Union Square Station
Malone
12/11

Nightmare Alley; The Clinton Legacy

My friend the Mad Scientist, a dangerous man given to long interludes of vacant contemplation, once emerged from a fugue state, looked me straight in the eye and said, "You know, there's absolutely nothing better than a good juicy nightmare. Don't you just love it when you wake up in a state of cold terror, feeling as though something truly evil is about to destroy you?" I had never seen it quite that way but I couldn't disagree with him, because there is something exciting about loving the horror within one's soul.

The current nightmare, one of many that have come and stayed long during the Clinton years, is enjoyable on its own level. Learn to appreciate desperation born of a hunger for power not unlike a vampire craving blood, learn to appreciate explicit lies embedded in rhetoric so accelerated that it sounds like the Hell's Angels have been called in to ensure a full, fair, complete, and accurate flow of crank, learn to appreciate hearing people repeat short bursts of words prepared for them by lame little creeps like Paul Begala and thugs like Bill Daley, and you'll find yourself just loving this nightmare and begging for more.

George W. Bush, who already seemed to have aged five years in the past year, in the last month seems to have added another five, even while he seems fit and as nearly relaxed as one of the main characters in the nightmare could possibly be. There's some mean clock on the man that's running out in front of him and he can't catch it, and winning isn't going to change that. For him this is the silent horror that simply powers itself off of circumstances. There's nothing to be done about it. You can see the same disturbing age progression in Mathew Brady's photographs of Lincoln through the Civil War or in the series of photographs of FDR across the span of WWII.

Al Gore has fared even worse. His figure at Madame Tussaud's will look better than he looks now. I've seen men look the way Gore does now who were dead three weeks later and no one said, "But he seemed so healthy when I saw him last." His running mate, who always struck me as having the demeanor of an undertaker, fits perfectly at Gore's side, like he has a prospect he doesn't want to let out of his sight lest he lose him to Frank Campbell's.

Dick Cheney, as usual a man of good grace, expressed his horror publicly with a heart attack. He ran into the hospital, had the offending artery opened, and was back in three days trying to form a government. Gore, meanwhile, has been hanging around the White House, probably hoping that it finally rubs off on him. He and his wife spend a lot of time with the undertaker and his wife.

Even the lawyers, who usually grow younger as the horror increases and the fees mount, look like they are starting to come apart. David Boies now resembles someone halfway through a round of chemo, and Barry Richards looks the way a salesman on the road looks after three straight weeks of closing the hotel bar and eating nothing but fried shrimp in a basket.

Finally, a week after they explicitly throttled the Florida Supreme Court by vacating its decision changing the rules of the election after it was over, the U.S. Supreme Court had seen enough. With the arrival of a fresh decision from the Florida high court once again writing new election rules, Rehnquist & Co. granted Bush a stay on the renewed vote counting, saying along the way that they did so because there was a "substantial probability" that they would find in his favor.

The action by the U.S. Supreme Court cast a pall over the world of Al Gore but nowhere did it dampen spirits more than it did at MSNBC, which under the thin disguise of being a news organization has been running a non-stop telethon on behalf of the Vice President. With the exception of Chris Matthews, a Democrat and old-style liberal who learned his politics from the late Tip O'Neil, and who knows with surprising clarity just how deep into hell his party has been taken in the Clinton-Gore handbasket, virtually the entire MSNBC crew shows enough solidarity with the Gore cause to be worthy of consideration for ambassadorships if Gore can find one more angle on the whole deal and pull the presidency if not himself back from the brink of death.

But how else would the Clinton years end, if not with one last nightmare scene reminiscent of the original Alien movie, where the creature locks itself onto the face of a victim, thrusts its egg tube down his throat, and plants its young in his abdomen. Whatever you do, don't go to sleep, you don't want to miss it when the new fully gestated creature pops out of America's chest and finally gives Bill Clinton the legacy he's earned.

© Union Square Journal 2000

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