Applause lines, my latest fantasy, my most embarrassing moments, &c.

January 31, 2002 9:35 a.m.

ou know what I’ve had enough of? Applause. Frequent, disruptive, annoying, and sometimes insincere applause. I don’t receive any such applause myself; I’m talking about State of the Union addresses. My colleague Rick Brookhiser and I had a mutual gripe about it Wednesday morning — the day after Bush’s SotU — and I have a bit of a head of steam about it.

(By the way, it’s natural for me now to say “Bush.” For a long while, it had to be “George W.,” because “Bush” was still, somehow, the 41st, not the 43rd, president. In titling pieces for NR and so on, it was also “George W. Bush” or “George W.” or “W.” — but now, “Bush” seems perfectly natural. Sorry, H.W.)

(By the way, again, one of the most endearing things I ever heard H.W. say was shortly after the son got elected. The first Bush said, “I used to be George Bush, I used to be the President. Now I don’t know who the hell I am.” I love that.)

At these State of the Unions, the congressmen applaud so much, a speech can’t get any rhythm, any gait. The speeches are too long, and are inevitably disjointed. Sometimes the presidents — the speechmakers — are responsible, because they include too many applause lines, and they speak, of course, in such a way as to invite applause. But the congressmen would applaud anyway; for one thing, it’s a way they have of expressing their opinion, of interjecting themselves.

One of the things that made Mario Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic keynote address — mendacious as it was — such a hit was that Cuomo managed the crowd’s applause: They wanted to applaud constantly, but he wouldn’t let them, holding his hand out and moving on, because he didn’t want the rhythm and momentum of his speech spoiled.

(A bit of autobiography: As an exercise, in a rhetoric class, I wrote a Reagan rebuttal to that speech. Wish Reagan had had a chance to deliver it, actually.)

It was in the Reagan years, I believe, that SotU applause got out of hand (so to speak). Reagan, being a fine speechwriter and maker, and having a fine sense of theater, should have nipped it in the bud. Republicans would applaud, I think, merely for the sake of making the Democrats seem churlish; Democrats would applaud sometimes when they thought the Republicans wouldn’t like it. In the Clinton years, when Clinton said, “The era of big government is over,” the Republicans — who had received an advance copy of the speech — were ready to go wild, which they did. It was a long time before Clinton could read the next line or clause, which was more Democratic, tempering the first.

I remember when Reagan made his last big speech, at the 1992 Republican convention. He had a nice line: “I would say that the Democrats in Congress spend money like drunken sailors, but that wouldn’t be fair to drunken sailors . . .,” and the crowd erupted, with a long, riotous ovation. Too bad, because Reagan was going to say, “. . . that wouldn’t be fair to drunken sailors, because they’re spending their own money!” Reagan read it anyway, but the effect was spoiled.

While I’m speechifying about speechifying, let me say that I’m not sure every politician can handle a TelePrompTer the way Reagan could. Actually, I am sure they can’t — I’m just not sure that some of them should use the device. There is a certain dignity and naturalness in reading a speech from paper, if you’re not speaking ex temp; and there is a certain unnaturalness about using a TelePrompTer inexpertly.

Your eyes look strange, your gaze is wrong, and the speech gets disjointed, as you move from one TelePrompTer screen to the other, on the other side. Bush, during the campaign, would say (with a platform-ful of luminaries with him), “They say you can judge a man [pause, pause, pause, as he turned his head to look at the other panel] by the company he keeps.” Bush is better when he just lets ’er rip.

Okay, this is the end of my little speech. Thanks for the applause.

Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times has been doing some interesting reporting from Riyadh, probing the Saudi mind, or at least the minds of that country’s rulers. In an interview she secured with the royal who runs the place, that leader rebuked the American president and the U.S. generally for not doing enough to ease the suffering of the Palestinians.

The richness, the nerve! I had a little Walter Mitty fantasy, wherein I was the reporter, doing the interview — and such interviews are quite rare — with this prince. In my fantasy, I say, “Oh? You’re a very rich government. You’re in the region. You call the Palestinians your ‘brother Arabs’. What are you doing to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people? Why should it be up to Westerners in Washington? You are perfectly positioned to help them. Why won’t you do it?”

And then, of course, I’d be kicked out of the kingdom, if not the Kingdom.

The Saudis, as you must know, don’t give a tinker’s damn about the Palestinians, except to use them for propaganda purposes. They have either neglected the Palestinians or treated them with contempt. The Palestinians are mere fodder in larger battles.

But the Saudi ruler did at least one thing that was helpful, in that interview: He spoke of the “proof” that al Qaeda “planned [the Sept. 11 attacks] very carefully.” Perhaps that will impress some of the Arabs who cling to the fantasy that the Jews did it. Or perhaps not.

Tish Durkin is a smart, enterprising, and engaging columnist, formerly with the New York Observer, now with National Journal. She also happens to be terribly pretty — which a true professional wouldn’t mention, of course, but then, what’s a breezy web column for?

In the current National Journal, she has a column — unlinkable, I’m afraid — basically teasing The Weekly Standard for reporting on the plagiarism problems of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian of popular 20th-century Democratic presidents and television-talk-show star. Durkin seems to think it’s terribly silly for the Standard and others to be making a mountain out of what’s a molehill at most.

While looking for reasons to fault the Standard — in kind of a tu quoque thing — she happens to remember what is probably my most embarrassing moment in journalism. She does not mention me by name — kind of her — but it was my moment, I’m afraid.

In February ’96, People magazine, one of my all-time favorite journals, put out a Valentine’s Day issue that celebrated “The Greatest Love Stories of the Century.” Being a close reader, I noticed that a good portion of these “stories” involved adultery, and that the betrayed spouses — usually wives — were hovering in the background, like ghosts. I seized the occasion to do a little essay on the neglect of such betrayed ones, and on the glamorization of the betrayers. Tish Durkin writes that my piece, “written in a tone of high dudgeon [true],” was “to the effect that liberals were wrong to accept a dichotomy between the personal and public moral records of leaders.” I did discuss some political leaders, after treating the People issue, but the point of this piece — here, if you care to see for yourself — was that adultery and the pain it causes are too easily glossed over, and that in a victim-crazy age, we should perhaps pay more attention to the genuine victims of marital betrayal (or at least not slobber over their tormentors).

(Did I mention that I used to work for the Standard, during the first three years of its existence? I should’ve. When I wrote this piece — the piece in question, to use Gary Hart language — the editor said, “This has got to be the most right-wing thing we’ve ever published.” I don’t think my record still stands — the magazine was about a half-year old.)

Anyway, here was my embarrassing moment. It is “worth quoting in full,” as they say. (I always ask, as an editor, “Don’t you show that you think it’s worth quoting in full simply by going ahead and quoting it in full? Why this semi-apology, this semi-defense, to the reader?” But that’s a language question, and we’re talking about something else here.)

To find the old values — the judging of righteous judgment — even in high places, one might look to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela has distinguished himself as perhaps never before in his long career of moral example. Last month, he stood in court, erect and unflinching, and did what he had dearly wanted to avoid: ask for a divorce from Winnie Mandela. Through everything, he had stood by her — had even believed her when she claimed she was innocent of kidnapping and torture — but one thing he could not abide, and that was her “brazen infidelity.” “If the entire universe tried to persuade me to reconcile with the defendant” — he would not utter her name throughout the proceeding — “I would not.” He had not wanted to reveal his wife’s adultery, but was moved to do so when she represented to the nation that the divorce was for other reasons. It was not. It was only for one, and when Mandela stood rock-like on principle, he, not for the first time, made the rest of the world look Lilliputian.

Well, how’s that for an outburst of Mandela celebration? After the piece was published, I immediately received several letters reminding me — telling me, actually — that the Great Man had left his first wife, Evelyn, for Winnie. (That couldn’t have been a trade up, could it have?) This was acutely embarrassing. It didn’t negate my point, though. Even now, I don’t know the circumstances of Mandela’s first divorce; and it is possible that he has since grown (and I don’t mean that in the conservative-moves-left kind of way). I thought he was brilliant at the moment — when he stood in that courtroom — and I still do, though with a pang.

In her column, Durkin twits me and the Standard for never “publicly and prominently acknowled[ing]” our “mortifying failure to look up and verify the factual basis of [the piece’s] argument before publishing it.” She continues, “I knew there was a reason I haven’t been sleeping well these past few years, and there it is. Sure, I think The Standard is generally a smart, respectable magazine. But having personally never, ever made a mistake of any kind, how can I bring myself to trust a publication that at least once in the past decade has made a doozy?” (The entire column is written in this sarcastic tone, that being the gimmick of the thing — mock outrage.)

No, we never “acknowledged” this “doozy” (though if she thinks that’s a doozy, what does she make of, say, factual errors or plagiarism?). My piece, with its contentions, stood; it was embarrassingly incomplete on the matter of Mandela and marriage. I am still embarrassed.

But I can assure one and all that my thoughts and words on Mandela came from no one else — perhaps unfortunately. As people say (stupidly and needlessly) in the Acknowledgments sections of their books, “I alone am responsible for any errors.”

(Come to think of it a little bit more, isn’t it a teeny bit strange that a columnist would bring up my failure to mention Nelson Mandela’s first marriage in a piece on effing plagiarism? But no more high dudgeon.)

And now to the other embarrassing moment in my inglorious career. (Yes, there have been only two, although many surely think I should count many more.) In a piece on the Estonian, Orthodox composer Arvo Pärt, I said that a particular work of his — liturgical, as I recall — was “full of Orthodox grimness.” Promptly I got a letter from an Orthodox priest — I think it was a priest; forgive me if I have the clerical designation wrong — saying, “And what do you know about Orthodoxy? What makes you think there’s grimness in it?”

I wrote back an abject letter of apology. And I have refrained from so much as whispering about any religion I don’t know well ever since.

Hang on, I’m not done with embarrassment. In a recent column, I ripped on Karmaloop, the “Urban Style Boutique,” for its “Fidel” line of clothing, incorporating the Cuban flag. I found this yet another annoying way of celebrating a brutal dictator.

The company says that the line has nothing to do with Castro, but rather is named after the designer Fidel Ramos. My sincere apologies. But — and probably I’m not being gracious or abject enough here — I still think that most people must assume that a hip clothing line, featuring the Cuban flag, called “Fidel” has something to do with the American glitterati’s favorite tyrant. If you put “Fidel” and the Cuban flag together . . .

But again: sorry. And best wishes to the stylish Sr. Ramos.

One more quick item on Cuba — two, actually. Jimmy Carter has signaled that he intends to go visit Castro. He would be the first president or ex-president to do so. If he made this trip, could we expect him to meet with members of the opposition, with democracy and human-rights activists? Could we expect him to insist on visiting jailed and tortured dissidents, such as Dr. Oscar Biscet? Given his (post-presidential) record in Central America and elsewhere, I don’t think so. I will watch this, in this space.

Also, I mentioned in the last Impromptus that both Cuban Communists and their supporters in the United States routinely refer to any pro-democracy or pro-freedom Cuban as a gusano, or worm. This is the accepted Castroite word for any Cuban who opposes the regime.

A little while ago, my colleague Rod Dreher handed me a flier from a leftist group getting ready to “demonstrate” in New York this weekend. It speaks of  “confronting klansmen, gusanos and other enemies of the people.” There you go. The efforts of Communists to dehumanize their opposition is an old story, but we shouldn’t let go, especially as Cuban suffering — “only 90 miles from our shore” — is appallingly ignored.

Oh, give me a third — and final — item: I have written before about Maritza Lugo, the great Cuban democracy and human-rights activist who just arrived in Miami. She certainly didn’t want to leave; her husband, Rafael Ibarra Roque, president of the Frank País November 30 Democratic party, is serving a long sentence in one of Castro’s jails. She herself has been imprisoned more than 20 times. She would have stuck it out for as long as necessary. But the toll on her young daughter was exceedingly hard, and if Lugo were packed away to prison for good, what would the girl do?

So Maritza Lugo came to the U.S. — the regime was more than happy to see this one go. (She has vowed to continue her activism from U.S. soil.)

If Lugo were any kind of heroine but an anti-Communist heroine, she’d be world-famous, the subject of television documentaries, books, movies, songs, etc. Think if she were Filipina (anti-Marcos), or South African (anti-apartheid), or Chilean (anti-Pinochet)! What if she were Burmese? She might have won the Nobel prize. Oh, she’d be huge. She’d be Erin Brockovich, Norma Rae, whoever. They’d make posters and T-shirts out of her. But Maritza Lugo is known only among Cubans, and the few others who care about the condition of that wretched island.

My point, or suggestion: Wouldn’t it be neat if President Bush received her in the Oval Office, for a little chat and photo? What would it hurt? What would it cost? Ford and Kissinger refused to receive Solzhenitsyn; President Reagan did much better with Armando Valladares — whom he actually sent to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva (one of Reagan’s glorious moves). No one will let the Dalai Lama in the Oval Office; too risky, too offensive of China, they say. The D.L. does things like visit the vice president in the vice-presidential office, and the president just happens to drop by.

And the cost of greeting Maritza Lugo in the Oval? Nothing — except to offend people who ought to be offended.

We know that George W. likes “Hispanics.” Well, here’s one.