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File Under "Pandering"

By Cullen Murphy
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1999, at 6:40 PM ET

You're right to raise an alarm about the ashes, I think: The Bill Clinton Forehead Watch is officially on. Would he actually have the nerve to appear in public with a telltale smudge? Of course he would, if his prior performance in other religious pastures is any guide. I keep a file labeled "Pandering," and I remember starting the file in May of 1992 after coming across a small item in the New York Times. What follows is the text of most of that item:

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The record may not hold for long, but when he appeared in the Hasidic stronghold of Brooklyn's Borough Park Sunday night, Governor Clinton clearly offered the most unusual promise of this, or possibly any, Presidential year. "If I become President," Mr. Clinton said as he opened his address to more than 500 members of the Council of Jewish Organizations of Borough Park, "we will keep a glatt kosher kitchen in the White House."... Several of Mr. Clinton's aides shook their heads and smiled when he made the offer.

I have no idea whether the president has made good on this pledge or not. But if he hasn't, then it may be one of the first completely-irrelevant-but-deeply-symbolic issues to knock Hillary over the head if she decides to jump into New York politics.

You and I have both been making jokey references to various files that we keep, but I suspect that neither of us is really kidding. I happen to be a file nut, believing that if you clip something out of a newspaper or magazine and put it in a folder it will eventually come in handy. I actually do have a "Pandering" file. It's preceded by files labeled "Nixon Funeral, (Contingency Plan)," "Nuclear Free Zones," and "October Surprises," and it's followed by "Passover Syndrome," "Pet Cemeteries," and "Puritanism." (This last file contains a 1991 article about the William Kennedy Smith trial, and raises the question of whether the American public will tolerate news coverage containing sexually graphic description. Nah.) After that come "Roaches," "Scapegoats," and "Second Marriages." Keeping files like this is a habit I suspect I picked up from my father, who for years has been collecting visual material that he can use as reference for the comic strip ("Fisticuffs, Women"; "Halberds"; "Knaves, Drunken"). He has about 24 file drawers full of this stuff by now. If you're in a hurry for the Life magazine pictorial about Ingrid Bergman's new role in Joan of Arc, my dad's files are the place for you.

Which brings us back to Prince Valiant and Lent. My father and I aim for a certain amount of historical accuracy, and so one big issue, I guess, would be how far north the pronouncements of the Council of Laodicea would have spread by the fifth century. (The Council of Laodicea, in A.D. 360, prescribed the 40-day Lenten period.) Arguably, the Vikings, who weren't Christian, didn't take such pronouncements seriously. The situation gets messy: Prince Valiant himself comes from Viking stock, but he was married by a monk. I should note that Easter has been celebrated in the strip, and so has Hanukkah. The palace at Camelot does not yet have a glatt kosher kitchen.

So what can you tell me about this Hans Kung fellow, apart from the fact that he doesn't take Laodicea seriously either?