Hi Nell:
Yesterday, I ended my last dispatch by referring to Henry Kissinger as an “unrepentant, unindicted war criminal.” I was giddy with power, I couldn’t stop myself; it’s something I’ve always wanted to say in print and could never find a way to insert into a movie review. I thought: “Yeee-haww!!!” Hours later, when the adrenaline (and caffeine) had ebbed and I found myself nestled in the bosom of a loving family, I thought: “What the hell did I just write?” This e-mail/breakfast table form is a peculiar one. It’s not like talking–it’s too deliberate. And it’s so much more promiscuous than real writing. It’s a bastard form. Bastards can be sexy, but this one sometimes feels too easy. So I’m going to be a little more careful…
Having said that, I should add that I look forward to Dr. Kissinger being dragged down to hell by the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and North and South American human beings who died in agony as a consequence of his “realpolitik.”
Well, it is a jam-packed news day, isn’t it? Linda Tripp held a news conference and was scarier than anything I saw last night in Halloween: H20. No, I’m not going to refer to how she looks (at least in print. What was scary is that she compared herself to me and you and every other decent, truth-loving American. Certainly it’s true that the president’s maladroit lawyer, Bob Bennett, threw gasoline on the pyre-that-is-Linda by calling her a liar when she was likely referring to something she actually saw. But here’s where Tripp differs from, for example, me. She and Lucianne Goldberg were peddling a “Behind the Scenes at the White House” book years before Monica Lewinsky batted her porcine baby blues at the Man from Hope. So the New York Times says that Monica’s going to hand over a dress. The word “dress,” which is in the subhead of the three-column lead story, is right around the level of the president’s mouth in the accompanying picture. The dress, allegedly bearing traces of the president’s affection, was a “bargaining chip”; a sidebar suggests that a motive for Lewinsky’s testimony was immunity for her mom, Marcia Lewis. Threatening someone’s mother is about as low as it gets, but if Lewinsky’s grandmother were still around, I have a feeling Starr would have yanked her out of her wheelchair and pushed her up the courthouse steps in leg irons. The story speaks of an unusually strong bond between daughter and mother; the latter, you might recall, wrote a book about the private lives of the three tenors in which she hinted strongly (and by all reports fantastically) that she’d made the beast with two backs with Placido Domingo. Meanwhile, Tripp’s testimony has given new meaning to the phrase: “The Fat Lady Sings.”
Speaking of which, the debate over obesity in opera rages on in Rec.music.opera, with participants continuing to call each bigots and fag-hags. As to the controversy itself, I gather that the more hippopatomic sopranos might gain a little on the top end but lose a lot more in being unable to pick up a spear without gasping for breath. Having always preferred to listen to opera rather than watch it, I’m less passionate about the issue than I am about, say, Henry Kissinger, whom I’d incidentally like to see cast as Don Giovanni and ultimately dragged down to hell by the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and North and South American human beings who died in agony as a consequence of his “realpolitik.”
I didn’t win the Powerball Lottery, but was highly amused to read of the displeasure of the high-toned denizens of Greenwich, Conn., over the unwashed masses pouring in from the west and south to buy tickets. The other night the Guinness Book of World Records TV program showed a tidal bore sweeping away hundreds of hapless Chinese. It struck the wrong coast.
Among the other big stories, I’ll limit myself to one: Clarence Thomas’s speech before a predominantly hostile National Bar Association, said to be the nation’s largest group of black lawyers. I wanted to bring up Thomas yesterday, when I complained that Paula Jones’s case had little merit because, however naughty the president might have been, she suffered no professional injury. The same case could be made (and was) against Anita Hill, so isn’t this a double standard? Well, Thomas’s credibility was shot long before Hill was even a twinkle in Susan Faludi’s eye, before the words “Coke can” and “pubic hair” were irrevocably joined. Under oath, this laughably underqualified jurist had perjured himself by denying that he had a position on the issue of a woman’s right to an abortion. Case closed. Yesterday, he did his usual minstrel-show tap dance, declaring: “I refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as an intellectual slave because I am black.” He also said that it’s time to “ignore those who sow seeds of discord and animus–THAT is self-hatred.” It’s scary that one of the nine most powerful judges in America defines “sowing seeds of discord,” otherwise known as protesting something you think is obscene, as self-hatred.
