A Colossal Wreck (20 page)

Remembering the bit about the “neurotic, Cinderella type,” we find Cesarani quoting Koestler on his taste in women: “I always picked one type: beautiful Cinderellas, infantile and inhibited, prone to be subdued by bullying.” Just so, he seems to have bullied his third wife into a suicide pact with him, which included dispatch of the family
dog. He was seventy-seven with leukemia and Parkinson’s; she was twenty-one years younger.

There’s a thread between Koestler’s tastes, rapes and passage with Communism. JoAnn Wypijewski sent me a few other quotes from his essay: “I was running after the Party, thirsting to throw myself completely into her arms, and the more breathlessly I struggled to possess and be possessed by her, the more elusive and unattainable she became.” Maybe post-Communist Koestler wrote those words, then went off and raped a “Cinderella type,” just to feel better and get his own back on the party.

1999

January 13

Listening to someone on CNN the other day describe the ceremony surrounding day one of the impeachment process, I realized that at last America has its answer to British royal coronations. Wolf Blitzer, or one of his CNN colleagues, had exactly the same hushed intonation that Richard Dimbleby used to describe proceedings in Westminster Abbey: “And here comes Black Rod, carrying the ewer of holy oil, in a tradition that has continued unbroken since Richard II.” “And now the group of thirteen Republicans presenting the charges against President Clinton is entering the Senate chamber in a tradition unbroken since Andrew Johnson …”

As I’ve always maintained, every presidency should have its impeachment, to begin on the Thursday following the first weekend of every third year in each presidential term. Under this practice Bill Clinton would have already survived his first impeachment back in 1995. It’s wonderful to see how Clinton of all people has reinvested the presidency with historical dimension. The other day at the post office I actually heard two people arguing about Reconstruction.

January 20

Bill Clinton’s most torrid love affair has always been with the twenty-first century and with his own role in ushering it in. And as so often in
the past the Republicans showed at Tuesday night’s State of the Union that they have no coherent strategy for dealing with the relationship. The President said that it was his hope that in the new millennium no older American would live in fear of penury or hunger. The Democrats applauded and the cameras turned to Republican house majority leader Dick Armey, who sat grimly with arms folded. The President hailed America’s fighting men and women and looked forward to a more peaceful world. The camera picked up the empty seats of Republican legislators like Henry Hyde, who’d chosen to stay away.

One could see the Republicans’ desperation not only in Armey’s graceless pose and in Hyde’s contemptuous absence, but also in the formal party response to Clinton’s address by House Republicans Jennifer Dunn and Steve Largent. In the old days they would have showered any Democratic President with ribald invective about tax-and-spend liberalism, but Clinton spiked those guns long ago. So Dunn and Largent used most of their allotted spans prattling about their normalcy, their children. Perhaps the idea was to strike a contrast with the satyr of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but if so, it didn’t work. To beat Bill Clinton at the game of launching America into an even more prosperous future you need an orator of equivalent effrontery and political hucksterism, like Newt Gingrich.

But Newt, who loves gassing about the twenty-first century as much as Bill, is gone, and the Republicans are clearly in dire straits. To watch them these days is like watching a gambler mortgaging everything to one rash bet. In the Republicans’ case it’s the hope that after a year of steadily mounting evidence to the contrary, some new disclosure, some toxic affidavit from Jane Doe, an appearance by Monica Lewinsky as witness at the Senate impeachment hearings, will turn the tide.

Maybe it will happen but the chances seem dim. Meanwhile Clinton’s speech Tuesday night shows the political mess they’re in, quite aside from the unpopularity of their attempts to kick Clinton out of office. If there’s a president who has managed to touch more political buttons in one speech, it’s hard to recall him.

For the liberals and the AFL-CIO there was the President’s call for the minimum wage to go up by a dollar. For Wall Street there was a gesture to the great goal of privatizing Social Security and handing it over to the mutual funds industry (something that Clinton had been on the verge of doing, when the Lewinsky scandal broke and he decided he need every friend in Congress he could muster). Law and order types got the pledge to keep people in prison till they are drug free and the military got its promise of a hike in defense spending. Women heard language about an ending of discrimination and a female President, and gays got a pledge on hate crimes.

To be sure, Clinton’s speech was ripe with brazen affronts to reason and justice. His proposed “reform” of Medicare included an injunction to sick old people to be smart shoppers. He permitted himself a populist sneer at international trade agreements and then threw in a plea for presidential fast-track authority to make them. The man who spoke in emotional tones about “humanizing” international trade agreements is the same Bill Clinton who once helped to push through the inhuman Multilateral Agreement on Investments.

One could go on like this, with a radical riposte to every second paragraph in Clinton’s lengthy address. America’s precious heritage? This is the administration that’s throwing the rest of Alaska’s arctic plain to the oil industry. But here again the Republicans have saved Bill Clinton from the insistent criticism from the left he deserves. Who—among liberals and leftists—wants to be on the same side as the Republican house managers?

Rhetorically speaking, the President does well when he is in peril. It was the same last year, just after the Lewinsky scandal broke. One simply has to admire his resilience. After all the narrow shaves and premature political death notices down the years, Clinton clearly believes in a visceral sense, far more profound than balanced political assessment, that he’s going to make it. This brash life force shines through and to judge by the polls most Americans admire such determination to survive on the political stage. And here again is the Republican’s problem. Clinton’s greatest love, for the future, is one beyond the scope of Ken Starr’s investigations. And since they have bet all on Starr, what can they do?

February 17

There are two ways to look at Bill Clinton’s persecution, both of them valid, one inspiriting and the other dismal. The inspiriting truth about the long scandal, terminated by Senatorial acquittal of the President last Friday by a simple majority on both counts, is that puritanism was vanquished. This is truly a glorious victory. Puritanism runs through America with as dark a trail of misery as in other societies cursed with its oppressive shadow.

Clinton was truly saved by the ordinary people. The elites would have finished him off months ago. And what the ordinary people have been saying is that they do not accept the premise (and all the hypocrisies that premise engenders) that presidents and politicians have to be moral exemplars. The ordinary people have stated clearly life is messy, but that getting in that sort of mess is not an impeachable offense.

The dismal aspect to Clinton’s travails concerns the rise of the prosecutorial state, whose shadow ordinary people dislike as much as they do puritans.

I stand to receive $1,000 from an east coast publisher, Russ Smith, who bet Bill would go, though I shall have to wait until Clinton steps down at the end of his term. That publisher has conceded that if Clinton is struck dead by a meteorite or run over by a car, my victory will stand, since our bet is about the President’s survival of the scandal, not any bolt from heaven. I also stand to get another $250 from an unwise associate of this publisher. Even in the final week of impeachment there were offers to wager even more money, coming from right-wing conspiratorialists with the devout belief that a fresh wave of scandals will lay Bill low.

March 15

WHOSE INDEPENDENCE?

Dear Bruce,

During the recent Senate “trial” of Bill Clinton, few journalists invested so many words in the defense of Bill Clinton than Cockburn.
Yet, now that Clinton—under cover of NATO—has taken small baby steps toward stopping an ongoing genocide, Cockburn wants Clinton impeached. What gives?

In his despicably titled “Sieg Hiel, NATO,” Cockburn asserts that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia. He also asserts that whatever is happening in Kosovo is an “internal affair” of “sovereign Serbia” and therefore nobody else’s business. So NATO’s military actions against Serbia (NATO being a front group for US imperialists) are “illegal.” Another example of “shameless” American “gangsterism.”

What’s funny is that Cockburn’s idea of what constitutes international law and order matches Henry Kissinger’s. It is a view shared by that old drunk running Russia and by the bent-over little Stalinists running China. In fact, about every blood-soaked dictator in the world agrees that “national sovereignty” is a licence to kill off whatever “restless ethnic minority” that happens to be plaguing them.

Then Cockburn departs from such company to blame Clinton and the US for failing to stop the recent genocides in east Africa. Cockburn can blame us if he wants to, but why doesn’t he blame the Organization of African Unity or the United Nations? And if some sinister western power is behind all of the bad things that happen in this world, then Cockburn should blame the massacres on the French and not us.

Cockburn assails NATO for usurping the rightful authority of the UN. Yet, given the UN’s disgraceful record as peace keepers and abject inability to mount any type of military action, why would NATO want the UN’s “help”? If you were trying to work out a will with your family, why would you invite your deranged distant cousin?

I respectfully decline to dip my beard into the intricate goulash of Balkan politics. But I do know genocide when I see it. When I was in Vietnam I developed a grudging respect for the Viet Cong. Soldier to soldier, I had to admire their courage, discipline and willingness to sacrifice. I’ve been watching the Serbian army operate for years, first in Slovenia, then in Croatia, then in Bosnia and now in Kosovo. What I see is a ragtag bunch of neo-Nazis whose depravity is matched only by their cowardice (and the cowardice of NATO and the UN).

In this sorry human catastrophe there is plenty of blame to go
around. But for this war—and war it will be—we can put the blame squarely on the Serbs. In their attempt to exterminate a people so they can take over their land they have forfeited their claim to the land. The “end game” for the Serb invaders of Kosovo should be: disband and disperse, be killed or be captured. For the regime of Milo
ević and his butchers, there should be extinction. For the Kosovars, whose blood now waters their ancestral lands, Independence.

B. Patterson

Boonville

Alexander Cockburn replies: This is the true yawp and blare of the demented, power-mad assholes who got us into Vietnam, and ended up killing over two million people. Invincible ignorance married to overweening arrogance. Start with Patterson’s concept of sovereign rights. I assume, on his “first-come” theory, that he will raise no objection when an Indian kicks him out of his house in Boonville. Next move to Patterson’s theory of foreign relations, which owes everything to the ethos that exterminated Indians here: namely an “end game” brusquely characterized as “disband and disperse, be killed or be captured.” And behind that, the even brusquer and indubitably final solution: “extinction.”

Of course Patterson apes the CNN brigade which relentlessly devalues the word “genocide.” The Serbs aren’t committing genocide. If they were, there would be no refugees. The common estimate of deaths in Kosovo before the NATO bombing started is 2,000. Genocide? Give me a break.

The UN’s role as peace-keeper will always be only as good as the dominant powers permit it to be. There have been some successes and many failures. That doesn’t vitiate the infinite superiority of the UN as, at least in outline, a world forum, as opposed to NATO which is an aggressive, regional military alliance. And as for the UN’s “abject inability to mount any type of military action,” the eviction of Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 was a UN action. Bush spent months cementing a UN alliance against Saddam. It’s a mark of the accelerated trend of the US toward international gangsterism that the NATO bombardiers have steered clear of any UN forum.

Before calling the Serbs “neo-Nazis” Patterson should read a little history. Hitler invaded Serbia in World War II and more than a million Serbs lost their lives, many of them in Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by the Croats. And the Serb fighters for whom Patterson displays such contempt still managed to tie down several Nazi divisions for years.

March 29

It was Jeff Frieden, some time in the mid-1980s, who urged me to call Lynn Turgeon for advice and counsel on Eastern European economies. Lynn, he explained, was a prof of economics at Hofstra and an original thinker. I talked to Lynn—the first in hundreds of such conversations—and swiftly realized he had the quality, so admired by harried columnists, of expressing ideas in clear, unpatronizing terms. Lynn was a passionate Keynesian, which sometimes lent an unguarded edge to his discussion of Hitler’s economic policies or Reagan’s military deficits. Across a decade or so of phone calls, he gave me an education in the economic history of the twentieth century that was always bracing.