American Rhapsody (12 page)

Bill Clinton needed an event that would break America's heart for a month or two. We'd go through the horror itself first. Then videotaped replays of the horror for weeks. Then we'd go through the grieving. Then videotaped replays of the grieving for more weeks. Prayers. Sermons. Sobbing faces. Children holding on to their mommies. Parents screaming.
All mourning all the time!
Then the experts would pontificate on
Larry King Live
, night after night, analyzing the horror and the grieving and the closure from all the replays, still picking through ruins—a child's Raggedy Ann doll, a smashed photo of a smiling young couple found in the rubble, an old lady crying on an old man's shoulder—as the camera panned across fresh graves at a turn-of-the-century cemetery . . . at
sunset.

Bill Clinton needed a Mike Tyson uppercut to our hearts. Something to soften us up. To put us into a more sensitive mood. To make us feel more forgiving. To make us feel better about him. (Reagan, his polls down during Iran-Contra, said, “Maybe I should go out and get myself shot again.”) Bill Clinton needed a great and horrible and welcome and opportune tragedy to put everything in perspective.

.  .  .  

He didn't get it. He didn't get the apocalypse he needed, but he got something. The explosions at the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, final proof that the Good Lord was on Bill Clinton's side. (Some would have their doubts later, when another act of God, a tornado, wiped out Bill Clinton's former Little Rock statehouse, including Chelsea's tree house.)
Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus! Bill Clinton was as happy as the day grocery stores started selling frozen pizzas!
This act of God, these explosions, coming during the period when Bill Clinton was clutching his Bible, were truly heaven-sent. The explosions were planned and carried out by Arab terrorists.

Forget the War on Burps; this war would be against Arab terrorists, and it would be real. The Beast would be showing America at war. The explosive cacophony of all of those bombs, live on CNN, would surely drown out the jibbering, jabbering cries for impeachment. The Creep would be recast as the Commander in Chief, clothing himself in the flag some insisted he'd burned in the sixties, draping Old Glory over the most inglorious part of his body.

Just to firm up his support a bit, he dragged his Saddam scarecrow out of the Pentagon's closet and hurled some more bombs and Tomahawks Saddam's way, too. Oh, he flew through the air with the greatest of ease, the high-flying Creep on his political trapeze, dropping Tomahawks on Baghdad and Afghanistan and the Sudan!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
What a lovely, handy, perfect little boomer war this was! Even the old-style, dadgum, shitkicker rednecks (who hated him) got booby-trapped by this one. Yessir, Amurrica was at war, by God! And by God, we had to support our boys, by God, and support the commander in chief, by God, by God (even if they hated him), because, by God, he
was
the commander in chief.

Well, sure, some people upchucked. Republicans Trent Lott of Mississippi and Gerald Solomon of New York, who'd seen that saddle burr Wag the Dog movie and thought they knew how to distinguish a reel show—first
A Time to Heal!
and then
A Time to Forgive!
and now
A Time for War!
—from real life. But when they criticized the cynicism and self-serving mendacity of the president of the United States, the nauseating and brazen timing of this, they were ambushed by their core constituencies. All those shit-kickers and By God Amurricans supporting our boys and the commander in chief. They had to stage a fast and undignified retreat.

Lott and Solomon knew they were on slippery, dangerous ground anyway. There were crazy people out there on the Internet claiming that Bill Clinton had bombed our embassies to save his skin, with the help of the CIA. They were the same sort of ding-a-lings who in the past had claimed that LBJ and the CIA murdered 129 people (connected in some way with JFK's assassination), and that LBJ, on the flight from Dallas to Washington, had stuck his willard into JFK's wounds.
Yea, verily,
Trent Lott and Gerald Solomon did a big-assed retreat indeed . . . and our Tomahawks kept falling around the world.

Cross-dressed in Old Glory now, fighting a victorious multifront war, officially and publicly forgiven by Hillary and Chelsea, riding his polls and approval ratings, the commander in chief thought for the first time that he could win the battle of his life. Not against big tobacco or the burps, not against terrorism and Saddam Hussein, but against Kenneth W. Starr. The war against Kenneth W. Starr would be the final distraction, the rarest filet mignon, served up to the Beast. Bill Clinton and his aides and his friends in the media (mostly sixties kids) would take this preacher's son, whom Clinton considered “filthy and sleazy,” and turn him into the ghost of drunken Joe McCarthy: Kenneth W. Starr portrayed as peepingly sticking his nose into the holy of holies—America's collective bedroom.

Bill Clinton would Saddamize the preacher's son the way Nixon had Saddamized McGovern. He would make Kenneth W. Starr the issue, not Bill Clinton. He would not allow himself to be ruined. He would ruin Starr. (“Here ruining reputations is considered sport,” Vince Foster had written in his suicide note.) Clinton would exploit Starr the way he believed Starr was trying to exploit him. He would accept the wisdom of his first White House counsel, Bernie Nussbaum, who had advised him “to do harm to enemies if you can.”

Kenneth W. Starr, Bill Clinton was convinced, was a Republican hatchet man, the demonic Helms's creature, the former chief of staff from 1981 to 1983 to Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith. He'd been appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by Reagan in 1983. Who really needed more proof than that? Starr was obviously a Helms man, a Reagan man—but there was more proof. Even as Starr was investigating Bill Clinton as special prosecutor, Starr was still getting a million dollars a year representing . . . big tobacco! Helms, Reagan, and big tobacco! And the pious twit was claiming that he was being fair?
Fair
? With friends and allies like that?

Bill Clinton wasn't discouraged. He contemplated the advice his mama had given him: “Nothing good comes easy . . . . We just have to be strong to pull ourselves together . . . . We've climbed mountains before and we've got one more to climb . . . . You can't saw sawdust.”

It was back to the barricades for Bill Clinton, back to the sixties: The pigs were lined up in phalanx, holding billy clubs and tear-gas guns, and they were lofting the canisters in, and flashcubes were sparkling, and Bill Clinton was out there, the Stones and the Who blasting inside his head. Arkansas's own Street Fightin' Man with his Prince Valiant Beatles haircut wouldn't ever get fooled again. Throwing those canisters right back at Judge Pig Starr, Bull Connor Starr, Rusty Calley Starr, Paul Harvey Starr, Judge Julius Hoffman Starr, screaming “Fuck you!” into the acrid, choking, dark night of his travail.
Look, top of the world, Ma!
Abbie Hoffman (now dead), Jerry Rubin (also dead, after turning into a real estate salesman), Bobby Seale (now selling barbecue sauce), and our lollipop-dispensing baby doctor, Benjamin Spock (dead now, too) would have been proud.

It was all starting to swing the commander in chief's way: The shows—
A Time to Heal!
and
A Time to Forgive!
and
A Time for War!
—had all been successful. This new show—
A Time to Saddamize!
—would play, too . . . but Bill Clinton was still uneasy.

There was that moment in Vancouver, up on the balcony, when Boris Yeltsin, the doddering sot, had seen Bill Clinton waving to producer Bud Yorkin's beautiful wife, the actress Cynthia Sikes, down below, holding Bud and Cynthia's baby . . . and Yeltsin had turned to him with his vodka red cheeks and said, “Is dat
your
baby?”
That was wrong!
The president of a bust-out derelict country had no right to speak to the president of the United States that way!

And then there was the uncomfortable moment in Hollywood, at that cocktail party, when he'd walked into the room, floating on his own charisma, and Sharon Stone was sitting there with her back to him. She didn't even turn to look at him. She just sat there with her legs crossed, thighs showing, and didn't even turn. Aware of him behind her, she arched her neck back and said, “Hi, Bill.”
Hi, Bill? Bill
? Like he was an ex-fiancé or something! He was the president of the United States! The commander in chief! She was an aging actress with
one
hit movie! Was that any way for a piece of fluff to greet her commander in chief?

Within hours, people in Hollywood told the story of how Sharon Stone had greeted Bill Clinton. In a place where a good title means dollars, their meeting already had a million-dollar title:
The Flasher and the Masher!

[9]

Kenneth W. Starr Confesses

F
orgive me, Lord, for I have sinned. Cast out the evil that has corrupted my flesh. Grace me with Your strength. Infuse me with Your spirit. Save me from the flames of perdition.

I have been Your servant. I sing Your hymns on my morning jog. I read Your Scripture when Alice and I go on our Sunday-afternoon drives. I have never cheated on my Alice. I am a straight arrow, a learned, affable man, courtly, thoughtful, and deliberate. I try to carry myself in a judicial and Christian manner. I have been a good husband to my Alice, who has been a good wife to me. Once a Mendell, once a Jew, she is now a Starr; she is Church of Christ.
I have never cheated on my wife!

But I will never, to my dying day, forget the look on my poor Alice's face when she found me down here in the basement, abasing myself with the Internet, my eyes red and lusting, ravishing Pookie's body. Alice has gone back upstairs now. I hear her puttering in the kitchen, and I know she can hear the abject sobs of my ruin. For a man of my judiciousness, decorum, and equanimity to be discovered by his faithful wife sitting at his computer in striped pants and morning coat, looking at his strumpet's naked body—
His! His! Not mine!
—is, I will be first to admit, an abomination.
I have never cheated on my wife, Lord!

I can't even bring myself to refer to
him
by his name. Nor can I force myself to violate myself further and call him the president of the United States. I will call him, then, POTUS, the inhuman acronym used by the Secret Service on their location maps. Please do not think, my God, that I am apportioning any of my blame to him by referring to him. I am on my knees as I hear Alice, sniffling upstairs now, begging to be forgiven for
my
sins, not POTUS's. I will use the worn-out and now meaningless phrase I have heard so often sitting high on my judge's bench: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

You know I have done my best to serve You and America my entire life. I say that not to excuse myself in any way for my sins, but to provide a moral context, to build a case for a pattern of my behavior that, until my exposure to POTUS, was as near-exemplary as humanly possible. I say that in all humility, my Lord, but You know it in Your all-encompassing wisdom to be legally accurate. Mother told me that I prayed to You already when I was two weeks old. I knelt as Father preached at home in between haircuts. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke. I went to see You at the Church of Christ. I sold Your Word door to door. I didn't dance. I didn't fornicate. When I married Alice, she taught me to dance. Alice and I didn't fornicate, either—we still don't. We celebrate Your presence in our hearts and loins. I've been true-blue, Lord. I campaigned for Richard Nixon in high school. I've served under Ronald Reagan and George Bush. I've spoken at Pat Robertson College.

I have suffered the slings and arrows of a blasphemous and profane world because of my beliefs and my loyalty to America and You. I have been called Chauncy Gardner and Mister Rodgers. I have suffered calumnies and bogus allegations. I have seen signs that say
WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH
? as I pass by. I have been called a doofus and a nerd. In my service to You and America on the federal bench and as solicitor general, I have taken courageous and maligned positions against abortion, burning the flag, and homosexuals. I have opined on behalf of school prayer. I have raised in tribute to You, with Alice's help, a beautiful family.
I have never cheated on my wife, Lord!
I have put one cigar into my mouth for a group photograph with my colleagues. I didn't light it.

I have been Your Christian soldier fighting the forces of the Church of Cool. In a world increasingly cool, I have spoken up for family values, for the unborn fetus, for Paula Jones, for the Constitution. I have represented the tobacco companies You need to bring sinners swiftly back to You, the automakers You need to bring broken bodies to repentance. I have gloried in not being cool, proudly using my smarminess, my thick glasses, my baseball cap, my Starbucks mug, my baldness, and my psoriasis as prayer flags for You—a reminder to all Americans of a bygone world when people didn't worship at the altar of cool and weren't focused on the slimness of their bodies, the inarticulation of their speech, the barbarism of their music. Hear me, my Lord! When the tie-dyed hordes befouled the earth in the sixties, I wore a suit and tie to school. My children speak English, not Ebonics; my dear wife is a mate, not a suffragette.

You know, too, surely, that intimately I have violated neither myself nor You. Father taught me the godly nature of an ice-cold shower. Mother never found anything when she examined my sheets. For my entire life, as I've stood at the urinal, I've held myself only with the tips of two fingers. The instant I have felt myself not even attracted, not even tempted, but in the tiniest platonic way curious about a member of the opposite sex, I have fled to Your Scripture. And You have rewarded me with an infinite capacity for work, with an energy impossible to deplete. You have made my psoriasis-scarred flesh as unto the fine, musty-smelling pages of a leather-bound law book. Thanks to You, the briefs I discuss are legal ones; the wildest climaxes I enjoy are in a courtroom at top hourly rates. Thanks to You, my seed is green-backed and collecting interest.
I have never abused myself, my Lord!

I beg You, then, now that I've defined the moral context, now that I've established my pattern of behavior, to forgive me for what I, a sinner, am about to confess.

In my servitude to America and You, I was asked to read a book in 1993. I regret to say that it wasn't the Good Book. It wasn't Your spirit and Your soul. It was a leprous book—a diary written by a sinner. His name was Robert Packwood. I was asked by a congressional committee. I couldn't refuse. The sinner was a United States senator. I was selected to read it thanks to the probity and decorum that You have granted unto me, oh my God. It was a diary of filth and sexual debauchery. It was a document written in a sewer. I was asked to read every word and form an opinion as to its relevance in a Senate trial. I read every word over and over and over and over and over and over again. It was torture. It was horrifying. Flesh, my Lord! Intimate female flesh that Packwood sniffed like a depraved beast.

Alice woke me one night, screaming, and said that in my sleep I had put my face, sniffing, against her flesh. I had to run to the bathroom because I was wet between my legs, the way I was wet sometimes as a boy.

I tried everything. Ice-cold showers. Ice cubes. Dry ice. Ice cream. Alice and I tried reading the Scripture to each other. I heard her, but my eyes were trapped on her breasts. I read to her, but I was drooling. Packwood, this beast, had immersed his wanton, dripping-wet hands in my brainpan. Images of pink flesh—on a single occasion, even dark-hued, but not black, flesh—were polluting my snow-white, decorous, judicial thoughts. After what seemed a very long time, I felt relieved.

Perhaps it was because I had converted to decaf and abjured eating red meat. Perhaps it was because my daughter's girlfriends stopped visiting our house. I had purged myself of Packwood's poison, but I still felt my recovery tenuous. I was still unexpectedly, joltingly reminded of passages in Packwood's diary by the most nonsensical things: a piece of white chicken meat, the inside of a cantaloupe, the bulb of an angel on our Christmas tree. But I prayed to You, every hour of every day. I bought a desk calendar with Your Word on every hour. And I was better.

I didn't know then that Packwood's diary was only the first step in my ruin, that his frenzied images were nothing but a means to weaken me for POTUS. I knew very well who POTUS was. I had watched him on television and at banquets, displaying his masterful, easy charm. POTUS was everything I wasn't and never wanted to be. He wasn't just cool. He was the Pope of the Church of Cool. POTUS discussed his underwear on television, tooted a horn for the wide-eyed naïfs. POTUS swept through a room like a powerful jolt of electricity. POTUS was good-looking and charming. POTUS wasn't a nerd, didn't wear glasses, wasn't bald, didn't have psoriasis. Nobody called POTUS Chauncy Gardner and Mister Rodgers. I had heard all the talk, too, about how POTUS had always betrayed his wife.
I have never cheated on my wife, Lord!

POTUS represented everything I was committed to fight against … for America and for You, my Lord: Abortion, promiscuity, pornography, suffragettes, homosexuals, AIDS, affirmative action, miscegenation, evolution, the Woodstock Nation, bilingual education, heathenism, communism, globalism, onanism, busing, rutting, flag burning, marijuana, clove cigarettes, herpes, tattoos, graffiti, pierced navels, Boogie boards, skateboards, sushi, Jolt, Brompton's Cocktail, bungee jumping, incense, the spotted owl, the Denim Bible,
The Ultimate Fighting Challenge,
bikinis, yoga, Altoids, protesters, demonstrators, longtime companions, anarchists, surfers, streakers, the Rosenbergs, Teletubbies, Studio 54, professional wrestlers, peace signs, the SDS, the IWW, the SLA, the ADL, the Rainbow Coalition, Nine Inch Nails, STDs, Marilyn Manson, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Manson, Warhol, Alger Hiss, Henry Reske, Mike Tyson, McGovern, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Ginzburg, Al Goldstein, Howard Stern, Jane Fonda, Gus Hall, Che Guevera, Ralph Nader, Mapplethorpe, the
Rolling Stone
s, rap, hip-hop, the Internet, Hollywood, massage parlors, massages, body paint, body parts, birth control, gay marriage, the polls.

I hated POTUS and what he stood for, and when I was asked to replace Fiske as Whitewater independent counsel, I was as happy as on days when Father would cut my hair and preach to me at the same time. I had the cross and the sword in hand now! Thanks to Your help, with Packwood's diary pushed to the back of my mind now, I had my old energy back. I would reveal POTUS as the low and base Borgia Pope that he was. I would force his followers to turn their faces from him in disgust. I would slay POTUS, and abortion and promiscuity and pornography and suffragettes and homosexuals and all the rest of it would die with him. Those who maligned me with their calumnies missed the point: I was
not
Inspector Javert. I was
not
Ahab obsessed with his white whale. I was Your St. George, facing Lucifer's dragon. I knew POTUS was guilty; all I had to do was to determine of what.

I began in Little Rock, a place built of excrement. I knew the full power of the stench now. It wasn't just POTUS; it was also his suffragette wife, FLOTUS. They were chest-deep in their own slime and corruption. But every time I was about to reach the link that would strip the clothes off both of them and expose their scrofulous nakedness, the link evaded me. Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate—the link would slip away. I sent Hubbell to jail and the harlot McDougal, but it did no good.

I kept hearing, again and again, about how POTUS had debased himself in pursuit of his fleshly pleasure. There were more stories about his debasement in Arkansas than there were watermelons. The more stories I heard, the more Packwood's diary haunted me all over again. I felt like my brain was a cavern of degradation, my Lord! Flesh danced in my sentence structures and dreams. I found myself confusing what Packwood had done and what POTUS had done. Alice was back in Washington; she couldn't help me. I looked in the mirror and saw an overwrought, overweight nerd with the pouches of sleeplessness beneath his sinner's eyes. I was afraid to fall asleep for fear of wetting the Little Rock Holiday Inn bed. But I did not betray You! I was not an accomplice in the evacuation of my seed.

Two events took place at roughly the same time. They are joined together in my mind. I read the Gennifer Flowers file that Bulldog Bittman and Jackie Bennett and some of my other disciples put together after interviewing her. She has a filthy mouth, my Lord! She has a beautiful filthy mouth, usually painted in hammer and sickle scarlet. I shouldn't have read the file.

I was not prepared—not even after Packwood's diary and the lascivious chitchat in Little Rock and my fevered dreams. How can Your creations do such things? Blindfolds and ropes and food from the refrigerator which they—
ice cubes
? For these purposes! When all of my life I have used ice cubes for the opposite effect! POTUS called her “Pookie.”

And I saw the photographs in the file, too. A young Pookie in her full shame! Pookie from every different angle! Pookie in close-ups! Pookie in color! I couldn't stop myself from staring at them, at her. I sat for hours in my office, the door locked and Pookie on the desk in front of me. I was rigid, literally petrified. I couldn't stop looking at her shame. She was disgusting! Pookie was so disgustingly perfect and so perfectly disgusting.

Shortly afterward, I met POTUS and FLOTUS at the White House. We took their depositions. I couldn't keep my eyes off him. He was his smiling, insidious self. I watched him and envisioned the photographs of Pookie in my files. He had done all of those abominable things to her, this smiling sinner sitting here with his betrayed wife. He had debased Pookie, impregnated her, and paid two hundred dollars for her abortion. Two hundred dollars! As I watched him and thought of her body and her shame, I resolved that if I didn't slay him, my life would be proved worthless.

But I was in worse pain than I'd ever been, my dreams filled with Packwood's hands and Pookie's shame and POTUS holding buckets of ice. And sometimes Alice and I would be in there, too. … My God, forgive me! I couldn't get it out of my mind! Even Alice wasn't much help to me anymore. She was unexplainably smiling much of the time, talking about our second honeymoon, waking me up at night. Were her lips painted, or was it my imagination? Had my sweet, loving, non-Jewish, baptized, Church of Christ wife now also become part of my infernal dreams? Or was Alice Pookie? Was I POTUS? Were Packwood, POTUS, and I taking turns with—was that Alice touching me or Packwood? Oh, abomination! Lamentation! Shame! Blasphemous ice cubes!
I did not abuse myself, my Lord! I have never cheated on my wife, my Lord!