LITTLE ROCK — So I wrote on my blog that I would limit to that digital platform my sarcastic diatribes on the newly renamed Clinton National Airport in Little Rock.
It was on the blog that I suggested we also should rename War Memorial Stadium as Spitzer Stadium. That’s owing to our apparent affinity for naming local landmarks in honor of politicians in New York who had sex scandals in their backgrounds.
That was tacky and I probably should go back and delete it.
I said on the blog that I would leave my columns to more important things. So now I’m going back on that. But it’s no worse than lying to a grand jury or pardoning Marc Rich, after which one can still get an airport named for him.
Anyway, it depends on what the meanings of “breaking” and “word” are.
I was being snide and whimsical on the blog. Here I wish to hold forth more thoughtfully on why naming all these area edifices in honor of Bill and/or Hillary Clinton, or in honor of anybody, bugs me.
I suspect it begins with my fundamentalist religious background, steeped as it was in Old Testament stories of idolatry.
We’re all flawed. We’re all mixtures of admirable and not admirable.
I, for example, can be admirable in some of my insight and advocacy as a columnist and occasional lecturer. Take this column, for example.
But I’m an absolute bleepity-bleep on the tennis court, a brat, a whiner.
No matter how compelling or persuasive or influential my writings might occasionally be—or may rarely be—you probably shouldn’t name anything for me unless maybe it’s the dumpster where I threw my tennis racquets that time.
To treat any among us as so superior that the rest of us can’t catch an airplane without exalting that other’s name—it strikes me as absurd both in the overdone honor of the one and in the unhealthy subjugation of the rest.
Bill Clinton is a great politician and was a good president.
Hillary Clinton is a superb intellect and a fine secretary of state.
That does not mean they are great people, anymore than an artist’s brilliant brush stroke makes him a great person or your household plumber’s command of drips and leaks commends him for some humanitarian award.
Devoted fandom in general evades me. It leads to blind, unthinking partisanship, which, among other things, is ruining our politics.
There’s this 62-year-old rock ’n’ roller whose body of lyrics and melodies means a great deal to me. I would say he’s my favorite.
But he’s got a new song out in which he says over and over, and over again, “We take care of our own.”
I criticize that as but the lazy outline of a real lyric, as the mere conception of a song that accidentally got recorded way too soon.
So some of these other fans of this rock ’n’ roller believe that I have committed holy treason. They had decided weeks before they heard the song that it would be great. So they can’t—and wouldn’t dare—go back now.
The Clintons do not even live here.
Most former presidents go home—Carter to Georgia and both Bushes to Texas and Reagan to California and Ford to . . . well, never mind, he went to Vail.
Yet we insist on basking in Bill Clinton’s glow as if we had no merit of our own and as if his occasional visits are missionary.
We’re losing our identity and sense of place to a man, a mere mortal, which is dangerous since he’s still alive.
Conceivably, any still-living person could get caught doing something with which we might not want to be affiliated.
Henceforth people will fly to the Clinton Airport for a tour of the Clinton Library and a lecture at the Clinton School and drinks and dinner on Clinton Avenue. They’ll fly out never quite aware of the actual name of the place they were, much less any sense of it.
Our community is us, not him.
Little Rock is all right, 1957 and its still-lingering effects notwithstanding.
You and I are all right, even if we do still live here and even if we always told the truth to a grand jury.
Finally, I do think this emerging nickname—the Hillbilly Airstrip, a play on the names of Hillary and Bill—may catch on.
P.S.—I know that I’m supposed to be the house liberal and that inadequate Clinton fealty undermines my readership base. But the Clintons aren’t liberals.
Anyway, I said he was a good president and she a fine secretary of state.
Oh, and I’d also like to apologize for saying on my blog that we should be careful about offending Clinton lest he put wheels back on his library and move it.
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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline. com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 03/22/2012