West Coast Blackouts; A Liberal's Anger; Onward to the Age of W!
The Age of Clinton signals its passing in California with rolling blackouts, or at least the threat of them. It's entirely appropriate. At the substantive level Clintonism was the economic program of the Democratic Leadership Council, preaching the glories of deregulation and an unfettered marketplace. Corporations would flourish and the public would bask in the beneficial
consequences of corporate aggrandizement. Corporate shills like the Natural Resources Defense Council lent their weight to the push for deregulation.
Westward look, the land is dark! The people are braced for utility bills two and three times what they were a year ago, and two once-mighty giants, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, teeter on the lip of bankruptcy. The price hikes for electricity and natural gas currently being touted will undoubtedly spawn a new populist movement, calls for public ownership of utilities and energy supplies. It's hard to preach the virtues of an unregulated marketplace to small businesses bankrupted by their fuel bills and householders too broke for heat or air conditioning.
More parables of deregulation: Amid the threat of blackouts I left Humboldt County, Northern California, last Friday, flew from Eureka to San Francisco and climbed on a TWA flight to New York. The Boeing 757 was about half full. After a couple of hours in the air the captain genially announced turbulence over Denver, adding that TWA had just been sold to American Airlines, but passengers shouldn't be concerned "because those of you with TWA advantage miles will make out like gangbusters." He must have felt he was in line for a financial killing, because he was in a jaunty mode for the rest of the flight, alerting "passengers on the left hand side to a spectacular moon," meanwhile consoling the starboard-side travelers with the news that "in a few minutes you will have an unusual view of Manhattan," which turned out to be the same old flight across Central Park. The flight attendant beside me gazed gloomily down at her drinks inventory, clearly seeing little in her future to cheer about.
Airline dereg, remember, was sold to us back in the Carter era as the promise of scores of new airlines battling to offer superior service and keen prices. Here we are in the dawn of 2001 and it looks as though we'll be down to a couple of airlines by the end of the year. For people taller than about 5-foot-6 a flight anywhere is a guarantee of physical constriction bordering on torture. Short and tall alike breathe in foul air and are spared food poisoning only because most airlines have given up serving food altogether in favor of pretzels. If the traveling distance is less than 1000 miles many friends of mine out West now prefer to drive, particularly given the news of the soaring likelihood of runway collisions. Airports like San Francisco and La Guardia are already operating well beyond rational capacity.
In the case of San Francisco, at least, there's one paradoxical consequence of its semi-paralysis. Enlightened planners have made the airport into an increasingly pleasant place to spend the day. With a couple of hours to waste between my two flights I was able to take in no less than four exhibitions, three of them of the finest quality. On this occasion the United terminal had a very fine show of drums and other percussive instruments. Trekking toward the south terminal I was able to see a display of new furniture, assembled to advertise the benefits of sustainable forestry. South Terminal itself featured an interesting display of police hats, collected by Calvin Chow of the SFPD during his trips to Europe. His website, designed by Alexander Gultyaev of the Vladivostock Police, boasts, all told, 400 hats. The picks of the bunch were an astrakhan hat worn by Soviet police officers in the 1970s in the Caucasus, the cockaded ceremonial hat of the assistant commissioner of the London metropolitan police, the dashing plume of some Italian law enforcer of high rank in the early part of the century. There were many samples of service hats of Asian police officers, all of them excessively banal.
Near the display cases of police hats there was yet another exhibition, this one designed to illustrate "eccentric collections." There were displays of corkscrews, models of piggy banks and aquarium furniture. The last, with scores of china mermaids, was my favorite, reminding me of a 50-gallon fish tank I designed when I lived in Key West in the mid-80s, replete with flooded Greek temples and Siamese fighting fish swimming through the ruins of Atlantis. Perhaps the less airports function as places where people might entertain a reasonable expectation of going somewhere else in timely safety, the more they will become limbo leisure spas, where people will go for the day, without perils of actual travel.
Amy's Anger
Having been deposited safely at JFK by the jaunty TWA captain, I made my way a day later to one of my favorite restaurants in Manhattan, Cendrillon, on the west side of Mercer St., a couple of blocks north of Canal, where Romy Dorotan presides over an Asian fusion menu with Filipino roots. Romy once studied political science at the University of York in the UK, then at Temple, but sensibly laid aside the dry texts of Locke, Mill and the others in favor of cooking, the acme of the fine arts. It was Joseph Conrad, introducing a cookbook by his wife Jessie, who wrote that of all the books, only those on cookery are morally above suspicion. Their one aim, the author of "Heart of Darkness" wrote, is "to increase the happiness of mankind, to add to the cheerfulness of nations." (Conrad went on to write that "the ferocity of the Red Indians was caused by their wives' lack of culinary skill. The Seven Nations around the Great Lake and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia.")
Romy's redoubtable wife, Amy Besa, greeted me warmly. "Alexander! Only this morning I was cursing your name." I asked her why and she hissed out the single word "Ashcroft," thereby indicating that she held me personally responsible for the defeat of Al Gore and the success of the Bush putsch, whose official consummation takes place next Saturday.
I teased Amy by suggesting that she was only opposed to Ashcroft because he anointed himself with Crisco, and that if he'd performed the same religious rite with a first pressing of choice olive oil she would be cheering his nomination as attorney general. Amy denied this indignantly and continued to shower me with abuse, despite my admonitions that after the terrible rampages of Janet Reno little remains for Ashcroft to do in the way of demolishing the Bill of Rights.
The more I listened to Amy's passionate complaints, the more I thought that Bush is indeed a unifier. Without his nominations of Ashcroft, Norton for Interior and (briefly) Chavez for Labor, the Democrats would be without a cause. Now they are uniting in ritual denunciations of Ashcroft and Norton, even as the liberal public-interest groups prepare to raise millions from their mailshot operations, flooding the U.S. postal system with warnings to the American people that only a subscription to The Nation, or to NOW or to the Wilderness Society will stave off backstreet abortions and the death of every polar bear cub in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.
Talk to any green veteran about James Watt and the more honest among them grow misty-eyed at his awesome prowess as a fundraiser. Merely to put this simpleton's mugshot on a flier next to a picture of a oil-stained seagull was to elicit a flood of dollars, and now the greens have Gale Norton, who studied at Watt's knee at the Mountain States Legal Foundation in Colorado.
But talk to warmhearted liberals like Amy in this cynical fashion and they grow ever more furious, absolutely oblivious to reminders that at this stage in the game back in 1993 Reno was three months away from burning about 80 men, women and children to death outside Waco, and on the edge of a career at the DOJ that included advocacy of two awful crime bills, the drug war and many other terrible things beside.
The liberals point furiously to Ashcroft's friendly relations with a militia-style outfit. This may be no bad thing, since most militia types I know spend most of their time denouncing excessive police power and abuses of privacy and the rights of free citizens.
Goodbye, Bill!
But is it really goodbye? Surely not. Clinton is part of the furniture of our lives, and I don't see him being carted off to oblivion at Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. He'll be with us always, whether as mayor of Hope, AR, or as secretary-general of the UN. He gave us the Lewinsky affair, and for that deed alone he lives warmly in my heart, and so I'll leave him with a tiny apology, since I now think that my story last week?that for its accommodation in the Clinton residence in Chappaqua the Secret Service is paying the exact equivalent of the Clintons' mortgage payments for that property?is probably without foundation. Here, however, is another story in which I have greater confidence.
A friend of mine was recently traveling in a limo from Baltimore to a town in West Virginia and fell into conversation with the driver, who related some of his ferryings to and fro of various bigwigs. One of these was Hillary Clinton. "An ornery woman," the driver commented. "And what a mouth on her!"
The driver went on to describe an occasion on which he was driving the First Lady and a couple of her (female) friends through a poor area of Washington, DC. They passed a beggar, and as they did so the First Lady expressed her disgust for the mendicant, adding, "He wouldn't be a bum if he had a piece of ass." The driver was able to shed no light on how or why she had arrived at this conclusion, stunned as he was by the coarse nature of her observations. Then they passed two young black women with babies. "There go two welfare cases. They make me sick. They're too lazy to work," supposedly said Sen. Clinton, champion of mothers and children everywhere.
So much for Clinton Time. Onward to the Age of W!