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Scarlet Letters
The Real Thing
I didn't have Kennedy. I got him from books, from TV. But I can't get enough of him, y'know? Can't stop looking at pictures of him, listening to him speak. I've never heard a president use words like 'destiny' or 'sacrifice' and it wasn't bullshit. So I want to be part of something, a moment, like that. When it's real. When it's history.

-- The fictional Henry Burton, "Primary Colors," by Joe Klein
 
     The first president I can recall with any clarity was Ronald Reagan, elected when I was five years old.
     When this fact was brought in my newsroom, the older reporters shook their heads in disbelief. I grew up in the Reagan years, and by the time George Bush Sr. took office, I was just old enough to dislike him. For reporters who remember Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower, that's a shock.
     When the rest of the country was cheering on the Gulf War, I was reading about Vietnam, puzzled by the contradictions and muddled politics in my history books. When I was seventeen years old, I took a political science class at the local university while finishing high school. My eyes were filled with the words of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Gettysburg Address. I had seen those words carved in marble at the Lincoln Memorial, when my family visited Washington, D.C. They made an impression.
     It was 1992, not 1960. It doesn't seem so long ago - only ten years. But it seems a lifetime ago to me. I watched the first presidential election I could really understand that year. Bill Clinton swept out of nowhere - literally - to capture the nation's attention. I was young and wanted so badly to believe in something. 
     With my friends from the college, I marched in the homecoming parade carrying signs for Clinton. We walked beside a beat-up Chevrolet that belonged to the president of the College Democrats. It wore hand-lettered signs that read, "I was a Cadillac before Reagan/Bush." Behind us, the College Republicans drove a bright-red convertible with a cardboard cutout of President Bush in it. My sign was a hastily-lettered poster pointing to this cutout, reading, "More lifelike than the real thing!" We watched the convention on television together and cheered. We studied the platforms in political science class. I watched my friends troop off to vote, and regretted that my eighteenth birthday would come four months too late for the 1992 election.
     God, we were young.
     We didn't have the Kennedys. Like the fictional Henry Burton quoted above from Joe Klein's "Primary Colors," we got the Kennedys from movies and history books. Perhaps that's why that particular book strikes such a chord with my generation and is disdained by the baby-boomers. They had Kennedy. We didn't. We waited for someone to come along that we could follow. We waited for the real thing.
     Well, we all know how that one turned out.
     No offense to the Teflon president. Clinton did a pile of things I cheered, and a few more that really disgusted me. I like to think both the Clintons went to Washington the same way we thought - full of ideals, wanting to change the world, blow apart the whole rotten stinking machine and remake the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
     But it never works out that way, does it?
     I don't think anyone has properly estimated how much the Clinton debacles disillusioned the so-called Generation X. He was the first thing we believed in, and we watched him get sidetracked, bogged down and finally destroyed by his own flaws. Then we watched as everything he accomplished for us in eight years was swept away with astonishing ease. 
     If you're as much of a fan of political movies as I, you probably watched the television biopic of Robert Kennedy that premiered Sunday. You've probably also seen movies like "Thirteen Days" and "JFK." All of these movies face their critics. Movies based on historical events get a harder shake from the critics than movies based on total fiction. As always, I was glued to the screen. 
     Perhaps it is the romantic notion of a political Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of Washington, fated to die before accomplishing his goals.
     Perhaps it is the sadly deluded voice inside that still watches "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," wondering if the Congressional Clowns dancing on C-SPAN ever watched that movie, ever teared up when Jimmy Stewart's voice cracks over that pile of telegrams.
     There are plenty of people who speak for the greatest generation. There are plenty of people to stand up as the voice of the baby boomers - after all, most of them are still in office. The boomers' concerns of Social Security and Medicare receive major airplay because their voices are heard. 
     But who speaks for us? The children of the boomers, we are called Generation X by those who cannot define or pigeonhole us into a convenient stereotype. Aimless and unmotivated, they say. 
     Once, we got behind someone. He let us down in a million small ways and a few big ones. We thought he was the real thing. He was the closest we'd come to a Kennedy of our own. He wasn't quite the real thing, after all.
     So we drifted away. They're all the same, we thought. Perhaps it was like the malaise that gripped much of the population after the assassinations of the Kennedys, of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X. What is there to believe in? They shoot the ones they can't ruin.
     I've interviewed political candidates of all backgrounds and political persuasions. I've seen the ones who knew they were beat and the ones who thought they had it sewn up. I've seen them yammer on and on about this grant, that program. Everything's about specifics, and nothing comes of a grand, sweeping desire for change.
     It's the political Silly Season again, and the fax machine is buzzing. Recently, a grant was approved for a Head Start program. The first press release was from Congressman Mostly Harmless, "announcing" the grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. The next one came from Congressman What's-His-Name from a neighboring district and opposite political party. Then another from the senator for our state. Each took credit for the grant, and none of them had the slightest thing to do with it. If they're not taking the credit for something, they're applauding it, or they're appalled by it.
     In all the yammer about programs and tax cuts and experience and votes, there's no voice calling out for us, nothing to excite us, nothing to inspire us to hang a sign on a beat-up Chevy and march in a parade.
     A couple of weeks ago, I met yet another political candidate in my state. Just another Congressman running for higher office. But there was something a little bit different. It wasn't charisma - most of them have charisma, and the ones that don't make up for it with rhetoric. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun was one of the most charismatic people I've ever met, and she was trounced in her re-election bid by a man whose own party barely supported him.
     It wasn't his stance on the issues - although he's about 85 percent in line with what I believe in, I've heard it all before. I'm not as cynical as some of the other reporters - you'd find it hard to group more cynics than you'll find in the average newsroom - but I'm still a skeptic. What they say on the way in is much different than what they actually do. Clinton taught us that.
     It was something about the way he spoke, about his way of meeting your eyes when you ask him a question, the jokes he cracks, sometimes at his own expense, sometimes a shot or two at the press. Something caught my attention and said, "This one could be the real thing."
     I could be wrong. No one else sees it. After all, they come and go. Sometimes they hang around, sell out and make their offices permanent by not offending anyone. None of them grab a megaphone from the police and ask the protesters questions, as RFK supposedly did before the Oregon primary in 1968. None of them say "damn the polls" and stand up for truth, justice and the American way.
     None of them ask us what we can do for our country. 
     If they did, none of us would believe it. It would sound like the false echoes of dead men who were leaders once, who made us believe in something that died with them.
     There's a whole generation waiting to follow the baby boomers as they prepare to collect their Social Security. We aren't aimless or unmotivated.
     We're waiting for the real thing. 

Column Credo:

     I'd be sitting in a restaurant and someone would come up and say, "I don't like your column on this or that." I'd hand him 35 cents. That was what the paper cost then. The refund on the product.  He'd get upset. Well, that's one attitude I have. Today, it's half a buck. What can you buy for half a buck? Do I owe them something that will be worth reading a hundred years from now? I don't think so. Do I owe them something of the quality of Mark Twain? Naaa. Not for 50 cents.
     I guess what I owe them is that when I write something, it's what I think. No editor told me to write it. I'm not doing it because the Tribune editorial page will like it, or not. So they can be quite sure that they're getting what I think at the moment.
-- Mike Royko