Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
The disconnect between Giuliani's Mr. Clean public image and his chaotic private life has certainly taken the bloom off his reputation as a tough, efficient executive. But Giuliani deserves credit for the kind of affairs he's evidently had: Unlike the predatory Bill Clinton, who riffled through vulnerable women like playing cards and demanded mechanical servicing from them like nameless plumbers, Giuliani has conducted authentic, long-term relationships with mature, intelligent, feisty career women.
Speaking of the current administration, the most sickening spectacle of the year has to have been the delusional behavior of the Washington press corps at last month's black-tie White House correspondents' dinner, where most of the overwhelmingly liberal guests hooted and hollered like baboons at a video of the leader of the free world performing childish stunts like raiding ice cream machines and riding a bicycle down the corridors of the Old Executive Office Building.
Evidently there is no shame left in the nation's capital and no sense whatever of the dignity of the presidency. Why should my fellow Democrats be surprised that a purging Republican tide is rising?
Reader response to my support of the government's forcible removal of Elian Gonzalez from his great-uncle's Miami home was extraordinarily negative: Despite national polls indicating a majority of Americans agreed with the government's action, at least 75 percent of mail sent to me via Salon took the opposite position and often in terms more virulent than anything I have seen since the date-rape wars of the early 1990s (when feminist fanatics from around the country called my university to try to get me fired).
In analyzing this explosive reaction, I tried to sort the most intemperate letters into groups. One faction conflated the Easter weekend INS raid with the 1993 ATF assault on David Koresh's ranch at Waco. This column has consistently deplored the government's atrocious behavior at Waco, but I see few parallels between the two incidents, except for Attorney General Janet Reno's procrastination and bungling.
The Northeastern media treated Koresh, a religious zealot who nevertheless had constitutional rights, like a crackpot hillbilly, while in stark contrast, they allowed the family and friends of Lazaro Gonzalez to rant and grandstand for the cameras for months, as a small boy, a Cuban national, was held hostage and amorally used as a stage prop. As a teacher, I was sickened by the crazed environment that that child endured virtually from the moment he was rescued from the sea last November.
Uncritical supporters of the egomaniacal Lazaro and his unstable daughter Marisleysis (who is reported to have been hospitalized for stress and anxiety three times last summer, long before Elian arrived) may have been relying primarily on print accounts of the standoff. If not, then they lack the ability to "read" information fully from visual images on TV. The Gonzalez household and street scene looked like an anthill on dope. That family was given more than ample warning, week after week, to comply with INS regulations, which they flagrantly defied.
The second group of negative letter writers claimed that their experience, or that of their parents, under past totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union gives them special knowledge that Elian would be far happier with distant relatives in the U.S. than with his father, grandparents and school friends in Communist Cuba.
As I have made clear, I am no admirer of Fidel Castro and look forward to the day when he's gone and impoverished Cuba inevitably democratizes. But it seems foolish to portray that slow-paced, backward Caribbean island in garish, apocalyptic terms based on the violent overthrow of the Batista government 40 years ago.
The third group of irate letters were of the my-America-right-or-wrong variety, coming from those who, as far as I could see, have rarely, if ever traveled beyond their native shores and have little sense of how the rest of the world lives. In the crassest terms, they equate America's cornucopia of material goods with personal happiness and fulfillment.
As someone only one generation (on my mother's side) and two generations (on my father's side) removed from the Italian countryside, may I suggest that, in a sunny climate amid the fertile operations of nature, it's possible for villagers who own very little to achieve a contentment not necessarily guaranteed in the frenzied, careerist U.S.
Several liberal readers wrote to upbraid me about my past praise for radio host Rush Limbaugh, who has repeatedly and vehemently condemned the government raid in Miami. Surely now, they crowed, I would admit that Limbaugh, in comedian Al Franken's words, is "a big fat idiot"?
How absurd! What this Salon column has stood for from the start is independent thought -- freedom from dogma and from insular partisanship. Rush Limbaugh is a conservative Republican, and I am a libertarian Democrat; of course we will disagree on many things. But nothing in the forceful position Limbaugh has taken on the Elian Gonzalez issue makes me respect him any the less.
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