Author Archives: Tin Man

Drinks with Roger Wicker

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I just realized that I had drinks back in 1998 with now-U.S.-Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi.

So, my therapist gave me a homework assignment last week: he wanted me to think about what my wants and needs were when I was in law school. (Long story.) I’d been thinking about it over the last few days, and this morning I decided to pull out some of my old journals from my law school years to try and help me remember. While going through one of them, I came across a description of a night I had completely forgotten about.

On the night of February 14, 1998, the Virginia Glee Club, of which I was a member, performed in a Valentine’s Day concert on Grounds (which is what you call the campus there). Coincidentally, in town that night was Hob Bryan, a Mississippi state senator and UVa law school alumnus who was a longtime friend of the Glee Club. Since he happened to be in town, he came to our concert. Afterwards, he invited three of us Glee Club guys to have drinks at the Colonnade Club, a swanky faculty club on Grounds.

So we went to the Colonnade Club, which was basically one room with a small group of people having drinks. And, quoting from my journal:

Not only Hob, but also this other guy around his age, the guy’s daughter, and a young guy who it turned out is a 4th year…

So we went downstairs, fixed ourselves some drinks, choosing from gin, Maker’s Mark (I think), Speaker’s Choice Scotch. Went back up, hung out in nice comfortable chairs in the elegant room. And it turned out this guy is a Congressman! He’s a member of the U.S. House from Mississippi, represents the northernmost district, 24 counties, bordering Tennessee. Roger something. Begins with W? And his daughter (Meg? Margaret?) is visiting UVA this weekend…

I was reading this, and I thought, well that’s interesting, because one of the current U.S. senators from Mississippi is named Roger Wicker. So I looked him up on Wikipedia and the description matches up. It was him.

To continue on with the evening: another Glee Club guy and his girlfriend showed up, and we continued sipping from our drinks. And then:

Congressman X recited from memory a speech on whiskey by one Nathan “Soggy” Sweat, a long-ago state senator (from the 60’s at least). Congressman X used to be a Mississippi state senator too, a colleague of Hob’s; he was elected to Congress in 1994, part of the Republican Congressional Revolution. This speech, during a time when Mississippi was debating removing its state prohibition laws finally (the last state in the nation to do so), was phenomenal. And he did it from memory and so convincingly. “If by whiskey you mean that drink of the devil, that… and… [etc etc] then I am against it. But, if by whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the… the drink that keeps you warm on a cold and frosty evening… [etc etc], the sale of which fills our state coffers, providing for crippled children, the elderly… [etc etc]… then I am for it. This is my stand.” It was hilarious; it was a phenomenal performance. I felt like I was in a movie.

This morning I looked up Nathan Sweat. Turns out I had gotten his name wrong; his name was Noah “Soggy” Sweat, not Nathan “Soggy” Sweat. Here’s the whiskey speech.

After a while, we four Glee Club guys sang “The Good Old Song,” the UVA school song, for Hob Ryan and Roger Wicker. Then some people left and only four of us remained: me and one other Club guy, and Hob Ryan and Roger Wicker. According to my journal, the four of discussed the Monica Lewinsky scandal — this was just three weeks after the scandal broke — and Iraq. Since Ryan was a Democrat and Wicker was a Republican, “we got some give-and-take for a while,” according to my journal. Then Mr. Wicker went to bed and the three of us stayed up talking a while longer.

I wonder how I would feel today about having drinks with a Republican congressman from Mississippi. Back then I was 24, sexually confused and closeted, and less politically opinionated (albeit a solid Democrat). Later in 1998, Wicker would go on to vote for all four articles of Clinton’s impeachment (only two of them passed), and of course in 1996 he had voted for DOMA (although to be fair, so did most of Congress).

It’s so weird that I didn’t remember any of this until rereading it in my journal. That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad I’ve written things down over the years.

I Like Ike

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I’m currently reading my second book in row about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Last week I finished Eisenhower: The White House Years, by Jim Newton, and now I’m reading a brand new biography of Ike that just came out last week: Eisenhower in War and Peace, by Jean Edward Smith (who wrote a great biography of FDR that I read a couple of years ago).

Eisenhower seems to be a forgotten president these days: a genial caretaker of peaceful 1950s America, smiling and playing golf between heart attacks. FDR, JFK, and Reagan are icons; LBJ and Nixon are larger than life, almost Shakespearean. By contrast, Ike seems like he was a normal guy presiding over a noncontroversial era. But he didn’t merely preside over a time of peace; he helped maintain that peace, at a time when the U.S. and the Soviet Union could have destroyed each other with nuclear weapons. He ended the Korean War, he declined France’s request to get involved on the ground in Vietnam, he worked with Krushchev, he let Joe McCarthy implode, he signed the first civil rights act in 100 years (albeit a pretty weak one, and he had to be dragged to do it), he initiated the interstate highway system, and he maintained the existing social safety net, and as he left office he warned against the growing military-industrial complex.

True, he also authorized coups in Iran and Guatemala. But on the whole, his record looks good.

In his first year in office, he said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

He was not a liberal, as we think of the term today: he wasn’t interested in expanding the social safety net to include national health insurance — for the elderly or for anyone else — and he barely did anything to rectify racial inequality. But he had no interest in lowering taxes or in destroying the existing safety net:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

He was the last Republican president before the GOP went nuts.

And of course, before he was president, he commanded the D-Day invasion. He is one of the few U.S. presidents who, had he not been president, would still hold a revered place in American history.

I’d always wanted to learn more about Eisenhower, and I’m enjoying reading about him now. The more I read about him, the more I admire him.

(By the way, isn’t it weird that the man who was president during the all-American 1950s had a German last name?)

Terrible Plane Ride to Houston

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Oh, poor blog. How I have been neglecting you. It’s been almost three weeks since my last post. Thanks to those of you who responded; what I really learned from it, unintentionally, was that some people who I thought read my blog apparently no longer read it, or at least want me to think they no longer read it. Or maybe they read it but have no desire to leave comments. The other thing I learned was that although my blog automatically posts to Twitter when there’s a new post, most of my Twitter followers don’t click on the link. I say this not to wallow; it’s just that it’s helpful to know who your audience is when you write.

Last week I went to Houston for a few days on a business trip. I have to attend a conference every year in Houston, and this one was a bit of a slog, because I was either sick or sleep-deprived much of the time. A week and a half before the conference I came down with a cold, and by the time I left for Houston, it was still working its way through my body, or at least through my nostrils. On top of that, for three nights in a row before the conference, I slept terribly. The night before the conference I couldn’t fall asleep until around 3:30, and then I woke up twice over the next four hours. This despite having a sleeping pill prescription, Sonata, which I’ve been taking two or three times a week for the last several months. Since it didn’t seem to be working for me, I worried that maybe my body was becoming immune to it.

So on Wednesday morning I woke up to go to the airport, feeling exhausted and shitty, with mucus still working through my system. The first leg of the trip, to Dallas, took off late. The captain came on and said that we were THIRTY-FIFTH in line for take-off, which meant we’d be sitting on the tarmac for 30 minutes before taking off. Ugh.

I was sitting by the window. I just wanted to sleep, but the two women next to me struck up a conversation with each other. They seemed to get along well, and then they both agreed that Satan was real. I don’t know how their conversation turned to religion or Satan in the first place. I think they both might have been Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I’m not sure.

I wanted to hate them, but then I realized that I didn’t really know anything about them, other than that they thought Satan was real and that they’d probably think I was Satan’s spawn if they knew I was gay. So I closed my eyes and tried to sleep and ignore them. I told myself at least I wasn’t sitting near a screaming baby. When the plane finally took off, they stopped talking to each other. Whew. Eventually I put my coat over my head and leaned my head against the wall next to my seat and once again tried to sleep, but couldn’t. And my stomach wasn’t feeling well.

Because the plane took off 30 minutes late, it landed 20 minutes late. By the time I got off the plane, it was 2:15, and my connecting flight was at 2:30, and it was in the next concourse. So I rushed with my bag, down the concourse, up an escalator, waited impatiently for a monorail, and finally managed to make it onto my plane at 2:25 or 2:26. I had to check my bag, but I was on the plane! Out of breath, tired, but on the plane! Win!

And then the plane sat there on the tarmac in Dallas.

After a few minutes, the captain came on and said there were severe thunderstorms in Houston and they weren’t letting any planes fly into the Houston airport. He didn’t know when he would have any more information, but he would let us know.

I was sitting by the window again, with two people next to me, on a full flight.

And then I started to feel claustrophobic.

I was also hungry, and exhausted, and sitting on a plane with no idea when it would move. I felt completely terrible. All I wanted, dear God, was to get out of this confined space and get to my hotel room in Houston. I felt myself on the verge of a mini-panic attack and tried to stave it off. I wound up calling Matt, and he talked with me for a few minutes, and I managed to calm myself down a bit.

At 3:35 — five minutes after my flight was originally scheduled to land in Houston — the captain came back on and said that if he didn’t hear anything in 15 minutes, he would let anyone off the plane that wanted to get off. I felt a rush of hope and relief.

A few minutes later, he came back on and said we were cleared to take off! Hooray!

We taxied down the runway. The flight attendant came on and said it would be a 44-minute flight. Excellent. At 4:02, we finally took off, and I looked forward to landing at around 4:45 or 4:50.

But no, that had apparently been old information. We had to take the long way around the thunderstorms. The pilot said we would be landing at 5:33. FUCK. The flight would be twice as long as scheduled. I just wanted. Off. This. Fucking. Plane.

I closed my eyes, listened to some music, tried to relax.

At 5:08 the pilot came on and said, “Good news, it looks like we’ll be landing a little early. We should have you on the ground in 18 minutes.”

Okay, good. Instead of 5:33 we’d land at 5:26. Really, seven fewer minutes should not have been a big deal, but when all you want to do is get off an airplane, every minute counts.

I basically started clock-watching (or, watch-watching). I couldn’t stop checking the time. We began descending into some enormous dark clouds. And we just kept being surrounded by clouds. I was like, are we descending, or not? How big are these fucking clouds? Why aren’t we landing?

We finally landed at like 5:35 or 5:36. Not 5:26. Not even 5:33. I know it might sound silly that I was so annoyed by a few extra minutes, but I was. Again, I JUST WANTED TO GET OFF THE FUCKING AIRPLANE. I was so pissed off at the pilot. Why tell us we’re going to land early when we’re not? Why didn’t you just keep that false good news to yourself?

Then we taxied. Then we stopped before we even got to the gate. ARGH. My knee was bobbing up and down and I was drumming my fingers on the seat and the guy next to me must have thought I was a lunatic.

Then we started moving again and we FINALLY got to the gate. I finally got off the fucking airplane. And then I had to go to baggage claim and wait for my bag, and wait, and wait, as about 10 irregularly-shaped and unusually heavy packages came down the ramp, each about 30 seconds apart, as the rest of us stood there and thought, what the hell? What are these things and who packed them and where’s our freaking luggage?

But my bag came and I got into a comfortable taxi and there wasn’t much traffic. At about 7:10 pm, I was finally in my hotel room, about two and a half hours later than I’d planned.

I got room service, watched TV, then tried to read but decided to just go to bed. Exhausted.

Oh, blog, thank you for your white space that allows me to pour out my anger and annoyance! Glad you’re still here.