Reality Check Classics 12/1/99

THE BELL RINGS

“I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re going to run the ball. We’re gonna pass the ball. We’re gonna move right down this field. And we’re gonna score!”
- Don Meredith

God bless Dandy Don. He was fearless, insane, and a damn sight better in a bar fight than on a football field. He meant well. It’s just that when it came to winning the big one, he made his coach, the venerable, Tom Landry look like a dumb-struck hat check girl at the Hellfire Club. That kind of mindless gumption flies in Texas. There, even the grease monkeys and criminals run for office, and the rest own shotguns and beer cards from Shoney’s.

New York is a different breed of feline. Here, we like our danger in pockets of greed and mischief. We like our crazies to have some sheen on them; polished and articulate, with a touch of humor. People will tell you it only happens in the big city, but when you spend more than an afternoon in Albany you get the feeling it runs rampart anywhere you turn in the state.

That’s why we never get too excited about political campaigns here. Sure, we expect the odd jab and duck, but it’s a subtle pony joust when compared to states like Alabama, Massachusetts, and Texas. Losers of those political races go to places like prison or California, or are expunged from society in way few of us can imagine without the aid of real grade-A embarrassment. The politically wounded speak in Cali and NY, go ask Jerry Brown and Ed Koch.

But that will all change come this summer, because it looks as though we have a real Texas race for senate heating up in the Empire State. The first lady and the mayor. Political death to the lesser and terminal social disease to anyone with fewer votes. An all out war of words and deeds. Petulant whimpers will rise into bellows of defamatory calls for beheadings and exorcisms. When Uncle Rudy and the Ice Queen from Arkansas are done with the trail only the deaf and the stupid will be fortunate.

Senator Rodham has finally dug into the starting line. The woman whose kept the fuck-happy circus that is the Clinton political machine together for two decades steps out of her cushy Pennsylvania Avenue lair to become the public junkyard dog she’s allegedly been behind closed doors. In hockey terms, “the gloves are off.” Her opponents, the press, and all those left for rotting corpses in the wake of two highly successful presidential runs lie in wait for the darling of the “stand by your man” set. Apologies to longtime Cowboys fans everywhere, but not even Dandy Don had those kind of balls.

This is a woman who never ran for any office making a run in a state she hasn’t lived in for one minute. Her track record as a legislator begins at horrendous and drops from there. Her reputation as a litigator is peppered with more alleged maleficence than William & Morris. The best you can say about her is that she is educated and willing to take the most shit from people who claim to love her in a more than clumsy attempt to latch onto something resembling power. No one has sold their soul for a chance at the American political brass ring with more blind gusto since Dick Nixon.

The mere notion that she would choose to endure the personal and professional thrashing that awaits her is baffling. Unless you consider that she is truly a woman scorned. Word out of Washington is she’s been making Big Bill pay for every pet he laid on Monica, and the only reason the president ordered the bombing of Kosovo and pardoned those Puerto Rican terrorists was because Mamma Hillary told him so.

And now Senator Rodham has the mighty chip on her shoulder that monster of a father told her she’d never have, but the boys at law school swore was there. They could see it every time she pulled back those ruby red lips and bore her fangs. Big Bill saw those things and married her before sundown.

This would all be a moot point in the realm of real wartime politics if the first lady had a victim sitting in the wings; someone she could badger with attitude and vigor, looking like an arch angel come to slay one of Satan’s bad boys. But alas, that little nugget comes packaged in one of the meanest political pit bulls this nation has produced since Lester Maddox.

When Rudy Giuliani finally joins the fray there will be nothing left to the argument that campaigns should be civil exchanges of policy and stance. There is no boxer in Uncle Rudy. He’s a puncher. When the mayor gets going on one of his jags he resembles Joe Frazier prior to one of those blood baths with Ali when he told his corner he’d prefer to go in the back alley of Madison Square Garden and settle the fight with bare knuckles and chains.

But Uncle Rudy wouldn’t be caught dead baring his knuckles when he can simply bring out the shiny brass ones he’s used on everyone whose opposed him since he was district attorney of NY. Not even his friends and colleagues can call him anything less than tyrannical now. He has turned NYC upside down, cleaned the streets and put the swagger back into the police. All the while he’s treated the first amendment like a Bazooka Joe comic and bullied the dissenters into looking like radical Commie guerrillas.

The bell rings.

First Published on 12/15/99 in The Aquarian Weekly. It is included with many others in jc's new book, Fear No Art available now on jamescampion.com!

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