Whites tended to believe, and to say, that Sharpton was “using” the racial issue — which, in the sense that all political action is based on “using” one issue or another, he clearly was. Whites also tended to see him as destructive and irresponsible, indifferent to the truth or to the sensibilities of whites — which, most notoriously in the nurturing of the Tawana Brawley case, a primal fantasy in which white men were accused of a crime Sharpton may well have known to be a fabrication, he also clearly was. What seemed not at all understood was that for Sharpton, who had no interest in making the problem appear more tractable (“The question is, do you want to ‘ease’ it or do you want to ‘heal’ it,” he had said when asked if his marches had not worked against “easing tension” in Bensonhurst), the fact that blacks and whites could sometimes be shown to have divergent interests by no means suggested the need for an ameliorative solution. Such divergent interests were instead a lucky break, a ready-made organizing tool, a dramatic illustration of who had the power and who did not, who was making it and who was falling below the line; a metaphor for the sense of victimization felt not only by blacks but by all those Sharpton called “the left-out opposition.” We got the power, the chants go on “Sharpton and Fulani in Babylon: Volume I, The Battle of New York City,” a tape of the speeches of Sharpton and Lenora Fulani, a leader of the New Alliance Party. We are the chosen people. Out of the pain. We that can’t even talk together. Have learned to walk together.
“I’m no longer sure what I thought about Al Sharpton a year or two ago still applies,” Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post, who had frequently criticized Sharpton, told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in September of 1990. “I spent a lot of time on the street. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. Rightly or wrongly, he may be articulating a great deal more of what typical attitudes are than some of us thought.” Wilbert Tatum, the editor and publisher of the Amsterdam News, tried to explain to Kurtz how, in his view, Sharpton had been cast as “a caricature of black leadership”:
He was fat. He wore jogging suits. He wore a medallion and gold chains. And the unforgivable of unforgivables, he had processed hair. The white media, perhaps not consciously, said, “We’re going to promote this guy because we can point up the ridiculousness and paucity of black leadership.” Al understood precisely what they were doing, precisely. Al is probably the most brilliant tactician this country has ever produced …
Whites often mentioned, as a clinching argument, that Sharpton paid his demonstrators to appear; the figure usually mentioned was five dollars (by November 1990, when Sharpton was fielding demonstrators to protest the killing of a black woman alleged to have grabbed a police nightstick in the aftermath of a domestic dispute, a police source quoted in the Post had jumped the payment to twenty dollars), but the figure floated by a prosecutor on the jogger case was four dollars. This seemed on many levels a misunderstanding, or an estrangement, or as blacks would say a disrespect, too deep to address, but on its simplest level it served to suggest what value was placed by whites on what they thought of as black time.
In the fall of 1990, the fourth and fifth of the six defendants in the Central Park attack, Kevin Richardson and Kharey Wise, went on trial. Since this particular narrative had achieved full resolution, or catharsis, with the conviction of the first three defendants, the city’s interest in the case had by then largely waned. Those “charlatans” who had sought to “exploit” the case had been whisked, until they could next prove useful, into the wings. Even the verdicts in this second trial, coinciding as they did with yet another arrest of John (“The Dapper Don”) Gotti, a reliable favorite on the New York stage, did not lead the local news. It was in fact the economy itself that had come center stage in the city’s new, and yet familiar, narrative work: a work in which the vital yet beleaguered city would or would not weather yet another “crisis” (the answer was a resounding yes); a work, or a dreamwork, that emphasized not only the cyclical nature of such “crises” but the regenerative power of the city’s “contrasts.” “With its migratory population, its diversity of cultures and institutions, and its vast resources of infrastructure, capital, and intellect, New York has been the quintessential modern city for more than a century, constantly reinventing itself,” Michael Stone concluded in his New York magazine cover story, “Hard Times.” “Though the process may be long and painful, there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again.”
These were points commonly made in support of a narrative that tended, with its dramatic line of “crisis” and resolution, or recovery, only to further obscure the economic and historical groundwork for the situation in which the city found itself: that long unindictable conspiracy of criminal and semicriminal civic and commercial arrangements, deals, negotiations, gimmes and getmes, graft and grift, pipe, topsoil, concrete, garbage; the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that’s the end of it. On November 12, 1990, in its page-one analysis of the city’s troubles, the New York Times went so far as to locate, in “public spending,” not the drain on the city’s vitality and resources it had historically been but “an important positive factor”:
Not in decades has so much money gone for public works in the area — airports, highways, bridges, sewers, subways and other projects. Roughly $12 billion will be spent in the metropolitan region in the current fiscal year. Such government outlays are a healthy counterforce to a 43 percent decline since 1987 in the value of new private construction, a decline related to the sharp drop in real estate prices…. While nearly every industry in the private sector has been reducing payrolls since spring, government hiring has risen, maintaining an annual growth rate of 20,000 people since 1987 …
That there might well be, in a city in which the proliferation of and increase in taxes were already driving private-sector payrolls out of town, hardly anyone left to tax for such public works and public-sector jobs was a point not too many people wished seriously to address: among the citizens of a New York come to grief on the sentimental stories told in defense of its own lazy criminality, the city’s inevitability remained the given, the heart, the first and last word on which all the stories rested. We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.
— 1990
CLINTON AGONISTES
September 22, 1998
1
No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent. The man was, Jesse Jackson said that year to another point, “nothing but an appetite.” No one who followed his appearances on The Road to the White House on C-SPAN could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as in a wildlife documentary, when things did not go his way: a response so reliable that aides on Jerry Brown’s 1992 campaign looked for situations in which it could be provoked. The famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions had already been documented and discussed, most exhaustively in the matter of his 1969 draft status, and he remained the front-runner. The persistent but initially unpublished rumors about extramarital rovings had been, once Gennifer Flowers told her story to the Star, published and acknowledged, and he remained on his feet. “I have acknowledged wrongdoing,” he had told America during his and his wife’s rather premonitory 60 Minutes appearances on Super Bowl Sunday of that year. “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage. I think most Americans who are watching this tonight, they’ll know what we’re saying, they’ll get it, and they’ll feel that we have been more than candid. And I think what the press has to decide is, are we going to engage in a game of gotcha?”