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piece last Thursday, warning about the lurking threat of Chelsea
Clinton, got a lot of attention. Howard Kurtz
harrumphed
at me in the Washington Post. Numerous people e-mailed in
calling for me to be horse-whipped on the steps of my club, or whatever
the American equivalent is. Andrew Sullivan, by sly excerpting,
left his readers — most of whom, being liberals, would be too
stupid to locate the original text — with the impression I
had called for the extermination of the entire Clinton clan.
I thought I would just put here, together in one place responses
to some of the commonest critical points, so I don't have to keep
repeating myself in e-mail. I also, of course, want to thank the
many readers who liked the piece — a strong majority, until
the liberals were woken from their dogmatic slumbers.
That wasn't funny. Well, it wasn't meant to be a thigh-slapper.
I had a point to make: There could be another Clinton in our future,
and on present evidence (admittedly rather scant), it would be a
chip off the old block. That's fair comment. However, my tone was
partly tongue in cheek. Listen: "As an Englishman, I naturally start
from a base of resentment against anyone with perfect dentition."
The alert reader would have grasped at this point that he was not
looking at a Heritage Foundation policy paper. Now, a writer's job
is to get his tone and meaning across to the reader. Even the best
don't always succeed — scholars are still arguing about what
Shakespeare meant by "Put out the light, and then put out the light."
And best, middling or worst, we all face the sad fact that there
is an irreducible minimum of people out there who are cloth-eared
to anything more subtle than simple declarative sentences. You can't
get through to everyone. You do your best, that's all. Humor and
irony are especially tricky. I grew up among people who spent Christmas
Day telling each other that Bob Hope wasn't the least bit funny.
Plainly a lot of other people disagreed with them. I personally
feel that I am doing pretty well if I bat .750 — that is, if
three readers out of four get a piece in the spirit I intended it.
To judge from e-mail responses to the Chelsea piece, that's about
what I'm batting. If it was .250, I'd hang up my keyboard.
Chelsea's only a kid. No she isn't. She will be 21 next week.
At 21, I had been out in the world on my own for three years. At
21, my father had fought as a frontline infantryman
| “Defenseless?
A Clinton? Where have you been for eight
years?” |
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in
a war and failed in business. At 21, my mother had been a working
hospital nurse for four years, and had seen many people die —
more than Dad, probably. At 21, my grandfather had been a coal miner
for seven years, had served a brief spell in jail, and had two children.
At 21, Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister of England. At 21, Monica
Lewinsky … Well, never mind her. Chelsea is old enough to vote and
old enough to die for her country (if that was a thing Clintons
did). She's old enough to take a little mild ribbing from an obscure
web journalist. She's been living large, and getting a swank education,
on my dollar and yours. There's a price for that, and it's not a
high one.
How would I feel if someone mocked my girl in public? I'd
be spitting furious. But then, my princess is only 8. If she were
20, I would not be furious. I'd tell her to suck it up. It's a jungle
out here, and by 20 you'd better know how to swing a machete. If
you don't, your parents have let you down. Something tells me Chelsea
Clinton's parents have not let her down in this particular way…
She's defenseless; I am a coward. This one cracks me up.
Defenseless? A Clinton? Where have you been
for eight years? The Clintons are very well able to defend themselves,
don't worry about it. Dad may be out of office, but he has some
mighty powerful friends. And Mom's in the Senate, remember. I expect
my audit notice from the IRS shortly. Defenseless? 'Scuse
me while I roll on the floor a little.
Imagine how her parents must feel. Please. Everyone has parents
at some point. George W. Bush has parents. On this argument, who
can we mock? Only people whose parents are dead? This is ridiculous.
Chelsea is a non-combatant. Is she? Politicians' offspring
are not automatically immune from public mockery. A presidential
daughter who stayed resolutely at home would be. One who published
a novel, started a dot-com, or joined the Spice Girls would not
be. Chelsea is at neither extreme, so her case is, I grant you,
arguable. (This is, in fact, the only point of substance in the
whole silly business.) She was out on the campaign trail last year
with Mom, pressing the flesh, greeting the punters, doing her part
to keep my state safe for socialism. She didn't have to do that.
She could have stayed home, or buckled down to her studies, as less
favored 20-year-olds have to do. No: By her own free choice, she
was out there working the crowds. Some unknowable number of the
votes that elected Hillary were inspired by Chelsea. She represented
this country at the Sydney Olympics. She didn't have to do that,
either. She's been sitting in on some pretty high-level stuff —
without, as I noted, any constitutional authority to do so. Yes,
it's arguable, but in my book, the woman is a public figure. If
she really doesn't want to be, she should have stayed home more,
and concentrated on learning a useful trade.
Lunatics might take the piece as an incitement to assassinate
Chelsea. This underestimates the subtlety of the lunatic mind,
which ranges much wider than this in its search for inspiration.
Charlie Manson thought that the Beatles song "Helter Skelter," which
is about a fairground attraction, was telling him to murder movie
stars. If we tailor our writing to the sensibilities of lunatics,
nothing will get published.
We don't mock the president's family. She's not president's
family. She's ex-president's family.
I am not a gentleman. We are a broad church here on the Right,
and some of us are more gentlemanly than others. While I do my honest
best with the gentleman thing, it is a truth universally acknowledged,
that you can take the boy out of the Bronx but not the Bronx out
of the boy. I also come from England, where the journalistic culture
is much more spirited, much less top-heavy with stuffy self-important
bores, and much less deferential to public figures, than
it is here in what Florence King calls "The Republic of Nice". One
exemplar of that culture, whose work I immensely admired, was Auberon
Waugh, who died last month. Here is an extract from the obituary
by his friend, Richard Ingrams:
[Waugh]
was deprived of his greatest ambition, which was to star in a libel
action. The nearest he came to it was a brief appearance in one
of Sir James Goldsmith's many court actions, after he wrote a piece
in The Spectator claiming that the great financier had a
very small penis.
(It was Waugh who defined the skill set of the opinion journalist
as "the vituperative arts". And come to think of it, it was Waugh's
father, Evelyn Waugh, of whom Logan Pearsall Smith, asked to give
an opinion, said: "Not a gentleman. No, not a gentleman.")
Have I no shame? More than a room full of Clintons.
Do I intend to apologize? In your dreams. I make it a point
of principle never to apologize to hysterical idiots.
Are the editors going to fire me? They say no. This may change
when their audit notice arrives.
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