17th
Values and Other Assorted Love Songs
I like it when I’m right.
About three weeks ago I predicted that it wouldn’t be long before another “values Republican” got nabbed for cheating on his wife. This time it was a Mississippi congressman with the awesome name of Chip Pickering.
He retired back in January after serving six terms in the House, and yeah, he also lived in that “Christian Fellowship Home” over on C Street, SE, along with Senator Mark Ensign (sleeping with his campaign manager’s wife) and former Congressman and current South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (hitting Evita Peron on the side.)
The house on C Street is basically home to the folks who organize the National Prayer Breakfast, at which the President is supposed to show up and give a speech. (I really don’t understand the idea of the “prayer breakfast,” by the way. Wouldn’t a “let’s eat and then go get some freaking work done breakfast” be more practical?)
By all accounts, this joint is the place to be for the more evangelical minded leaders in Washington. And apparently, it’s also the place to be for those who enjoy clandestine lovin’. I’m willing to bet these three guys spent a lot of time in the Christian Fellowship House praying that they wouldn’t get caught. Kind of like a reverse version of how back in the eighth grade I used to pray that Helen Learing would let me get to second base. She never did. I’m pretty sure that’s when I started to get skeptical about all this “God” business.
That must be a pretty tough racket, really. Ensign, Sanford and Pickering tried as hard as they could to live up to the standards of one trinity and ended up following a different one entirely. During the day it’s the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, and at night it’s the left testicle, his rambunctious roommate and the danger stick in the middle.
So yeah, yet another values dude plunges off the high horse. Man, even I’M starting to feel sorry for these guys. What I find interesting is the utter lack of commentary from any of the folks on the Democratic side. (On the elected official side of things anyway.) The Sphinx just won’t shut the hell up in comparison. No snipes, no jabs, no withering press releases.
It’s probably that the Dems think that the Republicans are kicking their own asses just fine and don’t really need any help. Or else they remember what happened to the Republicans the last time they got their hands on a Democratic sex scandal. Back in the Clinton Administration, the Republicans sucked all the oxygen out of the room for months over Monica Lewinsky, so much so to the point that you had non-stop news coverage in which a stain on a dress was scrutinized like a schizophrenic staring at a Rorschach test. People got sick of it, and Clinton’s approval ratings soared, and the Republicans actually lost five seats in the House in the 1998 elections. Granted, lying under oath is a damn sight different than just run of the mill adultery. But the Republicans didn’t just focus on lying under oath. They focused on stains and cigars and phone hummers until you couldn’t tell whether these guys were “OUTRAGED!” or just really secretly turned on.
These moral folk have obviously given themselves enough good, solid, Christian, family values strength rope, right? At least two decades worth. They can hang themselves without any help.
But I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, the Republicans will take a valuable lesson out of this, and in order to properly illustrate it, I will turn to Eric Clapton.
To be honest, I’m not a huge Eric Clapton fan. No doubt about it, the guy can play his ass off, but the vast majority of his songs don’t do much for me. I didn’t like “Cocaine,” really. I thought “Lay Down Sally” was just okay. “Wonderful Tonight” may have made girls all over the world yell “That songs about MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!” at the top of their lungs, but all that impossibly slow tempo and dog tired vocal track did for me was provide audio proof that Clapton had a bad heroin habit.
But if I ever get sentenced to death and am tied to a post with a blindfold and cigarette and the Sergeant At Arms asks me if there is anything I want to hear before the firing squad gets the job done, there is a good chance that I would ask for “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” in its entirety. I mean, if the time factor wasn’t an issue. I can imagine the troops starting to get a little itchy when the piano breakdown at the end of “Layla” gets to minute thirteen, but to hell with them. I’m the one taking a bullet here.
I first heard that album when I was around ten years old, and at first I just loved the sounds. I loved the dual guitar, the way the organ moved in all the right places and the weird backwards drumming on “Bell Bottom Blues.” I loved the weird painting on the cover and all the candid pictures on the insert. Later on, right about the time that God was completely being a dick about my prayers regarding Helen Learing, I started to really understand the lyrics. See, Clapton had it BAD, yo. Almost every single one of those songs is about his heart getting its ass kicked. There were a lot of good covers, but all the songs that he wrote himself were about a girl that he would have cheerfully thrown himself in front of a bus for, and apparently she just wasn’t having it at all. Man, who hasn’t been there before?
Exhibit A: “Bell Bottom Blues.” It starts out as kind of a rhythmical shell game, where the kick drum is on 2 and 4 and the snare is on 1 and 3, which is exactly backwards. There’s a great little spare guitar riff, and the organ player is propping everybody up with sustained half notes, and to this day it gives me goose bumps. Then Clapton starts singing, and you can tell that he’s just DYING, man. He means it.
And then the chorus kicks in, and its “Do you wanna see me CRAWL across the floor to you….Do you wanna hear me BEG you to take me back?” That kills me every time.
So about a year after I started really getting what the record was about, I was watching a documentary on Eric Clapton, sort of not caring about the Yardbirds and certainly not caring about Cream, when they finally got to “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” and I got psyched. I was gonna find out. I was gonna figure out who the muse was. Who was this girl that brought this masterpiece out of Clapton? I imagined that it was some cold, heartless viper of a woman who crushed his soul.
I remember vividly Clapton picking up a copy of the album, glancing at it, and saying in a completely understated British manner, “Ah, well, you see, I had fallen madly, desperately in love with my best friend’s wife, so I went off and made this album. It was a bit sticky, you know.”
My initial reaction? “You DICK!”
See, at that point Helen Learing had long since packed me in for a friend of mine. You know how it is. One day you have a girlfriend and the next day she chooses a guy with a cooler haircut and significantly less stains on his AC/DC t-shirt. Such is life.
But at the time I was furious. And I felt somehow cheated by Clapton. His best friend’s wife? Dude, you don’t go there. That is simply not the done thing.
And I honestly couldn’t listen to that record for about five years. I thought that anyone who would do that to his best friend didn’t deserve to be heard. (That’s how much of an obsessive music nerd I was back in the day. Jesus, I must have been exhausting to be around.)
Anyway, after awhile it occurred to me that I wasn’t being fair. I mean, Eric Clapton wasn’t my best friend. It wasn’t like Clapton rolled up to GW Junior High in his limo and stole Helen Learing from me. His situation had nothing to do with mine. And aside from all that, I also realized that perhaps Eric Freaking Clapton is the last person on earth who I should be looking to for moral and ethical leadership.
That’s not his job, you know. His job is to make music. My only concerns about Eric Clapton should be the following:
1. What do his songs sound like?
2. Do I like them?
3. Is this something that I would buy and listen to?
And that’s it. I shouldn’t care what Eric Clapton chooses to do with his unit anymore than I should care if my mechanic cheats on his wife. As long as my car gets fixed when I need it to, what business is it of mine? None. At. All.
As far as I’m concerned, people should have the following concerns about a Congressman, Senator, President, City Councilman or any elected official:
1. Do they vote the way I want them to on issues that I care about?
2. Do they represent my (neighborhood/district/state/country) effectively (which also translates to “Do they bring money home in boxcar lots?”)
3. Do they make wise decisions in the course of their work that I agree with?
The rest of it, where they spend their Sundays, how fervently they believe, how much they love their wives or husbands, how much of a “family man” they are, these things are all absolutely irrelevant to whether or not they are effective at their jobs. A vocal and passionate love for the lord and a committed Christian relationship with one’s spouse isn’t necessarily going to make a person a better doctor, lawyer or CPA, so why the hell would it make someone a better politician?
I know it seems hypocritical of me to say all this after I’ve been lambasting all these guys over on C Street, but look, they were the ones who made all of that irrelevant stuff part of the package that got them elected. These are the guys that bring us “Prayer Breakfasts,” after all. These are the guys who had who knows how many campaign ads featuring their wives and their kids. These are the guys that are selling themselves as a certain type of person, you know, the person who believes the right things and does all the right things and spends his Sundays the right way when he isn’t wheeling and dealing, undermining the work of people on the other side, killing legislation because one of the co-authors beat him at golf eight years ago, taking credit for the work of others or figuring out how to squeeze as much loot as he possibly can for his district. Call me bonkers, but I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t do ANY of that shit.
Competence at one’s job is way more important to me than anything else. And if the Republicans learn anything after all of this, I hope that its that maybe they should spend more time concerning themselves with promoting small, non-intrusive government, strong defense and low taxes and less time promoting themselves as keepers of the Christian Flame. If people really want that sort of thing, they should try the novel solution of going to Church.
