Henry Clay, who died 156 years ago this last June 29, contributed quite a few things to American history. Some put him in the top ten politicians to ever hold federal office. The man certainly kept busy, that’s for sure, almost single-handedly starting the War of 1812, acting as the chief architect of the Missouri Compromise, playing peacemaker by getting all sides to back off during the Nullification Crisis, and doing his best to postpone the inevitable conflict with his Compromise of 1850. On top of that, he was such a renowned constitutional lawyer that even today, cases he argued – and won – are cited as precedents.
What’s more, just as nearly all of his fellow American heros did, Henry liked to drink. Maybe more than most, even, because it’s an historical fact that Clay introduced the mint julep to Washington, at the Willard Hotel’s Round Robin Bar, back in the days when guys still settled their differences like true gentlemen – with a duel. And, as a matter of fact, Clay fought a very famous duel, in January of 1809, about a month before Abraham Lincoln was born, with a fellow named Humphrey Marshall, over some remarks Marshall made about Clay’s mother during a brawl the two of them got into on the floor of the Kentucky General Assembly concerning the merits of a bill which proposed to ban public wearing of suits made from English cloth. Talk about protectionism! When you consider that kind of policy, calling people who think NAFTA went a bit too far “protectionists” hardly seems appropriate; it’s like calling an A-frame house on a lake in West Virginia your family’s country estate. And oh, yes, for the record, it was Henry Clay who was in favor of that bill.
Now, in that duel, both sides were allowed three shots. Clay basically failed to do any significant damage to Marshall, scratching him a bit on the chest, while Marshall managed, on his third attempt, to inflict a flesh wound on Clay’s thigh. The reason nobody died, even after the discharge of six rounds at twenty paces, is, I think, fairly obvious – the mint julep. This is because, besides mint, sugar, iron-free limestone spring water and ice, the business end of the mint julep comprises three ounces of barrel-proof Kentucky bourbon. With a couple of those behind them, it’s a wonder Marshall or Clay could hit anything at all.
And so it was, after dining at the Willard with a client this evening, I visited the Round Robin Bar and was immediately reminded of Henry Clay when I saw General Wesley Clark at one of the tables, under a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, drinking a mint julep. The mint juleps at the Round Robin cost fifteen dollars, but you get your money’s worth in the bourbon department, I can assure you, and, from the looks of the progress Clark was making on his, he was about halfway ready for a duel with Humphrey Marshall. So, I stepped up and told the bartender to fix me one, too, and told him to have the cocktail waiter bring it to the booth seat opposite Clark, who was sitting facing the wall – so as to avoid being recognized, presumably.
“Good choice, Wesley,” I remarked as I sat down in front of him, “when a fellow like you has the respect of so many patriotic Americans, it’s only fitting he should be here in the Round Robin, quaffing Henry Clay’s favorite libation.”
Clark slowly looked up from his mint julep. “Oh, Christ,” he murmured, “just my damn luck. The minute I start to catch a decent buzz off a mint julep, along comes a Tom Collins.”
“I can leave if you’d like,” I offered.
“No, no,” Clark muttered, shaking his head, “they say you shouldn’t drink alone, so what the hell – stick around. What are you having?”
“The same,” I replied, indicating his mint julep.
“Really? What’s your problem?”
“No problem, Wesley,” I assured him. “I like mint drinks – fresh mint drinks, anyway, and besides, they do make the best mint julep in town here.”
“True,” Clark agreed, taking another pull off the straw as the cocktail waiter placed my own frosty mint julep in front of me. As served at the Round Robin, anyway, the drink is huge – two ounces of fresh, macerated mint in a twenty-four ounce beer glass, heaped with crushed ice, then smothered with at least three ounces of Kentucky bourbon, plenty of simple syrup and chilled spring water, right up to the glass brim, and dusted with powdered sugar on top. Like I said, if you can afford fifteen dollars for a drink in the first place, you certainly get your money’s worth, no doubt about it.
“It’s what you said about McCain, isn’t it?” I took my first sip while waiting for a reaction.
“Yeah,” Clark admitted, “that’s it. What else could it be?”
“You shouldn’t take it so hard,” I advised. “I certainly understood what you meant when you said that riding in an airplane and getting shot down does not constitute a qualification for the presidency.”
“That’s not exactly what I said,” Clark interjected, “but it’s close enough. And besides, this isn’t Face the Nation and you aren’t Bob Schieffer. Yeah,” he sighed, “words to that effect. I said them.”
“You must realize, that only completely immoral, dastardly sociopaths who hate Barack Obama, care nothing for the democratic process, and despise the American public, not to mention those principles that all true Americans hold dear; only habitual miscreants of the lowest imaginable character, who are willing to take that remark out of context, and spread it all over the media and the Internet with shameless malice…”
“In other words…” Clark broke in again.
“Ah… neo-conservative Republicans,” I ended, abruptly.
“In your opinion, anyway,” Clark flatly stated, taking another sip of his mint julep. “You ought to know we military types don’t care for pussy-footing around. We prefer that someone plainly speak what’s on their mind.”
“Right,” I concurred. “In any case, what I meant was, only people like that would, or could, misconstrue what you said as an attack on Senator McCain’s patriotism.”
“Damn right,” Clark agreed. “I was impugning his foreign policy and leadership experience, not his bravery. Hell, the man’s too brave for his own good, everybody knows that! Same as with the thing I said about how he never really commanded a combat squadron. He was always bragging about that, the squadron command, but he was never, ever honest enough to point out that the squadron didn’t engage in combat when he commanded it. Really now,” Clark implored, rhetorically, of course, “what kind of straight talk is that supposed to be?”
“Well,” I wondered aloud, “does being held captive and tortured by the evil North Vietnamese constitute more foreign policy qualification than being shot four times by the evil Vietcong?”
“I don’t know,” Clark confessed, “but I am pretty sure that neither of them entitles a public figure, whether he’s a United States senator or a retired United States Army general, to sing ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ during any kind of appearance in front of the press. What if McCain gets elected and pulls another stunt like that? Remember how all bent out of shape the Soviets got when Reagan made that stupid comment about nuking Russia during a sound check he didn’t think was being broadcast?”
“Sure,” I reminisced, “that nearly started World War III – or maybe World War IV, depending on how you count them.”
“The problem is,” Clark complained, “you can’t make rational, substantive points discussing the issues in a national presidential campaign anymore. People have to face the fact that, although McCain’s a hero, being a hero isn’t the point. Look at Eisenhower – was he qualified to be President and oversee US foreign policy because of how brave he was, or because he was the supreme allied commanding general, and therefore someone who understood both the military and the political aspects of foreign policy?”
“So you’re saying,” I reasoned, “that it’s a positive thing for a candidate to be a veteran, but, unless they were at least a general or an admiral, their experience in the political aspects of foreign policy issues is likely to be no more extensive than the average civilian’s?”
“Certainly not on the strategic level at which the President is expected to function,” Clark concluded.
“Sure, that makes sense.” A pregnant pause ensued. “It’s not,” I inquired delicately, “by any chance that you guys on the ground didn’t always get the best air support from fellows like McCain, is it?”
“Ah, well,” Clark mused, “everybody knew the Navy and Air Force pilots were chicken to fly close ground air support for the grunts like me and my boys. But who could blame them? Most of their jets were designed to fight the Russians during a nuclear war in Eastern Europe and only had missiles – no machine guns, no cannons – and no close ground air support training, either. Plus,” he smiled ruefully, “the Vietnamese were pretty good with their AA, and if one of those guys did get shot down, he knew he’d be much better off in the Hanoi Hilton than back at HQ explaining how he’d managed to lose a very big, very expensive jet fighter-bomber torching and exploding people who everybody in the Pentagon – and the White House, for that matter – was convinced amounted to no more than little guys in pajamas and sandals who lived in the friggin’ stone age.”
“Serving your country in the military,” I sympathized, “can be downright thankless.”
“No kidding,” Clark affirmed. “Especially after you finish your hitch and try using your military experience to get a decent-paying white collar job with benefits, regular hours and no heavy lifting, like President of the United States.”
Well, no matter what kind of penance General Clark ends up doing for committing the unforgivable sin of plainly speaking his mind, I have no doubt I’ll be hearing from Clinton, Obama and McCain supporters regarding it. Speaking of which, let’s have a look at the Quarterly Mailbag:
I more or less expected a bit of an uproar about my briefing a British physicist on the dubious charms of Dixie, but shut my mouth and call me grits, for about two weeks, my Inbox did runneth over with an abundance of invective that hath truly astounded me. Despite the fact that I’ve mentioned it in this Web log a few times, I doubt most of my readers are aware that I’m Italian-American, and my full name is Tom Collins Martini. But let me assure you, until I read the e-mails concerning that particular post, I thought there were only about half a dozen derogatory terms for such people as myself, tops. Now, however, I can assure all those egg-sucking, back-woods, redneck Confederate crackers who wrote in that this here spaghetti-stuffing, Pope-kissing, dago, wop, greaser, guinea, ginzo, goombah, geep, guido, hike, red-saucer mafioso Sicilian gorilla macaroni gavoon zip sure knows better than that now. And thanks also to that Czech and German from Chicago who called me a walch and a katzenfresser, respectively. Far, far fewer readers wrote in to comment (though almost all positively) on my assessment of airline safety; however, the title of the post did prompt a large number of women (and, to my surprise, quite a few men) to write in to tell me that “Let’s not and say we did” has been the most valuable phrase they know. And I must adimit, the testimonials as to what that phrase got them out of made for some interesting reading, indeed.
I got quite a flurry of responses to the post in which I describe my telephone conference with Barack and Michelle Obama, most of them protesting that the test I gave the good Senator does not, in fact, prove that he isn’t an elitist. But I suspect that the response was, in fact, astroturfing by the Clinton campaign, which, back in April at least, was still pretty scrappy. A lot of people also requested that I post an explanation of what’s supposed to be so damn funny about that Jascha Heifetz joke I used in the test I gave Obama. Well, okay, since there were so many of you, I’ll do just that. To an elitist, that is, someone who has known, probably since adolescence, if not earlier, that Jascha Heifetz was, at one time, anyway, the greatest violin player in the world, the joke is funny because, despite the fact that his mediocre conceptions of art caused him to realize that Heifetz was somebody important, and therefore constituted, in his pathetically Philistine mind, good reason for a trip of “over two hundred miles in the worst snowstorm the state of Ohio has seen in six decades,” to attend a Heifetz concert, the little old man (who is obviously no elitist) is such a pitiful ignoramus, he’s confused Heifetz with Enrico Caruso and therefore begs for “at least one song.” And no, don’t bother writing in to request an explanation of that explanation – if there’s any part of it you don’t get (such as who Enrico Caruso might be), Google it instead.
As for my post relating a conversation with a molecular biologist who can turn female fruit flies gay, the e-mail I got was split pretty evenly between outraged animal-rights activists and inquiries or suggestions concerning the fellow’s assertion that he could genetically engineer a contagious virus that would turn human females gay. As might be expected, most of the latter correspondents were women, although over a hundred men wrote in to say they think it would be a much better idea to engineer a contagious virus that turns women into bisexuals. Dream on, guys.
I received a large number of stern, didactic and/or vaguely menacing e-mails concerning my post about my friend Morton’s new job assignment at Boeing on the DARPA Vulture project. They originated, not surprisingly, mostly from Boeing, DARPA and NASA IP addresses and URLs. From them, I learned that there are even more derogatory ways to be called unpatriotic than there are to be called Italian. For those folks, apparently, the best way to be patriotic is to contact your representatives in Congress and demand that they back funding for any and every aerospace project proposed by anyone, but especially those proposed by people who work for NASA and DARPA.
I got plenty of e-mails congratulating me on the post about my telephone conversation with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but many, many more from people who complained, among other things, that the post makes Reverend Wright look like a muzzy-headed, half-witted, raving buffoon, to which I say, hey, if the shoe fits, wear it. In addition, somebody apparently gave my office phone number to every blessed member of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Fan Club, prompting something like a primitive denial of service attack on my office, completely filling up my voice mail so none of my clients could leave a message. Right. Big deal – my clients simply called me on my cell phone instead. The good Reverend’s fans did, however, clearly demonstrate one point with their barrage of messages – that the list of derogatory terms for Italians is at least finite, since not a single missive from any of them contained a term I had not already observed in the e-mails I got from the denizens of Dixie. Then again, it seems evident that many of my correspondents concerned with the Reverend Wright post, particularly those who jammed up my voice mail box, thought that “Collins” is my last name, and that therefore, I was of English, Scots, Irish or Welch descent. Those folks, being for the most part outraged persons of color, favored me with quite a few pejorative terms for the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon among us, and, while reciting quite a few of the usual suspects, such as “honky,” “ofay,” “mick,” “stupid paddy,” “bog-trotter,” “hayseed,” “trailer trash,” “whitey,” “redheaded/freckle-face Howdy Doody/leprechaun sucker,” “pogue,” “taffy,” “hillbilly,” “paleface,” “haole,” “round-eyes,” “peckerwood,” “hick,” “gringo,” and “blue-eyed devil,” also disparaged me with “ditch pig,” “fan kuei,” “kwai lo,” “dirty kwai,” “mackerel snapper,” “chite man,” “sarong party boy,” “cum sauce,” “jizzim skin,” (apparently those last three call me gay, too), “dogan,” “mullet head,” “fish belly,” “gabacho,” “cave man,” “septic,” “powder,“ “tabeetsu,” “conky,” “WIC,” “Mister Charlie,” “guerro,” “buckra,” “cancer patch,” “pikey,” “cremlin,” “albino,” “loco blanco,” “gomer,” “cabbage head,” “jikky,” “Mr. Mayonnaise,” “moon cricket,” “muppet humper,” “narrow back” (as in ‘I bet you can’t even satisfy your narrow back honky freckle face leprechaun girlfriend, even with that tiny snatch of hers – if you got a girlfriend, which I doubt, you cumsauce face albino white-[expletive] piece of sun-bleached dog [expletive] dried up shriveled in the sun, just like your stinking little white [expletive]’), “stump jumper,” “Timmy,” “hamster pecker,” “paste face,” “pine wood,” “potato head,” “rube,” “rutabaga,” “carrot top,” “saltine,” “shilaeli hugger,” “spud licker,” “TPT,” and “zeeb.” Well, you can call me what you want, just don’t call me late for dinner.
While scads of folks wrote in to add little tidbits of presidential lore to my trove of such stories, or propose clarifications and corrections to the things I stated in my post about George W. Bush’s deteriorating mental state, only five people wrote in to defend him. Of those, however, three were quite angry at me indeed, including one fellow who wrote in demanding that I apologize for comparing George W. Bush to Franklin Pierce. Okay, buster, you got it – I hereby formally apologize to Franklin Pierce, his family and all of his descendants for implying that George W. Bush might be a person of sufficient character, intelligence, integrity or accomplishment to compare with him in any manner whatsoever.
My post about poor old Blebs, the Democratic super delegate, drew an avalanche of sympathy and a hurricane of protest. As I read them, I could tell that the folks who sent the commiserating e-mails truly felt his pain, and, moreover, urged him, by an overwhelming majority, to endorse Obama yesterday if not sooner. The dissident communications, on the other hand, were, predictably, from feminist supporters of Hillary Clinton. While many of these, of course, called me “dirt ball,” “pig,” “ape,” and “chauvinist bastard,” I also got some others, such as “rapist lothario,” “microphallic Neanderthal,” “stone-age ninnyhammer,” “patriarchal buncomberist,” “pre-deconstructionist cacafuego,” “hircismusistic Victorian feist,” and “misogynistic coccydynia” that indicate these women read way too many books. Why? Because when I have to go look up what something means, it’s a sure indication that the person who wrote it needs to get out more – hell, maybe even get laid once in a while, unless they’re a lesbian, of course, in which case, they’re probably getting laid enough, but they still need to get out more.
My post about Hillary’s vice-presidential possibilities drew a response that was sort of a cross between the one about Blebs’ dilemma and the one about George W. Bush wandering around the White House talking to the presidential portraits. The vast majority offered additional historical tidbits concerning the abject fear and loathing American politicians have had for the office Vice President, some of which harkened back to the days when Daniel Webster was in short pants, while a small but vocal minority excoriated me, again often using words that I had to go look up, and fiercely demanding apologies for things like “suggesting that Senator Clinton would drink a bucket of warm spit.” Okay, I hereby apologize to buckets of warm spit everywhere.
For the first couple of days after I posted the transcript of my conversation with a reservist stuck in Iraq, my Inbox nearly exploded with e-mails written by soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines agreeing with the guy and telling me, in excruciating detail, the stories of how they, themselves, got royally screwed, often not in the usual place and hardly ever accompanied by a suitable lubricant. Then, suddenly, all the e-mails stopped, sort of like somebody had thrown a switch, pushed a button, or maybe hit the Return key on some Pentagon Internet access management software. Well, what can you do? It’s a free country.
Libertarians and libertines of every stripe wrote in to comment on my post about Formula One racing celebrity Max Mosley’s recent problems with hookers and fancy dress sex parties. Practically all of them told me they think I should apologize for something or another in that post, including everything from Max’s playmates to the institution of Formula One racing itself. But of all of them, I shall answer only those who took me to task for posting my friend’s Cerise’s characterization of Max Mosley as “an environmentally concerned neo-Nazi,” and, I hasten to point out, that my response does not constitute an apology. Rather, my response is in the nature of a correction – I suspect Cerise might have been wrong – I bet Max Mosley doesn’t really care a fig about the environment.
Concerning my post about how the Democratic primaries nearly drove my brother Rob Roy (and several million other people) stark raving loony, the e-mail messages were about evenly split among those who heartily concurred, and elaborated with tales of their own heroic efforts to remain sane in the face of such monumental asininity; people from New Hampshire and Iowa who were incensed that I would dare suggest it is not their God-given birthright to choose the presidential nominees for the rest of us; people from states like California and New York, who said good for you, Tom Collins, thanks to the current primary process, the freaking cows in Iowa and New Hampshire have more of a vote that we do; people who said no, you’re wrong, Tom Collins, it’s Florida and Ohio that are to blame; and, people who said you have to be kidding, Tom Collins, I’ve been looking all over for absinthe and can’t find any. To those folks, I say, thanks for sharing, as a long-time resident inside the Beltway I’ve found that drinking and sex help maintain one’s sanity in the face of the obscene and unending fools’ pageant of American political idiocy; go kiss a rabid stoat; you’re correct, so contact your representatives in Congress and demand that they do something about it – remember, your states have way more of them than those hicks in New Hampshire and Iowa; take off your tinfoil hats, the men in black helicopters did not steal the last two presidential elections, they were stolen, fair and square, by the Republican Party; and, if you don’t see absinthe for sale at your local liquor store, then ask them to order some; respectively.
My post relating the little family get-together at my place where Rob Roy’s little family, who are all rabid Obama supporters, deconstructed Hillary’s NOT A CONCESSION SPEECH drew a few kudos from rabid Obama supporters, a few more wryly amused responses from McCain supporters and a chorus of howls from Clinton supporters, plus one really nasty message from a Nader supporter who stumbled on Tom Collins World Wide Web Log while doing a Google search for drink recipes, read that post and subsequently read another I did months and months ago about Ralph. It was interesting to note that, at this point, despite the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Clinton supporters and that one, determined lone Nader maniac, I could not find any new derogatory or pejorative terms. So, I’ve discovered that if you get enough hate mail, it eventually becomes impossible for your detractors to insult you with any genuine originality.
McCain supporters got their chance to prove that statement, by the way, with my next post – the one about people running all over the Internet, from one Web site to another, posting terrible things about John and then sneaking away before he can show up and give them the lie. Horrors! What damnable cads! McCain supporters, I can assure you, Dear Reader, have no clue as to how I should be properly insulted, nor how I should be suitably disparaged, and their threats, compared to the ones I get from people enamored of other absurd causes, are disturbingly tame. So come on, McCain supporters, get out your dictionaries, thesauruses and other appropriate reference books! Please, thumb through them, along with your stacks of moldering Reader’s Digest, and all those yellowed George Will columns you clipped and saved, anticipating using quips from them against someone just such as myself someday. Search through your collected works of William F. Buckley, George Jessel, Ethel Merman, William Kristol, David Gergen, Jesse Helms, Barry Goldwater, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan and John McLaughlin for just the right barbs with which to fit your powerful lances of wit, all the better to pierce my agnostic, secular humanist heart. Then go to your regional central library and peruse the back stacks to find Chester Gould’s, Alfred Cap’s and Harold Gray’s clever, incisive sling stones and razor sharp arrows, specifically designed to slay the high-faluting prose of uppity, over educated, quiche-eating improper Bohemian, non-conformist rascals like me – rest assured, if Dick Tracy, Diet Smith, Mammy Yokum or Fearless Fosdick didn’t utter the thundering, lethal bon mot which you seek, then surely Daddy Warbucks did.
As for my friend Snodgrass and his confused daughter’s failed attempt at gay marriage, well, the post about them drew the expected barrage of fury from the expected Furies, many of whom assured me that they are well capable of beating me to death without breaking a sweat, and the expected deluge of indignation from good Christians, who assured me that God is sending me straight to Hell for what I wrote. So, as any good journalist would agree, having gotten the extremists on both sides of the question screaming for my head, I can smugly congratulate myself on having done a good and unbiased job. Aside from that, however, the rest of the mail on that post was from young men who disagreed with my analysis for today’s apparently ubiquitous lesbian fad. “Your a [sic] idiot,” wrote one irate swain, “and probably real old, like forty or something, too. Everybody knows people that old can’t [expletive] anymore, and you all have to walk around wearing adult diapers and [expletive]. Your [sic] just scared of how smart we young dudes are, and how we know all about computers and mobile phones and [expletive] like that YOU DON’T NO NOTHING [sic] about!” I think we can all agree that the young gentleman’s words speak for themselves.
Of course, I got the usual flurry of e-mails from other young swains; sporting fellows, I venture to guess, who are not much unlike the one who wrote me the warm and friendly epistle I just mentioned, all requesting further information about Veronica, whom, in turn, I mentioned in my post telling the story of my encounter with an acquaintance, Ira Nussglanzer, who was, until recently, a hedge fund manager at Bear Stearns. As in the past, I forwarded all those to Veronica for her consideration, and again, as I have in the past, I admonish you guys not to hold your breath waiting for her to reply to your e-mails, particularly the ones that feature video attachments of you doing tricks on you skateboards, trail bikes and so forth, or the stunts you submitted when you were trying to get in the Jackass movies. Practically everybody else wrote in suggesting various fates worse than death for people like Nussglanzer and his colleagues on Wall Street, to which I say hell yes, let’s build a bonfire of the portfolio managers right in front of the NYSE, stoke it with the worthless securities they pushed and get a nice, hot blaze roaring away by throwing their bottles of XO brandy on the flames. And oh, yes, one person wrote in to point out that “Nussglanzer” means “nut burnisher” in German. Thanks.
And the mail’s still pouring in for my June 27 post, where I told the world how I was held hostage and bullied by a bunch of kids and only escaped with my life by feeding them gourmet chocolate chip cookies and keeping them busy with a TV-based word game inspired by the late George Carlin until help arrived. It’s hard to say exactly what the final verdicts on the various subjects raised will be, but so far, the general consensus is that a) Catholics have too damn many kids; b) kids are smarter than we generally give them credit for; c) yes, television is really as stupid as those kids said it is, probably worse; d) George Carlin was a comic genius; and e) Tom, that chocolate chip cookie recipe is totally off the hook, we made some and they were absolutely awesome!