Capitol Ideas/Include Me Out
Bethell, Tom
Acouple of days before the Inauguration, I went downtown to take a look at America's Reunion on the Mall, a "celebration of America's cultural diversity" that was somehow intended to "unite us." The...
...Both the Washington Post and the New York Times used it in banner headlines on the day after the Inauguration...
...The big question is whether Clinton will be able to resist this chorus of greed (the desire to spend other people's money) dressed up as "sacrifice...
...Braiterman looked amazed...
...Tanya Osada and her sister Aka Pereyma had a booth nearby and they are egg dyers from Troy, Ohio...
...She uses flour or sand to draw floor designs that resemble heavenly objects, conch shells, and elephants...
...Bill and Al: Gays in the Military Now...
...Out on the Mall, a couple was dancing to the music of Mingo Salvidar y los Tremendos Cuatros Espadas...
...At last the Republican usurpers are gone...
...It's instructive to realize that the Smithsonian Institution—provider of sign-language translations for folk ballads—doesn't know this and probably imagines that its activities in general avoid the taint of politics...
...The messages on the Wall were political all right—but the politics were uncontrolled...
...Does anyone believe she would have been asked to compose it if she had not been a black woman...
...The less polite word that comes to my mind is decline...
...The new political code-word is Sacrifice...
...Clinton himself constantly invites the comparison...
...Did you ever hear such nonsense...
...But it's not their belts they plan to tighten...
...NB: No simultaneous translations provided for us Anglos...
...From Frost to Angelou we see decline: artistic standards swallowed up by political ones...
...Help Make Our Government Efficient...
...Diversity Mall was one of the few inaugural events open to the general public...
...But how come they never ask beforehand...
...All of it is political...
...A folk singer named Tish Hino-Josa from Austin was singing to a crowd of a couple of hundred in that lame-lamenting, folky-guitarstrumming wail that has been plaguing America nonstop since Joan Baez hit the coffee houses of Philadelphia thirty-five years ago...
...It is as if you have been looking in our brains for the last six weeks," Hillary Clinton told Maya Angelou after it was over...
...And inevitably: "Cure AIDS...
...Rock, River was little more than a portentous recital of politically correct categories: the gay, the straight, the French, the Swede, the homeless, the teacher, the Apache, the Native American: what rot...
...I thought the better of asking to see her immigrants' Green Card...
...Back in our midst we have a President who believes in big, activist government, the way Kennedy and Johnson did in the heady days of the 1960s...
...Prove America Free By Lessening the Regulation of People...
...Diversity Mall at least gave the people something to go to...
...That at least had the ring of truth...
...C'mon...
...Braiterman asked me...
...If he makes this mistake, he will be a one-term President...
...He wanted to express Kennedyesque sentiments without using Ted Sorensen's phrases...
...But I think that will be the extent of my praise for the "co-chairs" of the Presidential Inaugural, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, TV sitcom producers and Friends of Bill...
...Then again, it's possible that Clinton will keep his political radar switched on and skirt the shoals into which the Beltway chorus is trying to steer him...
...Across the top was written: "What Are Your Dreams for America that President Clinton and Vice President Gore Can Help Make Come True...
...On my way back I stopped in again at Community Hall, where a group called the Badland Singers were holding forth—some kind of a Red Indian War Dance, complete with feathered costumes...
...Reagan didn't...
...Welcome to Diversity Mall, 1993...
...The Post editorially parsed the "root idea" behind it as: "a greater national effort on behalf of public purposes...
...Heaven forbid...
...Clinton is enthusiastic...
...You said it much better than we could...
...I suppose we were all meant to admire the thoughtful "inclusiveness" of Angelou's lists...
...The emphasis on divisions is of course more likely to divide than unite...
...We seem to have been overlooked by the Smithsonian's political oversight committee...
...They said it was political...
...I n the last few weeks, the great theme in Washington has been: Restoration...
...Messages could be written on six-inch squares of colored paper and stuck onto the plywood wall...
...Chuck Spotted Bird was on the drums...
...Also on stage with this Hino-Josa was an American sign-language translator...
...They don't know what to expect...
...Oh, well...
...He didn't know the half of it...
...Several large white tents had been erected on the Mall...
...He was right about that...
...I gave up...
...Let's have a little respect for the truth, and for Whitman...
...Sacrifice" means that the people who live at other people's expense are planning a little belt-tightening...
...It's ours...
...Perhaps they vaguely imagine that they will bump into the new President, as though we were still in the age of Andrew Jackson...
...Sorry you missed it...
...She came courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, I was told...
...Next to her was Hansa Ashar, a practitioner of something called "rangoli...
...The New York Times the next day cravenly praised her "mighty Whitmanesque cadences...
...The parasite classes are urging the Democrats to take over the role traditionally assigned to Republicans: tax-collector for the welfare state...
...It means the opposite...
...Perhaps someone will remind him that the Kennedy Administration supported a big tax cut...
...Ah—but there was something new...
...For some reason this had been advertised as "Mexican-American" music...
...And so it went...
...The first booth I came to was occupied by Bharati Parikh, a "mendhi," who "paints decorative patterns with henna plant dye on women's hands...
...Probably, a sizable tax increase will make its way to Capitol Hill this spring...
...In the campaign, Bill Clinton kept using the word change...
...In his Inaugural Address, Clinton said that "we" (meaning the parasite classes) need to "reduce debt" (meaning raise taxes...
...I went into one called Community Hall...
...Compare the inaugural addresses of President Kennedy and President Clinton and you will also see decline...
...It had only been admitted after weeks of discussion and negotiation, apparently...
...He pointed to it...
...One of the organizers, Meyer Braiterman, a "consultant to arts organizations in New York City," told me that the Smithsonian Institution had put up a big fight before allowing this Democracy Wall to be part of "America's Reunion...
...went into the Arts Workshop Tent to / observe some apolitical crafts, for comparison...
...The persistent belief within the Beltway is that big government can be made to work, but only if it is headed by those who believe in it...
...The sound effects—I'm trying to avoid the word music—included some of the strangest grunting and warbling I ever heard in my life...
...Put bluntly, this means that the parasite classes are getting ready to dig deeper into our wallets...
...which in turn demeans members of legally privileged groups who need no such assistance...
...D own toward the Washington Monument was the 88-foot-long American Town Hall Wall, a "low-tech medium" dedicated to Clinton's "theme of seeking opportunities for inclusion...
...Probably, President Clinton will try to make.it work...
...But let that be...
...In the Heritage Hall, packed tight with people, there was a performance by a group called Los Comperos de Nati Cano, about twenty guys wearing those great big Mexican hats and shaking more maracas than you could shake a stick at...
...Routinely, today, the expansion of the state is masked by the rhetoric of thrift...
...You know why they objected...
...For the most part, the messages echoed Bill and Al and the news media in expressing a limitless faith in government...
...Then they go home...
...They said they weren't about to have it next to their Arts Workshop Tent...
...I think many people come to Washington for the Inauguration only to be disappointed...
...Congress's unrestricted ability to spend more than it collects is construed as a requirement that taxes be raised accordingly...
...At least he would have avoided the clunky clichés—"the vision and courage to reinvent America," and so on...
...Big government does not work and has been repeatedly shown not to work...
...She learned the skill from her family in Bombay and is now billed as being from Danbury, Connecticut...
...No illegal aliens being exploited here, I hope...
...And of course "deficit reduction" doesn't mean government reduction...
...She demonstrated, rather dramatically, that affirmative action involves lowering standards for the benefit of those who otherwise can't make the grade...
...So the Clinton people will soon be passing the (compulsory) plate for another levy on our incomes...
...What about the strong possibility that there are no deaf people present for a musical event...
...Robert Frost, her poet-predecessor on the (1961) Inauguration stand, called this kind of thing tennis without a net...
...This could land Clinton in serious trouble, as it did George Bush...
...There was also a NASA tent and, in addition to the Smithsonian, the official program offered thanks to: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Library of Congress, the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the National Park Service, and the National Park Police...
...But this whole thing is political," he said, sweeping his arm with a gesture that encompassed the Mall in general...
...n short, this was not so much an American festival as a festival of multiculturalism and affirmative action, the old criterion of quality having been replaced by political litmus tests such as ethnicity and gender (particularly gender...
...She learned the art from her family in Gujarat, India, and now lives in Queens, New York...
...Louise Goings is a basket-maker from a Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina, Marie McDonald (McDonald...
...The woman didn't ask...
...for the benefit of deaf folk who arealways presumed to be present when these singers ply their trade...
...When the music started she just launched officiously into her flurry of ambidextrous activity, hands curving about and mouth working away busily as she translated this ballad about some broken down San Antone romance in World War II...
...Some of the messages: "Support Kids in Business" (against the law, of course...
...Maybe he should have asked Sorensen to write him another speech...
...Next to them was Gomya Domsch, a lace-maker from Atwood, Kansas...
...Is there no progress at all...
...The truth is that Maya Angelou is a Quotapoet, and "Rock, River and Tree" is a Quotapoem...
...Which brings us to that so-called poem recited by Maya Angelou at the Inauguration: Rock, River and Tree...
...Bush was half-hearted...
...One way and another, the prospects for a successful Clinton Administration are not high...
...Which means that Clinton is heading for danger...
...More Funding for Public Education...
...Then she perked up as bright as a button and her hands seemed to fly even faster for the happy parts...
...Clinton has compounded his difficulty by placing in his entourage a number of faithful believers in unlimited government—Leon Panetta and Alice Rivlin come to mind...
...She went so earnestly about her business that you might have thought she was the sign-language translator for a deaf American President at a summit conference with Brezhnev or Khrushchev or someone...
...When it came to the sad parts—"He was a strong man in his way, lost his first wife in 1943"—she put on a - suitably woebegone look...
...Then there was Miguel Caraballo, a carnival mask-maker from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and let's not leave out Yang Fang Nhu and Ia Moua Yang, needle workers from Detroit, Michigan...
...No More Taxes...
...They end up standing on some street corner trying to catch a glimpse of the parade by peering through a periscope purchased at a novelty store...
...is a lei-maker from Hawaii, and Halimeh Abdul Fattah is an embroiderer from Dearborn, Michigan...
...And so he is adored...
Vol. 26 • March 1993 • No. 3
