On the life of legends

Legends may start with a kernel of a fact at their core, but if they catch on, they can become all-embracing myth, which one sage defined as a truth greater than the facts. And what readers of Arkansas’ Newspaper may be witnessing is a new birth of the legendary. For seldom have so many learned so much about their history as one threadbare legend is replaced by a shiny new counter-legend. And the new one shows every sign of holding up even on close examination.

So good morning, Mr. and Ms. Arkansas, and welcome to a newly clarified world. It’s as if a once somnolent generation had gotten a wake-up call. Or maybe just a new prescription for its spectacles, in which everything appears clearer and sharper.

There’s no better substitute for an old and faulty legend than a new sturdier one. Hard as it is for any remaining true believers, the exchange may require an open mind and a strong spirit, for it’s not easy to grow up and begin to see things as they really are, or rather were all along. But in the end it doesn’t pay to see the world with eyes wide shut.

The first dose of bitter reality came with the finality of a football score that no amount of Sunday-morning quarterbacking could reverse. Mississippi State 28, Arkansas 21 read the front-page headline of a recent Sunday paper. Oh, how the once mighty Hogs have fallen. Hubris has taken its usual toll. And a new legend is born—the saga of Jeff Long’s revenge on the school that so rudely dismissed him. Step right up, folks, and get your new legend in place of the old.

Once upon a time there was what became known as the Curse of the Bambino in honor of Babe Ruth, whose contract was traded by an overly ambitious owner of the Boston Red Sox in order to raise money for a Broadway show that was bound to be a hit. But wasn’t. And fans of the Red Sox cursed his name for the next century if they remembered it at all.

Here in Arkansas, the Curse of the Bambino has its separate-but-equal counterpart in the halo that’s been put around Jeff Long’s good name since he was forced out by university administrators who clearly value a good win-loss record over small matters like character and integrity. There is raw justice in these matters that honors the good and just even as they are abandoned by the powers that be in the educational establishment.

But nothing seems able to shake the faith of their fans in Bill and Hillary Clinton even as they go merrily from one scandal to another of their own making. But the truth will out, and a one-time believer in all their excuses—Ross Douthat—has started to ask unanswerable questions about the Clintons’ behavior and their plethora of alibis for it. The most pertinent question Mr. Douthat has raised in the pages of the New York Times of late is: “What if Ken Starr was right?”

Counselor Starr, readers may recall, was the star-crossed prosecutor who was tarred for raising questions about the Clintons’ scandal-strewn past, and Mr. Douthat now has raised the most pertinent of questions as he wades through all the particulars of that prosecutor’s case, and finds them as convincing as ever. Mr. Douthat has done his research:

“I skimmed the Starr Report. I leafed through books by George Stephanopoulos and Joe Klein and Michael Isikoff. I dug into Troopergate and Whitewater and other first term scandals. I re-acquainted myself with Gennifer Flowers and Webb Hubbell, James Riady and Marc Rich.” Doing all that only confirmed his decision to

stop playing patsy for the Clintons.

“It may be,” Mr. Douthat concludes, “that the conservatives of the 1990s were right about Clinton, that once he failed to resign he deserved to be impeached.” No kidding. Some of us were of that opinion decades ago, and time has not altered our opinion, which over the years has hardened into conviction.

“The sexual misconduct was the heart of things,” says Mr. Douthat, “but everything connected to Clinton’s priapism was bad: The use of the perks of office to procure women, willing and unwilling; the frequent use of that same power to buy silence and bully victims; and yes, the brazen lies and perjury.”

You can tell a lot about a country by the character of the men and women it chooses to admire, and with that unsettling thought we leave you to think on happier things at this season to give thanks.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.