Memorial Day

Back in the day—not so long ago—I thought Bill Clinton was one of the worst presidents in modern history behind my homeboy, Jimmy Carter. I thought electing an amoral, draft-dodging quasi-socialist was about the worst the American public could do.

I was wrong.

Ol’ Bill was simply taking to heart Henry Kissinger’s maxim that “power is the greatest aphrodisiac.” Psychopathic murderers are chronicled to reach orgasm at the moment they kill their victims; I suppose being the Supreme Leader of the nation that can end life on earth as we know it carries the same thrill, in a more general sense.

Time softens many things, and I suppose we can count ourselves lucky that President Clinton was only obsessed with satisfying his own personal quirks and lessening the testosterone madness that gripped him. If we could tolerate a leader who was satisfied with non-reciprocal sex in the Oval Office—as opposed to the thermonuclear incineration of a Third World country—then we were still sort of on track as the paragon nation of individual achievement.

When former president Clinton underwent heart surgery a few years ago, I made a public statement to the effect that I never thought I’d be in the position of saying a prayer for him. There are any number of people I personally dislike, for any number of reasons, but wishing death upon anyone is a karmic stance that I have reserved for only a couple of people; neither of them are public figures. The National Day of Prayer—recently outlawed by the courts—stipulates that we should ask God for favor on our national leaders. Unlike totalitarian theocracies—where failure to acknowledge the Supreme Leader is an offense against God punishable by death—we are asked to reach into our hearts and consider benevolence for those tasked with making the hard choices that attach to the unenviable task of leading us, as a nation, into an unforeseeable future.

I think we peaked with Theodore Roosevelt, but I digress.

I miss Bill Clinton. Like praying for him, I never thought I’d see the day. Once, being picked up off the floor, a cop gave me a consciousness exam by asking “Who’s the president?” I replied “That reprehensible hillbilly!” When the cop holding me up by the armpits stopped laughing, he said “He’s all right, let him go. I think he knows what ‘reprehensible’ means.”

The main reason I considered Bill Clinton reprehensible was that he was a draft-dodger. He went to England and did the college thing when working-class mooks like me were dying in Vietnam. I had my walk in the sun protesting against the war, but once I quit high school, I had no privilege or deferment to hide behind.

Veterans have a long and harsh institutional memory in matters like this. Clinton happened to be the first of the baby-boomers who fulfilled my long-ago threat to my Green Beret cousin Weyman: “Someday we’ll have political power, and then things will change.”

They certainly did.

Every year that Clinton showed up at the Vietnam Memorial Wall in DC to lay a wreath, there were protests. I half-remember a folk song of the time: “On Memorial Day/the bands will play/soldiers will be marching on the Mall…don’t care what you say/please stay away…please stay away from The Wall.”

Or something like that. Point is, for better or worse, the Commander-in-Chief showed up, laid the wreath, and said something in praise of those who died far too young. At least Clinton had the cojones to say publicly that he thought the war was immoral when he was a young punk waving a sign on the streets of London. The question of receiving lectures on morality from a cigar-smoking rube that didn’t have the common courtesy to give his barely-legal concubines a reach-around I’ll leave to the individual reader.

During the late 1970s, when the scars of ‘Nam were still fresh on our consciousness, I helped a few expatriate draft-dodgers regain their citizenship, after they’d fled to Canada. I never had a problem with doing this, for one simple reason: they acted out of principle. They gave up everything: family, friends, citizenship in the greatest country on earth, and all its perks. Yeah, they ran and hid, but however questionable their motives, they acted on conscience.

This gets you a lot of points in my book.

Bill Clinton took a somewhat different tack, and doesn’t get Brownie Points for conscientious objection. Nevertheless, when he weaseled his way into the White House, he showed up on Memorial Day and honored those who died without questioning their duty as soldiers.

Now, we have an outright self-avowed socialist, suspect closet Muslim, consummate machine-politics incompetent—to be gracious—narcissist who is turning the office of the presidency into a jumping-off point for wannabe reality show celebrities. Like the pathetic mooks who sign onto blogs with “First!” and nothing more substantial, the Manchurian Candidate seems more centered on parlaying an historical “first”—first president of color—into either an ongoing celebrity payoff or the most suicidal leadership role in history.

A few years ago, I became embroiled in a semantics issue with Bill O’Reilly. He kept saying the terrorism conflict is “World War III”; I kept insisting that War III was our proxy war with communism in low-level battles around the globe, and this is technically World War IV. Call it what you care to, we are faced with two—actually more—crises. The domestic economy is in the tank, nuclear–capable nations are facing off, the worst environmental disaster in modern times has its own real-time web-cam, a totalitarian nation of religious zealots continues hell-bent on development of thermonuclear weapons, America is overrun with illegal refugees from a corruption- and poverty-stricken nation that dares to criticize our way of life in our halls of government…

And what is our Supreme Leader doing?

Well, according to the hot word off this morning’s news, Osama Bamalama plans to spend the weekend hanging out in Chicago with his pals, whose corrupt political machinations launched his Manchurian candidacy. I wonder if this weenie roast will be open to Bill Ayers and “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright, the anarchist and the racist, respectively. On 2 June, when business resumes in De Cesspool, he plans a grand fiesta for Sir Paul McCartney. Hey, I love the Beatles, but they are essentially a British thing. A number of Americans died breaking us off from England to start this grand enterprise in human rights. Nowhere in this itinerary is an allowance for making even a token appearance at The Wall, or laying a wreath anywhere in Arlington Cemetery for any of our fallen veterans of past wars.

This is what I miss about Bill Clinton. He may have been a bumbling, horn-dog, poll-driven opportunist, but at least he acknowledged the gravity and meaning of the office he inhabited—when he wasn’t leaning against the desk getting momentary gratification. Whether he meant it or not, he at least showed up and went through the motions of paying respect, possibly even to the man who died for him in Vietnam. People—including me—didn’t like him, but at least he adhered to the principle that is sort of timeless to doing one’s duty: You don’t have to like it, but you have to show up.

The arrogance of our current leadership is breathtaking.

This is the time of the year we lift a toast to absent friends. For all who served, and continue to do so, I have two words:

“Thank you.”