‘Cupid’

One TV series that I really liked but which — as a direct result, I suspect — lasted for less than one season was Cupid, created by Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars), which ran on the ABC network from September 1998 to February 1999.

In addition to being one of the few attempts to translate the movie genre of the romantic comedy into (non-sitcom) episodic television, Cupid had a heart-piercing premise: a wanderer (Jeremy Piven) in contemporary Chicago proclaims himself to be the Greco-Roman god Cupid in human form, banished because of the sorry state of love from Mount Olympus to Earth by Jupiter. The self-described deity’s way to get back home? Bring together 100 couples. Until he does, he’s stranded in the land of mere mortals. Of course, the local authorities think him crazy and put him in the care of young psychotherapist Claire Allen (Paula Marshall). In order to get released from the loony bin, “Cupid” says that his name is “Trevor Hale,” but Claire — ironically an uptight academic specialist in the psychology of romance — believes the name to be an alias. Still, she does what she can to get him to adjust to life in Chicago while trying to uncover his real identity. For his part, the bluff smart-aleck Trevor does what he can to bring his requisite 100 couples together — each attempt being the subject of each episode. Trevor’s declared identity and mission would be easy to dismiss as delusion if it weren’t for his preternatural ability to unite lonely hearts, as well as other telltale signs, such as his uncanny adeptness at throwing darts.

Built into this intriguing premise was a Moonlighting-like unspoken romantic and sexual tension between Trevor and Claire, which both seemed to suppress. In addition to the taboo of romance violating the doctor-patient relationship, Trevor claimed that any amorous attachment on Earth would complicate his “return” to Olympus. Also, their tacit attraction was counterintuitive to their personalities: Claire’s cautious, over-intellectualized, somewhat pessimistic view of romance constantly clashed with Trevor’s wildly optimistic, impulsive, damn-the-torpedoes approach to affairs of the heart. So, while he worked from episode to episode to bring potential lovers together, Trevor/Cupid didn’t indulge in any amatory pursuits of his own. Shot on location in Chicago, Cupid grounded each episode’s quasi-magical romanticism in a down-to-earth depiction of life in the unromanticized city.

Another story-line staple of the series was a therapy group that Claire held for singles, a group that Trevor sometimes attended. When the lovelorn members of the group would tell Claire of their romantic difficulties, she would respond with by-the-book analyses of their problems with an emphasis on the joy-killing laboriousness of seeking a soulmate. To Claire’s analyses, Trevor would usually counter with exultations of the adventurous messiness of finding romance and the joy of following your instincts.

The plots of the episodes provided a deft mix of comedy and drama. One installment involved a husband who constantly burst into song and dance on the street, movie-musical-style, embarrassing his dance-deficient wife; Claire tries to get the husband to stop dancing in inappropriate places, while Trevor encourages the wife to take dance lessons. A woman “falls in love” with a man on a billboard advertisement; Claire lectures her about the pitfalls of “emotional transference,” but Trevor hunts down the male model who posed for the ad. A local singer laments the would-be childhood sweetheart that she missed having; Claire advises her to accept the failure of a relationship with the boy in her past to work out, but Trevor takes her on a road trip to find him. In one of the more unusual episodes, Trevor, on his own initiative, brings together a man and a woman whom he senses were meant to be together, but the woman then reveals that she has a terminal condition which only a heart transplant will cure, and her rare blood type makes a transplant unlikely. In the end, the man dies in a car crash, and his heart provides the transplant that saves her life.

Cupid’s weekly appearance allowed the series to follow both the humor and the heart-tugging solemnity of finding love in the big city. In one episode, a young woman named Helen (Twin Peaks’s Sherilyn Fenn) gets a crush on Trevor, not knowing his claims to a life in ancient Greece (Trevor to Helen: “I knew a Helen once — beautiful face; bit of a troublemaker, though”), and we grin at Trevor’s attempts to avoid her, so he won’t endanger his chances to make it back to Olympus. But in one of the series’ inter-episodic subplots, Trevor has introduced Claire to a possible Mr. Right, and he now seems to be regretting the decision. Perhaps because of his ambivalent feelings for Claire, or perhaps because of his desire to remove himself from this mundane mortal world, at his moment of possible consummation with Helen, Trevor — without revealing his alter ego to her — breaks down in front of her and tearfully tells her of his yearning to “go home.” But is the god “Cupid” really homesick for the mythical Mount Olympus, or is the Earth-bound mortal Trevor unfantasically falling for Claire.

One of the show’s few bothersome false notes was its portrayal of Claire and her profession. The series was so quick to celebrate Trevor’s from-the-gut approach to love that it often went too far in portraying Claire’s psychoanalysis as strictly from the head. She seemed determined to cram every problem that a patient encountered into some textbook-defined box so that Trevor could rip up this metaphorical box with some seat-of-the-pants idea and thereby liberate the patient’s true romantic impulses. In other words, Cupid’s portrayal of psychoanalysis as over-intellectual and somewhat anti-feeling was a caricature, a straw man for Trevor to knock down. Also, the show’s invention of Claire’s therapy group specifically for singles — while providing Trevor with weekly opportunities to flex his wings — would be unworkable in the real world: such a group would probably devolve into a meat market. But, hey, the episodes’ story lines fueled by the singles group still worked.

Was Trevor really the god Cupid or a flesh-and-blood mortal — albeit one extremely skilled in affairs of the heart — with an identity-engulfing delusion (and an extensive knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology as well)? The series never let on. Given Cupid’s naturalistic depiction of contemporary Chicago, the idea of a mortal Trevor would certainly conform to the show’s ambiance. But this was also the realm of fiction, where it wouldn’t be impossible for archaic gods to assume human form and toy with our knowledge of the known world. I was certainly hoping that the show would last long enough to answer the question of Trevor’s identity in an intriguing way.

Another thing: Trevor’s knowledge of Greek mythology is immense, but he claims that one story from the otherwise true tales of ancient mythology never happened — he says that Cupid, contrary to the well-known myth, never married a mortal woman named Psyche. “Psyche” is also the psychoanalytic term for the mental forces of an individual that influence thought, emotion, and behavior. The psyche is often the central concern of psychoanalysis (as its name might suggest), and Claire is a psychoanalyst. This sets up a compelling possibility: perhaps the story of Cupid and Psyche tells of an ancient occurrence that has yet to happen. Perhaps Claire is the beautiful mortal woman with whom the god Cupid falls in love. Maybe instead of falling for a woman named Psyche, the god of love falls for a woman of the psyche. Maybe it’s Claire’s destiny to live and fulfill the ancient myth. Or maybe Trevor’s just out of his gourd — one of the two. I just wanted the show to make the outcome interesting.

But such, alas, was not to be. After 15 episodes, Cupid was cancelled, leaving the motivating questions unanswered. I’m still disappointed that the series wasn’t picked up for another season or two in order to play out its richly comedic and dramatic possibilities. However, ten years later — perhaps in recognition of Cupid’s enormous potential — the show was reworked, recast, and given a second chance, something uncommon for a series that lasted less than one season. In this iteration, Piven’s bristly, sometimes obnoxious Trevor was transformed into a lovable hunky lunk played by Bobby Cannavale. The dark and brooding beauty of Marshall’s Claire gave way to the airbrushed blondness of Sarah Paulson’s not-terribly-troubled psychiatrist. And most dismaying of all, the moody, cinéma-vérité Chicago setting was switched to a candy-colored, picture-postcard New York. The old show’s agreeably quirky premise was back, but the new show was missing the old one’s carefully crafted soul. This rejiggered Cupid ran for only seven episodes from April to June of 2009.

Somewhere, in a more perfect world, gas costs only 28¢ a gallon, there’s no such thing as war, and the Mudville Nine won the pennant. And in this perfect world, Rob Thomas’ Chicago-set Cupid, starring Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall, would have been given the long and devoted TV run that it deserved.

The first ten minutes of the pilot to Cupid

Click here for ‘Cupid, Part Two’

Happy 70th Birthday, Mr. Zimmerman

I wouldn’t call myself Bob Dylan’s biggest fan, but my respect for him is greater than the Nashville skyline. His myriad songs have conveyed complex thoughts, reflected the social sentiments of a generation, and brought a greater literateness to popular music than any composer before him. The fact that the former Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, remains active in today’s music world — not only active but still a vital presence — after 50 years sings volumes about his importance. Like Elvis Presley and the Beatles, Bob Dylan’s contribution to contemporary music, and indeed to contemporary culture in general, can hardly be overestimated.

So, it’s with some embarrassment that I confess to rarely listening to his singing. Often nasal and occasionally cracking, Dylan’s voice has a sincerity and an integrity that suits his songs. What his voice doesn’t have is an ease of listenablity. For this reason, when I listen to a Bob Dylan song, I’m likelier to listen to a cover by a more accomplished vocalist than to an original recording by the tunesmith himself. I’m sure that my admission has just irretrievably cost me whatever cultural credibility I might have had with the music mavens of the world. But such are my shortcomings.

The juke box at my local bar can download multitudinous songs from Cyberspace. Whenever I’m visiting the old watering hole and feel like inflicting a block of Dylan songs on the room, I will usually play the following covers:

MR. TAMBOURINE MAN by The Byrds

ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER by Jimi Hendrix

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR by Eric Clapton

IF NOT FOR YOU by George Harrison

LIKE A ROLLING STONE by The Rolling Stones

WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN by Marcus Carl Franklin

STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN by Cat Power

So, despite my musical apostasy, Happy 70th Birthday, Bob Dylan. Here’s hoping for another 70 years of vital songs and a tireless presence on the music scene. Here’s hoping that you never stop.

Now, if you’d just do something about that mustache ...

Subaru Commercial: Baby Driver

I’m not big on commercials. But this one from Subaru gets me every time.

‘Piccadilly’: Not a Backstage Musical

To say that German director E.A. DuPont’s British film Piccadilly (1929) is not a backstage musical carries a ring of the obvious. Piccadilly is clearly not a backstage musical, nor a musical of any kind — it’s a freakin’ silent movie, for Pete’s sake! Movie musicals came about because of the technological advancement of sound on film. Pointlessness would abound if a movie were to perform music and singing unheard by the audience. So, why bother putting the title Piccadilly and the phrase “backstage musical” in the same sentence? Because this particular movie subgenre throws a bright spotlight on this particular silent film.

What is Piccadilly’s story? Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas, best known for playing Claudette Colbert’s jilted fiancé in It Happened One Night) is the owner of a London nightclub whose star attraction is the dancing team of Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Grey) and Vic Smiles (Cyril Ritchard). Wilmot and Mabel are a couple, but Vic keeps making passes at her, which she rebuffs. One night at the club, during a performance by Mabel and Vic, a diner (Charles Laughton in a cameo) causes a commotion over a dirty plate. Investigating the cause himself, Wilmot inspects the club’s scullery and finds its workers watching another worker, a “Chinese girl” named Shosho (the captivating Anna May Wong), dancing atop a table. Angry over his workers lounging on the job, Wilmot sacks Shosho and gives the others a stern warning. Later, Wilmot discovers Vic trying to ravish Mabel, so he fires Vic as well. With Vic no longer in the act, the club’s profits plunge, so Wilmot thinks of a new attraction. Wilmot sends for Shosho and gets the idea of having her perform a “Chinese” dance at the club. When Mabel hears of this, she feels threatened, not only for her career but also because Wilmot seems to be growing more attracted to the increasingly assertive Shosho. Once timid around Jim (King Ho Chang), a Chinese man who lives in her block of flats in Limehouse (London’s Chinatown), Shosho begins bossing him around. Shosho is a hit as a dancer, and the club’s profits are back up. Mabel quarrels with Wilmot, and the two split up. A free man, Wilmot takes his new star attraction out on the town, but interracial couples are frowned upon, so Shosho takes Wilmot back to her flat and seduces him. Mabel has been shadowing them all this time — with a gun in her handbag. After Wilmot leaves Shosho, Mabel confronts her, and an alarmed Shosho catches sight of the gun. In the confusion that follows, Mabel passes out. When she recovers, she finds Shosho shot to death. Due to circumstantial evidence, Wilmot is put on trial for Shosho’s murder. But in the court’s mortuary, dying from a self-inflicted wound and saying that he and Shosho “belonged together,” Jim confesses to killing her.

If a filmmaker ever remade Piccadilly, I don’t think the story would stay intact. Why? The entire movie is motivated by the assumption — an illation which seems to permeate every frame — that racial mixing is a bad thing. To modern eyes, Piccadilly stands as a beautifully photographed cautionary tale against miscegenation and little more. As its story gets underway, the film carries a sense of foreboding that Wilmot, a white man, is beginning a downward trajectory when he leaves Mabel and takes up with Shosho. And after the first act, Shosho, an Asian woman, is portrayed as predatory towards Wilmot. The interracial couple is presumed to be a surefire magnet for tragedy. Nowadays, when movies with white male leads and Asian female love interests are practically a subgenre of their own (see the book Romance and the “Yellow Peril” by Gina Marchetti), Piccadilly appears as dated as a warning about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons.

Of course, such a racist presumption shouldn’t be unexpected from a film that predates World War II and the civil-rights era. After all, this was a time of presumed white supremacism. This was a time when, for example, several films and stories told of miserable Eurasian characters whose lives were redeemed when they discovered that they were completely Caucasian after all (films such as Shame [1921] and Son of the Gods [1930]). In fact, virtually all of Anna May Wong’s most prominent roles were in films cautioning against the intermingling of the white and the “Oriental.” So, the fact that Piccadilly is yet another monitory movie touting sexual segregation — from an era in which sexual segregation was the norm — is nothing to write home about. Still, the film’s pejorative view of racial mixing also informs other aspects of the story and gives a tragic cast to situations that would be unproblematic today. And present-day eyes may view the film as an unnecessarily downbeat spin on what might otherwise be a story with a happy ending: Piccadilly is a frustrated backstage musical.

Piccadilly includes two dance numbers in its plot: Mabel and Vic’s jazzy jitterbug and Shosho’s hip-swaying pantomime, both floor shows for the nightclub. (Of course, since the film is silent, they aren’t really “numbers.”)  When Piccadilly was first released in February 1929, the movie musical wasn’t yet fully formed; the emerging genre was still in its experimental stages. So, the movie’s contemporary audiences wouldn’t have seen it in reference to musicals as an established kind of film. The idea of Piccadilly as a “frustrated backstage musical” is one that could only occur in retrospect. Also, the film is missing some important hallmarks of that particular subgenre. In her book The Hollywood Musical, Jane Feuer says that the plot of the typical backstage musical is about a romantic couple working behind the scenes of a stage production, and the ultimate success of the show analogizes the coming-together of the couple as committed romantic partners. So, since it doesn’t include any scenes of the rehearsals for either floor show, Piccadilly doesn’t meet this requirement of the subgenre either. However, the film makes use of one story trope most associated with the backstage musical: the tyro performer who gets her big break and becomes a stage star.

Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give. They’ve got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can’t fall down. You can’t because your future’s in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I’m through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out. And, Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!

So goes the speech that Warner Baxter, as the show’s director, gives to Ruby Keeler, as the star-in-the-making, just before she goes on the stage. The scene is from 42nd Street (1933), perhaps the most prototypical of the showgirl-to-star backstage musicals. However, it’s a speech that Piccadilly’s Wilmot could have just as well given Shosho on the opening night of her dance. And Shosho does indeed become the success that Wilmot needs her to be, professionally eclipsing the club’s temperamental erstwhile star, Mabel, no less. The present-day viewer can imagine an alternate version of the tragic story, a version where the enthusiastic applause that Shosho elicits marks the hoped-for revival of the nightclub’s fortunes. And as the metaphorical curtain falls on Shosho’s and Wilmot’s triumph, the camera can fade out on a happy ending.

But Anna May Wong isn’t Ruby Keeler. In The Hollywood Musical, Feuer writes that the newly minted stage star “need not come from Iowa ... but she must have her roots in the provinces” — that means the white provinces. She need not come from Iowa, but she can’t come from Limehouse.

Also in her book, Feuer makes the distinction between “folk” culture, “popular” culture, and “mass” culture — each term marking a different relationship between performer and audience — and how they inform the genre of the musical. Folk culture means that there is no real difference between the performer and the audience: a community (however small) is singing to itself (a campfire song is one example), perhaps with the members taking turns. Popular culture is where the community separates itself into professional performers entertaining a live audience: a stage show, for instance. Mass culture is at a further remove because the performance isn’t live: such as films and recordings. The movie musical is itself an example of mass culture but sees its remoteness from the live audience as a potential for alienation. According to Feuer, the classical musical bridges its remove from the live audience and holds alienation at bay by privileging live performance, musical numbers that evoke folk culture and popular culture in order to distract from the film as a form of mass culture. Songs and dances performed in the story by regular folks (actually played by professional entertainers) and that bring a group or community together are one way that the movie musical tries to present itself as a form of folk culture. In musicals about professional entertainers, the genre extends the notion of a “folk” community to the live audiences within the films.

Feuer’s distinction is important because it signals what kinds of performances are valued by popular cinema and what kinds are not. Musical numbers that include the community (such as the live audience) are preferred to those that do not. For example, it explains why there are many musicals about professional entertainers who are stage performers but virtually no musicals about cinema performers. (Singin’ in the Rain [1952] is something of an exception to this, but it still does much to emphasize the live audience, and only one of its numbers is sung in the film within the film.)

Using Feuer’s distinctions, Piccadilly shows its preference to Mabel and Vic’s dance over Shosho’s. During their jazzy duet, the camera moves with the dancers and includes the audience in the frame. While it would be an exaggeration to say that they are involved in the dance, the mostly happy, mostly toe-tapping spectators create a celebratory environment, and Mabel and Vic’s jaunty jitterbug feels like an extension of that cheerful environment, reinforced by the camera’s swishing pan of the exuberant jazz musicians providing the music for their movements. As Feuer might say, Piccadilly presents Mabel and Vic’s dance as a kind of “folk” performance.

But Shosho’s pantomime dance is presented in another key entirely. Shosho performs a more solemn dance, relying more on arm and hip movements. She wears what the film says is an “authentic” Chinese costume, but it looks more like she’s wearing a Cambodian mokot on her head and an abbreviated, shoulder-horned breastplate above her bare legs, apparently an eroticized variation of a traditional Cambodian/Thai dance costume and not anything remotely Chinese. In contrast to the elaborate tracking camera movements that follow Mabel and Vic, the camera movements following Shosho’s dance are minimal panning shots. And most of the camera compositions are medium close-ups or full-body shots of Shosho and do not include the audience with her in the frame. But in those long shots that do show both her and the audience in the same frame, the space emphasizes the distance between the performer and the spectators, who watch her with frozen expressions on their unsmiling faces. Instead of a merry jazz band, Shosho is accompanied by a stone-faced group of Asian musicians (including Jim) performing on traditional Asian instruments and photographed with an unmoving camera. And the rotating mirror balls surrounding Shosho throw spots of light on the stock-still witnesses, as though the beams held back the audience. The pair of audience members who exchange unheard words about Shosho are an effete-looking man and a beefy, short-haired, monocled woman who smokes.

Where Mabel and Vic’s dance brings a microcosmic community together, Shosho’s dance reinforces the distance between performer and audience. Where Mabel and Vic impart joy to the nightclub patrons (except the quarrelsome diner Laughton), Shosho holds them silently rapt. Where Mabel and Vic’s most conspicuous audience members invite identification by the film viewers, Shosho’s most conspicuous audience members suggest an alienating gender ambiguity. While Mabel and Vic’s dance may be seen as a kind of uniting “folk” performance, Shosho’s stressed ethnic otherness portends the breakdown of the folk, of the ethnically “homogenous” community. Mabel and Vic’s performance prefigures the celebratory production numbers in the emergent musical genre, but Shosho’s dance is portrayed as an ominous intrusion into what musical production numbers usually celebrate: the unifying of a community. Seen from a modern-day distance, Shosho’s dance might have been every bit as celebratory and community-building as Mabel and Vic’s, but Piccadilly doesn’t present her pantomime that way. Why not? Because Shosho is the wrong race.

Since Piccadilly denies Shosho and her dance the positive connotations that the musicals to come would bestow upon their performers and performances (and indeed that Piccadilly presciently bestows upon Mabel and Vic’s dance), the 21st-century viewer may perceive this silent film’s absence of synchronous sound and music as a further denial of the positive associations of the classical musical genre, such as the upbeat characters and happily-ever-after endings of examples like 42nd Street and Singin’ in the Rain. To modern eyes and ears, Piccadilly’s muteness consigns Shosho to an aphonic realm of tragedy, a forcibly hushed domain of gloom and doom that the audible genre of the musical — with its inclusiveness, its communalism, and its sheer musicality — might have countered.

And if the viewer takes Feuer’s distinctions between “folk,” “popular,” and “mass” cultures to heart, one might even view Piccadilly’s pejorative portrayal of Shosho’s dance as an adulteration of its positive potential. The flashy accoutrements of the dance — its Orientalist trappings, its glinting set, the relatively vast space between Shosho and her audience, her laughably non-Chinese “Chinese” costume — come across as unnecessary and estranging add-ons to a performance with greater possibilities for connection, as superfluous distancing devices to attract a paying audience. In this way, the negative associations of Shosho’s floor show may be seen as a capitalist corruption of the one true “folk” performance in the film: Shosho’s table-top dance for her fellow scullery workers.

Shosho’s dance in Piccadilly

Film Noir, Part Two

Not too long ago, I heard Bruce Springsteen’s haunting rendition of the old song-book standard “Angel Eyes,” and it stayed with me. While the song is best remember as sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra, accompanied by a lush orchestra, Springsteen stripped the song down. His voice barely escaping through clenched teeth, seething into the microphone and backed only by a solo acoustic guitar, Springsteen conveyed the wrecked spirit of a man devastated by the mysterious absence of his love. Springsteen took a song usually associated with sophistication and laid bare the narrator’s incomprehension, his vulnerability, and his sense of being utterly alone.

In other words, Springsteen’s version of “Angel Eyes” did to a familiar standard what film noir did to studio-era Hollywood: take an entity associated with glamour and twist it to reveal the darkness within.

haiku

Sand covers barbed wire

The guard towers stand empty

Ghosts haunt the desert

Re: ‘Love in a Time of Cruelty’

Phil Dillon has changed the name of his conservative blog from Another Man’s Meat to Fires Along the Tallgrass. (Were too many visitors mistaking it for a gay website?) I stumbled across another reply I left on one of his posts, one dated May 5, 2007, and titled “Love in a Time of Cruelty,” in which he likened the rhetoric of political opposition to Bill Clinton to that of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Beginning with a quote from Phil’s post, this was my response:

“In the eighties, Democrats expressed their contempt for Ronald Reagan; in the nineties, Republicans, the Moral Majority, journalists, and right wingers savaged Bill Clinton. The page turned again at the dawning of the new millennium with Democrats, environmentalists, feminists, leftists, and journalists vilifying George Bush.”


I think that the “savaging” of Bill Clinton when he was in office was of a different character than political criticisms of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. To say that conservatives treated Clinton the same way that Democrats treated Reagan or are now treating Bush is to overlook the differences.

Contrary to what Phil says, I don’t remember the Democrats during the 1980s as expressing “contempt” for Reagan. Then as now, Reagan was a very popular president (not with me, but with much of the rest of the country), and no Democratic politician dared criticize him too harshly for fear of alienating the Democratic voters who liked him.

To me, the political rhetoric in the mainstream heated up when Clinton became president. Maybe it was because Clinton won the White House by pluralities, and not by majorities, but mainstream voices critical of Clinton sounded much harsher, to my ears, than mainstream criticism of Reagan or George H.W. Bush did. For example, Rush Limbaugh, syndicated on hundreds of radio stations (and for a while, on TV), was especially blistering in his oral attacks on Clinton. For the life of me, I can’t think of a 1980s mainstream equivalent of Limbaugh that poured such caustic verbal venom on Reagan.

Hostility toward Clinton became especially fierce after the Republicans re-took both houses of Congress in the 1994 election. It seems clear to me that the entire Whitewater investigation, and its various spin-offs, was undertaken for one purpose, and for one purpose only: to dig up something on Clinton that could be used to impeach him. Why else would Republicans replace the original independent counsel in the Whitewater case, Robert B. Fiske, with the relentless Kenneth Starr at a time when the first attorney was ready to wrap up his investigation? Why else would conservatives leak the name of Monica Lewinsky to Matt Drudge just at the time when Clinton’s lawyers and Paula Jones’s lawyers were about to reach a settlement?

As for what the Republicans did to Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, what did the Democrats do to Reagan in the 1980s that would be its equivalent? Iran-Contra? I don’t think so: before their investigations into the scandal began, congressional Democrats took impeachment off the table. And Iran-Contra was a much more serious issue than an extramarital affair with a consenting adult — or even lying about such an affair under oath. Reagan was criticized by Democrats with kid gloves; when Clinton became president, the Republicans’ gloves came off.

I think that Clinton’s greatest sin, to Republicans, was not lying under oath. No, I think it was being a Democrat who had the temerity to get elected president, an office that many Republicans thought of as rightfully theirs. Otherwise, I’m at a loss to explain the Republicans’ vehement dislike of this rather centrist Democrat, a Democrat who pursued some policies that Republicans ought to have admired.

By contrast, you can’t accuse George W. Bush of being a centrist, despite his middle-of-the-road masquerade during the 2000 election. He has spent most of his presidency doing his best to alienate those who disagree with him. As other commentators have said, Bush would rather be President of the Republican Party [i.e., president of only half of the country] than President of the United States. Also, the misleading way that he took this country to war with Iraq and his current stubbornness in regards to that conflict don’t help his divisive image. Is it really so surprising that so many non-conservatives dislike him so intensely?

So, I don’t see the anger against Bush Jr. as a balanced inversion of the anger against Clinton. Where I believe that Bush has done much to earn the bitterness against him (what his defenders call “hate” in order to make it sound irrational), I don’t see what Clinton did to deserve such vituperation from conservatives — especially when you compare the efficient, centrist way that Clinton ran his administration to the highly partisan, botched job that Bush is doing.

Finally, I don’t think that any meditation on today’s political hate speech is complete without mentioning Ann Coulter. Whether she is saying that some 9/11 widows are enjoying their husbands’ deaths, calling for the poisoning of Justice John Paul Stevens, or suggesting that Timothy McVeigh should have bombed the New York Times building instead, Coulter has taken political discourse in this country to a new low. She got her start in the media by lobbing her invectives at Clinton. I find it interesting that the media tastemakers at the time would consider her mean-spirited, ad hominem, anti-Clinton, anti-Democrat, anti-liberal jeremiads acceptable. Where is her high-profile equivalent on the left calling for the murder of conservatives?