25
Perky
WHEN FREUD SAID, “Anatomy is destiny,” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the zygomaticus major—a muscle beneath the cheekbones that, when activated by the facial nerve, pulls up the corners of the mouth. Not that I’ve ever had this checked out, but I think my zygomaticus major might be major. I smile big and I smile a lot—even my resting bitch face is a smile.
When I was little, my sisters nicknamed me Smiley—I’d be the thousand-watt welcome wagon when their friends came over. In a fifth-grade production of The Tempest （why they had a bunch of 10-year-olds doing Shakespeare, I’ll never know）， I played the brooding sorcerer Prospero with a gummy grin, surveying the audience the entire time. That same year when I ran for student-council president, I delivered a stump speech that began “People wonder why I’m always smiling. It’s because I’m happy. Happy to go to such a wonderful school.” （Oh, brother.）
Years later, the media would go to creative lengths to describe my smile; the Washington Post said it “slides across [my] face like a puppy on linoleum.” Ironically, my two front teeth aren’t even my own—one got chipped when I was 6 and went flying over the handlebars; the other when Chris Foley tripped me on the blacktop in third grade. （My mother cried both times—worried about the dental bills as much as my pearly whites.）
My smile, and the ebullience that came with it, had become my defining feature. And at a certain point, reporters decided the word for me was perky—the adjective stuck like powdered sugar to a jelly doughnut. I hated it. I thought it made me sound unserious.
The thing that had opened so many doors now threatened to close others. So I vowed not to let that happen, to be a journalist in full, pursuing the meaty, difficult issues that obsessed me, as aggressively as necessary. No matter what my zygomaticus major might be doing.
SOME SEGMENTS I could do in my sleep （and sometimes did）—back-to-school shopping, Super Bowl snacks. And some sent me into the preparation bunker with stacks of research and calls to experts （including my dad）。 One of those was David Duke, white supremacist, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and, in 1992, a candidate for president of the United States.
Duke was at the NBC affiliate in New Orleans; I interviewed him from New York. His blow-dried weatherman look, helped along by plastic surgery, betrayed little of his vile ideology.
I greet him the way I would any other guest on TODAY and pose the sort of questions you typically ask a candidate—about reducing the deficit and foreign policy.
Then I pivot, channeling Tim Russert. Tim had an incredibly effective way of using things his guests had said to uncover falsehoods or hypocrisy. So I researched a number of inflammatory statements Duke had made through the years, then offered them up to see how he’d react.
Me: I’d like to repeat something you said in 1985: “I think the Jewish people have been a blight and they probably deserve to go into the ash bin of history.”
DD: Well, I don’t agree with that quote—that certainly doesn’t sum up my feelings accurately—
Me: That was just six years ago.
On the split screen, Duke looks defensive as I bear down and offer a more recent example.
Me: You’ve often said you’re a changed man, so I’m wondering why just yesterday you made this comment about the Japanese…
We play a clip from a press conference in which Duke said, “I come from Louisiana. We produce rice. We must go to the Japanese and say, ‘You no buy our rice, we no buy your cars.’”
Me: Hm. “You no buy our rice, we no buy your cars”—isn’t that a modernized version of “No ticky, no laundry,” a pretty blatant ethnic slur?
My dad had suggested that question, an insult that was more from his era than mine.
DD: No, I don’t think it is; I think I’m simply saying we’ve gotta open our markets to the Japanese. And it’s certainly humorous, but you know, a lot of people talk in broken English…
At the same press conference the previous day, Duke had said, “We cannot let this country go to the party of the Democrats, go to the party of Jesse Jackson and Ron Brown.” That sounded like a dog whistle to me.
Me: Did you intentionally invoke the names of two Black men when describing the Democratic Party?
DD: Well, I—I…I invoked who I think are the future of the Democratic Party, the liberal policies of the Democratic Party—
I point out that Jackson wasn’t even running for president, wondering in what sense he was the future of the Democratic Party.