Bush Is Doing Well by Doing Nothing
As the press corps sweats it out in Waco, wishing they were back on Martha's Vineyard, Bush climbs steadily in the polls. When Bush first announced he'd spend a month on his ranch outside Waco there was some pro-forma huffing in the liberal press about the President's prolonged vacation. A true hands-on leader should apparently sweat August out in Washington, with occasional sorties to Camp David.
But not for the first time in world history a nation's leader is finding that absence from the nation's capital sits well with the people. The only time this rule doesn't apply is in times of war, when the people want their man right at Ground Zero. Otherwise, the people find it soothing to have their president out of harm's way, swatting away at golf balls (Eisenhower) or chopping cord after cord of firewood (Reagan) or chasing bonefish off the Florida Keys (Bush Sr.). True to form, Clinton tried to have it both ways, being on holiday in Jackson Hole or Martha's Vineyard, but feeling impelled to rush out for photo ops in Yellowstone or to order the Navy to bombard Iraq. He did visit the golf course a lot, probably because these sexless excursions offered proof that he wasn't philandering. (Even so, the screwed-up knee he got on one golfing trip to Florida was supposedly a cover for tearing a tendon while cavorting with his mistress of the hour.)
See how readily I start reminiscing about Bill, whose biography is now about to be manicured by a ghostwriter in the form of Taylor Branch? I've grown fond of our current president precisely because he makes so few demands on one's intellectual and emotional reserves, which can then be squandered in ruminations about his adorable wife. Bill and the awful Hillary were a constant preoccupation, like having a couple of hippos in the house on a full-time basis.
Just the other day I was reading a chapter about the social unacceptability, hence subversiveness, of fatness in Laura Kipnis' extremely funny and intelligent 1996 book about porn, Bound and Gagged. She's describing a porn film called Mother Load 1, in which two women with a combined weight of 790 pounds discuss whether to go shopping. After a brief tiff in which they don red boxing gloves and "batter away while the camera roves around, over and between mountains of soft, quivering blubber," they collapse on the bed and do some perfunctory fondling of each other. "Eventually some of the lingerie comes off, and the frame fills with rolls and rolls of fat, and the camera gets as close as it can without causing injury?it seems to want to lodge itself between those deep pleats of flesh and take up residence as these two huge bodies heave and crash together like some ancient race of flabby female Titans."
Laughing over this I fell into a reverie about Bill and Monica Lewinsky and suddenly realized just how important had been the fact that they both were on the losing side of battles with fatness. The losing fight was crucial to their appeal, hence to Bill's political survival. I think America forgave them because of their plumpness. It was the victory of the pleasure principle over the Nautilus machine and the jogging track.
That's the main conundrum posed by George W. Ever since he supposedly forswore booze and running around, where's pleasure in his life? Of course for many politicians the mere fact of being in a position of power furnishes the necessary pleasure, but somehow Bush, to his credit, doesn't strike one that way. The women around Bush, not just Laura but also Jenna and Barbara, are obvious fun-lovers. We all know he likes to be tucked up by 10 p.m., but is it so that he and Laura can work their way through the Kama Sutra, or is he praying to Jesus?
Round Up the Usual Ironies
Meanwhile, all the usual ironies populate the landscape. Take the great symbolic environmental fight of Bush's first year: the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR). I was working my way through an article in the National Review by Rich Lowry, mostly devoted to the hash Don Rumsfeld is making of his job running the Defense Dept. But then, near the end, came this passage, apropos of the desire of the White House to diminish Bush's conservative profile: "On this model, Bush should abandon his ANWR drilling plan?which may produce only a negligible amount of oil anyway?and pursue photo-ops with caribou."
Within minutes of finding the National Review shouting, "Hands off the caribou and the Wildlife Reserve," I came across an item by Bob Novak, to the effect that the Teamsters Union is lobbying Sen. Tom Daschle fiercely to drop a proposed filibuster against plans to drill for oil in the reserve. "The union's vote-counters," Novak wrote, "see between 46 and 51 senators in support of drilling?close in an up-and-down vote but far short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster."
Novak added that Sen. Dan Inouye is also pushing strongly for drilling. Inouye is siding with Alaska's Eskimos, who favor drilling in ANWR's chunk of the North Slope in the futile hope that this will keep the oil companies out of the Beaufort Sea, where the Eskimo hunt whales and seals. The Alaskan Indians, in the form of the Gwich'in people, don't want drilling inside the reserve because they fear it will mess up the caribou migrations. Life sound complicated to you? Try this.
Meanwhile David Orr, Sierra Club activist and leader of the gallant fight to drain Lake Powell, tells me that Anne Ehrlich, Sierra Club board member (and wife of the Malthusian fanatic Paul Ehrlich), is boosting British Petroleum as Good Guy oil company, one whose gas one can buy with a relatively clear conscience on the grounds that the company is sensitive to the problem of global warming. The Sierra Club is in the forefront of the fight to save the reserve. BP is a member of the consortium hoping to drill in the reserve, and indeed everywhere else in and around Alaska.
Can an Oil Company Be "Good"?
On this business of "good" oil companies, anyone driving down an interstate asks themselves once in a while, Is there a "good" oil company? Don't bother. It's the wrong question, like asking Is there a "good," in the sense of virtuous, place in Manhattan in which to be mugged. Better to ask yourself which gas stations have the cleanest bathrooms. So far as I'm concerned, Sunoco is good because it sells 94 octane gas. Chevron is good because here in Northern California, down Hwy. 101 between Humboldt County and the Bay Area, its stations have good Mexican food franchises. The soft tacos with carnitas, also the tamales, are of the finest quality. The bathrooms are clean, and Chevron's high-test 93 octane gas isn't bad either.
As for Chevron's morals, they're predictably terrible. Back in the apartheid years the company was particularly tight with the white minority regime, and it remained active throughout the boycott. Chevron led the entry of drillers into Papua New Guinea, where Caltex (an operation Chevron shared with Texaco) murderously suppressed indigenous protests. Inside the U.S. Chevron has an appalling record on oil spills and toxic releases. But how do these offenses rate against BP's complicity with the Colombian military? Why try to discriminate?
How's Brown Doing?
Tom Hayden's had a minor heart attack, which shows us where the 60s have got to. What about the 70s? By then Hayden had become a booster of Gov. Jerry Brown, and only this week I was chided fiercely by Michael Jacob, a Bay Area radical, for my kindly words for Jerry Brown when he became mayor of Oakland. Indeed I was probably a bit soft on Brown, having spent the 70s saying he was a fraud, probably the decade when he less deserved that designation. But Brown's recent record isn't good. On crime, he's supported Oakland's "Beat Feat" program to confiscate and auction off cars that were allegedly used in drug deals. He's defended racial profiling on the basis that Oakland's premier task is to reduce crime. The OPD is notorious for its violence and propensity to fake evidence.
Worst of all has been his so-called "revitalization" of downtown Oakland, achieved with a scheme of promoting the arrival of 10,000 new residents in the downtown area, tucked into perhaps the most insidious work he has done around housing/environment/downtown redevelopment. He has promoted the old policy of revitalization through removing blight?with blight being poor people. He has pushed for the 10K plan?10,000 new residents in the downtown area, requiring about 6600 units?with a market price on these units estimated to be around $400,000 or more for a one-bedroom apartment.
As Jacob puts it in a note to me, "Much of this development would require the removal of SRO units that serve the poor. In other words, Jerry's 'revitalization' seems to be to replace the current population, none of whom could afford this housing, for a more desirable and wealthy lot. Brown has said flat out that he doesn't want to provide housing that is affordable for most people. He says we have too much affordable housing?his idea of 'diversity' is to balance the overabundance of poor people by replacing them with rich people. Some people have called this 'Jerryfication.'"
True to form, in his mayoral prattling about making Oakland a "World Class City," Brown refers to ancient Rome and Athens (in one NPR interview). As Jacob caustically points out, "it seems like he really means it, returning to slaves serving a tiny propertied?but very bright and artistic, mind you?class."
Long before Brown, Oakland's civic leaders have yearned to return the place to its 19th-century glories when its elegant houses and amenities outranked the dreary sand dunes and hills that were waterless San Francisco's prime features. And the problem has always been the same. How to get rid of the poor. At the moment downtown Oakland has a shabby charm, and a pleasant Chinatown. The man who cut my hair in Berkeley told me three weeks ago that he could just afford a tiny apartment there. If Brown succeeds, he'll have to move in the end, just as did all the bohemians and low renters living in the Mission on the other side of the Bay.
As a World Class City, Oakland would be a nightmare, just like almost all the other world-class cities, though I have to say that Paris and Geneva, which I just visited on the way to my daughter Daisy's wedding, were delightful, probably because the dollar is strong right now, and one can gourmandize on the cheap. Staying in Paris in the Fifth Arrondissement behind the Jardin des Plantes, I haven't enjoyed the place as much in many years, even though newspapers were profuse with stories about the murderous discontent of youth, the racism and so forth. Guzzling a grilled pig's foot on the Rue Linné, such difficulties did not overly weigh on me. In Carouge, an old village that has now become a suburb of Geneva, the proprietor of one restaurant pushed hard for us to eat the loup de mer, or sea bass. He said it was of incomparable freshness, and indeed it was. Where are you from, he asked. The U.S., I answered, and originally from Ireland. He paused, gazed at me gloomily, then said, "Rome, c'est la poubelle du monde." Rome is the dustbin of the world. Better that than a World Class Dustbin.