Read Online All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found by Philip Connors - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Philip Connors
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however many trillions it took to build a missile-defense shield, that sci-fi umbrella that would protect America from the rain of other nations’ missiles. Bob Bartley believed that with tax cuts, lots of weapons, and a missile-defense shield, Americans would remain safe, happy, and prosperous.
Bob Bartley had been writing editorials about these ideas for almost thirty years.
Someone once made a joke about editorial writers. Why is writing an editorial like pissing yourself in a blue serge suit? Because it gives you a warm feeling, and nobody notices what you’ve done.
Bob Bartley was no trouser-wetter, though. From what I could discern he never had warm feelings, and people in power tended to notice what he wrote.
The arena in which he’d had his greatest influence was tax policy. He was American journalism’s leading proponent of trickle-down economics: by cutting taxes on rich people and raising them for poor people, he argued, more money would end up not only in the hands of rich people but—because the rich people would spend it on housekeepers and yachts—in the hands of people who kept houses and built fancy boats. Because everyone would be making more money, the government would generate more revenue in taxes, even though the top tax rates were lower. Since bloating government coffers with more taxpayer money was actually a bad thing, an evil outcome of sound policy, the government would be obliged to funnel the extra tax revenues to bomb-building projects—in effect throwing the money away, since it created wealth, in the form of weapons, that could only be used once, if at all, and then only to destroy, never to create more wealth, which thus ran counter to the essence of capitalism, wealth creating wealth—while at the same time cutting programs for poor people and generally running the machinery of government with an incompetence bordering on malice, which would make poor people angry at the government and entice them to vote for Republicans, just like most rich people did, ensuring Republican rule forever.
Despite the baroque strangeness of some of his ideas, Bob Bartley had once won a Pulitzer Prize.
When I first joined the paper, Bob Bartley was in the late, hysterical stages of his obsession with Bill Clinton. Bob Bartley’s editorial page had printed enough editorials about Whitewater to fill three thousand pages in six anthologies. Bob Bartley was proud of these books, even though no one bought them. He thought Whitewater was comparable to Watergate; he was hoping to bring down a president, in the manner of Woodward and Bernstein, and perhaps win another Pulitzer Prize. But despite his three thousand pages of editorials, the Whitewater investigation devolved into an absurd argument about whether fellatio is actually sex, and the president did not resign and was not forced from office, although Bob Bartley was adamant that he should have been, because Bob Bartley did not approve of extramarital fellatio, at least not for Democrats. When a reporter had asked him whether he and his editorial page would’ve attacked Newt Gingrich or another prominent Republican faced with similar charges of sexual misconduct, Bob Bartley admitted that “we would have defended them. That’s the way it is.”
I was nervous when I went to Bob Bartley’s office. My internship at the Nation featured prominently on my résumé. While the work I had done there was utterly harmless to the spread of corporate capitalism, the Nation was known to say kind things about socialists. Bob Bartley detested socialists.
Bob Bartley held my résumé in his hands. I feared he would ask me about socialism, taxes, trickle-down economics. I would then face a choice: I could either tell him what I thought about these things, whereupon he would refuse to hire me to work on the Leisure & Arts page, or I could betray my principles, such as they were, and lie. I’d been here before, and I knew which path I’d choose.
He did not ask
Bob Bartley had been writing editorials about these ideas for almost thirty years.
Someone once made a joke about editorial writers. Why is writing an editorial like pissing yourself in a blue serge suit? Because it gives you a warm feeling, and nobody notices what you’ve done.
Bob Bartley was no trouser-wetter, though. From what I could discern he never had warm feelings, and people in power tended to notice what he wrote.
The arena in which he’d had his greatest influence was tax policy. He was American journalism’s leading proponent of trickle-down economics: by cutting taxes on rich people and raising them for poor people, he argued, more money would end up not only in the hands of rich people but—because the rich people would spend it on housekeepers and yachts—in the hands of people who kept houses and built fancy boats. Because everyone would be making more money, the government would generate more revenue in taxes, even though the top tax rates were lower. Since bloating government coffers with more taxpayer money was actually a bad thing, an evil outcome of sound policy, the government would be obliged to funnel the extra tax revenues to bomb-building projects—in effect throwing the money away, since it created wealth, in the form of weapons, that could only be used once, if at all, and then only to destroy, never to create more wealth, which thus ran counter to the essence of capitalism, wealth creating wealth—while at the same time cutting programs for poor people and generally running the machinery of government with an incompetence bordering on malice, which would make poor people angry at the government and entice them to vote for Republicans, just like most rich people did, ensuring Republican rule forever.
Despite the baroque strangeness of some of his ideas, Bob Bartley had once won a Pulitzer Prize.
When I first joined the paper, Bob Bartley was in the late, hysterical stages of his obsession with Bill Clinton. Bob Bartley’s editorial page had printed enough editorials about Whitewater to fill three thousand pages in six anthologies. Bob Bartley was proud of these books, even though no one bought them. He thought Whitewater was comparable to Watergate; he was hoping to bring down a president, in the manner of Woodward and Bernstein, and perhaps win another Pulitzer Prize. But despite his three thousand pages of editorials, the Whitewater investigation devolved into an absurd argument about whether fellatio is actually sex, and the president did not resign and was not forced from office, although Bob Bartley was adamant that he should have been, because Bob Bartley did not approve of extramarital fellatio, at least not for Democrats. When a reporter had asked him whether he and his editorial page would’ve attacked Newt Gingrich or another prominent Republican faced with similar charges of sexual misconduct, Bob Bartley admitted that “we would have defended them. That’s the way it is.”
I was nervous when I went to Bob Bartley’s office. My internship at the Nation featured prominently on my résumé. While the work I had done there was utterly harmless to the spread of corporate capitalism, the Nation was known to say kind things about socialists. Bob Bartley detested socialists.
Bob Bartley held my résumé in his hands. I feared he would ask me about socialism, taxes, trickle-down economics. I would then face a choice: I could either tell him what I thought about these things, whereupon he would refuse to hire me to work on the Leisure & Arts page, or I could betray my principles, such as they were, and lie. I’d been here before, and I knew which path I’d choose.
He did not ask
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