A Colossal Wreck (22 page)

May 30

It seems that Bill Clinton’s staff schedules three hours each day for the Commander in Chief to read books and make phone calls. Michael Kaufman disclosed this in the
New York Times
last Saturday. At least these days Clinton is getting a bit more honest in describing his reading habits. In 1992, he tried to pretend that he liked nothing better than to curl up with the infinitely tedious
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius. Now he admits straightforwardly that he likes Walter Mosely, Sue Grafton and Jonathan Kellerman.

June 2

In the final months of World War II the Nazis tried to delay the advance of the Allies by opening the dikes in Holland. The man issuing this order was the German high commissioner in Holland, Seyss-Inquart. By the end of 1944 about 500,000 acres of land had been flooded, leading to what historian Gabriel Kolko called “the most precipitous decline in food consumption any West European country suffered during the war.” Of the 195 Nazis indicted at Nuremberg, Seyss-Inquart was one of twenty-four sentenced to death.

Seyss-Inquart merely opened dikes in Holland. Kolko, who commented on that consequent fall in Dutch food consumption, was testifying about this German war criminal at the Vietnam tribunal, convened by Bertrand Russell in 1967 to hold hearings into US war crimes in Indochina. Kolko told the tribunal how the US Air Force had bombed the Toksan dam near Pyongyan. The plan was to destroy the irrigation system supplying 75 percent of North Korea’s rice farms. A subsequent USAF study of the bombing of the Toksan and Chasan dams noted, “These strikes, largely passed over by the press, military observers and news commentators … constituted one of the most significant air operations of the Korean war.” Of these deeds, the USAF historian remarked equably that the timing was aimed to
be devastating in its psychological effect, when the exhausting labor of rice transplanting had been completed, but before the roots had become firmly embedded.

The bombing of the North Korean dams was a rousing success. Water bursting through the holes in the Toksan dam made by US bombs “scooped clean” miles of valley below, with the added bonus of not only wiping out the rice paddies but also drowning Korean civilians in underground shelters. The USAF study exulted that “to the Communists the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance—rice. The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning that the loss of this staple food commodity has for the Asian—starvation and slow death.” Another study detected “oriental fatalism” in the way the North Koreans carried on desperate repair efforts without regard for the delayed-action bombs also dropped around the target area.

Similar successful assaults were made on dams in Vietnam. In 1969 Henry Kamm, a
New York Times
reporter, recounted how there had been a dam south of Hue “blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese of a food supply.” Kamm returned later to find that the paddies had then been destroyed by salt water encroaching from the South China Sea.

June 9

The sole purpose of the bombing was to demonstrate to Serbia and to the world NATO’s capacity to bomb, thus killing nearly 2,000 civilians, destroying much of Serbia’s infrastructure, and prompting the forced expulsion and flight of around a million Kosovars. Wars have been triggered by the frailest of excuses and prolonged on the slightest of rationales.

This was the Cowards’ War, bombing a country for two and a half months from 30,000 feet. It was the Liberals’ War waged by social democracy’s best and brightest, intent on proving once again that wars can be fought with the best and most virtuous of intentions: the companion volume to Hillary Clinton’s
It Takes a Village
turns out to be
It Takes an Air Force
.

Americans who had supported Bill’s right to remain President even though he had kissed Monica Lewinsky began to turn sharply against him when he bombed Serbian schools.

Here in the US the war found almost all Democrats in Congress marshaled for war. The heroic exceptions were twenty-six Democrats in the House, led by Dennis Kucinich of Ohio—himself of Irish-Croat ancestry—who leagued with a majority of House Republicans twice to deny Clinton legitimization for his war. Most liberals favored the bombing. Gross was the spectacle of Susan Sontag brigading herself with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright in terming this bombing campaign “a just war.”

June 30

A fifteen-year-old girl attending a very ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast told me last week that 80 percent of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Dexedrine or Ritalin, either separately or in combo. The pretext used by the school authorities for the legal prescription of these drugs is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The student is asked three questions along the lines of “Do you find yourself daydreaming or looking out the window during the school?” Say yes, as 100 percent of all kids around the world throughout all human history will obviously do if they are truthful, and the kids’ parents are urged to give the school a go-ahead to pump in the brew of uppers and anti-depressants.

At this particular school, my informant told me, there’s also a flourishing under-the-counter market in the same drugs. She herself had resisted the school’s urgings to take Ritalin, but said that there is heavy pressure to do so, not least because a student on Ritalin or Dexedrine can, according to one theory, get perked for the brief period of an exam to perform better than a student who is drug free. She gave a heartrending description of a friend who had, by dint of the usual preposterous questions, had been diagnosed as having ADD, and who had been pushed into taking Ritalin and Prozac by the school and her parents, much against
her will. Previously a vivacious and jolly young thing, she is now strung-out, morose, thoroughly dispirited and probably on the way to expulsion.

Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, was on Luvox. Like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, Luvox is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI. The idea is to change the amount of serotonin reaching the brain and thus prevent depression. Kip Kinkel, the kid from Springfield, OR, who shot his parents and two students to death, was on Prozac.

One particularly gloomy view of Ritalin comes from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which issued this statement after a 1996 conference on ADHD and Ritalin: “The use of stimulants [such as Ritalin] for the short-term improvement of behavior and under-achievement may be thwarting efforts to address the children’s real issues, both on an individual and societal level. The lack of long-term positive results with the use of stimulants and the specter of previous and potential stimulant abuse epidemics, give cause to worry about the future. The dramatic increase in the use of [Ritalin] in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society about the problems children are having and how we view and address them.”

July 7

Back in the age of innocence, in the 1950s, kids ordered up their firepower out of catalogues and you’d see students heading to school on bus or subway, toting guns they’d be using later that day in the ROTC drills. Back then parents fretted over the horror of comics and switchblades. Let little Albert dip his nose too deeply into the blood-drenched comics being put out by publishers such as William Gaines of
Mad
magazine fame, and he’d surely be set on the slippery slope of crime and slaughter.

In fact Gaines was hauled before a committee run by that tireless grandstander, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who also held famous hearings at the time into racketeering and the Mob. Here’s an extract from the transcript of the committee’s encounter with Gaines, as it appears in Frank Jacobs’s very funny
The Mad World of William
M. Gaines
, published by Bantam in 1972. Gaines is being questioned by Hebert Beaser, one of the committee’s counsels:

BEASER: Is that the sole test of what you put in your magazines, whether it sells? Is there any limit of what you wouldn’t put in your magazine because you thought a child shouldn’t see or read about it?

GAINES: No, I wouldn’t say there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are bounds of good taste. What I consider good taste.

BEASER (probing): Then you think a child cannot in any way, shape or manner, be hurt by anything that the child reads or sees?

GAINES: I do not believe so.

BEASER (still probing): There would be no limit actually to what you’d put in magazines.

GAINES: Only within the bounds of good taste.

KEFAUVER (doubtful): Here is your May issue. This seems to be an arm with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?

GAINES: Yes, sir. I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher, so that the blood could be seen dripping from it, and moving the body over a little so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

(Murmurs, stirrings among spectators.)

KEFAUVER (still doubtful): You’ve got blood coming out of her mouth.

GAINES: A little.

KEFAUVER: And here’s blood on the ax. I think most adults are shocked by that. Now here’s a man with a woman in a boat and he’s choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?

GAINES: I think so.

HANCOCK: How could it be worse?

HENNINGS (coming to the rescue): Mr. Chairman, I don’t think it is really the function of our committee to argue with this gentleman.

Jacobs reports that Gaines more than held his own in the initial hours of testimony, but then faded abruptly, seeming harassed and defensive. The reason was that he’d ingested a bracing dose of Dexedrine, thinking he’d ride through the session on its coattails only to find that the drug’s effects had worn off abruptly, leaving him high and dry.

July 9

One of the joys of talking to Larry Pratt, President of the Gun Owners of America, is that one can hear Charlton Heston denounced as a cocktail-swilling, brie-nibbling Hollywood sellout, only too delighted to betray the Second Amendment if it means he gets his face on network TV and taken seriously on Capitol Hill.

And it’s true. Heston’s NRA collapsed in the wake of the Columbine killings in Colorado. Only a combo of House conservatives and liberals was able to beat back the recent gun bill. Even so Pratt still fears that another house bill could get conferenced with New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg’s Senate Bill 254, which could introduce laws making it all but impossible for gun shows to continue to operate. Liberals hate gun shows, regarding them as the seedbeds of all that’s wrong with America. This is nonsense. Gun shows do of course attract people eager to exercise their Second Amendment rights, collect or exchange various types of firearms and so forth. They are also vibrant rendezvous for important elements of popular American culture. They are anti-government, genuinely populist and lots of fun. Which is why the better element, Lautenberg in the lead, wants to do them in.

Pratt’s solution to the schoolyard killings: let the teachers bear arms, just like they do in South Africa, where one instructor recently gunned down a bellicose student. Pratt also faxed me an interesting
recent study on urban delinquency, put out by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (part of the Justice Department) in 1994. This was a survey of delinquency in Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Denver, tracking delinquency “pathways,” as affected by drugs, school attendance, parental oversight, gang membership and so forth. The study shows clearly enough that one way of keeping kids out of trouble is to let them carry legal guns. Out of 1,000 boys and girls surveyed in Rochester in the early 1980s, some 7 percent of the boys owned illegal guns by the ninth and tenth grades. Legal guns are held by 3 percent. There is a strong correlation between illegal guns and delinquency and drug use. Seventy-four percent of the illegal gun owners commit street crimes, 24 percent commit gun crimes and 41 percent use drugs. Then the Justice Department study continues, “Boys who own legal firearms, however, have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even
slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns
” (my italics).

July 14

Gore and George W. are alike as two peas, right down to the same slightly dazed look that comes of having big-time politicians as fathers and interesting encounters with powerful drugs in their formative years. I don’t know anything about Gore’s mother, but Barbara Bush was one of the nastier women I’ve ever interviewed (a half-hour session in 1979, when George Sr. was fighting Ronald Reagan for the nomination). Maybe there’s a difference here.

In fact a debate between Al and George W. on the subject of parents—
their
parents—might be the sole means of putting together an exciting debate in 2000. Imaginatively staged, with both men injected with sodium pentothal, and moderated by Geraldo Rivera and Gail Sheehy, such an encounter might scrape off the dreadful rime of banality that cakes their public personae and reveal the wounded egos beneath.

As a force capable of reinvigorating our political DNA the left is in terrible shape. The radical right—which has contributed 80 percent of the political energy in the country for the past twenty years—is
almost as impotent although more healthily endowed with a hostility to state power. The left will never break away from the Democratic Party to any important degree, since the institutional ties between labor and Democrats will never allow it. Who else might precipitate a reinvigoration of the system?

July 21

You would have thought that after Chappaquiddick the Kennedy clan would have imposed a permanent ban on any visits, or attempted visits, to Martha’s Vineyard. The problem in that family seems to be an incapacity to assess odds properly or absorb the lessons of the past. So here we have John, arriving late with his wife and sister-in-law at that airport in New Jersey, calling it wrong. He must have known he would have to land at dusk or after. He knew he would have to rely on his eyes, since he didn’t know how to fly on instruments. At this point a prudent person would have thought twice. A prudent person wouldn’t have skied down a slope, playing a ball game and holding a video camera. A prudent person …