Bad Habits - Zell on earth - October 07 2004
A little senatorial introspection
My sister thinks Zell Miller has syphilis.
I still haven't been able to get her to stop talking about his Mussolini imitation at the Republican National Convention, not to mention the follow-up interviews on CNN and "Hardball with Chris Matthews." She is officially obsessed.
Sadly, it's not the most implausible guess at what's happened to the formerly semi-sane senator from Young Harris. Dementia and severe mental illness are common in the tertiary stage of syphilis infection, and what I saw did seem a little, well, nuts. When he spoke to Wolf Blitzer after the now-infamous speech, Blitzer asked Zell why he was so angry. Zell insisted he wasn't angry and apologized if it seemed that way. Evidently, that wasn't the emotion he was going for.
That made me wonder: What does his angry look like? Does he spray a noxious chemical over his unwitting victim like a cornered skunk? Remind me to ask Tom Daschle.
Anyway, when Zell told Wolf that he wasn't angry, my first thought was "stroke." I once spoke with a World War II vet who had had a stroke. When he was happy, tears would start streaming down his face. When he recalled something upsetting, he smiled. The wires were crossed.
The second-best explanation for Zell's erratic behavior came from Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter in the AJC. They think he's "getting right with God," basically preparing himself for the coming dirtnap.
Of course, this assumes that getting right with God means crapping all over gay people and undermining a woman's right to choose, but if he has syphilis, who's to say Zell doesn't firmly believe that he's receiving daily Western Unions from the Almighty?
But I'll give Zell some credit. He has made me think. How do you know the difference between hiking along the normal evolutionary path and straying into the woods of, as Jon Stewart said, "bat-shit crazy"? If you are the arbiter of your own behavior, it may make perfect sense that God has made you foster parent to every stray cat in the county. How do you age like, say, Jimmy Carter — growing more respected, more revered — and not like Bobby Fischer, more fucked up, more of an asshole?
My baby-daddy once believed in God, not just believed, but thought God played a role in his everyday life, ever vigilant, like a supernatural Fred MacMurray from My Three Sons, and Fred would personally intervene when my boyfriend failed to be a good Christian. (Teenage masturbation must have been hell.)
Now, on his good days, he believes in God just enough to despise the very notion. My boyfriend blames his wasted youth — wasted because he was never wasted — on his membership in a collective psychosis he calls the Southern Baptist religion.
I'm trying to protect myself. I've been composing a letter to my daughter, which I'm going to ask that she open when she turns 18. It basically tells her to be brutally honest with me, to inform me of behavior that might be edging toward the wearing-only-your-skivvies-to-Publix realm.
You might be asking: Why have her open the letter at 18? Why not 12 or 8 or 4?
Well, everybody knows that putting up with your parents', um, idiosyncrasies build character, and frankly, it's something of a birthright in my family. I don't want to rob her of that.
I'm convinced, though, that I can avoid becoming "cat woman" and get on that Dali Lama road to wellness, instead of the Zell Miller roller coaster into madness. The key is comfort, namely staying away from it.
My parents live in a small town in South Carolina. It's the kind of place that if conquered by, I don't know, Canada, the rest of the country, even in its current war mode, would kinda be OK with it. It's also the kind of place that coddles, even encourages, neurosis. Folks are just too kind, and they'd never mutter a word as you spend every nickel of your retirement to fill your house with Life magazines that you've come to view as a fitting legacy for your children.
I gotta keep moving to avoid that fate, keep trying to learn, stay a little uncomfortable.
I don't want anyone guessing which venereal disease explains my behavior.