From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith, 2006 - When I was a radio newsman in the late 1950s, I would sometimes snag the late or early shift and have to drive from my apartment on Capitol Hill the hundred blocks or so out 16th Street to Silver Spring. The streets were dark, silent and empty and I would turn on a black radio station and listen to The Cabbie's Serenade -- a show, the host said in a mellow post-midnight voice, dedicated to "all you guys driving the loneliest mile in town." Then Al Jefferson would play the blues to keep you company.
As I wandered deep into the mysteries of William Jefferson Clinton, the memory of those nights returned more than once. As one of a minuscule number of non-conservative journalists to make the trip, the streets were often dark, empty, and silent.
By the standards of my background, my trade, and my politics -- as I was frequently reminded -- I should never have never gone this way. Nothing I have ever done -- none of my activism, none of my writing, none of my choices -- left me so much the outsider as trying to write the truth about Clinton. It often seemed the loneliest mile in town.
There was a lot that was famliar. After all I hadtwo decades close to the story of Marion Barry, first as a friend and fellow activist, later as an observer and critic whom Barry described as "a cynical cat."
Initially I played a role with Barry not unlike many around Bill and Hillary Clinton. In fact, from the start I recognized something familiar about Bill Clinton. The soft southern voice unwavering in its glib assurance, the excuse for everything, the absence of inquiry, the cynical charm, a cause well used a quarter century ago and then forgotten, the adulterated intelligence, the inconsistency, the willingness to use anything or anyone, the undisciplined egocentrism, the populist rhetoric playing bumper tag with corporatist policies, the drugs, the women, the whiff of the underworld. It was not new; I had, after all, known Marion Barry for over 25 years.
There were other things that I recognized. For example, I knew enough political history to understand that modern corruption was largely a Democratic invention and that it had two primary branches: northern urban and southern ubiquitous. It wasn't that Republicans were more honest; perhaps they were just too greedy to share the wealth and thus seldom had time to build a good machine before getting caught. In any case, finding another corrupt Democrat was nothing new.
Then, some months before the 1992 campaign, I read Sally Denton's Bluegrass Conspiracy -- a stunning description of how illegal drugs corrupted Kentucky right up to the governor's office. The early tales from Arkansas contained eerie echoes of Kentucky. There were also new scents of old trails I had followed while writing about Reagan and Bush -- back when no one ever accused me of being a conspiracy theorist for just reporting what I had found. The droppings of BCCI and Iran-Contra, of S&L scandals and the CIA were in Arkansas as well.
Several months before the 1992 convention I compiled a list of troublesome things that had already surfaced in that state, drawing a flow chart to link the people and institutions involved. It was the first time any journalist had connected the dots. Some of the names would become much more familiar: Webster Hubbell, Seth Ward, Genifer Flowers, Dan Lasater, the Arkansas Development Finance Agency, Mena, Buddy Young, even the Indonesian multi-millionaire, Mochtar Riady. There were suggestions of illegal intelligence operations, illegal drug running, illegal financial manipulations, threats of violence, not to mention run-of-the-mill political corruption. It was a disturbing, but more disturbing was that no one seemed to care much about it. The Clinton juggernaut was already well under way.
o
My own problem with Clinton quickly became three-fold. I was convinced that he was one of the most corrupt politicians I had ever run across. I was equally certain that despite his idealistic rhetoric, the political Clinton was like the Raymond Chandler character: "smart, smooth and no good." In philosophy and practice, Clinton was a fraud.
My third problem was the reaction of others to my first two problems. A piece I wrote in May 1992 suggesting that the Democrats dump Clinton while there was still time was not well received by my liberal colleagues, especially those in Americans for Democratic Action where I was an executive vice president engaged with others in a quixotic effort to resuscitate the old war horse of liberalism. A few months earlier, Clinton had attracted only minimal support within the organization; now the leadership was pressing for an early endorsement on the grounds that it would endear Clinton to the liberal cause. This fantasy would only be the first in a long string of masochistic liberal delusions about Clinton, a failure to understand that, to their candidate, politics was the same to him as sex: a one-way street. You gave, he received.
Earlier that same spring I ran into Don Graham on 15th Street. He asked me whom I was supporting in the Democratic primaries. When I said Jerry Brown, the publisher of the Washington Post grabbed my arm and waved it in the air shouting to the cars and pedestrians, "I've found one! I've found a real live Brown supporter!"
o
Still, I couldn't bring myself to sit out the election as I had in 1968, and so I followed Mae West's dictum, namely that when faced with two evils, always pick the one you haven't tried before. I voted for Clinton.
Shortly after Clinton's inauguration, I was invited to a conference on third party politics sponsored by the Green Politics Network. I had arrived at Bowdoin College with caution but left realizing that my political discomfort was with far more than just one man -- I had developed an irreparable distrust and disgust with what the Democratic Party had become.
In April, I was asked to write a book about Clinton's first year for Indiana University Press. About the same time, the leadership of ADA decided to purge those of us they considered a problem. When I first heard of this -- shortly before entering the hospital for prostate cancer surgery -- I was stunned. For all previous executive vice presidents, the only grounds for termination had been death. Did the leadership of ADA know something that I didn't?
No, it was just that ADA had decided to end years of populist insurgency in its ranks, simulating the Democratic Leadership Council's successful efforts at quashing dissent within the Democratic Party. I and a number of other board members who had failed to hew to the party line were to be kicked out of our offices. Liberalism would once again be safe from the winds of change. Included in our number was a former national treasurer, the current chair of the Chicago chapter, and the former chair of Youth for Democratic Action.
About a year and a half earlier we had formed a "progressive caucus" within ADA. The paleo-liberals in the leadership -- some of whom had done battle against Henry Wallace's Progressive Party -- took kindly to neither the idea nor the irony of the name. We were not openly accused of political incorrectitude. At first we weren't accused of anything. Later -- and only after Washington's City Paper got wind of the purge -- we were charged with being "disruptive troublemakers."
I was personally accused of acting like both John the Baptist and Svengali towards the younger members, a remarkable blend of virtues and vices. In fact, our trouble-making had consisted largely of writing letters and introducing resolutions the ADA leadership didn't like. Apparently in ADA, dissent was a political dirty trick.
I was initially quite aggravated at the purge until it occurred to me that being a certified ex-liberal had a certain appeal. The truth was that liberals weren't doing much at all. ADA's most notable achievements had become its annual rating of Congress and its Christmas time toy safety survey. Eugene McCarthy had described the group as having been formed to keep liberals safe from Communists but now dedicated to keeping liberals safe from dangerous toys.
To some of us in the organization, ADA's ineffectiveness was unfortunate and unnecessary. We naively assumed that the group would be open to new ideas and strategies. Nothing proved further than the truth. Even when an alternative drug policy was twice approved by a national convention over the almost apoplectic opposition of ADA's leadership, the matter was simply filed away so that no one outside the organization would ever hear about it. As the Texas politician said, I don't mind losing when I lose, but I hate losing when I win.
During one convention, the leadership became so concerned that they called in the titular leader of the organization, Rep. Charles Rangel, to debate drug and crime expert Eric Sterling. Sterling got things off to a rocky start by reminding Rangel that they had met in Bolivia while on a congressional fact-finding mission. In fact, Sterling pointed out, they had shared coca tea together with their hosts. Rangel almost turned white.
The ADA establishment - some of which went back to the organization's founding in the late 1940s -- was as adept at internal judo as it was lethargic in broader political action. An extraordinary amount of effort was spent maintaining political correctness within the group while the nation drifted undisputedly towards the right. Some of the organization's leaders brought to mind Charles Hodge, who taught at Princeton Seminary in the early 19th century. Hodge boasted that in his fifty years of teaching he had never broached a new or original idea.
To be sure, as in a bad movie, occasional scenes brought things to life. For example, ADA helped to sink the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork and worked hard on single-payer health insurance. Many of ADA's other positions were admirable, although one often admired them somewhat in the sense that one admired a restored Studebaker.
This once vibrant organization rested on the political landscape, as Disraeli once said of the opposition bench, like a range of exhausted volcanoes.
o
Which was all right, because I needed time to recover from my operation and write my book. I asked my editor, John Gallman, when a book on Clinton's first year would have to be finished, and he laughed and recalled me having phoned him to say that my first book, Captive Capital, would be two weeks late. "I wasn't used to working in that short a time-frame, said Gallman who rode herd on the literary efforts of mostly academic types.
Gallman, the patient, skilled, and thoughtful editor of Indiana University Press, seemed quite satisfied with the book I wrote. He thought I should have omitted mention of the Gennifer Flowers affair and had been too cynical concerning the supposed virtues of free trade, but generally indicated that not only was the book well done but that it was newsworthy and would attract a readership.
We did have an argument over the cover. I had sent Gallman a mockup that featured a panel from a Tom Tomorrow comic strip. I proposed that the cartoon be set on a black cover with a title in pale fluorescent-multi-colored lettering in the manner made popular by the MTV network. Gallman called and said bluntly, "I hate your cover." I started to make a defense and he interrupted, "Look Sam, we're trying to mainstream you."
"Good luck," I replied.
The book, which came out the following April, received some wonderful reviews, but there were also noticeable silences. . The first sign of trouble came when Publisher's Weekly failed to run a review, a decision that so incensed Gallman that he wrote the editor a rare angry letter about it. The book got a friendly reception in as diverse locales as a black radio station in DC, a conservative talk show in Idaho, a populist weekly in Texas and a west coast business column.
WAMU -- Washington's public radio station -- wouldn't touch it, but Baltimore public radio was happy to have me on. I spent a cordial hour on a conservative talk show in Boston, but the establishment left such as the Village Voice and the Nation did not review it. The New York Review of Books would not touch it, but the right-wing Washington Times gave it a favorable nod.
Edith Efron in the libertarian Reason said she had to be almost forcibly restrained from quoting yards of the book; on the other hand, the editor of the New York Times Book Review told my editor that the book was "turgid," although, as Chesterton once said, "forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent."
On the other hand, the sainted non-establishment columnist Colman McCarthy gave the book a fine review in the Washington Post. But only thanks to happenstance; McCarthy had picked the book off of a discard pile on the floor outside the book editor's office door. McCarthy himself would be shortly dumped outside the door of the Post.
In sum, Gallman's effort to "mainstream" me proved a massive failure. The fault did not seem to be in the book or else a sharply critical review might have been expected here or there. There were none. How, I wondered, could a book be compared favorably not only to Bob Woodward's contemporaneous effort but to Tocqueville's work and still be steadfastly ignored by the mainstream media?
Was it too radical? Perhaps, but if so, why did conservative outlets treat it as well as they did?
Something else was at work. Robert Sherrill, in a Texas Observer review of both Woodward's Agenda and Shadows of Hope, offered this analysis:
These two books are, in a way, a perfect introduction to the unfairness and insanity of contemporary book publishing.
Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review, has for three decades been what is correctly called an "alternative" journalist in Washington, DC. Alternative to what? Well, for one, thing, to that quasi-adjunct to the federal government, the Washington Post, which employs the celebrated Bob Woodward as assistant managing editor for investigations.
What I mean by unfairness and inequity is that Sam Smith probably couldn't even get his book accepted by a major publishing house, which is why he wound up at Indiana University Press -- a first rate publishing house, by the way, but very, very small pumpkins compared to Simon & Schuster, which has been Woodward's cash cow since the days when the was writing about Watergate.. Woodward's book has been number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks.And yet -- I don't exaggerate -- Smith's book is by far the wiser and more useful and certainly the more entertaining of the two.
Sherrill's analysis was one reason I had not written a book in twenty years. I preferred a medium as ephemeral as the reaction one might expect from it. A periodical invited the casual glance, a browse, transitory involvement. There was a deadline and always another issue beyond, factors that put clear limits on one's own involvement in preparation. A book, on the other hand -- or at least a decent book -- requires extraordinary effort that is hardly ever, in the author's mind at least, fully requited, let alone properly remunerated.
I had thrown myself into the book. Not even an operation for prostate cancer had slowed me. After the operation my doctor said he had given me extra anesthetics. "Why?" I asked. "Because you were talking too much politics.?"
My wife recalls me coming home from the hospital with masses of clippings culled between painkillers and bad meals. I knew that I wouldn't get a chance like this for a long time and I called up every idea, fact, recollection, and conversation from more than four decades of national and local politics in order to tell my story.
I thought, in the end, that I had done a good job, but I had run smack into the impenetrable defenses of the extremist middle. The problem was, I eventually concluded, that I had not been licensed to write of these matters. My friend Jon Rowe noted that the media often referred to his old boss, Ralph Nader, as a "self-appointed consumer advocate." Where, Rowe wondered, did one go to get a license to become an properly appointed consumer advocate?
o
I realized later that I had stumbled upon the outlines of a new American political fault line. It was so new that it lacked a name, stereotypes, cliches, experts and prophets. In many ways it seemed more a refugee camp than a voluntary assembly, yet, as I thought about it, the more its logic seemed only concealed rather than lacking.
o
Increasingly, the words of encouragement that I received came from somewhere other than my home town, a place whose conventional thinking I had happily challenged for nearly thirty years. In the 1960s and 1970s it had been no problem; there had always been plenty of similar voices and I never felt alone. Washington -- like Madison or Berkeley -- possessed a vigorous counterculture ready to strike out, provoke, and outrage and to enjoy every minute of it. Although by the 1980s the voices of protest had greatly dulled, dissent was still fair game as long as one's targets were Reagan or Bush.
In the 1990s, however, the Washington establishment simply closed down the marketplace of ideas. This involved not merely Democratic lawyer-lobbyists now pursuing openly the cynical abuse of government they had discreetly enjoyed during the Republican years. It included not merely journalists whose sycophancy towards the powerful was now promiscuously out of the closet. It also included the professional liberal establishment of Washington -- labor, feminist, and environmental leaders whose heady new access to government blinded them to how distant what they had once advocated was from what they were now willing to accept over -- or even in return for -- lunch.
For mainstream Washington, there was no longer any politics, only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology; only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi.
The city's social life reflected the smog of grim, pallid process that settled in over the town. The New York Times reported that in the capital many men of power no longer even wished a social life. A former White House social secretary told the Times that her lawyer husband barely wanted to go out at all: "He whines. He says it's a school night. And if it's a seated dinner, he's dead, because he can't control the time at which you leave." It would have been one thing if these men were doing something imaginative, daring or, god forbid, useful. In fact their lives were as boiler-plate as the contracts they rushed off to revise. And the city turned gray with their souls.
I had been trained to become one of the gray souls. I attended college with them, had reported their profoundly predictable and tedious rituals, and had argued with them at cocktail and dinner parties. I had learned what caused your host and hostess to squirm and others to avoid you. I had learned that no matter how righteous your views, the evening is reserved for confirmation and not revelation. Over time, if you don't follow this rule, you find yourself not only bowling, but also dining, alone.
My own invitations to such events, never sumptuous, became even rarer over time. Among the last prototypical Washington dinner parties I attended was during one of those episodes of military excess against a country roughly one-fiftieth our size in which we killed roughly fifty times more people than is necessary to accomplish roughly two percent of our stated goal.
It was a civil evening attended by several well-known Washington journalists, two of whom entertained us at length with clichés they obviously planned to launch against a broader audience in the near future. Their point was to impress upon us the magnitude of American geo-political responsibilities in Iraq and the similar dimensions of their own minds. In such ways do Washington journalists establish their reliability. Their support of power is often not really ideological at all, but rather just another form of social climbing.
I listened quietly as long as I could and then asked gently a question: "Well, how many more civilians do you think we need to kill in order to make our point?"
The room seized up. I parried a bit and then retreated, realizing that no good was going to come of all this.
On the other hand, something interesting did. Sitting next to me was the wife of one of the killer scribes, herself a noted journalist. She had said nothing but after I asked my question, she patted my arm and whispered "Good.". This nationally known reporter was ever so gently and civilly egging me on.
When it was time to leave, the wife of the other bumptious and jingoistic journalist -- a man familiar to any visiting the Sunday TV talk ghetto -- took me aside and remarked, "I'm glad you said what you did. My husband is such a hawk and I get so tired of it."
The hostess, standing with us, added, "Did you notice how all the men supported the war and all the women opposed it?"
o
The mechanisms for discouraging sedition in the Washington of the 1990s were the same as among the smugly homogenous everywhere -- only the Clinton people did it far better and with far more cruel premeditation. A word passed, an invitation not sent, coldness in place of hospitality, phone calls not returned -- the exclusion of those who fail to comply. Diversity -- now defined only by ethnicity and sex -- allowed Clinton to claim a cabinet that "looks like" America yet would still include the most millionaires ever. Diversity of dreams, values, experience, class, suffering, imagination rhetoric, ideology, caring -- these were not part of diversity any more, but rather of subversion.
As one of the seditious, I found the city's doors closing one by one.
I had observed the fate of government and defense industry whistleblowers, so I was not surprised. The cultural isolation and imputation of madness are standard by-products of telling unwanted truths. I knew lawyers who specialized in these matters and how they often spent almost as much time counseling their clients on personal survival as they did providing counsel in the courthouse.
Whistleblowers, in the course of doing their jobs, typically stumble upon facts that point to danger, neglect, waste, or corruption. Far too often this discovery is met not with approbation and as a sign of exemplary public service, but rather as a threat to the agency or company. Among the consequences: firing, reassignment, isolation, forced resignation, threats, referral to psychiatric treatment, public exposure of private life and other humiliations, being set up for failure, prosecution, elimination of one's job, blacklisting, or even death.
From the doctor in Ibsen's Enemy of the People to Karen Silkwood, the nuclear industry worker killed after her car was forced off the road on her way to talk to a reporter, speaking truth to power has proved costly. The Mongolians say that when you do it, you should keep one foot in the stirrup.
Further, whistleblowers fall easily into traps that can hurt if not destroy them. They may become monomaniacal, paranoiac, depressed, confused, and terribly lonely. One study found that 232 out of 233 whistleblowers reported suffering retaliation. As Admiral Hyman Rickover told a group of Pentagon cost analysts: "If you must sin, sin against God, not against the bureaucracy. God may forgive you, but the bureaucracy never will."
I had also followed the fate of others who had challenged the Clinton myth and considered myself lucky. I took as a perverse sign of my sanity that people would ask me from time to time if I didn't fear for my personal safety. I had covered politics since Eisenhower and no one had ever asked me that before. And I was pleased by little signs that my efforts had not gone unnoticed such as the black White House staff photographer who, upon meeting me and recognizing my name, smiled and said, "You're bad. You're bad!" I thanked her.
And other things were happening as well. A cable television program asked me to be a regular guest on a panel otherwise comprised of African-American journalists. During a time in which that I was being isolated from my own culture, another had welcomed me. It would have been an unblemished pleasure had not the black city served by the program been under severe attack. A combination of a fiscal embargo by Congress and fiscal mismanagement by the local government would soon lead to a federal takeover of DC and the largest de facto disenfranchisement of American voters since the days of Jim Crow. Our program would become a small metaphor for what was happening.
The television station was owned by the University of DC, a land grant campus that served as an educational underground railroad for the neglected and forgotten young of the city. The fiscal problems of the Washington had already hit UDC. The elevators could no longer be relied upon; it was wiser to walk the four flights up to the studio. The air-conditioning in the studio became unreliable and finally one night the station manager told us they could no longer afford to continue the show. In our place, the station began running stock footage from NASA.
The faculty protested the budget cuts and the students tried to rebel and even blocked busy Connecticut Avenue one day. But the city and its politicians failed to respond and the president of the university, a weak man of colonial sensibility, went to the White House and sat silently as other heads of black colleges futilely made what should have been his case.
After the TV show was canceled, the host, Ernest White, asked me to appear weekly on his radio program, Cross Talk, a rare outlet for those seldom heard in this capital of power and pretense. I would refer to myself off air as the "real earnest white on the Ernest White Show." Then a couple of years later, after the university's faculty had been slashed still more and the public relations and alumni affairs offices had been closed and the water cooler was no longer being stocked, the station manager came in one day and told us to make the show a good one because it was to be our last.
The university was going to sell the station in order to help cover its deficit. Just one mile to the west was Radio Free Ward 3 -- WAMU, the public radio station of affluent Washington with its pristine studios and prissy paradigms. Somewhere in that mile crossed the American fault line.
At first it appeared that a Christian sect would buy WDCU, but the deal fell through. Eventually the station was purchased by the Shrine of the Immaculate Center, C-Span, allowing the elite city to hear still more affirmation of its status quo.
As the station disintegrated so did White - with AIDS, drugs and alcohol. A man who had been one of the few true links in a fractured city was spotted begging for change outside the annual dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus. The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy wrote
White had been one of black Washington's most treasured resources . . . For White to end up unemployed, homeless and begging on the street gave the phrase "disposable society" a painful new face. White had helped hundreds of people. During one of his many on-air Thanksgiving fund-raisers for the homeless, he received a telephone call from a woman who said she had been on the verge of committing suicide but had changed her mind after hearing him play a song of salvation. After the show, White took the woman several bags of food and clothes, then talked her into surrendering her life to God.
Now, at age 52, White himself is in trouble. A viral infection in one leg left him in a wheelchair, and his descent into alcohol and drugs was so stunningly swift that nobody really knew how to help him. Efforts to provide him with temporary shelter, food and clothes did not amount to much, for none of those things could ultimately address the spiritual crisis in which he was embroiled. A month ago, after being kicked out of a local motel for having undesirable guests, he moved into the Randolph Shelter in Southwest Washington, where he now wages nightly battles with lice, rats and crack addicts.
As White was falling apart, the city he had loved was being bullied, squeezed, and demoralized by the federal takeover. Schools would be closed, health clinics eliminated, inmates sent hundreds or thousands of miles away to privatized gulags. A form of socio-economic cleansing was underway, only with budget cutbacks and tax policy rather than with land mines and rifles. The corporatist technocrats of both parties wanted Washington rich and free of human reminders of the failure of their inhuman policies. They wanted a Singapore on the Potomac.
Twenty-five years ago, Washington's white liberals had helped overcome the segregationists in Congress in order to win DC a semblance of home rule; now their successors grumbled about Marion Barry, only barely concealing the fact that Barry was a euphemism for others who looked like him. DC was no longer a community but a facility and the burghers of white Washington demanded to know why they had not been better served for all their tax dollars. Yet they no more expected to engage themselves personally in the city's affairs than they would have changed the sheets while staying in a hotel suite.
o
The antipathy to things that had once defined local liberalism mirrored the national retreat. The new liberals spoke happily of welfare "reform," and showed indifference to growing incursions on civil liberties and the massive injustice of the war on drugs. The word "anti-trust" never crossed their lips and the corporatizing of much of America and the incarceration of the rest passed unnoticed.
Should you press them on any of this, a standard rebuke was that Clinton was better than Dole or that the White House had to move right to co-opt the right.
What about the more than 40 friends, associates, aides, and firms around Clinton convicted or pleading guilty?
Guilt by association.
What about the over 100 witnesses who pled the Fifth or fleeing the country?
Their constitutional right.
What about? . . .
You can't prove it.
What about? .
. .
You don't believe that rightwing crap do you?
Liberalism had become the abused spouse of the Democratic right.
o
Facts had became obsolete in Washington. They were at best a filler between arguments on TV about what really mattered -- perception and image. Facts were background noise at a news conference, multi-colored jimmies on scoops of policy, and just plain annoying in private conversation.
At times I felt trapped in the compound of some bizarre cult of overwrought rhetoric, infantile premises, and manic mythology. There were no ideas, only a leader; no ideology, only icons; no inquiry, only arrogant certitude.
I felt as though both local and federal Washington had been stolen. Yet, as it turned out, I was also gaining something, something I couldn't see as clearly as that which I was losing. My very isolation was forcing me to see my surroundings differently, encouraging me to discover things I might otherwise had discounted or missed entirely. A way, the Quakers promise, will open. In the midst of my anger and melancholy, I only belatedly noticed that it already had.
When I went on a radio station in Idaho Falls -- Mark Fuhrman country -- I heard the host pick out the one sentence in my book in which I spoke well of the right of jury nullification. Somehow this conservative talk show host had found that sentence and he introduced me by saying that I was a supporter of the fully informed jury movement, which had cross-ideological support but was particular popular in the libertarian west. I was meant to be on for 20 minutes but we kept talking for an hour and a half. Some debate but no hostility. I waited for the call from a right-wing crazy; it never came.
I went on Duke Skorich's show in Duluth. Duke had some tough listeners, including members of the Minnesota Militia. I was working hard but having fun, when a guy called up and said, "You know, this fellow in Washington's got a point; we've got to stop worrying about those gays and feminists and start worrying about what the corporations are doing to us."
On Larry Bensky's Pacifica show, a listener began discussing the need to set national priorities. We can't solve anything without starting at the right place. I agreed. Then the caller raised the ante: "And the right place to start is with the problem of extra-terrestrial aliens, don't you think?"
Larry looked at me as if to say, you're on your own. "Well," I responded, "My view on that we ought to treat extra-terrestrial aliens like anyone else in this country. We should welcome them as one more immigrant group that will add to the strength and character of the nationd."
I was on my own; I felt free to enjoy America again, free to talk trash or truth to any citizen without having to run an ideological credit check on them first. Free to speak to them as real people rather than as the personification of paradigms. Free to discover unexpected common ground. It's the kind of politics I liked; the kind I think of as bar room politics: if you can't walk into a bar and hold your own, then you don't have it down no matter how many op- ed pieces you've written about it.
I wondered if this was how it was with the Free French, with communists and Gaulists and everything in between in temporary alliance -- fighting for the right to fight each other fairly. Certainly the Peronist Clintons, their policies of globalization, their brain-clouding agitprop, and the growing proto-fascist mechanisms of control were reason enough for those outside the inner party to look more kindly upon each other. Far better to form an uneasy common defense than to have our freedoms snapped off one by one, until we were none.
o
My next book was about repairing politics and the pattern repeated itself. Among the more mainstream media, only Weekend All Things Considered paid it any mind. The book received rave notices in populist and green publications and an excerpt was printed in Utne Reader along with an exceptionally kind profile by Jay Waljasper. But not only did the corporate media not mention it, it was ignored by such presumably friendly publications as the Village Voice, Nation, New York Review of Books, and the Progressive.
In part, I knew I was paying the price for my attacks on Clinton. With an overwhelming majority of the Washington media still solidly on Clinton's side, it took little more than a few snide comments over lunch or some phone calls to make one persona non grata in the club they call the nation's capital but regard as their own.
Only a few times was the hostility overt. Such as the night that I met a top White House aide at a party she was giving for a neighbor and she noted that she had invited me despite my opinions. Such as the day Marion and Peter Edelman, Lou and Di Stovall, Sy and Liz Hersch and I were standing on the sidewalk passing the time of a sunny weekend afternoon and Don Graham walked by. Don soon found himself under attack from the others for the way his paper had handled Marion's "Stand for Children" demonstration. Don listened somberly and said he appreciated the comments because "I respect what you have to say . . . . except for you, Sam." He smiled but I knew he meant it, and he knew I knew he meant it. I smiled back.
Such as the time after I had appeared on the local NPR station and when I left the studio, the conservative black host Derek McGinty turned to the station's political editor, Mark Plotkin, and said, "He's banned" and I was. Several times when McGinty went on vacation Plotkin had me on, but the station manager noticed and told him to stop. I asked Mark why I had been banned and he said he thought it was for "excessive irony."
I made a joke of it, explaining my expulsion by saying that it was all right since I had discovered that irony was a violation of the DC Code, a lesser included offense under paradigm abuse. And my friends would occasionally call in and make McGinty mad by asking about my status. One caller asked why and McGinty denied that it was because of a particular line of questioning. Said McGinty: "I can't say that he's not persona non grata, but if he is, it's not for that."
In fact, irony was risky in Washington. Once, I was on McGinty's show with Marion Barry who was complaining about how reporters always blamed him for all the problems of the city. "I don't blame you for all the problems," I replied "I just blame you for 23.7% of them." Marion said, "I'll take that."
Some weeks later, at a party, I told the story to a Washington suit. He listened absolutely straight faced and then asked, "How did you derive that percentage?"
Over the next two years I was dropped as a guest by Fox Morning News. A Washington Post reporter told me casually that, yes, she guessed I was on that paper's blacklist. And there was an end of invitations to C-SPAN after two appearances were canceled at the last minute, presumably by someone more powerful than the host who had invited me. My speech during the first protest over Bosnia was the only one deleted from C-SPAN's coverage - even though a folk singer saying that she was the "warmup band for Sam Smith" was left in. I received a long phone call from the host of a local Pacifica talk show berating me for what I written about Clinton and I was graced with mocking suggestions by other journalists that I was a conspiracy theorist and becoming paranoiac.
It wasn't just the politics that bothered me. I still loved broadcasting as reflected in a note I wrote to a C-Span producer some years earlier:
Thanks for having me on your program. Since then I have received 45 letters, 12 phone calls, including a 15-page cure for inflation, several remedies for other problems (mostly from those who also do not believe in page margins), three inquiries concerning the name of my automobile insurance company, an annotated listing of every point I made, one piece of hate mail and a viewer who wrote "Shame! Shame!" for my failure to mention plebiscites.
o
Well before Monica Lewinsky, I wrote,
The worst Clinton scandal may be yet to come. This is not a prediction, only a premonition, a realization that time is running out. In a little over three years, the way things are going, the most destructive presidency of modern times will end in a blaze of fawning editorial thumb-suckers, blubbering ruminations on the departee's historical legacy and pompous praise from the blow-dried minds of television news. Clinton, if nothing changes, will leave unimpeached, unindicted, and largely unscathed -- a triumph not only of his remarkable political sociopathy but of a federal city that no longer cares what anyone thinks about what it does or the way it does it.
No one will have called him to account for willfully having failed to faithfully execute the laws of the land. Only a few will remember the wholesale misappropriation of FBI dossiers, the rampant obstruction of justice following the death of Vincent Foster, or the deeply suspicious links to the drug trade. Clinton's repeated assaults on constitutional and other citizen rights will be unnoted as will his energetic efforts to undermine local, state and national sovereignty in the interest of multinational marauders.
Underneath the sturm und drang of political debate, official Washington -- from lobbyist to media to politician -- had reached a remarkable consensus that it no longer had to play by any rules but its own.
There was a phrase for this in some Latin American countries. They called it the culture of impunity. In such places it led to death squads, routine false imprisonment and baroque corruption. We were not quite there yet but we were certainly moving in the same direction and for some of the same reasons.
In a culture of impunity the rules served the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values ostensibly guided a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of impunity encouraged coups and cruelty, at best practiced only titular democracy, and put itself at the service of what Hong Kong with Orwellian understatement referred to as "functional constituencies," which is to say major corporations.
Such a culture does not announce itself. It creeps up day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism. And in a culture of impunity, what replaces the Constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all sort of arcane stuff? Simply greed. As Michael Douglas put it in one of his movies: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works."
Of course, there has always been an overabundance of greed in Washington. What was different now was the stunning lack of limits on the avarice. The federal city had become a town without heroes, without conflict over right and wrong, with little but an endless struggle by narcissistic boomer bandits to get more money, more power, and more press than the next guy. In the chase, anything went and the only standard was whether you won or lost.
The federal government no longer effectively regulated corporate greed. Republicans no longer combated Democratic greed and vice versa. Liberals and centrist Republicans were pathetically ineffective forces within their own parties. The local bar largely devoted itself to undermining decent government in the interests of its corporate clients. The media had lost both its will and skill for keeping others honest. And, increasingly, law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies made their own rules.
The culture of impunity was not an exclusively Washington phenomenon, as demonstrated by NYPD officers torturing a prisoner as they cried, "It's Giuliani time." Consider also that the UN estimated the worldwide drug trade at 8% of the global economy -- roughly equivalent to the world automobile industry or, in this country, to all state and local government. Was it possible that such a huge industry -- alone among major economies -- lacked easy access to every state house and major city hall?
Still Washington set the tone, the style, and many of the new rules under which the country increasingly functioned. These were not the rules we were taught in civics but the laws of competing mobs in control what we once thought was our capital.
I'm talking here of culture, not of conspiracies. If you have a strong enough culture you don't need a conspiracy. One of the reasons ethnic minorities and women continued to have such difficulty moving into the institutions of our country was precisely because there was no one to blame, no smoking gun, nothing on paper -- only the stone wall of implicit values and ingrained behavior.
Similarly, the Washington that thumbed its nose at the Constitution, its supporting statutes, and the desires of the American public, was not the creation of some evil cabal, but rather the product of incremental individual and institutional choices made over a long period. Do not wait for the last judgment, Camus said. It happens every day.
A good -- although far from the only -- place to look for the origins of Washington's culture of impunity was at the beginning of the Reagan administration. I could feel it coming and wrote a piece for the Washington Post in 1980 attacking the notion then being fostered by local media and business that the city was undergoing some sort of renaissance. Rather, I argued Washington had become "the Paris of prevarication, the London of dissemblers, the Florence of deceit:"
The much touted physical changes of the city have produced little other than rampant displacement, creeping homogeneity and an overabundance of automatic teller machines. Washington's "greater sophistication" is virtually indistinguishable from cynicism and mindless profligacy, and its auto-erotic fascination with power for its own sake threatens to prove that masturbation does cause insanity. . .It is the city of real estate dealers rather than merchants, the city where you damn well better not leave home without it, clone of Gotham, sire of scandal so tawdry it has discredited political corruption, the city in which a day's work can consist of a memorandum revised, a two-hour quiche lorraine and martini lunch, and four phone calls to say you're all tied up.
By 1987 such thoughts were no longer permissible in the Washington Post, but I wrote a piece for the weekly City Paper in which I described the city's new elite this way:
They have come to be close to power, but because they have little purpose beyond power, they are loose cannons on the deck of the city. . . If they are lawyers, they spend their days serving the avaricious and spend their evenings boring us about it. If they are journalists, they fill our papers and ears with the latest disinformation from government officials so carefully cultivated over lunch or drinks. . . If they are politicians, they deaden our evening news and our morning reading with such disingenuousness, such tediousness, such gracelessness that one longs for the next tampon commercial. Collectively they clog our roads and then honk at us for daring to turn left; they brutalize our language; they talk too loudly in the subway about excruciatingly uninteresting subjects; and create excessive lines for increasingly marginal services and goods. Their bike-riding couriers, carrying their turgid memos and latest schemes for destroying the cityscape, run us down in the street. They don't answer our phone calls. They so fill available aircraft on their puerile missions that we end up missing our grandmother's funeral.
That was the last time any major anybody would publish something like that because among the victims of the new city were humor, social criticism and passion. In fact, the last time I was published in the Post was a piece following the suicide of our city council chair, John Wilson, in 1993. John and I disagreed on a lot of things but the need for humor, social criticism and passion were not among them. We also were among a declining number in Washington who believed that one shouldn't go around telling people that poison was candy.
John once told me as we both gazed into a store window on Connecticut Avenue, "You know any town with Marion Barry and me running it has got to be fucked up." We had wandered up from Dupont Circle where John would sometimes go just to talk with the chess-players, the winos, and bike messengers who gathered there. "You know which of my constituents I like best?" John had asked me once when he was still representing the highly variegated Ward Two, which included not only riot corridors but the Watergate Hotel.
"Damned if I know," I replied.
"Those folks in Foggy Bottom."
I stood in the path through the circle and tried to figure out why his most fusty neighborhood should be his favorite.
"Why's that, John?"
"'Cause they don't move. Those folks up on 14th Street, just when you've got them, they get evicted or something. But in Foggy Bottom, man, they just stay there year after year."
For years after his death you could still see cars around town with bumper stickers that read: "I miss John Wilson."
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