Earth Day made an impression for once. The lay Catholic monk St.
John Kerry of Hanoi grabbed a handful, liked its taste, and has
been heaving dirt at right-wing sinners ever since. This
environmental spoilage has been accompanied by an alarming outbreak
of speciesism, particularly at the expense of chickens and hawks.
So once again new questions gush forth concerning the person of
Senator Kerry. Whence this appetite for mud-slinging? From his days
in the silty Mekong Delta? Or is there something else?
An enduring mystery concerns Kerry’s activities and whereabouts
after his departure from Vietnam in April 1969. By August of that
year, was he tripping and oozing in the muck and the slime of
Woodstock, New York? Here’s one for the vested right-wing
conspirators to examine further. They can build on the successes
they’ve already had at the expense of the no-longer so presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee.
Yes, we’re talking about the flurry of gleeful concern that Mr.
Kerry may be ousted by Democrats before his name is put in
nomination at this summer’s Boston convention. In happier times,
such as the Clinton epoch, rightists would wait until their target
was elected and fully ensconced in the Oval Orifice before divining
ways to have him ousted and dragged through the streets of
America’s capital city. Now they’re even more ravenous, smelling
blood before it’s even been pumped through a Democratic brave
heart. When they’re through with Mr. K., he’ll be an exile in
remotest France, or even more fashionably, an honorary resident of
the tony resort isle of St. Helena, where no one minds if you’re
French-looking.
We have lived in interesting times. Once it was the role of a
Republican vice president to serve as enforcer and heavy on behalf
of a president. But now a Republican president’s legions of enemies
have turned the tables to become the mockers and tormentors of the
most statesmanlike of Republican veeps. How quickly they forget
that four years ago Joe Lieberman wanted to be him. Now all their
guns are trained on Dick Cheney. They would even deprive him of his
children, on the grounds that they were conceived under false
pretenses. They reached that conclusion all on their own, without
the help of Orwell’s 1984, which as everyone knows is a
pretty sexist document.
Don’t believe us? Call someone “Big Sister” and see if it evokes
any fear.
Luckily, we’ve got ourselves a Big Sissie. Rep. Jim McDermott,
who looks like a mean version of the late Captain Kangaroo, was up
to his old tricks the other day, sending a coded message to his
friend and mentor Saddam Hussein. On the floor of the United States
House of Representatives, fat Jim honored Saddam by toppling the
reference to “under God” in his recitation of the Pledge of
Allegiance. But Jim is open to negotiations. If we replace the
divisive passage with “under Allah,” he’ll reconsider next time he
leads his colleagues in honoring America.
So we’re down to our three finalists. Two of them were on a kind
of National Guard duty at the White House yesterday only to go
AWOL. Nine-Eleven Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton didn’t escape
to Canada, exactly. Instead, he wandered off to introduce Canada’s
prime minister at a luncheon at a nearby tofu restaurant, where the
menus are safely bilingual and printed in Quebec. Bob Kerrey, the
other fugitive, went off on school business, involving the
experimental New York college he runs. Evidently it is losing its
avant-garde preeminence, now that the University of Massachusetts
has produced a graduate student who in an op-ed boldly proclaimed
that Army Ranger “Pat Tillman is not hero: He got what was coming
to him.” The author’s name is Rene Gonzalez. An EOW prize will not
be wasted on him, but you may want to pray for his soul, if he has
one.
