Eagle Pennell Has Landed

"Texas nostalgia, more than most kinds of nostalgia, comes with a deadly disadvantage: it’s easy to overdo it. That helps to explain why Eagle Pennell’s first two feature films — The Whole Shootin’ Match and Last Night at the Alamo — are such special things." More from Tom Block at Dogcanyon.com.

Safire Is What Closed on Sunday Night

In 1991, Eric Alterman wrote an article for GQ speculating on a likely replacement for William Safire on the New York Times' op-ed page. It was based partly on the assumption that Safire, who had been parked at the Times since 1973, would be announcing his retirement sooner rather than later. Like hell; Safire, who died over the weekend, hung in there until 2005. (When he finally did retire, the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., announced that "The New York Times without Bill Safire is all but unimaginable.") If Safire had taken the hint and retired a dozen or so years earlier than he did, he would have denied mean bastards like myself from pointing out that he devoted the last several years of his career to banging the drum for every obvious, high-profile fraud that came rolling down the pike, spending the Clinton years confidently asserting that Whitewater was always just about to break wide open with disclosures of great crimes and cover-ups of said crimes that would result in long prison sentences for those involved and pushing the lies about Wen Ho Lee, then topping himself during the Iraq War period by making free-wheeling predictions about Saddam Hussein's vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons, insisting on an actual connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden and Saddam's involvement in 9/11, with frequent references to the famously nonexistent Prague meeting between Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer, which Safire clung to like a sixty-year-old who has never lost his belief in Santa Claus.

Mind you, it's not that Safire declined; as the Times columnist who was most inclined to style himself as a "reporter"--Maureen Dowd, a former actual reporter, at least deserves credit for making no bones about treating her promotion to columnist as what it was, her official retirement from honest work--he had always had a thing for the Big Nothing story. According to legend, Safire was looked on with distrust and displeasure by his colleagues at the Times until he broke, flailed to death, and ultimately won a Pulitzer for the story that destroyed President Carter's budget director, Bert Lance, half a year into Carter's term. Lance, a blubbery-looking good ol' boy who must have seemed to sum up everything that Washington society found tacky and K-Mart quality about the Carter team, was accused of "questionable business practices" when he'd served as Chairman of the Board of Calhoun National Bank of Calhoun, Georgia, and I'll bet that a lot of people inside the Beltway were more appalled by the "Calhoun, Georgia" part than they were by the "questionable business practices" part. Lance lost his job and was subsequently cleared of all charges, but the headlines about that development were a lot smaller than the ones about the allegations made against him, and seven years later, when Walter Mondale first tried to name him chairman of the Democratic National Committee and then floated his name as a possible vice-presidential candidate, the press and pary regulars reacted as if Jack the Ripper had been hired as a special consultant to the National Organization for Woman.

The Lance affair helped establish the new post-Watergate ground rules for Washington scandal; within a couple of years, the same culture of journalism that had openly mocked the Washington Post and Woodstein for pursuing the Watergate story as Nixon had coasted to re-election assumed a new position that politicians were assumed guilty until proven innocent. The irony, of course, is that Safire had come to national prominence as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration, working for Spiro Agnew, the felonious vice-president who Hunter Thompson, in the most succinct insult of his career, once accurately described as having been "born wrong." Safire's reputation as an "unpredictable" columnist rather than a lockstep conservative largely came down to his solid support for civil liberties and his loathing of Henry Kissinger, and it's worth stressing that, in both cases, his convictions grew out of personal grudge: he had been subjected to electronic surveillance at the White House, at Kissinger's behest, and not stopped being pissed off about it. (He also wrote and wrote and wrote about what an utterly shitty president George Bush the Elder was, especially as the noodle-like world leader sought re-election in 1992. But in 1992, stopped clocks were united twice a day in their belief that George Bush the Elder was an utterly shitty president.)

As the Times' official Respectable Conservative Voice for more than three decades, Safire got to enjoy a lot of hollow flattery about how lively and peppery and well-written his columns were. (The sole benefit of this is that, when the Times declined to renew William Kristol's column because everyone in the world agreed that it wasn't any good, the obvious conclusion that this meant that Kristol's writing wasn't even as good as Safire's must have struck the younger man like a knife in the heart.) Safire's writing brightened up a little, and his congenial side was more entertaining, when he was dealing in ephemera, most notably in the language columns that showed him to be the cream of the American verbiage cops, if outshining Edwin Newman and John Simon is the sort of thing you want on your tombstone. But to an embarrassing degree, his reputation was based on his pretending to be Johnny Deadline, an actual reporter breaking stories on the op-ed page, and none of them held up, and he was never a big one for even acknowledging that his scoops were pure gas. (Oddly enough, he was better about admitting to having been too soft on such friends as Roy Cohn and Reagan CIA Director William Casey, who he defended for his role in the Iraq-Contra affair. Maybe Safire didn't mind being seen as a soft touch for his friends, though he never offered an explanation for why someone who was presented as both smart and basically a nice guy had so many scumbags for friends.) In fact, over the course of five presidential administrations, from Lance to the Iraq War neocons, he was the prototype for the bad Times reporter as national menace, a sucker for any flagrant bullshit that was fed to him that he, for some political or emotional reason, wanted to believe was true. He could get away with it for much longer than Judith Miller or Jeff Gerth could, because of his special place as a reporter on the op-ed page, which is to say, a reporter who wasn't expected to have his facts right. His "reporting" had horrible real-life consequences for many people, but since he was supposed to be an opinion columnist, people must have thought that holding him to any kind of serious standards of consistent accuracy would be cheating.

Book 'Em

I've never read The Catcher in the Rye. I suppose I could just drop everything and hustle up a copy and take the phone off the hook for an afternoon, but I just never have, and it's one of those funny little gaps that I suppose we have in our cultural education. Mine has a small story to go with it. When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time compiling reading lists from references to books and writers that came up in the course of what I was already reading (and, because I was a contrary little pimple head, stubbornly ignoring whatever was assigned for me to read in class, even if I'd have jumped at the chance to read it if the idea had occurred to me on my own time), and once, during Christmas break of my junior year, something--I can't remember what--left me with a strong feeling that this was a book I needed to read. Now, there weren't any bookstores anywhere near where I lived in Mississippi, and though there was a library in Tylertown, it was mostly a place where the senior citizens could have club meetings and people could donate their used Harlequin Romance paperbacks. As a high school student, my main access to books came--brace yourself--from my high school library, where I also worked an hour every day. So the first day after classes resumed, I strolled confidently into the library and asked Mrs. Whoshername, the librarian, if they had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. She reacted as if I'd asked if she had any incest in her family. I gulped and dropped the subject and then had to spend the next several months adjusting to the fact that my asking for that particular book had permanently soured our relationship, and she treated me like pond scum for the rest of the term. It was especially frustrating because, in that pre-Internet age, I had no way of finding out enough about The Catcher in the Rye to deduce what was supposed to be so awful about it. (It's not as if that title was a lot of help.) I figured I'd read it when I got the hell out of Walthall County, but then a funny thing happened: when I hit college, I learned that reading Catcher when you're in high school is part of the great shared experience of literate snots in this country, and all the cool-geek kids I wanted to fit in and be friends with (dream on, Li'l Abner) had already read it and were fast moving on to Charles Bukowski. I was embarrassed, so I just didn't read it, and I never have. Nowadays, when somebody stages a kamikaze assault on Salinger's reputation or exploits their ties to him or makes the awful mistake of trying to pay tribute to his masterpiece by hitching a ride on it, I can only muster theoretical interest.

This thrilling tale about the costs of adolescent literary deprivation is brought to you as part of Banned Books Week, "an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment." The very phrase "banned books" conjures up images of angry mobs of people, stupid and bellicose enough to inspire dismay and pity in a Tea Bagger, yowling about the dangers of literacy and the awful possibility that little Shirley will be struck blind or, worse, turned into a scarlet woman if she gets hold of a copy of In the Night Kitchen and sees Mickey's winkie. In an editorial in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, Mitchell Muncy sniffed at the very idea that there might be a need for or a point to such a thing. Muncy cites some florid language in the American Library Association's "manifesto" ("To you zealots and bigots and false patriots who live in fear of discourse. You screamers and banners and burners. . . .") as proof that "the sponsors are more interested in confrontation than celebration", which may be a fair cop. But Muncy also ridicules the idea that "banned books", as a concept, even exist. According to John Lundberg, "the ALA reports that just 513 challenges to books took place last year, and the vast majority of those were unsuccessful." The ALA might point to those numbers as evidence that their efforts to discourage book banning have been successful; Muncy doesn't see that there's anything to discourage. "If a book isn't available at one library or bookstore, it's certainly available at another. Not even the most committed civil libertarian demands that every book be immediately available everywhere on request—though in the age of Amazon that's nearly the case."

Banned Books Week was created in 1982, early in Ronald Reagan's presidency, when the Moral Majority (as the religious right was then) was in its fat and sassy phase and schools were under attack by organizations trying to "return" America to some imaginary Leave It to Beaver era. Churches, including my old Mississippi Southern Baptist worship center and snake pit, urged parishioners to bring in their sin-soaked record albums to be fed into communal bonfires, and with these bloodshot eyes I saw such proponents of devil worship as Elton John and Billy Joel consigned to the cleansing fires. For the most part, even the most wacko church leaders restrained themselves from holding book burnings, because even people whose knowledge of twentieth-century history is mostly gleaned from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade knows that book burning is one of those things that will forever be associated with the Nazis. But asking that some vulgar text be removed from school library shelves and reading lists because it offends some parent's sensibilities will always strike many people as sweet reasonableness personified, because there will always be too many parents who think that their tender flowers have soft, squishy brains that must be protected from infiltration from dangerous ideas and upsetting images than they simply cannot fight off, whether it's Holden Caulfield denouncing the phonies or President Obama being so sneaky as to tell kids to study hard while not wearing his swastika arm band and werewolf mask.

Things have changed a lot since 1982, and I suppose that Muncy has a point when he says that there aren't many books that a kid couldn't get his hands on someway, at least if the kid, unlike me back then (unlike me now, too) has a credit card and scads of disposable income. But for the sake of the one or two kids in this country somewhere who still might be have need of the services of a school library because they just can't afford to track down and buy every book they're interested in reading, it would be nice to keep those shelves well stocked. And no, it's not a matter of making every title imaginable in every venue; it's about making sure that, if a teacher or librarian who's doing his or her job thinks that a particular title might be of interest to the people whose needs are there to be served, no mealy-mouthed self-righteous spoilsport should be allowed to prevent them from doing it. At its simplest level, this is simple a matter of gratitude to people who have chosen to perform important and thankless jobs that don't pay as well as they should and who should be spared the bother of having a bunch of jackasses screeching at them. And despite the obvious conclusion one might reach from seeing one side of this issue endorsed by the WSJ op-ed page and the other side sort of saluted at the Huffington Post, it's really a bipartisan, or nonpartisan issue. Conservatives who object to the "troubling" elements in Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, or Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret ought to have the fire hoses turned on them, but the water should be no softer or warmer when it hits those who would ban Huckleberry Finn because its uneducated, pre-Civil War characters toss around "the N word", or even those who would protect their children from casual exposure to Ann Coulter's latest unofficial sequel to The Turner Diaries or one of Glenn Beck's coloring books. As for those who would ban what they see as Roald Dahl's or J. K. Rowling's celebrations of the dark arts, there really should be no partisan classification for "Rock Stupid."

It's probably easy for me to see the issue of what kids should or should not be "protected" from as a simple, clear cut matter, because I've never been a parent. My own outlook is that of a former child, one who remembers what it was like to be curious about things that larger people could deny me the chance to experience, and who remembers how frustrating that was. It was frustrating, and enraging, in fact, to a degree that dwarfs the degree to which anything I actually read in a book or saw in a movie as a child turned out to be upsetting or traumatic. I did read and see some things that were awfully confusing to me as a child, and it would have done me a world of good to have had some adults to talk to about it at the time. I didn't have that option, because the adults in charge of my upbringing had already taught me that a large chunk of my education would have to be conducted in guilty secrecy, because they didn't want it to happen, or at least didn't want to know about it. (And be assured that it felt like the latter; my parents may have really thought that they were trying to do what was best for me by pretending that there were things that I was just never going to find out about, but as a kid, it just felt as if they didn't care enough about me to bestir themselves to talk with me about things that made them uncomfortable.) In the absence of parental guidance, a library is a hell of a good thing for a kid to have unfettered access to, though ideally all kids should of course have the chance to enjoy both, just as librarians should have the chance to do their jobs in relative peace and quiet. Maybe Banned Books Week is a corrective to a non-problem, but by now, you could say the same thing about the Salk vaccine. Would we have more pressing need of them if they didn't exist? I vote that we never find out.

Random Thoughts of a Man Who Spent the Weekend Cleaning Out His DVR After a Week Buried in Work that Was Neither Enjoyable Nor Financially Rewarding

--Bored to Death has my favorite opening credits sequence in ages. I have a feeling that I ought to find the show itself flimsy and overly self-infatuated, but two episodes in, I sort of enjoy it. The amateur-private-detective angle is tired, and Jason Schwartzman, in the lead role as writer and series creator Jonathan Ames's hangdog alter ego, executes slapstick like someone who thinks that if he does it as if he were just barely considering making an effort during dress rehearsal, he won't make himself look ridiculous and we'll still appreciate the effort. But Zack Galifianakis is such a terrific, natural sidekick that he doesn't even seem to need someone to play sidekick to. And Ted Danson had slipped so gracefully into his silver-fox elegant buffoon phase that it's as if the guy who showed up at the Friar's Club in blackface with a watermelon under his arm to roast Whoopi Goldberg never even happened. Id probably like it more if Schwartzman weren't on it, but I've always thought that I'd like living on this planet more if Jascon Schwartzman weren't on it. If I managed to accommodate myself to the one, I should probably be able to accommodate myself to the other.

--Watching Courtney Cox in the eyeball-mangling, eardrum-piercing sitcom Cougar Town after seeing Schwartzman in Bored to Death raises the question, which is more tolerable: seeing someone do a self-protectively half-assed job at playing physical comedy, or watching someone throw herself into it when she's so devoid of talent, skill, or even physical grace that you wish she'd be content to just sit on a folding chair in the middle of the set and read aloud from a script in her lap? I'm giving this one to Schwartzman on points. Cougar Town is about a 40-year-old divorcee who complains with her girlfriends about how hard dating is for women in their situation, which means that it gives you the chance to see people who've spent their whole adult lives, and in some cases more time than that, in the Los Angeles-based entertainment industry trying to address a subject of interest to actual residents of planet Earth. The results are a show in which it's a given that any middle-aged unmarried man is beating nubile college girls off him with a stick and the teenage boys are so dazzled by the discovery that Cox's character is a sexual being that they begin stealing the reality signs off her lawn so they can masturbate to her picture, as if they were starved for material to feed their horny imaginations and couldn't for the life of them figure out how to Google "Megan Fox." Cougar Town even begins with a scene in which Cox examines her sagging body parts, including her tummy, in close-up. This scene is quickly followed by a scene in which, wearing nothing but her bikini underwear beneath her robe, she marches out into the street and finds an excuse to flash a kid on a bicycle. The real reason for it, of course, is that it's simpler and cheaper than having the network send a mass email to everyone who might have seen the show to let us know that the flabby thing we saw earlier wasn't really Courtney's midsection, which in the flashing thing looks as if John Badham could use it to play "Moby Dick."

Cox herself has a teenage son in the show. He is played by a kid whose distracting resemblance to Corey Feldman really should have disqualified him from work in the film and TV world.

--Dan Humphrey and his high school pals on Gossip Girl are in college now, and all the beautiful literature-besotted trendies who must have been hiding behind the barn when I was in college--there's one on Californication too; she tells David Duchovny's "bad boy novelist" that "words" are her "drug of choice"--want to be Dan's groupies because he was in The New Yorker's "20 Under 20" special issue. I take this to be a fantasy issue of that magazine that published work by twenty writers under the age of twenty. Has any publication that generally targets a more adult audience than the market demo of Cricket (my own grizzled age may be showing--do they still publish that?) ever even dreamed of such a thing? Am I the only one who, upon learning of this wrinkle in Gossip Girl's fantasy of what New York is like, experienced a full-body shudder at the very thought? I guess it's conceivable that twenty residents of our planet might be able to produce one small piece of writing each that one might read while the coffee cooled without inducing violent retching, though I know all too well that I would never have been one of them. They'd have needed intense training and coaching from a serious, exacting mentor and literary adviser, though. Those who stopped in on Gossip Girl during its previous season may remember that Dan Humphrey himself learned everything he knows at the knee of special guest Jay McInerney--who probably thinks that he should have been given the editorship of The New Yorker before he was twenty.




--Speaking of Californication: I watched a few episodes of this when it started a couple of years back, and though I remember having bailed on it because I thought it was just horrible, somebody told me that I should give it another chance and see how it had evolved. Most of Showtime's original series are conceived as a game of capture-the-flag to see who can push the envelope farthest, and Californication, which had an edge on the competition as soon as it got christened with that title, may be the one that passes furthest into the black hole of self-parody. David Duchovny spent most of the '90s playing a character who was meant to be simultaneously brilliant, sexy, and celibate. (Fox Mulder's fixation on pornography would have been a lot less funny if he'd looked like somebody who might plausibly have had a problem getting laid.) This turns out to have been the ideal groundwork for playing a self-styled artist who's a congenital horndog with verbal diarrhea as smugly and insufferably as possible. (In Duchovny's quest to achieve unparalleled heights of facile loathsomeness, it helps that he directed the season premiere himself, so there would be no filter between himself and his self-admiration.) Californication badly wants to be a new, cutting-edge provocation, but it's tethered to an image of the writer as untamed cocksman and wild man that is most appealing and convincing to people who don't read. Duchovny is meant to be summing up both his character and his character's vocation when he says, "So I'm an asshole because I say what everybody else is thinking?" Nobody on the set seems to have thought about it long enough to recognize that anybody who would come up with that line, or have frequent need to cite it, would actually have his own shock radio show now.

New additions to the cast include Kathleen Turner as a sexually voracious literary agent, giving to talk of coming like a gorilla and such. I can understand why Turner would have refused to speak the lines written for her, but whose idea was it to have her dubbed by Harvey Fierstein?

Next week on Californication: Duchovny meets special guest Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl! I anticipate scenes that will do for smug preening what Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant's scenes in Coppola's Dracula movie did for arch sneering.

--And two broadcast episodes and a week after my post making cruel sport of its premiere, The Beautiful Life has been declared the first cancellation of the new TV season. If only I could use my powers to create instead of to destroy...

Again: What It Means

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

--Barbara Bush on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina




"Remembering Kirsten Brydum" at Counterpunch.

New in Nerve

Ten Sexual Controversies That Changed TV

[Read the extra-long-ass "director's cut" here.]

Alphabet Soup

Michael Sragow once wrote that "when a movie fad runs out of gas, it occasionally brings forth a final, anticlimactic belch." The same goes for television, big time. The Beautiful Life, which had its premiere on the CW last night, is a gassy emission that's blow back from Gossip Girl, Dirty Sexy Money, Lipstick Jungle, maybe even a little Models, Inc. It cratered in the ratings and may not be around much longer, but the network is threatening to rerun the pilot this Friday and Sunday night, and connoisseurs of unintentional parody may find it worth their time. The setting is the glamorously cutthroat world of the New York fashion world. In terms of prominence of billing and name recognition, the show's star is Mischa Barton, but the romantic leads are actually Sara Paxton as Raina, a fresh-faced blonde newcomer to the modeling business, and Ben Hollingsworth as Chris, a farm boy--people actually address him as "farm boy" to make sure that you get the idea--from "Center Point, Iowa" who's so much newer than even her that he makes her look like Robert Morse as Bert Cooper in full gnomic sage mode. Just in the course of the first half hour of the first episode, he manages to display bewilderment upon hearing the terms "go-see" and "backdrop", indicating that not only don't they get Project Runway in Center Point, they don't even have a Sears photo department. When farm boy is introduced to the big agency boss (Elle Macpherson) and she asks him if he has some photos of himself to show her, he replies, "I have a picture of me and my sister at the Statue of Liberty."

Simon, the gay talent scout who is Elle Macpherson's right arm, is convinced that farm boy has something special, though, so he sends him to the loft of the hottest photographer in New York to start building his portfolio. Raina, who at some point has been told that if you just keep making a cute shrug with your eyes wide and your lips pooched out whenever you're stuck for a reaction pose it never gets old, tags along for moral support. The hottest photographer in New York asks farm boy what kind of music he likes, and farm boy being farm boy, "Sweet Home Alabama" is soon blaring in the loft. But even with the sweet sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd to set him at ease, farm boy can't seem to get into his groove. Raina knows just what to do: she changes the music to something sexy-trancey, sits down next to farm boy, and whispers in his ear: "Just relax. Listen to the music. Imagine you're in the shower. Shut your eyes. You're in the shower and the water's warm. Can you feel it? Breathe in the heat and the steam. Let the warm water fall all around you. Now open your eyes." To my great disappointment, when he does open his eyes, he does not say, "Nina Garcia is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

As for Mischa Barton, she plays Sonja, the hot model of six months ago, whose star cooled went she vanished, secretly had a baby by a mystery man whose offers of help and money she spits on through her cell phone, and returned to the runway only to discover at the last minute that she couldn't fit into the dress she was supposed to showcase at special guest star Zac Posen's show because she had "gained two pounds." I don't want to join in the bitch press in jumping all over Barton, who's been through so many tabloid exploits since leaving The O.C. (where she was dependably sweet and likable for as long as the writers gave her something to work with) that her presence here as a celebrity train wreck amounts to stunt casting. The fact remains that, cast as some version of her own public image, she plays a disintegrating diva like a high school student who's working from her close study of old Lana Turner movies. (Other prematurely faded names in the credits include Liz Phair as a member of the music-poaching team and Ashton Kutcher as one of the series producers. In the first scene, Raina is about to hit the runway when she's told that the celebs sitting out from include "Gwen [Fred?], Ashton, and Renee [Fleming?]." Seriously, is this a joke? That's the best company that Kutcher can arrange for his off-screen cameo in his own show? He couldn't have suggested that he be described as sitting with Barack, Serena, Zooey, and Bradgelina?) The cast also includes a scheming model with a British accent that she ought to consider losing even the actress is really British, a loutish mimbo who deals some cocaine to a bit player who might as well be wearing the words "I AM AN UNDERCOVER COP" on her forehead in flashing neon letters, and High School Musical's Corbin Bleu as an aspiring musician who used to be a star in TV commercials as a child model but now spends his nights trying to find a club D.J. to slip his demos to. Just what you want in a character in a happening contemporary serial: a guy who combines the back stories of Madonna and Rodney Allen Rippy.

Over the summer, the first TV shows appeared that seemed designed to acknowledge the different world we've been living in since last year's economic collapse, including Hung (the HBO comedy about a divorced, homeless--and, as of the season finale, laid off--40-year-old high school coach who tries to pick up some extra scratch as a male prostitute) and The Philanthropist, a half-hearted attempt to make a hero out of a feverishly generous gazillionaire which, despite a strong cast (including James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams--Marc Anthony meets Omar Little!), sank without a trace on NBC. Like some other new shows, The Beautiful Life represents a defiant attempt to not just shut out any trace of reality but to refuse to seek out new forms of escapism that might have a little more resonance than the wet dreams of the Bush II years. But really marks the show as pathetically dead in the water even before it's begun is the fact that its official title is really The Beautiful Life: TBL. Those poor sad letters insistently flash on the screen in a way that makes you painfully aware of the network's doomed hope that people will eagerly text, twitter, and maybe even say out loud "TBL" to identify the show, and there's just nothing more pitiful than someone or something trying to persuade you that it's so culturally omnipresent that it has its own acronym. Whoever had this genius idea probably thought that it was very much of the moment, like those subway ads that tied Gossip Girls to the phrase "OMG!" But it really just links The Beautiful Life to such earlier flops as Darren Star's Central Park West AKA CPW--the final, anticlimactic belch of the 1995-1996 TV season.

Truth Squad

Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The The Untold Story of a War, and the Story of the Man Who Told It spins its wheels when it resorts to hyped-up pseudo-thriller staging and amateurish-looking animated bits, but it has a major resource in its title character: Ellsberg himself, who, along with his wife, Patricia, and Tony Russo, his co-conspirator in the plan to leak the Pentagon Papers, agreed to be extensively interviewed for the movie and basically narrates his story. The movie keeps cutting back and forth between photos and news footage of the charismatic, handsome Ellsberg in his late thirties and forties and the now 78-year-old, weathered but still photogenic Ellsberg, who is seen both in the directors' interviews with him and in scenes of him still participating in political activity, even getting hauled away from an Iraq War demonstration in handcuffs. The effect is of seeing a natural star slowly turn into a sage.

When Dangerous Man (which opens today at Film Forum, local New Yorkers: the Ellsbergs are scheduled to be present tonight and tomorrow) gets self-consciously movie-ish, it seems to want to be a real-life version of such '70s conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View. Actually, as Ehrlich and Goldsmith tell it, their story has the solid kernel of a Hollywood movie, but one that's basically a love story. Ellsberg met Patricia in the early 1960s; he was a former Marine officer and Harvard graduate who already had one marriage (which had produced a son and a daughter) behind him and was a fervent Cold Warrior who worked for the RAND Corporation and as an assistant to Robert McNamara. Ellsberg's duties at the Pentagon kept him so busy that he didn't often have the time to date, and when he called Patricia the first chance he had after meeting her at a party and was told that she was planning to attend an anti-Vietnam march on the weekend, he proposed that it double as their first date, while hoping and praying that nobody recognized him. Ellsberg would eventually ask her to marry him, but when she expressed concern about reconciling the best qualities she saw in him with his work devoted to keeping the Vietnam war going, he (in her words) retreated to a place where she couldn't reach and disappeared from her life.

By the time they reconnected, he was a secret dove on the verge of turning whistle blower, and I'd begun imagining the two of them portrayed in a romantic comedy starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams. (I didn't know this when I saw the movie, but it seems that the Ellsbergs have already been played by James Spader and Claire Forlani, in a 2003 TV film called The Pentagon Papers, which also featured Paul Giamatti as Tony Russo. I haven't seen it, but Ellsberg shared his impressions of of it here.) Once Ellsberg decided to steal a copy of the Defense Department's classified secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and circulate it to the newspapers, the scheme soon turned into a family project. Ellsberg invited his kids to help him, because, he says, he didn't want to deny them the chance to be part of making history--his ex-wife took a different attitude about it, especially after their son received his first subpoena--and there's a hilarious description of the three of them working in tandem to copy the report and faking out a guard who knocked on the door and was disarmed by the innocent-looking family tableu.

There are a couple of vital points to be made about Ellsberg and what I guess might be called his radicalization that may fly in the face of common assumption but that may also be highly revealing about the way such transformations work and political commitment is formed. For one thing, Ellsberg, probably unlike the mass of people who supported the war and continue to defend it as a noble cause, was deeply involved in the fate of the Vietnamese people and cared about what was happening to them. In the movie, we see him visiting the country in the sixties, getting to know the people there and seeing first hand how the policies he was paid to support affected their lives. His reaction made for an interesting contrast with that of, say, Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the Iraq War supporter who has done the most to emphasize his own first-hand commitment to the people of Iraq. Because he cared about them, and because they were ruled over by a tyrant who didn't care about the quality of their lives, Hitchens felt that it was necessary to show how much he cared by supporting the killing of as many Iraqis as possible and the upending of their lives, trading the thoughtless misery caused by Saddam for misery inflicted on them by those who claimed to care very much. Ellsberg regretted that the Vietnamese people had to suffer any miseries at all, and preferred that he not be complicit in whatever suffering they were made to endure. A neocon would say that he liked the sturdy moral fiber of someone who could settle into his comfortable town house at night and toast himself on being brave enough to approve of destroying people to save them from tyranny.



The most exciting part of the movie arrives when Ellsberg slips the report to the New York Times and the paper begins publishing it on its contents on its front page on June 13, 1971. What follows is a thrilling pre-Internet saga of journalistic hot potato, much of it relayed in the film by TV clips of a visibly elated Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News: When Nixon's Attorney General and future convicted felon, John Mitchell, got an injunction to stop the paper from running its ongoing series of excerpts, the Washington Post jumped on board and, picking up at the point where the Times had left off, began running its series until it received its own injunction, at which point Ellsberg slipped a copy to another paper. The report kept going from paper to paper until the tree was fully tapped. (People like Judith Miller who only transcribe the words of those with a vested interest in what's going on, submit them to their paper, and call that journalism invariably explain that this is what their job is; I'd love to know what the hell they think the Times and company were doing.) eanwhile, Alaska Senator Mike Gravel acquired his own copy and, on June 29, quietly called a one-man meeting of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds and used the occasion to enter the report into the Congressional Record.

Ellsberg and Russo would go on to face felony charges, but the idea that they were traitors, or that the charges could have stuck, says less about the nature of their act than it does about the priorities and mindset of hardcore advocates of government secrecy. The report, which had been sitting in the files since 1968, revealed nothing that the Vietnamese didn't know and might have cared about. It was originally classified as secret because its authors didn't want President Johnson to read its pessimistic conclusions, and it was kept secret after Johnson left office because it contained material that the government didn't want the American people to know. It was regarded as top secret not because its release would have in any way dented national security but because its release would have exposed the U.S. government to embarrassment and worse. The fact that Nixon and his Justice Department actually thought that Ellsberg had committed a treasonable offense by making public information that didn't even reflect on their own administration is proof that there are people who genuinely believe that protecting governments from honest accountability is a defensible use of the "national security" veil. It is also proof that such people are completely unfit to govern, and possibly unfit to operate heavy machinery or drive on public roads.

If we could use more people like Ellsberg, the movie leaves you with a view of the man that may suggest why more of them don't emerge. (At one point, someone describes jury selection in the Ellsberg case and remembers saying that it would be best for the defendants to pack the box with younger people, because a jury composed of middle-aged people would likely include several who had compromised their own ideals by then and gone to some pains to convince themselves that they'd done the right, responsible grown-up thing; such people would likely view Ellsberg with a great deal of contempt, partly because his story made them hate themselves a little.) Though he seems to enjoy talking his way down memory lane, Ellsberg claims to have been disappointed by what little effect he feels his actions had; people got caught up in the story of the papers' publication, but not enough people actually, really read them. Thirty years later, he and his wife were protesting a whole new unnecessary, mismanaged war, one that was midwifed by a couple of venal loads whose attitudes towards public service and government's nonexistent responsibility to the people were formed during their own youthful service in the Nixon administration. Ellsberg seems reluctant to reject the idea that it may have all been for nothing. But when he's loaded into a paddy wagon near the end, he's smiling.

White Noise Redux

Jimmy Carter's remarks that Joe Wilson's freak out was "fueled by racism" will of course please those at Fox News and other organizations who would see the chance to ridicule the stated opinion of Jimmy Carter, history's greatest monster, as reason enough to believe that the sun must be cold. And this particular development will inspire delighted hooting from the kind of hacks who get all giddy and hug themselves as they think about what deliciously bad boys they must be to always have such a dependable vice grip on the conventional wisdom. I know that what's important here is who wins the spin war and what gives hacks a giggle, but those lost souls who care about who's right and who's not should keep in mind that racist Southern politicians happen to occupy a space where Jimmy Carter has a tremendous amount of hard-won moral authority. Five years before most Americans heard of him as he was running for president, Carter was featured on the cover of Time magazine as the face of the "new South", and the first lines of the article, taken from the Georgia governor's first inaugural address--"I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Our people have already made this major and difficult decision. No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice."--wasted no time in making it clear what it was about the South that needed to be made new.

As the replacement for Lester Maddox, the self-made goober immortalized in the lead cut of Randy Newman's greatest album, Carter arrived in the early seventies with the promise that the South could get over its decades-long post-Civil War temper tantrum, adapt its codes to fit the most basic and obvious moral truisms, and stop priding itself on harboring the kind of ignorance and barbarism typified by Maddox and Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond because it got a morbid tingle out of how aghast such behavior seemed to make the uptight Yankees. With the issue of segregation settled, the South could shrug, reflect that it had enjoyed its fun, and then grow up and raise a generation that could compete at full mental strength with the rest of the country. Almost forty years later, the South, egged on and exploited by chiselers and demagogues who flattered its worst qualities, has degenerated into a place that talks up its patriotism while insisting on seeing itself as another country, at war with the half of the United States that generates the entertainment and media (including, horror of horrors, even Fox News) and processes its subsidies and Social Security checks. If anyone, even Mickey Kaus, really believes that this has been more beneficial and less damaging to the world than Carter's brand of "smug moralizing", I'd hate to meet him.

The stated objections of Joe Wilson's son to Carter's scolding of his old man should help spinners on either side depict the exchange as a family feud between a couple of hillbillies. It's worth remembering that Wilson used to work for Strom Thurmond, and that after Essie Mae Washington-Williams publicly acknowledged, after Thurmond's death, that she was his daughter by a black maid that the 22-year-old Thurmond had impregnated when the woman was 16, Wilson was quick to denounce the woman for having sullied his mentor's reputation. He later apologized, because these patterns repeat. But it's hard no to think that it says a lot about a man's mindset and values that, when he reflects on the fact that a powerful colleague had a daughter he kept a secret for most of his life while devoting much of his career working hard to deny her the basic human rights befitting a citizen of this country, he can't contain his anger at the daughter he sees as an inconvenience who has stained a great man's name because she had the poor grace to be born. Thurmond was part of a generation of politicians who, on the single most important and the most clear-cut moral issue of their time, disgraced themselves and proved themselves to have souls made of shit. It would seem to be a no-brainer that anyone who managed to be wrong on the issue of whites-only drinking fountain should never be trusted to decide anything else, but a lot of folks like Thurmond managed to have long careers and be treated with deferential respect after desegregation became the law of the land, even as having opposed the Vietnam War was being cited as reason enough to accuse people of treason thirty years after that unpopular war ended, even people who'd earned the right to criticize it by fighting in it.

Thurmond and others found ways to explain that what they'd been up to wasn't rooted in racism but in "states' rights" and other alibis worthy of the Island of Misfit Toys, and in the end, they paid less for their views than did later-generation Southern pols, such as Wilson and Trent Lott, who figured they'd better tribute to this rotting dinosaurs and found out the hard way that there are right ways and wrong ways to go about it. I still think it's a shame that, when it was decided that having wanted to deny people the right to vote on the basis of skin color, it wasn't at least agreed that it would be a good way to make sure that the reformed segs were marked so that people trying to evaluate their views on the latest issues could be reminded of their past and how much their views were worth. First Lieutenant Aldo Raine might have had some ideas about how this could be done, and if I'd been there at the time, I'd have been honored to hold some of them down for him.



Of course, "everybody's a racist." I got that one in my comments box some years ago, in response to what probably remains the most-viewed post in the history of the Experience, the one about Don Imus and his mealy mouth. This is a popular construction among racists and other idiots of every stripe, and it isn't true. I suppose the idea behind it is that "everybody" has, at some point, at the end of a long day standing in front of the pizza oven in late summer heat and Radio Raheem and Buggin Out come barging in again, been so pissed off at someone that, in everybody's heart of hearts, the list of reasons why you are sick of the sight of this fool expands to include the color of his skin and maybe the rumor you heard that two of his toes are webbed. But everybody probably, at some point, thinks that it sure would help out with the student loan debt if everybody could come up with a plan to rob Fort Knox, and this does not make everybody a thief. A racist is someone committed to the sort of rancid views that everybody probably has entertained at the worst moments of his or her life. These thoughts are not invariably connected to feelings of hate, which is why the best display of righteous indignation that you will ever see comes from racists who have been accused of racism and can't imagine why, since they don't hate anybody. Lester Maddox always swore that he didn't hate anybody, he just didn't think that blacks had any more business eating at the same restaurants as white people than dogs had sitting at the dinner table, if not less. He was beloved by a vast number of white people who didn't hate anybody, they were just fed up with having the gummint tell them how they had to live their lives. You could extrapolate something from the fact that they were able to deal with the gummint telling them that they had to register for the draft and put stamps on their envelopes but all suddenly agreed that a line had been crossed when the gummint told them that their kids would have to go to school with black kids, but that would be oh so very rude.

Of course, some expressions of racism are--I almost wrote "less blatant", but screw that, let's say that some of them are less openly cretinous than others. When some tobacco-chawin' waste of space calls Michelle Obama close kin to a gorilla or a grits-swilling embarrassment circulates a picture of Obama with a bone through his nose, that's at one end of the extreme; the worst part of it isn't the insult itself but the awful feeling you may have that the poor dumbassess think they're clever. "Haw haw, they done called me on whut I said about Michelle and King Kong, an' I just told 'em that that's just what she must think, since she believes in the evil-ution. I guess they learned better than to mess with me (To any first-time readers horrified that I have just used stereotypical Southern images to describe people who have chosen to act like stereotypical Southern losers: I'm from Mississippi, okay? Now get off my foot.)

Then there's such bullshit as the story about some black bullies beating on a white kid on a school bus and the way that it's been picked up by the likes of Rush Limbaugh: "It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,' and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white." Of course, white kids have gotten beaten up on school buses since forever and nobody, least of all Rush Limbaugh, ever gave a shit, but that was before there was a dollar to be made by tapping into the fears and hatreds of white people so dim-witted and so alienated from the thought of a colorblind society that they picture an American with a non-white leadership class and can only imagine it wanting to do to them what they wouldn't mind doing to non-blacks. (And to hell with giving Limbaugh himself the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he himself is just a master manipulator. He's too good at seeing anti-white feeling in every blade of grade to be immune to those feelings himself.) If the best test of whether a charge of anti-white racism is utter bullshit is to imagine what those making the charge would say if the roles were reversed and people were calling an act of school bullying against a black kid racist, the school bus incident doesn't begin to pass the smell test; Limbaugh and company have picked up on much more suspect incidents and openly ridiculed the idea that white bigotry played a role, let alone that they said something about the influence of the current president.

It's too stupid to be worth talking about. But the fact that right winger attack drones are talking about is a topic essential for discussion. It wasn't much more than a year ago that pundits were assuring us that the people who brought us "Al Gore, Serial Liar" and the Swift Boat follies would never stoop to trying to appeal to people based on uneasiness about Obama's race, because...well, they just wouldn't. Their fundamental decency would come to the fore, and even if it turned out they didn't have any fundamental decency, appeals to racism are just somehow way different than, say, attacking a man for having fought for his country in war. It wouldn't pay of in the long wrong; it would turn off more people than it would win over, and the demagogues would self-immolate. Turns out they underestimated how little the right cares about anything but making life miserable for everybody else and listening to itself holler. At times like this, it's worth remembering that, at the atomic level of political culture and social development, Jim Crow itself only happened because too many people who might have refused it and shamed it into submission said, "You know, I can't say these people make much sense to me, but they sure do feel strongly about things, and some of them seem to br crazy. It's probably better for all involved if we just let them have their way. Especially for the colored people--they're the first ones they'll go after if they get angry." The role of the demagogues is to keep pushing the line between what's considered acceptable discourse and what's considered the ravings of a psycho in a tin foil hat farther and farther in the direction of screaming bedlam. It has to stop.

Oops

Slate's Jack Shafer in a piece on the the failings of Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth: "I thank the Fates every day that my greatest professional mistakes came when nobody was watching."

I've turned this over and over in my head for close to an hour, trying to divine its real meaning, reluctant admit that it can only mean what it seems to mean: at some point, on more than one occasion (note the plural "mistakes"), when nobody was watching, Jack Shafer did something more completely, hair-raisingly, indefensibly stupid than write this!

It should be noted that it only took Shafer six months to figure out that he might want to post a grudging mini-retraction, though he did admit to wishing that he could wait another six months. I guess that when November 2003 rolled around, the teasing you were getting around the office for your use, half a year earlier , of the past tense in the passage "George W. Bush had a good war. Donald Rumsfeld had a good war..." might be starting to sting. The fact remains that Shafer not only bought into the WMD fantasy but that he was willing to boast that he bought into it because he found Bush and Rumsfeld more credible than, say, a legendary investigative reporter and the United Nations weapons inspectors team. Given the popular misconception that "everybody"--which isn't a misconception, really, but a reminder that the media doesn't think that anyone not caught in the lockstep of conventional wisdom counts as anybody--believed that Saddam had a dangerous stockpile of weapons, it would be a hard sell to say that this is not a belief that could have ever been embraced by intelligent people, even though, in retrospect, the fact-based reasons for believing it were very to nonexistent. So let's cut the difference and say that "everybody", including Shafer, based their opinion about a matter of international importance not on any available facts or the likely credibility of either side but on who was promising them a month of really good cable news that would make them feel as if they had brass balls painted red, white and blue.

This is still going to haunt me, though. Shafer, by his own admission, has done more than one thing in the course of his career that was worse than thinking that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had a sounder grip on how war and the world work than Seymour Hersh, and when he did it, nobody was looking. What the hell could that have been? Did he write an essay urging the first President Bush to stay vigilant against the Communist menace that he was just about to send to his editor when he got the word that the Berlin Wall was coming down? Compliment Ronald Reagan on his performance in Red River? Suggest to Mickey Kaus that he might enjoy blogging? Somehow, none of these have quite the wild-eyed, numbskull brio of using the cerrainty that the Iraq War was both necessary to our national security and an immediate success as an excuse to bash Sy Hersh. Maybe nobody was watching when Shafer did whatever it is he's thinking of here, but I hope to God that, after he dies, some video turns up.

Brotherly

Ted Kennedy's memoir hits the stores today; Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo has an exclusive excerpt in which Kennedy, writing about the frenzied salesmanship of the Iraq War, basically douses Dick Cheney in gasoline and then lights his cigar for him. ("Cheney seemed agreeable to me at first, affable and smart, even though we had different political views. His votes were ultraconservative. Maybe we just didn't notice how extreme he was because his positions didn't carry the day. But when he became vice president, he had the power, but he lacked the good judgment to see beyond those extreme views.") I was out in the hallway having a smoke and bothering the cleaning woman when the Senator died last month; I did think about logging on and writing something to mark his passing, but I decided that I didn't have anything to say that wouldn't likely be covered by someone else. Besides, being offline made for a good vantage point from which to observe the obituary notices from those not inclined to be appreciative of Kennedy's life work--or, worse, those who might have been expected to be appreciative of it on some level but who felt they had to do justice to their bad boy images. For those looking for an original angle, what would they be able to latch onto that would make all those Chappaquiddick references in everybody else's snarkfests seem old hat? Unsurprisingly, Christopher Hitchens did stellar work here, using a litany of Kennedy's tabloid headlines and personal failings to set up the begrudging claim that whatever good he did in life can perhaps be appreciated as an attempt, albeit probably an insufficient one, to "atone" for all the foul attacks committed by his older brothers during John's presidential term, which barely overlapped with Ted's career in public service by as much as a year.

I don't know how much the line about Cheney is typical of what's in the book, but I do know that, if anyone had a right to settle scores with people from beyond the grave, it was Kennedy. For some thirty years or more, as the country grew ever more reactionary, no national politician had a stronger image as Mr. Unrepentant Liberal, yet no one in Congress did more to play the thankless role of bipartisan deal maker, He Who Reaches Across the Aisle. As a reward, he got to stand for target practice from a lot of people who, in a sane world, would not be considered morally or intellectually qualified to pass judgment on most of what passes for human in the dock at the Hague. According to the recent piece on Donald Rumsfeld in GQ, the Bush administration briefly considered thanking Kennedy for his help on passing the No Child Left Behind legislation by giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, only to be shot down by the always classy Rumsfeld, who blurted out "“They can’t give Kennedy a medal! Not after he murdered that woman!” Then he stuck his hands back under the water faucet and resumed yelling at his aides to find out how the hell long it's supposed to take to get all this blood washed off.

As a child of the seventies, I grew up in the shadow of the shadow of Camelot; I remember a lot of awed murmurings when the subject of the Senator's murdered brothers came up but not a lot in the way of details about what they'd done to deserve this kind of reverence. And when Ted Kennedy himself first really impressed himself on my consciousness, it was when he began his run against the incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1979 and 1980. It was a doomed campaign that would be echoed many years later by Bob Dole's sacrificial-victim campaign against Bill Clinton in 1996. Both men were natural-born legislators who stepped out of the place they belonged because they felt that it was what was expected of them--in Dole's case, as the inevitable capstone to a long political career, in Kennedy's case because, well, he had to pick up the gauntlet and do what Kennedy men did. And the public and the media, sensing that he was unworthy to follow his brothers, really kicked the crap out of him, starting with the notorious Roger Mudd interview where Kennedy was seen as unable to formulate a coherent answer to the question, "Why do you want to be president?" In retrospect, it didn't help that Kennedy was performing in the pre-DVR/You Tube era; most people didn't see the interview when it was broadcast but read the damning transcript that appeared in countless stories after it was deemed newsworthy, and the transcribers had been careful to include all the myriad pauses and "um"s that one scarcely notices when listening to someone speak off the cuff but which, when seen in print, would make Cyrano de Bergerac seem like Boo Radley.

So I didn't think much of Kennedy for most of the first months that I was aware of his existence. Then, of course, he arrived at the Democratic National Convention and, on August 12, 1980, delivered the speech that more or less redefined him in the public eye as a singular individual with his own legacy to build and perhaps the premier American political orator of his generation. It was a real barn burner of a speech, a passionate statement of what America owed to liberalism and what liberalism could still do for the country, as well as a scathing frontal assault on Ronald Reagan's blinkered mental complacency that used a hilarious litany of Reagan's own words to depict him as a man lost in dreamland with a merry smile and a calcified heart. It was the kind of thing that Southern kids like me, raised to think of politics as spectator sport, used to watch the conventions in vain hope of seeing, and of course, I missed it. I watched every other night of both the Republican and Democratic conventions that year, back in the days when networks boasted of their "gavel-to-gavel coverage" and watching them meant submitting to a prolonged assault on your eyeballs. But, having bought into the conventional wisdom at that time that the Senator from Massachusetts was a burnt-out load, I figured that was as good a night as any to let my mom take me and my sister to see Airplane! I did eventually catch up with the speech on one of the many subsequent occasions when it was replayed on C-SPAN. It was worth the wait, and I can't say that, while I was waiting, I didn't learn something good to know about the value of conventional wisdom.



Judging from the more generous obituaries I read last month, much of what once would have been controversial to say about Kennedy--including the distinct possibility that he was finally the most historically important and politically valuable of his siblings--is now itself conventional wisdom. Kennedy himself might have shrugged that suggestion off, but he might have wryly conceded that he was able to have the career he had thanks to who his brothers were. Whatever he had of them in his DNA may have had less to do in shaping who he was than his ties to his maternal grandfather, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the Boston mayor described by Robert Dallek as "a natural politician—a charming, impish, affable lover of people", and a man whose boisterous public style was regarded by many people as an old-school, vulgar embarrassment compared to the cool, modern Kennedy style. Kennedy, like his grandfather, was a politician; John and Robert Kennedy became martyrs, and icons. People project their hopes, especially those that they feel will never be realized, onto icons; politicians work to get things done. (And for all the hateful "jokes" about Kennedy being out of shape and a drunken womanizer and worse, the intense hatred that many right-wingers feel for him even now can be chalked up not to any real disgust for his personal style but to the simple fact that he believed that people of good will could use politics to get things done--that he was, simply, the definition of a legislator, and a walking inconvenience to people on the left who get off on talking about government itself as Tea Party nimrods talk about it, as the enemy. Nor did his identity as a man of privilege who thought that the poor and disadvantaged were human beings whose lives could be made easier by government programs, rather than as rabble to be lied to and roiled, make him look any less like a man out of time in the age of the Bush dynasty. Of course, by 2003 he clung to a lot of outdated, unfashionable views--such as the view that war is something to be taken seriously and avoided if at all possible, instead of something to be cooked up and rushed into so that you could strut around posing as a bad ass.) John Kennedy, and maybe especially Bobby, can serve a purpose in death as heroic examples, but the greatest things done in President Kennedy's name were done by hard-knuckled politicians--first President Johnson, who used the iconic power of Kennedy's martyrdom to shame the Congress into getting behind the fight for civil rights, and then brother Ted, whose shared name with his brothers helped keep him electorally safe all his long, unfashionable, complicated life. For both men, the cost, which each of them seemed happy to put up with, was that they would never get as much love or credit for what they did as would be accorded to the icons. Being a politician can be its own kind of martyrdom.

How Far We've Come Department

Pete Campbell on last night's Mad Men, contemplating the high numbers of a brand of TV set in Detroit in Kansas City: "Could it be that Negroes are buying them more than other people"?

You know what struck me when I heard that line? If the same observation had been made by Joe Wilson or Saxby Chandliss or a member of Glenn Beck's target audience, do you think that any of them would have been sure to say "other"?

You Lie, Joe!

In my last post about Smokin' Joe Wilson and his outburst at the president's speech--I almost wrote his "deranged" outburst, but that gives it too much credit for originality and liveliness; he yelled "You lie!" at the leader of the free world in the way that others of his personality type would yell "Get off my lawn!" to a Girl Scout on cookie patrol--I neglected to touch on what is actually a very important part of the incident, which is, was Obama lying at the time the accusation was made? Because even if you think that it would be wrong to so rudely interrupt the president under such circumstances, it does make a big difference whether the interrupter in question was a kneejerk jackass looking for something to fume about or if he was a disgruntled truth teller who just couldn't take it anymore. If the latter were the case, I myself would be tempted to flirt with contrarianism and suggest that Joe had set an example that his more polite, lie-swallowing colleagues might be encouraged to follow sometime. One reason that I didn't bother to touch on this is that I thought it was known by all that Joe was wrong as shit; the claim by Obama that set him off, i.e. that illegal immigrants will not be covered by his health care plan, was of course true, and anyone who suspected that it might be otherwise really overestimates how much politicians enjoy hearing Lou Dobbs talk about them as if they were the Vampire of Düsseldorf. Thus did Joe Wilson--who, to the surprise of no one, has quickly gone from apologizing for his vile outburst to imploring his fellow citizens to fill his campaign coffers to help him fend off outback by those who would crucify him for speaking truth to power--join the ever-growing ranks of the loudest bunch of scam artists to emerge in the last twenty years, the multipartisan sect that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly, Oliver Stone, and a goddamn reserve army of birthers, 9/11 truthers, and certain elected members of Congress, the self-appointed whistle blowers and defenders expose artists and stubborn defenders of the truth who hardly ever have their facts right.

What these jokers lack in seriousness they make up for with their natural closeness to their fan base. There's a shared assumption there about how being a truth teller works that leads to e bond more consistent than any that could be formed by any two people who are actually committed to the truth: nobody who actually knows the facts can ever agree on anything, but the people we might, in Colbertspeak, call the truthiness tellers start out with certain assumptions and accept that whichever red-faced bellowing load is massaging those assumptions must be the one telling the truth. The facts are no merely irrelevant but to avoided, as a potential threat, like the siren song of President Obama trying to seduce kids into a life of Socialism by telling them to stay in school and get grades. It's the evil messenger, not the innocuous message, that matters, and the fact that you view the messenger as evil may not actually be based on any message that he's ever actually delivered. A couple of weeks ago, when I was taking the pulse of the nation regarding health care, I was struck by how many people who, when invited to explain in their own words what they found most troubling about the issue, were quick to say that it was the mysterious unknowability of it all. Many of them thought that health care reform was needed, but not this health care reform. And they couldn't explain what was wrong with it, because nobody knows what's in the proposed legislation. They meant that literally. They meant that no one outside Washington would be allowed to know exactly what was being proposed until it was too late, and they had a problem with the "fact" that none of the people in Congress who would actually vote on it would be permitted to read it first, either. From the sound of it, some of them didn't think Obama himself knows what's in there. They seemed to think that an alien spacecraft had beamed the whole package down and that Obama was hustling to get it passed without questions or considerations, blind to the pleas of his advisers who were concerned that the words "TO SERVE MAN" on the front of the binder might have a double meaning.

Of course, what these dimwits--and I will make no apologies for referring to people who are simultaneously trying to effect public policy and acting too stupid to deserve a dollop of respect as morons; like Barney Frank, I have a safe seat--are really doing is bragging of their own ignorance of what they're claiming to be worried about. Back in 1993, a few closed-door meetings provided the basis for people to denounce the Clinton-era health care plan as having been ginned up in secret by a scheming dominatrix and her cadre of winged monkeys. Once again, the Obama people have tried to show how much they've learned from the Clintons' mistakes by holding these town hall meetings and making information available on the Internets and basically making a big show of openness, and once again their efforts have only proved that there is no degree of openness or information that will satisfy people who base their political opinions not on the available facts but on who they choose to blame for the fact that their oatmeal was soggy this morning. Again and again, people with the exact same degree of marksmanship training as Lee Harvey Oswald have been called upon to show that they could easily squeeze off as many shots in as short a stretch of time as Oswald did at Dealey Plaza, while not a day goes by when some chowderhead with a live mike doesn't have a chortling fit as he contemplates the stupidity of us lemmings who don't know that for Oswald to have done it would be an impossible act. People who would become indignant if the bank refused to cash their check using their Blockbuster Video card as identification will never be satisfied that Obama is a U.S. citizen until they see the original copy of the nonexistent long-form copy of the special double official birth certificate with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what they are.

In a Slate report on this past weekend's "Kiss Me, I'm a Wingnut!" march, Christopher Beam describes a conversation between a sane person and a loon that sums up the whole mindset nicely. The sane person says that he knows that the health care bill has no provision for illegal illegals, because he's read it; the loon responds confidently that if he thinks that, then he didn't read it. And I'm sure he doesn't mean to call the guy a liar. He probably accepts that he read it, just as he knows in his heart that he himself knows better what's in the bill because he didn't read it. It's like Jerry Falwell used to say about movies, like The Temptation of Christ, whose existence he deemed objectionable even though he hadn't seen them and never would. You don't meet the devil halfway. If you actually learn something about what you're protesting, that just makes you vulnerable to brainwashing. If you actually read the bill and don't find all that horrible stuff in there that Sarah Palin promised is there, then that's just the proof that knowing what you're talking about will only confuse you. The devoted will go farther with this than you might want to imagine: in the wingnut documentary New World Order, an especially worthless individual can be seen trying to reach a man who says he was inside the Pentagon when the plane struck it on 9/11, carefully explaining to him that the Pentagon wasn't really struck by a plane. The creepiest thing is that he doesn't even seem to understand why telling a stranger that he wasn't almost killed like he thinks he was seems to get the fellow all heated. But it's not as if these people, some of whom probably value their first-edition copies of Report from Iron Mountain are vulnerable to irony. Beam reports that the put-on group Billionaires for Wealthcare infiltrated the march and performed a few numbers, getting a toe-tapping response from simian protesters so death-defying thick they couldn't even tell they were being made fun of. "They're for us," Beam quoted one unwitting poster child for Marxist revolution. "They're wealthy, so they're thanking everybody for coming."

I don't want to get into some Howard Beale rant about infotainment and the death of journalism and the devastating effects of reality TV, but the fact is that, in a sound bite society, loud morons have a terrific advantage over thoughtfully informed people when it comes to getting their voices heard. The people who are out there screaming for the cameras about how their country has become a stifling dictatorship because the guy who won the presidency in a landslide is permitted to take to the airwaves and roam to land freely making the best case he can for his policies may be outnumbered, but they can always find someone to broadcast their complaints about how they're being ignored and shut out, and they can't help having some effect on what's considered acceptable in the form of mainstream discussion. It's considered naive to complain that this is unfair, but aside from being unfair, it's actively destructive to our country's good at a time when serious problems need fixing. As Rick Perlstein recently pointed out, there's never been a shortage of shithead malcontents in this country, but there was a time when Birchers and their ilk weren't used by the media as pawns in this game where scary, backward-thinking, democracy-opposing nuts are floated on TV so that programmers can tap into them for their colorful energy while gauging the degree of public sympathy they may be able to generate on the basis of their puppy-dog eyes and Grant Wood faces; if they score as well as, say, Oliver North or G. Gordon Liddy, they may go overnight from menace to society to TV or radio star. There ought to be a multitude of voices in the public arena, but every single one of them ought to be speaking from some commonly accepted base of solid fact. Effecting the way the world turns just because your head hurts is too easy, too unpatriotic, and way too--what's the word I'm looking for? oh, yeah--way too fucking stupid.

Bastard Out of Carolina

What was he thinking? That's the real question that you might expect people would be asking today about South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, the guy who yelled "You lie!" at the President of the United States during a nationally televised speech in the House chamber. Wilson, a former page to the long-time South Carolina political fixture and worthless racist troglodyte Strom Thurmond, previously had his biggest moment of national attention when he delivered a report on the current state of Southern chivalry, in the form of an attack on Thurmond's illegitimate biracial daughter, whose tacky existence he saw as a vicious smear on the great man's wholly nonexistent good name. Wilson reportedly scurried out of the room as soon as the speech was over, leaving it to his Republican colleagues to rat his punk ass out to anyone who asked for the identity of the heckler. The fact that Wilson issued an apology and tried calling the White House even as John McCain was shaking his head in dismay over this gross violation of basic etiquette earns him some kind of record for a Republican figuring out that he'd done something wrong--or at least, that he'd done something that wouldn't play.

In his apology, Wilson claimed that his "lack of civility" was caused by his letting his "emotions get the best of me when listening to the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill." In other words, he's sorry he was rude, but the spectacle of the two-faced Democratic president with his bizarre and misplaced concern for poor people with serious medical problems lying his ass off was just more than he could bear; he snapped, under pressure that all honest people should be able to relate to. If Opie Taylor, still at the age when we last saw him goin' fishin' with his dad, were somehow beamed into the Capitol building, just in time to hear George W. Bush talk about Niger and yellowcake, or for his farewell address to the press corps in which he bitterly complained about how there are people now who really, mistakenly believe that the federal response to Katrina left something to be desired, then this scenario would have to be regarded as plausible. But this guy is a Republican politician who grew up under the tutelage of the last of the die-hard segregationist snake oil salesmen, and the subject at hand is the one that's generated so many Republican position papers on Death Panels and the president's commitment to Nazi eugenics; Wilson must say, and hear, more lies in an average day than I see rats enjoying the miracle of physical love together on the subway tracks. I know enough about the current mainstream Republican mindset to understand that, to him, what he perceives as a Democratic president lying about his weight must seem a million times more vexing than, say, a Republican lying about whether he's cut a deal to sell the products of our hospital nurseries to Venusians in exchange for alien technology. But still. Is anybody halfway buying this?

According to the New York Times, Brother Joe "seemed rattled in the wake of his comment"; I suspect that what he was really rattled about was his disappointed surprise at hearing crickets chirping in response to his witticism. I imagine that he thought he was getting the ball rolling, and that once he'd delivered the first angry scream at Obama's head, the rest of his brethren would fall in line and start stamping their feet, hooting, cackling, and name-calling until Obama threw down his text and fled from the room in tears, in search of his blankie. Maybe he thought that, even as the Obama administration seemed to encourage talk that the speech was their big chance to push the reset button and obliterate the memory of this past summer of screaming loons and ostentatiously displayed AK-47s, it could really serve as the coup de grace, a time to announce that no Democratic president would ever even be treated respectfully during a public address again. I actually flashed on the good old days at Walthall Academy, specifically the day when Angel Corman, the raven-haired troublemaker, lobbied everyone in the room to play a "joke" on the teacher by not taking our seats when the morning bell rang. Does Joe Wilson think he's both a revolutionary guerrilla and a lovable scamp? In his dreams, is Obama Alfalfa Switzer, and is it Joe's mission to thwart him from singing at the ladies' auxillary with his slingshot and pointy-edged hat? Angel could get away with stuff like that, because she was both the daughter of the owner of the town's largest flowery nursery and kind of easy on the eyes. I have no idea how big Joe Wilson's daddy's flower nursery is, but if he thinks that he can depend on his adorable good looks to get him out of situations like that, he might want to consider the possibility that some of his aides have been blowing smoke up his ass on the subject of the captivating nature of his great physical beauty.

In this space a year or so ago, I wrote--rather wistfully, I thought, and with some reluctance, because I remember that it pleased my grandmother for me to try to think the best of everyone who wasn't a cast member of The Young and the Restless and trying to start some shit with Victor--that the Republican party had ceased to be a real political party and become instead a criminal gang. That was back when they still had real power to effect change and control the outcome of significant elections. Now, in keeping with a party whose official policy is that Americans have so concern for one another and so little stake in a shared quality of living that that government should serve no purpose beyond military defense, they are a performance art troupe, with no ideas or goals not connected to stirring up shit to prevent any possible improvements on what we kindly refer to as the status quo, even in times of emergency. They are a people whose view of life and their fellow human beings is unremittingly black and apocalyptic, and who react to any suggestion that some things might be made better by indignantly denouncing the unpatriotic notion that things aren't already glorious almost to the point of exceeding our ability to give thanks for it all. A lot of people look at the way Republicans comport themselves now and conclude that the spectacle of a black president has driven them nuts, but it was during the time of Bill Clinton--a time when they had an obscene amount of help from so-called "progressives" in thwarting the will of the elected majority--that the Senate and the House rang with words such as "scumbag" and it was suggested that the president might not be safe from attack on U.S. military bases, and that the Wall Street Journal ran editorials calling for an investigation to confirm that the President and First Lady hadn't had a hand in the death of a White House Counsel who left behind a suicide note citing, as part of the reason for his decision to take his own life, scurrilous attacks lodged against him in the form of editorials in the Wall Street Journal.

It was during Clinton's first year in office that it was made clear that a highly vocal percentage of the Republican party made it clear that they would automatically regard any elected Democratic president "illegitimate", simply on the grounds that no Democrat had the right to follow Ronald Reagan into the Oval Office, and watching these same people fight to have George W. Bush appointed to the presidency by shutting down any effort to count the votes cast in 2000 before he'd taken the oath of office cleared up any questions one might have had regarding either their moral standards or their imperviousness to irony. With the Democrats nominally in control, they have no function whatsoever but to explore the limits of what degree of nastiness they can get away with; they have no interest in doing anything besides expanding their accepted abilities to try to tear down those attempting to run the country, and the next few years, so far as input and leadership from them goes, will likely amount to an experimental, ongoing exercise in pushing the outside of the envelope. The birthers were a hobbyhouse they could ride for a while, though in the end it was necessary to make an insincere show of being above that sort of thing, even if it took the form of not officially calling for a full-scale, taxpayer-funded investigation into the president's birthplace. On the other hand, a number of "mainstream" conservatives seem to have viewed the town hall meeting fiascoes as a chance to complain that people like Barney Frank were being meanly elitist and insulting towards everyday citizens who just wanted to know why Obama was following the Nazi playbook by trying to make health insurance affordable. If Joe Wilson had had a seizure for a reporter on Fox News about Obama's "lies" after the speech was over, he might have been the new Dan Burton; by designating himself as the one to prove that Washington isn't ready yet for the innovation of having spitting lunatics yell at the President during a speech, he instead gets to be the new Orly Taitz. But his blunder will not stop Republican scientists from continuing to work on new and exciting ways to make national politics less statesmanlike and issue-oriented and more like something that's worked out by steroid-addled, spandex-clad men with hair extensions, and someday, as the de-evolutionary process continues baby step by baby step, presidential addresses might be conducted from behind a wire mesh screen set up to protect the speaker from rotten fruit and flying beer bottles. Then Joe Wilson will be remembered as a small, bacon-flavored prophet. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round...