American Rhapsody (35 page)

As Arianna appeared on more and more talk shows, trashing Bill Clinton, she began working with the voice coach for
Forrest Gump,
trying to get rid of her accent. She was the Sorceress of all of Washington now, impressively wealthy, still throwing her lavish parties for her spellbound conservative followers. Her research assistant was Matt Drudge's best friend. She even threw one big bash where Drudge was the guest of honor. Drudge came walking in with Lucianne Goldberg and all the guests started to applaud. The Scavenger, the Bag Lady of Sleaze, and the Sorceress had a fiendishly good time!

[ Act Three ]

SUSPICIOUS MINDS

To taste the savage taste of blood—to be so devilish!
To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy . . .

To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,
To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue.

—
WALT WHITMAN
, Leaves of Grass

[1]

The President Is Black

“He must feel as though everybody potentially can turn,” Linda Tripp said. “Do you know what I mean?”

“But that's his own fault.”

“Why?”

“Because if you fuck people over,” Monica said, “they're going to turn around and fuck you.”

W
hile Republicans in Congress formed into a posse riding full gallop to a lynching, it was those who had the most experience with lynchings who became Bill Clinton's staunchest defenders: African-Americans. Republicans didn't much want to be seen messing with
them.
Racism in the nineties had become the media's hanging offense. And those black people who were putting their bodies on the line in defense of Bill Clinton knew a thing or two about damagingly playing the race card against their adversaries.

Feeling themselves all too vulnerable anyway to charges of racism, Republicans found themselves outfoxed, outshouted, and, in the mid-term November elections, which they insisted on turning into a referendum on Bill Clinton, outvoted. When it came to their moment of no return—calling the president's devoted black secretary, Betty Currie, the woman at the epicenter of all the parsings and contradictions, as a live witness—they chickened out, fearing that if they called her, they would publicly cast themselves in the racist role too many of them privately played so well. The irony was enormous: Had Betty Currie and, to a lesser extent, Vernon Jordan been white, Bill Clinton very possibly would have been convicted and removed from office.

Bill Clinton, as Toni Morrison put it so well, was “the first black president of the United States”—one reason why the Republican posse hated him so much. But black people knew in their bones what this posse was about. The posse's spiritual ancestor was J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI icon who liked to wear red dresses and feather boas, who had one teenage boy read to him from the Bible while another diddled him wearing a rubber glove. The rheumy-eyed old queen had tried to do to Martin Luther King, Jr., what the posse was now forming to do to Bill Clinton.

Hoover, described as looking like “a remarkably ugly woman” when dressed in a short, flounced black dress with lace stockings, high heels, a curly black wig, pancake makeup, and false eyelashes, wasn't in good shape at the end of his reign. He hated people with moist palms or pimples or people who were bald or had their ears sticking out. He hated germs and flies, keeping on his staff a black servant whose duty was to swat them.

More than anything or anyone else, he hated Martin Luther King, Jr., especially after Dr. King won the Nobel Prize in 1964. Ferreting into Dr. King's private life, the kiddy-porn lover assigned his agents to tape-record Dr. King in flagrante delicto with a woman other than his wife. Hoover sent the tapes in an unmarked box to Coretta King, with an anonymous note that urged Dr. King to kill himself as “the honorable way out.” Dr. King didn't know, as he tried to keep his marriage together, that he was
still
being taped—that Hoover was giggling every evening as he listened to Dr. King's tortured discussions with his wife. But Dr. King didn't allow the tapes to stop the crusade that would transform America. When he was assassinated several years later, an FBI agent in Atlanta shouted, “We finally got the son of a bitch!”

As the posse formed for the lynching of Bill Clinton, African-Americans made it clear they were not going to allow the political assassination of “the first black president of the United States.” “Let us not be confused,” Jesse Jackson's son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., said. “The Republicans are impeaching Social Security, they are impeaching affirmative action, they are impeaching women's right to choose, they are impeaching Medicare, Medicaid, Supreme Court justices who believe in equal protection under the law for all Americans. Something deeper in history is happening than sex, lying about sex, and perjury.” Representative Maxine Waters, Democratic congresswoman from California, said, “This is indeed a Republican coup d'état. The Republicans will couch this extremist radical anarchy in pious language which distorts the Constitution and the rule of law. Bill and Hillary Clinton are the real targets, and the Republicans are the vehicles being used by the right-wing Christian Coalition extremists to direct and control our culture.” John Conyers, Democrat from Michigan, chairman of the congressional Black Caucus, said, “Impeachment was designed to rid this nation of tyrants and traitors, not attempts to cover up extramarital affairs.” Perhaps John Lewis, the venerable veteran of so many street-fought civil rights battles, put it most powerfully: “America is sick. Her heart is heavy. Her soul is aching. Who among us has not sinned?”

Black people heard the Republican rhetoric about raising the flag at Iwo Jima and the Founding Fathers and the incessant waving of the Constitution (which some Republicans kept in their pockets) and they knew damn well what they were hearing: It was the same old cracker bullshit. It had red-white-and-blue sparkles on top, but it still smelled to high heaven. More specifically, it was the same old
Republican
cracker bullshit . . . the party of Lincoln still mutated as the party of whippin', the party of lynchin'. Earl Butz was a Republican, wasn't he? He'd said, “All a black man needs is a new Cadillac, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.” And James Watt was a Republican, too, Reagan's secretary of the interior. And he'd said, talking about a commission he'd appointed, “We have every kind of mix you can have. I have a black. I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” And George Bush was a Republican, scaring all the white folks with that ad about bad Willie Horton, who just happened to be black, raising the specter of black people out there robbin', rapin', maraudin'. George Bush didn't even bother to make a trip to L.A. after the Rodney King explosion. And Nixon or Reagan—how many black faces had anyone seen around them? Eartha Kitt? Sammy Davis, Jr., with his Nehru jacket, love beads, and mile-long cigar? And James “Go for the Green” Brown? And what about right now—which black faces were in there among the Republicans? J.C. “Couldn't Make It to the NFL” Watt? Or Clarence “Long Dong Silver” Thomas, who liked to go fishing with that sexual-harassing cracker from Texas, Dick Armey? The truth, black people sensed, was not subtly hidden in lifelong Republican Linda Tripp's words. The Ratwoman said she didn't want to get her hair done during the Million Man March because she “didn't want to see all those—all those
bodies.
” (Chris Rock made the same point in reverse at the Republican National Convention: “I feel like I'm at the Million White Boy March.”)

Even among Democrats, black people had never felt like they had one of their
own.
Everybody knew LBJ was a cracker, him and his cowboy hats, talking about “nigger” this and “nigger” that among his cronies . . . . JFK believed it, he talked the talk, but did he walk off into the night with
black
women? Did he sit down and do some ribs with Jackie? . . . McGovern had as much soul as a Kiwanis Club president in a one-horse town . . . . Jimmah was okay, but he was a damned old fool when he was still a young man . . . . Dukakis or Du-who? or Du-whatever, aw, man, who
was
that chump? Somebody gonna do his woman and the chump says he gonna 
 . . . aw, man!

But now Bill—President Bill Clinton—he was different. No wonder he'd been called “Niggerhead” and “Nigger Lips” his whole life. No broomstick up his white ass. None of this “I share your concern” crap, a stiff shake of the hand and I'll see you next election. Bill Clinton could get down. In all kinds of ways. With the sax. With the ribs. With his shades. With the bitches.
Down, man,
human. Real. It was in his eyes and the way he hugged you if you were black. He meant it. He walked the walk in all
kinds
of ways. And Hillary. Maybe
she
wasn't black like he was black, but at least she tried. For a white bitch from the lily white suburbs, she
really
tried. Didn't she always say the greatest moment of her life was meeting Martin Luther King, Jr.? When she was up there in her private fancy Yankee school, didn't she try to make sure the brothers weren't done over by the
po-lice
? Didn't she even work for a Black Panther lawyer one summer? Didn't she go into the
ghet-to
when she was a girl, even if it
was
like a class trip to the zoo? Not bad. Not bad at all for someone from Park Ridge, Illinois, the same place that white-haired cracker with the sore ass was from . . . Hyde, Mr. Henry 
 . . . that fool gonna put the flag up on Iwo Jima again? . . .
Mr. Henry Hyde.

Bill Clinton knew and liked black people as much as he liked his fellow whites; didn't see an ounce of difference between them. Not even at first at the integrated convenience store his Papaw used to run. Played with black people, hugged them, cussed them, fought them, dated them, seduced them, passed legislation for them, tried to help them . . . and black people recognized that, relative to all the other white politicians, there was something special about him. Hillary didn't have his
flow,
and there was talk about how Hillary had dissed the only black man in the Senate when she was in college, but even that didn't matter, because lots of people thought Edward Brooke was more white than black, and anyway, he was a Republican. But Bill Clinton had
flow, ease, soul,
and when he ran for president, black voters responded to him. He'd kept his promises, too, just as he had in Arkansas, where he'd appointed an unprecedented number of black people to state boards and commissions. He appointed Ron Brown secretary of commerce, Mike Espy secretary of agriculture, Hazel O'Leary secretary of energy, Jesse Brown secretary of veterans' affairs, Clifton Wharton, Jr., deputy secretary of state, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders surgeon general. And he saved affirmative action and welfare from the planned cross-burning by Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” Republicans.

There was one other relatively hidden factor, too, which indicated the absolute lack of a smidgen of racism on Bill Clinton's part. Clearly a man who enjoyed intimate contact with women, he enjoyed intimate contact with
black
women, too. No wonder his name was William
Jefferson
Clinton. He may have been a sexual predator or he may have been a satyr, but he didn't discriminate. His willard was an equal opportunity predator, his satyriasis was integrated. The point was that he enjoyed contact with black flesh. No president since Thomas Jefferson had been known to enjoy that. JFK and LBJ had enjoyed contact with thousands of women and no one ever implied that even one of them was black. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was being linked with a black Little Rock newswoman, with a black former Miss America, with former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's daughter, with a black prostitute who claimed to have given birth to his child, linked even in Joe Klein's fictional
Primary Colors
to a black teenager whom he impregnates. The president of the United States was making love to black women in an America that had been suffering racial strife for forty years. Perhaps not the Great Emancipator, the Great Masturbator was also the Great Integrator. No wonder black people loved him and white racists hated him: Bill Clinton understood black people from the inside.

It drove the racists to their usual excess: Some claimed that the only reason Bill Clinton liked black women was because he was black himself. They pointed to the fullness of his lower lip, his mother's flirtatious nature, and his birth father's death while he was still in the womb. But if the racists thought they were damaging him by making their charges on the Internet and in faxed sheets, they were wrong. It only strengthened Bill Clinton's already-massive black support. Maybe he really
was
the first black president of the United States. Fine! Dig it! About damned time!

As the unyielding, adamantine nature of the president's black support became apparent, the same old polarization became apparent, too, the same deep electoral chasm we had seen during the Night Creature's reign between the Silent Majority and the rest of us. The Silent Majority then and now was made up of Christian Conservatives, Republicans, strict Constitutionalists, and nonrelative moralists screaming for Bill Clinton's lynching. They also included, as they always had, those people who simply didn't like “niggers.”

But there was a difference this time, as the November elections showed. There were more of us than them. They were no longer a majority. Those of us who had grown up in the sixties respected and, in some cases, revered black people. The unyielding nature of their support for Bill Clinton influenced those soccer moms and Little League dads who were maybe wavering in their support of the president who had dropped his wet, half-chewed cigar on their dinner tables. We were struck by the
steel
in the black response to the charges. We were reminded in our preretirement years that the battle for equality among whites and blacks in the sixties was still being fought by some people. We saw that the police batons now were in the hands of Gingrich and DeLay and Armey and Hyde, et al. We realized that black people felt if Bill Clinton was removed from office, they'd be back where they were before . . . because he was
one of them.
Were we, the white generation that had fought alongside our black brothers for civil rights, now going to let people like John Lewis, a hero to us in the sixties, down?

We had aged since then, too, and there was another element to this black anger that we found deeply troublesome. There was an anger at play here that we recognized from the sixties, its last manifestation the reaction to the Rodney King verdict not too many years ago. We remembered all too well the urban riots and racial conflagrations in Watts and Detroit and Cleveland and Newark and so many other cities. We remembered our cities burning and occupied by National Guardsmen. We remembered the explosion of black rage following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination as we remembered the more recent images of snipers on rooftops on Sunset Boulevard. But crime was down now.