the Newt -- Take 2

Ah, the Newt…the Newt…

Gingrich is back. Improbably, almost impossibly, he is back. He is now, in fact, actually within some striking distance of the GOP nomination for President.

I don't much care for him. Though, I did write about him a lot back in the early 1990s. Nothing terribly flattering, I'm afraid.

Here, in fact, is some of what I said about him in my Xcargo ezine back in 1998, when I thought he was gone for good. I was too optimistic. And, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't said some of the hard things I said about the Democrats. (I had a few readers in those days who were conservatives, you see, and I was trying to cultivate them.)

But, otherwise, I find I'm almost pleased with this little piece, particularly the part that talks about the GOP and its Faustian bargain.

The price of which, I fear, all the rest of us have had to pay…





explosive-cargo

by Michael Jay Tucker


Not the UK: No Newt?

No.

No. No.

No. No. No.

NOOOOOO!

This can't be happening! This is horrible. This is terrible. This is ... well, what I hoped for several years.

Over the weekend, just after the U.S. Republican Party -- a.k.a, the GOP -- failed to sweep Congress, and in effect reelected President Clinton for two more years ...

Newt Gingrich resigned as Speaker Of The House. He may even leave Congress.

I'm devastated.

No. Really and truly. I am. That's why I'm taking a short break from my current infamous multipart series (this on my recent trip to the UK), to write this brief Newt-note. Call it a Newt-letter. And you know what they say. No Newts is good Newts. Or something like that.

Anyway, I loved Newt. Oh, as a person of course, I thought he was probably a waste of protoplasm that would have been better spend constructing ring worms and intestinal parasites, but that wasn't the choice of the Creator, and who am I to question the ways of God? Inscrutable as they may be. In fact, down right incomprehensible. In fact, actually, might make you sort of question the sanity of the All Mighty. But we won't go into that.

But, I did love Newt. I mean, as a public figure to write about. I mean, that little square head! Looking sort of like a cinder block outhouse with a polar bear skin tossed over the top. I mean, couldn't have asked for better if you'd phoned ahead and ordered special. Comics, political cartoonists, and columnists are weeping in the aisles from one end of the country to the other. I'm thinking of organizing a support group. And a 12 step program.

And those wonderfully wretched books he'd write! And his seminars! And his taped "classes"! The ones where he'd go wandering off into some bizarre Peter-Drucker-Drivel Management Fad Buzzword New Speak Futurism where ... somehow ... in an alternative universe ... it all made sense. and, the Contract with America didn't sound like a subplot in the Godfather: Part XXXVI.

I may never smile again.

*
Actually, seriously (and this will surprise you), I think he's getting a bit of a bum deal. It really wasn't his fault that his party lost five seats in the Senate, rather than gaining the 14 he'd hoped.

No. THAT was the doing of the fanatics on the Right Wing of his party. That was the fault of the idiots who were running around making absolutely certain that Starr was on TV each and every night, with yet another grim set of hideous revelations about our Fearless Leader, Mr. Bill ("Can't Keep It In His Pants") Clinton, and thus rubbing John and Jane Q. Public's noses in the fact that yes, yes!, this WAS a Do-Nothing Congress that could see nothing outside the Belt Way.

And of course, they were talking Impeachment. Smart, that. Really brilliant. Americans are, by nature, a conservative people. And that means big sweeping changes, brought on all of a sudden without a good deal of time to argue it up, down and sideways ... well, it just makes them nervous. And, I think, with good reason.

But the Hard Right didn't listen to that. They were so busy closing in for the kill they didn't notice they were charging nose-first into a tar-pit. Bubble, bubble, boil and trouble ... you see.

*

But I think he's not getting a fair shake particularly because come right down to the nitty-gritty of it ... and say what you like about him being the spawn of the devil with 666 tattooed under that white hair of his ... but the simple fact of the matter is that if weren't for him, there would have been no GOP resurgence in the middle '90s.

'Twas he most of all, I think, who brought forty years of Democratic hegemony to an end. He realized that the Dems had held power that long only because it had the support three groups -- Organized Labor, Minorities, and Women. And it was he who saw that those three groups weren't what they used to be. Labor had been in decline since the 1960s and the de-Industrialization of the American economy. Minorities and women, meanwhile, were either themselves susceptible to a Conservative message, or else were
so involved with "Identity Politics" that they no longer spoke to each other ... much less the Liberal and Moderate White Males who could have been their allies.

And it was he who saw that you could build a revolution with the small business owners, and middle class suburbanites, and Southern regionalists, and general centrists who had found themselves before excluded from the decision-making process in Politically Correct America.

In short, he found the Republican Party a country club of the very rich, and left it a Revolutionary Rotary.

*

And, even though I'm a card carrying Democrat, on some level I can't even object to Newt's dethronement of the Dems. Forty years is a long time for anyone to run a country. Sometimes, you need a little shaking up. Even the home team can't win all the time, or you gotta start wondering who's paying off the ump.

But the thing which does worry me, and which may be the Newt's single most important accomplishment, is that while he was doing all of this ... he also was the one who signed in blood for the GOP's Faustian Bargain.

He, you see, was the one who saw that the Republicans could run the country via an alliance between the vaguely Libertarian New Right, and the finely honed theocracy of the Old.

It was he who saw that the Religious Right ... and in particular, the Christian Coalition ... could be to the GOP what Labor had been to the Democrats: the nearly fanatical political action committee that was Everywhere.

*

But, in the end, I wonder if that isn't also what brought him down. And I wonder too if it isn't an unhealthy legacy for Conservatism in this country.

For how can you be both a champion of the Individual and the servant of a Medieval concept of God ... a Moloch, who demands not merely your worship, but your annihilation? Your unconscious, uncritical, and mindless obedience?

*

But, that's neither here nor there.

The important thing is I'm crushed. No more Newt. Dear heaven. Whatever am I going to do?

Maybe he'll run for president.

Still, that's two years away. Two long years. Argh.

Oh well. Just as long as Jesse Helms doesn't go anywhere.

Onward and upward.

(c) Copyright 1998 by Michael Jay Tucker


You may see other vintage Xcargos at Explosive Cargo