Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 28, 1998
Here comes another killer epidemic
by Wesley Pruden
Just when the AIDS epidemic shows signs of abating, we've got another one to worry about.
Some people are trying to spread civility, which heretofore was never known to be contagious. This is official notice to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to go on Red Alert.
Howell Raines, the editor of the editorial page of the New York Times, should expect to be quarantined with Sam Donaldson, if he has not been already. What a promiscuous duo.
Mr. Raines -- "Mr. Roundheels" to his closest friends, for the way he lets certain leftist advocacy groups walk all over him -- is so proper that he turns male guests away from his dinner parties if they've forgotten to wear their spats, and women whose outfits clash with the design in Mrs. Raines' tablecloth.
Nevertheless, he let Rep. Dan Burton have it in such intemperate language for calling President Clinton a "s--m b-g" that small children have been sent into the countryside for safety's sake until all copies of that day's editions have been found and recycled.
What can we say about poor Sam Donaldson? What can anybody say about Sam? Once the scourge of presidents, the nemesis of pompous a---s, a plague on the houses of the self-important, a blight on the bumbling barons of bombastic bloviation ... in fact, I once saw Sam mow down an entire regiment of White House advance men while we were waiting for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II in San Francisco. Sam kept everyone's attention practicing his shouted ribald questions for Her Majesty. Secret Service agents kept moving the tape holding back the reporters, trying to get Sam out of range. When the Queen finally arrived with President Reagan, the only question Sam remembered to squeak out was one about the weather. Even then, a crocus of civility was yearning to be liberated from Sam's bosom.
There he was on Sunday morning, holding forth on ABC-TV, struggling to be delicate and civil, refusing to say the word that Howell Raines would not write: Sam called it "scum-whatever it was." Mr. Raines, as dainty as a Birmingham debutante, used dashes to represent the word. Sam was trying, but he shrank from the clean half of the word -- "bag" -- and blurted out the heinous half, "scum." "Scum whatever it was." For shame.
These promiscuous practitioners of decorum aim to tame the discourse, the banging and clanging of rhetoric and argument that constitute the raucous noise of the people making up their minds about public issues. Jefferson, who would have had far too much testosterone to survive in the Gelded Age, took consolation in the prospect that the natural toughness and resiliency of the yeomanry would carry the day. Alas, as the novelist Charles ("True Grit"/"Masters of Atlantis") Portis observed in another context: "This was something Jefferson could not have foreseen: an effete yeomanry."
Some of our most effective meanies are tempted to turn mellow. John Robert Starr, the longest-running Clinton watcher, whose column in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the newspaper owned by followers of the foreign-born archbishop of Canterbury, is a throwback to the days before two-fisted newspapermen became limp-wristed journalists. He writes about being called mean by Bill Clinton when the prez was merely the Boy Governor, complaining about being badly treated by "them lyin' newspapers."
"I remember a day in 1980 when Governor Clinton verbally assaulted me in the Capitol corridor just outside his office," he writes. "Getting so close that his halitosis almost knocked me over, he semi-shouted, 'Everything in your damn newspaper was against me.'
"Not so, I said. Calm down. I'll show you. In his office, I showed him the mentions of Clinton and state government in that day's paper, and 12 were positive. The only negative comment was encompassed in two (count 'em, two) paragraphs in my column. About 100 words. Perception does not always make reality."
And if you want to see mean, he urges a study of James Carville, "the Cajun cur who will say anything, do anything to help Clinton. He's not in the media, but he is a mean machine. Carville called Paula Jones 'trailer camp trash,' a commodity with which he has had much experience.'"
John Robert calls me "one of our meaner national correspondents," and affects to want me to give him lessons in mean. I have nothing to teach him, but he is urged to close his doors and seal his windows. Just as the killer bees approach Texarkana from the south, the civility virus leaps the Mississippi into Arkansas.
What the libs and lefties are having to deal with is the loss of their exclusive franchise in the marketplace. When they cry civility, what they really mean is: "Everybody but us, shut up!
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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