-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 7, 2007 12:12:52 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Zorro's Message to Chuck Hagel
"Before this is over, you might see calls for Bush's impeachment."
Chuck Hagel's historic moment, and what it means for a declining
presidency.
By Charles P. Pierce
3/ 7/2007, 5:18 AM
http://www.esquire.com/features/chuckhagel0407
The rapier is more silver than the moon. The horse, red eyed and
fierce in the California night, is rearing up, and its rider points
his sword toward the sky, and its tip seems to touch the lunar
surface, dimpling it further between the craters.
On the wall near his desk in the Russell Senate Office Building,
Chuck Hagel has hung a painting of Zorro done by his brother Mike.
"Isn't that a great effect?" asks Hagel. He is informed that his
visitor not only dressed up as Zorro for every Halloween from third
grade all the way to his freshman year in college but also credits
Johnston McCulley's hero for his ongoing career as an aging épée
hack. Hagel's laugh lasts just long enough to be heartfelt, and not
so long as to be calculated.
"I always thought he was the best of them," Hagel says.
If Hagel were better fitted for metaphor, Zorro would be an awfully
good one, certainly better than that overrated royalist stooge
Robin Hood. With his Michael Curtiz pastels and his Merry Men, the
former Earl of Locksley fought to restore to the throne Richard I,
the bloodthirsty slaughterer of Saracens, who'd left England to
corruption and destitution while he went haring off to the Middle
East on some damned Crusade. A renegade aristocrat himself, Zorro
fought only to free the peons from a tyrannical governor. Zorro
wore black. Zorro always rode alone.
But there are no places in Hagel for metaphor. His face is too
meaty for poetics, its tectonics shaped by old football injuries
and one horrible day in the Mekong Delta when the flesh of it
bubbled and burned. His sentences are too often arrhythmic,
breaking in the middle, when what he's saying takes an unexpected
turn that seems to startle him most of all.
"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore,"
Hagel says, measuring his words by the syllable and his syllables
almost by the letter. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't
totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you
might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how
this goes."
The conversation beaches itself for a moment on that word --
impeachment -- spoken by a conservative Republican from a safe
Senate seat in a reddish state.
It's barely even whispered among the serious set in Washington, and
it rings like a gong in the middle of the sentence, even though it
flowed quite naturally out of the conversation he was having about
how everybody had abandoned their responsibility to the country,
and now there was a war going bad because of it.
"Congress abdicated its oversight responsibility," he says. "The
press abdicated its responsibility, and the American people
abdicated their responsibilities. Terror was on the minds of
everyone, and nobody questioned anything, quite frankly."
He is developing, almost on the fly and without perceptible
calculation, a vocabulary and a syntax through which to express the
catastrophe of what followed after. Rough, and the furthest thing
from glib, he's developing a voice that seems to be coming from
somewhere else, distant and immediate all at once.
Listen to him calling out his fellow senators in committee.
"If you wanted a safe job," Hagel said memorably, "go sell shoes."
No pricey Beltway word whore could come up with "Go sell shoes."
Not enough poetry. No Churchillian carillon ringing through the
image. But the language is changing as the country's calling,
because the war's gone bad.
Country's calling now. War's gone bad and nobody's listening, and
the country's calling the way it always does, like the moan of a
train whistle, soft and distant at first, but with increasing power
behind it, the way the trains come through all the small places
where Chuck Hagel grew up in Nebraska. All the little towns, where
everyone knew if your father was drunk and smashed up the car or
lost his job, where every family kept secrets that every other
family knew anyway but were too polite or kind to mention.
Rushville and York and Ainsworth.
And Columbus, too -- the City of Power and Progress -- founded in
1856 by men of grim visage and considerable chin whiskers, where
Bill Cody first worked out the rough parts of his Wild West show
before taking it down the line to the bright lights of Omaha. The
old man, a veteran of the Pacific war who never quite made it all
the way home, died in the little house on Woodland Avenue in
Columbus on Christmas Eve 1962. Five years later, his sons went off
to war. A train whistle blows in Columbus and it could be calling
from four blocks away or 150 years ago. Country's calling from
places just like that, louder and louder, demanding in a new,
plainer language an end to incompetence and vainglory, creating one
of those moments that find the man through which the moment finds
its voice.
Go sell shoes.
Slowly, then, too slow, too late, maybe, but with inexorable
purpose, the country begins to move.
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