There's been an awful lot of outraged huffing and puffing going on in the wake of the accusations against Governor Rod Blagojevich, the bad-haired boy of Illinois. Editorial writers across the country have had a field day denouncing Blago, as the tabs have tagged him. He's making deals! He's feathering his own nest! He's using bad language! And so's his wife!
Gosh Almighty. The editorialistas at USA Today even compared Blago's alleged offer to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat to Caligula's famous nomination of his horse Incitatus for the job of Roman consul.
But the comparison is unfair; Blago has none of Caligula's flair for the outrageous. Blago's name will be as distant from public memory as Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig.
Despite the puniness of Blago's alleged abuses, the editorialistas have been calling for his head.
Excuse me if I fail to get exercised about reforming the sea of corruption that has suddenly hove into view thanks to only three months of government wiretaps in the governor's office. And forgive me if I fail to be shocked -- shocked! -- at the man's venality. The wiretaps reveal a tough-talking Chicago pol who, in the words of another such bird, appears to have merely been caught in the act of seeing his opportunities and taking them.
That other pol, the historically minded may remember, belongs to a long-gone (but not completely forgotten) former Democratic Senator from New York named George Washington Plunkitt, a proud and wealthy son of Tammany Hall. It was Plunkitt who made famous, in an interview with William Riordon in 1905, the distinction between "honest graft and dishonest graft."
"There's all the difference in the world between the two," Plunkitt said. He admitted -- with more than a touch of pride -- that he'd made a "big fortune" out of the game of New York politic is "and I'm gettin' richer every day." But his wasn't money made by dishonest graft, which would have been "blackmailin' gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc." No. It was none of that, said he:
"It was honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': 'I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."
Plunkitt then described to Riordon how, for example, knowing where a new bridge was scheduled to be built might be a valuable bit of information when the bids went out and the once-worthless land that he'd bought up for peanuts could be sold at a handsome profit when the time rolled around.
"Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight?" he wanted to know.
And he didn't confine his investment opportunities to real estate speculation either. "Anything that pays is in my line." He then explained how he bought 250,000 granite blocks for $2.50 at auction. Imagine what he would have asked for if, like Blago, he'd had sole responsibility for the appointment of a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Am I endorsing political chicanery here? You bet I am, especially since I don't have an answer to this question: Who, besides Blago, was hurt by these revelations? The public? Not apparently. Whatever money he was hoping to make wasn't going to come from public coffers.
What's been hurt in all this is someone's IDEA of political propriety. A seat in the Senate shouldn't be up for sale. A price tag is so . . .unseemly.
Blago seen his opportunities and, in a political tradition that pre-dates Caligula, he took 'em.
If Blago had been more discrete, if he'd met directly with the job applicants in a room that was noisy enough to obliterate the possibility of being bugged, he would still be the funny-looking, highly self-regarding and wealthy Chicago politician with an unpronounceable name that he always was.
Now he's become the poster boy for what's wrong with the political system, and that's a shame, because he's such a drab example of the species he's come to represent.
What's discouraging about Blago isn't his greed or his unseemliness but his utter lack of style. A good big-city pol would by now have launched a loud pr counter-offensive, sent up a barrage of fireworks, blamed his chief of staff, blamed the media, the prosecutor, the winds off Lake Superior. A real Chicago pol would by now have generated enough good newspaper copy in defense of his actions to sell enough papers to pay off the Chicago Tribune's back debt.
Imagine for a minute what a pol like Plunkitt would have done in Blago's shoes. Or imagine what any of Plunkitt's true heirs would have done. Imagine The Kingfish, Huey Long of Louisiana or James Michael J. Curley, a chunk of whose fourth term as Mayor of Boston was spent in a federal peniteniary or, closer to home, imagine Albany's Mayor-for-Life, Erastus Corning. They were political operators of the first water, men who gave the people what they wanted by manipulating the levers of political machines they has mastered. Yes, they were greedy and corrupt by any moral standard you choose to use, and reformers of their day relished bashing them. But the names of the upstanding moralists Plunkitt called "goo-goos," good-government types, are lost to history while characters like Long, Curley and Corning are still remembered as friends of the people they may have fleeced but who also delivered whatever goods or services the people needed or wanted. The results are great and once-great cities, built by thieves whose peculiar strengths and weaknesses are the stuff of legend.
Blago, the inheritor of this colorful tradition, is unworthy of it. His alleged chicanery was all about him, not his constituents. Worse, he talked nakedly about his self-enrichment plans on a telephone he suspected was tapped. That's plain stupid, and whatever you want to say about the Plunkitts of the world, they weren't stupid.
Blago spilled the beans that any village trustee knows to keep tightly sealed and well hidden. He showed not that he was a corrupt politician but someone far more dangerous and dull -- an inept one, someone who couldn't play the game by rules that have been in effect since before Caligula's day, rules that have nothing to do with propriety and everything to do with making things happen, sometimes for the good of the public, sometimes for the good of the pol and sometimes for the good of all.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Perhaps a Banana
Twenty years ago, I wrote "Perhaps a Banana," a column inspired by the nefarious antics of one Oliver North. He was a sort of male Sarah Palin, a right wing-nut who captured a lot more attention than he deserved back in the Reagan era. This column isn't strictly about him, he's the occasion rather than the subject of a story about the role of language in politics. It begins with the testimony of Robert W. Owen, a non-entity of the day, as quoted in The New York Times:
Q: And this signature - 'Warm regards, Steelhammer' - to whom did that refer?
A: That was one of Ollie North's code names
Q: Did f Contra leader] Adolfo Calero also have a code name?
A: Occasionally we called him Sparkplug.
Q: And did you haue a code name for yourself?
A: I would usually sign my memos 'T.C.'
Q: And what did T.C. stand for?
A. The Courier.
- Irangate testimony of Robert W. Owen, quoted in The New York Times
The buzzer summoning me into the Colonel's office buzzed. Actually, it rang, because it was a bell. Sometimes the Colonel finds it necessary to call one thing another. Actually he always finds it necessary to call one thing another. Today, the bell was a buzzer. Tomorrow, perhaps a banana. Only time and the Colonel's code book would tell. I entered the Colonel's basement redoubt.
He looked up at me. The medals on his chest jingled smartly, which was especially impressive since he was naked from the waist up. I noticed the Colonel had his service revolver trained on me. A look of firm resolve covered his face like a horse blanket. Through clenched teeth, he uttered a single command:
"Baascrwrd."
Seeing the puzzled look on my face, he relaxed his jaw muscles and repeated himself: "Password."
I was ready for him. "Waldorf salad."
He jumped from behind his desk, his automatic pointed in my face. I heard the safety flick off.
"Prepare to die, Marxist-Leninist tomato!"
My mind raced.
"Ooby Dooby!"
The Colonel's face relaxed.
"Ooby Dooby what?" he asked quietly.
"Ooby Dooby ... sir."
"That's better. At ease, T.C."
The Colonel shouldered his revolver and sat down behind his bullet-scarred desk. He turned to me.I could see there were tears in his eyes. He was obviously thinking about the freedom fighters. The gun fell off his shoulder.
"T.C.," he said, "this ol' poodle's going to
My mind began to race again. "Poodle" was today's codeword for "the world." And
The Colonel must have seen the consternation on my face.
"Handbasket," he mumbled helpfully
At once I understood.
"Yes sir, the poodle certainly is going to
"T.C., I want you to take an important Buick over to the Popcorn, pronto."
"The Popcorn, sir? The Popcorn of the
"No, no, the enchilada's in
The phone rang in the middle of the Colonel's explanation He pointed to it.
"Get the banana, will you? I've gotta take a wicked maple tree."
He disappeared behind a door marked "Wombats." I got the banana on the third ring.
"Popcorn here. Give me Steelhead."
"Do you mean Colonel, uh, Steelhammer?
"Yeah. The Big Cheese ..."
"I'm sorry, sir, but there's no Mr. Cheese here. But if you'd like to leave a Buick for
"Okay, okay. Tell him the eyes of the potato are upon him. Repeat. The eyes of the potato are upon him. Got that?"
"Got it.
"Good. Have a nice combat boot."
The line went dead. The Colonel returned, wiping his cabbages on his carburetor.
"Who was on the horn?"
"Sir?"
"The banana, stupid. Who called?"
"The Popcorn, sir."
"Any Buicks?"
“He said, ‘The eyes of the potato are upon you.’
The Colonel became livid.
"Is that a canary'? Well, you run right over there this minute and you tell his excellency I've had about enough of his Peoria-fired potato-eyes. Where's his sense of Hershey Bar? Whatever happened to good ol' American corn muffins? What's this great hockey stick of ours coming to, when a red-blooded American lampshade can't kick a little Marxist-Leninist candycorn without a bunch of Congressional teabags getting all steamed up? You tell Mr. Potato Head that the tuna fish has hit the overhead projector, and pretty soon, it's gonna be every wombat for himself."
"But sir, will the Popcorn understand what you're saying? I think he's missing a few pages from his code book."
The Colonel shook his head dismissively.
"He knows what I'm talking about. Him and me - we speak the same pineapple. Now get going. And shut the damned cottage cheese behind you."
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