Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (June 1, 1995)
PAGE 12 NEWT'S HERE BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER I am standing at my usual place at the bar of Astona’s premier nightspot, the Top Of The Astor, overdosing my liver vsath an inexpensive poison I call Red Death, vtfien this pompous guy vwth uptight silver hair walks in with three very predatory looking persons. He leads them to a table in a comer next to windows that look out over the city's waterfront and the Columbia River I see clouds outside the windows rise out of the ocean and spread across the sky like a sheet pulled over a corpse. My friend Rita takes their orders. "You know who those people are?" I ask her vtfien she comes to the bar. She looks at me wearily. 'Yeah I know who they are," she says. "Assholes." "Newt Gingrich and three stooges from Salem," I say. "Clamo, Derfler and Tieman, the new breed of Wild West sub urban Republicans. Tom McCall vould despise them." Rita looks over at the table. "Like I said," she says. "Beavis & Buttheads." She loads drinks on a tray and takes them to Newt's table. I slide down the bar so I can listen. I am curious why Newt Gingrich, the most powerful Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives since Uncle Joe Cannon's grim and reactionarty reign during the first Roosevelt, is in Astoria far away from beltway celebrity and mainstream media. I am quickly answered. Newt jabbers while Clamo, Derfler and Tieman lean eagerly toward him like a football huddle. He is estactic that the Legislature has successfully fabricated what he says is a "Contract With Oregon," which he says over and over again like a mantra. He praises the reinvention of private property and the hoped for demolition of Oregon's once pioneering landuse laws. He is a cheerleader for ciearcutting the last public forests and abolishing endangered species laws. The same for clean air and pure water regulations which interfere with the economic bene fits of pollution and sewage. He raises Rita's thermostat when he greets the obsequious Top Of The Astor manager with boister ous support for applying waitress tips to any pay raise, an idea cooked up by the state's restaurant owners. "I don’t get paid anything because my tips are taxed more than I get," Rita says to me. "Now Newt and my boss want the tips I don't get to be the raise they're never going to give me." Newt looks at Rita like she doesn't exist when she goes back to the table with change. She returns to the bar with an empty tray. Stiffed! 'They're treating me like a slave," Rita says. "Of course they are," I say. 'They are demonstrating their superiority over you after reducing you to poverty." She looks at me sourly. "You don't get it," she says. 'These are piss on mother's nurturing breast kind of people. It's got nothing to do with politics." "Everything's got to do with politics," I say. Rita shakes her head. 'Their vtfiole way of looking at life is because they think they didn't get enough tit when they were babies," she says. Newt congratulates the three Oregon legislators for their loyalty to the Republican banner throughout the 1995 session of the State Legislature which the GOP has for the first time in 40 years packed both houses. He likens it to the Republican domin ated 104th Congress' breakneck and breakheads tempo its first 100 days to pass his ambitious and hardhearted Contract With America, which critics liken to a Mafia contract. He praises Tieman's merciless attack on public workers and Derfleris aggressive efforts to peel back the state's landuse laws. He is more restrained and less specific when he compliments Clamo, a woman, for upholding the Contract With Oregon in her status as Speaker of the state House of Representatives. "A Contract With Oregon is a Contract With America," Newt says. "And vice versa," Tieman interrupts excitedly. Newt implores his passionately avaricious toadies to carry the Contract's banner beyond the legislative session. You can't go home and rest on your laurels, he tells them. The Contract must be implemented everywhere, carried to every farm and suburb. "We must reassert American civilization because we have to lead the human race,” Newt says. "We need a new American journey We need a quest into the future." I stare at Newt’s reflection in a large mirror back of the bar. I can't focus on him. He is jerky and irrepressible, a distinct type of American character both appealing and repellent, an ideologue graced with a little learning and the power to use it. His speech is larded with hyperbole and spacebabble - Jerry Brown of the right some call him, only farther out in space: Newter Moonbeam. Andy Rooney plated over Power Rangers. Boris Yeltsin, southern fried. People who know him say Newt is concerned about humanity but has a hard time relating to human beings, which they really mean he is a control freak. He promotes himself as vigorously as if he is a car or a house he is selling. "Government must be returned to the people," Newt says. 'To you state legislators. To mayors and city councils. That's what the Contract With Oregon means." "Power to the people!" Clamo, Derfler and Tieman say in unison almost as an amen. 'The government is out of control and out of date," Newt says. "It is obsolete and backward thinking and needs dynamic change. Our modem leaders have forgotten that government cannot substitute for private initiative, personal responsibility or faith." He says the country needs a new modem dialogue, an "American People's Plan" and a "New Birth of American Free dom," which sound like 12-step programs. Newt blames welfare for America's malaise. Welfare fosters anti-work, anti-family and anti-property, he says. "We must replace the welfare state wth the opportunity society and the world market state.” New4 blows bromides like bubbles."Work over laziness," he says. "Savings over debt Family over individual chaos.” He says the Democratic Party "despises the values of the American people" and indulges in "multicultural hedonism that is inherently destructive of a healthy society." Republicans are the real Americans, Newt says The normal Americans "We are the Party of Main Street, not Wall Street," he says disingenuously and rather unbelievably. 'There Tomorrow they will be keepers of the lavatories." In old Rome Newt would have been leader of a political street gang that beat opponents to death and burned their houses down. He torches our national house and acts like the Caesar of its reconstruct ion. I wonder if he regards himself as F. Scott Fitzgerald's model of a "first rate intellect" who is "able to see that things are hope less and yet be determined to make them otherwise." More likely his zealously superficial brain realizes the public despair is his ticket to omnipotence. I am dazzled by an epiphany. The eye of Newt is upon the Presidency! What else would be his grail? His entire political course has been a Mein Kampf toward his greater future as American führer. I suddenly realize Newt is not the advocate for Congress he pretends to be: Congress is his powerlift to the Presidency. He must be President to force his Contract upon America. He has to saddle the whirlwind he blew up or lose the momentum he created. The so-called Republican Revolution he orchestrates is a deceptive restaging of Gilded Age hogfeeding he manipulates for residency in the White House. Newt echoes Ivan Boesky: "Greed is good." Newt is a populist demagogue pundits and doom and gloomers are always warning about, an obsessively ambitious and clever impostor who operates on the fringe of fear and loathing. He exploits the disruption and apprehension usually apparent at fin de siècle, but the end of the 20th century is also the start of a Millennium which can't help but spring out old hysterias and superstitions. Gingrich Khan emerges from the shadowed plateau of our dread. Newt made his bones as the Republicans' chief assassin in Congress. He scorns even an appearance of benevolence and wears his black hat proudly. "I am an American Gaullist," he says. "DeGaulle restored France. His faith was in nationalism and technology." But DeGaulle was a royalist who thought only he could save France and he also believed its worst enemies were some of its citizens. Newt's eyes lock onto mine in the bar mirror. He looks like somebody who won't be a friend. His eyes flicker away may be a Republican epic, but it is not a romantic myth," he rhapsodizes. "It's more about people coming together on a wagon train and how hard it was going West. At the end of this period people will say I was on the wagon train that dramatically changed the country." I almost knock over my glass of Red Death at Newt's blather but the new Oregon pioneers stare at him in rapture. "We are the new revolutionaries," Newt says "We aren’t going to replace the social engineering of the left with social engineering of the right. A new civilization is emerging in our lives and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it." Clamo, Derfler and Tieman nod and look serious. 'The enemies of democracy are within its body like a cancer. That's what Jefferson said," Newt says "Cancer and calumny eat away at democracy from within." Sounds more like Joe McCarthy. Anybody can use Jefferson. Which Newt does again almost immediately. "When Jefferson said 'Every generation needs a revolution,’ he wasn't making an argument for chaos," Newt says. "He was making an argument for the creative replacement of the old order with a new order. If all you are is a revolutionary with no sense of order, you're just a bandit." But Newt twists Jefferson Old Tom's intent was to replace a repressive and corrupt colonial government with a truly revolutionary guarantee of power to the people. Newt's purpose is to return America to the vertically organized and patronage dominated 18th century that the American and French Revolutions blew asunder. Newt's America runs especially counter to Thomas Paine’s America, which is a vision of a decent and happy life for ordinary people who are rulers rather than ruled. Newt wants to reestablish an old older of privilege and power based on wealth and property, which currently dominates but does not yet entirely rule the country. "Politics means allowing somebody to dominate your life," Newt says, reversing Jefferson and Paine I think of Juvenal writing of old Rome's political gangs: 'Yesterday they were ruffians. Today they rule over our lives. CANNON BEACH 215 N HEMLOCK 436-1572 3556 SE HAWTHORNE PORTLAND 239-4605 J
