Keep the flag flying

LITTLE ROCK — That’s what makes horse races—and different reactions to the same painting. Call it a difference of esthetic opinion.

One of Little Rock’s city directors, Lance Hines of Ward 5, says his constituents’ sensibilities are offended by the sight of Occupy Little Rock’s tents on the old parking lot at Capitol and Ferry near the Interstate 30 overpass.

“When you come across the bridge,” says Director Hines, “you see the Clinton Library on one side and the Occupy camp on the other.” It’s clear which view he finds more pleasing. And which he’d like to be well rid of. He says the Occupiers are hurting the city’s image. And, as we all know, image is all in these PR-centered times. Substance? Not so much.

But to some of us, we unorthodox few, it’s the sight of the Clinton Library, that glorified bridge to nowhere, that’s the urban embarrassment. It starts out bravely headed for North Little Rock but never gets there. It seems to stop in midair, suspended somewhere above the Arkansas River. The thing seems incomplete, like a huge trailer that’s lost its tractor.

The best feature of the Clinton Library is that, once inside, it’s the one place in Little Rock from which you can’t see it. Once settled in its Great Hall for an evening of chamber music, your view is of the lights of downtown Little Rock, the sound that of Mozart or Bach, the feeling that of lightness of being. Only when you step outside and look back at its hulking presence does the sight of it leave you depressed, heavy as a pillar of salt.

Maybe that’s only because you know what’s inside: a presidential museum hawking the usual exaggerated achievements and hokedup history, all displayed with the delicacy of a carnival barker’s spiel: SEE the Presidential Limousine! SEE the genuine replica of the Oval Office! But take no notice of the scandals, pardons, cover stories, outright falsehoods and, somehow worse, the half-truths that marked that administration.

If such details are mentioned at all—and how do you avoid that little matter of impeachment?—they’re tucked away in some dingy alcove with a few exculpatory comments. (Our Hero was really the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. He never did it, and if he did, entirely too much was made of it. What’s a little white lie or two under oath? Now move on, nothing to see here, folks.)

With its gleaming surfaces and waxed floors and sterile history purged of any and all embarrassments, the Clinton Library & Tourist Attraction doesn’t so much attract as it saddens those of us who like our history real. And reality can be messy.

By contrast, the site of Occupy Little Rock’s scruffy tents, with Old Glory flapping in the breeze, refreshes. The ragged band that occupied Valley Forge, Pa., wasn’t a pretty sight, either. Sanitation was a real problem that winter of 1777-78, but food, shoes, clothing and everything else was in short supply, too. And the occupiers themselves, ill-fed, ill-shod, ill-clothed, must have made a shabby contrast with Lord Howe’s English gentlemen-officers. Not to mention His Majesty’s well-provisioned hirelings.

“It’s not the prettiest sight,” Director Hines said of Occupy Little Rock’s camp site. Neither was the remnant of what called itself the Continental Army after the long series of defeats and retreats that led it to settle in for the winter outside Philadelphia, which it could no longer hold against the shining redcoats.

And yet that ill-kempt bunch somehow routed the mightiest empire in the world. Sic semper tyrannis!

A word to and for our own occupiers as this winter of our discontent melts into another

mellow Southern spring: Keep the flag

flying!

And, oh yes, Restore the Glass-Steagall Act! That’s been one of the Occupiers’ more arcane shibboleths nationwide, and one of the better ones. Glass-Steagall was one of the New Deal’s early, shining contributions to fiscal sanity before powerlust overcame it. And a fitting rebuke it was to the high-rollers caught in the Crash of ’29.

Glass-Steagall stood like a wall for more than six decades against the kind of slicksters who are always thinking up new ways to gamble with other people’s money. It erected a wall between the old-fashioned, conservative kind of banking and the speculative kind that puts depositors’ funds at risk.

Lest we forget, Glass-Steagall was repealed by the Clinton administration and an equally thoughtless Congress. Both acted as if they’d discovered the secret of perpetual prosperity when they were just riding the crest of the dotcom boom before it bottomed out.

The New Paradigm, it was called in the booming 1990s. It was that decade’s equivalent of the New Era proclaimed in the Roaring Twenties. Neither era lasted. Any more than their lessons did. But the Occupiers remember. And are trying to remind the rest of us.

Director Hines may not like the sight of the Occupiers’ encampment, but some of us find it hard to resist blessing them in the spirit of an ancient prophet whenever we cross the I-30 bridge: How beautiful are thy tents, O Occupiers, how lovely thy dwelling places!

And our flag is still there.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.