The Shame of Baylor University & Us

What — indeed — would Jesus do at Baylor? I hear the word H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-T-E-S echoing in my head. The Baylor mess is one of the reasons I have foresworn watching student athletes cavort for the masses. Another mess is the Ohio State nonsense with oral exams for an idiot running back. One of my favorite professors at the University of Denver — Alfred Crofts — said in class in 1960 that the Soviets had it right. The premier athletes in the old Soviet Union were treated as trained animals with no pretense of amateurism. That is what should be done in the United States. The present athletic structure is corrupt all of the way down to kiddie sport. We have lost our souls. If this be (fair & balanced) blasphemy, so be it.

[x CHE]
POINT OF VIEW

What Would Jesus Do at Baylor?
By ALAN WOLFE

Baylor University is not the only institution of higher education that has found itself embarrassed by transgressions in its athletics program. True, its lapses have been more serious than altering student transcripts or providing illegal stereos, the usual fare of National Collegiate Athletic Association violations. One of Baylor's basketball players, Patrick J. Dennehy, was murdered; another, Carlton E. Dotson, was arrested and charged with the crime; and their coach, Dave Bliss, resigned after being taped plotting to accuse Dennehy of dealing drugs to support himself in college. (Dennehy may not have needed to deal drugs, because he was allegedly being paid cash under the table, in violation of NCAA rules.) Still, alumni and athletics supporters at most universities, and especially those in Texas, have considerable clout, and, other things being equal, Baylor could be expected to recover under the leadership of a new athletics director and basketball coach.

But other things in this case are not equal, for Baylor has made clear that it does not want to be like most other American universities. "Baylor is founded on the belief that God's nature is made known through both revealed and discovered truth," reads the university's mission statement. At Baylor, religious statements like that are not just boilerplate. Baylor's president, Robert B. Sloan Jr., a Baptist preacher, puts Christian commitments into practice. He interviews faculty candidates to determine their fidelity to Christian ideals and established a center that gave prominence to "intelligent design," the evangelical-Christian alternative to Darwinism. According to his "Baylor 2012" plan for the university's future, "within the course of a decade, Baylor intends to enter the top tier of American universities while reaffirming and deepening its distinctive Christian mission."

Christianity, as Baylor and its president frequently point out, constitutes a set of beliefs about the truth. But it is also an ethical system and a way of life, which is why Baylor, again according to its mission statement, "seeks to provide an environment that fosters spiritual maturity, strength of character, and moral virtue." For many Christians, behaving well is as important as thinking right; when deciding about when life begins, or whether violence is justified, they frequently ask, "What would Jesus do?" Not, "What would Jesus conclude?"

Inevitably, therefore, the question has to be asked: If he were at Baylor, what would Jesus do? Would he respond to the basketball scandals by emphasizing "moral virtue" and "spiritual character"? Or would he dig in his heels and try to protect Baylor and its leadership in the same way that any secular institution would?

To this point, one can find little specifically Christian about the way events have unfolded at Baylor. The day after the tape of his coach's remarks about Patrick Dennehy was released, Baylor's president issued a statement that was anything but confessional in tone: Blame was heaped on Bliss rather than acknowledged by those who, like Sloan, had hired and previously supported him. As is usually the case when scandal hits, an internal investigation was promised. Otherwise, the president's statement could have been written by officials at Enron. It contained not one word about sin -- seeming to convey, by that omission, the sin of pride -- nor did it invoke such Christian ideals as atonement or redemption.

Baylor's Board of Regents has also not shown itself to hold any particular Christian character in its approach to the issue. In the aftermath of the scandal, five regents, the Faculty Senate, the editorial board of the Lariat, the student newspaper, and three former board chairmen asked for Sloan's resignation. Those pleas were rejected by the full board on September 12. At most universities in the United States, trustees tend to support incumbent presidents, and that was certainly the case here.

Whatever took place in private discussions, the board's public actions were little different from those of corporate boards, which rarely subject CEO's to scrutiny. If anything, morality seems to matter outside of Baylor more than it does inside. Recently, the board of the New York Stock Exchange agreed to pay its chief executive, Richard Grasso, almost $140-million in salary and deferred benefits -- this at a time when many Americans are having difficulty making ends meet. Grasso was soon forced to resign, in part because critics like California State Treasurer Phil Angelides called on the exchange to restore its "moral authority."

Nor has the Baylor faculty responded to the crisis in a faith-based manner. The senate's call for Sloan's resignation reportedly had more to do with unhappiness over his hands-on administrative style than with any violation of the Ten Commandments. Like faculty members in most institutions, moreover, many professors objected to Sloan's attempts to raise Baylor's academic profile, fearful, perhaps, that his emphasis on research would undermine the character of the undergraduate-oriented university that Baylor once was. When a faculty censures a president, it is nearly always because faculty members do not like the way the administration treats them, not because the president lacks moral virtue.

Finally, there are the students. Most of them, it appears from news accounts, disagree with their own newspaper and support Sloan. But that seems to have more to do with the desire of students, even very religious ones, to move through their college years quickly and without trouble. It is hard to find a more conservative force anywhere in America than a typical student body, especially when that student body finds itself deep in the heart of Texas.

However Baylor has responded to its crisis, there is the further question of whether a religious institution should be held to a higher ethical standard than a secular university. One possible answer is that it should not. Just as believers should have the same rights as nonbelievers -- a position adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Rosenberger v. Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia (1995) -- some people would conclude that holding religious institutions to a higher standard than secular ones constitutes a form of invidious discrimination. To that legal point could be added a moral, even a religious, codicil: Those anxious to point the finger of blame at Baylor had best look first at their own institutions, for, in an imperfect world, one should be reluctant to cast the first stone.

In the case of Baylor, however, such a response is not fully satisfactory. No doubt Baylor's Christian identity is sincerely offered; I have been there, talked with students and faculty members, and have come away impressed by the devotion and commitment that the institution radiates. Still, Baylor's religious identity serves secular as well as godly purposes. "From a purely marketing perspective, the idea of a Protestant Christian university playing in the big-time academic world of ideas while maintaining quality teaching gives Baylor a unique niche in American higher education," wrote Barry Hankins, a history professor at the university, about the "Baylor 2012" plan.

Hankins is right: Baylor's Christian niche has been good for the place. Worried parents sometimes choose Baylor over other institutions because they believe that drinking and sex will be kept under control there. Wealthy alumni might be tempted to give more to the extent that they are persuaded that Baylor will not come under the sway of "liberals" and "secularists," as conservatives in Texas often call those with whom they disagree. While some faculty members have left the university because they find its religious atmosphere too confining, others I know have accepted positions there because they want to teach at a place that makes faith central to its mission. In a decidedly religious country -- indeed, in a country whose born-again president maintains a ranch roughly 24 miles from Baylor -- having a Christian identity can help win significant support. Many an American university would be thrilled to have so well defined and successful a niche as its Christian commitments have given Baylor.

Because it benefits so substantially from its Christian character, Baylor all but invites judgment by the same criteria. That does not mean that its president should give up his job and salary to don sackcloth and seek penance in the Mojave Desert. But it does suggest that he, as well as the Baylor Board of Regents, might learn something from the Roman Catholic Church's crisis in Boston. Under the leadership of the recently appointed Archbishop Sean Patrick O'Malley, the Boston Archdiocese has acknowledged its error of covering up sexual abuse by its clergy, made a sincere and generous financial offer to the victims of the abuse, and conducted itself with impressive humility. O'Malley's obviously sincere efforts have not yet repaired the damage of the scandal, but they have begun the long process of healing essential to the restoration of trust.

In asking that Baylor act by the same Christian principles that it professes, critics of the university, far from discriminating against it because of its religious character, are doing it a favor. The very marketing advantages that Baylor derives from its Christian identity are threatened when it acts like any other institution on the defensive. Just as it has taken a leadership role in attempting to integrate faith and learning, Baylor should be in the forefront of trying to blend virtue and conduct. It would be unseemly for anyone to benefit from murder and cover-up, but the university's president, its regents, and faculty and staff members have been offered a remarkable opportunity by this crisis to show Americans that religion really matters. In acting as if it matters not at all, they have, perhaps unwittingly, provided ammunition to those who believe that Christians all too often invoke their religion only when it works to their advantage, and not when it ought to lead them to make serious changes in the ways they lead their lives.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His books include The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (Free Press, 2003).

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

George Plimpton, RIP

What a life! George Plimpton claimed that he played college football for the Newfoundland Newfs. The Detroit Lions were not amused. I was taken in by the Sidd Finch hoax. I think that George Plimpton lived life well and gracefully. I am not surprised that Robert Kennedy was his friend. If this be (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
George Plimpton, Author and Editor, Dies at 76
By RICHARD SEVERO


George Plimpton in 1963 as a third-string quarterback with the Detroit Lions, an experience he chronicled in Paper Lion.

George Plimpton, the New York aristocrat and literary journalist whose career was a happy lifelong competition between scholarly pursuits and madcap attempts — chronicled in self-deprecating prose — to try his hand at glamorous jobs for which he was invariably unsuited, died at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Mr. Plimpton's agent, Timothy Seldes, said it was most likely a heart attack.

Mr. Plimpton, a lanky, urbane man possessed of boundless energy and perpetual bonhomie, became, in 1953, the first (and principal) editor of The Paris Review. A cultural force and ubiquitous presence at book parties and other gala social events, he was tireless in his commitment to the serious contemporary fiction the magazine publishes.

Easily identifiable in later years by his thatch of silver hair and always by his cheery, lockjaw delivery, Mr. Plimpton was a familiar figure, ranging above other guests at the restaurants, saloons and weekend destinations where blue-blood New York overlapped with the New York of the famous and the creative.

All of this contributed to the charm of reading about Mr. Plimpton's career as dilettante par excellence — "professional" athlete, stand-up comedian, movie bad guy, circus performer and many other trades — which he described elegantly in nearly three dozen books.

As a boxer, he had his nose bloodied by Archie Moore at Stillman's Gym in 1959. As a major league pitcher, he became utterly exhausted and couldn't finish the inning at an exhibition game between National and American League all-stars in 1959 (though he managed to get Willie Mays to pop up). And as a "professional" third-string quarterback with the Detroit Lions, he lost roughly 30 yards during a scrimmage in 1963. On Sunday Mr. Plimpton was in Detroit for a 40th-anniversary reunion with the players who once lined up with "a 36-year-old free-agent quarterback from Harvard."

He also tried his hand at tennis (Pancho Gonzalez beat him easily), bridge (Oswald Jacoby outmaneuvered him) and golf. With his handicap of 18, he lost badly to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

In a brief stint as a goal tender for the Boston Bruins, he made the mistake of using his gloved hand to catch a flying puck, which caused a nasty gash in his pinky. He failed as an aerialist when he tried out for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. As a symphonist, he wangled a temporary percussionist's job with the New York Philharmonic. He was assigned to play sleigh bells, triangle, bass drum and gong; he struck the last so hard during a Tchaikovsky chestnut that Leonard Bernstein, who was trying to conduct the piece, burst into applause.

That was Mr. Plimpton, the popular commercial writer. His alter ego was as the unpaid editor of The Paris Review, an enduring, chronically impoverished quarterly, founded in 1952 by Peter Mathiessen and Harold L. Humes, who asked him to edit it. He did so from 1953, when publication began, until the end of his life.

Over the years, the magazine gained a loyal following for its dedication to new fiction. Among the many authors it published were Terry Southern, Philip Roth, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, George Steiner and V. S. Naipaul. It also introduced works by Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino, Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace.

The Paris Review was a must-read as well for its interviews with established writers: Archibald MacLeish, Pablo Neruda, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ernest Hemingway and scores more. Mr. Plimpton interviewed some, including Hemingway, personally.

Some years ago, Gay Talese, a longtime friend of Mr. Plimpton's, wrote about The Paris Review in an essay called "Looking for Hemingway." Describing the review's earliest days in Paris, Mr. Talese wrote that the editors, chiefly Mr. Plimpton, turned out a successful magazine because "they avoided using such typical little-magazine words as `zeitgeist' and `dichotomous,' and published no crusty critiques about Melville or Kafka, but instead printed the poetry and fiction of gifted young writers not yet popular."

Later, after Mr. Plimpton and his friends had moved to New York and become known variously as "the Quality Lit Set," "the East Side Gang" and "the Paris Review Crowd," they gathered regularly at the Plimpton apartment, Mr. Talese wrote, "for the liveliest literary salon in the city."

As a "participatory journalist," Mr. Plimpton believed that it was not enough for writers of nonfiction simply to observe; they needed to immerse themselves in whatever they were covering. For example, football huddles and conversations on the bench constituted a "secret world," he said, "and if you're a voyeur, you want to be down there, getting it firsthand."

And he didn't always fall on his face. One night in 1997 (too old by then to engage in strenuous contact sports), he showed up at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, which was then having its amateur night. He announced that he was an amateur, and when asked what he was going to play, replied, "the piano." He knew only "Tea for Two" and a few other tunes, but played his own composition, a rambling improvisation he called "Opus No. 1." The audience adored him, and the charmed judges gave him second prize.

In 1983 he scored another success when he volunteered to help the members of the Grucci family plan and execute a fireworks display to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. They accepted his kind offer, and he did his job without destroying himself or any of the Gruccis. For a time, he was regarded as New York City's fireworks commissioner, the bearer of a highly unofficial title with no connection to the city government. In 1984 he wrote a book on his love of the rockets' red glare, called "Fireworks: A History and Celebration."

He was given to practical jokes. While he was a writer for Sports Illustrated, he invented a fictitious pitcher, Sidd Finch, whom he described as a Buddhist with a 168-mile-an-hour fastball. This unlikely soul became the centerpiece of his 1987 novel, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.

Mr. Plimpton was first married in 1968 to Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's assistant. They had two children, Medora and Taylor, who survive him. The marriage ended in 1988. In 1991 he married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, 26 years his junior, who also survives him, along with their twins, Laura and Olivia.

George Ames Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927, in New York, the son of Francis T. P. Plimpton, a corporate lawyer (he was one of the early partners in the firm that is now Debevoise & Plimpton) who became a United Nations ambassador. His mother was the former Pauline Ames. His grandfather, George A. Plimpton, had been a publisher. The family traced its roots in this country to the arrival of the Mayflower.

Mr. Plimpton was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard and Cambridge. His career at Harvard, where he studied literature, was interrupted in 1945. He spent two years in the Army, then returned to college and received his bachelor's degree in 1950, although he always regarded himself as a member of the class of 1948. He earned a second baccalaureate degree at Cambridge, where he also earned a master's.

Mr. Plimpton's career included teaching at Barnard College from 1956 to 1958 and editing and writing at Horizon magazine (1959 to 1961) and at Harper's magazine (1972 to 1981). He also contributed material to Food and Wine magazine in the late 1970's. In the late 60's, he was seen frequently as a host or a guest on several television shows, and still later, he made some commercials for De Beers diamonds.

He had been inspired as a youth by Paul Gallico, an author and sports writer for The Daily News. Mr. Gallico believed so much in participatory journalism that he once had a brief encounter with the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.

"What Gallico did was to climb down out of the press box," Mr. Plimpton said, creating "a wonderful description of what it feels like to be knocked about by a champion." The only problem with Mr. Plimpton's similar match with Archie Moore, set up by Sports Illustrated, was that Mr. Plimpton wept after Mr. Moore bloodied his nose. He called it a "sympathetic response."

Many of Mr. Plimpton's books dealt with his adventures, most notably Out of My League (1961), on baseball; Paper Lion (1966), on football; and The Bogey Man (1968), on golf. Ernest Hemingway read Out of My League and declared that it was "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, his account of a self-imposed ordeal that has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty."

The Walter Mitty reference was picked up by several critics, but Mr. Plimpton's exploits were not really like those of Mitty, James Thurber's fictitious daydreamer. For while Mitty only imagined that he was doing heroic things, Mr. Plimpton wasn't imagining anything.

Not all of Mr. Plimpton's writings dealt with his guises. In 1955 he wrote a children's book, The Rabbit's Umbrella. He also edited American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy (1970). He was a friend of the Kennedy family and was with Robert Kennedy the day he was shot to death by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles. Mr. Plimpton said Mr. Sirhan "seemed composed and peaceful" after Kennedy died.

In 1997 he also wrote an unconventional biography of Truman Capote, in which he meshed the techniques of oral history and traditional biography. And in 2002, joined by Terry Quinn, he created Zelda, Scott and Ernest, a dramatization of the correspondence between F. Scott Fitzgerald; his wife, Zelda; and Hemingway. It was produced in Paris.

Mr. Plimpton made it into movies and television, too. He was an extra — a Bedouin — in Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, and in Rio Lobo (1970) he played a crook who is shot dead by a heroic John Wayne. When the movie of Paper Lion was made in 1968, Alan Alda played Mr. Plimpton, who had a minor part himself. For a time, Mr. Plimpton also had a recurring role as Dr. John Carter's wealthy grandfather on E.R. He used to say he had been pegged as "the Prince of Cameos."

Last year Mr. Plimpton was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Perhaps his career was best summarized by a New Yorker cartoon in which a patient looks at the surgeon preparing to operate on him and demands, "How do I know you're not George Plimpton?"

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company

The Best Idea Yet: Total Recall

Read the fine print on the Trudeau petition. Just as it makes no sense to send a bodybuilder to solve a fiscal crisis, it makes no sense to send an idiot to solve a world crisis. If this be (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

Welcome To RummyWorld!

Uh oh. The Project for the New American Century? What happened to the Trilateral Commission? What happened to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? What happened to...? This business gets nuttier all of the time. Ol' Maureen likes the Bushies about as much as I do. If this be (fair & balanced) treason, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Drunk on Rummy
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

There are many disturbing passages in the soon-to-be-published book "Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait," by Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter is doyenne of the neocon movement, wife of the neocon patriarch Norman Podhoretz; mother of John Podhoretz, the neocon Iraqi war cheerleader and new "West Wing" adviser; and friend of the neocon clan of the über-hawk Bill Kristol.

Her son wrote in his New York Post column last February that those who worried that the Bush team had no postwar vision were "pathetic" sophists: "No one has thought more deeply or seriously about what a post-Saddam Middle East could or should look like than Bush's foreign-policy team. The question has been a near-obsession for conservative foreign-policy intellectuals for more than a decade."

Now Mom has written a love ode to the 71-year-old "studmuffin" defense secretary so palpitating it recalls the clip of a teenage Judy Garland singing "You Made Me Love You" to a picture of Clark Gable.

Others may be wondering whether the Bush administration had a testosterone explosion that sent America a cropper in Iraq, alienating the allies and infuriating the Iraqis, building up hate and debt.

Others may be demanding Donald Rumsfeld's McNamara-slick head, as John Kerry did on CNN: "He rushed this to war. He has not listened to the military personnel. Our military is weaker today. They're overextended. He and Mr. Wolfowitz proceeded with false assumptions."

Teddy is spoiling for a fight with Rummy. "The tragedy," Senator Kennedy said on the Senate floor Friday, "is that our troops are paying with their lives because the administration failed to prepare a plan to win the peace."

But swelling problems in Iraq have not impeded Ms. Decter's swooning prose. The chapter on invading Iraq is called "Push Comes to Shove." (Shouldn't it be called "Bush Comes to Shove"?) The author avers that Rummy's manly Midwestern aura will prove a more potent legacy than his changes in the military.

"The consensus among many of Rumsfeld's friends is that the role he has come to play is somehow connected to his qualities and experiences as a wrestler," she writes. The book is replete with hubba-hubba photos of Rummy wrestling, playing polo, skiing, on a tractor. The one in his Navy flight suit features the caption, "On duty to self and country." (World domination to follow.)

The word to describe Rummy, she says in Helen Gurley Brown italics, is manliness. (I would describe him as the man who trashed two countries, spent hundreds of billions, exhausted our troops, but still hasn't found Osama, Saddam or W.M.D.)

Democrats are melting over the heroic manliness of their general, but Midge and Rummy have a back story. In 1997, they were both co-signers, along with Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Mr. Cheney's future chief of staff, Scooter Libby, of the Project for the New American Century's manifesto, which became a blueprint for the wrestle-the-world-to-the-mat pre-emptive foreign policy that would become the Bush doctrine, once Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby installed it in President Bush's head.

As riveting as Midge finds Rummy, it is her description of Paul Wolfowitz as a "former mathematician" that riveted me. The whole attitude of Rummy and Wolfie at Congressional hearings was "Barbie hates math." They couldn't come up with a concrete number for anything.

Skeptical, I checked and discovered that Wolfie's father was a mathematician from Cornell who specialized in probability and statistics; he hoped his son would follow in his footsteps, considering political science on a par with astrology.

Instead, his son chose the field of obscuring probability and statistics, refusing to cooperate with lawmakers to add up how much the war was going to cost in dollars and troops and years, or to multiply the probable exponential problems of remaking the Middle East, or even to subtract the billions that were never coming from snubbed allies.

I guess Wolfie never calculated the division in America his omissions would cause when we finally got a load of the bill — including $100 million to hide the families of 100 Iraqis in the witness protection program, $19 million for post office Wi-Fi, $50 million for traffic cops and $9 million for ZIP codes. At these prices, the Baghdad ZIP better be 90210.

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995 after having served as a correspondent in the paper's Washington bureau since 1986. She has covered four presidential campaigns and served as White House correspondent. She also wrote a column, "On Washington," for The New York Times Magazine.

Ms. Dowd joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1983. She began her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. When the Star closed in 1981, she went to Time magazine.

Born in Washington D.C., Ms. Dowd received a B.A. degree in English literature from Catholic University (Washington, D.C.) in 1973.

Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company

Nixonian Revisionism

The Trickster is a GIANT compared to W! The Trickster could take ideas seriously. If W had a thought, he would dial 911, thinking he was having a cardiac incident. Garry Wills wrote the best book on the trickster in the '70s: Nixon Agonistes. The best Molly Ivins could do for W was Shrub: The Short, Happy, Political Life of George W. Bush. The Trickster was contemptible, yet Garry Wills accorded him a connection to the literary canon. W's sole literary connection would be to Dick and Jane readers. I miss the Trickster. He would not have mucked around in RummyWorld. If this be (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.

Friends in highbrow places
Nixon the populist anti-intellectual delighted in the literary realm
by Jeet Heer
National Post

Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in Columbus, Ohio, October, 1968. Aside from Woodrow Wilson, Nixon was the best-read U.S. president of the 20th century.

Like so many other right-wing Americans, Richard Nixon loved to rail against intellectuals. "The so-called intellectuals are against us," Nixon can be heard muttering in one of his White House self-recordings. With such words, Nixon was merely echoing the familiar pose of conservative public figures, who so often present themselves as plain folk whose native common sense saves them from being bamboozled by the fancy talk of the cultural elite.

In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy warned that "eggheads" were likely to be communist spies, while in the following decade George Wallace derided his opponents as "pointy-head college professors who can't even park a bicycle straight." More recently, we have Ann Coulter's febrile fulmination against "treasonous" Americans who are supposedly hiding out at universities and in high-end newspapers such as The New York Times.

Yet if Nixon belonged to a long line of American anti-intellectuals, he had a rather awkward spot within this tradition, since he himself was something of an intellectual. Nixon always resented the fact he received a backwater education at Whittier College and Duke University while such well-born rivals as John Kennedy got to go to Harvard and other Ivy League schools. Perhaps to compensate, Nixon, throughout his adult life, would continue with a strong regimen of extra-curricular reading.

Aside from Woodrow Wilson, Nixon was the best-read U.S. president of the 20th century. Throughout his life, he would pick up highbrow magazines (notably Commentary and National Review) searching for fresh ideas. During his presidency, Nixon's happiest moments were spent conceptualizing public policy with such thinkers as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger, both erstwhile Harvard professors. Unlike the seedy backroom operatives who also populated the Nixon White House and carried out the Watergate burglary, Moynihan and Kissinger satisfied their boss's hunger for smart talk about social trends and geopolitics.

While he never let go of his animosity toward liberal and radical intellectuals, Nixon took a bookish delight in corresponding with learned writers. To see the intellectual half of Nixon's divided personality, we need only look at his correspondence with several major literary critics.

As a lifelong conservative, one might think Nixon would have had little use for Leslie Fiedler, the maverick essayist who died this year at age 85. Known as the "original wild-man critic," Fiedler first gained notoriety in a 1948 article titled Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!, in which he argued that homoerotic interracial love was one of the great unacknowledged themes of American literature.

The relationship between Huck Finn and the slave Jim was Fiedler's main example, but he would later note that most Hollywood buddy films also gave primacy to cross-ethnic male bonding over heterosexual love.

With their iconoclastic take on the classics of American literature, Fiedler's essays seemed designed to offend conservative sensibilities. By the 1960s, Fiedler had morphed into a middle-aged champion of the hippie culture. In 1967, the State University of New York-Buffalo English professor was even busted for marijuana possession.

But in the early 1950s, the ardently anti-Stalinist Fiedler attracted Nixon's favour. In a controversial 1951 Commentary magazine article, Fiedler condemned liberals who refused to accept the fact that prominent New Deal civil servant Alger Hiss had spied for the U.S.S.R. and committed treason. "American liberalism has been reluctant to leave the garden of its illusions," Fiedler argued, lamenting the "half-deliberate blindness of so many decent people." He went on: "There is no magic in the words 'left' or 'progressive' or 'socialist' than can prevent deceit and abuse of power."

In writing his essay on Hiss, Fiedler was both living up to his bad-boy reputation and articulating the position of the New York intellectuals, a group of radical writers that then congregated around journals like Partisan Review and Commentary. At that time, a major goal of the New York intellectuals was to purge the political left of any sentimental illusions it might have about Soviet communism. Since many of the intellectuals had been Trotskyists in the 1930s, they had an acute sense of Stalin's villainy.

Nixon, who built his political career on his pursuit of Hiss, was probably unaware of the radical provenance of Fiedler's essay, but he enjoyed its anti-liberal thrust. Then a senator from California, Nixon immediately sent Fiedler a fan letter, which was made public by Mark Royden Winchell in his recent biography "Too Good To Be True": The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler (University of Missouri Press).

"So much has been written and said about this case which has completely missed the real points involved, that it was pleasure for one who was so close to it, as I was, to read the objective analysis which you presented," Nixon wrote to Fiedler.

Nixon's other dealings with literary critics were confined to more conservative thinkers. As vice-president in 1958, Nixon corresponded with the great scholar of modernism Hugh Kenner, reassuring him that Ezra Pound would not be indicted for treason for his activities during the Second World War. As a frequent writer for the conservative magazine National Review and a friend of right-wing pundit William F. Buckley, Kenner was much closer politically to Nixon than Fiedler was.

Oddly enough, Kenner would later write an interesting essay about Nixon, not as a politician but as a literary figure. In 1974, Kenner reviewed for National Review a book titled The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon, in which Jack Margolis took various statements from the Watergate tapes and elsewhere and turned them into found poetry. (The Margolis book anticipated future volumes of found poetry based on the utterances of Jean Chrétien and Donald Rumsfeld.)

"These are no sonnets for an idle hour," Kenner wrote, in a brilliant mockery of lit-crit clichés. "Stark, tense, hard-bitten, cunningly disequilibrated -- tiptoe, in fact, on the needlepoint of our century's anguish -- these poems speak to and for the thwarted Tamburlaine that lurks in the psyche of urban America."

Perhaps Nixon's closest friendship in the literary world was with Jeffrey Hart, now a retired English professor at Dartmouth and senior editor at National Review. Hart worked for Nixon in 1968 as a speechwriter. In 1978, after Nixon had resigned in disgrace from the Presidency, Hart reviewed his old employer's memoirs in National Review. According to Hart, the memoirs were a "tremendous" work unfairly slagged by other reviewers, "who would pan War and Peace if Nixon were its author."

As so often in the literary world, friendship led to log-rolling and mutual back-scratching. In 1990, when asked by The American Spectator to recommend Christmas gifts, Nixon suggested Hart's Acts of Recovery, which attacked feminism and multiculturalism while celebrating such Tory cultural heroes as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and T.S. Eliot. Although Hart's book is a rather humdrum exercise in right-wing polemics, Nixon's recommendation is quite revealing. In Hart, Nixon found a literary critic who shared his own combination of bookishness and hostility toward the politics of liberal professors.

© Copyright 2003 National Post

Welcome to RummyWorld!

Garry Trudeau has Roland Hedley — intrepid war coorespondent — in RummyWorld (his inspired invention) interviewing an Al Quaeda leader somwhere in RummyWorld. Speaky of Rummy, his performance testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was awesome. Awesomely inept. In fact, Ben Sargent has summed up Rummy's performance. If this be (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

Texas: Average (C) In U. S. History Instruction? Lord Help Us!

Texas gets a C in U. S. history instruction in grades K-12? The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation needs to take a look at the first set of exams in my HIST I and HIST II classes this fall. (In fact, I am playing hooky from reading the drivel by writing this rant.)

Colorado - (my home state) - D
Illinois - (home of the Bobster, jazz-buddy of the Nedster) - F
Maryland (where my grandson will likely go to school) - C
Ohio (home of the Nedster) - D
Wisonsin (home of my son, daughter-in-law, and Tom Terrific) - F

Read 'em and weep at Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card. If this be (fair & balanced) educational criticism, so be it.

PS: The half-dozen A-states were : Alabama(?), Arizona, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York.

[x Thomas B. Fordham Foundation]
State Education Standards Weak in U.S. History

In a state-by-state analysis of K-12 education standards in U.S. history only six states earned As, while 23 received Fs, according to a report released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The new study, Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card, is authored by Sheldon Stern, former chief historian at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston. Stern rated U.S. history standards in 48 states and the District of Columbia on comprehensive content, sequential development, and balance. Six states -- Indiana, New York, Arizona, California, Alabama, and Massachusetts -- earned top marks, with numerical scores of 27 or above out of a possible 30.

Bringing up the rear -- with just two points on the 30-point scale -- are Alaska, Arkansas, Maine, and Wyoming. Iowa and Rhode Island were excluded from the study, as they had no U.S. history or social studies standards as of May 15, 2003.

"Americans deserve to know whether schools are really doing their job or evading accountability by hiding behind often hollow rhetoric about 'excellence' and 'standards,'" Stern writes. "Teachers, of course, should have wide latitude in the selection of materials, points of view, and interpretations for their classrooms. But that latitude does not include a lack of knowledge of essential historical material."

Why does this matter? Notes Fordham Institute president Chester E. Finn, Jr., "Standards supply the recipe from which today's education is cooked. They declare a state's aspirations for what its young people should learn. If they are ill-conceived or wrong, much mischief follows. The curriculum will be shabby, the textbooks ill-suited, the tests misguided, the teacher preparation weak and certification flawed. In an era of standards-based education reform, the first obligation of a state is to get its standards right. This study shows beyond dispute that it can be done-look at the states that have done it -- but that in far too many states the vital subject of U.S. history is in woeful shape."

This evaluation of state U.S. history standards is the third in a series of four reports that are being released by the Fordham Foundation and Institute this fall as part of Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies, the organization's effort to revitalize the teaching of US history and civics. It is a topic that will be explored this week September 24 in a U.S. Senate hearing sponsored by Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH).

Full details, rankings, specific state analyses, and examples of effective and ineffective standards are available on the Fordham Web site.

Texas


(Assessment based on Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Kindergarten-Grade 12: Social Studies and Economics, 1997, Texas Education Agency)

The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Kindergarten-Grade 12: Social Studies and Economics, often referred to as TEKS, forthrightly affirms that a solid foundation in social studies (history, geography, economics, government, and citizenship) "enables students to understand the importance of patriotism, function in a free enterprise society, and appreciate the basic values of our state and nation."

Texas begins to build this foundation in K-3 by introducing the concept of chronological order, identifying "people who helped to shape our state and nation" (such as Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Washington, Lincoln, "and historical figures such as Amelia Earhart and Robert Fulton who have exhibited a love of individualism and inventiveness"), explaining holidays (such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Independence Day) and the significance of state and national landmarks. Students also "learn the purpose of rules and the role of authority figures in the home and school," become familiar with the beliefs and principles that contribute to American national identity, and "learn about the lives of heroic men and women who made important choices, overcame obstacles, sacrificed for the betterment of others, and embarked on journeys that resulted in new ideas, new inventions, and new communities."

In grade 4, students move on to the history of Texas "from the early beginnings to the present within the context of influences of the Western Hemisphere," highlighting Native American origins, Spanish and Mexican rule, the Texas Revolution [of 1836], the Mexican War, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the development of modern oil, gas and aerospace industries. Students also "recite and explain the meaning of the Pledge to the Texas Flag" and discuss "the contributions of people of various racial, ethnic, and religious groups to Texas." In addition, under fourth-grade Economics, students are expected to "describe the development of the free enterprise system in Texas,""describe how the free enterprise system works in Texas; and give examples of the benefits of the free enterprise system in Texas." Students are also asked to "explain the impact of American ideas about progress and equality of opportunity on the economic development and growth of Texas."

Grade 5 students tackle a very general introduction to American history from the colonial era through the twentieth century, including "the roots of representative government in this nation as well as the important ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution." The substantive historical details include: when and why people colonized North America, the contributions of colonial leaders, the origins and results of the Revolution, the events that led to the Constitution, the [early] industrial revolution, westward expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction, postwar urbanization and industrialization and "world wars, and the Great Depression." Students are also expected to "Identify the challenges, opportunities and contributions of people from selected Native American and immigrant groups." However, even though the grade-five survey delves into the reasons for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the origins and development of slavery are never mentioned in the K-5 Texas/U.S. history sequence. (Even the word "slavery" does not appear.) Likewise Jacksonian democracy and antebellum reform movements are skipped (though they are included later in eighth grade). In addition, borrowing nearly verbatim from fourth-grade Texas history, students are asked to describe "the development of the free enterprise system in colonial America and the United States," "describe how the free enterprise system works in the United States," and to "give examples of the benefits of the free enterprise system in the United States."

Texas history is revisited in grade 7 but, TEKS asserts, "Content is presented with more depth and breadth than in grade 4." Students are also expected to "use primary and secondary sources to examine the rich and diverse cultural background of Texas as they identify the different racial and ethnic groups that settled Texas." The content is indeed detailed, particularly on Texas political history leading to independence and statehood. But, despite asking students to "analyze the causes of and events leading to Texas statehood" and to "explain reasons for the involvement of Texas in the Civil War," TEKS, as in the K-5 sequence, never explicitly mentions the role of slavery in early Texas history (especially in the controversy over statehood and in the 1844 election). After covering Reconstruction in Texas, the seventh-grade history content becomes far sketchier, referring very generally to expansion of the Texas frontier, development of the cattle and oil industries, the growth of railroads and reform movements such as Progressivism. Populism is not mentioned despite the fact that Texas was a leading Populist state. The civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century is discussed, but oddly without historical context since the development of Jim Crow in late nineteenth-century Texas and the South is not included.

Eighth-grade United States history, from the early colonial era through Reconstruction, "builds upon" the fifth-grade survey "but provides more depth and breadth." The content is particularly strong on the growth of representative government during the colonial era (although this key development is never linked directly to the origins of the Revolution) and on political events from the 1790s through the antebellum period. A good deal of solid historical content is also included in the Economics, Government, and Citizenship sections of the eighth-grade social studies survey. Students are asked, in discussing the Civil War, to review "the effects of political, economic, and social factors on slaves and free blacks" and to "analyze the impact of slavery on different sections of the United States." This appears to be the first use of the words "slaves" and "slavery" in the K-8 Texas/U.S. history sequence. The Economics section also requires students to "explain reasons for the development of the plantation system, the growth of the slave trade, and the spread of slavery" and, rather paradoxically, to also "describe the characteristics and the benefits of the U.S. free enterprise system during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

Students complete the Texas/U.S. history sequence in high school with a full-year survey on American history since Reconstruction. Political and social history in the quarter century after 1877 is covered in reasonable detail (including Indian policies, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, the expansion of railroads, the growth of political machines, civil service reform, the development of labor unions, and farm issues). But Populism is not mentioned again, nor are crucial issues such as restoration of white supremacy, the rise of the KKK, the disenfranchisement of black voters and the spread of Jim Crow sanctioned in 1896 by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.The impact of the Progressive Era is inaccurately placed after Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles, and Theodore Roosevelt's progressive agenda and record are not discussed at all. (The Rough Riders, many of whom were Texans, would not be amused.) The history sequence also skips directly from the 1920s to World War II; however, the Great Depression and New Deal are covered under Economics, and FDR's effort to "pack" the Supreme Court is included under Government. Similarly, the civil rights movement and the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, are discussed under History, but Brown v. Board of Education appears under Government—such is the bizarre historical logic of social studies.

A political agenda is clearly evident throughout the TEKS. The history of America, and especially of Texas itself, is not merely celebrated, but glorified. Important facts, such as the central role of slavery and southern political power in the movement for Texas statehood, or the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK after Reconstruction, are evaded. Students are also repeatedly expected to extol the virtues of the "free enterprise system in Texas" and to use the oil, gas and aerospace industries as examples. In fact, at least since Alexander Hamilton, the U.S. has never been a laissez-faire, free enterprise society. Many states and the federal government have promoted specific sectors of the economy, and denied support to others, through tax policies, tariffs and land grants (for example, to railroads in the nineteenth century). The oil and gas industries have benefited from tax breaks (such as the oil depletion allowance), and the aerospace industry has received massive federal support for decades. The development and importance of free enterprise is obviously central to understanding Texas and American history, but students should be encouraged to reach their own conclusions about its virtues and shortcomings. To, in effect, require students to espouse a particular ideological viewpoint, whether from the left or the right, violates the basic purpose of public education.

The historical material in the TEKS for Kindergarten-Grade12: Social Studies and Economics is sequentially exemplary, admirable in its specificity from the early years to high school, but substantively uneven. In addition, an ideological subtext may discourage teachers from including or thoroughly exploring some essential historical material. A revised, more balanced version of these standards would be both intellectually and educationally advisable.

Copyright © 2003 Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

W & the UN

W's performance in the UN General Assembly had to be the alltime low in post-WWII presidential appearances. W, Rummy, and the Dickster are a little less arrogant. However, they still don't get it. Powell appears on Letterman. Is the Daily Show next?

W should go on the Daily Show for a face-to-face with Senior White House Correspondent Stephen Colbert. Watch Colbert skewer the W nonsense. Then, view Ben Sargent's take on W and the UN. If this be (fair & balanced) diplomatic history, make the most of it.

Gymboree Ain't Lottie Cotton

The two-career family is almost universal in the United States. We are not paying attention to the phenomenon of the commercialization of intimate life. Aldous Huxley wrote of communal nurseries in Brave New World and they are now the reality. The family — under capitalism — may be under attack that is silent and deadly. If this be (fair & balanced) social criticism, so be it.

[x The Atlantic Monthly]
Books & Critics
Books
Nannyhood and Apple Pie
As capitalism's "latest recruits," American women may know less than their nannies about loving care
by Sandra Tsing Loh

The Commercialization of Intimate Life
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
University of California Press

On the bulletin board at my frantic Gymboree in Los Angeles there are flyers, business cards, and tear-off slips for services targeted at every brand of overbooked, underappreciated post-feminist new mother. There are lactation support groups, baby yoga classes, eco-friendly housecleaners, Reiki-trained doulas, and a service that takes the notion of mother's helper to a whole new level: "Nanny and Me: For your caregiver and child—courses in Spanish that lovingly teach your Latina nanny the customs and daily practices of Jewish culture."

This would be ripe fodder for Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist and the author of The Second Shift and The Time Bind. In her opportune and profoundly fascinating new book, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, she writes, "Love and care, the very basis of any social life, are a source of great confusion in America today." This eclectic collection of essays—which Hochschild describes as "lanterns to shed light on what's happening to care in everyday life under global capitalism"—covers (and contrasts) a wealth of topics: Japanese versus American advice books, the transmission of patriarchal Indian customs from mother to daughter, male bias in academia, modern marriage, contemporary work. Although the lantern light can at times flicker, particularly in the sections originally presented at academic symposia, this collection is a must-read sociological primer for anyone concerned with the intricacies and ironies of American family life today.

Hochschild begins the book with a lyrical recollection of her own parents in the 1950s. Her mother was a troubled caregiver, cooped up at home, who "gave us many gifts of love, but each with a touch of sadness." In contrast, she writes, "When I remember my father, I picture him skip-stepping down a long flight of stairs in front of our house, whistling a jaunty tune, facing away from the house and from us." It's no surprise, then, when she informs us that "like many white middle-class women of my generation, I became a 'migrant' in the 1960s from the emotional culture of my mother to that of my father."

However, problems have ensued in this personal—and cultural—migration. Hochschild refers to feminism here—as she did in The Second Shift—as a worthy but "stalled" gender revolution. Women did skip-step off to work, but no one moved home to take their places. Men kept working the same long (if not longer) hours, while adding 20 percent of the housework to their loads, and although their fathers had done no housework whatsoever, these modern men drew resentment because their contribution wasn't 50 percent. Hard-driving wives trying to make partner at their firms felt it was unfair that they should do more housework than their hard-driving husbands. "Instead of humanizing men," Hochschild concludes, "we are capitalizing women."

Like some Big Mother in the sky, though, capitalism both creates the problem and rushes in with a solution—of sorts. Echoing Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Hochschild writes, "Feminism is to the commercial spirit of intimate life as Protestantism is to the spirit of capitalism. The first legitimates the second. The second borrows from but also transforms the first." And incorporates, co-opts, and abducts it. At the product level capitalism proffers relatively benign items, such as Instant Quaker Oatmeal for busy mothers (an ad for which Hochschild winningly deconstructs). At the service level, plugging what Hochschild calls the "care gap" left open by women, we have, she notes, "childcare workers, eldercare aides, hospice workers, summer camp counselors, psychiatrists, and for the affluent, chauffeurs, family photo assemblers, and birthday party coordinators."

I think only a mother with a psycho-chemical disorder would fondly miss the light-headedness and nausea that come with blowing up birthday-party balloons, but here's where things get creepy: Especially in their more recent incarnation, the commercial substitutes for family activities often turn out to be better than the real thing. Just as the French bakery often makes better bread than mother ever did, and the cleaning service cleans the house more thoroughly, so therapists may recognize feelings more accurately, and childcare workers prove more even-tempered than parents. In a sense, capitalism isn't competing with itself, one company against another, but with the family, and particularly with the role of wife and mother.

So, fifty years of progress later, men are men, women are men, and a Third World nanny is home lighting the menorah candles. (Economic inequalities being what they are, tending strangers' children may be the nanny's only means of supporting her own five, back home in a different country—a phenomenon Hochschild describes in "Love and Gold," an essay that previously appeared in Global Woman, a collection she co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich.) Perhaps more damning still, when it comes to child-rearing, the nanny (along with other "commercial substitutes") is fast becoming the new ideal. A nursery-school director quoted by Hochschild remarks, "This may be odd to say, but the teacher's aides we hire from Mexico and Guatemala know how to love a child better than the middle-class white parents. They are more relaxed, patient, and joyful. They enjoy the kids more. These professional parents are pressured for time and anxious to develop their kids' talents. I tell the parents that they can really learn how to love from the Latinas and the Filipinas."

Who or what, then, comes first in professional parents' hearts? Hochschild argues that owing to the "religion of capitalism" and the "emotional draw of a work culture," what many Americans find easiest to love is work. In a capitalist society work dictates the schedules, the deadlines, the urgency; product life cycles supersede family life cycles at every turn. (The capitalism so beloved of "family values" conservatives—the same capitalism that is so friendly to radical individualism—is by its very nature inimical to the nuclear family.) In a study Hochschild did at Amerco, a Fortune 500 company, she found that many employees with twenty or more years at the company were on their second or third marriages. "To these employed," she wrote, "work was their rock, their major source of security. They were getting their pink slips at home."

So sweeping a cultural trend is easy to track. But Hochschild's theoretical contributions to the field of sociology may prove harder to follow, at least for non-Ph.D. candidates. One of her major stratagems is re-examining the writings of the sociologist Erving Goffman—the results of which can include sentences like "But if we do presume a self with an interior life, we are led to explore gender codes that regulate the emotional bottom of that life fully as much as the interactional surface."

More potent are Hochschild's own thoughts on the American family under capitalism. When in the mid-nineteenth century, men were drawn into market life and women remained outside it, female homemakers formed a moral brake on capitalism. Now American women are its latest recruits, offered membership in the public side of market society on the same harsh terms as those offered to American men. The result makes for a harshness of life that seems so normal to us we don't see it.

As normal as a mother's hiring out the raising of her children to a woman physically separated from her own, though schooled in her mistress's customs. Such is the magic of the marketplace.

Copyright © 2003 The Atlantic Monthly

Richard (Kinky) Friedman Pays Tribute To A Great Woman

Lottie Cotton, I wish I had known ye. If this be (fair & balanced) appreciation of a great human being, so be it. Thank you for sharing, Kinky.

[x Texas Monthly]
Lottie's Love
Lottie Cotton cared for me and my siblings as if we were her own kids. When she died this summer at age one hundred, a piece of me died too.

by Kinky Friedman

WHEN LOTTIE COTTON WAS BORN, on September 6, 1902, in the tiny southeast Texas town of Liberty, there were no airplanes in the sky. There were no SUVs, no superhighways, no cell phones, no televisions. When Lottie was laid to rest this past July in Houston, there was a black Jesus looking after her from the wall of the funeral chapel. Most biblical scholars agree today that Jesus, being of North African descent, very likely may have been black. But Lottie was always spiritually color-blind; her Jesus was the color of love. She spent her entire life looking after others. One of them, I'm privileged to say, was me.

Lottie was not a maid. She was not a nanny. She did not live with us. We were not rich rug rats raised in River Oaks. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood of Houston. (My mother was one of the first speech therapists hired by the Houston Independent School District; my father traveled throughout the Southwest doing community-relations work.) Lottie helped cook and babysit during the day and soon became part of our family. I was old enough to realize yet young enough to know that I was in the presence of a special person. Laura Bush, my occasional pen pal, had this to say about Lottie in a recent letter, and I don't think she'd mind my sharing it with you: "Only special ladies earn the title of 'second mother.' She must have been a remarkable person, and I know you miss her."

There are not many people like Lottie left in this world. Few of us, indeed, have the time and the love to spend our days and nights looking after others. Most of us take our responsibilities to our own families seriously. Many of us work hard at our jobs. Some of us even do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But how many would freely, willingly, lovingly share the architecture of the heart with two young boys and a young girl, a cocker spaniel named Rex, and a white mouse named Archimedes?

One way or another for almost 55 years, wherever I traveled in the world, Lottie and I managed to stay in touch. I now calculate that when Lottie sent me birthday cards in Borneo when I was in the Peace Corps, she was in her early sixties, an age that I myself am now rapidly, if disbelievingly, approaching. She also remained in touch with my brother, Roger, who lives in Maryland, and my sister, Marcie, who lives in Vietnam. To live a hundred years on this troubled planet is a rare feat. But to maintain contact with your "children" for all that length of time, and for them to have become your dear friends in later years, is rarer still.

For Lottie did not survive one century in merely the clinical sense; she was as sharp as a tack until the end of her days. At the ripe young age of 99, she could sit at the kitchen table and knowledgeably discuss politics or religion—or stuffed animals. Lottie left behind an entire menagerie of teddy bears and other stuffed animals, each of them with a name and personality all its own. She also left behind two live animals, dogs named Minnie and Little Dog, who had followed her and protected her everywhere she went. (Minnie is a little dog named for my mother, and Little Dog, as might be expected, is a big dog.)

Lottie is survived by her daughter, Ada Beverly (the two of them have referred to each other as "Mama" for at least the past thirty years), and one grandson, Jeffery. She's also survived by Roger, Marcie, and me, who live scattered about a modern-day world, a world that has gained so much in technology yet seems to have lost those sacred recipes for popcorn balls and chocolate-chip cookies. "She was a seasoned saint," a young preacher who'd never met her said at her funeral. But was it too late, I wondered, to bless the hands that prepared the food? And there were so many other talents in Lottie's gentle hands, not the least of which was the skill to be a true mender of the human spirit.

I don't know what else you can say about someone who has been in your life forever, someone who was always there for you, even when "there" was far away. Lottie was my mother's friend, she was my friend, and now she has a friend in Jesus. She always had a friend in Jesus, come to think of it. The foundation of her faith was as strong as the foundation for the railroad tracks she helped lay as a young girl in Liberty. Lottie, you've outlived your very bones, darling. Yours is not the narrow immortality craved by the authors, actors, and artists of this world. Yours is the immortality of a precious passenger on the train to glory, which has taken you from the cross ties on the railroad to the stars in the sky.

By day and by night, each in their turn, the sun and the moon gaze through the window, now and again reflecting upon the gold and silver pathways of childhood. The pathways are still there, but we cannot see them with our eyes. Nor shall we ever again tread lightly upon them with our feet. Yet as children, we never suspect we might someday lose our way. We think we have all the time in the world.

I am still here, Lottie. And Ada gave me two of the teddy bears that I sent you long ago. As I write these words, they sit on the windowsill looking after me. Some might say they are only stuffed animals. But, Lottie, you and I know what's really inside them. It's the stuff of dreams.

Copyright © 2003 Texas Monthly

W Needs A Colonel Tom Parker

Peter Guralnick — in his magisterial, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley — nails Colonel Tom Parker dead. Trade in Karl Rove for Colonel Tom Parker. There is honesty in open dishonesty. If this be (fair & balanced) rock'n roll, so be it.

[x NY Review of Books]
Hustling Elvis
By David Hajdu


(click for larger image)

The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley
by Alanna Nash
Simon and Schuster, 394 pp., $25.00

Elvis Presley
by Bobbie Ann Mason
Lipper/Viking, 178 pp., $19.95

Having aspired to be as famous as Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup (a gut-bucket singer and songwriter well known only to blues devotees), Elvis Presley surpassed his early ambitions by a factor of about a zillion, and after a few years the enormity of his success began to weigh upon him. He struggled to grasp how he—a poor boy from East Tupelo, Mississippi, who had failed music in high school—could become the most popular recording artist in history, an idol to young people all over the world, and a movie star. "Why am I Elvis?" he wanted to know. "Why was I plucked out of the millions and millions of lives to be Elvis?"

At the suggestion of his confidant and hairdresser, Larry Geller, Elvis started reading inspirational texts and popular books on mysticism and Eastern thought, such as Paramahansa Yogananda's The Autobiography of a Yogi, Vera Stanley Alder's The Initiation of the World, and The Impersonal Life (by "Anonymous").[1] He took this spiritual inquiry so seriously that he considered devoting the rest of his life to it by becoming a monk.

Elvis would never find the answers he sought, though, because he was looking in the wrong place. Turning inward, as he was, he could presumably have learned something about himself and the music he created; but to understand how he became Elvis, the phenomenon, he would have had to study a different person: his manager (and something more), an outsized mystery man who went by the name of Thomas A. Parker and insisted upon being called "the Colonel."

Before Parker laid siege to the twenty-year-old Presley and assumed control of his career, early in 1955, Elvis had been a regional sensation—a big story, but local news. Performing an erotic transmutation of black rhythm and blues, white gospel, and country music (with strains of cornball humor and Tin Pan Alley schmaltz), Presley had roused Southern girls to hysterics at county fairs, and local demand for the first few records he made for the Memphis-based Sun label, beginning with a fiery rendition of Crudup's "That's All Right" and a rocked-up version of the country ballad "Blue Moon of Kentucky," overtaxed the small company's pressing facilities. Distributed mostly in the South, the records Presley made for Sun Records never made the national pop-music charts.

Rock and roll was in the air; Elvis did not invent it. Teenagers, black and white, had been dancing to hard-driving "jump blues" records by black groups such as Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats' "Rocket 88" (commonly regarded as the first rock song) since the early 1950s, and white "hillbilly cats" and western-swing musicians such as Bill Haley and Billy Jack Wills were combining elements of African-American music with commercial pop and country-and-western styles around the same time. In fact, Haley had begun to make a career out of retooling black musicians' hits like "Rocket 88" for white audiences even before Elvis paid Sun Records founder Sam Phillips four dollars to cut his first record. In doing so, Haley followed an old American custom of whitening black music for profit and glory, updating the tradition that had given us Stephen Foster; the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer; the first jazz record, "Livery Stable Blues," by the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band; and the Swing era.

To judge from Presley's earliest recordings, however, it was Elvis who represented rock and roll at its unblushing, volatile best; he was its first master and the embodiment of every reason that adolescents of the postwar years turned to it in favor of the cheerfully torpid pop music (that of Perry Como, Teresa Brewer, and the like) to which their parents were listening. Elvis and his music were both young, and in their earthy unconventionality, overt sexuality, and coded blackness— Presley was white, yet, as a Southerner, still other to the rest of America —they implied all kinds of challenges to the conservatism and homogeneity of mainstream popular culture in the 1950s. Of course, in order to become our all-purpose symbol of postwar discontent, Elvis needed to quit his previous job as a truck driver for Crown Electric, and Colonel Parker, who had heard talk of Presley while he was promoting the country singer Eddy Arnold, made that possible by buying out his Sun contract (for a then-impressive $35,000) and taking him to RCA Records and into the big time. The Colonel's price was lifelong servitude.

Parker thought nothing of music or culture of any sort. "He really was tone deaf," the journalist Alanna Nash quotes Joan Deary of RCA Records as saying in The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley, a commendably temperate and serious treatment of a story that could have tempted a lesser writer to sensationalism.[2] Parker, like many people in the 1950s (including some of Presley's fans), thought of Elvis as a charismatic novelty—an exotic, unique, and therefore valuable commodity in the entertainment trade. A veteran of the lurid, freewheeling carnivals and tent shows that appeared on the outskirts of rural communities and disappeared with the townsfolk's earnings, the Colonel learned most of what he knew about show business and public taste as a sideshow barker and concessionaire. (He had a special fascination for one exhibit, a man with long hair, a beard, and a phony tail billed as "the Thing! Half Man, Half Animal!" according to Nash.)

He was also a highly developed grifter, a self-proclaimed con artist who thought every situation in life was a game to win, every person either a shill or a mark. He treated Elvis as both, accomplice and victim. He carried on negotiations with film studios as if he and Presley were collaborators and full partners, and he signed everything, even his Christmas cards, as "Elvis and the Colonel." At the same time, his contract with Presley gave Parker independent decision-making authority over nearly every aspect of Elvis's career, and he rigged the financial machinery so that he, the manager, often made more money than his client. Parker sometimes had Presley sign the bottom of blank contracts, which he would fill in later. Nash recounts an exchange between a British journalist and Parker in 1968. "Is it true that you take fifty percent of everything Elvis earns?" Parker was asked. After a moment's thought, he answered, "No, that's not true at all. He takes fifty percent of everything I earn."

He claimed that he and Presley had a commensurate division of responsibilities: Elvis made the music and the movies, and the Colonel made the deals. The truth was knottier, as it often is with creative artists and their managers. Parker's machinations dictated or limited most of Presley's professional activities—the kinds of songs Presley could record, and when, where, and with what musicians, which movies he could make as well as many of his personal moves, down to the friends he could see, how they would spend their time, and even the woman he would marry. (The Colonel pressured Presley to wed Priscilla Beaulieu, the daughter of an army officer, whom Elvis met while he was stationed in Germany and who had been living with Presley in Graceland since she was sixteen, in order to avoid a career-damaging scandal exposing him as the seducer of a minor.) "Look, it's pretty easy," Parker told his client. "We do it this way, we make money. We do it your way, we don't make money." Elvis ended up doing almost everything the Colonel's way, frequently to his career's and his own detriment and, in time, to his frustration.

Like the managers of two other dominant figures in twentieth-century popular music—Irving Mills, who represented Duke Ellington, and Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan —Colonel Parker recognized the profitability of music publishing and tried to maximize his artist's participation in it. Mills and Grossman nurtured their young clients' urges to compose, while Parker exploited Elvis's trust and inertia, confining his repertoire almost exclusively to songs from a malleable old country-music publishing company he could manipulate, Hill and Range Songs, which "cut in" Presley (and, by extension, Parker) on the royalties. Elvis Presley's name appears on the copyrights of dozens of tunes he recorded, including "Don't Be Cruel," "Love Me Tender," and "Heartbreak Hotel." As Dylan, the Beatles, and their peers elevated the standards for rock songwriting, Hill and Range's offerings seemed ever more pale and dated. By the mid-Sixties, Elvis was recording goofy tripe such as "(There's) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car," "Do the Clam," and "Petunia, the Gardener's Daughter."

Like Doris Day's manager-husband, Marty Melcher, who took a sultry jazz singer and reduced her to pandering infantilism, compelling her to sing only "bouncy tunes," Parker imposed a rigid code on Hill and Range songwriters. An "Elvis song" had to have simple, accessible words, a first-person point of view, and a happy ending— like the standards of children's books. Composers were also prohibited from meeting Elvis, restricting their conception of him to his ever-more-wholesome public image and insulating them from his own indifference toward their contributions to it.

No other manager of a noted artist has ever been so cynical of his client's talent, as Parker demonstrated in his pitiless lordship over Elvis's tenure in Hollywood. Presley, a movie buff since boyhood, had committed whole scenes from Rebel Without a Cause to memory. Always fearful that his music might prove to be the passing fad of his critics' predictions, he was enormously gratified when in 1956 Parker succeeded at parlaying Elvis's early fame into a movie contract with Paramount, and he hoped to begin a substantial screen career, like those of pop-music stars of preceding generations such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. As he told the producer Hal Wallis, "My ambition has always been to become a motion picture actor—a good one, sir." Parker, never confident of Elvis's acting ability (or of the money in anything smacking of art), made sure Presley never had the chance. The studio contracts which the Colonel negotiated gave Parker approval over all of Elvis's prospective movie projects, which he saw strictly as cross-merchandising vehicles for soundtrack records, tie-in singles, and souvenirs.

In doing so, Tom Parker was one of the inventors of the contemporary entertainment industry, in which the movie is the promotional device, and the baseball cap with the title logo is the main product. Every Elvis movie had to include at least four songs, and they would inevitably come from the Hill and Range catalog. Parker refused to allow Elvis to appear in Thunder Road, West Side Story, or Midnight Cowboy.

Indeed, Parker effectively kept Elvis out of the film world; although Presley starred in thirty-one movies (or, more accurately, made one movie thirty-one times), they have always existed in a self-contained, unchanging sphere all their own, unrelated to developments in film during the same years. (In 1956, a year before Love in the Afternoon, Presley appeared in his first title, Love Me Tender; thir-teen years later, when They Shoot Horses, Don't They was released, he made The Trouble with Girls.) Elvis movies, with their interchangeable titles (Girls! Girls! Girls!, Girl Happy, Easy Come Easy Go, Live a Little Love a Little) and story lines (young race-car driver/pilot/speedboat driver with guitar confronts gangsters/politicians/businessmen, thereupon getting girl), have a genre to themselves: the Elvis movie. Ostensibly set in vacation locales like Acapulco or Hawaii, suggested by cartoonish backlot sets, they are as exotic as the foreign foods in a mall food court, and in their manufactured predictability, they provide the same kind of cheesy comfort. "They'll never win any Academy Awards," Parker admitted. "All they're good for is to make money." Presley called them "travelogues" and came to resent not being entrusted with more serious material.

Like Brian Epstein, who took a band of working-class rockers in pompadours and leather jackets, packaged them in bangs and Edwardian suits, and merchandised them, creating Beatlemania, Colonel Parker neatened up, softened, and promoted Elvis Presley as a brand suitable for mass consumption. Unlike the Beatles (especially John Lennon), however, Elvis failed to project a strong sense of self or a challenging artistic conception to counterbalance the accreting banality of all his marketing.[3] While Epstein licensed the Beatles' identities for use as characters on a Saturday morning cartoon show, the boys were recording "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever," and Lennon was writing books of arch verse. The Mop Top hype and promotional gimmicks always felt ancillary and irrelevant to the real Beatles. In the case of Elvis, the exploitation came to define its object; indeed, it seemed to replace him. For years before Presley died in 1977, at the age of forty-two, there appeared to be nothing more to him than his detached, out-of-time presence in those movies, the throwaway songs, the garish Las Vegas stage shows, and the chintzy souvenirs—just the Elvis an old sideshow carny wanted us to have. To this day, much of what we think of when we think about Elvis is the handiwork of Colonel Parker.

How could any artist submit to such constriction for so long? For all the good their managers did them at one time, Duke Ellington fired Irving Mills once he was well established, and Bob Dylan eventually left Albert Grossman. When Marty Melcher died, Doris Day took over her own affairs (and won a landmark suit against Melcher's partner for misappropriation of funds), as the Beatles did after Brian Epstein's death. (They ended up suing one another.) Theories about the mysterious bond between Presley and Colonel Parker have been the midrash of Elvis fandom. Some believe Parker allowed Elvis to fall into drug addiction and supplied him with pills to keep him compliant, although there's no hard evidence to support this. Others, including Nash, see the Colonel as a surrogate parent. (Elvis's beloved mother, Gladys, died in 1958, and his father, Vernon, who outlived his only son by a few years, was something of a rogue and, in Elvis's eyes, betrayed him by cheating on his mama.) There may be some truth to the latter notion: after Parker arranged for Presley to sign with RCA Records, Elvis told him, in a telegram,

You are the best, most wonderful person I could ever hope to work with. Believe me when I say I will stick with you through thick and thin and do everything I can to uphold your faith in me.... I love you like a father.

Bobbie Ann Mason, whose Penguin life of Presley deals knowingly with his roots in Southern poverty, de-fends Elvis's subservience to the Colonel as a function of his provenance. Being poor and Southern and feel-ing powerless and inferior, Elvis (like his parents, whose approval was crucial to Parker when Elvis was still a minor) learned deference to authority as a survival tactic. The Presleys raised Elvis to see virtue in work, and he accepted orders from Colonel Parker because he was the boss, despite the technicality that Elvis Pres-ley employed him. Moreover, Mason suspects, if the Presleys recognized Parker as a hustler, they likely respected him as such:

There had to be a hustle, because you knew the game was rigged against you.... The Presleys knew they needed a guide, someone of their own kind who could maneuver among the bankers, lawyers, company executives—none of whom were to be trusted. The Presleys probably considered them- selves lucky to find a con man who could challenge the big dudes, because they knew the big dudes would just stomp on them. That was the way life was.

Elvis and his parents all died without knowing how grand a hustle the Colonel had pulled off. He was scarcely "one of their kind," the West Virginia–born colonel he pretended to be, but an illegal alien named Andreas van Kuijk, who had fled his native Netherlands under hazy circumstances —perhaps a murder (never solved)— and scammed his way through the ranks of the American entertainment industry, from the carnivals into country music to Elvis, with stops as an army deserter (discharged as a psychopath) and a game warden along the way. Parker (never his legal name) kept his identity a secret until his final years, when he thought a few details from the truth would give him a tactical advantage in a court proceeding. In her book, Alanna Nash, building upon the research of the German journalist Dirk Vellenga, tells in unprecedented and meticulous detail the full story of Parker's real history and his audacious posing.

In retrospect, it seems almost fitting that the man who transformed Elvis Presley into an icon of pop artifice should be a creature of self-invention. He knew his trade, as Bobbie Ann Mason points out. Both Presley and Parker were never what they seemed, we now know: in his youth, when Elvis terrified parents as he snarled and gyrated like something from hell, he was actually a shy, religious fellow who lived with his mother and father. When he returned from the army, looking clean-cut and demure, he began his private descent into drug abuse and sexual excess. No degree of deception could have fazed his manager, the colonel from Noord-Brabant.

Presley "was trapped by his dependence on the Colonel," the songwriter Jerry Lieber told Alanna Nash. "He was never able to take control of his own life." One can't help but wonder how Presley's life and work might have been different had he mustered the will to leave Parker in the Sixties, as he told friends he wanted to do. Would he have made Midnight Cowboy, after all, or accepted Barbra Streisand's overture to appear with her in A Star Is Born? Could he have improved his performances? Or was he doing what he really wanted to do all along—and posing when he talked of wishing he could do more serious work?

Colonel Parker liked to stand outside the theater after Elvis had given a concert, peddling souvenirs. For Presley's fans, Parker had "I Love Elvis" buttons. For others, he also carried "I Hate Elvis" buttons. Clearly, neither was appropriate for Parker; he just liked selling the buttons. He didn't care one way or another about Elvis. In the end, sadly, his client seemed to feel the same way.
Notes

[1] Written anonymously by Joseph S. Benner in 1916, the book is currently published by DeVorss as The Impersonal Life: The Little Book in Which Elvis Found the Light: Graceland Edition.

[2] Several other books about Parker and Presley have been published. Among them: Elvis and the Colonel (Pocket Books, 1975), by May Mann, a fan's diary; Elvis and the Colonel (Delacorte, 1988), by Dirk Vellenga (with Mick Farren), a straightforward account of Parker's life and association with Presley by the journalist who first investigated Parker's secret history; My Boy Elvis: The Colonel Tom Parker Story by Sean O'Neal (Barricade Books, 1998), a sketchy book whose cover photograph shows Presley standing alongside a man who is not Colonel Parker; and Colonel Tom Parker: The Curious Life of Elvis Presley's Eccentric Manager (Cooper Square Press, 2001), by James L. Dickerson, which glances over Parker's early life.

[3] There were exceptions, most notably Presley's 1968 TV special, one of the highlights of his career, and the two soulful albums he made in Memphis shortly after that.

Copyright © 2003 New York Review of Books

Sign Me Up, Molly!

I was walking out of men's gathering this AM and one of the attendees is moving to Austin (dreaded leftwing and hippie center of the Texas universe). And — in the back-and-forth with three righteous, Panhandle, conservative Republicans — the name of Mollie Ivins was invoked. This would be the peril of living in Austin: breathing the same air as Molly Ivins. One of the righties proclaimed that he didn't know why the local fishwrap ran her stuff. I replied, her column today was worth the subscription fee. Ol' Molly has thrown the gauntlet. She's a Bush-hater. So am I. W wouldn't even make a respectable village idiot, let alone president of these here United States. If this be (fair & balanced) polemicism, make the most of it.

Amusing Cluckings
by Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas -- Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W. Bush is a terrible president.

Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his 44 years of covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of "Bush haters" in Time magazine, as though he had never before come across such a phenomenon.

Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to -- our last president. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven't let up yet. Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug-running, sexual harassment, financial chicanery and official misconduct, and his wife of even worse.

For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters. Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing on radio talk shows, "Christian" broadcasts and nutty Internet sites. People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines, people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with notoriously racist pasts -- all were given hearings, credence and air time. Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and many an ambitious young right-wing hitman -- like David Brock, who has since made full confession -- took that golden opportunity.

After all this time and all those millions of dollars wasted, no one has ever proved that the Clintons did a single thing wrong. Bill Clinton lied about a pathetic, squalid affair that was none of anyone else's business anyway, and for that they impeached the man and dragged this country through more than year of the most tawdry, ridiculous, unnecessary pain.

"The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from," mused the ineffable Krauthammer. "Whence the anger? It begins of course with the ‘stolen' election of 2000 and the perception of Bush's illegitimacy." I'd say so myself, yes, it would. I was in Florida during that chilling post-election fight and am fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore actually won Florida, not to mention getting 550,000-more votes than Bush overall.

The night Gore conceded the race in one of the graceful and honorable speeches I have ever heard, I was in a ballroom full of Republicans Party flacks who booed and jeered through every word of it. One thing I acknowledge about the right is that they're much better haters than liberals are. Your basic liberal is pretty much a strikeout on the hatred front. Maybe further out on the left you can hit some good righteous anger, but liberals, and I am one, are generally real wusses.

To tell the truth, I'm kind of proud of us for holding the grudge this long. Normally, we'd remind ourselves that we have to be good sports, it's for the good of the country, we must unite behind the only president we've got, as Lyndon used to remind us. If there are still some of us out here sulking, "Yeah, but they (SET ITAL) stole (END ITAL) that election," well good. I don't think we should forget that.

But, onward. So George Dubya becomes president having run as a "compassionate conservative," and what do we get? Hell's own conservative and zilch for compassion. His entire first eight months was tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich. Then came 9-11, and we all rallied. Country under attack, most horrible thing, what can we do? Ready to give blood, get out of our cars and ride bicycles, whatever. Shop, said the president. And more tax cuts for the rich.

By now, we're starting to notice Bush's bait-and-switch con. Make a deal with Ted Kennedy to improve education, and then fail to put any money into it. Promise $15 billion in new money to combat AIDS in Africa (wow), but it turns out to be a cheap con -- no new money. Bush comes to praise a job-training effort, then cuts the money. Bush says AmeriCorps is great, then cuts the money. Gee, what could we possibly have against this guy?

Then suddenly, in the greatest bait and switch of all time, Osama bin doesn't matter at all, and we have to go after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9-11. But he does have horrible weapons of mass destruction. So we take out Saddam Hussein, and there are no weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the Iraqis are not overjoyed to see us. By now, quite a few people who aren't even liberal are starting to say, "Wha' the hey?"

We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass destruction, the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to hell, we're stuck in this country for $87 billion just for one year, and no one knows how long we'll be there. And still poor Krauthammer is hard-put to conceive how anyone could conclude that George W. Bush is a poor excuse for a president.

It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad president. Grown-ups can do that, you know -- decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without lying awake at night consumed with hatred. Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape because of his stupid economic policies. If that make me a Bush-hater, then sign me up.

Copyright © 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Wesley Clark: Enough Already!

Hell, Wesley Clark — on the worst day of his life — would make more sense than W anytime. W was a real hit at the UN. And, he showed a lot of class in walking out on Jacques Chirac. The French leader sat and listened to W babble, but W walked and took Condi and Colin with him. W's chances of gaining UN support in Iraq? Slim and none and Slim went home. We have a fool in the White House. God save us. If this be (fair & balanced) blasphemy, make the most of it.

[x HNN]
Is General Clark's Political Inexperience a Handicap in the Campaign?
by E.J. Dionne

[T]he truth is that Americans are opportunistic, fickle and capricious on the subject of experience in politics -- which also means that we are practical and sensible. There are times when the voters are looking for a plumber, mechanic or doctor. The idea is to hire someone with a long track record who can fix problems and keep an eye on things. There are other moments when voters yearn for a preacher, an actor, a general -- even a wrestler -- who might lift their spirits by offering vision, or just by being different.

Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who announced his presidential candidacy last week, hopes this will be one of those moments. If elective office is the only relevant "experience" for the White House, Clark is a sure loser. As Ron Fournier of the Associated Press pointed out, Clark never even ran for student council. But for many Americans, that might be one of his strongest qualifications....

In truth, experience has always been a slippery concept in American politics. For one thing, experience is no substitute for ability. When Republican Party bosses picked Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio as their presidential nominee on the 10th ballot in 1920, they were nominating an amiable cipher. "Harding had no qualification for being president except that he looked like one," wrote historian William E. Leuchtenburg, even though Harding had held several public offices. Democrat William McAdoo memorably said that Harding's speeches "leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork."

But this was Harding's greatest asset. Americans had just had plenty of ideas and experience from Woodrow Wilson, including World War I and its disappointing aftermath. Harding gave Americans little to be against, promised "normalcy," and that was enough to win him a landslide.

In 1960, Richard M. Nixon based much of his campaign against John F. Kennedy on the experience issue. Both men had been elected to Congress in the same year, but Nixon was an exceptionally high-profile vice president and was seen as having lots of know-how in foreign policy. Kennedy had not made much of a mark on the Senate.

Nonetheless, Kennedy was a Democrat in what was still a New Deal country. He offered verve and drive and vision galore, even if the vision was a bit gauzy. Nixon tried to get past the party labels and glitz by being safe, sound -- and, well, experienced. "Because Experience Counts" became one of his main slogans. The 1960 result was one of the closest in U.S. history -- a virtual tie between experience and its competitor.

The big difference between 1960 and now is that the country has gone through one merciless anti-Washington campaign after another. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Howard Dean -- all, in one way or another, tried to turn Washington experience into a form of leprosy.

It's enough to make a grown member of Congress cry -- and protest.

Here's Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, the Democratic presidential candidate, who was first elected to Congress in 1976: "I'm not going to say what's fashionable in our politics -- that I'm a Washington outsider, that I couldn't find the nation's capital on a map, that I have no experience in the highest levels of government," said the former House Democratic leader in announcing his presidential candidacy. "I do, and I think experience matters. It's what our nation needs right now."

Yet what, exactly, constitutes "experience"? You can think of certain candidates -- among them Gephardt, Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry, Bob Graham, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Carol Mosley Braun and Dennis Kucinich -- who say elective office is an asset. That would seem to leave out a general like Clark. Generals are used to having people follow orders, which could make matters dicey with, say, Congress and the voters. Clark has no professional experience with domestic issues, and acknowledged to reporters on Thursday that he had few specific policy ideas to offer at the moment. More experience might have prevented his embarrassing flip-flop last week -- first he said he probably would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq, then he reversed himself the next day.

Yet if the presidency is in part about command, who better than a former general? George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Dwight D. Eisenhower were no slouches. How many senators have ever run things? In the wake of 9/11, which "experience" is more relevant -- Clark's in foreign policy and war, Howard Dean's as a chief executive, albeit of a small state, or the extensive legislative experience of most of the rest of the field? (Senator Graham, former governor of Florida, can claim both executive and legislative experience, but it hasn't helped him in the polls so far.)

The fact that "experience" is itself a mushy concept becomes even clearer if you consider this question: Was George W. Bush's six years' experience as a governor sufficient to prepare him for the presidency? Ask any dozen people and I bet you an old Nixon button that their answers break down almost entirely along party lines -- proving that experience can have little to do with our view of "experience."

That we are terribly ambivalent about experience is brought home by our vacillation between the Cincinnatus and Richard J. Daley models of leadership. Our hearts regularly go to the proud and independent person who has never been soiled by politics or compromise and comes to our rescue out of nowhere. This sort of character (Jesse Ventura played him on TV) appeals to our mistrust of politics and our desire to escape it.

Copyright © 2003 Washington Post