On Thursday night my perception of him was shattered, so today I am being a good person and writing an apology to Tavis Smiley.
I was in the midst of my nightly tea ritual, pouring just-boiled water into my favorite mug while, in the living room, Tavis Smiley was yakkety-yakking with Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who I ignored until last week. He “hasn’t ruled out” going after the Republican nomination next year and has just published a book. The title of the book is either Simple Government or something very close to it. I’m not going to spend time looking it up because the title, in my opinion, tells me all I need to know. We live in country with 330 million people who represent a number of ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, economic, political, sexual, marital and nutritional situations, inclinations and ramifications. We live in a world that is transforming before our very eyes more quickly than even our greed can destroy its best features. So let’s dumb it down, amp up the folksiness to the point where it’s deafening and keep it simple? I think taking a third-grade approach to infinitely complex issues and challenges in adherence to this “Joe the Plumber” stupidness isn’t just wrong, it’s arrogantly irresponsible. On the other hand, there are 12 “ideas” for this simplification, so maybe it’s a recovery manifesto in disguise.
The first thing that caught my ear was when Tavis Smiley told Mike Huckabee that he always enjoys interviewing him – that’s the Charlie Rose influence at work – and that he considers him a friend. But with all due respect …
Like most Republicans, Mike Huckabee thinks the government is too big. Great, but don’t lots of Republican governors say that and then accept federal money? Why yes, Mike Huckabee said, they do, but it was theirs to begin with, and it’s theirs to spend as they see fit because the states should have at least as much – if not more – of a say as “the government” does. Oh hang the hell on, Tavis Smiley said (not exactly in those words, but close). The Smiley family has, on occasion, been on the receiving end of states’ rights legislation in a few Southern states, and the experience was, according to even the most conservative history books, anything but liberating. At times, the states’ rights line of thinking permitted entire branches to be sawed off the Tavis family tree and sold; at other times they were just lynched.
Then, Ronald Regan. Finally, finally someone on television spoke up about the national adoration of the man who allowed thousands of homos to die without saying a word, the man who demonized and debilitated the public sector like no other has before or since (so far), the man who did the heavy lifting toward today’s rabid, thoughtless anti-union mindset, the man who managed to have mental illness reclassified as a crime, the man who nearly destroyed my parents’ marriage, and it was Tavis Smiley. All this uproar over the 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth, Tavis Smiley said, with disgust in his voice. You guys have made him into some kind of Messiah. (Messiah was his word, not mine, though I couldn’t have thought of a better one had I tried.)
Finally, a phrase I thought had disappeared with Dan Quayle: family values. Tavis Smiley pointed out – quite well, I think – that there are families, and there are values, and then there are family values, a term that inevitably leads to trouble because, in spite of the beauty of simplicity, there are lots of differing opinions out there, lots of different families, if you will, and lots of different values.
And here’s what scares me about Mike Huckabee: he was able to talk through every single point that came up, without losing, for even a second, that sickening, slightly upside-down smile smeared across his pudgy little face, a smile and a face that would work as well behind a pulpit somewhere (anywhere) in Arkansas as it would telling lies from behind a dented metal desk in a pre-fab building off to one side of a muddy used car lot also, preferably, in Arkansas.
The racist violence that used to pass for “due process” in places like Arkansas? No worries! There are “higher laws” and there are “natural laws” and we can all take comfort in them.
Worshipping Ronald Regan? It’s about the spirit of the man, Mike Huckabee said, it’s about the optimism, the faith in the future. Air traffic controllers? People with schizophrenia sleeping in dank stairwells and desperate alleys four blocks from the U.S. Capitol? Whatever!
And family values? Well, Mike Huckabee knows there are a lot of different kinds of families doing their best all across the land. Why, his wife was raised by a single mother, and they had a rough go of it, but she’s a wonderful woman, so clearly they managed. But, Mike Huckabee said in a tone so preacherly I shivered a bit in spite of my cup of steaming tea, we all know that the best way for a child to grow up is with both parents, one father and one mother.
How and why, I wondered, is Mike Huckabee so certain that that’s the best way for a child to be raised? Tavis Smiley, after asking questions in a way I wish more television people would, ran out of time. I, on the other hand, did not, and I have two possible answers. The first is that Mike Huckabee is so white, and so male and so Christian that he takes it on faith that anyone who doesn’t aspire to what he is, and who does not want what he has, is a degenerate on whose behalf we need to intervene. The second is that he is so white, and so male and so Christian that he doesn’t really need to explain his views, because simply – very, very simply – articulating them is all that’s required of him.
