This is our last big convention, the last time—you might say—around the track. It is great to come back home to Texas, come home to where it really began for us in the political sense. The friends we made here and throughout our lives are the friends who are in this room—some from Texas, some elsewhere, every one of whom we owe a vote of gratitude to—friends who have stood by us when times are great and when times are tough. Now, we are about to embark on the fight of our life … and one thing that is the most comfort is that through good times and bad, I have had you at my side.
There was a photographers’ platform erected fifteen feet above the floor and a hundred feet from the podium, and it was jammed with echelons of TV cameras, perhaps so many as forty or fifty; crowded in was a second host of still cameras. Out of this intensely compressed workforce, a voice shouted, “Bullshit!”
Later, the heckler was reported as saying, “What are you going to do about AIDS?” but that was later. The first muffled sound was “Bullshit,” and everyone at the lunch froze for an instant as if everyone belonged again to one American family and was passing through the hour when Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been killed, and Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford wounded and shot at. Like all families who put together a fragile composure after the death of someone who inhabited the center of the home and circle, it was as if the air went pale.
“Bullshit,” came another voice, “what are you going to do about AIDS?” and by then, security was up on the platform manhandling the malefactors, who proved to be two wan young men with the telltale pallor of the disease, their hair cut in a punkrock clump, and sores on their faces; now they were hustled down the stairs from the photographers’ platform and out the exit.
Bush picked up his discourse, but he was shaken—how could he not be? The moment one will be assassinated must become one of the hundred entrenched expectations in every public leader’s life—unlike other crises, there is not much to prepare for; the angle of attack is never known. In the aftermath, Bush started to make a sour joke—with all else, he felt sour—“This is a crazy year when they can get credentials for this,” he muttered, but other voices started up on the photographers’ platform (“What are you going to do about AIDS?”), and now several of the new hecklers—second wave of the plan—waved condoms at the boutique crowd there for lunch, and security whammed and slammed the second group of hecklers down from the platform and out of the room, while Bush came up fast with a few figures on what his administration was spending on AIDS—one cannot be a major politician without having a statistics tape in one’s head—and then he added, the room now feeling at last restored, “In my line of work lately, this seems normal. If anyone else has anything they would like to say while we are all standing …”
He went on. He told his audience that he was working on his acceptance speech. “To be honest, I can tell you that I have a few butterflies … but you can count on this, I look forward to this fight. I can feel it building in my blood.”
It was the presence of AIDS that would build in the Astrodome that night, however, and not far from everyone’s blood. Mary Fisher, a slim, blond, and undeniably lovely young lady with a delicacy of feature and a poignancy of manner, proceeded to give the Republican address on AIDS not long after prime time commenced. If a casting director had searched for a fine actress unlikely ever to have contact with the virus, he would have selected Mary Fisher if she had been an actress, but she was not. She was in a rare category, a Republican princess; her father, Max Fisher, eighty-four years old and reputedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, had been a major fund-raiser for the party since the early days of Richard Nixon. Mary Fisher could speak of Georgette and Robert Mosbacher and Gerald and Betty Ford as her friends; indeed, the women were weeping and the men were wiping their eyes as she spoke. Before she was done, the Astrodome floor would be awash. She was not only lovely, but innocent, after all; she had caught the disease from her ex-husband before they separated. Now presumably, she would die and have to say farewell to her sons Max and Zachary, four and two.
The Democratic convention had heard from a man and a woman, Elizabeth Glaser, who was HIV-positive, and Bob Hattoy, with AIDS, and their speeches had similarly affected the Democrats’ convention. There had been accusations that not enough had been done by the Bush administration to fight against AIDS, and Bill Clinton had declared that such a fight would be one of the central issues in his campaign.
Mary Fisher was the Republican answer, then, to Democrats, and she was effective beyond measure. Outside their gates, across the bordering street beyond the Astrodome, in a weed-filled vacant lot now named the Astrodomain and renamed Queer Village by the protesters themselves, there had been a riot on Monday night. A half dozen arrests and a number of beatings had been handed out “professionally” by the police after a few of the one thousand protesters had put up effigies of George Bush, set them afire, and then had begun smashing wooden police barricades to feast the fire. The police had charged in on horse and foot and a helicopter shook the sky overhead as chants of doggerel came up from the protesters. “A hundred fifty thousand dead,” they began, “Off with George Bush’s head!” and “Burn, baby, burn!” They cried to the effigy, “We’re queer and we’re here.” One protester announced, “This shows how far we mean to take our anger,” but then the anger was as bottomless as the rage that victims feel against hurricanes and earthquakes. “We’re all innocent. Do you want to see me die?” had shouted one AIDS activist to Senator Alfonse D’Amato in a Houston church when D’Amato made the mistake of remarking on the tragedy of AIDS when it took the lives of innocent children. “What about us?” someone shouted back. “We’re also innocent and we’re going to die.”
Well, they were innocent or they were guilty. It was the intolerable and unspoken question at the heart of AIDS. Many a Republican was harboring ugly thoughts. AIDS, went the whisper, stood for Anal Injection—Dirty Sex! Out in Oregon a movement was commencing against the gay nation. The Oregon Citizens’ Alliance had sent out mass mailings that said, “Homosexual men on average ingest the fecal material of twenty-three different men per year,” which, if a particularly roto-rooter way of stating that the average homosexual had twenty-three lovers a year, also posed the riddle of how the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance ever obtained their statistic. But the anxiety of homosexuals, borne in private for who knows how many centuries, was now inflamed by the enigma of nature. Was excrement a side-product of nature, offensive to some, as the Democrats would doubtless have argued, or was Satan in everyone’s shit? Which, in turn, was a way of saying that the Devil was present more often in homosexual than in heterosexual encounters—exactly the question that blazed on the divide. We are dying, said the victims of AIDS, and you have no mercy. Are you cold to our pain because we are the Devil’s spawn?—beware, then, for we will haunt you. That was the question. Was the gay nation guilty or innocent, victims or devils, damned by Jehovah or to be comforted by Christ? Were such acts shameful or natural? The wheel of obsessive and unanswerable questions went round and round, and gay rage came up from the bottomless funnels of the vortex. Was their illness for cause in a world of immutable principles? Or was it the absurdity of a badly designed natural system that had not provided for safe sex short of the damnable deadhead odor of a condom?
What had happened to American politics? Like Mr. Magoo, it teetered on the lip of ultimate peril—which is to say ultimate questions—and all the while a blood rage had been building in the nation. “If I am young and dying of AIDS,” went the credo that was forming, “then I might as well go down in flames.” Yes, the riots were building, and the forces of the right, equally inflamed by the more and more vivid presence of the gay nation, were out to extirpate—so went the secret agenda—all human flesh that carried such a virus. Scenarios were germinating on the other side of that hill of time which is ten years away. Scenarios, we know, are rarely put into production by the cosmic forces who make the real films of our lives, but let us co
ntemplate the Republicans in this pass—an enormous congregation of the conservative-minded, who can be enumerated as the greedy, the spiteful, the mean-spirited, in party congress with the sincere, the godly, the principled, and the tidy, all philosophically unsuited to contemplate the nightmare of a disease that is not amenable to medical science and may or may not have the deepest moral roots; yes, the Republicans were paralyzed before the obscene enigma of AIDS and so when Mary Fisher spoke like an angel that night, the floor was in tears, and conceivably the nation as well, for instead of the Evil Empire, so nicely manipulable by American might—we always held the aces—now we lived on the edge of uncontrollables we did not know how to stir against—drugs, crime, abortion, race, disease. How much, nearly half of the nation at least, must have longed for Buchananite solutions: how bewildered was each angry soul of the right that there was no retaking of the disease of AIDS block by city block.
Into this stew of choked passions and muffled fears (where a city was now defined as a place you would not enter until you knew where you would be able to park your car and ascend by elevator to your event), into this ongoing panic came Mary Fisher with a message so old that the coruscated souls of the Republicans, nine-tenths barnacled by now in greed and wealth, cant and bad conscience, fury and fear, began to weep in longing for the old memory of Christ kissing the feet of the poor. How contradictory are our conventions! At this one, the most moving message of the four days came from a Republican princess who had the Republicans bawling their hearts out at sentiments usually characterized by the L-word:
Less than three months ago, at Platform Hearings in Salt Lake City, I asked the Republican Party to lift the shroud of silence which has been draped over the issue of my HIV/AIDS. I have come tonight to bring our silence to an end.
I bear a message of challenge, not self-congratulation. I want your attention, not your applause. I would never have asked to be HIV-positive. But I believe that in all things there is a purpose, and I stand before you and before the nation gladly.
Tonight I represent an AIDS community whose members have been reluctantly drafted from every segment of American society. Though I am white and a mother, I am one with a black infant struggling with tubes in a Philadelphia hospital. Though I am female, and contracted this disease in marriage, and enjoy the warm support of my family, I am one with the lonely gay man sheltering a flickering candle from the cold wind of his family’s rejection.… We may take refuge in our stereotypes but we cannot hide there long. Because HIV asks only one thing of those it attacks: Are you human? And this is the right question. Are you human? Because people with HIV have not entered some alien state of being. They are human.
I want my children to know that their mother was not a victim. She was a messenger. I do not want them to think, as I once did, that courage is the absence of fear; I want them to know that courage is the strength to act wisely when most we are afraid.…
To my children I make this pledge; I will not give in, Zachary, because I draw my courage from you. Your silly giggle gives me hope. And I will not rest, Max, until I have done all I can do to make your world safe, I will seek a place where intimacy is not a prelude to suffering.
I will not hurry to leave you, my children, but when I go, I pray that you will not suffer shame on my account. To all within the sound of my voice, I appeal: Learn with me the lessons of history and of grace, so my children will not be afraid to say the word AIDS when I am gone. Then their children, and yours, may not need to whisper it at all. God bless the children, God bless us all—and good night.
Marilyn Quayle came next. Had the coordinators been wholly unready for the impact of Mary Fisher’s speech and so had not foreseen what a powerful effect it would produce upon the mean-spirited not to be mean-spirited for a little while? Or did the convention organizers possess the wisdom to know that Marilyn Quayle was ready to appear at the podium after anyone—Gorbachev, Saint Peter, Madonna—she would not be cowed by those who came before. She had, after all, the insularity of a duchess, an insensitivity to her surroundings so monumental that it was almost attractive—one of a kind!
So she gave her little speech with absolute composure; the only sign that not everyone in herself was right there at home and listening came from her logo—that is, her horsy smile—that peculiarly self-intoxicated stretch of lips and protrusion of teeth that came and went to a rhythm that had next to nothing to do with what she said. Her words might be pious, or reflective, or she might even attempt to be funny, “If only Murphy Brown could meet Major Dad—what a story,” but then the smile would come, on the beat, off the beat; it was like the reflex learned in childhood to hold off tears when one is being scolded.
Her language, however, was always correct. When it came to being politically correct—as a Bush Republican, that is—who could approach her? Her speech was seamless, and her espousal of Republican womanhood could not be improved, nor injured: it was there, flat as Indiana. “Watching and helping my children as they grow into good and loving teenagers is a source of daily joy for me.”
On the other hand, she was not a duchess for too little. She had a nasal voice that could drill into clay, and given her disconnected smile, she could have been the president of a garden society, birdlike for all her horsiness, elevated above dross, and spacey as a space station. Let us say farewell while listening to her encomiums to the royal couple:
Because leadership has everything to do with character and unwavering commitment to principle, Dan and I have been deeply honored to serve these four years with President and Mrs. Bush. America loves Barbara Bush because she exemplified our ideal of a strong and generous woman, dedicated to her husband, her children, and her nation. She is a model for all generations, a woman I am proud to call a friend and our nation is proud to call First Lady.
To say that the appearance of Barbara Bush at the podium was the second if not the first most important event of the convention is to miss the point. Barbara Bush was also the major gamble of the Bush strategy. The economy, no matter what quantities of pork barrel were going to be brought up from the hold to feed electoral mouths in September and October, was going to remain a problem antipathetic to solution. One might as well roll the dice then with Barbara Bush, and pump up the advantage the Republicans held in family values. It was certainly a gamble. If America reacted with the cry—jobs, not happy hearths—then the election could be lost. On the other hand, Barbara Bush was the only exceptional card they had to play, and one could find a logic to the bet—patriotism, the flag, and the family were, after all, the values taught in elementary schools (even if they were public schools), whereas politics only commenced (if it did) with high school civics. So family values were gut-bets. Unless the economy got so bad that people had to vote with their minds, patriotism, the flag, and the family had a real chance to hit. George could take care of the patriotism, but Barbara could demolish every Clinton position when it came to family values, and you wouldn’t even see the smoke. The beauty of it all was that she was also an ameliorative and corrective force. If the good ship GOP was lilted ten degrees further over to the right than it cared to be, with every attendant impediment to responsive steering, Barbara could ballast it back a little to the left. The pro-lifers had kept cutting too hellish a swath in Houston that week, blockading abortion clinics so violently that forty-one of their religiosos got arrested on Monday, and then were so bad in court that they called the judge, who was a mother and a Catholic named O’Neill, nothing less than “anti-Christ”—Jesus, it was enough to make you swear. Ultrareligious Americans were not paying heed to the effect on the electoral result. After Judge O’Neill ordered Operation Rescue to keep a hundred feet away from Planned Parenthood clinics, one preacher even started praying for the judge to repent or she would “be stricken from the face of the earth.” Somebody else left a stink bomb at Planned Parenthood. Besides, you couldn’t have a crazy-looking father, holding his kid, scared frozen, by one hand, while he swings a seven-month fetus (still ree
king of formaldehyde) with the other. Republican women were going to leave the party in droves. George understood female psychology. You don’t allow something as ugly as a fetus to be waved in public—women do not like to advertise the disagreeableness of some personal and private functions. Dammit, the party needed amelioration concerning pro-life.
Barbara could provide it. Barbara would provoke the religious right hardly at all, because, after all, even they knew they needed her. Pat Robertson made a point of saying, “I can’t believe the American people are so blind that they would want to replace Barbara Bush.” Family values was the epoxy, then, to keep the party together, and Barbara could handle any press conference or podium assignment. Trust her every time. In with reporters from The Boston Globe and The Washington Post just a week ago, why, she blocked every thrust, and these were top-flight journalists, true hard-ons, honed!
BOSTON GLOBE: On abortion, I have to ask you something. Why is it so many of your friends think you are pro-choice?
BARBARA BUSH: I have no idea. I have no idea.
BOSTON GLOBE: Because you never expressed it to them? Never talked about it?
BARBARA BUSH: I’ve always felt that if I ran for president, George Bush would back me 100 percent. That’s the best I can do. [So] we can’t return to that. I’ve given my answer.
WASHINGTON POST: Well, I’m returning to it and I want you to tell me how the Republican Party which …
BARBARA BUSH: I don’t know the answer.
WASHINGTON POST: … which wants less government in our lives …
BARBARA BUSH: I don’t know the answer to your question and so, in all honesty, don’t ask it. Pro or con. I just don’t want to get into it. I’ve had it with abortion.
Mind of an Outlaw Page 51