21st Century Man

This is a great year for Ronald Reagan nostalgia. Of course, people like Grover Norquist mean to see to it that every day is a great day to remember how American peaked during the eight years of Reagan's presidency, but the fact that last February's Super Bowl happened to fall on Reagan's hundredth birthday, and that the game was broadcast on Fox, which made it possible to begin the festivities by showing Bill O'Reilly slapping President Obama around in the Oval Office, officiallyt made that day the most American day ever. There will be reminders of Reagan's centennial spread throughout the rest of the coming year, and yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the day he was shot. I'll admit to having sort of taken Reagan's recovery period in stride at the time, but in recent years, it's become a major part of his mythology: I recently caught a History Channel documentary that made a great deal of how, by surviving being shot with a smile on his face and a skip in his walk, Reagan inspired everyone in the country by making us feel that we, as a nation, could also heal from the nightmare of having had to put up with Jimmy Carter.

I do now think that the shooting brought off support for Reagan to have a successful presidency, but in a strange, non-ideological way; I think that, after Kenndy's assassination, Johnson's retreating from running for re-election, Nixon's running from the law, the Ford hiccup, and Carter's one-term presidency, there was a tremendous hunger among people who'd survived the '60s and '70s to see someone make it through two terms in office and emerge in one piece. (This feeling really blossomed in 1987, when you could turn on the TV at any hour of the day and see some expert who seemed to be on the verge of a stroke insisting that, as bad as it was for the White House to have been conducting a secret foreign policy that betrayed most of its stated principles and broke many interesting laws to boot, Reagan simply could not be impeached, and it would be wrong to even talk about it, really.) Giving the growing likelihood that Reagan did not emerge in one piece--his son, Ron Junior, has been making himself persona non grata with the suggestion that Reagan, whose estrangement from reality was not just well known in the '80s but often touted as part of the key to his magic, may possibly have exhibited signs of Alzheimer's before leaving the White House--it's worth noting that the aftermath to the shooting also typified the reasons some of us found Reagan's presidency uncomforting and unsettling, not to say scary: it turns out that, at the time, a lot of effort was spent concealing just how close to death Reagan was and how much the shooting left him weakened and unable to work for more than a few hours at a stretch. Every few years or so, I seem to get the urge to try to make sense of Ronald Reagan, which his admirers would recognize as a confession of defeat in itself, proof that I'll never get it. You don't try to figure Reagan out, you just lie back and soak in his Reagany goodness.

The stature that Reagan's admirers insist on conferring upon him is especially mystifying if you make the mistake of thinking that it must have something to do with the policies he pursued while in office. It's not as if he can be given any credit for fiscal discipline or economic management or for proving, as Norquist and his ilk would have liked for him to prove, that low taxes and an antipathy for regulation result in big gains for everyone and a healthy nation. Reagan came into office promising to be a delivery system for the trickle down theory, but as his purist budget director David Stockman got in trouble for pointing out that the time, Reagan made a hash of things because he didn't have the heart to cut the budget as ruthlessly as the supply-side scheme demanded. In the end, Reagan repeatedly shored up the economy the same way he had as governor of California, by signing off on tax increases; he just kept wailing about the evil of tax increases at the same time he was inflicting them, and somehow, this seemed to fly with people, who either blamed the Democrats in Congress for the increases, shrugged when Reagan called them "tax incentives" or some other euphemism, or just failed to notice that their taxes had gone up, the same way the Tea Party hordes somehow failed to notice that Obama had cut their taxes. He still managed to somehow leave behind a massive budget deficit, which Dick Cheney would later cite as reason enough for the Bush administration to plow ahead with its tax cuts in spite of its effect on the budget surplus they'd inherited from one of those spendthrift Democratic presidents. ("Reagan proved deficits don't matter.")

Not that Reagan didn't change the country's economic landscape permanently: he invented the modern culture of homelessness, put the final nail in the coffin of organized labor with his firing of the striking air traffic controllers, began the thirty-years-in-the-making income shift between the rich and the poor that would reinstitute the Gilded Age and all but wipe out the middle class, and, even as he called for a return to a Leave It to Beaver America, preside over an amazing shift: by the middle of his term, it would have quietly become understood that you needed two incomes to run an American household. If that had happened under a more liberal president, there would have been an outcry from Midge Dector types horrified at the economically enforced death of the traditional nuclear family. But aside from his special talent for making people feel up-to-date for not seeming to notice things and making them feel righteous about ignoring others' suffering, especially if the other were unkempt and smelling and sleeping on grates, Reagan benefitted from good timing: people in general were so ready to adopt the model of a family with two working parents that nobody seemed to mind much that this new model was just scraping by on twice the effort that the single-breadwinner model had flourished on a couple of decades earlier. In general, Reagan's timing could scarcely have been better. I'm convinced that one reason Reagan, who turned 70 his first year in the White House, was such a hit with thirtysomething baby boomers is that it made them feel young to have a grandfatherly president (just as I'm convinced that one reason Bill Clinton had such a hard time with the boomers who by then made up the top tiers of the media establishment was that he made them feel old, and won their disapproval by not striking them as the right sort to have the honor of being the first president chosen from the ranks of the Smuggest Generation.)

Some of Reagan's supporters like to point out, that just a few years before he won the presidency, he had been widely considered unelectable because of his far-right politics. This, I think, is supposed to say something about how out of it the media was. I think it says something about how much more seemingly lovable ol' Ron got as he grew older and wrinklier, and how little chance he ever had of making it to the Oval Office on the strength of his stated political views, which, as we've observed, he had a lot more trouble implementing, in their pure form, than his poll numbers might have led you to expect. Look at some news footage of Reagan from the late '60s, when he was authorizing police to crack heads at People's Park,, up to around 1978, when he was foaming at the mouth over the handover of the Panama Canal, and you see a very different man, or at least a very different camera subject. The Reagan who who shared his suspicions that Martin Luther King was a paid agent of the Kremlin, sneered about having seen "a fellow" at a peace demonstration "who looked like Tarzan, walked like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah”, and, when Patty Hearst's kidnappers forced her father to arrange for a handout of free food to the poor, said, "It's just too bad we can't have an outbreak of botulism", was a scary guy, unapologetically hateful and hate-filled, who can be seen in reams of old clips spitting out his one-liners from a face gnarled with contempt for those he doesn't understand and can't relate to. I don't know if that guy could have gotten elected president, but the president who got elected in 1980 had a raw edge that had been blunted by the years and an aw-shucks manner that, for a lot of people, took the curse off the underlying meanness of many of his most-cherished attitudes and longest-held beliefs. ("Reagan croons," wrote Garry Wills, "in love accents, his permission to indulge in a hatred of poor people and blacks.") In a recent History Channel documentary, Kenneth Adelman, the Reagan advisor and later Iraq War cheerleader, insists that "the Soviet Union was really the only thing Ronald Reagan ever hated"--a ludicrous statement, but one in keeping with the idea that the old man was affability incarnate, Will Rogers with brass balls.

I guess the big enduring historic accomplishment of Reagan's life is supposed to be that he ended the Cold War and killed off the Soviet Union. He was there when it happened, and he deserves points for his conduct during the last year or so of his presidency: he reached out with an olive branch to Gorbachev, and in so doing, made it easier for Gorbachev to sell reform to his own country, even as the hard-liners in his government were still screaming that it must be a trap. Just keep in mind that, in order to go there, Reagan had to turn away from everything he'd ever said in the past and infuriate the hard-liners in his posse, some of whom were still screaming, as late as early 1989, about how their foxy grandpa turned senile old thing been duped by the cunning Soviets and sold us out to them for a handful of beans. Some of these same people, in their late-inning attempt to get right with history, have now revised not just their opinion but reality itself and made the claim that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a cunning plan: supposedly, Reagan intuited at the outset of his presidency that the Evil Empire was on his last legs, so he began accelerating the arms race so that they would bankrupt themselves trying to keep up, so that by the end of his second term, they'd have no choice but to sue for peace and then self-immolate.

A cute theory, so long as you have no problem with the idea that the last honest man spend so many years lying to the public, claiming to believe that the U.S. military buildup was necessary because the Evil Empire was such a towering threat, and that he sponsored bloody proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and built up the Mujaheden in Afghanistan just to support his cover story. His devotion to the cover story helped lead to the biggest crisis of his presidency, when the funds illegally obtained from selling arms to Iran got illegally funneled to the Contras in Nicaragua, which led Reagan to utter the most Reaganesque sentence of his life, when he had to retract his previous claim that his administration hadn't been dealing with terrorists and supplying weapons to a terrorist-supporting enemy of America at the same time it had been talking tough about its moral resolve to have no dealings with evildoers: "My heart and my best intentions still tell me this is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is so." Assume that this collection of words is supposed to add up to something more than a round of Exquisite Corpse, and it would appear to mean that Reagan's heart, which is what he was proud of doing his thinking with, as well as what Hell is paved with, will never make room to accommodate the facts and the evidence, though he does understand that not all spoilsports will agree with him that this is reason enough to sweep it under the rug and trouble the heart no further. The head can go take a long walk off a short pier.

Having had the disadvantage of living through the Reagan years, I tend to think that what happened was a lot closer to what seemed to be happening at the time. Reagan had gotten into the Iran-Contra business, after all that bold talk about never negotiating with kidnappers and terrorists, because he'd made the mistake of actually meeting with the families of some kidnapping victims. He was incredibly moved by their plight and suddenly wanted to do something about it without publicly admitting that he wasn't strong enough to stick to his tough talk in the face of direct hits on his emotions, all of which is what you can expect of someone who prefers to think with his heart. Between the time all this went down and the time it finally made the papers, he had his first face-to-face with Gorbachev. Although they got off to a shaky start, Reagan decided that Gorbachev was different from all previous Soviet leaders. He very likely was, but it must have helped that he was the very first Soviet leader Reagan had met face to face, three other contenders for that title having died in office while Reagan was still insisting that he saw no point in breaking bread with such scum. Because Reagan thought with his heart, he was probably halfway to concluding that Gorbachev was different than your average Soviet leader as soon as he saw that there weren't a couple of holes cut in his hat brim to make room for the horns. After Reagan's popularity numbers plummeted over Iran-Contra--a development that confused and depressed him and sent him shuffling back to bed with a glass or warm milk and his Teddy, while Nancy stepped in to do damage control and take care of the firings that heart-thinking Ronnie never had much of a stomach for-- the thought of making nice with Mister New-Style Soviet, a move that made hard-liners shudder but won approval from both the opinon polls and Nancy's astrologer, seemed more appealing than ever. But the idea that it was the result of a long-thought-out Machiavellian plan is batshit, and it's just possible that we haven't spent enough of the last twenty-odd years being thankful that the first Soviet leader who had the chance to dazzle Reagan with his previously unsuspected humanity was Yuri Andropov. (George W. Bush later famously paid homage to Reagan's method of dealing with Russian bosses by looking into Vladimir Putin's soul and liking what he saw.)

All in all, it is a curious record, one that those inclined to believe that still, clear waters run deep and wild can muse about for hours, if not weeks, on end. In Eugene Jarecki's new feature documentary Reagan, Ron Reagan, Jr. says that the irony is not lost on him that his father, whose family was rescued by the New Deal during the Depression, would later position himself as the enemy of the very government assistance programs from which he had so richly benefitted. Ron Junior says that he has no idea what to make of this. I think I do. Reagan, who was famous for saying that, in the years after Roosevelt, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me," was a hypocrite of a very familiar type, someone who managed to suckle at the government teat without letting it interfere with his self-image as a self-reliant, self-made man. Secure in this illusion, he was then well-equipped to see government programs for the poor and disadvantaged as a scourge when, during the '60s, he began to see them as benefitting people unlike himself at the expense of real, white Americans. It goes without saying that the same degree of hypocrisy was on display in his tax policy and his brand of hawkishness, which was designed to let him indulge in the bad-ass rhetoric while leaving it to non-Americans to do the dying. None of this was likely to win him anything but favor from the millions of Americans who are hypocritical in exactly the same way. You'd think this would be easy to understand, but the secret of Reagan's popular success is so far from generally grasped that his self-styled heir, George W. Bush, tried to follow in his footsteps by doing all the things Reagan pretended to do, except for real--starting open-ended tough-guy wars for real Americans to die in year after year, cutting taxes and then defiantly cutting them again even as the economy threatened to crater--with predictable results.

In a birthday tribute to Reagan in Politico, Ben Quayle, son of Dan, writes that "When I was a child, President Ronald Reagan was the nice man who gave us jelly beans when we visited the White House. I didn’t know then, but I know it now: The jelly beans were much more than a sweet treat that he gave out as gifts. They represented the uniqueness and greatness of America — each one different and special in its own way, but collectively they blended in harmony." Dopey as that sounds, it actually does a pretty fair job of capturing the tone of most of the recent attempts to sum up exactly what it was that made Reagan such a paragon. In the end, after everything else has been debunked and deflated, it comes down to this: we were sad as a nation, after Vietnam and Watergate and the high oil prices, because we seemed to have serious problems that we had to grapple with, and then a nice old man came and told us we didn't have to deal with our problems at all, and so we were happy. People talking about why they think Reagan saved the country sound as if they're explaining why they love their liquor cabinet or crack pipe. The dream is about as substantial as that, and maybe that's why it demands the constant denigration of Jimmy Carter, whose greatest sin as president seems not to have been his failure to solve all our problems but his telling us they existed and needed attending to. (It was only during last year's elections that it suddenly dawned on me that one reason Barack Obama gets up conservatives' noses so much is that the outpouring of worshipful affection and optimism that his election inspired must have looked to them like the feelings that can spontaneously generate towards Reagan, refracted through a fun house mirror.) In terms of detail and substance, celebrations of Reagan are like that scene in Forrest Gump
--a movie that's like the post-Reagan version of Being There--where Forrest gets up to tell the crowd the one true thing he has to say about Vietnam, and the mike goes out, so that nobody can hear what the one true thing is (because there's nothing he could say that would please everybody in the audience), though we do see someone who was close enough to hear him assure us that it was brilliant. But because of the consensus agreement that making so many people feel upbeat while passing any worries along to the next generation (and the next presidents who'd have to deal with the consequences of Reagan's not wanting to handle them), he did make it politically impossible for anyone running for president to even whisper that the most fortunate members of our society might have to be make sacrifices or postpone gratification for the common good. That sort of thing became tainted by association with Jimmy Carter, which, for the real Reagan-lovers, is to say that it's practically anti-American.


In another centennial piece by Edmund Morris, who made a laughingstock of himself with his "official" biography of Reagan, Dutch--a book whose tortured fantasy aspect was necessitated by Morris's refusal to consider the possibility that Reagan might not really be the sage he wanted him to be, just because he hadn't said an insightful or memorable thing in all their hours of personal communication--is reduced to addressing the charge that Reagan wasn't too bright with a surly, "Yeah, right." As they used to say of Reagan's old enemy, Gerald Ford, If he's so dumb, how come he's president? In the end. Reagan was a smiley button that either made you feel alienated or gave you a warm fuzzy feeling that all was right with the world, and his greatest domestic accomplishment was to embolden a later generation of conservative politicians and activists, such as Bush and the Tea Party candidates now concentrating on anti-union legislation, to push the goalposts on how far it's acceptable to go in combating progressivism and rolling back the New Deal, to the era before child labor laws and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Reagan never dared go as far as his acolytes are prepared to go, and they've learned to word their tributes to him carefully: Ben Quayle gives him credit for "the framework" that made the end of the Soviet Union possible, and for "reducing the scope" of the federal government, a vague phrase that presumably means something different from reducing the federal government itself, which expanded under Reagan. Yet in the 2008 Republican presidential candidates' forums, it became a ritual for every single candidate to name someone called "Ronald Reagan Of Course" when asked, "Who is your favorite Republican president?" That's a hell of a lot of professional blowhards to go on record as thinking that Abraham Lincoln didn't do shit.

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Gerry's Kids

This past week has been one '80s flashback after another. There was all the excitement over the 25th anniversary release of Stand by Me on Blu-Ray, an event that confirms my suspicion that anything that people slightly younger than me watched 500 times on cable or videocassette when they were in the tweens and teens will be regarded as a classic for however long it takes for that generation to die out; I saw it once, when it came out, and remember it as a movie that suffered from far too many scenes in which the people weren't puking on each other. ("I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve," Richard Dreyfuss whimpers into his word processor at the end. "Jesus, does anybody?” True, it's been a long time since I hung out with people who talked incessantly about "whores" and "sluts", dared each other to eat food they'd found in the trash and spit on, and waited for their friends to fall asleep so they could punch them in the head. Not long enough, though.) Then there was last week's episode of Archer, which parodied the conclusion of the second-season premiere of Magnum, P.I., perhaps for the express purpose of making me ashamed to realize that I actually remembered the conclusion of the second-season premiere of Magnum, P.I. (As I recall, Ivan, the Russian spy who used to torture Magnum in Vietnam, resurfaced to orchestrate an assassination plot on the big island. Magnum abducts him at gunpoint and murders him in cold blood to show that, like John Yu, he's learned that the quaint moral scruples once observed by pulp heroes don't cut it in today's world. The episode earned a rave review from Tom Carson in, of all places, The Village Voice; during the first wave of Reaganism, a number of surprising people jumped at the chance to declare that they were on board with the reclassification of murderous jingoism as the new hip, just because they were terrified that, otherwise, someone might mistake them for hippies.)

The memories brought to the surface by the news of the death of Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's 1984 running mate and the first woman to ride aboard a U.S. presidential ticket, are of a weightier nature. In the summer of 1984, I was sitting in on a poli-sci class at a third-rate institute of higher learning, because that's the kind of fun magnet I was at the time. As the Democratic National Convention approached, the instructor suggested that we all write down our predictions about who would snag the vice-presidential slot and put them in an envelope, so we could read them after the announcement had been made. There had been speculation that Mondale, who needed to pull something bold and flashy out of his hat just to remind the nation that he still had a pulse, would pick a woman, and around the time we were invited to don our Criswell hats, Time ran a cover story on the subject; it was illustrated with pictures of Ferraro and Diane Feinstein, and, feeling cocky, I decided to write Feinstein's name down on my ballot, because I'd heard of her before. As soon as I turned it in, I regretted not having picked Ferraro, precisely because I'd never heard of her before, and since it's not as if money was riding on it, I might as well go for broke. Naturally, I regretted it even more after Ferraro turned out to be the nominee, and God help me, the fact that I passed up a chance to dazzle everyone in that room with my amazing powers based on a choice made on a whim still bugs the hell out of me.

I remember something else about that class: the look of absolute misery on the face of the guy who sat next to me the day after Mondale announced that Ferraro was his running mate. The guy thought the world was over, because a woman had been included on a national ticket that nobody thought a whisper of a chance of winning the election. This most theoretical of advances struck him as one more giant step towards the abyss for the world at large, not to mention his party: the guy was a Democrat. Nor was he the most obviously stupid son of a bitch I'd ever met in my life, even if his reaction pretty clear shows that I'd been giving him more credit than he deserved. I'll bet that, today, a lot of people who felt the way he did would not only deny it, but claim that the thought of a woman being a heartbeat away from the presidency wasn't especially shocking in 1984, not just to them but to almost everyone in the country. I'll bet they'd believe it, too. By the time he was sharing the Supreme Court with the first black member of the court with reactionary politics and hostility towards affirmative action, William Rehnquist really believed that he'd always supported desegregation in his heart and truly regretted that he'd once been forced to conclude that making it the law of the land was, sadly, unconstitutional. The mind has a way of executing these little retroactive, face-saving adjustments.

One of the great things about being the first at something is being on the receiving end when the media discovers a new way to give people shit. Ferraro was attacked during the campaign over vague, mysterious allegations involving not just her own finances but her husband's. Her husband was a real estate developer named John Zaccaro, and the bad mouthing about Ferraro ended up taking two forms: veiled suggestions that she must have been mobbed up, or at least that the combination of "questions" regarding her family's finances and all those vowels in her and husband's names created an "appearance of impropriety" or "cause for concern", and unveiled suggestions. In a strange cover story for The New Republic, one filled with such sentences as "Perhaps she will be [vindicated]" and "Undoubtedly, much more remains to be known," Sidney Blumenthal compared her to Michael Corleone and scolded her for not having followed the example set by the ambitious bootlegger Joseph Kennedy, who understood that it's the generation that comes after the one that established a fortune by criminal means that gets to rise to national political prominence. Blumenthal's article was intended as a review of the autobiography Ferraro published in 1986 and was part of a wave of national indignation over Ferrara's "cashing in" on her elevated profile, by such means as her book deal and a Diet Pepsi commercial, apparently shot by someone with glaucoma, in which she appeared with her daughter. In the wake of Bob Dole's career as a spokesperson (including a commercial that someone described as, "Wow, Bob Dole's dog wants to fuck Britney Spears, that makes me want to drink Pepsi!"), not to mention two solid years of Palinmania, the harrumphing over Ferraro's modest exploitation of her own modest fame seems quaint indeed.

Those who were still pummeling Ferraro for her defects as a candidate two years after the election seemed to hold it against her that she hadn't turned Mondale down when he offered her a chance to be part of history, as John McCain did when John Kerry offered him the understudy role in the first split-party presidential ticket of modern times. The idea is that she was offered a plum unworthy of her and greedily snatched at it. Maybe she did, but these complainers don't seem to consider the possibility that there was a downside to playing a historic role, and that taking shit from Sidney Blumenthal might in fact be the least of it. Although Ferraro kept her hand in for years, hosting cable news shows and running for office (including a couple of unsuccessful runs for the Democratic nomination for New York's U.S. Senate seat) and serving various posts in the Clinton administration, her political career following 1984 might well have been more scattershot than it would have been if she'd told Mondale to take a hike. She did have one quality that I kind of liked, and that, if she hadn't been lashed to a drowning man in 1984, might have actually done her and her running mate a lot of good: her down-to-earth, plainspoken unpretentiousness tended to bring out the worst in her opponents. I'm not just thinking of George Bush, Sr., who embarrassed himself a little in their debate and then embarrassed himself a lot when he shared the opinion that he'd "kicked a little ass" in their encounter and then all but wet himself when he realized that he was speaking into an open mike. When Barbara Bush, repulsed at the smell of new money, referred to Ferraro as ""that four-million-dollar—I can't say it, but it rhymes with 'rich'," it was the first time most people got any kind of good look at the loathsome, wormy mass that was always hiding behind Babs's grandmotherly carapace. (Ferraro's reported response was, "Why is that nice old lady calling me a bitch?" I'd say Ferraro run that round, on points,)

I think a lot of people who were inclined to make a hero of the first woman to get where she got were disappointed that she was less an inspiring, charismatic figure than a smart career politician--i.e., the only kind of person that Walter Mondale would ever have likely been comfortable being in the same room with, never mind running for president alongside. The last time I remember her being in the news was during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when, as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, she told a reporter that Barack Obama had in some ways benefited politically from being black, just as (she said) she had benefited politically from being a woman. Inoffensive and sane by my (white, male) lights, but the Clinton machine, which had its own charges of racism to contend with, threw her to the wolves. But a few months later, when McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, a remarkable thing happened: nobody seemed horrified or even shocked by the thought of a woman in the Oval Office, and I don't remember anyone asking whether al-Qaeda might not see Palin as easy pickings just because of her gender, as reporters had been unembarrassed to ask Ferraro if she didn't think that her gender might not get the Russkies in the Kremlin wildly excited for all the wrong reasons. (In fact, it was the conservative woman candidate whose supporters were quick to make the argument that any people who claimed to have a problem with her being a heartbeat away from the presidency, just because she was a lightweight bully and drooling moron, were revealing that they were really sexists. I would be lying if I said that I've never seen the funny side of that.) Geraldine Ferraro deserves the credit for that, if all she ever did was say "Yes, I'll do it," and it's not a small thing. They also serve history who take the bullet.

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Liz

The first time I ever saw Elizabeth Taylor, at least in an "acting" role, was in a rerun of Here's Lucy. In an episode first broadcast in 1970, just a little past the midway point of her first marriage to Richard Burton, she and Burton played themselves, Liz 'n Dick, engaging in some wackiness that involved Lucille Ball managing to get the latest bauble that Dick had bought for Liz stuck on her finger. I think I remember one line--Lucy wondering how she was going to get the ring off and Liz saying something like, "Does the word 'amputation' ring a bell>"--mainly because Taylor gave a memorably shrill reading of that shrill line, one that was all the more confusing for me because all of a sudden her British accent came out, and I didn't know that she was British.I had only the dimmest idea of who she was and what she was famous for, but as a child in the 1970s, she was among the people whose name I'd sort of known for as long as I could remember. I don't know exactly what age I was then, but I might have been as old as Taylor was when, as the nine-year-old star of Lassie, Come Home, she became world famous. That ought to be kept in mind when trying to make sense of the life and career that followed. If people who've survived childhood stardom don't deserve to play by slightly different rules, then nobody does.

The first movie I saw Taylor in was X, Y and Zee, a 1971 romantic melodrama, from a screenplay by Edna O'Brien, that was set in what was left of Swinging London and co-starred Michael Caine as Taylor's husband and Susannah York as the woman he considers leaving her for; at the end, Taylor and York have a bedroom scene in which the older woman "saves" her marriage by annexing her husband's lover. It's a very weird, somewhat trashy, but compelling movie, and when I saw it on TV as a kid, I had no idea what to make of it. I saw it again a few months ago, though, and this time it made me sit bolt upright, and not just because Richard ("Riff Raff") O'Brien, the writer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, appears as an extra in a party scene. (Before confirming this at IMDB, I first thought he might be Brian Eno.) I don't know that Taylor is a great actress in it, but she's a hell of a force of nature. The character is childish, greedy, loud, and vulgar, like the character she played in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stripped of the tonier theatrical-event cultural setting. More to the point, she's a lot like the tabloid image of Liz the man-eating international jewel thief, and the woman who came across in such stunts as her appearances on General Hospital and the movie version of The Flintstones. Taylor got a lot of praise for her performance in Virginia Woolf, but a lot of that was just the customary praise any god or goddess can get for being willing to be seen that way, sprawled in a heap at the base of their pedestal with a broken liquor bottle nearby. But after that, Taylor didn't just seem willing to be seen as slovenly and bitchy. She reveled in it. I think she enjoyed it, way more than she enjoyed being photographed through gauze and vaseline and trying to cling to scraps of her old glamour. There were plenty of members of an earlier generation of movie actresses who crawled their way out of working class backgrounds and then, once they'd become famous, started putting on royal-goddess airs and made themselves insufferable. Taylor was natural royalty who embraced everything she enjoyed about herself that seemed tacky and crass without relinquishing her right to a crown. It looked as if that route was a lot more fun. It sure seemed more human.

I suspect that, the first time I saw it Taylor, she seemed older to me than she was at the time, but the first time today that someone I was talking to commented on her death, it was to say that she was surprised that Taylor was only 79. Part of that is the effect of having known about someone's fame all your life, but there's more to it than that. For much of her adult life, Taylor was known for being a tabloid wreck, ridiculed by such epistles of classiness as Joan Rivers and the National Enquirer for her weight gain and stints in rehab and string of busted marriages, but another way of putting it is that the woman lived. And she was deceptively strong. She went through a number of very public health scares, including the one in the early '60s that's credited with returning her to the public's good graces after the scandal over her marrying Eddie Fisher after the death of her husband Mike Todd and breaking up Fisher's marriage to Debbie Reynolds. Yet she outlived the considerably younger Burton by more than a quarter of a century. She outlived the critic Mel Gussow by almost six years, and that's notable, because it's Gussow's byline that's on her New York Times obituary.

For people who grew up with Taylor, who watched her transform from a lovely child into the most beautiful woman in the world to the spangled steamship of her middle years and later, it must have been perplexing. Some of the resentment she engendered has to have come from people who thought that she hadn't held up her end of the bargain by staying delicate and exquisite forever, some of whom were probably the same people who resented her for having been delicate and exquisite in the first place. (The Times obituary features a quote from Roddy McDowell: “People who damn her wish to hell they could do what they think she does.”) As a movie star, as a child and as a young woman, Taylor was indeed delicate and exquisite; as an actress, she had her moments, most notably in A Place in the Sun, where her yearning for Montgomery Clift felt a lot realer than any hot looks she ever threw at Burton, let alone Eddie Fisher, onscreen. But I knew her best, and came to love her the most, as a tough broad, a dinosaur surviving the crunch, redefining glamour and vulgarity by showing how well they could co-exist in one person's image, and not giving a flying fuck what anybody else thought of her. That's a quality that might have been a little off-putting in the most beautiful girl in the world, but it can seem liberating in a woman who used to be that girl and gone over a couple of hills since. I can't say that I ever looked forward to seeing her in a new movie, but it was fun to know that she was out there somewhere, plotting mischief.

Bombs Away!

In an evisceration of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, Max Boot writes that, while history will not absolve the man he characterizes as one of the two worst Secretaries of Defense in the history of this country (rivaled only by Robert McNamara), "[George W.] Bush seems to be enjoying a rebound in public affections, thanks in large part to the vindication of two of his most controversial strategies—the surge in Iraq and the 'freedom agenda' across the Middle East." I probably would not have ever thought to Bush's finally agreeing to an increase in troop levels in Iraq as vindication of anything or anyone but those who'd been saying that he'd spent the first six years of his administration listening exclusively to the wrong people, but I guess a case could be made that he deserves some credit for doing anything that could be seen as an admission that he'd made a mistake: in a grown-up, the admission would have come in less than half the time and been simply chalked up to common sense and basic humanity, but we're grading on a real curve here.

But the idea that there is some connection between the recent rebellions against dictatorial governments in the Middle East and what might have arguably been the sweetest of Bush's forty-eight arguments for why it was necessary to invade Iraq--the fantasy that seeing the United States remove a tyrant by force would inspire people all over the region to organize against their own leaders and force them to accede to democratic reforms-- is just silly. If the economy recovers at some point down the road, does Bush get the credit for that, too? Back when Bush was describing the confluence of 9/11 and his appointment to the presidency in utopian, if not messianic, terms, daydreaming aloud about all the glorious things would result from his being in a position to use his power to do damn near anything he wanted, he did say that leveling Baghdad and making Saddam Hussein dance at the end of a rope would surely cause democracy to spread throughout the Middle East. He also said that he was going to "restore" honor and high moral standards to the White House, and anyone who believes that sanctioning torture, going to war on a whim, and abandoning American cities and citizens in dire straits to the elements rank as more honorable and morally upright than fibbing about a blow job may think that he did that, too, but the rest of us will always have our doubts. Giving Bush credit for changing the world for the better because he liked to say that he supported democracy is like giving someone the Medal of Freedom for saying that he doesn't like genocide. (It is true that, under Bush, people were routinely awarded the Medal of Freedom just for saying that they supported democracy, or rather, just for saying that Bush supported it, and getting the crotch of his pants wet and slobbery in the process, but that's another conversation. In the meantime, I'd love to hear some of the former-and-future-Republican-administration deadwood who are excited about events in Egypt speculate on how much thanks should be given to Wikileaks. Think any of them want to go there?)

As for the subject at hand, Bush did nothing to change the region outside Iraq and Afghanistan--where the commercial he was providing for American-style democracy was, shall we say, mixed--to make it more receptive to democratic reform, beyond the kind of cosmetic activity that used to go on in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua when it was time to ask Congress to renew funding, either to the fascistic governments we regarded as friendly or to the hired goons trying to subvert governments that had just finished knocking over the tyrants we also regarded as friendly. Condoleezza Rice, say, might announce that she was canceling a trip to Egypt because the Mubarak government had locked up an opposition leader, whereupon Mubarak would make a grand gesture of releasing the opposition leader. Then Rice would reschedule the trip and use the occasion to call attention to how our good friend Mubarak, a loyal supporter of our work in the region and a prominent member of the coalition behind the first President Bush's first invasion of Iraq, was getting with the program. Then Rice would fly back to Washington, and Mubarak would have the opposition leader locked the fuck up again. This is what diplomats and world leaders, going back to the era of "Cold War realists" and before, have as their Circle of Life. As it happened, it was a routine that Bush was a lot more comfortable with than democracy itself. The real test of his devotion to the concept came in 2006, when thep arliamentary elections that he had loudly called for in the Palestinian territories resulted in an electoral victory for Hamas, a development that Bush welcomed in the same spirit that Nixon and Kissinger had welcomed Salvador Allende's election in Chile. ("I don't see why we need to stand by and let a country go communist because of the irresponsi bility of its own people.”) Because there was no way to have the U.S. Supreme Court take care of things the way they had the last time Bush had disapproved with the legitimate outcome of an election, he and Rice seemed to be ready to deal with this strange new thing called democracy by standing by whistling nonchalantly while Israel bombed Lebanon into a fine powder.

Whatever Bush's idea of democracy coming to the Middle east looked like in his head, I'll bet anything that it didn't have loyal buddies like Mubarak humiliated and driven out of office in scenes that some of the neocons not caught up in the thrill of it all experienced as flashbacks to Iran, 1979. I don't want to stretch that comparison myself, because the one thing I've learned from watching governments fall and rise over the course of the last thirty-odd years is that making comparisons mainly serves to set you up for being wrong by giving you the false idea that you understand what's going on better than anyone does, because you have a template for it. So does grouping different kinds of bad governments into categories to provide a handy guide for The One Right Way to deal with them. It was in 1979, when a lot of people were scrambling for an ideological lifeboat, that Jeanne Kirkpatrick published her essay in Commentary
explaining that there were "traditional authoritarian regimes", like our "friends" in Latin America and the Shah's pre-revolutionary government in Iran and the apartheid government in South Africa, and "revolutionary", "totalitarian governments" like the Soviet Union and the Ayatollah's; while both might be monstrous, it was important that we hold our noses and shake hands with the former, because they were susceptible to change and, in the meantime, could be helpful bulwarks against world domination by the latter, which could never change and would certainly never collapse under their own weight.

As those of you not just awaking from comas that you lapsed into around 1982 might have noticed, Kirkpatrick's theory was proven by actual events to be completely wrong in every detail, not just but certainly including the notion that it was somehow more effective morally to be in bed with Ferdinand Marcos and Roberto D'Aubuisson than Amnesty International. Of course, the appeal of her theory was never that it passed any kind of smell test intellectually or ethically but that it provided a handy rationalization for people who found it politically expedient to align themselves with the first thing that crawled out from under a rock mouthing anti-Communist platitudes. The Reagan years, and the events of 1989, established pretty well that the key fact about dictatorships of any flavor is that, when things get hot, the results get decided according to who's prepared to tell the military to start butchering and who isn't, and "Western influences" don't seem to have much to do with who falls into which category. The Soviets, who we were supposed to be too fine to have had dealings with for most of Reagan's term, turned out to be a bunch of old guys who just wanted to make it home alive at the end of the day and didn't have the stomach for blood in the streets. On the other hand, by 1989, American diplomatic and financial interests were so intertwined with those of China that, when it turned out that those guys had the stomach for just about anything, President Bush could think of no more appropriate response to Tiananmen Square than to send his consigliere, James Baker, on the next plane to toast his brother monsters for being the devil we knew.

I don't know if I'm the only person who remembers this, but back in the giddy days of 2003, Muammar Qadhafi was supposed to be one of the side benefits of the Iraq war and flashy evidence of how brilliantly Bush's policy was changing the Middle East for the better. Qadafi had been America's official Big Bad for a year or so there in the middle of the Reagan years, when we bombed Libya as punishment for Qadafi's sponsorship of terrorism and for giving the New York Post such gaudy front page material. (Remember when the Post and the National Enquirer ran competing composite photos of the Qad in women's clothing?) But with the Ayatollah and the Sandinistas and a different close-to-death Russian premier every couple of years, he really had to work to extend his fifteen minutes. And then our dear friend in the region, authoritarian tyrant Saddam Hussein, finally got around to reading Kirkpatrick's essay and concluded that he could push his luck a little further than proved to be the case, and that was all she wrote for Muammar, at least in terms of coverage in the Western media. At least until he announced that this new sheriff the poets called Dubya had so put the fear of God into him that he was washing his hands of his own WMD program and would pal around with terrorists no more. He may have also pledged to use his powers for good by guiding Clarice Starling in her hunt for Buffalo Bill, but my memory on that point is al little hazy.

The important thing is that, by 2006, Bush's State Department was so pleased with Muammar's change of heart that it announced that would restore full diplomatic relations with Libya and remove the country from its list of states that supported terrorism. So why are we now in the process of blowing the shit out of our new dear friend's country? True, it turns out that he didn't do a very good job of transforming himself into a good man and compassionate leader, but then, neither did the Emir of Kuwait, and those of you with really sturdy memories may recall that the pitch for the first Iraq War came with fulsome promises that, if we would just get the Emir's country back for him, he would then reform the shit out his medieval government. A number of people have taken to the airwaves and their keyboards in the last few days to ask, why are we bombing Libya, instead of any of the other countries plagued with evil leaders doing bad things to their people? I hope that at least some of the people asking this question are having trouble doing so with a straight face. Obviously, we're doing it for roughly the same reason that, in the wake of a massive terrorist attack by a bunch of Saudis, some people were quick to conclude that we had to attack Iraq. The turbulent string of events in the Middle East has made it seem that we have to do something there, whether to take advantage of a rare opportunity or just so we can go on believing that we, the world's superpower, are somehow responsible for the way history turns; Libya, compared to other bad players in the region, looks like a pushover, and pushing it over won't screw up any important economic or diplomatic arrangements; and its leader, who can be handily accused of that least defensible of crimes, manhandling his own people, has been auditioning for the role of the Joker for as long as anyone can remember. About all that's missing is that President Obama can't snuffle that Qadafi tried to kill his dad.

I don't want to make too much of that comparison, either: I'm sure not suggesting that this is fated to turn into a quagmire of epic clusterfuckian proportions. It probably won't, if only because Obama, unlike his predecessor, isn't a complete fucking moron who, like Jake and Elwood, keeps his sunglasses on even in the dark of night and thinks he's on a mission from God. It'll probably be a quickie adrenaline rush in the mold of Grenada and all the other cable-news-age American military adventures that have come after it--Reagan's Libya bomb run very much included--which, come to think of it, is what the 2003 Iraq War would have been if it weren't for the fact that, see previous sentence. I don't know what's more depressing, though: how quickly this was made to seem like a necessity of life, or how all the clowns who were all over the airwaves ten days ago talking about how necessary it was are now all over the airwaves whining that, if only it had happened sooner, it would have been the right idea. I hope that there's no part of Obama that agreed to this because he felt he should throw those assholes a bone, because it's not as if he could do anything they'd approve of. They made it clear during the Clinton administration, when the U.S. military was, among other tricks (including, heh heh, bombing Iraq), used to stop an actual genocide, that when they complain that a Democratic president isn't using the military option forcefully enough, they don't mean to suggest that a Democratic president has the right to use the military for anything at all; he doesn't. if only because if he does, then they have to go to the trouble of revising their notes before the next time the cameras show up. In the meantime, I trust that Obama will at least do the one obvious right thing he can do in this situation and sneak over to Oslo in the middle of the night and leave his Nobel Peace Prize outside the front door.

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House: "Fall from Grace"

Marcel's Quantum Kitchen

My New Favorite "Citation Needed"-Worthy Claim Made at Wikipedia

"After ...[Kim Darby] starred in True Grit, film critics predicted that she was at the beginning of a long career as a great actress. In fact, she has made almost no films of note since. This has caused some critics^{[citation needed]} to put her in the same category as Bo Derek (in 10) and Maria Schneider (in Last Tango in Paris), because all three actresses made spectacular splashes in their first films, but never acted in successful films again."

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Detroit 1-8-7: "Blackout"

Know Your Candidates: The Buddy System

Given that the party line among high-profile Republicans is that President Obama is a socialist tyrant who hates the country he governs and probably somehow stole the 2008 election with the help of ACORN, which for an organization that proved so easy to destroy sure managed to rig a higher fraudulent vote count than the Supreme Court of the United States was able to deliver for George W. Bush in 2000, you might think there'd be more eagerness among the boogers to throw their hats into the ring for the 2012 election, even if the idea was just to earn a mention alongside Nathan Hale in the history books. The fact that so many potential contenders have proven slow on the trigger in making an official announcement of their candidacy has opened a door for Buddy Roemer. Who he?, political junkies have been asking in recent days. Of course, the unfamiliarity of the name, coupled to the fact that the name itself is kind of fun to say until you get sick of it, is part of Roemer's "freshness." But for those of us who lived in or near Louisiana in the 1980s and 1990s, this is just the latest chapter in the ultimate bad penny story.

Roemer was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980 and has been celebrating himself ever since as one of the "Boll Weevil Democrats" who were of such great help to Ronald Reagan in his first term. In 1987, he ran for the governorship against the charismatic and stone-crooked three-term incumbent, Edwin Edwards. In Louisiana elections, all the candidates, regardless of party affiliation, run against each in a lollapallooza electoral showdown, and then, the two top vote-getters face each other in the runoff. (That's assuming that no one candidate has taken a clear majority of the vote in the first round; as A. J. Liebling pointed out in his classic The Earl of Louisiana, any candidate who does is invariably regarded as a party pooper.) Edwards finished with 28 percent of the vote to Roemer's 33 percent--a very respectable showing for a candidate who had spent half his time since his previous electoral victory standing trial in federal court on various charges of fraud and corruption, a pair of back-to-back trials that were enlivened by accounts of the Gov jetting back and forth to Las Vegas, sometimes bringing along briefcases filled with cash to settle the losses from the last time he was in town. I know of no intelligent, non-delusional persons who think that, if it had gone to a runoff, Edwards would have, could have, lost that year to Roemer. But when Edwards, a Machiavellian Cajun who believes in punishing people by letting them have what they've been pretending to wish for, grandly declined to participate in the runoff, thus ceding the governor's chair to Roemer, the local papers, all of which had endorsed Roemer and his crusade for "good government", treated it as a great Capraesque moment in purity and dragon-slaying.

As far as winning elections went, that was Roemer's greatest triumph, hands down. As far as actual governing goes, he has never had any triumphs at all, unless you share his inclination to pen a medal on him for every time Ronald Reagan farted and Roemer rushed to holler, "Seconded!" He continued to be treated worshipfully by the local media, and even by some representatives of the nations media: In 1989, The New Republic, ran a profile called "Saint Buddy" under the banner headline, "People We Like." People seemed incredibly charmed by the fact that there existed an ambitious Louisiana politician who was, everyone agreed, honest. And certainly Roemer was ambitious: he made no secret that, even then, he had presidential ambitions. The idea was that he'd dazzle the country by fixing Louisiana and then glide into place as Reagan's successor. Self-doubt was never his problem. In this week's interview with the New York Times
blog, Roemer says, I know I’m not the smartest guy in the world,” This is a bare-faced lie. Part of Roemer's almost unique anti-charm is that he has always believed that he is the smartest guy in the world. It would have counted as quite a feat if he had only been the smartest politician in Louisiana, but in fact, he was one of the five or six stupidest, and, convinced that his book smarts and purity of motive would inspire people to back him up on anything because he was so right, he was among the politically maladroit, the kind of guy the Edwin Edwardses of this world would hate to have to do without. (The worshipful Slate
piece included a mention of the time that the non-Catholic Roemer paid a visit to a Catholic chuch and affably committed sacrilege by participating in the taking of the host, presumably thinking that it was like joining in with the pie-eating at the county fair.)

As Governor, Roemer earned himself a footnote mention in two great political fiascoes of the day. The first began in the summer of 1990, when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a ruling on abortion that emboldened abortion opponents around the country to try to whip up a law that might provide a "test case" for an overturn of Roe vs. Wade. Like many politicians who had come along in Reagan's wake and forged reputations for themselves as "social conservatives", Roemer's position on abortion, up to that point, could be described thusly: never miss a chance to perform for the anti-abortion diehards by howling and tearing your hair out about how you think abortion is, literally, child murder, and should be totally illegal, while winking at everyone else, gently reminding them that Roe vs. Wade is the law of the land and you can't actually do anything about it. When the state Senate called his bluff and sent up a bill that would have outlawed abortion, including in cases of incest. Roemer did his Hamlet act, dithering about it for months before vetoing it, in the face of studies showing that, if he'd signed it, businesses would have fled the state. The next year, Roemer pulled off his all-time greatest feat of political haplessness, running for re-election and finishing out of the money, far behind professional racist and plastic surgery success story David Duke.

Duke's "triumph" over Roemer led to an explosion of national press coverage, and the drafting of--it's him again!--Edwin Edwards to enter the race, amid a flurry of stories attributing to the old con man supernatural powers that would make him the only man who could defeat Duke and stave off the empowering of old-style racism in the new South, (That was the election that led to the creation of a popular bumper sticker bearing the slogan, "Vote for the Crook. It's Important".) No one was more surprised by Roemer's defeat than Roemer, who seemed to think that he was ensuring not just his re-election but stepping up his move to the national throne when, with great fanfare, he switched his party affiliation to Republican just months before the election. (More strongly identify yourself with George H. W. Bush as the months count down to the 1992 presidential election--what could go wrong?) It also shocked the local media, which really didn't seem to be aware of just how badly his smug ineffectuality went over with voters.

Speaking as someone who was actually soaking up daily life on the streets of New Orleans at that time, I've always thought that the coverage of that election overstated Duke's popularity, and the size of the threat he represented, because the local media was in denial over just how much Roemer was loathed by the public at large, and then when the national media showed up in town, they took the local experts' word for it that this racist asshole has pulled off a remarkable coup by outpolling this awesome historic figure and poster boy for good government who had been a juggernaut headed for the White House. Even after Edwards effortlessly turned Duke into a greasy spot on the side of the road, both Roemer and the local media worked hard to keep from getting it. In 1995, Roemer made his comeback bid in that year's governor's race, as a one-issue candidate: he blanketed the airwaves with TV commercials, designed to look like an outtake reel from Cool Hand Luke, in which he vowed to get tough with crime by bringing back chain gangs. I remember an especially worshipful interview in the weekly Gambit
which appeared yoked to the observation that, whatever you or I or the lamppost might think about the commercials, there was no way these crowd-pleasing sentiments wouldn't propel Roemer back into office, so that the true reform era of good government could finally commence. In fact, Roemer ate all the other candidates' dirt, and everyone I talked to who wasn't merely disgusted by the commercials was scared shitless by them.

The vast and unbridgeable gap between Gambit's expectations of how voters would respond to the chain gang ads and how the voters actually did respond to them nicely points up the central conundrum of Roemer's career, which is not the distance between his and the media's estimation of his stature and his actual lifelong lack of impressive achievements but the distance between the media's estimation of his appeal and his consistent ability to have the same effect at the ballot box that Mars Needs Moms has had at the box office. For those still looking for clues to the mystery, there's a big one in the Times piece:

So far, he declines to bash his likely Republican rivals, though he stumbled a bit in a round-table conversation with Times reporters and editors when asked whether Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, was qualified to be president. He squirmed a bit and said, “Momma told me there’d be days like this.”

Finally, he added: “Well, you know, I like her. Does that answer your question? Am I dodging it? I think she showed some weaknesses in terms of knowledge. We all will. But hopefully, we then go back and learn. We’ll see what kind of homework she’s done. It’s possible. I don’t dismiss her. I like her spirit. I like her pride.”

But by the end of a long primary campaign, Mr. Roemer could be the Republican equivalent of the pea under the mattress — the one who makes everyone uncomfortable.

When you consider that one of the great moments in the Roemer mythology is his blunt statement, made during a debate during the 1987 election, that he would never endorse Edwin Edwards if Edwards ended up in the runoff, your first thought about this may be that straight talk sure isn't what it used to be. But this, of course, is dog-whistle "straight talk", aimed squarely at the reporter Roemer is talking to, especially with the cutesy preamble, "Momma told me there'd be days like this." The point is to invite the reporter to recognize that Roemer thinks that a piece of rebar would be better qualified to be president than Palin but cannot say that because he has to be careful about alienating her supporters. They, the reporter and the candidate who the reporter is meant to recognize as being smarter than the kind of voter he has to attract, can have a good chuckle about it. This is what happened all the time with Roemer in Lousiana, and neither he nor the local media ever figured out that, while the average voter may not be a genius, he can tell pretty well when a politician and a reporter are teaming up to condescend to him, especially when one or both the members of that particular tag team are a hell of a lot less clever than they seem to think.

In order to fully appreciate just how far Roemer is from being as smart as he thinks he is, keep in mind that Sarah Palin has been shedding admirers at about the rate than a dog would shed fleas if you soaked it in gasoline and set it alight; it takes no great act of courage to talk her about unsuitability for the presidency in much blunter terms than Roemer summoned up, and Roemer's big show of good-natured waffling before the shrine of the Wasilla goddess is actually as tone-deaf as it is craven. The Republican candidate who went after her with a bludgeon would probably get a big boost from all the grateful Republicans who want their party shed of her baleful idiot influence, but the first person who does it will be viewed as something of a wild man by the media, and not as a wise outsider with Roemer's presumed folky charms. The media will eat Roemer up, because they assume--probably not altogether rightly, given his ego and estranged relationship with reality--that he knows he's not a serious candidate with a chance of winning or even of gaining influence in the party, but is this year's John Anderson or Bruce Babbitt, the lovable no-hoper gently speaking truth to power. It's not a role for which he is ideally suited, but it's the one that the media has always longed to cast him in, with the same heedless disregard for common sense and endearing generosity of spirit that led to Oliver Stone to conclude that Colin Farrell would make a dandy Alexander the Great. and he might as well revel in it as best he can and enjoy his last shot at his long-postponed fifteen minutes of national fame. What's the worst that can happen? [CUT TO: DAVID DUKE accepting the presidential nomination at the 2012 Republican National Convention...]

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Raising Hope: "Mongooses"

Amuck

Here's what blows my mind about this story: the announcement that Gilbert Gottfried has been "fired" from his job as the voice of the duck in Aflac's TV commercials after his offending tweets cracking wise about the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster seems to imply that it was an ongoing gig, and that every time Aflac wanted to put out a new commercial since 2000, they actually had to call Gottfriend up and have him come into the studio and quack the company's name again. I've seen a fair number of these things the past decade or so, and I do know that some of the quacks are longer and more strangulated than others, because Gilbert Gottfried is a master of the art of making many differently nuanced kinds of grating noises. But I always assumed that they just had him and some recording equipment in the same general vicinity for half an hour once upon a time and had been sampling the results ever since. But no, it seems that each and every time you've heard Gottfried utter that name, it counted as a separate delivery for which he got paid. That's show business, people. When you think about that, and consider that the people talking about politics on TV and on the op-ed page are much closer to being in show business than in any other general field, it helps you understand why so many of them can't see any point to there being labor unions.

This is a little off to the side of the subject, but as a lifelong connoisseur of embarrassingly self-revealing attempts to re-name and redefine hipness in an exclusionary way that leaves the theorist and his particular neuroses sitting on top of the mountain, I hated to let this thing pass without comment. Bret Easton Ellis began his career at the place that Andy Warhol only arrived at about five years after he'd become famous and exhausted his supply of original ideas, as an empty commercial hustler brazen enough to intimidate the culturally insecure into thinking there must be something audacious and subversive about his presenting himself as an empty commercial hustler. If you've ever regretted not having been a bestselling, "transgressive" writer and gossip page fixture when you were twenty-one, take heart from his cautionary example: the cost of that kind of success seems to be that your intellectual abilities freeze at that age while your frame of reference starts to shrink, so that twenty-five years later, when you're asked one more time by a desperate editor to define where the edge is these days, you're likely to decide that it's wherever someone who's hosting an awards show is letting his contempt for the assignment show. The poseur that Ellis was twenty-five years ago would have tried to establish his cool bona fides by insisting, under threat, that he had no idea who Ricky Gervais or what the Golden Globes were, and while that would have been just as fraudulent, it might have been less pathetic. And speaking as someone who thinks that this kind of thing should have had its jersey retired after Norman Mailer wrote "The White Negro", I think it's a shame that Mailer's punishment for having once written that he sort of kind of appreciated American Psycho in theory has to be that Ellis is going to be citing him as a member of his club until the end of time. Surely the statute of limitations has run out by now.

David Brooks Sits on His Big Ten Inch

On 60 Minutes last night, Bob Simon interviewed Rafid Alwan, the Iraqi defector who, as "Curve Ball", supplied the key "information" bolstering the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. More than once, Simon acknowledged that, listening to this guy, it seemed more unbelievable than ever that anyone could ever have, well, believed him. Simon also talked to Charles Duelfer, a weapons inspector who had worked for the CIA, who assured Simon that the intelligence agencies would have been very negligent to have seen through this guy rather than take his bullshit very seriously. This is something you always hear when powerful people who are paid to make world-changing decisions get it all wrong: the path that set us forth on was so important that it would have been terribly irresponsible of them to have gone another way. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when everyone could see that the preceding couple of decades of U.S. foreign policy and the Reagan-era defense buildup had been based on the false idea that a crumbling, hollowed-put ruin overseen by deteriorating old men who only wanted to hang onto their careers was actually a powerful, threatening juggernaut bent on world domination, a lot of editorialists were quick to expound on how irresponsible it would have been for the U.S. to have behaved any other way. One can only assume that the people who say these things must mean that people who get it right are terribly irresponsible. Being right and being wrong about the same thing can't both be the responsible way to go. When Judith Miller said that her reporting on Iraq's enormous supply of WMDs showed that she'd gotten it "right", what she presumably meant was that, while nothing in her stories was accurate, it was inaccurate in the way that was responsible at the time, and that all the people who thought the assertions she repeated were horseshit were wrong for swimming against the current, even if they were, inconveniently, right in terms of the accuracy of what they were saying.

Unlike Miller, David Brooks is an opinion columnist who made his reputation as a culture critic. He's the most successful and respectable kind of cultural critic. The review of his books, such as the popular Bobos in Paradise and the new The Social Animal
may tell you that Brooks goes out and observes the way people are living now and then spins theories about it, but that kind of thing would get in his way, career-wise, because it might alienate some editor who doesn't want to be confused by reading something that hasn't already occurred to him, or that he hasn't already come across a hundred times in the media. Brooks goes the smart pupil's way, deciding what he thinks and then citing all the examples he can think of from the culture than will back him up. The job gets easier as he goes along because the more firmly established he is as a brilliant culture critic, the less he's obligated to tell the truth when he starts picking examples, like nits, off the unbathed orangutan of his mind. Last fall, he wrote a celebrated piece about Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom and about how Franzen--here's an irony for you--failed to capture contemporary life accurately because he was mainly interested in showing "that American culture is overobsessed with personal freedom" and that we live in a country "where people are unhappy and spiritually stunted." In order to make this point, Brooks has to tell many, many lies about what's actually in the book. He probably didn't think he was lying, of course. Presumably he heard that a white guy with glasses who once got snobby about Oprah's Book Club had written a thick book about America in the time of George W. Bush that was going to be on the cover of Time and thought, "I haven't read it, and will never do more than skim it, but just looking at this fellow's jacket photo, I have a good idea of what shallow prejudices he must harbor and how they will shape his work. To the keyboard, to chastise him for his shallow, stereotypical mind and the false, limited framework it imposes on his writing!" I do not know whether he would go as far as Judith Miller and the neocon Soviet watchers might, and that he thinks that reviewers who reviewed the book that Franzen actually wrote were irresponsible, but I'm sure he scorns them as unworthy of starring on the Times op-ed page.

In a more recent column, which I would have missed if not for the sharp eyes of Tom Scocca, Brooks argues that American society is in trouble because people think too much of themselves, based on too little evidence, these days. It is an idea that I would readily endorse, based on all those people who got religion about the federal deficit at the end of the Bush administration and took to the streets to demonstrate their ignorance of what had been going on in their own country for the preceding ten, twenty, thirty years, as loudly and belligerently as possible, Brooks doesn't mention them, but he does cite this "anecdotal evidence":

A few decades ago, pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess; now those songs dominate the charts.

Now, I'm not sure how long ago "a few decades" actually comes down to. Let's give Brooks a wide berth and guess that he's thinking of rap, so that'll take us back to the dawn of the 1980s. So, before "That's the Joint", David Brooks thinks that "pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess". What, in practical terms, does this mean?

I guess the most shocking thing is that Brooks literally does not know that there was once a very popular pop singer named Elvis Presley, because even if he were totally unfamiliar with Presley's actual recordings, he could not be aware of his existence without having picked up that there was a certain... current that ran through his work. It's pretty amazing, to think that he must have seen a few Elvis T-shirts and silkscreens in his day while he was trawling garage sales and bowling alleys looking for bits of local color he could use when writing those books about what he already knew he was going to say about the country, and it never crossed his mind that he ought to ask someone who the dude was. Other performers who Brooks must not know ever existed include Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Tina Turner, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White, Donna Summer, and the Starland Vocal Band--a remarkable list, to be sure, given his specialty and the role that popular music has had in shaping American culture.

There's also the matter of a little something called the blues. Certainly no one who knows anything at all about the music would write what Brooks wrote about songs praising the singer's "prowess" being a recent development in our culture. But maybe Brooks is some kind of gutbucket blues purist who would get sniffy at the mere thought of labeling Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, or Howlin' Wolf "pop" song writers. (Surely this is not the place to argue about where to file Ray Charles.) I can appreciate that, though blues had done so much to influence rock music by the end of the 1950s that the music, and its perennial subject matter, can't easily be separated from what was accepted as mainstream pop. Mind you, Cole Porter got off a few lyrics that would make David blush, if only he had ever heard of him.

I'm teasing a little. I'll bet that Brooks has heard of some of these people, just as he probably read a couple of the Amazon reviews of Franzen's book, and may even have asked a few questions of someone who'd skimmed the Time cover story about it, before rushing it to use it as an excuse to write a bunch of stuff he'd been itching to write about fancy-shmancy acclaimed novelists with eyeglasses and their big ol' elitist brains. What really gets me is that this line made it past the copy editor; you don't expect the copy editor to have read the new Franzen, maybe, but this is sort of special. They must really love the hell out of a good rhetorical premise over at the Times. Rather than spoil it by demanding something like a tangible connection to reality, they're prepared to look as stupid as necessary over there.

New at The A.V. Club

Chopped

For Damn Near Nobody

Thirty years ago, in a review of Altered States, Pauline Kael speculated on what collaboration between two "hopelessly mismatched talents" could be more "grotesquely inspired" than that of Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky: "Why not Akejandro Jodorowsky and Bernard Slade? John Milius and Edward Albee? (A Delicate Balance, perhaps.) Sam Peckinpah and Ntozake Shange?" Kael, who died in 2001, didn't get to see the ascension of Tyler Perry, who wound up bringing Shange’s 1975 theatrical poem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, to the screen, last fall, under the bluntly simplified title For Colored Girls. I missed it when it was in theaters, but now it's on DVD, the morbid curiosity was just too strong for me.

The play consists of seven black women, each identified by a color ("Lady in Red", "Lady in Blue", etc.), who express their joys and (mostly) sorrows in a series of interconnected, lyrical monologues. The play was such a smash in its day that it transferred to Broadway and was included among the Tony Award nominees a year after it first hit New York, with Shange herself as the Lady in Orange, a role that she repeated in the 1982 TV production for American Playhouse. For the movie, Perry, who directed from his own adaptation, has reshaped the material as a naturalistic melodrama with nine central characters, plus their men (who are played by actors with faces and bodies, though it would be a stretch to say that their characters have been fleshed out), who cross each other's paths as their storylines overlap, and who come together at the end for a group hug. Trying to honor Shange's work, he includes long passages of her original text, and the actresses--Loretta Devine, in particular--really sink their teeth into this stuff. Then their speeches run their course, and they re-enter the world where people converse with each other. To be honest, many of these transitions play a lot more gracefully than you'd expect.




But the melodrama level is pitched so high throughout, and the selection of women's misfortunes so comprehensive. that the whole thing is a car wreck of heightened emotion joined to a checklist of topics for daytime TV talk shows. Perry has updated Shange's bagful of agonies with a plot device that cunningly links what may be the two biggest additions since the mid-70s, AIDS and the humiliating inconvenience of finding out that your man is on the down low. But the biggest humiliation for Shange's fans may be seeing how naturally the raw material of her play translates to his usual big-screen soap. It fits so well with his usual style of narrative that he really pops the buttons off his vest coming up with a presentation bold and garish enough to do it all justice. Intercutting a horrifying rape with a night at the opera and shifting the play's climactic nightmare, when a deranged, shiftless woman-beater scoops up the kids and throws them out a high window of the apartment building, to the midpoint of the action, with just about every character contriving a reason to be on the scene so they can spend the rest of the movie reacting to it and wondering as to its meaning.

I think that For Colored Girls is probably the first Tyler Perry movie that was shown to critics before it opened. Perry's usual stuff is pre-sold and review-proof, but though it's true that he has no critical standing, I think he gets off a little easy, too; ever since it became clear what a solid audience base he has, reviewers have shied away from really bashing Perry's movies, presumably for fear of appearing insensitive to the needs of the black moviegoers who respond to what he shovels into theaters, because it at least attempts to reflect their lives, like nothing else. For Colored Girls was clearly intended to boost him up into respectability, but the funny thing is that it may have done him more damage than anything else he's signed his name to, because critics who normally would have ignored him or tried to be kind felt obligated to rake him over the coals for having traduced Shange's pioneering work of art. Is Shange completely innocent in all this? I'm not sure, myself: the only time I've seen her play performed as it was intended was a college production in the mid-80s where the audience was rolling in the aisles laughing at things (including the woman-beating/child-killing stuff) that I'd hate to think was meant to be funny, and I've never been sure that the performance itself was to blame. Either way, Perry will be the one to take the full blame for the movie. Shange's play will go back to being a "classic" from a particular time, while Perry, his fling at artistic respectability over and done with, will go back to being a well-compensated hack whose clumsiness and hard-won path to success help him to pass as some kind of primitive outsider artist we cannot judge by the same standards we would any other hack. If he likes, he can pretend to be the Ferdinand Cheval of direct-to-video cinema.

Just Because It's a Hearing Doesn't Mean You Have to Listen

In his analysis of yesterday's House Homeland Security Committee's hearing on "radicalization in the Muslim community," David Weigel notes that Representative Peter "too many mosques" King, the chairman of the committee and self-styled toastmaster general of anti-Islamist paranoia, neglected to invite spokesmen for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which he had been bashing in the lead-up to the hearing. Weigel thinks that this oversight robbed the hearing of "focus", which would be true if the point of it all was to actually explore whether there are dangerously radicalizing elements lurking behind domestic front organizations with boringly polite-sounding names. I don't know that there was ever any reason to think that the hearing wasn't just the latest, splashiest effort by King to make it socially acceptable to define Islam itself as a terrorist ideology, or at least to declare that anyone who's a Muslim--or looks as if he ought to be, like that poor guy in the skull cap who caught nine kinds of hell from the Ground Zero protestors last year for daring to cross their line of sight in the process of trying to get himself a sandwich--has a responsibility to prove that he. for some reason, doesn't share his co-religionists' enthusiasm for blowing up and beheading good Judeo-Christian white people. What would have been the point in having people from CAIR at the hearings, unless King wanted to have some kind of dialogue with them--which he didn't, anymore than people like Jerry Falwell wanted to see The Last Temptation of Christ before denouncing it. On a practical level, it's part of King's mission to narrow down, ideally to zero, the number of people associated with the Muslim religion who you can talk to in a level voice without being accused of consorting with terrorists. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who shared his experience of permitting such groups to talk to him, in a professional capacity, without turning fire hoses on them, was informed by Minnesota Rep. Chris Cravaack, "Basically, you're dealing with a terrorist organization, and I'm trying to get you to understand that they might be using you, sir, to implement their goals." In the context of an actual law enforcement officer being accused of culpability with the devil by a freshman douchebag, the "sir" was a nice touch.

"What about Timothy McVeigh?" writes David Horowitz at his blog. "It’s interesting how every time there’s any mention of Muslims and terror, Timothy McVeigh comes up as counter-example. The Oklahoma City bombing was the demented work of a lone individual and was 16 years ago! Where are the other counter-examples?" That's what this sort of thing comes to--when you're really committed to proving that Muslims are a lower order of being, you start thinking of non-Muslim monsters as "counter-examples", the exceptions that prove the rule. Horowitz doesn't consider Jared Lee Loughner a terrorist, of course. He's just a "loon." So are these fruitcakes, and so were Richard Poplowski,, and Byron Williams, and Gordon Kahl, and Joseph Stack, and every non-Muslim who's every shot an abortion provider or blown up a clinic. Anytime a white man acts like this, he's flipped his wig--though if some conservatives believe their own rhetoric, some of those in the last category I mentioned were actually the John Browns of our day--whereas anytime a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, he's revealing his true nature, and any time a Muslim throws a rock in a direction that would cause Martin Peretz to swoon, he's committing an act of terrorism. (By comparison, someone like Randy Weaver was just a little frisky.)

Presumably, people like Horowitz thinks that the reason names like McVeigh's come up in these... I'll be a sweetheart and call them "discussions", is that it's a contest, and whoever can name the most examples to tag on their group of choice wins, and that non-Muslim white people who don't recognize that terrorism, as opposed to freak acts of violent looniness, is intrinsically Islamic and Araby, are self-hating guilt peddlers who want to prove that white people are the real evildoers. This would fall under the heading of "political correctness", a term that was pulled out of mothballs so many times during the hearings that I started having flashbacks to 1993 and almost checked to see if Kurt Cobain was still alive. By invoking the dreaded initials "P.C." in connection to Islamic terrorism, the invokers mean to suggest that people who aren't openly suspicious of all Muslims, and who are not in fact up in the face of "the Muslim community" demanding that each and every one of them concede that they should be assumed to be part of a sleeper cell until they prove otherwise, perhaps by voting for whichever politician in their area seems most likely to support internment camps for their swarthy kind, are a bunch of Neville Chamberlains who'd rather see their own children burn in an Islamofascist apocalypse than face the ugly truth. When the Ku Klux Klan were mentioned at one point in the hearings, it was angrily pointed out that their have been congressional hearings on the Klan, and on skinheads, too. Not on the white community or on whether angry anti-government blowhards of a certain partisan bent might have anything to do with fueling a climate of anger than pushes lost, confused people in a certain direction, of course, but the Ku Klux Klan, and on skinheads. So now there was a hearing on Muslims. See how naturally we got to this point? (You may have heard that King in particular has come in for some ribbing because, even as he searches under every Muslim's bed for Osama bin Ladin's fingerprints, he remains a longtime and unrepentant supporter of the I.R.A. With admirable willingness to look like a douche, King has explained that he doesn't much care what the I.R.A. has done that others might find objectionably terroristy because they have never targeted the United States. I'm trying to start an Internet rumor that Peter King doesn't mind that the I.R.A. have killed so many people in Britain because of the anti-colonial attitudes he developed during his Kenyan childhood.)

After the invasion of Iraq, Dennis Miller went on the radio and expressed his incredulity at those who didn't think that Saddam Hussein had no role in 9/11, or that he at least didn't know about it in advance. He was one of the bad people, and one of the Middle East people, and surely that meant that he and Osama bin Laden, whatever there personal differences, must have been on the same chat board, or traded high fives when they passed each other in the hallways at the International Assembly of Super-Villains complex, or just shared the same reptile brain. In old Westerns, the Navajos always knew what the Apaches had planned, and communications technology has come a long way since the days of smoke signals and tribal drums. In a lot of those old movies, there was a recurring character, the Good Indian, who recognized that it was inevitable and right that his way of light should be wiped out by the great white brother, and who signed on to work for the hero or the cavalry as a scout or translator. In Sam Peckinpah's mesmerizing botch Major Dundee, one of the most ambitious, enlightened, and confused of all cavalry movies, Charlton Heston's Dundee has an Apache scout who presents himself as a Good Indian but who Dundee can never bring himself to trust. In the original release version from 1965, the fellow simply disappears from the movie, like the Fool in King Lear, as it's crashing towards its climax, never to be seen again. In the restored version that was released a few years ago, Dundee and his men find that the Apaches he was helping them pursue have crucified him and left him to die, a discovery that forces Dundee to reluctantly consider the possibility that he may have misjudged this savage.

Traditionally, getting killed in the service of the white man was the only sure way to prove to a hard-headed movie cowboy that a Good Indian really was good. One of the most startling moments of the hearings came when Muslim Representative Keith Ellison teared up while talking about Mohammed Salman Hamdani, 23-year-old first responder at the World Trade Center site on 9/11 whose death that day did not prevent people from arguing that, because he was Muslim, he might have been in league with the terrorists. King let that moment pass quietly, perhaps silently acknowledging that there are indeed Good Muslims, and that we will know who they are when they have done the right thing and proven that their hearts are not with the terrorists, the only way they can. (Because contemporary right-wing bloggers and tweeters are made of much sterner stuff than any mere Charlton Heston character, many of those worthies were quick to jump in with attacks on Ellison, ranging from false claims that there was no evidence of posthumous attacks on Hamdani's character to Washington Post blogger's Jennifer Rubin's curious complaint that Ellison was let off easy for making with the waterworks, compared to all those meanies who made cruel sport of that tender lily of the valley, John Boehner, when he teared up on 60 Minutes.)

A number of people, in discussing King and his merry band, have resorted to the word "McCathyism". This strikes me as wrong. McCarthyism destroyed a number of individual lives, but Communism only benefited from it indirectly, in that it made anti-Communist look dishonest and idiotic. (It wasn't, despite the efforts of various charlatans and chowderheads to benefit from it opportunistically.) But I doubt that it minted many Communist revolutionaries, unless additions to the ranks of the shallowest kind of campus radical counts. But the end result of teaching a whole, emerging generation of American Muslims that they're not considered "real" Americans by those who think it's their place to decide such things, that they'll born out of society and will never be able to adequately prove that they're not plotting mass murder in the name of violent revolution, that it's a disgrace for them to have a place to pray... well, it's as easy to imagine the worst of it as it was easy to imagine what the results would be if, in response to an attack by people who wanted the world to see America as an imperial oppressor with cruel designs on the whole Middle East, the U.S. were to invade a country without provocation, bomb it into the Stone Age, destroy basic services, and then hang around to pull people out of their homes and off the street at night and drag them off to a torture chamber at Dracula's castle.

George W. Bush, who for the life of him could never imagine how anyone could respond to that series of circumstances with anything but Bambi-eyed gratitude, did understand that it would do America no good to behave as if Islam itself were a malign force and our mortal enemy, and for his whole administration he was able to keep such talk tamped down. Now that the genie is out of the bottle and swinging for the fences, it's impossible to tell whether he was doing some heroic job in forestalling the inevitable all that time or if his being replaced by a black guy with a name with a lot of vowels in it had a deranging effect on a good percentage of the population that is beyond even a surreptitiously recorded NPR fundraiser's worst nightmares. Not behaving this way is "right" in the politically correct, which is to say moral, sense; it's also the obviously right thing to do in terms of basic strategic intelligence. But lots of people would never dream of not strapping themselves to the nearest A-bomb and riding it to Earth whooping like Slim Pickens, if the cost of not immolating themselves was that they had to pass up a chance to step into the ring with a straw man and feel like a proper badass.