Civility Missing In Little Caesar’s Domain

I’d forgotten what a many-splendored thing it is to spend time with Ross Perot.

That barbed-wire yapping. That wet-otter hair. Those endless renditions of “Anchors Away.” Those terrifying pop quizzes.

“How many people in this audience know who Jack Kirby is?” Perot barked at the United We Stand members gathered in a half-empty convention hall. Getting no reply, he planted hands on hips. “Isn’t that interesting?” he droned, before instructing: “He is the man who holds the basic patent on the integrated circuit, and without that integrated circuit, there would be no space program, no stationed satellites.”

Perot still has those patriotic anecdotes. “I had the privilege of introducing Col. Bull Simons to John Wayne one night. Big tears came in John Wayne’s eyes, and he’s a guy who didn’t cry very easily. And he said, ‘Colonel, you’re in real life the role I only play in the movies.”’

Perot still has that keen grasp of popular culture. “This meeting could be called a Joe Friday meeting, who said, ‘Just the facts, ma’am.”’

And Perot still loves uniforms. “Someone asked me a few minutes ago, ‘Why did you have the Boy Scouts here?’ To remind everybody, ‘Be prepared.”’

Little Caesar had devised a delightful weekend for himself. He got to yammer for two days with the CNN and C-SPAN cameras rolling. He got to have his ring kissed by a long line of presidential candidates. He got to plug his books. He got to schedule a lot of intensely dull speeches by Republicans and Democrats - Paul Simon on “The Importance of a Strong, Stable Dollar,” Dick Armey on “Simplifying the Federal Tax System,” Mack McLarty on “Speaking for Bill Clinton” - that only deepened the determination of audience members wearing “Third Party Now” buttons. When Richard Gephardt brought out his slides on the trade deficit, I started looking around for one of those buttons myself.

Perot scolded that political campaigns have deteriorated into “name-calling, propaganda, dirty tricks, blaming the other party,” but his pleas for “civility” did not trickle down to the booths in the exhibition hall.

One peddled videos on “The Death of Vince Foster - What Really Happened?” Another hawked “Slick Willie” crying towels. A third celebrated Proposition 187 by displaying a gruesome autopsy picture of a child allegedly murdered by illegal aliens.

June Griffin, a preacher from Tennessee, sold frilly aprons with two pockets - one square pocket for a Bible and one a holster for a gun. Modeling the $20 “Bill of Rights” apron with a toy gun, Griffin explained that in the event of trouble with a man, “it would be unseemly for a lady to wrestle, but a .22 could do the job nicely.”

Gayle Ross of San Marcos, Texas, was selling a conspiracy book called the “Who’s Who of the Elite: Members of the Bilderbergs, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones Society, Committee of 300.” “The elite gradually are taking over the world,” Ross warned me, pointing to entries for “Stephanopoulos, George R.” and “Gergen, David R.”

Some more gradually than others.

At the “Things Perot Collectibles” stand, Joseph Almond stood before a stained-glass panel reading, “In Perot We Trust,” which he hopes will end up in the Perot Presidential Library. Almond handed out petitions to draft a Perot-Colin Powell ticket and encouraged people to sign with five different names. Promoting his idol’s candidacy, he demanded: “What’s wrong with being a lunatic?”

Nearby, Carla Michele, staffing the Alan Keyes for President booth, said she was offended by Almond’s stained-glass message. “There’s only one person in whom we trust - Jesus Christ,” she said. Later, when Keyes volunteers showed a graphic anti-abortion video, police and Perot staffers swooped in to close down the booth. Keyes denounced their “storm-trooper tactics.”

I decided to give up on civility and settle for pandering. All day, all night, politicians approached the Sun (Belt) King, making offerings. And Ross Perot kept bouncing around the stage like some crazed nightclub master of ceremonies.

For 11 straight hours, that high-pitched, highhanded voice was pinging on my brain like hail on a tin roof. “If I live to be as old as Noah - and he was 400 when the flood came - I’ll never forget this weekend,” Perot said.

I agreed. It was going to be tough to forget.

And when I thought of Ross Perot living to be as old as Noah, I trembled for the republic.

xxxx