Divided We Stand

A weirdly personable young man demonstrated again that fascism was only an intolerant blink away for people angry or desperate enough. And this time, David Duke was almost elected governor of Louisiana. It may have been a measure of our losses that the results of that election came as such a relief: In a pinch, we told ourselves happily, we prefer chicanery -- in the person of once and future Gov. Edwin Edwards -- to the smiling Nazism of Duke.

Another measure of loss was Magic Johnson, and the furtive gratitude that AIDS activists had to feel at seeing their cause joined by one so famous and so popular -- one who might finally be able to frame the issue as something other than the sufferers' just deserts.

It was a year that found our dividing lines over and over: here in Mount Pleasant, where our melting pot overheated to reach a hostile boil; down in Palm Beach, where Kennedys floundered again in their fateful nocturnal mix of women and drink; out in Wichita, where this year's most visible battle in the civil war over abortion was waged. Gender, race, religion, rank: We probe these painful divisions constantly, without relief, a tongue returning insistently to a throbbing tooth. Away from home, out in the larger world, history glided startlingly by, like a dreadnought -- the real thing, out of its time! -- appearing suddenly in a crowded harbor.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed in a handful of August days, ckkrrrWHOOOOOMPF, like the artificial thing it had always been.

The dreaded arrival of the anti-Gorbachev coup gave way to unimagined improvisation, a sea of people daring hope for the future, buoying up the lone form of Boris Yeltsin. In Red Square, homemakers talked reasonably about the discovery of things worth dying for. Lenin's immovable form, his bronze replica in all those city squares: The people simply moved it.

There remained, of course, plenty of cause for anxiety. Starvation still threatened; Russians might never rid themselves of the autocratic impulse, cautioned scholars (and not a few Russians); and who, precisely, controlled the battlement of missiles that ringed the imploding empire?

Still: When was the last time we watched a world power bend itself, almost without bloodshed, to the reinvention of politics?Here, impulses ran the opposite way. Nineteen ninety-one was the year we stewed in our politics, despised them, reviled them, flirted seriously with abolishing them. Members of Congress bleated apologies and nervously loosened their neckties as Washington state nearly passed a term limit referendum.

But those moments of fear were exceptions to the iron rule of 1991: business as usual. This was the year when the Senate raised its pay and the Congress bounced its checks; up on the Hill they were shocked -- shocked! -- that John Sununu was traveling on the taxpayer's dime. Columnists inside the Beltway started explaining to their readers, which is to say their sources, that ordinary Americans tended to resent their lifestyles, especially when the country was running a 12-figure deficit. This is hard to grasp, power types explained to each other with patient self-pity, but it doesn't play well out there.

Yet Washington passed the year in its usual satisfied partition of the spoils: Republicans in the White House, Democrats in Congress, people in the distance.

Most political debate over the future began and ended with the observation that whatever the solution, we could not afford it. Political debate over the past vanished in a welter of trivia. Oliver North won a technical acquittal; Robert Gates was confirmed; and Iran-contra finally lost all reality, as Congress pursued the sexier chimera of a 1980 "October Surprise."

When the going got rough, Republicans -- with some glee -- sacrificed Sununu to the implacable gods of opinion who rule within the Beltway.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic Party spent most of the year in a vegetative state. Its elderly medicine man, Clark Clifford, lost his magic to the year's most redolent scandal, BCCI. (A scandal that was, itself, the apotheosis of scandal: It was multinational; it had drugs, banking, political corruption and the CIA; almost no one understood it.) But the Democrats showed flickerings of life toward the end of the year, when Harris Wofford trounced Dick Thornburgh in Pennsylvania, Mario Cuomo allowed as how he might ponder thinking about considering actually running for higher office, and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton earned good reviews for talking what sounded a lot like substance.