Editorials / Clinton: Week One/Clinton: Week Two
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
/ wonder if at some dizzying point during President Bill Clinton's unique glorification rites, he saw what I believe I saw. Perhaps it was when he, his wife, and the vice presidential couple...
...Springs is convinced that our youthful President has had a facelift...
...It was not unlike the halo that the painter Fra Angelico used to confer on biblical notables back in the fifteenth century...
...The President's populist face is a false face...
...Well, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, as Senator Joe Biden F or a new administration well supported, as a new administration always is, by the abundant good will of the American people, the Clinton Administration is facing an unusual amount of enmity and doubt...
...Concerning these last two imbroglios, President Clinton was responding to the ideological demands of human rights purists and of militant homosexuals...
...What is more, Mr...
...He sketches caricatures for major news organizations on both sides of the water...
...Most likely it was another of the technical marvels pulled off by Gary Smith, executive producer of the American Gala, but no one knows...
...At one point, when President Clinton slowly turned toward the beaming co-president, several inches below his chin I perceived two halos radiating from both eminences...
...To them, appearances are everything, and forever manipulable...
...At some point I saw a golden halo encircle the head of the gently smiling leader...
...I owe you and send you my deepest gratitude...
...Springs is, by the way, nonpartisan...
...Sure the media believed it when candidate Bill let on that he had read "300" books in one year and "40" in the first eight months of 1981...
...Clinton is experiencing at this very hour in Washington...
...Thus all the talk of "reunion" and "reclaiming America...
...The reality we are about to discover is that the Yuppie left cannot govern...
...CI heavy weather Mr...
...Immediately after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy another poet, Archibald MacLeish, wrote President Kennedy that his inaugural ceremony "left me proud and hopeful to be an American—something I have not felt for almost twenty years...
...Most of what they claim to believe is pishposh...
...Not only members of the "entertainment community" felt this sense of emancipation...
...Contrary to President Clinton's claim, his administration's face is not the face of America but the face of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government: blacks trained in elite schools, tans trained in elite schools,whites trained in elite schools, women trained in elite schools—and most of the training is in law and the jargon of social science...
...Now they are in power...
...Lucia, for times were again tough...
...His problems with the press will grow, for a rule of American politics is that he who lives by conning the press dies by conning the press...
...Never in the history of presidential inaugurals has personal glorification been such a central theme...
...Behind every appearance there is a reality...
...Their rarefied community has so little diversity that they have never heard their untruths challenged...
...But now the press corps is in a snit that Bill is breaking campaign promises wantonly...
...Now in the gray aftermath of his immortalization, as he gets down to governing us all, I still do not know if that halo was a genuine manifestation of Divine approval...
...He is convinced that Ronald Reagan was dependent on hair dye...
...Perhaps Springs is correct and President Clinton now smiles through a second face...
...Its credulousness goes only so far...
...All it can do is squabble about race, gender, and other gaudy hypocrisies...
...The poet, Maya Angelou, also expressed the notion that only Bill Clinton's election had released her from a long and frightening period of captivity or exile or something-or-other that had made life hell for her (she did not go into details and neither did Shep...
...Throughout the Reagan-Bush years they doggedly manufactured untruths about the economy, the society, the world...
...Clinton would not have spoken so rashly about opening our shores to Haitian boat people...
...This sense of a Democratic presidential victory representing national salvation is not unprecedented...
...We feel like we can be heard again after all these years...
...But Springs is surprised that a 45-year-old man with relatively good looks would have a facelift...
...So blatant, however, have been the hypocrisies of the incoming administration that even before these glorification ceremonies the press was growing restless...
...If the Clinton Administration were truly in touch with ordinary Americans, the President would have anticipated the public outcry against nominating as attorney general a millionaire corporate lawyer who had knowingly employed illegal aliens...
...And their complaints would recirculate through the public discourse and on into the history books, adding yet another mythical example of conservatism's intolerance, jingoism, and bigotry...
...The reality is that his administration's appointments reflect not populism but elitism...
...After promising middle-class tax cuts they think they can effortlessly pass a middle-class tax increase...
...They are not particularly productive people, but at a rather heavy price to society they do produce harangues and endless squabbles...
...The realities of American politics are now shaking the appearance that President Clinton believed he could endlessly manipulate...
...Nor have so many Hollywood entertainers hit Washington...
...Nor have tears and mawkish sentiment been so abundant...
...The recent observation of one of the Western world's leading students of the human face gave me a clue...
...Why is this...
...Had President Clinton but looked into one of the myriad of television monitors always nearby, he would have seen it...
...Never before has so much money been expended on a presidential inauguration...
...MacLeish was reacting, it seems, to the hellish tyranny imposed on the nation by General Dwight David Eisenhower of the United States Armed Forces, and the grateful poet had to write from that infamous Caribbean hellhole, St...
...Nor would he have created the present furor about ending the military's ban against homosexuals...
...Then, too, imagine the whining that we would hear from the Democrats if at Ronald Reagan's 1981 inaugural the incoming conservatives had said that they were "reclaiming America...
...Next I expected the famous couple to sprout wings and levitate a few inches from terra firma, but good taste prevailed...
...President Clinton came to Washington claiming to be a champion of populism and diversity...
...They cannot cut government spending, because they cannot say no to their special interests...
...Behind all President Clinton's rhetoric about diversity and populism is the reality of an administration composed of the Yuppie left...
...indignant liberals would blubber...
...CI...
...Are they questioning our patriotism, our democratic values, our Americanism...
...Its members are lawyers, career government employees, university faculty members, and careerists for such special interests as "consumerism," "environmentalism," and "human rights...
...Perhaps, too, this is why President Clinton has been less than forthcoming about his medical records...
...And the millions shoveled out by corporate America for these revels add irony atop irony...
...After all their guff about recession and depression they are faced with an economic recovery and they have not a clue about how to sustain it...
...Nor has high tech been so exuberantly resorted to for what Hollywoodians call "special effects...
...We have heard some amazing testimonials to our new President...
...Pursuant to his art, he has just finished studying President Clinton's face...
...It was Shep Gordon, manager for the singer Luther Vandross, who said: "The Inauguration has mobilized the whole entertainment community...
...John Springs is a distinguished sketch artist here and in London, where he lives...
...There are scars from a facial refurbishment that the trained eye can perceive below the jaw and ears...
...The answer is: appearances aren't everything...
...Are they saying they have a superior claim to America than we...
...But what does this have to do with thehas undoubtedly said...
...Yet, in light of all the derision and repugnance that the Democrats so recently leveled against the "Hollywood glitz" of the Reagan years, this garish Hollywood saturnalia is a bit jarring...
...Springs has not had enough experience with Americans of the Yuppie left...
...The Clinton Administration includes few Asians, eastern Europeans, urban Catholics, or rural Protestants beyond the President's native state...
...My guess is that there are actually many homosexuals who recognize the idiocy of allowing overt homosexuality in the barracks...
...The lumpy body does not comport normally with the smooth face...
...Perhaps it was when he, his wife, and the vice presidential couple withdrew down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or when he sat on a bar stool pontificating to the children at Monticello, or during that characteristically euphuistic acceptance speech...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
