Archive [April 1999]

If you lift up a rock — large, medium, and especially Little Rock — you will find in the dirt a writhing, wriggling mass of worms, bugs and other reclusive life forms. You glimpse a netherworld averse to sunlight.

If you were to pry up the President’s footwear, however, you would find a plethora of smashed items which were once quite beautiful and noble. Sacrificed people and institutions litter the landscape where he has trod, or they stick under his soles like so much spat-out chewing gum.

Here from the long list of what he has crushed, trampled, or otherwise abused and corrupted: Honor, integrity, fidelity, constancy, virtue, American pride, American history, women in general and women who happen near him in particular, the Presidency, the judicial system in general and testimony under oath in particular, the English language (the meanings of “is,” “alone,” “sex”), the United States military, every agency of the federal government, and every person or group who opposes or tells the truth about him. Next underfoot: the world.