Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 26

("Quid coniuratio est?")

L.J. DAVIS INTERVIEW

L.J. Davis, author of an article offering a good look beneath the surface of Arkansas politics ("The Name of Rose", The New Republic, April 4, 1994), was interviewed by phone by David Inge of the local PBS-connected radio station on August 4, 1994. What follows is my transcription of that interview.

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DAVID INGE:
Again, our guest is L.J. Davis. He's a contributing editor to Harpers magazine.

We'll go to the phones here, starting with a local caller, in Urbana, on line 1. Hello.

CALLER #1:
Hello. The rhetorical question you posed about Indonesians and Pakistanis arriving in Urbana-Champaign probably didn't take a good location. It probably wouldn't create much excitement here because if Pakistanis and Indonesians aren't arriving every day, they are, very, very frequently, along with Taiwanese, Koreans, and mainland Chinese. So...

L.J. DAVIS:
Carrying bags of money, of course.

CALLER #1:
Uh, sometimes a fair amount, I should expect. At least the Saudis.

But anyway... The question was good. I think, perhaps, the location wasn't.

But it seems to me, the case you're making is that there are a lot of muddy feet and not simply in the Clinton administration. There's more in the previous two administrations and that it's going to be very difficult to get Congress to come to pointing fingers.

DAVIS

Well they're, they're certainly trying. You know, a congressman or a senator loves nothing more than a television camera, and they certainly have had a lot of them recently, haven't they?

CALLER #1:
Um-hmm. Yes, they have.

-+- A Fat Man in a Fez -+-

DAVIS

But you know, going back to Little Rock, you know, I mean after I'd been there for awhile, considering the milieu and considering the strange people that did show up there, I wouldn't have been surprised if I encountered a fat man in a fez, Peter Lorre, and a Maltese falcon! It was that sufficiently strange.

We haven't talked about the involvement of many of these same people, including Hillary Clinton's boss, in the first, billion dollar S&L failure in the country, which happened to occur in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where all the world seemed to come together! You had the corrupt Prudential-Bache branch in Dallas involved. You had Bob Straus's law firm involved. You had the son of the mayor of Dallas involved. It was an incredible mess.

CALLER #1:
It still sounds to me as though this is a very pervasive condition which doesn't affect a single administration but, regrettably, sounds as though it affects everything during the last 25 years!

-+- For a Long Time to Come -+-

DAVIS

I would say that the world changed rather considerably during our lifetimes. And [for] our younger listeners, of course, this has been their lifetime. They don't remember that it was ever different. {1}.

One of the examples that I frequently use is that, before the regulations were hauled off to the knackers' yards -- starting in the Carter administration -- from the crash of '29 until the 1980s, there has been precisely one major stock scandal (that everybody forgets), the salad oil scandal, in the 1960s. Afterwards, everything went haywire.

Your point is an excellent one. We're gonna be recovering from this for a long time to come.

CALLER #1:
I agree with you, very much so.

How do we get back to the position of considering regulation not to be a dirty word?

DAVIS

Well we have to acknowledge something: It seems to me that on inaugural day in 1981, the purport of the President's message was that human nature had just been repealed!

CALLER #1:
This never happens, of course.

-+- A "Miraculous" Reappearance -+-

DAVIS

Exactly. Some regulations were foolish, of course. Others were strangling, yes. But to... Nobody seemed to think, to realize, that those regulations were put in place by "fiends" like Franklin Delano Roosevelt because they had a rather cynical view of human nature: they believed that people, when placed in the vicinity of a large sum of money, might be tempted to steal it. And I have repeatedly pointed out, in articles that I've been writing over the last decade or so, that before you repeal a regulation you ought to examine the purpose of that regulation and see just exactly what it was designed to prevent! All too often, once the regulations were repealed, the very abuses they were designed to prevent made a "miraculous" reappearance in our society.

CALLER #1:
I really think we need to re-read the history of the period of Teddy Roosevelt, and just preceding that, to see what we're headed back for.

DAVIS

Well, or a thing that, another period that I would call to our attention, is the Grant administration.

CALLER #1:
Yes.

DAVIS

A time that bears an eerie similarity to what we've been going through for the last 15 to 20 years.

CALLER #1:
Of course that's what set up the conditions that led to the reforms of the liberal Republicans at the end of the century and the beginning of this century.

DAVIS

And then the liberal Republicans turned into liberal Democrats. In fact it was, you know, two members of the same family that led the charge! Uh, "Teddy" and Franklin.

CALLER #1:
Yeah. And in my home state, the LaFollettes...

DAVIS

And the LaFollettes.

CALLER #1:
...ultimately migrated to the Democrats.

Very good points! Thank you.

INGE

Thank you for the call. Let's go to Champaign county on line number 4. Hello.

CALLER #2:
Yeah. The wider context: I'm wondering whether you're familiar with the Houston reporter, Peter Brouton's(sp?) book, is that?

DAVIS

Uh, I know Mr. Brouton. I know him by telephone. We have been telephone friends over the years.

CALLER #2:
Right. And you've seen some of his clippings and some of his articles and that sort of stuff?

DAVIS

I have seen... I at one point leaned, some of my stories leaned, rather heavily on Mr. Brouton's findings.

His book, unfortunately, is, shall we say, "dense"?

CALLER #2:
Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's... I have not read it. I do know that it has a title, and in the foreward, he says that he could easily have put Lloyd Bentsen's name at the end of it, instead of George Bush's, 'cause he's basically looking at underworld ties to S&L failures in Texas. And both of those gentlemen are implicated fairly well, I understand.

-+- "America's Switzerland" -+-

DAVIS

Um basically what he... I think that book is mis-titled. Basically what he's got is a "good 'ol boy" network of the sort that we all too frequently see in the "Bubba Belt", as I call it, throughout American... well let's see, the "Gulf Band", as it were, you know. The most egregious state is probably Louisiana -- "America's Switzerland", you know? I mean, in Louisiana, things that are against the law everywhere else in the world, including Switzerland, are perfectly legal. But, you know, you sort of get the impression after awhile that the telegraph line between those states and Washington has been down since 1861!

[...to be continued...]

--------------------------<< Notes >>---------------------------- {1} "They don't remember that it was ever different." Exactly. For many, having an obviously corrupt Presidency is normal. They have no memory of what it was like to have a President that (at least in theory) you could look up to. For those growing up today, what can they aspire to? To be like George Bush? To be like Bill Clinton?

I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."

Brian Francis Redman bigxc@prairienet.org "The Big C"

"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."