Dance of the Reptiles (37 page)
Read Dance of the Reptiles Online
Authors: Carl Hiaasen
So why did I plead guilty to disorderly conduct if I did nothing wrong?
I was tricked by those crafty big-city prosecutors in Minnesota. Not being a legal sharpie, I had no idea that pleading guilty was actually the same as admitting guilt.
I apologize to my family, the voters of Idaho, and the Republican Party, which needs another sex scandal like Lindsay Lohan needs another vodka.
Mark Foley was dumb enough to e-mail those congressional pages, and David Vittner, my Senate colleague from Louisiana, was dumb enough to give his phone number to that escort service. Me? I didn’t tell anybody my real name until after I was busted!
Back in 1999, when I still wasn’t gay, I voted to impeach
Bill Clinton for lying about having sex with that intern (I forget her name, but she had killer hair).
At the time, I told Tim Russert of NBC that Clinton was “a nasty, bad, naughty boy” who deserved a spanking. I stand by those words, as weird as they might sound today. Clinton
was
a very naughty boy.
I’m not. I’m a hardworking senator who believes in traditional values—faith, family, and a strict justice system, except as it is applied to certain sitting members of Congress.
Standing humbly before you this morning, I can honestly say that I’m as not-gay right now as I have ever been in my whole life. In fact, I’m so not-gay that the gay community wants nothing to do with me. This silly Minneapolis restroom incident has been blown out of proportion so badly, and it’s time to set the record straight.
Here’s a promise to the good folks of Idaho: I am so not-gay that I will quiz myself every morning with that magazine survey and publish the results in the Congressional Record for all to see.
The day I turn gay, you will be the first to know.
Then you can spank me all you like. Please.
January 18, 2009
America Catches Up with Its History
In the spring of 2007, at a gathering of fewer than 100 people in Indian River County, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois stood up and talked about leading this country in a new direction.
The man was sharp and impressive, and I left that event feeling absolutely certain that he had no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, much less the presidency. No
way, I said, will America elect a black man with a strange name like that. Not in my lifetime.
Being wrong isn’t always bad. On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the nation’s 44th president.
The fact is difficult to absorb for a white kid who grew up in the South—and don’t let anyone tell you that Florida in the ’60s wasn’t the Deep South.
But the astonishment over what’s happening in Washington this week goes beyond the breaking of racial barriers. On another level, Obama’s ascent to the White House challenges the core skepticism of my generation, which we sometimes bear like a scar.
How did we become like this? It didn’t happen overnight.
One day, when you’re 10 years old, the teachers start crying and somebody whispers that the president got shot in Dallas.
A few years later it’s Martin Luther King, Jr., and then Bobby Kennedy, and even though you’re just a teenager, it dawns on you that your country can be a mighty dangerous place for leaders who dare to speak out for change.
That same year, voters choose Richard Nixon to be president because he says he has a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, the first in an avalanche of lies.
One day, a month before your high school graduation, you turn on the TV and see that four college students have been killed by the Ohio National Guard during a campus demonstration. These are American kids being shot by American troops, and now it dawns on you that your country can be a dangerous place for
anybody
who dares to speak out for change.
Later come the Watergate tapes, which confirm your darkest suspicions about Nixon and his goon squad. By the summer of 1974, when he was finally routed from the White
House, the country was desperately gasping for fresh air. Just as it is today.
America is exhausted, tapped out. The last eight years have felt like a hundred.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are leaving office with some of the lowest public approval ratings in the history of ratings. Somewhere, Nixon must be chuckling.
Now the nation turns, with hope, to Obama. In a recent CNN poll, a stunning 82 percent of Americans surveyed had a favorable opinion of the president-elect. That says as much about the country’s punch-drunk psyche as it does about Obama’s charisma. We know he’s smart. We know he’s a good communicator. Now we’d like to see some supernatural powers, please.
He should begin by rebuilding the U.S. economy, a flaming pile from top to bottom. Fix the banking system, which, under Bush, was allowed to gorge itself on flimsy debt. Then unfreeze the credit markets, clean up Wall Street, and revive the housing industry. As soon as possible, thanks. Then he should reform public education so that every teacher gets a decent salary and every student learns to read. Add these to the national wish list: energy independence, affordable health care for everyone, and an end to global warming.
Don’t forget Iraq. Obama should withdraw U.S. forces swiftly and responsibly, while making sure that decades of sectarian atrocities are forgotten and all ancient hatreds set aside, so that the whole place doesn’t erupt in civil war as soon as we’re gone.
Then it’s on to Afghanistan, where the new president should shut down the opium trade, neutralize the Taliban, and track down Osama bin Laden before he dies of old age.
The situation in Gaza is a bloody nightmare, but with
the right kind of persuasion, Obama should be able to bring Hamas and Israel together. Never mind that each side is a sworn mortal enemy of the other.
Then there’s Iran, Russia, the narco-war in Mexico …
Whew.
When Bush took office, the economy was purring, the national budget showed a surplus, and we weren’t at war with anybody. Those aren’t conditions in which voters tend to act boldly, and a candidate like Obama probably couldn’t have won the White House in 2000.
It took a total meltdown of confidence, a shattering of trust in our leadership, to bring such a long shot to the highest job in the land. Obama is inheriting problems so dire and tangled that they practically defy comprehension.
Despite the odds, lots of Americans are optimistic and even excited about the prospects of this new presidency. Among those are many in my generation, who once thought we knew better than to tie our hopes for this country to the voice and vision of one man. But it’s not a bad feeling.
October 31, 2009
Dear Sarah: Keep Up the Great Writing!
Confidential response of Sarah Palin’s book editor to the first draft of her upcoming memoir
, Going Rogue.
Dear Sarah,
Thank you for turning in the manuscript so quickly. I thought only Stephen King could crank out 400 pages in four months! Seriously, there’s some terrific material here, and all of us at HarperCollins are thrilled to be publishing your life story.
Before we move ahead, the fact-checking department has
asked me to pass along a few notes and comments that may require some revisions on your part.
1. Eric Clapton spells his last name with a C.
More significantly, his publicists tell us that you were not the inspiration for “Layla” and that he doesn’t recall ever having an affair with you. Is it possible you’ve got him confused with another rock star?
2. The mainland of Russia is indeed visible from parts of western Alaska during favorable weather conditions in the Bering Strait. Considering the ridicule you endured over this issue during the campaign, your desire to set the record straight is understandable.
Still, 78 pages is a big chunk of the book. Perhaps it’s possible to deal with the “I can see Russia” controversy a bit more succinctly.
3. Our researchers can find no evidence that Tina Fey belongs to the Taliban. Could you send us the sourcing for that reference?
4. John McCain’s campaign staff is vehemently denying the incident you describe in Chapter 13. Perhaps you could provide our legal department with the names of persons who actually witnessed the senator placing the duct tape over your mouth.
5. Even though you quit with 18 months remaining in your term, your achievements as Alaska’s governor will be of great interest to your readers and political supporters.
How about expanding that section of the book to a full chapter?
6. On page 107 of the manuscript, you describe a frisky
interlude with Todd as taking place on a John Deere Cyclone 340 snowmobile.
However, that particular model has been out of production for several years. Is it possible that you two were cavorting on a Sprintfire?
7. Our researchers can find no evidence that Katie Couric is secretly financing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Could you send us the sourcing for that reference?
8. Although the passage about moose shooting from helicopters is certainly provocative, perhaps it could be re-polished to focus more on your cooking recipes—which look very yummy, by the way—than on the preferred field techniques for skinning and gutting.
9. Our copy editors are still struggling to sort out the many colorful characters in your manuscript. In one chapter, the children are called Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, and Trig, yet only 44 pages later, they appear as Caribou, Cessna, Herring, Juniper, and Scrod.
Maybe you could check with Todd and get back to us on that.
10. “Mexican” is not a language (see manuscript page 188).
11. Our researchers cannot verify that David Letterman is “heavily involved” in the opium trade in eastern Afghanistan. Could you provide the sourcing for that reference?
12. The details of your high school basketball career are inspirational, but would it be possible to condense that section from three chapters to one? Just a thought.
13. John McCain’s office says that it was the senator, not you, who came up with the “two mavericks” campaign theme. He claims you originally proposed a slogan saying, “One Creaky Elder Statesman, One Hot Young Maverick—but Don’t Worry, Folks, She Knows CPR!”
14. Tony Blair was the prime minister of Great Britain. Tony Orlando is an American pop singer (see manuscript page 341).
15. Levi Johnston emphatically denies that Mitt Romney paid him to seduce and impregnate your oldest daughter. Furthermore, he claims that you personally offered him $50 to moon Joe Biden during the vice presidential debate.
Our legal department has suggested removing any mention of this young man (including those beer-pong photos) from the manuscript. What do you say?
Finally, on a personal note, I’m sorry you’re having so much difficulty reaching the ghostwriter we assigned to this project. After your first meeting, she left me a rather frazzled message saying she “needed to take a break and do some soul searching.”
We’ve tracked her to a sweat lodge down in Taos, New Mexico, and I’m pretty confident she’ll be back on the “Going Rogue” Express in no time.
Meanwhile, keep up the great writing, Sarah. We can’t wait to read the finished book!
January 17, 2010
Robertson Again Blaming the Victims
It’s no secret that the Rev. Pat Robertson is a yammering fool, but last week he hit a new low.
During a chatty sit-down segment of his television program,
The 700 Club
, the prominent Christian preacher offered his viewers a unique explanation of the terrible earthquake in Haiti: “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you get us free from the prince.’ True story.
“And so the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’ They kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor.… They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God.”
Robertson was referring to Haitian voodoo rites that were supposedly conducted before a slave uprising against French colonists in 1791. Why God waited more than 200 years to unload a natural disaster of such magnitude on an innocent generation of Haitians remains a question that perhaps God will answer for Robertson during their next private conversation.
It should be noted that Robertson’s idiotic comment was followed by a promise that one of his organizations, an aid group called Operation Blessing, would send medicine and workers to Port-au-Prince to help in the relief efforts.
A spokesman for Robertson has since scuttled forward to insist that the famous televangelist—a stalwart of the Christian Coalition and founder of the Christian Broadcast Network—wasn’t really saying that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by God’s wrath. But that’s exactly what Robertson was saying. It’s what he always says when something bad happens.
If you buy the gospel according to Pat, the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States were divine retribution
brought on by homosexuals, abortion activists, feminists, and the ACLU. The same sinners were to blame for Hurricane Katrina, or so proclaimeth the Rev. Robertson. When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was felled by a stroke, it was God’s way of punishing him for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. Again, Robertson connected the Biblical dots.
In most advanced countries, a guy like this would have been laughed off the stage long ago as a bombastic fraud, and nothing he said would be taken seriously.
Until he made it big on television, he was just another sweaty faith healer, “curing” hernias, ulcers, and hemorrhoids in exchange for cash donations. Lord, does he hate to be reminded of those days!
Another touchy subject is his dismal record as a prognosticator. Robertson announced that the world would end in the fall of 1982, one of scores of loony predictions that have fizzled. Six years later, with doomsday apparently rescheduled, he ran for president and got stomped in the Republican primaries. But he didn’t fade away. He just went back on TV and kept blurting the same outrageous, offensive crap.