Gerry's Kids

This past week has been one '80s flashback after another. There was all the excitement over the 25th anniversary release of Stand by Me on Blu-Ray, an event that confirms my suspicion that anything that people slightly younger than me watched 500 times on cable or videocassette when they were in the tweens and teens will be regarded as a classic for however long it takes for that generation to die out; I saw it once, when it came out, and remember it as a movie that suffered from far too many scenes in which the people weren't puking on each other. ("I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve," Richard Dreyfuss whimpers into his word processor at the end. "Jesus, does anybody?” True, it's been a long time since I hung out with people who talked incessantly about "whores" and "sluts", dared each other to eat food they'd found in the trash and spit on, and waited for their friends to fall asleep so they could punch them in the head. Not long enough, though.) Then there was last week's episode of Archer, which parodied the conclusion of the second-season premiere of Magnum, P.I., perhaps for the express purpose of making me ashamed to realize that I actually remembered the conclusion of the second-season premiere of Magnum, P.I. (As I recall, Ivan, the Russian spy who used to torture Magnum in Vietnam, resurfaced to orchestrate an assassination plot on the big island. Magnum abducts him at gunpoint and murders him in cold blood to show that, like John Yu, he's learned that the quaint moral scruples once observed by pulp heroes don't cut it in today's world. The episode earned a rave review from Tom Carson in, of all places, The Village Voice; during the first wave of Reaganism, a number of surprising people jumped at the chance to declare that they were on board with the reclassification of murderous jingoism as the new hip, just because they were terrified that, otherwise, someone might mistake them for hippies.)

The memories brought to the surface by the news of the death of Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's 1984 running mate and the first woman to ride aboard a U.S. presidential ticket, are of a weightier nature. In the summer of 1984, I was sitting in on a poli-sci class at a third-rate institute of higher learning, because that's the kind of fun magnet I was at the time. As the Democratic National Convention approached, the instructor suggested that we all write down our predictions about who would snag the vice-presidential slot and put them in an envelope, so we could read them after the announcement had been made. There had been speculation that Mondale, who needed to pull something bold and flashy out of his hat just to remind the nation that he still had a pulse, would pick a woman, and around the time we were invited to don our Criswell hats, Time ran a cover story on the subject; it was illustrated with pictures of Ferraro and Diane Feinstein, and, feeling cocky, I decided to write Feinstein's name down on my ballot, because I'd heard of her before. As soon as I turned it in, I regretted not having picked Ferraro, precisely because I'd never heard of her before, and since it's not as if money was riding on it, I might as well go for broke. Naturally, I regretted it even more after Ferraro turned out to be the nominee, and God help me, the fact that I passed up a chance to dazzle everyone in that room with my amazing powers based on a choice made on a whim still bugs the hell out of me.

I remember something else about that class: the look of absolute misery on the face of the guy who sat next to me the day after Mondale announced that Ferraro was his running mate. The guy thought the world was over, because a woman had been included on a national ticket that nobody thought a whisper of a chance of winning the election. This most theoretical of advances struck him as one more giant step towards the abyss for the world at large, not to mention his party: the guy was a Democrat. Nor was he the most obviously stupid son of a bitch I'd ever met in my life, even if his reaction pretty clear shows that I'd been giving him more credit than he deserved. I'll bet that, today, a lot of people who felt the way he did would not only deny it, but claim that the thought of a woman being a heartbeat away from the presidency wasn't especially shocking in 1984, not just to them but to almost everyone in the country. I'll bet they'd believe it, too. By the time he was sharing the Supreme Court with the first black member of the court with reactionary politics and hostility towards affirmative action, William Rehnquist really believed that he'd always supported desegregation in his heart and truly regretted that he'd once been forced to conclude that making it the law of the land was, sadly, unconstitutional. The mind has a way of executing these little retroactive, face-saving adjustments.

One of the great things about being the first at something is being on the receiving end when the media discovers a new way to give people shit. Ferraro was attacked during the campaign over vague, mysterious allegations involving not just her own finances but her husband's. Her husband was a real estate developer named John Zaccaro, and the bad mouthing about Ferraro ended up taking two forms: veiled suggestions that she must have been mobbed up, or at least that the combination of "questions" regarding her family's finances and all those vowels in her and husband's names created an "appearance of impropriety" or "cause for concern", and unveiled suggestions. In a strange cover story for The New Republic, one filled with such sentences as "Perhaps she will be [vindicated]" and "Undoubtedly, much more remains to be known," Sidney Blumenthal compared her to Michael Corleone and scolded her for not having followed the example set by the ambitious bootlegger Joseph Kennedy, who understood that it's the generation that comes after the one that established a fortune by criminal means that gets to rise to national political prominence. Blumenthal's article was intended as a review of the autobiography Ferraro published in 1986 and was part of a wave of national indignation over Ferrara's "cashing in" on her elevated profile, by such means as her book deal and a Diet Pepsi commercial, apparently shot by someone with glaucoma, in which she appeared with her daughter. In the wake of Bob Dole's career as a spokesperson (including a commercial that someone described as, "Wow, Bob Dole's dog wants to fuck Britney Spears, that makes me want to drink Pepsi!"), not to mention two solid years of Palinmania, the harrumphing over Ferraro's modest exploitation of her own modest fame seems quaint indeed.

Those who were still pummeling Ferraro for her defects as a candidate two years after the election seemed to hold it against her that she hadn't turned Mondale down when he offered her a chance to be part of history, as John McCain did when John Kerry offered him the understudy role in the first split-party presidential ticket of modern times. The idea is that she was offered a plum unworthy of her and greedily snatched at it. Maybe she did, but these complainers don't seem to consider the possibility that there was a downside to playing a historic role, and that taking shit from Sidney Blumenthal might in fact be the least of it. Although Ferraro kept her hand in for years, hosting cable news shows and running for office (including a couple of unsuccessful runs for the Democratic nomination for New York's U.S. Senate seat) and serving various posts in the Clinton administration, her political career following 1984 might well have been more scattershot than it would have been if she'd told Mondale to take a hike. She did have one quality that I kind of liked, and that, if she hadn't been lashed to a drowning man in 1984, might have actually done her and her running mate a lot of good: her down-to-earth, plainspoken unpretentiousness tended to bring out the worst in her opponents. I'm not just thinking of George Bush, Sr., who embarrassed himself a little in their debate and then embarrassed himself a lot when he shared the opinion that he'd "kicked a little ass" in their encounter and then all but wet himself when he realized that he was speaking into an open mike. When Barbara Bush, repulsed at the smell of new money, referred to Ferraro as ""that four-million-dollar—I can't say it, but it rhymes with 'rich'," it was the first time most people got any kind of good look at the loathsome, wormy mass that was always hiding behind Babs's grandmotherly carapace. (Ferraro's reported response was, "Why is that nice old lady calling me a bitch?" I'd say Ferraro run that round, on points,)

I think a lot of people who were inclined to make a hero of the first woman to get where she got were disappointed that she was less an inspiring, charismatic figure than a smart career politician--i.e., the only kind of person that Walter Mondale would ever have likely been comfortable being in the same room with, never mind running for president alongside. The last time I remember her being in the news was during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when, as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, she told a reporter that Barack Obama had in some ways benefited politically from being black, just as (she said) she had benefited politically from being a woman. Inoffensive and sane by my (white, male) lights, but the Clinton machine, which had its own charges of racism to contend with, threw her to the wolves. But a few months later, when McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, a remarkable thing happened: nobody seemed horrified or even shocked by the thought of a woman in the Oval Office, and I don't remember anyone asking whether al-Qaeda might not see Palin as easy pickings just because of her gender, as reporters had been unembarrassed to ask Ferraro if she didn't think that her gender might not get the Russkies in the Kremlin wildly excited for all the wrong reasons. (In fact, it was the conservative woman candidate whose supporters were quick to make the argument that any people who claimed to have a problem with her being a heartbeat away from the presidency, just because she was a lightweight bully and drooling moron, were revealing that they were really sexists. I would be lying if I said that I've never seen the funny side of that.) Geraldine Ferraro deserves the credit for that, if all she ever did was say "Yes, I'll do it," and it's not a small thing. They also serve history who take the bullet.