Mea Culpa

I sort of feel as if I owe an apology to Erick Erickson at RedState. In the wake of Mark Sandford's disappearance, Erickson wrote a post about how the Liberal Media Conspiracy had turned a non-story into something by trashing the facts: for instance, he wrote, "Sanford did tell his staff and family where he was going." Erickson was quick to turn on Sandford (while still denouncing those who'd been fanning the flames-- and, as he put it, linking to his own post "and laughing"--for not having been good enough people to just keep hoping for the best. As I wrote at the time, though, what I found most off-putting about Erickson's defense of Sanford was that he was so quick to call the wayward Governor's wife and staff liars; since there was no chance that he didn't know perfectly well that they had denied over and over that they knew where he was, and since anyone who cared enough about the story must have known that, then it went without saying that by writing that they did know where he was the whole time, he was saying as much, and maybe implying that they themselves were part of the conspiracy against Sanford, right?

Well...maybe not. Starting yesterday, South Carolina's newspaper the State has been running a dandy series publishing choice excerpts from the e-mails that Sanford's office received from such people at such news outlets as Fox News, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal promising that they had the Governor's back. Today's article includes this message from Erickson to Sanford: "“If he wants something more personal for the blog to push back, I’m happy to help." More tellingly, it also includes Erickson's explanation of what he was up to: "“I wasn’t trying to be a reporter. I wanted to curtail the story. Well that didn’t work.” This clarification makes it clearer that Erickson didn't really care about what Sanford had been up to or put any thought into the implications of what he wrote about Sanford's wife or staff. He just wanted to protect someone who he saw, based on a more or less random selection process --it couldn't have been based on what Sanford actually stood for or his moral standards, since his attitude towards those things was the same as Roman Hruska's to Watergate when he said, "Don't confuse me with the facts!"--as his boy. I feel bad about this, because in my own eagerness to give people the benefit of the doubt, which in this case amounted to naiveté, I thought that Erickson had meant what he was saying on some level, when he was just playing the mealy-mouthed unprincipled sleazeball, ready to cut anyone else's throat to protect another unprincipled sleazeball in the name of species loyalty. It makes you wonder, though: having gone as far as he did, why didn't he simply go the obvious next step after Sanford's press conference, and rewrite his own moral code so that the Gov's candid adultery, like his willingness to wander away from his elected office, his family, and all attendant responsibilities in a cock-struck daze, seemed to him to be admirable? Maybe there comes a point where even the proudest barnacle can no longer bear to be laughed at in a good cause.

The Spirit of '74

Just a week or so after taking in the Willie Nelson acid Kool-Aid flashback at Anthology Film Archives, I got to sample another documentary record of a concert from 1974, the year that gave us Nixon's resignation, Michael Corleone's Lake Tahoe period, and Hong Kong Phooey. Like Leon Gast's instant-classic When We Were Kings, Soul Power is a delayed product of the championship fight in what was then called Zaire in which Muhammad Ali reclaimed his heavyweight title from George Foreman. That film featured tantalizing glimpses of the musicians--including James Brown, the Spinners, and Miriam Makeba--who appeared at a three-day festival that was supposed to be joined at the hip to the fight. In the end, the concert wound up preceding the fight by six weeks after Foreman got a cut near his eye while sparring and called for a postponement before stepping into the ring. Given the involvement of Don King, a prominent onscreen figure in both these films, it would have been a strange thing indeed if Kings hadn't been held up by legal wrangling for decades, and when you factor in the way the music business works, it's no surprise that Soul Power needed another thirteen years before someone got it cleared for takeoff. (The movie credits as director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, who was one of the editors who labored on Kings.)

Soul Power lacks the clear narrative flow of Kings, and without new interviews, it also lacks that movie's efforts to put the event in historical context. (Many of the biggest names onscreen, including Brown, Makeba, and the Spinners' mighty Philippé Wynne, have died, as have two of the principal interview subjects from Kings, Norman Mailer and George Plimpton.) The movie looks as if Levy-Hinte dove into the mountain of footage and tried to select the best bits he could find about documenting the build-up to the show, then tried to do justice to each of the big acts (which also include B. B. King, Bill Withers, and the Fania All-Stars, fronted by Celia Cruz; there are also glimpses of such world music giants as Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau, son of Kenner, Lousiana and "Stagger Lee" hitmaker Lloyd Price (seen here in his relatively button-downed mode as one of the festival promoters, and the teenage members of Sister Sledge, spotted backstage teaching some locals the Bump. ("You'd get arrested doing that in the States," offers one dance critic.) When in doubt, the movie cuts in one more slice of Ali holding forth on the time-honored subjects of race, America's history of cultural oppression, and how bad he is. (At one point, he fails to connect with a fly that's too fast for him to swat and is inspired to deliver an impromptu lecture on how the decadent wastefulness of American society has rendered our own flies bloated and sluggish.)

The fight and the concert were both held at the pleasure of Mobutu Sese Seko, the strongman dictator and kleptocrat who was still in charge of what was still called Zaire when When We Were Kings finally started making it into theaters in 1996 and early 1997. (Mobuto, ailing with cancer, was overthrown in spring 1996 and died in exile later that year.) Some reviewers of Soul Power have complained that the new film doesn't do enough to stress the irony that this happy musical throw-down was going on in the shadow of totalitarian evil; maybe they underestimate the likelihood that anyone eager to see this movie will have already seen When We Were Kings (in which Norman Mailer remembers him as a small man with a mean face and a sadistic streak who was terrified of the prospect of assassination), or maybe they undervalue the ominous force of the repeated images of mammoth posters of the dictator seen on view, or maybe they're just spoilsports. Soul Power is content to function as a time capsule of an especially exciting time in African-American culture specifically and popular culture in general, a moment when even the confusions--such as the repeated idea, which some of the musicians seem to fell obligated to express, that they're getting a taste of something liberated and free in the air of this poverty-stricken dictatorship that they've been denied in the country that made them rich and world-famous--carry a charge. If there's a trace of sentimentality passing for radicalism there, it keeps getting undercut by stubborn recurrences of plainspoken common sense, from Bundini Brown's daring to confuse and upset Ali by insisting to his ranting face that he, Brown, doesn't actually feel all that oppressed in America, to Brown's capsule summing-up of one of Don King's tirades: "You can't get liberated if you're broke."

Brown himself single-handedly sums up much of what seems contradictory here and at the same time explodes any impulse you might have to do anything in the face of it but bliss out. No longer the compact, piston-legged dynamo of The T.A.M.I. Show,, the fortyish Brown is a fiercely mustached, stocky man who takes the stage in a tight, cleavage-baring number with "GFOS" rhinestoned across his midsection. (I'd like to think that he found it on the rack at the same place where Van Morrison picked up his own low-cut party togs for The Last Waltz.) He looks like a howl, and he doesn't need much stage time to make you realize that not too many people who've been reluctant to appear ridiculous have been able to leave their audience with visions of the great unknown. For me, the upshot of seeing this and the Willie Nelson film damn near back-to-back has been a renewed admiration and envy for musicians; even the guy playing behind Miriam Makeba who looks like the Middle Earth equivalent of Uncle Jesse has such a glow about him that I have no choice but to conclude that he has a few groupies waiting for him backstage. If I had it to do all over again, I'd try to be a failed musician, instead of a failed whatever the hell I am.

Heads!

The news that Casey Kasem has, after thirty-nine years, performed his last countdown is news worth posting, even if I'm mentioning it a week late, mainly because that how long it took for the New York Times' Week in Review section to mention it to me. I remember listening to Casey's weekly radio show in the early 1980s, though for the life of me I can't remember why I would have been listening to it, during that of all stretches of pop music history, since I had less use for most of what was lodged in the Top 40 in those days than did Tipper Gore. Maybe it had something to do with my sister's having developed enough of a pitcher's arm by then to bean me from across the room if I tried to change the dial.

I do know that the last time I heard Kasem in action, it was through the auspices of Negativland. Of course, years before that, I had grown up listening to Kasem as the voice of Shaggy on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and its various offshoots. (My personal favorite was The New Scooby-Doo Movies, presumably so titled to prevent confusion with the old classics Scooby made in the black and white days when he was under contract with RKO. These were stretched-out episodes in which Scooby and the gang would team up to solve mysteries with such celebrity guests as Phyllis Diller, Jerry Reed, Sandy Duncan, and the occasional fictitious or dead person. (Both Batman and Robin and Laurel and Hardy spent a working weekend or two eating Fred and Velma's dust. These would start out like any "Scooby-Doo" episode, but then the gang would hear a menacing creak and a figure would step into the light, whereupon everyone would exclaim, "Don Knotts!" The animated figure of Don Knotts would then explain, in the actual voice of Don Knotts, that he had taken a part-time job guarding this spooky old lighthouse and strange sounds had been heard. As near as I can remember, the gang always tactfully refrained from asking Don Knotts which arm he had used to shoot up all his money from The Andy Griffith Show and so been reduced to the position of a non-union lighthouse guard.) I wish I could say that as soon as I heard Kasem's voice on the radio, my hair shot up and I hollered, "Zoinks! It's Shaggy." But I think that some time actually passed before the Shaggy-Top 40 Countdown was pointed out to me by those better clued-in than my clueless self.




Actually, the role that I knew Casey best from, or at least the one that incorporated not just his expressive voice but that challenged the film medium to stretch its boundaries well enough to contain his whole corporeal form, was from the little-loved 1971 horror movie The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant, directed by Lake Charles, Louisiana's own Anthony M. Lanza, notable for having been professionally associated with both Timothy Carey on The World's Greatest Sinner (line from self-explanatory theme song: "He's the world's greatest sinner/ As a sinner, he's a winner") and Coleman Francis, who made the movies that Ben Grimm would have made had he been forced to make movies as a front for a border coyote operation. This is one of several notably terrible movies, many of which were made by Al Adamson,, that I watched repeatedly on late night TV while growing up in Mississippi for much the same reason that the man climbed Everest: they were there. The cheap exploitation films in the vaults of the local stations tended to reflect the adventurous tastes of someone who'd overslept on Saturday morning and gone out to hit the yard sales around two in the afternoon armed with four bucks and a blinding hangover, and even then, I knew all too well that, so far as early-70s monster movies about two-headed guys were concerned, I had drawn the short straw.

In the early days of the Nugent family's arrival at the ancestral home in Mississippi, my dad liked to show that he was getting into the spirit of things by laying down some newspaper in some corner, resting paint cans on it, then deciding that he didn't feel like painting after all, and leaving it all there for four years. After enough time had passed, I would pull out the sections of the yellowing papers and peruse the movie ads from my younger and even more ignorant days. It was this chapter of my education that tipped me off that the gold standard of head-transplant movies in this period was set by the racially charged The Thing with Two Heads (tag line: "They transplanted a WHITE BIGOT'S HEAD onto a SOUL BROTHER'S BODY!"), which I longed to see. God put off that day of reckoning until I was pushing twenty, perhaps because he sensed that my brain was not yet ready to process the sight of escaped convict Rosie Grier imploring his girlfriend to provide him with a safe haven while she wonders why Ray Milland's head is sticking out of the other end of the neck hole of his turtleneck sweater.

What 2-Headed Transplant lacks in topical relevance, it makes up for in sordid repugnance. It held the record for most thoroughly unpleasant lead performances in a movie that I had seen for, oh, thirty-something years, right up until a couple of weeks ago, when I saw Tony Manero. My man Bruce Dern does his bit as a man scientist who, to the despair of his wife (Pat Priest, A.K.A. Marilyn from The Munsters), has retreated to a house in the desert and sealed himself up in his claustrophobic basement laboratory where he spends his time building two-headed bunny rabbits, perhaps as some sort of misconceived plan to woo the lettuce industry. The prize nasty performance comes from Albert Cole, whose mustache and pop-eyed leer makes him look like a pornographic Jerry Stiller. Cole is entirely too well cast as a murderous sex fiend and degenerate rapist who blunders into Dern's domain and winds up getting his head grafted onto the mountainous body of the local lovable half-wit, played by John Bloom. (That same year, the seven-foot-four Bloom made his movie debut as the Frankenstein monster in Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein, a movie that I never missed when it was on TV back then. I guess I thought that, eventually, I'd be old enough that my eyesight would develop to some next level that would make it possible for me to decipher the action scenes. Cole, too, used to work for Adamson. In a lot of ways, The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant is a lot like an Al Adamson movie without the one-foot-in-the-grave formerly famous aged Hollywood character actors or the mail-order bondage gear, both of which, it turns out, are missed.) When the sadistic pervert gains control of the lumbering body, it's Zodiac meets Of Mice and Men! In the money scenes, the monster attacks any female extras it can find on location, while the director illustrates the eternal split between human conscience, inherently good but sometimes ineffectual, and feral desire, powerful and untamed, with shots of the Jerry Stiller dude standing behind the Lenny dude and smacking his lips and sniggering while resting his head on the big guy's shoulder while the big guy whimpers and protests that this isn't right. The parallel with Colin Powell's time in the Bush White House is obvious.

It all comes to a bad end when Albert Cole decides he wants to do terrible things to Marilyn. This is where Lenny, showing a defiant toughness that would have done Colin Powell some good long about the time he was asked to uncork all that bullshit in front of the U.N., draws the line. Meanwhile, Dern's only friend, Casey Kasem, has put two and two together and summoned the cops, which will be great news to those of you who still remember how this post began and have been living in hope that it would all come together somehow. It must be said that in this, perhaps the only movie appearance by Casey in which isn't just a voice coming out of the car radio and--with all due respect to his work as "Police Pathologist" in The Dark-- gets to play a character with an actual name and everything, he plays his stable-good-guy part a bit more blander than need be, considering that Sacha Baron Cohen has yet to create a character who wouldn't look contained and well-balanced when standing next to Bruce Dern. Truthfully, he has less to do with why this film has left such a long-lasting impression on me than the ugly house and other featureless, unphotogenic settings out in the middle of hardscrabble nowhere. This is one of those movies that look as if they might have been made to prank some future race of extraterrestrial visitors into thinking that they must have made made after the nuclear holocaust by a small group of survivors who were just trying to keep busy and distract themselves from imminent and certain death at the hands of the giant mutant ants who became our hungry overlords.

After the Flood

Mary Robison's One D.O.A., One on the Way is the best work of art about New Orleans and Katrina that I've come across, and my favorite new novel in many a moon. I was a fan of Robison's back in the '80s, after I came across her first novel Oh and her short stories, but she slipped off my radar in the '90s; it's only recently that I found out that she was battling writer's block during that time and that she came back with 2001's Why Did I Ever, a novel composed in the form of a collage of short, bite-sized passages, a style that she replicates in One D.O.A. Robison is a "minimalist", which was a hot-ticket label in literary circles in the '80s, but which always struck me as the shared designation of a number of writers, such as Amy Hempel and Bobbie Ann Mason and the sainted Raymond Carver, who I liked a lot less than I was supposed to. As a student, I always had a hankering for whatever I'd just missed out on, which, so far as books went, meant big, sprawling tomes like Gravity's Rainbow and Mumbo Jumbo, full of metatextual gamesmanship and attempts to rewrite half of human history according to the author's own hang-ups and pet conspiracy fantasies, resting on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, back when that venue stood for something, like the monolith from 2001. The big claim made for Carver, in particular, was that by boiling everything down to its colorless "essence", the work would more honestly reflect the lives and minds of working-class characters making do in a degraded cultural environment--an idea that I thought had a lot of condescension in it--and that, as in good Hemingway, the simple sentences and arid settings would make the emotional impact that much stronger and purer. I think that Robison pulls that off with a much greater hit-to-miss ratio than Carver did over the course of his career, plus she has a tremendous sense of humor, which I'm not sure that real Carver die-hards would regard as a virtue.

It never occurred to me before that the combination of Robison's humor and her shorthand style would add up to a great way to approach New Orleans as a setting and a subject, though it should have. New Orleans is a trickster and a trap for writers who imagine that such a lively place, with a romantic history and so many colorful eccentrics scampering about, is a great novel in the making: just stir it up good and add a plot. This has resulted in a lot of tiresome writing about goofy grotesques capering among the kudzu and getting wasted in the French Quarter (and being boring as only drunks out think they're "outrageous" can be). Robison's restrained style, and the weariness in the voice of her first-person narrator--Eve, a location scout for movie production in the city--helps dry the potential for cuteness out of her affection for quirky weirdos, even though the book includes a pair of old-money twins, one of whom is named Adam and is married to the heroine ("Our names didn't really bother me that much until the mail started arriving addressed to 'Adam and Eve Broussard'.") and who is dying of Hepatitis-C. The other twin, Saunders, is a self-hating, self-destructive, beautiful drunk in a dinner jacket, and the closest thing here to a familiar New Orleans novel cliche. (He also has a beautiful wife named Petal who at times appears to be the sanest person around and who, as if in homage to Tennessee Williams, winds up in the loony bin.)

When I lived in New Orleans, the business of catering to out-of-town filmmakers was booming; rare was the say when you could pass through the Garden District and the Quarter without seeing some plush mansion of seedy bar roped off by film crews. (My time there also coincided with the season of The Real World that was shot there, and I got used to the sight of pretty young people walking down the street endeavoring to have a normal conversation while pursued by a cameraman and a boom mike operator on roller skates.) In the post-Katrina environment, Eve is going through the motions of keeping her business alive and tutoring her young employee (who has to take a break midway through the book to serve a ten-day house arrest inside his FEMA trailer for having shoplifted after the hurricane), but with New Orleans no longer safe--or less safe than the pre-Katrina murder capital of America was before the flood--she spends most of her time watching business migrate to Shreveport, Louisiana and advising new acquaintances to take the hint.

As it happens, this is accurate: the combination of tax incentives to filmmakers and a wide-open emptiness that makes it possible for Shreveport to pass for just about anyplace has turned this little town, which I have driven through on numerous occasions, not just the new New Orleans in terms of film production, but practically the new Toronto as well. There are also frequent little bursts of information, lists of factoids about the city's crime rate and the laws (barely) governing public drinking and all the public facilities that once tended to the poor and the homeless that are now "closed, for ever." (One of them was Charity Hospital, an historic-beyond-measure institution whose possible demise ought to be a bigger national story than the nation seems to think it is. Back when I was working as a G.E.D. instructor at a homeless shelter, it was to Charity that I always took my pregnant female students when they were ready to deliver--and all my female students were pregnant at some point or another during our association.) These sections don't feel like Robison emptying the contents of her research notebook onto the page. It's a smart way to contextualize the action that's in keeping with the way Eve the professional planner thinks. (She also frequently slips into little reveries where she lists all the things she's never going to do again. They include "spinning until dizzy on barstools", "reading lengthy bits of scripture into the answering machines of my enemies", and "wearing the Trotsky t-shirt or a newspaper sailor hat to church." She is, however, only "mostly done with cutting the nipples out of bras.") It all helps set the scene for the moment when Eve gets fed up enough with a dipshit client to unload on him about the failures of the Army Corps of Engineers and the local environmental rapists and their responsibility for the destruction of the city. It's kind of a soapbox moment, but it feels perfectly in character (though the guy she's yelling at is a cartoon straw man), and anyway, everything she says is right. Among all the other things it is, New Orleans is a place where smart people who are fed up end up just ranting. One reason Robison's book feels like such a perfect evocation of the place is that she captures the degree to which all the things that make it special and sort of magical can also make living there just seem exhausting.

In the course of ranting at the out-of-towner, Eve happens to drop the name of my old friend, Helen Hill, who I have attempted to write about from time to time. In the course of trying to stress the unpredictable nature of the violence gripping the city, Eve refers to her as "The murder victim, Helen Hill...A filmmaker like yourself." This happens very near the end of the book, and I was picking up steam, speeding along to the conclusion in that way that I have, and suddenly seeing Helen's name invoked like that, without warning, was kind of like having a tire blow out when you're doing seventy on an unlit country road. After taking a minute to decide how I feel about this, I came to conclusion that this is, after all, a terrific book about a place that was very close to Helen's heart--I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that she died for it--and I think she'd be very pleased to be a part of it. But there's no way to put a happy face on seeing one of the best people you've ever known commemorated, not as "the woman with the million dollar smile" or "the wife and mother of your dreams" or "the North American tea party hostess champion" but as "the murder victim."

Totally Crushed Out

A few days ago I suddenly noticed that I was over a crush. My crushes tend to linger stubbornly and to just quietly die, of their own accord, when they damn well feel like it; this one dated back to the Clinton administration. I think I realized that it was gone when it hit me that, if I kill myself anytime soon, it'll be entirely because I can't scrape the rent together by the end of the month and have to face the prospect of having that conversation with the landlord again; for the first time in years, I was feeling doomy and depressed, and this crush didn't factor into it at all. (No doubt we all enjoy our epiphanies in our own way.) I was sure glad to see it go; usually these things burn out inside me inside of four, six years tops. It reminded me of a moment in James Toback's documentary The Big Bang (which, I should probably make clear given the context into which I've dropped a reference to it, is not about an orgy) in which Tony Sirica, the professional mook who has since gone out to become beloved as The Sopranos' Paulie Walnuts, describes what it was like to go to prison while still in love with a woman who did not return his feelings, a condition that seriously cut into his chances of being voted Mr. Congeniality on his cell block. Sirica described what it was like to wake up one morning and know that he had fallen out of love with her. It was the best day of his life, as he recalled.

So I know that I'm not the only person to feel this way. I do wonder if I'm that unusual in having to wait so long for my unrequited crushes, and they've all been unrequited, to go in the direction that I'd have long since sent them in if I had some way of getting my hands around the necks of these feelings and stuffing their remains in a car trunk loaded with a shovel and a gallon of quicklime. ("I wish," Elvis Costello sang on King of America, "that I could push a button/ And talk in the past and not the present tense/ And watch this lovin' feeling? Disappear like it was common sense.") The ancient bards used to make a lot of not being able to move past having been rejected by some ideal or other, but back then a combination of a lack of pamphlets about proper hygiene and the recurrence of plague must have done some job of thinning out the dating pool. The ex who's overseas was just complaining to me the other day that she's being driven nuts by cowardly would-be suitors who are wasting her time making with the mixed signals, and she wishes that alpha male would take the direct approach with her. That was never my problem, but the direct approach, uninflected by any cunning or the nuances of the game, can get you shut out pretty effectively. I fear that I never managed to make up for my Kaspar Hauser-like upbringing, which kept me alone and shut out during the very period when most people are learning their social skills. As a result, I started trying my hand at connecting with babes when I was in college, with the same easy feel for it all as an Eastern European who's learned English at fifty and just been confronted with a Lord Buckley record. My standard entrance line of, "You're pretty and I think I love you, wanna dance?" was heartfelt but had no takers.

One of the nice things for me about reading Cristina Nehring's new book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century is that I felt as if it were on my side. Not that I think Nehring would have suggested that any of those women should have danced with me; even I don't think that now. But in her proselytizing for the virtues of giving in to passion, with all its irrational components and its potential for making an unholy mess of the rec room if not your whole life, in defiance of the tendency in an age where wild-eyed yearning is often taken by Oprah and her audience as a sign of psychosis (and probably by Dr. Phil as one of the twelve sure-fire signs that you're raising a future serial killer), when people try to show how responsible they are by picking out their partners to go with their careers and their flower beds, I thought I heard a faint whisper of those words of tender understanding I always longed to hear back in the days before I threw in the towel: "Give the little freak a break." I am grateful for the book as a sane corrective to the tendency, in the age of stalking and sexual harassment, to look askance and even fearfully at strong romantic feeling, which in the annals of P.C.-related crimes against society is my personal bugbear in the way that "yet another bill to erect another monument to slavery" is to Representative Steve King. The irony--I almost wrote "tragedy", but let's get real--of Nehring's case for passion is that the last upholders of the flag will be monsters and mutants such as myself, who will never become jaded with what we can't reach from behind the electrified fence. As you head for home tonight and notice that short dumpy fellow with the acne scars sitting on the curb looking as if his dog died, you might want to give him a curtsy, for know that you are gazing on one of the last undying romantics in the world. Either that or he's one of the two percent of our demographic who get embittered and become serial killers. I hate to give Dr. Phil credit for anything, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I, Object

My friend Jenny has posted her contribution to the Significant Objects site, which is itself one of those ideas so crazy that it just...might...work. It goes without saying that, of the entries yet posted, Jenny's is my favorite, but of those submitted by people to whom I do not owe money, I have a special fondness for Annie Nocenti's "pre-assassination JFK Salt Lick head" and her accompanying essay, which begins, "I’m long off the vine. Eighty, truth be told. I refuse to be one of those biddies that dies with clutter. Found drooling in a wing-back, her thousand-strong frog collection eyeballing her." As a lifelong devotee of clutter, I admire the sentiment even as I completely fail to relate to it. When I die, it's going to look like when Henry Darger kicked off; representatives of the Encyclopædia Britannica will want to take a picture of my apartment to illustrate the entry on fire hazards. I once spent six weeks on retreat at a Buddhist monastery high in the Himalayas trying to overcome my addiction to the cheap pleasures of the material world, only to end up buying out the gift shop. (Subsequent research found that this yeti scalp for which I paid top dollar was actually taken from the backside of a yak. I should get the Better Business Bureau on their zen asses.)





Another item up for grabs, Lucinda Rosenfeld's cow creamer, reminded me of a classic passage from P. G. Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters, in which Bertie Wooster describes a cow creamer that his uncle was threatening to spend good money on as "a leering, underworld" sort of creature, "the kind that would spit out the side of its mouth for tuppence." I can only assume that I was not among the "talented, creative writer[s]" invited to participate in this intriguing project because someone guessed that the thought of picking out one of my beloved pieces of crap to put on eBay would have reduced me to a shuddering wreck. It gives one mixed feelings to be so well understood by strangers.

The Latest Show on Earth

Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting at home minding my own business, watching a documentary about the Uruguayan rugby players whose airplane crashed in the Andes in 1972--not for nothing is Casa de la Nuge known as the House of Fun--when an old girlfriend called, from overseas no less, to alert me that the Michael Jackson memorial was going on by yelling the words we all hope might someday be used to describe our own funeral services: "Tell me you're watching this shit!" Actually, there was less chance of my missing most of it than either of us realized. CNN started replaying massive chunks as soon as the Staples Center started to empty out, and when I sat down in front of the box a few hours later, lured by the promise of a new episode of Better Off Ted and eager to relax with a taste of the comedy stylings of Portia de Rossi, I was surprised to discover that ABC had wiped their schedule clean so that they could instead spend the evening burying Michael all over again. I wound up checking the TV every few hours for the rest of the night and well past the dawn, and we were pretty far into the day before I could no longer find a channel that wasn't rerunning the memorial. It reminded me less of other celebrity farewells than of those days when the Challenger explosion and the fall of the twin towers were replayed again and again, as if there were still someone out there who couldn't believe it had really happened until they'd seen it just one more time.

In some ways, Jackson's death, or rather the organized reaction to the death, has more in common with those disasters than it does with any of the rock-star deaths that might compare to it. Elvis's death inspired a spontaneous wave of mourning that caught the media, then still controlled largely by people too old to have grown up with the music, largely off guard; Janice and Neal Gregory's book, When Elvis Died, has a chapter describing how a couple of young staffers at CBS News had to break a sweat trying to convince their dubious bosses that the king's death was a big story. Just three years later, it was obvious that the news of John Lennon's murder was a major story before his body hit the sidewalk, but that was different in a lot of ways from Jackson's death, even though Lennon's fans and the media were as quick as Michael's to not just celebrate his life but sanctify his image. As for James Brown, who had the bad luck to expire on Christmas day, the difference in the coverage of his death and that of Michael's might be the best evidence for all the claims made for Michael's role in integrating popular culture. JB's death was treated as a big, big story, but also as a kind of exotic one, not quite of the American mainstream. There were a few too many helpful reminders for the young folks about just who this weird old dude was and why people at some place called the Apollo Theater were tearing their hair out because of him. Some white reporters could be heard saying things like "the mood here in Harlem" in the same tone as a bad actor in a jungle movie saying, "The drums have been restless."

Of course, Brown died almost a quarter of a century older than Michael Jackson, though I'm not sure that they weren't on about the same time line in terms of how far past the peaks of their stardom they'd traveled, and how much scandal had marred their images. A big reason that Jackson's death evoked such a strong reaction in so many people has to be that he was so young--which, in turn, affected a lot of people because it suddenly made them feel very old, and mortal. A lot of the people crying for him were surely projecting onto his casket the sense that twenty-five years of their own lives had suddenly just dropped out from under them. Some of these people were the ones in charge of shaping the media coverage of his death, and that may have as much as anything to do with why they couldn't let the story go--though they probably told themselves that it was "the public" that would keel over from shock if they weren't allowed to milk the bittersweet ache till the last drop was gone. And that's why, by the time that Mariah Carey was onstage yesterday covering her own ealr-'90s cover of "I'll Be There," the event felt closer to the Challenger explosion that the death of Elvis. Over the course of a dozen days, we went from seeing genuine, spontaneous displays of stunned grief to getting that hollow feeling that comes from sensing that the TV set is telling you, in an almost threatening way, how you're supposed to feel about something. In that way, the coverage might actually be said to have telescoped the first two stages of Jackson's career. We might be entering the third stage, one driven by confused feelings of knowing things we don't understand and sort of wish we didn't know, now that Peter King and Sheila Jackson Lee prepare to go head to head on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Writing in Slate, Troy Patterson congratulated the show's planners for having "erred on the side of dignity and taste", in the face of the rich "opportunity to commit vulgarity on an astronomical scale." I know what he means, but that's also part of what I found depressing about it. Even with all the talk of an "all-star tribute"--a little overblown in the face of a case that gave so much prominence to Jackson brothers not named Michael--there was no way any viewer could have ever forgotten that somebody had died. On the other hand, a Martian might have had trouble guessing that the great claim to fame of the man who'd died was supposed to be that he was a legendary entertainer. All the songs chosen were slow, and many of them, especially the show-closers "We Are the World" and "Heal the World", represented the songwriter at his most sanctimoniously mealy-mouthed. Except maybe for John Mayer's noodling guitar on "Human Nature", nobody was about to do any musical playing around, and for sure nobody was going to get rowdy with a little dancing.

Okay, fine, I didn't get up and jitterbug at my grandmother's funeral either, but that wasn't broadcast on international TV as part of a presumed effort to help the planet achieve closure after the passing of a beloved artist and popular entertainer. The fact is, there were, at minimum, two Michael Jacksons, and one dominated for the first half of his life and the other took over for the second half, and one was practically a nullification of the other. After we all fell in love with the fleet-footed performer whose joy was infectious and who seemed to love to be applauded for his stagecraft, we gradually saw him replaced, in public at least, by a bitter, self-pitying fellow with a Christ complex whose greatest pleasure in life seemed to be adding to the collection of lifetime achievement awards that he could never get enough of to make it up to him for the suffering our adulation put him through. It would be easy, and comforting, to think that all the people who were cheering him on during the nuthouse phase of his career were simply loyalists who couldn't see what he'd become, like all the countless people who refused to admit that there was something very, very wrong with Fat Elvis. But I have an awful hunch that a lot of people think that Jackson's self-righteous self-mythologizing, and his eagerness to turn out est-philosophy lyrics to leaden beats in the name of charitable good causes, marked his development into a more "serious" artists than the glittering moonwalker. And the show at the Staples Center had room only for the legacy of Michael in his Fat Elvis period.

Twelve years in New Orleans may have spoiled me for shows like this. In New Orleans, dead jazz and blues and r & b musicians are traditionally remembered by their fast, happy numbers, which may be a matter of necessity, since nobody ever made the charts down there by droning on about his desire to save his own life by feeding the children. Still, the upshot is that people go home from a New Orleans street funeral feeling good, a feeling that they forever after attach to their memories of the deceased, and "closure" can go take a flying leap. One of my few happy memories of TV news is of an interview I once saw done with the leader of a New Orleans jazz funeral band by a roving correspondent for a mid-90s Fox morning show that was hosted by Tom Bergeron, Laurie Hibberd, and a puppet with mange. Summing up the New Orleans tradition for the folks at home, the correspondent said that you accompany the coffin to the cemetery while playing a dirge, and then leave the cemetery playing a lively, upbeat number, and then, addressing the bandleader, he asked, why is that, why do you leave the cemetery playing a lively, upbeat number? The bandleader, making no attempt to conceal his opinion that the man taking up his time was clearly an idiot, replied, "Why, to get your mind off the fact that you put the man in the hole." At his best, Michael Jackson took your mind off any troubles at hand, but at his worst, which is what his memorial typified, it was as if he wanted all of down there in the hole with him.

Bad Sight of the Day

Corey Feldman at the Michael Jackson Memorial:



You know, not to be judgmental at a moment like this, but most people who have agreed to marry their girlfriend on a reality TV show in exchange for a deal for the network to chip in for the wedding can take some comfort in knowing that they've already done the tackiest thing they'll ever do in their lives.

Sarah Palin Is Pissed Off and Has a Rocket Launcher

I have discovered a new hidden thread in the vast tapestry of theories about Sarah Palin and her mystery resignation. The eureka moment came the way most of my breakthrough insights come to me: at the movies. I was sitting in a theater watching the trailer for the forthcoming G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, while trying to dig my Dr. Pepper and Entenmann's brownie out of my backpack without alerting security, when I noticed that one of the villains blowing stuff up on the screen before me was, as the writers of pulp paperbacks would put it, distaff, distaff and hot. Distaff, hot, and dark-haired. She handled a rocket launcher with the aplomb of a trained huntress and was quick to turn to violence with a smirk and a grudge. And her swaggering hotness was only accentuated by the fact that she wore--eyeglasses, stylish eyeglasses that clearly marked her as a woman too busy and secure in her hotness to bother with laser surgery, never mind contacts. Because I was so busy trying to figure out who the actress was--turns out it's Sienna Miller after a brunette rinse job--I was slow to recognize what my brain was really yelling at me, which was that the associations forming there went beyond the identity of the actual woman onscreen. Gradually the pieces began to come together: oh my God, Sarah Palin has joined S.H.I.E.L.D!

Or, rather, Cobra. I should confess right up front that I'm not the best person to go to for a breakdown of the G.I. Joe mythology, if that's not too grand a word for the back story behind a late-summer movie based on a TV cartoon based on a toy line. I have faint memories of the glorious days of the original G.I. Joe, which I believe may have been the first product ever to inspire arguments that included some form of the claim, "Nuh-huh, dolls are for girls, this here's an action figure!" In his golden age, G.I. Joes were a foot tall. The toy was first issued by Hasbro in 1963. Joe's division was racially integrated starting in 1965, and in 1967 the guys were joined on the front lines by a female figure, the G.I. Joe Action Nurse. This turned out to be the New Coke of the G.I. Joe line and was quickly discarded, so quickly that its existence could easily be discarded from any history of the product line, but I don't think you should ever pass up the chance to type the words "Action Nurse." In the mid-70s, which was around the time I first made his khakied acquaintance, Joe learned kung fu and picked up a movable "eagle eye", which I remember thinking was bionic, a notion that I developed with or without any encouragement from the manufacturers. It's not as if I were taking notes.

Little did I realize at the time that G.I. Joe was on his last legs. Because of the Vietnam syndrome polluting the air and an invasion of idealistic hippie teachers into the educational system, war toys were out of fashion, replaced by Free to Be...You and Me and acoustic sing-a-longs of "Kumbaya." The Joe line was discontinued, kung fu grip and all, only to re-emerge in the 1980s, physically shrunken but still patriotically motivated as all the bedamned, after Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America. One place where the new morning went unnoticed was my bedroom, especially on weekends, because after a childhood slavishly devoted to watching Saturday morning cartoons, I had reached an age where I found that I could explore much stranger and more stimulating worlds than those provided even by Sid and Marty Krofft by sleeping till noon. (In those days, my version of "Watching the sun come up" was "Staring in confusion at the CBS Children's Film Festival".) It was during this period that G.I. Joe got his own TV series, one that rewrote the books by giving the old boy an adversarial organization, the terrorist outfit Cobra. Again, I missed all this, and would later have the pleasure of being made to feel like an old fart by peach-cheeked youngsters doing geeky comic riffs on Joe and Cobra Commander instead of on Pet Rocks and the Bay City Rollers, as God intended. Suffice to say that as little as I know about this phase of G.I. Joe's career, I would know even less if I weren't willing to do the research necessary to keep up with Robot Chicken.

In the contemporary Joe mythos, Sarah Palin's doppelganger is the Baroness Anastasia DeCobray, who according to Wikipedia "serves as the COBRA Organization's intelligence officer, sex kitten, and lieutenant to Cobra Commander", and "whose beauty is matched only by her ruthlessness", just like Palin and my mom. Apparently she went over to the dark side after her brother was killed by an American soldier and has a long-standing, murky relationship with a Cobra bigwig named "Laird James Cullen Destro XXIV"--and not to bash family tradition or anything, but after a while, doesn't the Roman numeral thing begin to just denote a lazy reluctance to even try to think of a different name?--who is played in the new movie by Christopher Eccleston, which means that whatever nefariousness he's involved in, I'll probably end up rooting for him a little. (Wikipedia notes that James McCullen XXIV, and the Baroness and Jimbo "share a romantic relationship [the extent of which has never been revealed]." Mark Sanford would probably say that they never crossed the ultimate line.) The Baroness was so well received by TV viewers that she was later immortalized as part of the toy line. She was substantially more successful than Action Nurse.

Does Miller's Baroness really look that much like Palin? Let's split the difference and say that she looks almost exactly the way that the media keeps insisting that Palin looks: ripe and lascivious in a nasty, aging-mean-girl sort of way, she embodies what reporters seem to be getting at when they write stuff like this, from Todd S. Purdum's instantly notorious Vanity Fair article: "Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen."

Of course, standards of beauty in politics keep shifting all the time: when Palin announced that she was quitting, I actually thought, for the first time in years, of Susan Molinari, the House Republican whose star rose after the 1994 elections because GOP bigwigs liked to point to her as proof that there was a place for both women and social moderates in the party, and who bolted two years later when offered an on-air job at CBS News. You used to hear a lot, even from people standing in the same room with her and who she could have beaten with a cudgel if the mood struck her, about how Molinari was too "cute" for politics; her fast fade from the airwaves was a harsh reminder that there remains a vast chasm between being too cute for politics and cute enough for TV news. This really is a tricky area to discuss, but I'll just say that, for those of us who haven't been in solitary confinement since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there really are people who are perfectly acceptably assembled yet who we simply cannot see in a sexual light, and for me, Palin leads the list. It's not her politics, and not entirely the personality that comes through, but (to steal a phrase from Spalding Gray) the teeming amoebic mass that is her face, the way that it's always going through a non-stop round of "wink, leer, sneer, pout, glower, repeat." I watch her doing this stuff with her features while she's performing family-audience-approved activities in public, and I am gripped with a desperate need to not even imagine what that hyperactive mug of hers gets up to when she's in the throes of passion.

Did the Liberal Media Conspiracy deliberately plot to make the G.I. Joe movie just so they could have Miller doll herself up in Palinesque drag and plant subliminal images of the Wasilla warrior palling around with, indeed, fighting alongside terrorists, in the minds of voters? And did Palin get wind of it all, and, recognizing the damage that it would cause to her beloved children for them to hear playground chants of "Nyah, nyah, your mama had a romantic relationship the extent of which has never been revealed with Doctor Who!" Note that the movie opens early in August, which means that Palin, who plans to leave her job at the end of July, will be able to finish fixing the state and retreat, with her family, to an undisclosed underground lair where she can plot her next move without insidious media contaminants seeking through the vents. Obviously, I don't actually believe this; it's just one of those things I let my mind run with while waiting out the twenty minutes of trailers at Loew's Sony. But if I can address myself to a single reader for just a moment: Glenn Back--you like? Slide me $250 via PayPal and it's all yours. Throw in an extra $50, and I've also got one about how the Mark Sanford who left his house Friday morning isn't the same one who came back from Argentina...

The Fog Lifts

Throughout a long talk arising from [Errol] Morris's 2003 documentary "The Fog of War", moderator Mark Danner pressed the former Secretary of Defense [Robert McNamara]--under Kennedy and Johnson the tribune of the Vietnam War--to apply his conclusions from that time to the present day. Again and again, McNamara--at 88 in frightening command of his faculties, vehement, direct, lucid, at times even monomaniacally focused--ignored the question, dodged it, refused it, denied it. Finally Danner announced that he would read the "Eleven Lessons" from McNamara's 1995 "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam": "I'll ask you while I do so," he said, "to keep the present situation in mind."

One by one, the items went off like small bombs: "'We failed to...We failed to...We failed to...We failed to draw Congress and the American people into the pros and cons of a large-scale military action before it got underway...We did not realize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient...We do not have the God-given right to shape other nations as we choose...'"

"When I read these lessons again I felt a chill go through me," Danner said. "I was in Iraq. In October, reporting...they seemed to reflect with uncanny accuracy--it's for that that I've tried to push you, not only about--" McNamara cut him off. "What he has done," he said to the audience, "is extract those lessons from this book. The lessons are in there...I put them forward not because of Vietnam, but because of the future!" He turned to Danner: "You want me to apply them to Bush. I'm not going to do it." He turned back to the audience, full of people who decades ago fought him with everything they had. "YOU APPLY THEM TO BUSH."

--Greil Marcus, "Real Life Rock Top Ten" column, March 3, 2004

By dying at 93, Robert McNamara outlived a lot of people who would have loved the chance to dance on his grave. McNamara was a remarkable figure in the history of twentieth century America, at the very least one of the most important supporting characters of the century's latter half. He never held elective office, but he was recognized as a brilliant man even before World War II drew him into the Army Air Forces, where his work with the Office of Statistical Control--analytical work that anticipated both his approach to business and government, where he pioneered the field of policy analysis--earned him the Legion of Merit. Some twenty-five years later, after leaving the post of Defense Secretary in which he'd served for, for almost seven years, under Kennedy and Johnson, he spent thirteen years as head of the World Bank, where he shifted the Bank's focus on efforts to combat poverty world-wide. At this moment, though, the most remarkable period of McNamara's career might be his tenure, before his time at the White House, as the head of the Ford Motor Company. where he turned the troubled automaker around through his emphasis on greater safety measures and smaller, more efficient cars. The history of Detroit might have turned out differently if he'd stuck around instead of going to Washington. Christ knows his obituaries would read a lot differently.

McNamara had a long, many-sided, altogether impressive career, with just one major blot on his record: his conduct, as Secretary of Defense, of the Vietnam War, and not even his full term but the last three years or so, when he and Johnson escalated the war and resorted to deceptions such as the Golf of Tonkin incident to build support for their actions. At the time, he could have had no way of knowing that saying that his career was exemplary except for the little matter of his management of the Vietnam War would come to sound kind of like saying that a man had a great relationship with his wife right up to the minute that the cops found him standing over her corpse holding a bloody nine-iron. By the time he left the White House, McNamara's biggest legacy was that he'd given intellectualism in government a bad name. Unlike the Bush-era neocons, he actually knew something about military combat, and he never came up with anything as fanciful as democratizing the Mideast and ending religious terrorism by invading a secular dictatorship, but his big ideas for dealing with the Vietnamese had a similar cloud-borne quality. From his White House office, he authorized bombers to rain terror down on the Vietnamese, who were supposed to be shocked and awed into submission.

When they sucked it up and kept fighting all the more fiercely instead, McNamara was horribly aware of the scale of the carnage he'd caused, and of how totally senseless it now seemed. A big part of the rap on McNamara for years was that he was such an arrogant son of a bitch, but in fact, events seem to have permanently dented his self-assurance pretty fast. He felt alienated, too, and felt an intellectual bond with the college protesters--his son was one of them--that he knew the protesters themselves felt no desire to reciprocate. Then in 1995, he broke his silence with a memoir in which he admitted to having known the war was a mistake before he stopped fighting it. (It's never been clear whether he stopped fighting it by choice--whether he resigned or whether he was prepared to keep going if Johnson, horrified by McNamara's telling him that they should end this thing, hadn't steered him towards the World Bank.) All hell broke loose: what seemed to be thousands of people in the media and the press at large wanted to kick the shit out of him for saying this now, instead of back then, when it might (who knows) have done some good, and the thousands of people who'd spent the '80s redefining the Vietnam War as a noble cause were only to happy to scapegoat him as the wishy-washy crybaby that Rambo also suspected was somewhere at the top, subverting the war effort from within. In a culture where asking talk-show audiences for absolution seemed to be the national pastime, Robert McNamara was officially the man who had no right to say that he'd been wrong. The window for that had passed, if there had ever been a window when it would have been all right for him to say he'd made a mistake, which was unlikely.

When The Fog of War came out, some friends of mine who are older than me and who actually remember Vietnam were disgusted to hear that I felt a measure of sympathetic respect for the old guy. Parts of that movie, which is essentially a feature-length interview with McNamara, 85 years old at the time and sharp as a tack, are in code; McNamara went into it with the ground rule that he wouldn't specifically discuss certain things about Vietnam, but you can guess at what he thinks from what he says about other things. Crucially, he recalls his role in approving the fire-bombing of Japanese cities during World War II, and he agrees with General Curtis LeMay's speculation that, if the United States had not won that war, he and LeMay would have prosecuted as war criminals. Whether through deliberate duplicity of faulty memory, McNamara gets some things wrong--and Morris doesn't fact-check him-- and there are areas where he seems to think that it would be dishonorable for him to weigh in, but in a not altogether unslippery way, he tried to be candid about the moral cost of what he'd done, even if he felt more comfortable talking about the atrocities for which he'd been rewarded. I remember one of those friends of mine asking if I thought I could feel any sympathy for Donald Rumsfeld if he were to publicly admit he'd been responsible for midwifing a monster, and the only honest answer I have for that one is that I'd like to think I could, but the odds are against my ever finding out for sure. Maybe Rumsfeld will surprise me, if he gets to live another twenty years. But car company CEOs and war criminals are two things that we just don't seem to be able to make the way we used to.

It's Always Fairlie Weather

The fact that the Fourth of July weekend news cycle wound up being dominated by Sarah Palin is fairly amusing. And by "fairly amusing", I of course mean that it's completely fucking disgusting. The day itself is now long gone and the weekend nearly over, but before both disappear into the distant past, I'd like to lift a glass to Henry Fairlie, as great an American patriot as a British citizen is likely to have been. I grew up reading Fairlie's essays in The New Republic back during that magazine's glory period in the 1980s; he arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1966 and died in 1990, at the age of 66, from complications that sprang up while he wasting away in the hospital after breaking his hip in a fall. Fairlie published a few books in his lifetime, most notably The Kennedy Promise and The Seven Deadly Sins Today, but his famously awaited memoir of his career as a writer and reporter was either lost or never fully completed, and the new collection Bite the Hand That Feeds You, edited by Jeremy McCarter, is the first published collection of his magazine work. He was a first-rate thinker and excellent writer and a heroic example to others in his profession. If he knew about the title I have selected for this post, he would come back and beat me to death with a brick.

I had been in the country about eight years, and was living in Houston, when a Texas friend asked me one evening: "Why do you like living in America? I don't mean why you find it interesting--why you want to write about it--but why you like living here so much." After only a moment's reflection, I replied, "It's the first time I've felt free." One spring day, shortly after my arrival in America, I was walking down the long, broad street of a suburb, with its sweeping front lawns (all that space), its tall trees (all that sky), and its clumps of azaleas (all that color). The only other person on the street was a small boy on a tricycle. As I passed him, he said, "Hi!"--just like that. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before. Yet here was this one, with his cheerful "Hi!" Recovering from the culture shock, I tried to look down stonily at his flaxen head, but instead, involuntarily, I found myself saying in return: "Well--hi!" He pedaled off, apparently satisfied. He had begun my Americanization.

"Hi!" As I often say--for Americans do not realize it--the word is a democracy. (I come from a country where one can tell someone's class by how they say "Hallo!" or "Hello!" or "Hullo," or whether they say it at all.) But anyone can say "Hi!" Anyone does. Shortly after my encounter with the boy, I called on the then Suffragan Bishop of Washington. Did he greet me as the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done? No. He said, "Hi, Henry!" I put it down to an aberration, an excess of Episcopalian latitudinarianism. But what about my first meeting with Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States, the Emperor of the Free World, before whom, like a Burgher of Calais, a halter round my neck, I would have sunk to my knees, pleading for a loan for my country? He held out the largest hand in Christendom, and said, "Hi, Henry!"

--"My America!", 1983

As a clear-eyed enthusiast of what was best about America, Fairlie was a welcome corrective to those English journalists who dazzle Americans with their ability to spit venom in a superior, lofty style that passes for wit. (The New York Times, having its little joke, passed the new book off to the anti-Fairlie, Christopher Hitchens for review. His performance does not disappoint: he warms up by quoting from the book's introduction to make the point that Fairlie was a drunk and a sponging deadbeat who enjoyed the company of women, and then sneering that "It was more than something of an achievement, then, that the general tenor of his essays was able to sustain such a high moral tone." He regrets that "Fairlie said, of the Republican convention delegates, that “the Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy.” His hasty show of references to H. L. Mencken and Randolph Bourne — about whom he wrote passionately and well in other contexts — cannot conceal the straining for effect and the feigning of outrage that are so sadly evident here." He signs off with the thrilling news that, towards the end of Fairlie's life, "I caught him out making a slanderous allegation in print that was backed up, when challenged, only by an unimpressive piece of bluffing and blustering," then regretfully notes that the lying windbag died soon afterwards and so was unable to apologize to Hitchens for having stolen his brilliant, one-of-a-kind idea to write a piece making fun of Perrier drinkers. A man will have to be dead a lot longer than nineteen years before he can be forgiven for having written work of more lasting value than Christopher Hitchens.)

The America that Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of Prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of "better dead than Red"; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy. The America of fear . For it is in fear that the ungoverned and the unfree are doomed to live...It is time that we reminded ourselves, and said aloud and more often, that it is from these people that nastiness comes."

--"Mencken's Booboisie in Control of GOP", 1980

Fairlie arrived in the United States from England as a self-described Tory, and this turned out to be an excellent position from which to separate what, in his time here, was inspiring about America and what was ominous and unsettling and ugly. He saw himself as classically conservative, but he got to witness the early stages of American conservatives' abandonment of true conservatism for the strange new gods of neo-conservatism and base Republicanism. Fairlie, who wrote movingly about the consoling power of FDR's voice over the radio during World War II, never wavered in his belief that government was a force for good that had a responsibility to set a certain level of civilized existence below which the most unfortunate citizen should not be left to fall below, an idea that by the time of his death had all but been officially redefined as heresy by the forces in politics and the media that shape conventional wisdom.

Because he cared about what words mean and where ideas come from, he was especially well equipped to dismantle George Will, who back in the '80s--he might still be at it, I honestly don't know--enjoyed labeling himself as a "Tory", with the understanding that, so far as both he and his readers were concerned, the term just meant a Republican who had declared himself classier than the Dennis Hasterts of the world by virtue of his knowing a British term and dressing like a member of the Nation of Islam. The review of Will included here is perhaps the best example of what a mean mouth Fairlie had on him and how smartly he could back it up. (If I have a major complaint about the book, it's that McCarter, eager to show Fairlie in a bug-hearted light, has seriously undersold how good he could be at his most acidic, and so left a number of deserving classics--his lacerating essays on the '80s reboot of Vanity Fair, of Alexander Cockburn and Pamela Harriman, a tremendously unfair and very funny screed about Ted Kennedy called "Hamalot"--in the back issues section. Their absence from the present volume is a major disappointment, but much will be forgiven if we are in line for a follow-up titled Biting Every Hand in Sight.)

I hardly read newspapers anymore...I think they are poor reading for a journalist. They are one reason journalists go on saying the same things.

--"Migration", 1984

There was no subject on which Fairlie was more vituperative or prescient than the decline of mainstream journalism in his time. The piece on Will is partly the reaction of someone who had seen promise in the bow-tied hustler and was saddened to see the little fellow sell out like so many others. Will threw his promise as a writer over the side in exchange for the celebrity that constant TV appearances bring and the riches that come from the subsequent bookings one can attract on the lecture circuit. Although he succumbed to the moral failings noted by Christopher "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine" Hitchens, Fairlie himself abstained from the siren song of remunerative media whoring. (It is amusing--again, in the Sarah Palin sense--that Fairlie did so much railing against the dire influence of TV while writing for a magazine then owned by Martin Peretz, the unapologetic racist nutjob whose hobby used to be writing angry pieces in the back of his weekly journal protesting the fact that, because of an unfair media blacklist against unapologetic racist nutjobs, he was never invited to appear on TV to share his expert opinion on the Palestinian issue.)

I never knew anything about Fairlie's life besides what he chose to share in his writing, and so it was from the introduction to the new book that I learned that, in his last years, he actually lost his apartment and, living hand to mouth, spent his dotage living in the New Republic offices until the accident that caused him to retire to a hospital bed. He died homeless, alone, and dead broke, none of which seems to have affected his writing for the worse. Considering how much more entertaining he probably would have been on the air or at the lectern than such TNR colleagues as Fred Barnes and Morton "Gump" Kondracke, his preference for sleeping on the floor to hiring an agent and ordering the bastard to get cracking might just be taken as the act of a man of principle. As someone who's slept on a few floors himself, I can agree with those who would point to the housing arrangements he was forced to make at the end of his life as reason for other writers to see him as a cautionary example. Of course, if you're talking about the quality of one's work versus the quality of one's life, it's the likes of Will and Hitchens and Barnes and Kondracke who are the cautionary examples. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Quote of the Weekend

Captain Sullenberger, of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 fame, in response to 60 Minutes interviewer Katie Couric's asking him if he prayed as his plane was approaching the Hudson Rover: "I would imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane."