Clinton & Me Read online

  In America, the land of Sally Jessy Raphael and TV psychics, this all makes perfect sense. Why condemn Hillary Clinton for doing the White House equivalent of calling Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network?

  And I agree. Mrs. Clinton is no more stupid for hanging out with Jean Houston, sacred psychologist, than you and I are for getting a reading from Madame Zelda, psychic chiropractor.

  Perhaps you think it’s unfair to compare Houston to a spiritualist when she says she doesn’t do séances. Once again, I agree. Indeed, the most disturbing part of Mrs. Clinton’s “journey of faith” is that there is none.

  If Mrs. Clinton were having truly spiritual experiences—achieving nirvana, speaking in tongues, running a backhoe over the cast of Friends—there would be some faithfulness on her part to respect. But there is no spirit in Mrs. Clinton’s spirituality.

  For old-time Methodists, seeking God meant going to church and praying to the Risen Lord; for Hillary Clinton, it means hiring a sacred psychologist and talking to Eleanor Roosevelt.

  This sort of faux religious experimentation is the metaphysical version of “I didn’t inhale.” It is typical of people who feel they ought to believe in something because believing in something is nice, but they don’t want to be, you know, weird about it. In the end, they have just enough nonrational tenets to believe that you should stop sinning, but not enough faith to believe that they should, too.

  In other words, they are hypocrites. The result of this sort of religion without faith is always hypocrisy. Thus we have a White House that can support partial-birth abortions but violently attacks tobacco, an administration that thinks nothing of poking through your FBI file but maintains its position as the first ever to refuse to release the president’s medical files.

  So whether it’s Jean Houston, Tony Robbins or the Reverend Al Sharpton, the news from the White House this week is much the same as it was last week: It is a place where anything can happen . . . if you’re willing to believe in anything.

  Keyed Up

  * * *

  March 1996

  I’m no James Carville, but it seems to me that two things a candidate for president never wants to do are

  a. Go on a hunger strike.

  b. Get detained by the police.

  Alan Keyes has done both in the same week.

  Last Sunday, police officers had to forcibly remove Keyes from an Atlanta TV station that was hosting a presidential debate to which he was not invited. “As Martin Luther King went to jail in order to secure my right to participate, I go to jail in order to exercise that right,” Keyes bellowed as he was led away. “My only crime is that I am qualified to be president!”

  Three days earlier, Keyes launched a hunger strike to protest his exclusion from a debate in Columbia, South Carolina. “I shall take in neither food nor drink,” he intoned biblically, “until my ideas and my campaign are taken seriously.”

  I’m afraid Keyes is going to get very hungry.

  While the voters have declined to take his campaign seriously, Alan Keyes continues to liven up the 1996 presidential race. He has an amazing effect on Republican audiences, particularly down South. Mixing a conservative, anti-government diatribe with a heavy dose of brimstone, Alan Keyes is the perfect speaker for any group of guilty white Republicans (how redundant is that?) in need of a good spanking.

  He preaches that America is a spiritual wasteland, we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, and abortion is the great moral crisis of our day . . . though not so great as to cause Keyes to skip a meal over it. Indeed, as far as I can discover, Alan Keyes has never gone hungry, been jailed or received so much as a jaywalking ticket in his tireless fight against abortion.

  So much for great moral crises.

  But there is a bigger issue raised by the embarrassingly goofy candidacy of Alan Keyes and the serious treatment he’s receiving from the media. The fact is, Alan Keyes is getting away with this nonsense because he is black.

  The Keyes candidacy is yet another example of the media’s condescending attitude toward black people. Accepted norms of behavior and the otherwise sacrosanct rules of journalism are all cast overboard in the presence of any prominent yet stupid person who happens to be black.

  For example, Keyes wasn’t the only presidential candidate excluded from recent debates. Established political figures seeking the presidency, such as Senator Richard Lugar (R.-Insomnia), were also left out of the same events—but without hunger strikes or hissy fits. They may not be happy, but they’re behaving.

  Now, try to imagine the media reaction if Bob “B-1” Dornan (R.-Rush Limbaugh’s Lap) had been arrested at a debate site and started invoking the name of Martin Luther King. The comedy of it alone would make the story big news, maybe landing it on the front page. But for Alan Keyes? Buried with the obits.

  Keyes’ behavior is shameful and juvenile. He should be publicly mocked at every turn. Instead, interviewers nod compassionately while he spouts more incoherent gibberish. He’s being held to a different standard because wimpy liberal types—in their heart of hearts—don’t believe black people are capable of measuring up to reasonable standards of behavior.

  An even more glaring example is Louis Farrakhan, who even if he dropped the “dirty Jews” talk would still be one of the most moronic national figures of our day. I was particularly impressed when he went to Nigeria to urge the citizenry to be more supportive of the brutal military dictatorship currently oppressing them.

  Try to imagine a white politician touring South Africa to support apartheid or a Hispanic American cruising Chile with Pinochet. They would be universally denounced. But Minister Farrakhan is given a bye. “He doesn’t know any better,” nervous editorialists tut-tut. “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

  No. It’s a stupid thing. I do understand. Stupidity knows no racial or ethnic bounds. Stupidity can afflict us all—rich or poor, black or white, straight or gay. Pretending that dumb actions by black people are reasonable isn’t compassion; it’s racism of a most pernicious sort.

  One last note on the media and race: A friend of mine got into trouble a few years ago when he hired an unemployed black fisherman to run in a Republican primary election. It was a cynical ploy to increase white turnout, and it didn’t work.

  But what did work was the media condescension factor. The “candidate,” who was not even registered to vote when he entered the race, could barely read and write and was utterly unfamiliar with the office he had been hired to seek. However, a reporter tracked him down and interviewed him—no mean feat given the gentleman’s lack of correct grammar and limited vocabulary.

  But instead of an exposé of a clearly incompetent candidate, the reporter repaired the grammar, developed some sentence fragments into policy statements and cranked out a thirty-column-inch story that dressed up this bozo like a statesman. Fortunately for the democratic process, nobody read the article, and the candidate lost.

  Somewhere there’s a voter trying to make an honest judgment about the candidates who has no idea how loony Alan Keyes is because no one will tell him. If he knew, he would never give the candidate his vote.

  A sandwich, maybe . . .

  B.M.O.C.

  * * *

  May 1996

  Jermaine O’Neal is a South Carolina basketball phenom, a born superstar who combines the two attributes vital to success in professional sports: overactive glands and underachieving intellect. After spending four years mopping the floor with his high school counterparts, Jermaine made headlines when he decided to skip college and head straight to the NBA—and the accompanying multimillion-dollar contract.

  The young man’s decision sparked heated debate, around the NBA and at local cocktail parties, over the question of whether or not it is good/wise/moral for a young man such as Jermaine O’Neal to miss the tremendous opportunities offered by America’s institutions of higher learning. Can mere money compare to the exquisite experience of undergraduate life in the halls of acad
eme?

  As a successful college graduate and former master’s degree candidate, I can answer with complete confidence: “Jermaine! Take the cash!”

  I make this suggestion with no thought of O’Neal’s ability to succeed in the pros. I have no idea and even less interest. If someone wants to pay this adenoidally advanced young man a billion dollars to sit on the bench and wear inflatable sneakers, I say, “Congratulations!”

  What does rattle my cage is the underlying notion about college that drives this argument. “There is something wrong,” says the San Jose Mercury News, “when young men decide against an all-expenses-paid college education for the chance to grab the wealth and stardom of pro basketball.”

  “Tut-tut,” cluck the callers on local talk radio. “How can this poor young man be allowed to set aside his education to pursue a quick buck? Shame, shame!”

  How about “yank, yank”?

  The premise put forward by the do-gooders is that everyone who can go to college should. They are wrong on two points:

  a. No, they shouldn’t.

  b. He can’t.

  O’Neal’s leapfrog over the NCAA and onto the big-league hardwoods was inspired not by ambition but by ineptitude. He would like to play a year or two in the NBA minor-league system (read: college basketball) but can’t get into a real school, that is, one without the word technical in its name. O’Neal just doesn’t have the grades.

  To be eligible for a Division I school, O’Neal would have to add 100 points to his best SAT score of 830—an unlikely event for a young man who missed his last SAT exam because he couldn’t find the right building!

  Attention, Harvard! Do you have this guy’s home phone number?

  I don’t mean to pick on O’Neal—really, I don’t. I feel sorry for him because he is hitting his head against America’s wall of hypocrisy on higher education. If O’Neal were a carpenter, a cook or a chiropractor, he would be welcome to practice his profession without spending more than an afternoon in his local library.

  But because he is an athlete, he must endure four years of crib sheets and curved grades to prove he is worthy of his profession. He is required to waste four years of his economic life on a pursuit he has already demonstrated he has no interest in whatsoever—developing his brain.

  This is not necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone has the interest or ability for astronomy or calculus. Not everyone belongs in college at all. Indeed, America was built by men and women who had nothing more than a moderate education but were blessed with good sense and willingness to work.

  The result of encouraging unwilling or incompetent students into our colleges is easy to measure. Sit down this week with one of our freshly minted college grads, and after an hour of conversation, try to figure out what he or she actually got for that $40,000 in tuition besides a future of dodging phone calls from the student loan Nazis.

  The real question, the obvious question, is never asked, namely, “What are all these people doing in college in the first place?” The fact is, half of today’s students are as out of place in college as Michael Jackson would be at a school for wayward boys.

  As a former grad student at a certain public university in Columbia, South Carolina (no names, but its initials are USC), I spent time, up close, with the pride of the Confederacy. While some students are intelligent, motivated and determined to get an education, many simply have no idea what the purpose of their college career is, except that it somehow involves the keg in their dorm.

  I once met a student in her early twenties who had $50,000 in student loans and was still years away from getting her degree. Her major was holistic anthropology with a minor in tarot cards or some such blather, so her economic outlook was exceedingly dim. Had she borrowed the fifty grand and built a house, she would at least be unemployed with a roof over her head. Instead, it’s as though she dropped a wad in Vegas and hopes to find a job for a “people person” at 25K per annum before Guido gets her home address.

  She never belonged in college, and neither does Jermaine O’Neal. Indeed, there are only three legitimate reasons to spend major bucks for college: to get a job, to get married or to get an education. In that order.

  For certain fields—biology, engineering, political correctness storm trooping—college is essentially a tech school. For such students, the only difference between a university and Clyde’s School of Chiropractic and Auto Diesel Mechanics is that Clyde doesn’t force you to waste time in courses such as New Age Elizabethan Poetry or Erotic Photography as Rococo Art.

  As for marriage, this may be the single most useful service to society performed by institutions of higher education. Thanks to extremely liberal admissions standards at most universities (“Can you spell SAT? You’re in!”), the gene pool is tremendously mixed. Plumbers’ sons and bank presidents’ daughters are flung together with abandon, often at a period in life when their hormones are taking no prisoners. This is one reason why class envy has never taken hold in America. Junior may not have the brains to achieve greatness, but thanks to our national coeducational policy, he can marry it.

  People who claim they are in college just to get a good education are always lying. Run into one of these at a kegger and you’ll hear, “Just getting an education makes me a better person, more well-rounded, more competitive. I’m really proud of my degree in transactional Sumerian psychology—say, doesn’t your dad work at the Highway Department? Think he could get me in?”

  Meanwhile, the students who are seriously committed to learning something—clearly a minority—are shafted by the current lowest-common-denominator system. Classes move slowly while the professor tries to explain to basketball players and bimbettes that cosines aren’t what your dad gives the bank so you can get a lower car payment.

  In the early 1990s I found myself, through a circumstance too painful to recall, trapped in a 100-level philosophy class. On our first exam, with a modicum of preparation, several classmates and I scored a 95. After the curve was applied, we discovered that a 35 was a B and an 18 was a C. More amazing was the idiot sitting in front of me who complained that the class was too hard. His test score: an 8.

  You say that’s typical undergraduate work, that grad school is different? Then come meet the doctor of education candidate who has a master’s from NYU and cannot read. In her thirties and with kids when I met her, she hadn’t worked in years—though she said she was certified to teach (not English, I prayed, after listening to her bludgeon the language into submission). She literally could not read her financial aid form or answer simple questions such as “What year did you graduate?” Yet here she was, waiting for another $12,000 in taxpayer payoffs. And she got it.

  The cost of education is spiraling ever upward for one reason: demand. Too many people—make that stupid people—are going to college when they should be going to a trade school, in apprentice programs, or trying multilevel marketing. The only way to get these students through the most meager courses is grade inflation, which means the value of every degree declines, which means you need another degree to indicate academic excellence, which means more people going to grad school, which means more doctorates, et cetera, et cetera.

  The solution? Stop sending the Jermaine O’Neals of the world to college, and make it tougher, not easier, for everyone else.

  President Clinton’s tax increase/deficit reduction/budget balancing/the deficit still goes up a trillion bucks/ha-ha plan included a federal direct lending program, which will make it easier for young people to take out loans they can’t afford to take classes they don’t want for a degree they can’t use.

  Now that’s what I call compassion.

  If you think I’m being too rough on college students, sit down and talk with a few. After your headache goes away, write me and apologize. If you don’t know how to write, call your local financial aid office and tell them you’re an education major at an American university. Your check is in the mail.

  Olympics of the Damned

  * * *r />
  July 1996

  As the mystery surrounding the crash of TWA flight 800 continues, one nagging question comes to my mind again and again: Where was Stone Philips when the plane went down?

  My suspicions drift toward Stone not because he has the second dumbest name in contemporary broadcasting (Wolf Blitzer still holds a commanding lead), but because he works for Dateline NBC. Dateline has two strikes against it: First, it has a penchant for blowing things up to create news (just ask General Motors), and second, it’s on NBC—also known as the Nightly Body Count network.

  NBC is absolutely obsessed with death. This realization came to me as I was watching their coverage of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which, as of press time, features more dead people per frame than a driver’s ed training film.

  It must be some Clinton administration mandate for the media to feel people’s pain. Virtually every event, seemingly every athlete, is profiled by NBC in context of a related death, some of them recent and some not: swimmers who just lost a parent, a Greco-Roman wrestler whose brother died in a car accident. For the producers at NBC Sports, the most competitive events aren’t track and field or gymnastics, but Olympic bucket kicking and 100-meter freestyle grave digging.

  If you’ve watched even a few token minutes of the Coca-Cola 100 (as the Games are known in Atlanta), you must know what I’m talking about. The cameras are live at the track or in the arena, the athletes are waiting for the gun, then suddenly the theme to Love Story begins, and we segue to a taped shot of an Olympian walking pensively along a lonely road.

  “When she goes for the gold later today, Suzy Shaumberg of Oakbrook, Illinois, won’t just be shooting at clay pigeons,” Bob Costas intones in a funereal hush. “She’ll also be firing rounds of remorse from a tragic air rifle accident that claimed the life of her half sister Molly just three years ago.”