-waving media morticians pushing them to “release their pain” about some personal tragedy, real or imagined. I keep waiting for one of the athletes to just explode. It would have to be an American, because the other athletes (with the possible exception of the French) are too polite.

  And the other nations’ athletes are largely spared this experience, because they’re foreigners and who cares if they die, anyway? (Once again with the possible exception of the French.)

  I pray that before the Olympics are over, some high-strung athlete will turn to an NBC reporter and say: “Shut up! Just shut up! Yes, my coach’s manicurist died last Thursday on the way to the Games! And yes, no American has won a medal in this event without a manicured coach in a non-boycotted Olympics since the Berlin Games of 1936, and yes, I’m a little worried right now. Wouldn’t you be a little nervous if two-thirds of the world’s population was watching you dive seventy-five feet into crystal clear water wearing nothing but a Speedo on live television? Now get off my back, you microphone-waving moron, before I shove Willard’s hairpiece up your ———!”

  In their melodramatic attempts to humanize the already painfully human stories of the Olympics, NBC is succeeding only in marginalizing these stories. Just as films such as Independence Day lose all the emotive power of death by killing virtually everyone, the nonstop pseudo-tragedies of overblown media coverage destroy the power of the true human dramas it touches.

  It is a destruction far more tragic than the events themselves—the death of our sensibility toward death. Stone Philips and a busload of dynamite couldn’t do as much damage, not even in prime time.

  Jesse Goes to Hollywood

  * * *

  March 1996

  Where we’re coming from, we totally understand the dire needs of commercial cinema. We know that until the audiences walk into the theater, you’re really nobody.

  —India’s leading movie director, Shekhar Kapur, explaining the success of Asian directors in Hollywood

  I don’t know what the current rate of unemployment is for black males, but it is too high by one. Someone has got to find a job for Jesse Jackson.

  Idle hands are the devil’s playground, and when there isn’t a Democratic presidential primary to grandstand or restaurant chain to shake down, the Reverend Jackson falls prey to mischievous demons. He starts seeing things: a reasonable side to Louis Farrakhan, an efficient city government in Washington, D.C., and a racist regime at Hollywood and Vine.

  Yes, Hollywood is a stronghold of the Aryan Nation and the Klan, says Jackson, because not enough Academy Award nominees are black. Then again, quite a few nominees are Jewish, but hey, maybe the Hollywood Klan is more progressive than their branch offices in the rural South. Anyway, Jackson knows racism (and a mega media opportunity) when he sees it, and the right reverend is going to get Tinseltown to see the light.

  His Oscar-night effort, entitled “Lights, Camera, Affirmative Action” (ouch!), involved an unenthusiastic handful of marchers gathered around Jackson outside the Hollywood studios of KABC, the Los Angeles affiliate broadcasting the Oscars. Jackson was, as usual, simultaneously articulate and overreaching: “[There is] racial exclusion, cultural distortion, lack of employment opportunities, lack of positions of authority. . . . It doesn’t stand to reason that if you are forced to the back of the bus, you will go to the bus company’s annual picnic and act like you’re happy,” Jackson said.

  His supporters were even more direct, carrying placards saying Same Slavemaster, Different Plantation.

  Well, excuse me if I’m not ready to declare war on southern California and march on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Maybe it’s because I’m from South Carolina and get to see real-life racism up close and personal, the kind of racism that gets black college students dragged out of their cars and beaten by overzealous highway patrolmen.

  Or maybe it’s because I spent Oscar night listening to Whoopi Goldberg’s monologue, Quincy Jones’ music, Oprah Winfrey shamelessly sucking up, and Will Smith stumbling over his lines.

  Or maybe, just maybe, the tired cry of racism has come so many times from the self-appointed shepherds of black America that even liberals and journalists are beginning to have second thoughts.

  In choosing Hollywood as his target, Jesse Jackson has done more than just alienate his base (i.e., guilty white people with more money than brains). He has chosen the one field in which affirmative action, aka quotas, will never be effective—the entertainment industry.

  No amount of civil rights legislation could force people to sit through Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn, and no amount of secret racist plotting by the Anti-Defamation League and the John Birchers could keep Americans from flocking to Beverly Hills Cop. (It took two sequels to do that.)

  The entertainment industry is the ultimate merit-pay system. How much you are worth is directly proportional to how much people will pay to see you. No quotas, no weighted admissions system, no “excellence through diversity.” Whoever puts the most butts in the most seats wins. Period.

  Quotas don’t work in industries where individual performance matters. Jackson’s race-based bean counting is better suited for fields where mediocrity is a career advantage.

  Thus, Jackson and his gang have had great success in the bureaucracies of academia and corporate America, where losers of all races are easy to hide. But where do you hide an underachiever on a basketball team or a tennis court? Where do you hide your unqualified quota hires on a Broadway stage?

  I will concede to the Reverend Jackson (and anyone else) that the Academy Awards themselves are not merit-based. They are, largely, a joke. This year’s debacle—no Best Picture nominations for Nixon or 12 Monkeys but one for a pig movie—is typical for the intellectual lightweights who are members of the so-called Academy.

  But the Academy Awards aren’t a joke because of racism; they’re a joke because of the pedestrian mores of the Academy members themselves.

  Whoopi Goldberg’s Oscar, for example, came not from her starring role in The Color Purple but from her phoned-in performance in a cheesy romance called Ghost. It was, however, a cheesy romance that made a whole lot of money, and that’s how to get the Academy’s attention.

  But if Jackson manages to convince the “Academics” who hand out the Oscars to set aside a certain number of nominations for minority actors, more power to him. Indeed, in a spirit of cooperation, I would like to make the first nomination in such a special category, Best Black Actor of 1995: O.J. Simpson.

  And Jesse Jackson thinks black actors can’t get a break in L.A.

  A Southern Man

  * * *

  October 1996

  This is a tragic day for America when Negro agitators, spurred on by communist enticemen
ts to promote racial strife, can cause the United States Senate to be steamrollered into passing the worst, most unreasonable and unconstitutional legislation that has ever been considered by the Congress.

  —Strom Thurmond, on passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

  On a recent trip to Chicago, a friend was driving me past a cemetery on the North Side, and I noticed the top of the wall was lined with barbed wire.

  “Let me guess,” I told him with a laugh. “You only do that in election years. Slowing them down on their way to the polls, right?”

  My friend, a proud native of America’s most corrupt political city, responded angrily: “What? Are you saying no dead people ever vote in South Carolina?”

  “Are you kidding?” I shot back. “Dead people don’t vote in our elections—they run in them! Hell, they even win!”

  And so the laughable corruption of Chicago and the hilarious stupidity of South Carolina converged for a brief, shining moment in this otherwise humorless election year. With the presidential race turning into a blowout of Atlanta Braves–esque proportions, the pathetic farce of the eighth Strom Thurmond U.S. Senate campaign is a much-needed seventh-inning stretch.

  All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and places of recreation.

  —Strom Thurmond, 1948

  Like all farces, the ending is both outrageous and predictable. That Strom Thurmond is going to be reelected in a landslide goes without saying. In any election, particularly in South Carolina, one of the most dependable predictors of Election Day behavior is to ask yourself: “Is there any candidate for public office who is so incompetent or embarrassing that to vote for him would require a overwhelming display of ignorance or stupidity?” When you’ve found such a candidate, bet the farm. You’ve got yourself a sure winner.

  Such a candidate is Strom Thurmond. It’s hard to imagine a more unpleasant convergence of gross personal incompetence and vile political philosophy. Most political consultants would kill to run against either a ninety-four-year-old drooler who can’t stay awake through a committee hearing or an icon of racism who filibustered for twenty-four hours to keep “darkies” out of public restaurants. In a race against Strom Thurmond, you get both!

  And yet Strom Thurmond’s opponents—in the primary and general elections—have made little headway against the Great Methuselah. Why?

  Because most political campaigns are arguments about what is best for you, the voter. “Elect me,” the candidates claim, “and I will make you richer, happier, stronger, faster.” There is no such argument for voting for Strom Thurmond. It is impossible for the Thurmond camp to argue that their candidate is going to do anything about crime or taxes or teenage pregnancy, because it is impossible to argue he is going to do anything at all.

  They’re left with campaign slogans like “Strom Thurmond: Getting Out of Bed for Over 94% of a Century!” or “Strom: He’ll Probably Show Up!”

  I have done more for black people than any other person in the nation, North or South.

  —Strom Thurmond

  Indeed, the notion that Strom Thurmond is a senator is purely delusional, a delusion the good senator clings to desperately. He is no more familiar with the force structure of the armed services (whose Senate committee he chairs) than he is with the lyrics of “The Macarena.”

  Despite these truths, the senator is a lock on Election Day. Another reason for his certain success is that the people covering this race are giving Senator Thurmond a bye. No one takes him seriously as a senator. When opponents point out his poor record protecting South Carolina jobs (we lost more jobs to military base closings than any state in the Union), reporters simply yawn, “Of course he’s incompetent. He’s ninety-three years old!” When opponents run TV ads pointing out that he’s too old, reporters write, “Desperate challengers make issue of Thurmond’s age, ignore substance!”

  It’s the ultimate political strategy: presumed incompetence. And it works.

  Much has been made, by the way, of TV ads (one of which I wrote) talking about Thurmond’s age. Polling seems to indicate that viewers of all ages react violently against them. Pundits say this backlash is an indicator that South Carolinians think making age an issue is unfair.

  In fact, this is backward. Targeting Thurmond’s obvious physical inability is too fair. As H. L. Mencken noted, “Any man can bear injustice. What stings is justice.” The voters of South Carolina are going to vote for Thurmond, they know it is obviously foolish and indefensible, and the more clearly you point out the obvious, the angrier they get.

  Hooray for Strom Thurmond. . . . Southern men stand up for themselves, for their friends and for their families. And Thurmond’s a southern man.

  —South Carolina GOP chairman Henry McMaster after Thurmond shoved a USAir flight attendant

  Like the drunkard stumbling toward his waiting car or the secretary pulling into the parking space outside her married boss’ motel room, the last thing these people want to hear is reason. They’re going to vote for Thurmond, even if they have to follow him to the graveyard to do it.

  One day—and I sincerely hope it is in the distant future—J. Strom Thurmond will finally succumb to his own mortality. I trust he will be remembered for the whole man: his racism, his heroism, his selfless commitment to public service, his selfish refusal to relinquish the political spotlight. But if Senator Thurmond were to honestly write his own epitaph, I believe his gravestone would read Jes’ One Mo’ Term!

  My other prediction: He would win in a landslide.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  The Most Ethical Administration in American History

  Just Say No

  * * *

  August 1996

  I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.

  —W. C. Fields

  President Bill Clinton, the Houdini of American politics, has done the impossible: He’s gotten me excited about voting for Bob Dole.

  I have never, ever voted for Bob Dole. Not in ’88, not this year, not ever. It has been a point of personal pride, for Bob Dole is one of the most repulsive Republicans in contemporary America. He brings together the grand political vision of George Bush and the warmth of human spirit of Richard Nixon. He is, in short, everything I revile about Republican politics.

  But I will vote for him on November 5, and I will do so with pride. Which is a statement that cannot be made by any American voting to reelect President Clinton, a candidate whose supporters can only feel shame.

  Now, shame is not necessarily a sufficient reason to change your vote. I voted for George Bush in 1992, and at the time I was very ashamed to do so. But I was willing to acknowledge my shame, to acknowledge that President Bush had done nothing to earn my (or any other rational conservative’s) vote.

  But while I wasn’t too thrilled about voting for the worst Republican president since William Howard Taft, it is beyond my ability to imagine myself voting for the worst president since George H. Bush: William Jefferson Clinton.

  President Clinton is, quite simply, a man without shame. There is no lie so obvious, no posturing so political, no insincere emotional display so nauseating that he will refrain from throwing his entire 250 pounds of self-righteous egomania into it. There are no limits to his self-deception, no borders to his buffoonery. And in the long litany of scams, shams and flimflams being run out of the White House these days, none demonstrates so clearly the shamelessness of the Clintons as Filegate.

  Filegate began when the Clinton administration put longtime Democratic hack Craig Livingstone in charge of White House personnel security despite the fact that his only prior security experience involved Hillary-watch duty outside a gently rocking state patrol car in a Little Rock parking lot.

  Livingstone, unsurprisingly, chose another Democratic hanger-on, Anthony Marceca, as his assistant. Their job was to review the security status of people who would be regularly roaming the Clinton White Hou
se. In doing so, they requested the personal FBI files of a number of American citizens (around eight hundred or so)—all Republicans. (“Here’s a White House request for the file on Reagan, Ronald W. Hmmm . . . I wonder what cabinet post he’s up for.”)

  Why this sudden surge of bipartisanship in the Clinton White House? And how were these political hacks able to get these sensitive files using nothing more than unsigned form letters?

  Now, unsigned requests for secret FBI documents would normally be ignored . . . at least, I hope so. If not, then you and I could send over a blind request for Elvis’ files and wrap up this whole JFK/Jimmy Hoffa thing in a weekend. So why then would the FBI even honor these anonymous file requests from the Clintons in the first place?

  Because another Clinton political hack, Louis Freeh, is in charge of the FBI. Boing!

  If that were the end of it—a president violates the privacy rights of hundreds of political opponents in an apparent attempt to gain political advantage—I would just laugh it off as the usual political sleaze. But the president will have none of that. His policy is to deny not only that anyone in his White House has done any wrong, but that it is unimaginable that the morally superior inhabitants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would possibly do anything so . . . so . . . (ooh) political.

  So when the president’s spokesman was first asked if Livingstone was a political operative, the answer was no. The next day the answer was yes, but only after about a million newspapers reported that Livingstone had worked on numerous campaigns, including President Clinton’s.