Mind of an Outlaw (69 page)

What had happened to American politics? Like Mr. Magoo, it teetered on the lip of ultimate peril—which is to say ultimate questions—and all the while a blood rage had been building in the nation. “If I am young and dying of AIDS,” went the credo that was forming, “then I might as well go down in flames.” Yes, the riots were building, and the forces of the right, equally inflamed by the more and more vivid presence of the gay nation, were out to extirpate—so went the secret agenda—all human flesh that carried such a virus. Scenarios were germinating on
the other side of that hill of time which is ten years away. Scenarios, we know, are rarely put into production by the cosmic forces who make the real films of our lives, but let us contemplate the Republicans in this pass—an enormous congregation of the conservative-minded, who can be enumerated as the greedy, the spiteful, the mean-spirited, in party congress with the sincere, the godly, the principled, and the tidy, all philosophically unsuited to contemplate the nightmare of a disease that is not amenable to medical science and may or may not have the deepest moral roots; yes, the Republicans were paralyzed before the obscene enigma of AIDS and so when Mary Fisher spoke like an angel that night, the floor was in tears, and conceivably the nation as well, for instead of the Evil Empire, so nicely manipulable by American might—we always held the aces—now we lived on the edge of uncontrollables we did not know how to stir against—drugs, crime, abortion, race, disease. How much, nearly half of the nation at least, must have longed for Buchananite solutions: how bewildered was each angry soul of the right that there was no retaking of the disease of AIDS block by city block.

Into this stew of choked passions and muffled fears (where a city was now defined as a place you would not enter until you knew where you would be able to park your car and ascend by elevator to your event), into this ongoing panic came Mary Fisher with a message so old that the coruscated souls of the Republicans, nine-tenths barnacled by now in greed and wealth, cant and bad conscience, fury and fear, began to weep in longing for the old memory of Christ kissing the feet of the poor. How contradictory are our conventions! At this one, the most moving message of the four days came from a Republican princess who had the Republicans bawling their hearts out at sentiments usually characterized by the L-word:

Marilyn Quayle came next. Had the coordinators been wholly unready for the impact of Mary Fisher’s speech and so had not foreseen what a powerful effect it would produce upon the mean-spirited not to be mean-spirited for a little while? Or did the convention organizers possess the wisdom to know that Marilyn Quayle was ready to appear at the podium after anyone—Gorbachev, Saint Peter, Madonna—she would not be cowed by those who came before. She had, after all, the insularity of a duchess, an insensitivity to her surroundings so monumental that it was almost attractive—one of a kind!

So she gave her little speech with absolute composure; the only sign that not everyone in herself was right there at home and listening came from her logo—that is, her horsy smile—that peculiarly self-intoxicated stretch of lips and protrusion of teeth that came and went to a rhythm that had next to nothing to do with what she said. Her words might be pious, or reflective, or she might even attempt to be funny, “If only Murphy Brown could meet Major Dad—what a story,” but then the smile would come, on the beat, off the beat; it was like the reflex learned in childhood to hold off tears when one is being scolded.

Her language, however, was always correct. When it came to being politically correct—as a Bush Republican, that is—who could approach her? Her speech was seamless, and her espousal of Republican womanhood could not be improved, nor injured: it was there, flat as Indiana. “Watching and helping my children as they grow into good and loving teenagers is a source of daily joy for me.”

On the other hand, she was not a duchess for too little. She had a nasal voice that could drill into clay, and given her disconnected smile, she could have been the president of a garden society, birdlike for all her horsiness, elevated above dross, and spacey as a space station. Let us say farewell while listening to her encomiums to the royal couple:

To say that the appearance of Barbara Bush at the podium was the second if not the first most important event of the convention is to miss the point. Barbara Bush was also the major gamble of the Bush strategy. The economy, no matter what quantities of pork barrel were going to be brought up from the hold to feed electoral mouths in September and October, was going to remain a problem antipathetic to solution. One might as well roll the dice then with Barbara Bush, and pump up the advantage the Republicans held in family values. It was certainly a gamble. If America reacted with the cry—jobs, not happy hearths—then the election could be lost. On the other hand, Barbara Bush was the only exceptional card they had to play, and one could find a logic to the bet—patriotism, the flag, and the family were, after all, the values taught in elementary schools (even if they were public schools), whereas politics only commenced (if it did) with high school civics. So family values were gut-bets. Unless the economy got so bad that people had to vote with their minds, patriotism, the flag, and the family had a real chance to hit. George could take care of the patriotism, but Barbara could demolish every Clinton position when it came to family values, and you wouldn’t even see the smoke. The beauty of it all was that she was also an ameliorative and corrective force. If the good ship GOP was lilted ten degrees further over to the right than it cared to be, with every attendant impediment to responsive steering, Barbara could ballast it back a little to the left. The pro-lifers had kept cutting too hellish a swath in Houston that week, blockading abortion clinics so violently that forty-one of their religiosos got arrested on Monday, and then were so bad in court that they called the judge, who was a mother and a Catholic named O’Neill, nothing less than “anti-Christ”—Jesus, it was enough to
make you swear. Ultrareligious Americans were not paying heed to the effect on the electoral result. After Judge O’Neill ordered Operation Rescue to keep a hundred feet away from Planned Parenthood clinics, one preacher even started praying for the judge to repent or she would “be stricken from the face of the earth.” Somebody else left a stink bomb at Planned Parenthood. Besides, you couldn’t have a crazy-looking father, holding his kid, scared frozen, by one hand, while he swings a seven-month fetus (still reeking of formaldehyde) with the other. Republican women were going to leave the party in droves. George understood female psychology. You don’t allow something as ugly as a fetus to be waved in public—women do not like to advertise the disagreeableness of some personal and private functions. Dammit, the party needed amelioration concerning pro-life.

Barbara could provide it. Barbara would provoke the religious right hardly at all, because, after all, even they knew they needed her. Pat Robertson made a point of saying, “I can’t believe the American people are so blind that they would want to replace Barbara Bush.” Family values was the epoxy, then, to keep the party together, and Barbara could handle any press conference or podium assignment. Trust her every time. In with reporters from
The Boston Globe
and
The Washington Post
just a week ago, why, she blocked every thrust, and these were top-flight journalists, true hard-ons, honed!

BOSTON GLOBE:
On abortion, I have to ask you something. Why is it so many of your friends think you are pro-choice?

BARBARA BUSH:
I have no idea. I have no idea.

BOSTON GLOBE:
Because you never expressed it to them? Never talked about it?

BARBARA BUSH:
I’ve always felt that if I ran for president, George Bush would back me 100 percent. That’s the best I can do. [So] we can’t return to that. I’ve given my answer.

WASHINGTON POST:
Well, I’m returning to it and I want you to tell me how the Republican Party which …

BARBARA BUSH:
I don’t know the answer.

WASHINGTON POST:
 … which wants less government in our lives …

BARBARA BUSH:
I don’t know the answer to your question and so, in all honesty, don’t ask it. Pro or con. I just don’t want to get into it. I’ve had it with abortion.

She could front any confrontation. The day before she had said, “It’s a personal choice.… The personal things should be left out of … platforms and conventions.” She had said that during a televised interview in a simple setting. The only picture in the room was on the end table next to her, and it was a framed photograph (signed, presumably) of Pope John Paul II. She could offer every indication to Republican women that she was their advocate for choice in the land, while reassuring the religious right by dint of her close respect for John Paul II—no champion of abortion was he!

Speak of presumption, let us leave these musings of George Bush to hack away at the matter on our own. Concerning abortion, Barbara Bush is leaving just the kind of mixed message that only a monarch can dare to send out. Mixed messages are the prerogative of kings and queens; they are supposed to represent the entirety of the populace.

That was just what she did in her speech on family values. It was no rhetorical gem. On the page, it read like one of those decaffeinated pieces of prose that used to blanket the old
Reader’s Digest
, affirmative, highly simplified, and emotionally available to anyone whose IQ had managed to stay below 100. But the GOP, we can assume, was profoundly aware, along with Barbara Bush, that most of the electorate was right there, right under that magic number.

Virtually at her commencement, she paid lip service to other orators: “There is something not quite right here … speeches by President Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford, Secretary Jack Kemp, Senator Phil Gramm, and … Barbara Bush?!” It was evident already that despite her protestations, she was an exceptionally good speaker, and this because of one exceptional and virtuous ability—she could address tens of thousands of people
as if they were not more than two or three individuals sitting across from her on a couch. This faculty is available to few, and it suggests she had managed some exceptional transcendence—a woman once sensitive about her stocky build and much-lined face, her dumpy presence once so remarked in relation to Nancy Reagan, had undergone, now that she in turn had become First Lady, so many rites of passage, that she was now possessed of a consummate ease in public. So she gave her audience in the Astrodome a satisfaction they had found nowhere else—a wholly comfortable, social, witty, and reigning queen in their midst; yes, Barbara Bush was politics in the deepest sense, even as is monarchy. Her confidence suggested that one thing at least was right in the world—herself! We vote for what looks right.

So the royal presence that the Reagans had imperfectly commenced, the Bushes had now developed. The presidency had become a monarchy. In place of landed estates or thousand-year-old families, we had endowed symbols—endowed by the psychic etching upon our values of our quick history and, intrinsic to us, our American entertainment. Our symbols and our heraldry were in our American West, our Cavalry, the Marines, the Air Corps, the spirit-of-the-fourth-quarter, Notre Dame, and the kind of family values that had come down to us from Queen Victoria and been brought over by boatloads of immigrants, a sense of propriety brought up to the mark now by Queen Mother Barbara, and our own not wholly overpowering King George, a fantasy of rich national theater. However, since Mr. and Mrs. Bush partook of it as only WASP gentry and WASP vigor can settle into a set of roles they are able to spend their lives living out, but will never name, a subliminal nourishment was there for that part of America which could hardly survive without the certainty of a single powerful and uplifting idea, the unvoiced sense that Barbara Bush was, for all effects, our queen and so could underwrite the religion beneath all other American religions—America itself. Well, thought the Republicans, we’ll win by an avalanche if we can only keep the focus on Hillary versus Barbara, Hillary with her feminist intelligence and her hairband.