He said, “We’re working on getting rid of unnecessary regulations and making them more sensible.” (Be charitable. If you talked as much as he does, you, too, would say some odd things.) Republicans, he said, would let Medicare “wither on the vine” with their plan to let it balloon to only 15 percent of the budget in 2002.
Republicans sternly said the government is doing many things it should not be doing-subsidizing the arts, running a railroad, paying for television programming–and principles are principles, doggone it, so the government must henceforth do these improper things a little less lavishly. Democrats dug in their heels against such “extremism.” “It is a glorious day-if you’re a fascist,” said Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat. “Worse than Hitler,” said Rep. Major Owens, a New York Democrat, of his Republican colleagues who were, he said, “practicing genocide with a smile.”
In Washington’s darkest hour since the secession crisis, the government was shut down, a calamity noticed by people who needed new passports. Workers deemed"nonessential," including 11,071 of HUD’s 11,500, were sent home. Elsewhere, compassion and rectitude flourished. In Italy a law forbidding imprisonment of persons infected with HIV resulted in a gang of HIV-positive bank robbers passing through a revolving door in the criminal justice system. And in North Carolina a state legislator, who, when not legislating, is a funeral director, said he should not vote on a bill to legalize carrying concealed weapons: “Seems like if anyone is going to make any money on a bill, I’m going to make money on this one.”
In the Trial of the Century (you remember: the Weeping Judge, the Racist Cop and a vast supporting cast), the jury’s decision left open the possibility that Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman committed suicide. Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. The most admired man in America was an African-American who decided not to seek the presidency but to become a Republican anyway. White America seemed amazed that the Million Man March on Washington drew a mostly middle-class crowd from mostly middle-class black America, and produced no outbreaks of crime or basketball.
A doctor’s book, cleverly combining two of America’s favorite topics, sex and the Civil War, reported that Union troops were more sexually rambunctious because Confederates were so often on the march. The Gay and Lesbian Commission of the Los Angeles public school system reported that Abraham Lincoln had a homosexual affair with his friend Joshua Fry Speed. “You mean Cleveland High was named after a former president?” exclaimed a student at Los Angeles’s Grover Cleveland High School. “I always thought it was named after that city in Canada.” There was metaphor congestion at Harvard, where a co-chair of a student committee studying various injustices said, “There need to be enough women on the boat to rock the glass ceiling.” Shannon Faulkner was a soldier-in-training for five days.
The Rocky Mountain News reported that tax dollars made possible lawsuits by a Nevada inmate who claimed he suffered “cruel and unusual punishment” when he ordered two jars of chunky peanut butter but received one of chunky and one creamy, and by a New York inmate who said a “defective” prison haircut caused his chest pains, and by an Oklahoma inmate who said his religious freedoms were being violated but he was not allowed to say how, because his religion enjoins secrecy about its practices. In Dusseldorf, a new play, “Love Letters to Adolf Hitler,” based on genuine letters, depicted Hitler as causing women to swoon throughout the Third Reich.
After some of Hitler’s emulators slaughtered thousands of people from the “safe area” of Srebrenica in Bosnia, the West, having said “Never again!” again and again, abandoned its policy of even-handedness between the butchers and the butchered. From a couple of demented cowards came the carnage in Oklahoma City. Yitzhak Rabin, a warrior and leader true to a motto of Israel’s officer corps–“After me!”–was shot in the back by someone fresh from conversing with God. Prince Charles and his spouse infused fresh meaning into the phrase “a royal bore.”
With a few keystrokes of a computer in Singapore, Nicholas Leeson, 28, sank his employer, London’s oldest investment bank. Windows 95 was born; the Smith-Corona typewriter company filed for bankruptcy. Rose Kennedy, 104, born during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, died. So did Grover Cleveland’s son Francis Grover at 92. The lives of the father (born in 1837) and son spanned 158 of the 219 years since 1776. Jonas Salk, whose polio vaccine made summers safer and iron lungs scarce, was 80. Fred Astaire, a perfectionist, once said to a new dance partner, “Don’t be nervous - just don’t make any mistakes.” Ginger Rogers, who died at 83, rarely did. Jerry Garcia, now playing guitar among the harps, made lots of mistakes, as did number 7, the switch-hitter now, as always, playing a heavenly centerfield.
Michael (if you wonder “Michael Who?” you have been off the planet for a few years) returned to basketball from baseball and baseball returned to its senses, sort of. You say you want a revolution? The mighty Cleveland Indians had baseball’s best winning percentage since the Indians of 1954, and the quarterback of the magnanimous Northwestern Wildcats knelt to kill the clock in order to avoid rolling up the score against Penn State. On Sept. 6 the nation was mesmerized by the spectacle of a man going to work, as usual. He works between Second and Third in Baltimore. If anything is predictable, it is that he will do that 162 times in 1996.
