Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408210023
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The line has become the most memorable phrase so far of Virginia's Senate race, thundered by Oliver North at his convention acceptance speech, regularly invoked as part of his standard stump talk, even referenced by Time and People magazines in stories on, of all things, what constitutes hipness in modern society.
It is, one of North's senior advisers declares, the verbal equivalent of George Bush's 1988 campaign commercial that showed a helmeted Mike Dukakis driving a tank - a vivid image that mocks and ridicules the other side.
But what, precisely, does it when North says "Virginians are sick and tired of a . . . White House governed by a bunch of twentysomething kids with an earring and an ax to grind"?
Does it mean the Republican Senate candidate is deliberately writing off the Generation X vote? Is the ex-Marine honestly offended by men who wear earrings? Or is this just a rhetorical flourish and, if so, is it supposed to mean anything?
"It's a metaphor," North says cryptically.
Metaphors, though, are a literary shorthand for something else; so just what kind of image does North intend the line to conjure in voters' mind?
That depends, say political analysts following the Virginia campaign, and that's why they say it's such an effective example of campaign rhetoric. It means different things to different listeners.
"It's a stroke of wordsmanship," says Bill Schneider, CNN's political analyst and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington. "You can find layers of meaning."
The line is triple-packed with flash points, much like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
But why so many fuses? Is North merely trying to get a bigger bang? Or are all three descriptions required to get the desired effect? Does North, for instance, find thirtysomethings with earrings acceptable, provided they don't come armed with a blade?
These are not silly questions, Radford University political analyst Matthew Franck says. "You ought to ask candidates what their rhetoric means."
That's especially true in the case of North, says Bob Holsworth of Virginia Commonwealth University. "These cultural appeals are the ultimate root of his campaign. There's very little economics, except for `I won't tax you.' "
So let's parse the candidate's prose.
The "ax to grind" aspect seems self-explanatory (although it really isn't, as we'll see later); most people would agree someone with an "ax to grind" is a bad thing.
The "twentysomething kids" in the White House also seems obvious; North is hardly the first political figure to object to the youthfulness of the staffers in the Clinton White House.
"I've got kids that are twentysomething, and I was once one myself," North says. "The problem I have is, in this administration there's a decided lack of maturity, in both perspective and experience. It is reflected in the ambivalence of this administration's foreign policy, the way they deal with issues. Everything has become a confrontation for them."
All in all, pretty mild stuff; Democratic congressmen have been known to utter stronger oaths against the Clinton Kids.
Which brings us to the earring. That seems to be the word that generates the most heat. North assures us he's talking here only about earrings on
So what does he mean by it?
"It's a metaphor for that very liberal or almost radical perspective," North says. In the Clinton administration, "there's a sense of almost pandering to the more radical elements in our society. . . . These guys seem to be headed well to the left of anything I've seen in my lifetime. This isn't just turning back the clock to the Lyndon Johnson era. This is remarkable, the way they've attached themselves to the most radical elements of society."
Such as?
"They've endorsed the agenda of the most radical elements of the homosexual movement," North says.
So "earring" is a code word for gay?
Not at all, North advisers insist. It's a code word for, well, the liberals on the White House staff.
There are two factual problems with this.
First of all, the evidence that male White House staffers are sporting earrings is inconclusive.
When North first uttered the line, The Washington Post conducted a tongue-in-cheek "investigation" that included "on site" spot checks of White House personnel. The Post couldn't find a single White House male wearing an earring, although assistant press secretary David Dreyer had been known to wear one in the past.
The Post left open room, though, for the possibility that more anonymous staffers - "the communication guys and the computer types" - were dangling jewelry from their ear lobes.
North is undeterred. Campaign spokesman Dan McLagan challenges The Post's "investigation" of earrings as unreliable. "I've been over there and I've seen them." Besides, he says, echoing his boss, "it's a metaphor."
Valerie Steele says it's a metaphor that's embarrassingly out of date. Judging from the number of calls she's gotten on the subject, Steele must qualify as the nation's foremost expert on earrings.
A professor of fashion history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Steele points out that "men have worn earrings for thousands of years."
If North is using "earring" as a code word for radical, or even liberal, he's got his fashion sense all wrong, Steele says.
"Ancient Egypt, China, India - wherever you had a big ancient civilization, men were wearing earrings," she says.
Not until the early 1800s did earrings fall out of fashion among European men. Even then, they continued to be popular among sailors. "They thought it made your eyesight better," she says. That's why the archetypal pirate always sports a gold hoop. Put another way, if North had joined the Marines in, say, the 1760s instead of the 1960s, even he might have gotten his ears pierced.
From the prudish Victorian years onward, earrings disappeared from male ear lobes. They first started to show up again in the 1970s - mostly on gay men and other "sex radicals," as Steele calls them. "But it hasn't been a gay thing for 10 years. It's definitely spread throughout the male population. It's just a cool thing guys would do that doesn't even mean they're Democrats."
In the past few years, she points out, piercing of all kinds of body parts - noses, nipples, navels, you name it - has become a fad.
That's why, Steele says, "I think it's a dated metaphor. It's a pretty generational thing. For an older audience, it's really aberrant and weird; and for a younger audience, it's just a fashion thing and not a sex thing. It's like long hair in the '60s."
But that's precisely why North's line is powerful as a political statement, if not a fashion one. North has made it clear his campaign is as much about cultural issues as legislative ones.
In this context, Clinton is a powerful symbol for North to employ - and earrings on men on Clinton's staff are more potent symbols still.
The public was uneasy enough about Clinton's '60s background to begin with - his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War, his smoke-but-didn't-inhale experimentation with marijuana, Schneider says. That didn't prevent his election.
But Clinton's early attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military "has had immeasurable consequences for his image," Schneider says. "It's become a symbol of Clinton's closet liberalism, the sense that "he fooled us, he said he was a New Democrat, but turned out to be a liberal.' "
The earring line just crystallizes those doubts.
"He's basically trying to create the image of Washington as a place run by elites whose values and culture is alien to us," Paul Goldman, a former Virginia Democratic Party chairman, says of North. "The whole image is of Berkeley in the 1960s."
Schneider agrees. "What North is doing is communicating with his base that the counterculture of the 1960s has taken over Washington."
Yet North is doing it in a clever way, Schneider says, because he probably doesn't offend swing voters in the process. "It's a metaphor that connotes different things to different communities," Schneider says. Listeners are left to fill in the image of their choice; some may hear "earring" and think "gay"; others may think "liberal"; others may just think it's a cute phrase.
Indeed, the "ax to grind" line that doesn't register with some mainstream listeners carries a powerful message for cultural conservatives, Schneider says.
North says it's supposed to stand for the way the Clinton administration has demonstrated its hostility to people of faith by depicting the religious right as an extremist faction. He says that's the equivalent of an attack on anyone who is religious.
"This administration has tried to create a bogeyman out of people who go to church or synagogue or temple or whatever they call it," North says.
That sense of embattlement fits the way many cultural conservatives see American society, Schneider says. They see the Clinton administration "grinding its ax" against the values of conservative Christians who believe, for instance, that homosexuality is immoral and that demonstrating at abortion clinics should be a matter of free speech.
"They're defensive because they feel their way of life is threatened by secular humanists," Schneider says. "The rest of society, though, sees them not as defensive, but aggressive, that they're the ones attempting to impose their views on society. It's a very big discontinuity - the religious conservatives do not see themselves the way they are seen."
But back to earrings on men: Does North approve or disapprove? He's hard to pin down.
"Not in the Marines," he says.
What about in civilian society, though?
"It's not a matter of approving or disapproving."
Do any of his male staffers wearing earrings? No. But North quickly points out some of his supporters do. At a campaign event in Arlington recently, he said, "Several of the men had earrings. They clearly didn't have a problem with my comment."
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POLITICS
by CNB