As falls from grace go, former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders took a hard one. Elders hasn’t heard word one from any administration official since she was canned in December 1994 after advocating school children be taught how to . . . butter their own corn, as my pals in the bunkhalls of Camp Alto Frio used to say.
It’s sad, really, watching her peddle her newly published autobiography at a miked podium in a D.C. bookstore with only 15 people present due to a torrential downpour. A fourth of us are media, and Elders barely finishes her speech before an innocuous-looking Ruth Shalit, the Lizzie Borden of the New Republic, pleasantly suggests they “go out for a sandwich or something.” Such an invite is the journalistic equivalent of cannoli with Clemenza from The Godfather. But Elders merrily complies and even lives to see another book-signing later that night at some far-flung public library in Maryland.
She was always a lot more passionate than politically astute. From “Bomb Thrower” to “Condom Queen,” she’s been called many things, “Brightest Bulb on the Tree” not being one of them. She says she never saw her severance coming, since “masturbation is something that is normal — it alleviates stress, it prevents disease.”
In her defense, she and Bill Clinton seemed to enjoy any number of indelible bonds that would have precluded her termination: They both grew up poor Arkansans. They both love sugary snacks. Her son sold cocaine, his brother bought it. She got in trouble for espousing self-touch, he for touching others.
“He knew what he was getting,” Elders says with no rancor. And indeed Clinton did; she had a condom-in-every-school-clinic policy back in Arkansas. But Elders was expendable as the embodiment of the Administration That Time Forgot, becoming a garish funhouse image of the unpalatable Clinton associates he has since worked so hard to distance himself from.
At least she made us see the good in others. By comparison, her turf- conscious boss Donna Shalala looked moderate; Jim McDougal positively sane. Unlike Clinton’s other jettisoned meeklings, however, Elders retains a romantic mulishness. “Regrets? . . . I’d do it all the same,” she states with the swagger of Sinatra if he were a black female pediatric endrocrinologist. It is this kind of willingness to step in it that, even in exile, still attracts kick-the-carcass reporters like me and Ruth.
But getting Elders to reiterate and even compound her greatest foibles proves a hollow experience. It’s a feeling I can only compare to that which B- movie directors must get when coaxing Shannon Tweed to take off her shirt. The goal is so easily realized that it quickly loses its sport.
I ask her if drug dealers should be imprisoned. She thinks a bit, then says, “No . . . as long as they’re not selling to children.” She still advocates free birth control for prostitutes who need money to buy their drugs: “I wouldn’t want them having any unplanned children.” And she harbors no remorse about calling pro-lifers “fetus lovers.” “They are!” she says.
As for the onanistic uproar, she remains genuinely perplexed. After all, Elders says, let he who has never drawn the shades for a quick tug on the giggle stick raise his hairless palm. “We know that 90 percent of men masturbate, 70 percent of women masturbate, and the rest lie . . I think we just need to make people understand how important it is.”
So it’s small wonder she remains radioactive. But don’t pity the old gal. She got to keep her uniform, and though she rarely goes to occasions formal enough to sport the gold-braided epaulets, “I wear the shirts — 12 white cotton ones, which I really enjoy.”
She’s back plying her trade now at the University of Arkansas. And, as when she was the nation’s top doctor, she rarely digresses into the metabolic derangements of hepatic glycogen storage diseases. Mostly, she talks about sex and stuffing high school backpacks with prophylactics.
Her earnestness is still as pungent. She dons a lightning bolt on her lapel — “I always said I didn’t mind being the lightning rod if you all would be the thunder behind me.” But in her oversized glasses, no-frills navy suit, and sailor-knotted scarf, she looks more like an American Airlines stewardess than the most incendiary expatriate of the Clinton administration. She welcomed all comers as if they were visiting relatives, even sitting down for 30 minutes with an ill-intentioned reporter who still couldn’t dampen her buoyant spirit.
And with good reason. The folks back home don’t get so ruffled about her spouting off — which she now does at $ 15,000 a clip — when she’s not signing books, as she was kind enough to do mine:
“To Matt, Keep your hands out of your pockets — Joycelyn Elders.”
MATT LABASH
