LITTLE ROCK — As a rhetorical framing device, elephant on the dais, umbrella, what have you, Bill Clinton is impossible to dismiss.
Maybe that's why throughout the day Monday at his presidential library, as luminaries from the world of philanthropy, as well as the national media flown in to lob flattering softball questions to them, gathered for the Slate 60 conference, panelists found themselves constantly name-dropping, as if to prove they had been listening. "As President Clinton said earlier ..." was a common refrain.
The Slate 60 conference, a living, breathing complement to the online magazine's annual ranking of the nation's most generous money-givers, takes itself extremely seriously, down to its stylings. Each linendraped table featured four flower vases of varying heights. Between nodding thoughtfully at the words of Carlos Slim Helu,a former executive from the Mexican Stock Exchange who Slate editor Jacob Weisberg kept referencing as "Mr. Slim," as if he were a Bond villain, a woman wearing a printed scarf and her hair in a silvered chignon sipped water from an enormous goblet. Everything was plummy, as if the sponsoring magazine were not a scrappy, forward-thinking product of the Web but Town & Country.
With self-seriousness like that, it's difficult not to defiantly focus on the gossipier portions of the menu: The same morning she quizzed Justin Rockefeller as part of a panel about the next generation of philanthropists, Sally Quinn of The Washington Post had been outed by Wonkette, the Washington-insider blog, as a former dalliance of the grizzled, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. "He would always open the door for me, and whenever he'd meet me, he'd be standing there with a little bouquet of flowers,'' Quinn apparently says of Thompson in his forthcoming biography.
And although he is hardly a Paris-Hilton-to-Conrad-Hilton allegory, Jean-Guillaume de Tocqueville, the great-great-nephew of Alexis, sounded as cute as a socialite getting used to throwing around the family name as he gushed about his ancestor's quotation he ran across in Clinton's new book Giving, copies of which the author signed later that afternoon: "Actually, he was quoted next to Benjamin Franklin," he said. Then he talked about having to deal with people calling up and wanting to put his coat of arms on their foundation logos.
Taking all this in from a corner table, a pair of leather ankle boots kicked under his chair, was a slim man in a charcoal suit and rectangle-shaped eyeglasses. He patiently waited his turn to speak, and hardly anyone approached him, except for a sole member of the Clinton School of Public Service's graduate program for future policymakers and problem-solvers. The student brandished a DVD for the man to sign: Back to the Future.
About an hour later, Marty McFly - oh, OK, Michael J. Fox - took the stage, joined by Michael Kinsley, Time columnist and Slate's founding editor, who, like the actor, has Parkinson's disease. If either of them began trembling, it might signal their medication wearing off, he warned, or "it also might be the fact the Capital Hotel had no hot water this morning, and it was very cold," he said.
As Fox began to speak, it was as if the entire conference exhaled. In contrast to the top-dollar donors scattered throughout the room, "you're using a different currency, which is fame," Kinsley said to Fox, referring to the actor's ability to make Parkinson's a hot cause. "Did you ever think that was cheating in some way?" "I don't care," Fox said.
"When you're a kid growing up, you hear there'll be a cure for this and that," Fox said. "Who's in charge of that? You'd think there'd be a Department of Cures, or a Secretary of Cures. But there isn't."
Suddenly, celebrity gossip seemed very far away and just as irrelevant. The only thing resembling a personal revelation came when Fox offered that the medication he takes to keep him from rocking back and forth uncontrollably is also administered to the elderly as a protection against the flu.
"So I don't look like Axl Rose - and I don't get the flu," he said.
The audience laughed warmly, but everyone knew Fox had merely given them food for thought and a good grounding; no matter the good intentions in the room, this still wasn't the Department of Cures.
"It isn't a channel to these answers," Fox said of even the most solidly funded disease research. "It's a labyrinth."They said it
"As a European, it is exciting to see this explosion of giving."
- Jean-Guillaume de Tocqueville, during the panel "The New World of Global Philanthropy," at the Slate 60 Conference in Little Rock.
"I don't believe in charity too much."
- Carlos Slim Helu, also a philanthropy panelist at the Slate 60 Conference. (Instead, Helu said he believed in economic empowerment through employment.)
"Just because you got a stain on it doesn't mean you have to throw it out. Give it to her!"
- Box Turtle manager Heather Raymond, introducing the fall collection of Arkansas designer Erin Lorenzen, which draws heavily on recycled fabrics, before Lorenzen's runway show at Hillcrest HarvestFest.
"I believe the only one who has all of the characteristics to lead America forward into the future is ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee."
- Chuck Norris, the former star of martial-arts movies and Walker, Texas Ranger, throwing his support behind Huckabee on the Web site World Net Daily.
High Profile, Pages 47, 56 on 10/28/2007