FIREWORKS FOR THE FEW IN THE SPRING OF 1993, President Clinton stalled runway traffic at the Los Angeles airport so he could receive a $200 haircut aboard Air Force One at the hands of the gifted Christophe. Or maybe he didn’t—the facts of the case have never been established to The Scrapbook’s satisfaction. But the story was seized on by Republicans as expressive of larger truths about Bill Clinton: his towering vanity, his disdain for the convenience of ordinary people, his monarchical sense of entitlement, his insistence on personal gratification at the expense of all other considerations. The tale of the $200 haircut became a kind of shorthand critique of the Clinton presidency. A similar story may have been launched last Wednesday night, when, at the command of the White House, a massive fireworks display was uncorked from the Ellipse, adjacent to the Mall, following the State Dinner for President Fox of Mexico. Though it was done on public property, at public expense (the cost of a high-quality, 15-minute show could easily top $100,000), the fireworks were planned essentially as a private affair, put on for the benefit of those 100-plus guests who were lucky, or rich, or well connected enough to cadge an invitation to the dinner. The show began at 11 p.m., when most people are getting ready for bed but just as the president’s favored guests were moving on to the White House balcony to savor the night air and digest their Fava Bean and Chanterelle Ragout. The president’s staff gave no public notice of the fireworks, which meant that no one else had a chance to enjoy them. A public announcement might have brought thousands of people to the Mall. But what fun would that be? This was a special treat, for special people. To explain all the secrecy, the White House invokes “security concerns”—the common excuse employed nowadays to justify the remoteness of the rulers from the ruled. This is why, for example, President Clinton banned non-government vehicles from Pennsylvania Avenue, and why—just wait—President Bush will soon renege on his campaign promise to reopen the street to the traffic of average citizens. But it is a particularly pitiful excuse in the case of a fireworks display. At the first ka-boom, the president was already securely hunkered down in his compound. The only “threat” would have been to guests leaving the White House in their Town Cars when the party was over. Imagine poor Clint Eastwood or Alan Greenspan or Plácido Domingo having to peer through the car window at hordes of Washingtonians! A security nightmare, clearly. The “security” excuse is merely a ruse, of course, but the president’s men should beware of constantly invoking it anyway. For like the tale of Clinton’s haircut, the fireworks story is expressive of many things, none of them flattering to the president. It plays to the caricature of Republicans as royalists, sipping their brandy and savoring their cigars, surrounding a frightened king—not merely a monarch but a querulous one, refusing even to grant his subjects the meager consolations of bread and circuses, and fireworks. AND WE WON’T EVEN GET RICH DOING IT AS A GOING AWAY PRESENT to retiring Senate Banking chairman Phil Gramm of Texas, the Senate last week passed the 2001 version of the Gramm-sponsored Export Administration Act by a vote of 85-14. Among the 14 senators who opposed the bill, Sens. Jesse Helms, Jon Kyl, John McCain, Richard Shelby, and Fred Thompson are to be particularly commended for putting up a rear-guard fight for effective export controls. Of course, the real present was to the business interests who helped draft the bill, poured tons of cash into various coffers to gain support for it, and will soon be free to sell all kinds of dangerous, multi-use technologies to states like China. The bill, ludicrously, gives the Commerce Department the preeminent role in stemming exports of technologies that would be detrimental to our national security, precludes the departments of State and Defense from having anything but the most minimal say in these matters, and radically curtails the president’s discretion in stopping such exports by setting up standards that make it nearly impossible for him to act under the color of law. The incongruity is that the Senate bill is fully supported by the White House and an administration which argues with a straight face that it is still serious about weapons proliferation. Given all the pressure applied to Congress and the administration by commercial interests, one would think that the stakes for U.S. business were really high. But the appalling reality is that the trade being regulated is no more than 3 percent of our total exports. THE STILL-HAIRLESS MAN “MEN WITHOUT CHEST HAIR,” David Skinner noticed in our July 21, 1999, issue, have taken over the important male roles in movies and television. The depilated man represented the logical endpoint of the mainstreaming of gay culture and popular disillusionment with traditional concepts of manliness. Alas, this turns out to be one of those trends, the noticing of which does not mark its high-water point. Recently the Hartford Advocate reported on one talent agency where 90 percent of the (adult) male models have no body hair. And last week, the Wall Street Journal quoted the editor of Men’s Health magazine as saying that if a male model showed up on a cover shoot with hair on his chest, “we’d ask him to remove it.” Where the entertainment and fashion industries lead, the young men of America follow. Gillette, according to the Journal, is considering devoting a section of its website to explaining how to shave one’s chest. Our advice: Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. As Skinner put it two years ago, “Where can one find reflections of manliness, if everywhere you turn, the American male seems boyish, hairless, shorn of any sign that he is an adult?” KEEPING IN MIND THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT (CONT.) AS PART OF OUR ONGOING CAMPAIGN of supervision to help China prepare for the 2008 Olympic games, a couple of more helpful suggestions for Beijing: *Intimidation campaigns aren’t sporting, even if successful. We refer here not to your own citizens but to American investment bankers. Last week there were reports that firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch “backed away from helping Taiwan hold an investment promotional tour in the U.S. for fear of upsetting Beijing.” Apparently, this decision was influenced by the fact that Credit Suisse First Boston—after helping promote a similar tour for Taiwan in Europe—was punished by being removed from its underwriter role in the planned share offerings by two major state-owned Chinese companies. Now, capitalism is nothing if not a contact sport—”creative destruction” was Schumpeter’s phrase—but your willingness to strongarm financial giants sends a signal that it’s the destruction part of capitalism you like, not the creative part. *Don’t expect sympathy for your Falun Gong crackdown. We refer here to the disgraceful propaganda pamphlet “‘Falun Gong’ Is a Cult” that your embassy in Washington distributed to staffers on Capitol Hill last week. “Our fight against Falun Gong is part of a worldwide struggle against destructive cults,” you wrote in a cover letter. “We believe we have a great deal to learn from the experience of other countries, the United States included.” The pamphlet then compares Falun Gong to “the Branch Davidian cult in the U.S.” We wonder what lesson you think you learned from that tragic massacre in Waco. Shoot first and ask questions later? We’ll be back with more tips, as needed. Sincerely, The Scrapbook.
