Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 22
An hour’s perusal of our national charter makes it hard to understand what the argle-bargle is about. The First Amendment forbids any law “abridging the freedom of speech.” It doesn’t say, “except for commercials on children’s television” or “unless somebody says ‘cunt’ in a rap song or ‘chick’ on a college campus.”
The Second Amendment states that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” period. There is no mention of magazine size, rate of fire, or to what extent these arms may resemble assault rifles. All rifles were assault rifles in those days. Furthermore, if the gun laws that Massachusetts has now had been in force in 1776, we’d all be Canadians, and you know what the weather in Canada is like.
There is no reference to abortion whatsoever in the Constitution, not so much as an “I’ll pull out in time, Honey, honest.” The Tenth Amendment tells us, “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This means the power to drive the nation crazy over a gob of meiotic cells that wouldn’t fill a coke spoon and, on the other hand, the power to murder innocent babies that haven’t even been born yet are—just as the amendment says—“reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Constitution is not hard to understand. Although the quality of reasoning degenerates in the later amendments. The Sixteenth Amendment is particularly awful: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”
And Section 4 of the Fourteenth is very silly: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.”
The Twenty-sixth Amendment, giving the vote to eighteen-year-olds, must have been drafted by people who’d never met any eighteen-year-olds or, worse, by people who were eighteen.
And then there is the—from a male point of view—tactically foolish Nineteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.”
This made women stop protesting a trivial wrong to their gender—exclusion from the electoral process—and allowed them to focus their indignation on more serious forms of injustice, such as the fact that women suffer discrimination and harassment in the workplace, are paid less than men, are rarely promoted to the highest levels of corporate or professional responsibility, and this year’s hemlines make their legs look fat.
There are also a few gimmicks and dodges in the Constitution, such as Section 4 of the presidential disability and succession amendment, which says that the vice president “and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” (italics my own) can declare the president incompetent. If I’m reading this right, it means that with the help of pals in the House and Senate, Dan Quayle and the principal officers of the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Elks Club can send George Bush to the bughouse and declare a national golf emergency.
But, on the whole, the text is easily glossed. The single exception being Article Two, Section 1: “The electors shall … vote by ballot for two persons … The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President … and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them.”
This was later modified by the rather more confusing Twelfth Amendment: “The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”
The idea seems to be to make the election of a president so complicated and annoying that no one with an important job or a serious avocation—that is, no one presently making any substantial contribution to society—would be tempted to run for the office. So far, it’s worked.
Otherwise, only one important question is raised by the Constitution, a question implicit in its preamble.
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …”
The question being, “Are we done yet?”
The first objective was achieved in 1865 when we squashed the rednecks. The result was a definitely more perfect union. Compare it, for example, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the AFL-CIO. We’ve established about as much justice as the country can stand—maybe more. (Perfect justice being a thing none of us would care to confront.) Domestic tranquility we don’t have, but how we’d get any without violating every clause of this document that is supposed to ensure it I can’t imagine. The common defense is so well provided for that even such uncommon things as Saudi Arabians are defended by it. In the matter of promoting the general welfare, we have—to judge by the welfare rolls—done it too well. The blessings of liberty are so manifestly secured to ourselves that we seem weighed down by the things, and lately are attending AA meetings, joining strict religious cults, and formulating personal diet and exercise regimens to ease the burden. And, as for posterity, that’s why birth control was invented.
So when can we quit passing laws and raising taxes? When can we say of our political system, “Stick a fork in it, it’s done”? When will our officers, officials, and magistrates realize their jobs are finished and return, like Cincinnatus, to the plow or, as it were, to the law practice or the car dealership? The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
The Winners Go to Washington, D.C.
I, embarking on my attempt to make government comprehensible, and the Bush administration, embarking on its attempt to make government, arrived in Washington at about the same time in early 1989.
Many reporters, when they go to work in the nation’s capital, begin thinking of themselves as participants in the political process instead of as glorified stenographers. Washington journalists are seduced by their proximity to power, and that was me. Power had my lipstick smeared and was toying with my corset hooks before I even got off the Trump Shuttle.
Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated—serious, bulky, and blandly worthwhile like a high-fiber diet set in type.
All of Washington conspires to make reporters feel important—a savvy thing to do to people who majored in journalism because the TV repair schools advertised on matchbook covers were too hard to get into. The U.S. government, more than any other organization on earth, takes pains to provide journalists with “access” to make the laptop Saint-Simons feel that they are “present at the making of history.” Of course, the same high honor can be had by going around to the back of any animal and “being present at the making of earth.”
If you can get accreditation to the Congressional Press Galleries—which, when you’re employed by a “major news outlet,” is about as difficult as falling asleep in a congressional hearing—you receive a photo ID tag to wear on a chain around your neck. Everybody who’s anybody in Washington wears some kind of ID tag on a chain around his neck, so that the place looks like the City of Lost Dogs. I wore mine everywhere until one day in the shower, when I had shampoo in my eyes, the chain caught on the soap dish and I was nearly strangled by my own identity. This happens a lot to members of the Washington press corps.
Within days of getting to Washington I began to write pieces featuring all the access I had and frequently mentioning that real political figures, some of them so important you’d actually heard their names, spoke directly to me in person. Thus, readers were left with an indelible sense of “A politician talked to him? What the hell else does a politician ever do to you except take your money?” I even got a part-time slot on one of those public affairs TV shows that air at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday mornings. It was a sort of farm-team McLaughlin Group, but it gave me a chance to say things like “Washington journalists are seduced by their proximity to power.”
Washington is a fine place for journalists to live as well as to brownnose. It has plenty of the only kind of people who can stand journalists—other journalists—and plenty of the only kind of people journalists get any real information from—other journalists. It is, like most journalists themselves, not very big (Washington is smaller than Memphis, Tennessee) and not as sophisticated as it thinks. And it’s pretty. Washington has lots of those Greek- and Roman-style buildings that practically make you feel like a senator just walking up the steps of them. Senators, in particular, are fond of this feeling, and this is one reason official Washington escaped the worst effects of modern architecture. That plus the fact that steel and glass skyscrapers are relatively cheap to build, and cost effectiveness is not a concept here. As Article One, Section 9, paragraph 7, of the U.S. Constitution says, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” So it’s obvious what the whole point of lawmaking is.
But Washington, though it costs taxpayers a fortune, is itself inexpensive—at least compared to New York or Los Angeles. In Washington journalists can afford to live almost as well as people who work for a living. Those stories about crack wars and the “murder capital of America” are nonsense, of course—as long as you stay in the part of Washington that concerns itself with real wars and being the regular capital. This is the part that extends northwest along Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin avenues from the tourist attractions on the Mall to the Maryland suburbs—the “white pipeline.” People do occasionally venture outside this zone, people who come in to do your cleaning or mow the lawn.
Numerous demonstrations, marches, PR stunts, and other staged events are held in Washington to give journalists an excuse for not covering real events, which are much harder to explain. Barely a weekend passes without some group of people parading in the capital to protest the piteous condition of those inevitable victims of injustice, themselves.
One Saturday it’s opponents of abortion dragging little children along to show they hadn’t been killed. The next Saturday it’s advocates of abortion dragging little children along to show they’d been born on purpose. The homeless come and make themselves at home around the Washington Monument. The Vietnam veterans are veteran gatherers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Earth Day organizers litter the streets with posters and pamphlets calling for trash to be recycled. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is unfolded, and the Cancer Sampler and Car-Wreck Duvet are probably coming soon.
For the people in government—rather than the journalists who pester it—Washington is an early-rising, hardworking city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. At 10:30 on weekday nights Washington bars and restaurants are as empty as synagogues in Iraq. I have never gotten up so early in Washington—or stayed up so late—that somebody wasn’t already awake and jogging by beneath my apartment window. On my first full day in Washington I saw an astonishingly beautiful young woman, slim, doe-eyed, and still dewy from a hinterland childhood, the kind of girl who would be streaking like a Tomahawk cruise missile through the New York fashion-model and dance-club world. She was reading Defense News on the Metro at 7:45 a.m.
People in government jobs, especially political appointees and high-level bureaucrats, are customarily at their desks by eight in the morning and are still there at six at night. They return calls, are courteous over the phone, prompt in their appointments, and helpful to the point of obsequiousness.
Government people work so hard for the curious reason that their output can’t be measured. There are plenty of ways to determine bad government, but good government is hard to quantify. How can streets be too clean or crime rates too low? A poverty threshold is easy to establish, but nobody’s ever too rich. The casualties of war are simpler to count than the augmentations of peace. And that’s why government employees work so hard—since output can’t be measured, input has to be.
People in government are also a cheerful and indefatigably optimistic bunch. At first I was mystified. Government work would seem to be a run in a hamster wheel. Government can do nothing, at least nothing right. For instance, the deficit is terrible, but lower spending will hurt the poor, and higher taxes will lead to a recession causing more people to become poor and get hurt by the lower spending needed to bring taxes down to end the recession, and so on. But since government rarely succeeds, it hardly ever fails. And government programs aren’t necessarily designed to go anywhere. Like the joggers beneath my window, who are the people who run those programs, they just go. The results—sweat, ruined knees, America as a second-rate world power—don’t matter. It’s the effort that makes the action worthy. Frank Lavin, who was the director of the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House (notice my access), told me, “People who believe in government regulation and intervention in life—for them government is a church.” And people who are truly committed to government exhibit the same dull self-satisfaction and slightly vapid peace of mind as do devout churchgoers. They also know their business is never going to be bought by Sony.
Washington’s optimistic enthusiasm, dreadfully wholesome energy, and overabundance of media types are never more evident than when a fresh batch of optimistic enthusiasts and wholesomely energetic dreadfuls is sucked into town by a new presidential administration and all the media types rush there to meet them.
This was particularly true in the case of George Bush. Usually journalists suffer a brief, syrupy infatuation with an incoming chief executive. But everybody had such a crush on George that you began to wonder if the New York Times editorial board wasn’t maybe driving by George’s house in the middle of the night and pining out the car window or sneaking into the Kennebunkport Yacht Club to leave anonymous poems in his locker.
First the jerk disappeared—the tall schmo with the nasal lockjaw, the one who was running for president but nobody could figure out why because he kept getting his tongue in a clove hitch and calling every what-chamajigger a “thing.” He vanished without a trace. You’ll remember that until the beginning of January 1989 George Bush was a skinny, inconsequential doofus, an intellectual smurf and moral no-show who’d wound up in the White House by default. Then one day I saw in the newspapers that the president-elect was a seasoned Washington professional, a man who knew where all the levers and pedals and remote-control channel changers of government were located, plus he was a symbol of unity and strength reaching out to Americans of every hue, stripe, and polka-dot pattern and gathering us together in an immense bipartisan hug, cuddle, and smooch.
Next George was applauded like an Academy Award–winning actor with cancer for his proposed cabinet appointments. (This being before the U.S. Senate decided that former senator John Tower was too drunk and silly to be secretary of defense but not quite drunk and silly enough to be a senator again.) In fact, only two of Bush’s nominees were other than mundane. There was William Bennett, who had been so much fun as Reagan’s secretary of education. You had to love a man who’d made that many schoolteachers mad. Bennett always seemed about to say, “Anybody who doesn’t know what’s wrong with America’s schools never screwed an el-ed major.” However, now Bennett was to be “drug czar.” Would his scholastic background help? Would he make dead crack addicts stay after life and write, “I will not be killed by rival gangs of drug dealers” one hundred times on the blackboard? Then there was Jack Kemp, the proposed secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But was it a bold stroke or a mean prank to make the only real conservative in the crowd go down to the ghetto and explain the Laffer curve?
Anyway, for the moment, the media were treating Bush’s cabinet picks as if they were the nine worthies, the three wise men, and two surefire ways to lose weight without dieting. And this was nothing compared with what had happened to Barbara Bush: apotheosis. Now, Barbara Bush was reputed, on good authority, to be a nice woman, warmhearted, funny, sensible, and all the things we usually say about our mothers when they’re listening. But it wasn’t as though she’d actually done anything or even said much. Barbara Bush, it seemed, was elevated to secular sainthood strictly on the basis of gray hair and a plump figure. And such is the remarkable speed of fashion in Washington that, within hours of the swearing in, snowy bouffants and comfortable tummies appeared everywhere among the politically chic. A few extra pounds were spilling over the waistband of my own boxer shorts.
Even the Dan Quayle market was—very temporarily—up. This is the fellow who was supposed to answer the question once and for all “Can a person be too dumb for government?” But in February 1989 columnists and commentators were mumbling about what a hardworking senator Dan had always been. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to call him “an avid reader … not just of newspaper clips or an occasional magazine piece, but of real live books.” Quick to note a vogue in toadying, the New Republic offered a Quayle Revisionism Award, only to have readers write in suggesting the prize be given to the New Republic’s own senior editor, Morton Kondracke, for saying Dan Quayle was “well-informed, intelligent, candid and engaging.”
There was a giddiness in the District of Columbia during inauguration week, and not just among Republicans dizzy from victory and cheap, warm domestic Inaugural Ball champagne. Liberals were sidling up to each other and confessing profound relief that Puckermug Micky Dukakis was back in Boston with a huge, poorly balanced Massachusetts state budget about to fall on his head. Garry Trudeau had run out of punch lines for his Doonesbury comic strip and was stuck with an “invisible George” joke, about a president so hopelessly visible that he seemed to show up everyplace except The Oprah Winfrey Show. Jesse Jackson and George Bush looked to be on the verge of starting their own two-man Operation PUSH chapter. Jackson said Bush’s inaugural speech “set exactly the right tone.” And the Tehran Times—this is true—welcomed George Bush to the White House and opined that he’d “acted wisely” at the onset of his administration.
