Lieberman Meets the Medicis; Satyrs with Enormous Cocks; Who Is Al Gore?
I hate to say it, but the Lieberman pick was a smart move. It's been hugely popular with the press, allowing the parlor moralists, like Howell Raines of The New York Times, to wallow in Bill's depravity one more delicious time, while simultaneously cheering Gore for selecting the righteous Senator from Connecticut. Meanwhile, critics of Lieberman have had to tread softly. Call Lieberman a whore for AIPAC and you get hit with charges of being a Holocaust denier. The Republicans had better be careful this fall. Already, as I predicted here last week, the Democrats are jeering at Bush and Cheney for being the tools of Big Oil. To make it all the more perfect, Dick Cheney is now having to explain why he concealed his $20 million retirement package from Halliburton.
Such strictures notwithstanding, the public spaces are well organized, and you don't get the feeling, all too familiar in many museums these days, that their true function is as venues for banquets for the museum's big-time donors. Robert Irwin's Central Garden is an odd mix of ideas from Burle Marx (descendant of Karl, noted for his modernist Brazilian gardenscapes) and Gertrude Jekyll's herbaceous border. I liked his giant mushroom-like parasols of rebar iron, supporting bougainvillea vines. Resting under one of them I fell into conversation with two ample black ladies. I asked them if they were bothered by Bill's morals. They said it had been embarrassing to explain his conduct to foreign visitors. Besides, said Mary, who had been happily recounting her solo drive up the coast to Alaska 20 years ago to visit the pipeline then under construction, if you were going to have sex, why not have real sex?
I went back into the galleries, all rather dingily lit in the modern manner. Lieberman would have felt uncomfortable. Here was Jan Steen's Bathsheba After the Bath, featuring a slutty girl with big breasts eagerly preparing for her first interview with King David. Here, too, Theodore Gericault's Three Lovers, an unabashed and altogether approving portrayal of two girls and a fellow in bed, blissfully ignorant of the Gore-Lieberman menace to their enjoyment only 180 years over the horizon. Even the 18th-century English gallery contained intimations of immoral conduct, with Peter Lely's hot portrait of Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth and mistress to Charles II. Across the room is Gainsborough's amiable portrait of his friend James Christie, founder of the auction house. This was one of Getty's earlier purchases and also one of his best. How Christie would have laughed at all the fakes palmed off on Getty in the middle decades of this century. Particularly in the Italian galleries, Getty's credulity is pleasingly visible. The general aroma of duplicity is nicely summed up in the museum's solemn caption to Dosso Dossi's portrait of St. George: "Dosso focuses on the complex psychology of the saint as he emerges from his legendary battle with the dragon. The saint's furrowed brow, emotive eyes and open mouth suggest the toll of the fierce fight mixed with dawning sorrowful relief."
In fact St. George was just the sort of man who would have slept in the Lincoln Bedroom and contributed handsomely to the Democratic National Committee, not to mention the campaign treasury of Joe Lieberman. He began his career as a defense contractor, owning the bacon franchise to the Roman army. Then he became a tax collector. As Gibbon remarks, "His trade was mean. He rendered it infamous." Mired in scandal, he announced he had been reborn and the church installed him as bishop of Alexandria, where his peculation was so burdensome that the populace stoned him to death.
The impresarios of both the Democratic and Republican National Committees would do well to visit the Getty Center and study how they stage-managed big events in the old days. Luca Carlevarijs did a couple of paintings of Venetian regattas, one of them with the doge marrying the city to the Adriatic. How nice it would have been to have had Bill landing in a Venetian barge at Santa Monica pier, marrying his party to Hollywood by symbolically tossing into the polluted waters a copy of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, etched in gold, before repairing to the lovely home of Barbra Streisand, he dressed as Belshazzar and she as Vashti who, you will recall, declined to attend Ahasuerus' revels, thus paving the way for Esther and, ultimately, for Joe Lieberman.
But do not bid adieu to Bill yet. His current plan is to enjoy the defeat of Al Gore in November, four years of economic depression under the supervision of George W. Bush, followed by his own triumphant return in 2004. In the meantime, what of Al Gore?
It's hard to find noble moments in Gore's political career. Such was not the case with his father. Albert Sr. lost his Senate seat in 1970, in part because of his principled opposition to the Vietnam War. Al Jr. never forgot what he has perceived the lesson of that defeat to be. A visitor to Gore's office at the start of the 1980s urged him to "do the right thing" on an issue that spelled possible political trouble for the Congressman. Gore pointed to a portrait of his father on the wall of his office. "He did the right thing," he exclaimed, "and look where it got him."
Gore is expedient, a trimmer. Take the issue of abortion, sadly the sole benchmark by which many liberals measure their expectations of a Democratic nominee. "At least Gore is for choice," they insist. Maybe so, but for how long? For whom? Not for the poor in federally funded clinics. As a congressman, Gore spoke of his belief in "the fetus' right to life." He was a relentless supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions for poor women. In one early version of Hyde's bill there was language allowing exceptions to the ban in the case of rape. Gore voted against that.
In 1976, at the onset of his political career in Congress Gore stated his view of homosexuality as "abnormal" and ratified that view in many subsequent votes. In 1980 he voted for an amendment prohibiting the Legal Services Corp. from assisting homosexuals whose rights were denied because of their sexual orientation. As a member of the U.S. Senate Gore backed three antihomosexual measures put up by his colleague, Jesse Helms. In August 1986, Gore voted for a Helms amendment forcing the District of Columbia to overturn its law prohibiting health, life and disability insurance corporations from using the new HIV test to reject applicants for insurance. A year later Gore voted for a Helms amendment requiring HIV testing for immigrants, effectively prohibiting HIV-positive people from settling in the U.S.
The liberal loyalists who are staying with the Gore-Lieberman ticket instead of jumping ship are making the usual noises about the "lesser of two evils." But when it comes to substance instead of moral pretension, the record refutes such cautious optimism. Right now Gore, buttressed by his runningmate Joseph Lieberman, is staking out the ground for a "moral rearmament" campaign representing much of what the Christian right has been calling for down the years: a big stick at home in the form of family values, censorship, more cops. God in every sentence. A big stick abroad.
What can minorities or labor hope for from the Democratic ticket? Lieberman has an explicit record of attacks on affirmative action. Gore has a substantive one. Ask Blacks in Government, an organization of federal employees, its opinion of Gore's Reinventing Government rampages in 1993 and 1994, which axed the civil service at a rate Ronald Reagan never dared dream of. In 1999 Blacks in Government issued an assessment ("National Partnership for Reinventing Government: The New Spoils System?") that concluded that "Reinventing has generally been silent about fairness and equality issues and has had a devastating impact on federal workers, particularly racial minorities."
Ask labor about trade, NAFTA or the WTO.
Al Gore distills in his single person the disrepair of liberalism in America today, and almost every unalluring feature of the Democratic Party. He learned at his father's knee the liberal idiom of the New Deal, and he has spent his political life destroying the substance. There's a myth that the death knell for liberalism as the dominant strain in the Democratic Party came with the crushing of Walter Mondale by Ronald Reagan, in 1984. That disaster supposedly engineered the "moderate" takeover. A year later the Democratic Leadership Council was formed, with Gore applying his old journalistic skills to write its inaugural press release.
But the real progenitors of the "moderate" Democratic Anschluss were Richard Nixon and Kevin Phillips in 1968, devisers of the Republican Southern Strategy, which proved that an updated appeal to God, guns, states' rights and racism could secure the South. It was that strategy that finished off Albert Sr., stigmatized by Bill Brock as an effete Yankee liberal, the "third senator from Massachusetts," anti-God, antimilitary, pro-busing. In his very first campaign Al Jr. took the Southern Strategy for himself, and it remained his political road map in the campaigns that followed. Gore won his first and, indeed only, seriously contested race as a Tennessee politician campaigning against Democrats, and that's how he has continued to define himself.
Al Gore: A User's Manual, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, will be published by Verso in September.