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Margo Howard and Martin Peretz

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from: Martin Peretz

Royal Clintonisms

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2001, at 3:07 PM ET

Dear Margo,

I wrote in my morning missive that, as senator, Hillary Clinton will have a "regal pretense." I should not have put it in the future tense. There was literal evidence of this in the last days of the administration. Several of my friends are on the White House staff, and all of them went to the many moveable feasts in honor of the first couple. But there was one party that was supposed to be for staff, a farewell for all of them who had worked thanklessly (which is how one works for the Clintons) in this administration. It turned out not to be a party for them but another one in the endless series of celebrations of the first couple. In fact, it was actually produced by Harry Thomason, the TV impresario, with film clips, celebrity appearances, and live music by Fleetwood Mac, playing--if you can believe it--"Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." None of this had the psychodrama effect of the limelight-grabbing, long, lonely walk down the corridor of the arena at the Los Angeles convention. But it was meant to.

In a rip-off of the Academy Awards, various mini-celebrities spoke a narrative of the Clinton years. It was quite accurate in one regard, and that is that it showed how many times and where the Clintons had traveled, mostly abroad. For all of Thomason's professionalism, this had a March of Time effect--which you and I remember from the movies but almost no one else does. Well, the Clintons went all over, some places repeatedly and--at least according to these accounts--triumphantly. They certainly went to Israel a lot and also to the Palestine Authority, wherever that is. But did it not occur to the producers--it would be too much to expect it to occur to Bill and Hillary--that all that travel to the Middle East amounted to a failure, a dismal failure for which Israel will pay dearly, having made concessions for nothing. The photographs with Rabin and Peres and Netanyahu and Barak and Arafat and Mubarak and King Hussein, they are now like the pictures you see in New York delicatessens, the owners hob-nobbing with famous people, and with just about similar consequence.

Anyhow, finally to the royal part. I pieced together all of the above from three or four people. But the following I got from everyone to whom I talked. In fact, I got two telephone calls especially to be told this tale. You remember that, after Ms. Rodham Clinton (you see, I take your admonitions seriously) published her book about it taking a village and all that, she went to Africa, presumably to many villages. In one of them, maybe in Burundi, maybe elsewhere, the camera finds a little girl in the crowd who asks her mother who this lady is. And her mother--maybe Rodham Clinton's alter ego--says she is "the queen of the world." This would be mortifying to any self-respecting woman. She might confide it to her husband or to her mother. But to allow it to be shown in public? Ugh! Feh! Imagine Eleanor Roosevelt permitting this or encouraging an atmosphere in which this would be permissible. Or Tipper. Or Laura Bush, for that matter. Come to think of it, you may be right about Laura Bush. I apologize for what I implied about her this a.m.

By the way, L. Brent Bozell is the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr. I think they were at Yale together--they actually learned something there--and ran National Review together for a number of years.

Have you been reading the New York Times series about Muslim terrorism? The articles focus on Osama bin Laden's wide-flung network of assassins and mass murderers. It is an eye-opener. Many of these jihadniks descend from the American-sponsored war in Afghanistan against the Russians, a worthy cause. But, once it was won and the Soviet Union collapsed, you had a whole generation running into the tens of thousands who knew nothing but how to kill. And kill they did. Pakistan is really no longer a country because of this human detritus of God fearers with mostly American weapons. But this does not exhaust the species. And its likes are now all over the world: the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Turkey, the Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, many of the countries ending with "-stan" from the ex-Soviet Union, and, of course, emerging Palestine. This is a phenomenon one is not permitted to notice in polite company.

Maybe happier stuff tomorrow.

Yours,
Marty

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Martin Peretz

Royal Clintonisms

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2001, at 3:07 PM ET
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Margo Howard writes Slate's "Dear Prudence" column. Martin Peretz is a lecturer in social studies at Harvard and editor in chief and chairman of the New Republic.
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