5 September 2004
Bruce Jackson
Zell Miller's Mothers
A triumphant turncoatPerhaps you saw Zell Miller’s keynote address to the Republican convention in New York last Wednesday night. The entire speech was an ad hominem attack on John Kerry. The words were savage and enraged and so was Zell Miller’s face and body. He wasn’t just a turncoat Democrat performing like a trained attack dog for the Republicans. He needed to be there doing that; he loved being there doing that.
The audience in Madison Square Garden loved every moment of it. They cheered and yelled and stomped their feet. This wasn’t just someone tearing John Kerry a new one; it was a Democrat doing it. It was like having the blackest man you could find get up at the KKK convention and say Yes, every black man really did spend every waking hour thinking of ways to violate the palest of white Southern virginal womanhood.
Hardly anything Zell Miller said was true and he knew it. Even the lapdog commentators at CNN, were all over him immediately after his performance.
Why would Zell Miller do something like that? Why would he get up there and with such affect tell one huge lie after another? We know why the Republicans would want lies like that told. Just as with the Swift Boat Veterans attack, they’re following Josef Goebbels basic instructions about propaganda: “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed....The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly... it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” That’s Josef Goebbels and it’s Swift Boat Veterans for Vengeance, but why Zell Miller? People don’t betray members of their own party like that because they differ over ideas. Ideas, especially for politicians, aren’t powerful enough to invoke such rage, justify such mendacity.
Perhaps Miller himself provides the answers to those questions.
Miller’s medal
His official bio on his web site says “Throughout his career, Senator Miller has credited two major influences for his success: his strong mother and the U.S. Marine Corps.”
He’s got a photograph of himself prominently displayed on the website. If you click on it you get a much bigger version of it in resolution high enough for printing. He’s maybe 24 years old and he’s wearing USMC dress blues. It’s a spiffy outfit, with a red stripe going down his leg, the white belt and white gloves, the gold buttons, insignia and piping. He stands 3/4 to the camera with his face is turned a little more so you can see it straight on.
In that photograph he is nothing like the choleric demagogue who addressed the Republican convention at Madison Square Garden on September 1. He is young and happy to be in that blue suit with his Expert Rifleman medal, his National Defense Service Ribbon (which everyone who enlisted when he did got the day he finished boot camp), and another ribbon I can’t make out—most likely a Good Conduct ribbon.
His biggest military distinction, other than not getting drunk and losing his stripes, was getting that Expert Rifleman medal. In those years in the marines, everyone from buck private to four-star general had to qualify on the M1 rifle. There were three levels of performance: Marksman (190 out of a possible 250), Sharpshooter (210) , and Expert Rifleman (230). You shot from three positions (prone, kneeling, standing) at paper targets 100, 200 and 300 yards away.
You had to be a real incompetent to fail to make Marksman. If you didn’t shoot 190 they just kept you on the rifle range until you did. Shooting Sharpshooter, in the middle, wasn’t a big deal. It just meant you could hold your breath long enough to line up and squeeze off most shots and you’d been off the booze long enough so you could hold the rifle steady. Shooting Expert was difficult, and it got a medal that was far prettier than the medals you got for shooting Marksman or Sharpshooter.
I’m not faulting Zell Miller for liking that picture of him as a young man in dress blues with his Expert Rifleman medal or for still liking that medal after all these years. It’s good he shot Expert. If he’d ever been called upon to shoot at anything other than a paper target he’d probably have been more likely to hit it that the guy who barely made Marksman or guys like me who only shot Sharpshooter. But he wasn’t. During the years Zell Miller served in the USMC, there was nothing going on anywhere that required marine riflemen to shoot at anything other than paper targets, so being stateside in the marines, as he and I were, consisted entirely of practicing things you might do, and marching.
What’s creepy is his bragging about it now, fifty years later and the prominent display of that fifty-year-old photograph. It’s like a 72-year-old guy demanding to be taken seriously because he caught a pass in a high school football game and he’s got a picture to prove it and he demands you look at it and say something approving. It’s nice he caught that pass in high school and has the picture as a memento, but so what?
I read Miller’s recent lines on how proud he is to have shot Expert Rifleman in the marines fifty years ago and I think of the great “Saturday Night Live” bit on “Star Trek” freaks several years ago. William Shatner, who played the central character, Captain Kirk, in the original series, is at a “Star Trek” convention. The groupies are asking him questions as if he is Captain Kirk and as if the series hadn’t folded years earlier. “Get a life,” Shatner says.
Miller’s mothers
Miller explains himself in his autobiographical article on his web site, most of which is taken from the prologue to his 1996 book, Corps Values: Everything You Need to Know I learned in the Marines.
Miller joined the marines in August 1953, a month after the Korean War ended. He was 21 years old and had been arrested for drunk driving. He had been brought up, he writes, by strong, moral women, but “I did not have a male role model in my life.” He had left his small all-white, all-Protestant town, and gone to college in Atlanta. He couldn’t stand it, so he returned home and took up drinking. After he was bailed out of jail he went to church where,
My thoughts drifted back to a sign I had seen in Atlanta: "The Marines: We make men," it proclaimed. Then and there I decided either to cure or kill myself by signing up for a three-year enlistment in that elite outfit....
The kill almost came before the cure, but it was the turning point of my life. Everything that has happened to me since has been at least an indirect product of that decision, and, in the twelve weeks of hell and transformation that were Marine Corps boot camp, I learned the values of achieving a successful life that have guided and sustained me on the course which, although sometimes checkered and detoured, I have followed ever since. That weak, mixed-up lad on the back pew never came back home; a strong disciplined man in olive drab did. And when that guy quit at Emory, it was the last time he quit at anything.
The best analogy I have heard describing what it is like to go through Marine Corps boot camp is that it is the closest thing to a birth experience grown men will ever go through. The main difference is the gestation period is compressed into three instead of nine months.
Even the geography of Parris Island, South Carolina, site of Marine Corps boot camp, can be seen by a raw recruit as the equivalent of the female birthing anatomy. It is configured like a giant womb into which the only entry and exit is a two-mile long causeway ending in a two-lane bridge over Archer's Creek, a tidal arm of Broad River. The base, which is surrounded by alligator infested swamps, is the uterus, and the recruits, who are introduced into it in platoon-sized increments of approximately 74, are the fertilized eggs. There are 65 or so who manage to take root and survive the rigorous and demanding training of the following twelve weeks subsequently emerge from the same channel as newborn Marines who will never again look upon life and its challenges as they did some 90 days earlier.
In the course of one season of the calendar, boot camp turns sometimes aimless youths into proud and self-disciplined Marines who have well-honed senses of self-esteem and dedication to themselves, their mission and their country. The differences of economic classes and prejudices of race and religion, which they brought with them, have been transformed into respect for others and an ability to follow orders to achieve mutual goals.
Confusing canals
That is the loopiest, the most bizarre, the most fruitcake description of marine corps boot camp I have ever read. A young man having trouble with the bottle in a life dominated by strong women goes to Parris Island to find manly maturity and perceives himself as an egg being brought to maturity and squeezed out by an enormous womb.
It’s one thing to have metaphors like that when you’re a kid looking to get away from the women and grow up, but to carry it with you into the United States Senate? To proclaim it in one of the major documents on your web site?
I have heard Parris Island boot camp referred to as many things, but never, other than in Miller’s account, as a womb. An ex-marine I know read Miller’s description of Parris Island as a great womb and said, “That silly bastard doesn’t know the difference between a mother and a motherfucker. PI was a motherfucker. He missed the point.”
Zell Miller’s hatred
We know a man’s conduct because we can see it. Discovering his motives is always iffy—assumption and guesswork at best. You can never know what is in another man’s mind or heart. But that’s no reason not to speculate about motives and what’s in the heart, especially when people do things that make as little sense as what Zell Miller did last week in Madison Square Garden.
Why does he hate John Kerry so? Why is he working so hard to destroy him, even to the point of standing up in a huge assembly hall and hurling charges he knows are untrue and are easily documentable as untrue? Two years ago, why did he fail to stand up for his fellow Democrat Senator from Georgia, Max Cleland, when Cleland, a Vietnam triple-amputee, was similarly being attacked by the Republican right for inadequate patriotism and lack of support for our troops here and abroad?
My guess is it has to do with Zell Miller’s second birth, with his astonishing gender confusion in his narrative, with three facts he cannot bear to have exist at the same time:—First, that the most important thing that ever happened to Zell Miller in his adult life is that he was reborn as a Marine on Parris Island in 1953, but he never got to do anything with it other than practice and have his picture taken.
—Second, that John Kerry and Max Cleland did a great deal more than practice and have their picture taken; and because of that they earned medals of a very different kind and order than Zell Miller’s.
—And third, after earning the medals—a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, three Purple Hearts—Kerry came back and told the United States Senate that being macho and shooting well and having your picture taken in a dress uniform weren’t enough. That there were consequences to going out there and shooting people and blowing them up that nothing in his military training accounted for or wanted to account for. That it was necessary to do more than wear the uniform well and take and execute orders correctly and promptly. That’s what the Swift Boat Veterans attack on Kerry is all about, and Zell Miller knows it perfectly well.
Seventy-two-year-old Zell Miller is still trying to be the kind of man he wanted to be when he was 21 years old in the drunk tank in 1953, back when he didn’t yet have a fully developed forebrain. Perhaps he was twice-born, but he has yet to grow up. He is an anachronism, a man out of his time, a man who adores his two mothers but remains incapable of recognizing or coping with the feminine side of the human sensibility, the side that insists on care and meaning and understanding.
Zell Miller doesn’t hate John Kerry and Max Cleland because he believes the lies spread about them. He hates them because he knows the stories spread about them are lies, because he knows that Kerry and Cleland, and everyone like them, grew up into the kind of man Zell Miller always wanted to be, but never was.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.