Hoovering It Up

If your idea of a good time is finding reasons to be interested in Clint Eastwood movies, J. Edgar is sort of interesting as the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Clint's efforts to come to terms with the fact of homosexuality. Back in the '70s, the early Dirty Harry movies had a homophobic subtext--Scorpio. the extortionist hippie serial killer of the first one, paid Harry a leering compliment on the size of his gun, and the secret police death squad in motorcycle gear of Magnum Force looked as if they'd stepped out of Scorpio Rising--that went surface text at the end of the third film in the series, The Enforcer, the one where Harry adds insult to injury by calling the chief bad guy a "fucking fruit" as he blows him away. That was back when Eastwood was regarded as an action caveman by most critics. Now that he's a serious auteur in the winter of his career, he has to be more thoughtful about these things, or at least more solemn. Previously, his biggest attempt to reach out came in 1997's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, arguably his worst movie as a director, or at least the most migraine-inducing. Eager to use the story of a man who murders his male lover as a chance to show that he and the gays could just get along, Eastwood cast the drag queen Lady Chablis, who had a minor real-life connection to the events depicted, as herself, then just kept handing her more and more "screen time", a term that, in this context, is synonymous with "rope."

J. Edgar is a long, uninspired slog of a movie built around the recurring image of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) standing on the balcony of his office, acknowledging the inaugural procession of one new President after another, as the years slip by and he remains solidly in place as the head of the FBI. The movie is very impressed with its idea that Hoover was a man trapped inside his own paranoid head, running old newsreels between his ears, while history was moving on somewhere outside his diminishing reach. (He's right to keep his distance; whenever he gets to close to history itself, performances as bad as Jeffrey Donovan's Robert Kennedy, and a cussing Nixon who would embarrass the one in the movie version of Watchmen, keep invading his and the viewers' space. Donovan plays Kennedy the way anyone who's watched him struggle with accents on Burn Notice would expect him to, and the movie's Nixon looks like Norm Macdonald with his hair colored with a black magic marker.) The core emotional relationship in the movie is the one between Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), the FBI agent who was Hoover's closest friend and associate throughout his whole working life and who is commonly assumed to have been, in some way or other, the love of his life.

In photos, Tolson looks like the presentably bland Joe Friday prototype of Hoover's dreams, and it's a good joke to imagine them spending their lives together looking like the straightest guys in the world, the perfect products of the closet. But while DiCaprio gives a perfectly creditable performance, Hammer has been encouraged to act like... well, not a screaming queen, exactly, but a beautiful, fluttery Tim Gunn type who teaches J. Edgar how to dress in all the best shops and complains that one female entertainer is "too camp for me." Speculation about Hoover's sexuality didn't really take off until after Hoover and Tolson were both dead. If this guy were at Hoover's side for five minutes, let alone his whole life, people never would have stopped speculating about them. (Hammer's performance gets worse at it goes along, because he has no idea how to act like an old person. The Crypt Keeper makeup job doesn't help.) Maybe this is Eastwood's only idea of how a gay man who's comfortable with who he is might act. If it is, then the movie is of a piece: a portrait of a man whose mind never left the Victorian era, from one who's more of his soul mate than he knows.

Creamed Kael

I was all revved up to check out Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A life in the Dark after reading Manhola Dargis and A. O. Scott "discuss" Kael's legacy in The New York Times. (I put the word "discuss" in quotes because it actually reads like Dargis standing on her desk yelling into a bullhorn while Scott wanders around the room trying to find his glasses, occasionally looking up from the sofa cushions to mutter, "Yeah, sure, whatever. The seventies, death of film!") Dargis, who says that Kael's work doesn't do anything for her anymore, joins a long line of people who have detected flaws in Kael's writing and immediately proceeded to the dual insight that her whole career was shit and she was also a very bad person. "Given how badly she comes across in the biography — palling around with filmmakers she reviewed is merely the beginning — she doesn’t set a good example," Dargis writes, before going on to say that whatever influence Kael's name still holds has little to do with her "ideas, pugilistic writing style, ethical lapses and cruelties (and not merely in her reviews." I got the impression that this was going to be one of those books, such as Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell or Albert Goldman's Elvis, that reels all around the vomitorium, full of disgust for its own subject, who is revealed to have committed a bevy of gaudy sins against taste and decency. I like Kael, but I like gossip, too. I couldn't wait to get my hands on the thing.

With all due respect to one of the leading critics for the cultural section of our most important national newspaper after USA Today, Dargis needs to trade in her crack dealer. Where's the goods? Kael had a weird relationship with her daughter, who Kellow describes as practically being her mother's indentured servant. (Later, her grandson had her wrapped around his little finger. I confess to recognizing a not-altogether-unfamiliar pattern from families I have known firsthand.) Some of Kael's "cruelties" sound pretty funny from a distance, such as the scene where she greets the announcement that her daughter is getting married with a loud, "Oh, shit!" Others I don't really buy, such as the description of her torturing an ailing and over-the-hill Nicholas Ray by enumerating his films' failings over lunch, until the broken old maverick can barely stand to hold his head. (That story comes from a memoir-essay from reformed "Paulette" David Denby, which itself must be one of the strangest documents that has ever been used to space out the perfume ads in The New Yorker. It begins with Denby going on about how he was encouraged in his career as a movie critic by Kael, but that her malign influence was so great on the sensitive, impressionable writer he was then that he found himself crippled, writing in plain imitation of her voice. Then, he says, she sat him down over lunch--why did people keep accepting her invitations to restaurants?--and told him that she didn't think his movie criticism was cutting it and he should try something else. Denby presents this as both a traumatic moment for him and a gross violation of the proper decencies by Kael, even though, if he means the stuff he'd shoveled at the start of the essay, she was agreeing with him about his own estimation of his work, assuring him that he was right to be concerned about it, and suggesting an alternate route. Instead, Kael's telling him what he claims to have already known apparently strengthened his resolve to become the lamest and most undeservedly successful film critic of his generation, a goal that he has since made good on. In fact, he made it look easy.)

Kael is also said to have had unethical dealings with a fellow from whom she pinched much of the research that went into her book-length essay on Citizen Kane, stealing even the staggering insight that, when the dying Charles Foster Kane says "Rosebud" on his deathbed, there isn't anybody in the room to hear him. That essay, which remains a delight as a piece of writing and as an argument for Kane's place in the line of screwball-comedy newspaper movies, will always be a thorn bush, especially for those who think that it was an attempt to shaft Orson Welles out of his proper due, a broad fraternity that I do not happen to belong to. (It also contains maybe the single weirdest slip of Kael's career, when she insisted that a scene in which Kane has been eating in the newspaper office,a scene which looks carefully prepared and acted and appears in the script, was "clearly" just caught by the camera, and that Welles had to include it in the finished film to show what a sport he was. John Gregory Dunne would use that as proof that, for all the smarty-pants airs Kael put on in print, she didn't know jack shit about how movies were made. Reasons for Kael's worthlessness as a critic and as a human being--she was too "pop", she had a potty mouth, she was a homophobe, she was a self-hating anti-Semite-- kept coming in shifts, disappearing, and then re-emerging--and the "she didn't understand the technical process of moviemaking" one has recently made a comeback, with Clive James citing it in a recent article about the latest edition of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film to explain why he had once been a Paulette but now wouldn't cross the street to piss on her grave. As someone who has dared to review records even though I can't read music, I am not the best candidate to share James's scorn on this point.

Dargis refers to the big, big thing Kael is supposed to have done wrong (besides write all that stuff, of course) when she mentions that all that "palling around with filmmakers she reviewed", much as the young Barack Obama was bad to pal around with terrorists. Although Kael crossed paths with a number of filmmakers, and was lured out to Hollywood by one of them, Warren Beatty, for a brief and unfruitful stint trying to work as a Hollywood player, the most social contact with a director that Kellow describes is with James Toback, who she scarcely elevated to major status in any way. Dargis isn't the only woman who had problems, in a big way, with Kael's work: Renata Adler wrote probably the best-known attempt to turn her "legacy" to ashes in The New York Review of Books, and the former Village Voice critic Georgia Brown once committed to print a deranged piece, complaining about the witch had sent forth her winged monkeys to taint the results of the 1989 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. (Probably the definitive Kael-haters' unintentional self-parody, it proceeded from the assumption that only racism could cause someone to prefer any movie released that year to Do the Right Thing and fully blasted off when Brown marveled that anyone could be so blind to true artistic greatness to think that Tom Cruise and his prosthetic balding pattern in Born on the Fourth of July had not soundly bested that sorry hack, Daniel Day-Lewis.)

Still, anyone who thinks that Kael's personal connections to filmmakers and time spent away from her writing desk count that much against her, and who would argue that this has nothing to do with her being a woman, had better have a solid explanation for why there's never been much of a movement for driving Edmund Wilson's reputation underground after he rewarded Anais Nin for some time in the sack with an insincerely flattering review, or why it doesn't matter so much that James Agee, who was the first film critic to get his own volume in the Library of America, wrote film scripts, including one for a director, John Huston, he'd praised as practically the only real director in Hollywood, or why nobody much minds Roger Ebert having written scripts for Russ Meyer. Or is it less of a conflict of interest in their cases because they actually got something on the screen, and the credits to go with them? In a crowd of reviewers, an actual credit on a major theatrical release, whether it's The African Queen or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, might do as much to legitimize one's status as possession of a penis.

For those who've read the most overheated denunciations of Kael and her social set, or just who've been impressed by the hedonistic thrust of her writing, the biggest news to come out of the biography is that Kael's sex life seems to have just stopped around the time she had her daughter, when she was about thirty. Not a hundred pages into the book, Kellow has so little to report about her personal life that the prose dries up and the biography turns into an annotated series of capsule descriptions of her reviews of the biggest pictures of the day. This is all right for what it is, though Kellow might have done a better job of keeping his bewilderment towards her admiration of Brian De Palma to himself--he writes that she "inexplicably" included Dressed to Kill as one her NYFCC nominees for Best Picture of 1980--considering that it's almost as if as a biographer of Clement Greenberg just didn't get what his subject ever saw in Jackson Pollack. He also commits a few slips himself--inexplicably, as he might say, considering how far it must be from real work to accurately synopsize movie reviews-- and at one point, whether through sloppy writing or an astonishing act of misreading, makes it seem as if he's reporting that Kael had something approving to say about Love Story. ("This thing is so instinctively, plus manipulatively, engineered to leave 'em crying that it could hardly fail commercially even if the actors were programmed by Terry Southern to make obscene gestures at the audience at ten-second intervals.") I am glad I read it, though, partly because, especially if you read between the lines, it casts Kael's palling around, especially with younger critics, in a much sweeter, less sinister light than we're used to seeing. Kael was in her late forties when she finally got The New Yorker gig and started making a modest living wage from her writing, and most of the years that preceded that lucky break were grimmer and lonelier than anyone reading her high-wattage, laugh-a-minute prose would likely have guessed. Some people will always see her as some combination of Circe and the Wicked Witch of the West, drawing a crowd of shapable young minds around her to corrupt them with her love of Harry Ritz, but she sounds to me like someone who'd waited a long time for the chance to have spending money, and an audience, and some people to hang out with.

A lot of people who'll leave a bigger carbon footprint on the art of writing about film than Manohla Dargis, let alone Georgia Brown, have regarded Kael as a pure menace. (Andrew Sarris, who Kael seems not to have ever mentioned in print again after the legendary takedown "Circles and Squares", often dropped her name in his writing, in a way that implied that he saw her as serving the role in his life and career that Lex Luthor served for Superman.) The arrival of a selection of her work, edited by the art critic Sanford Schwartz, and published as part of the Library of America, is designed to turn people who used to be on the fence into hardcore, frothing haters, and make long-term haters' heads explode. Personally, I think that David Ansen summed up the real reason that Kael pissed off so many people in ways they find unforgivable when he said that she had the unique gift of making you "feel like an asshole" for disagreeing with her." Another critic, Richard T. Jameson, once wrote that Kael "demonstrated the viability of a kick-him-in-the-nuts style of argumentation that continues to pass as the bottom line in truth telling, for many readers and not a few emulators," and the concept of a "truth teller" is based on the idea that a lot of people are wolfing down bullshit and asking for seconds. Some of the standard knocks against Kael as something other than an honest critic--her reputation as someone who based her reviews on a single viewing of a movie and wasn't constantly rushing in with freshly "revised" opinions used to be two big ones--amount to disapproval that a critic might have enough confidence in her own way of seeing to reject received opinion and not even pretend to feel apologetic about it. (Maybe the closest Kael ever came to apologizing for her opinion was with the preface to her pan of Shoah, a plea for the readers' forbearance which William Shawn demanded as a precondition for even running the review. Kellow performs a long-overdue public service by printing the dry-edged judgment of The New Yorker's crack European correspondent Jane Kramer--"[Claude] Lanzmann was such a sanctimonious presence--kind of like the Elie Wisel of filmmakers. He sure as hell wasn't the Primo Levi"--alongside the objections of a raft of critics, most of whom can't seem to offer up anything more thoughtful than the embarrassing notion that, if someone spends years of his life making an epic-length documentary about the Holocaust, then it's just basic math that the resulting work cannot be criticized.)

If Kael was a polarizing writer, that's partly because she was so passionate about the arts that she was inspiring. The strangest crack in the Dargis/Scott piece is Dargis's remark that she didn't seem to care much about life outside the movies. One of the biggest things that sets Kael's work apart from most of what passes for film criticism now is that Kael was interested in so much besides movies and brought her insights about painting, music, opera, theater, and books to bear on movies, whereas most movie writers today really don't have demonstrate much of a reference field outside movies, and maybe TV. (When A. O. Scott was first hired by the Times as a movie critic, Roger Ebert complained that Scott wasn't qualified to write about movies, because he'd mostly worked published literary criticism.) It was precisely because Kael knew of traditions and developments in the arts outside the multiplex that she often failed to be impressed by ideas and attitudes that seemed dazzling to people who'd just seen them, for the first time in their lives, in a movie. Maybe it was because she had other things to do that she concentrated on what was on the screen and was never one for indulging a conceptual experiment or misfire that seemed "interesting" if you held it up the light and read something into it. In one of their previous thought-experiment duets with Scott, their defense of the "boring" qualities of work produced by, say, Kelly Reichardt, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jia Zhangke, and A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, Dargis wrote that "[Andy] Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like Empire, eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one)." My definition of someone who needs to get more of a life outside movies would begin with anyone who would sit through all eight hours of Empire and then emerge with the news that the experience was worthwhile because not being entertained for eight hours served to challenge the notion that art should be entertaining. (I tend to agree with the idea, promulgated by Dwight Macdonald, who called Warhol's movies "boring mystifications", that art is entertaining or it's nothing. Of course, some people--for all I know, Dargis might be one of them--are silly enough to associate the word "entertaining" only with shallow pleasures. A Monet's water lilies occupy the mind and eye in a pleasurable and interesting way, and so are entertaining. A Transformers movie does not, and so isn't. A J. Hoberman dissertation of a Clint Eastwood movie like Heartbreak Ridge is entertaining, though it doesn't make the movie any better. A Manohla Dargis explication of a dull but ambitious Eastwood movie such as Gran Torino or J. Edgar achieves an exquisite match between the value of the thing itself and its subject matter, but you still can't get back the five minutes you wasted while reading it.)

The Library of America book doesn't include either "Circles or Squares" or the review of Love Story. Like For Keeps, the best-of anthology that Kael helped assemble in the '90s, it focuses on raves, and seriously limits the number of pans. This is nice in theory, but regrettable in action, because even though Kael was one of the few movie critics who was as much fun to read when she was breaking out the champagne as she was when she had her cutlas at the ready, many of her most vicious reviews contain her clearest statements of aesthetic preference. Kael scattered a lot of opinions over the years, and some of them, God help us, may have been "wrong". (Manny Farber, the other critic who preceded Kael to his own volume in the Library of America, was "wrong" at least as often, and was a fair match for it when it came to brazenly telling people they, and their favorite films, were full of shit. Maybe he never inspired anything remotely like as much vitriol as Kael because he never had as respectable a perch as The New Yorker. Then again, I'm betting that the fact that he had a penis made him seem more reasonable to a great many people.) What can her writing, or Farber's, mean to people who are perfectly comfortable with the state of film criticism these days, when a strong writer with an unusual point of view (and, to be fair, a habit of praising movies I find atrocious and dumping on others that I think are the berries) like Armond White is regularly dismissed as a deliberate troublemaker who's just pretending to deviate from the pack to "call attention to himself"? One of the comic high points of the Dargis/Scott exchange comes when Dargis writes that Kael thought that movies and movie criticism had lost something in the early 1980s and, rolling her eyes in print, notes that at the same time Kael was expressing this opinion, Siskel and Ebert had become a very hot act on TV! (Another comes when she rejects the idea that there's anything wrong with movie criticism these days, when "there’s an astonishing amount of exciting work coming out of academia.") Roger Ebert has become a universally beloved nice guy, but he and his late co-host also defined a colorless, juiceless alternative to real criticism where any film that sets out to satisfy certain predigested requirements for "entertainment", based on one's expectations set by previous films and promises made in the advertising, is objectively "good" and gets a thumbs-up, and any film that wanders into unfamiliar terrain, whether it's a Blue Velvet or The Brood, stands accused of being too smarty-pants big for its britches and gets a thumbs-down. Even if you don't mind the good or great films that get the short end of the stick by this method, that still makes up for a hell of a lot of pointless, unnecessary, hacky-ass movies that are automatically given their thumbs-up. It's helped land us in a world where people are less interested in reading a review by someone who's seen a movie and gotten something different out of it than they might have than in making sure all the ducks are in a row when their latest favorite is assigned its rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Ebert was always predictable, and he helped midwife a safely predictable media landscape where everybody knew what everyone else was going to think and the crazies like Armond White are not only denigrated for being out of step with received opinion but scolded for being "wrong" in bad faith; how can anybody hate a Pixar movie and mean it? In that Times piece, Scott does bestir himself at the end when he wonders why Sarris and Kael ever had a feud. After all, Sarris was advocating the "auteur" theory, which proposed that movie directors are artists, and Kael thought they were artists too, so what's the beef? His confusion here is based on an increasingly common problem among people who, I guess, haven't actually read either "Circles and Squares" or the Sarris essay that Kael was responding to. Sarris, in his less-than-proudest moments, seemed to be trying to sell the idea that if a given director was worthy of consideration as an artist, then that meant that all his work, even the hackiest stuff that he did on his off days, was worthy of deep consideration, and that seemingly lesser films by someone like Otto Preminger or Raoul Walsh gained in interest if you could detect thematic "links" between them and, say, Laura or High Sierra. In retrospect, he seems to have been trying to elevate movies to the status of literature by showing that you could make the same mistakes in studying them that had traditionally been made by the dullest and most bone-headed literary critics of their day. Kael wasn't having this, partly because she didn't think that the secret to finding art in movies lay in talking as if you were talking about something more culturally respectable, and partly because she insisted on taking every new encounter with a movie as its own unique experience. This meant that, for all her reputation for playing favorites, Kael panned a lot of movies that happened to be the work of directors she officially championed--movies by Altman, Peckinpah, De Palma, even Jean Renoir--and praised many movies by directors who she had most often derided (Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon, James Bridges's Mike's Murder, Herbert Ross's Pennies from Heaven). Meanwhile, Sarris was stuck, having once detected some trace of artistry in the work of Blake Edwards, with having to re-watch Darling Lili over and over until he could finally report to his breathless readers that it didn't look that bad on the thirty-second go.

The conventional image of a writer who loves Pauline Kael is someone who, well, grew up wanting to be Pauline Kael. Me, I grew up wanting to be James Wolcott. It was Wolcott I first discovered, when I was still an obnoxious little blot on the Mississippi landscape, reading his TV column in The Village Voice in the early '80s. I had gotten the subscription through the mail, thanks to one of those little cardboard flyers that used to littler the hallways of public schools, and as I first perused the confusing jumble of that paper, I zeroed in on Wolcott partly because, writing about TV, he was the critic who was most likely to be writing about something I'd actually seen. He was effortlessly sharp and funny in those days, and seemed to know everything about everything, and I pictured him as looking like Sami Frey in The Little Drummer Girl, a world-weary, sardonic grin in black leather. I finally got to see him when he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, and it was a rude shock to see that he looked pudgy and pasty, with limp hair that was too long for the shape of his head--that is to say, an older version of myself. Reading his own new memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York,a good chunk of which is devoted to his relationship with Kael, iI got a sick rush from discovering how shambling and unsure of himself Wolcott really was at the time that my pimply-faced ignorant ass was venerating his image, back in the sticks.

Of all these books, I did get my biggest laugh out of Wolcott's, when he describes hanging out at Kael's office at The New Yorker, doing an impression of Redd Foxx staggering around clutching his chest whenever William Shawn tried using his legendary heart condition to try to talk Kael out of threatening to review Deep Throat or saying mean things about li'l Terry Malick. (Wolcott assures us that he was careful not to do it when there were other people around.) I can't say I enjoyed his memoir as much as I would a collection of his old Voice columns--is there really no market in the publishing industry for thirty-year-old thoughts on The Good Neighbors?--but it does convey a melancholy sense of a lost New York world where people could care about punk rock and the ballet and even find other mad dreamers to hang out with and shoot the shit about said obsessions. How much of that world is really lost, even with Ballanchine dead and CBGB's shuttered, and how much of it was simply pissed away by Wolcott is another thing: Given how important Kael's role is in his book, there's no getting around the fact that Wolcott dynamited their friendship in 1997, when he wrote a Vanity Fair piece about the Paulettes and the torch he felt that they'd taken to film criticism. Now he says that he never meant any of the shrapnel from that piece to hit Kael herself, but I wonder.

I suspect that the best way to drive a shiv into Kael's heart would have been for a friend to unexpectedly start bad-mouthing her favorite movies, and Wolcott kick-started his article with the announcement that neither The Godfather, Part II nor Mean Streets (which, seen today, seems to be "all attitude") had held up for shit! Bewilderingly, in his memoir, Wolcott tells a story about Kael meeting another critic leaving a screening as she was going in. The critic told Kael that the movie he'd just seen was nothing much and probably not worth bothering with, and Kael, saying, Oh, well, as long as I'm here, went in anyway. That movie, Wolcott then reveals triumphantly, was Mean Streets! I waited for the punch line, for Wolcott to write something to the effect that the other critic was right, since Wolcott is on record as thinking that Mean Streets is a piece of crap, but the point seems to be that Kael never took anyone's word for anything, and was right to do so. Is there any chance at all that, having once claimed to like Mean Streets when he was a Paulette-in-good-standing, and then turned against it when he tore up his membership card, he's changed his fucking mind again, and now thinks it's brilliant again? Maybe not constantly revising your opinions about movies isn't the terrible thing that Kael-haters think it is. After awhile, your head might be in danger of coming unscrewed.

Incidentally, in Kellow's book, the critic Charles Taylor describes Wolcott as "a careerist creep." One of the funny details in Kellow's book is that Kael, whose biggest career breakthrough, being hired by The New Yorker, looks like a classic fluke--a case of the exact right editor discovering the exact right writer to cover the exact right subject at the exact right time--apparently always thought that it was proof that good work would be rewarded. One of her younger writer friends, Ray Sawhill, reports that Kael was always bugging him to write long critical pieces and send them to magazines on spec, and that when nothing ever came of it, she bugged him even harder; she couldn't believe that he was really beavering away and nothing was coming of it. Wolcott, by contrast, dropped out of college to hit New York after he'd sent Norman Mailer something he'd written --something about Norman Mailer--and Mailer offered to put in a good word for him with Dan Wolf, then the editor of the Voice. Wolcott proceeded to lay siege to the Voice until Wolf gave him a job, and within half a dozen years, he had worked, or was doing work, for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Creem, Esquire, The Texas Monthly and other high-profile venues. Whatever sweat and politicking must have gone into his success, Wolcott, true to his book's title, sticks to his story that it was all luck, just dumb luck, that led to every break he got. I can't help thinking there's a comedy in there somewhere, and that in its ideal form it would be written by Preston Sturges and star Thelma Ritter and the young Robert Morse.

O Stuporman!

Abraham Lincoln was ugly. He had other qualities, but he was ugly. That's part of what's come to define him--in a good way, since his homeliness serves his image as a man of suffering integrity, who must have been deep, since nobody was going to hand him the keys to the car based on his looks. (One of the more durable political wisecracks of the nineteenth century is Lincoln's response to being called "two-faced": "If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?") George W. Bush is stupid. When Bush was president, a lot of people on the "reasonable" left or in the middle used to scold people who complained that he was stupid that they were failing to appreciate a mind that must have had something going for it for its possessor to be so successful, and in the process, cutting themselves off from the greater public that would see no point in working with people making such hurtful personal assumptions, which reflected badly on Bush's supporters. And now that the important thing about Bush, for his diehard supporters, is not that he win re-election but that his "legacy" be a good one, many have started being very abusive about all the people who have been proven "wrong" about the former once-elected two-term president's smarts. But Bush sold himself as stupid, while maligning his opponents, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, as being so smart that they must be pretty lame, the boring good kids who actually went to college to get a dumb ol' education, and his most literate supporters were on board with this, and the media professed to love it, presumably because they believed that the great unwashed loved it. Forget all that; the man's a genius, write it down. People have every right to think that stupidity is linked to solid, simple values and moral rectitude, just as people have a right to think that physical homeliness is linked to rectitude and depth of character. But the day after Lincoln died, nobody was going around getting up in people's faces and insisting that he'd looked like Zac Efron.

The case that Bush is brilliant boils down to the charge that it's mean to say he isn't, plus, he reads history books. The case that he's stupid can perhaps best be made by means of a thought experiment. Imagine it's 2000, and at one of the presidential debates, someone asks Bush the following question: "Sir, imagine that it's the first year of your first term, and you've told your intelligence agencies to stop focusing on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, because, you've said, Bill Clinton told you they were a real danger and you'd already decided that the secret to a successful presidency would be to do the opposite of anything that Bill Clinton thought was a good idea, and your economic policies have already turned the surplus you inherited into a black hole that, because of your tax plan, is only going to get deeper and blacker. At this moment, al-Qaeda strikes on American soil. Is there any chance that part of your response would be to wage a war of choice against a country with no connection to al-Qaeda, based on arguments that make a joke of your father and your vice-president's claims to have effectively isolated and neutered that country, while maintaining your tax cuts, so that there's no way to pay for your war?" The next morning, the headlines would read, "ELITIST MEDIA INSULTS REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WITH TRICK QUESTION DESIGNED TO GET HIM TO SAY THAT HE MIGHT CONSIDER POLICY THAT ONLY BE CONCEIVED BY A DROOLING IMBECILE!" Certainly no one would have voted for Bush, before 9/11, if they thought he had the capacity to think of something like that. But once he was President, the fact that he did think like that had to be taken as proof that he, well, he had a certain swagger, God love him. Rick Perry's supporters were very angry with Politico a while back, because the site had the audacity wonder if he was "dumb." At the same time, Perry's every word and gesture were designed to woo the "We like 'em big and stupid" crowd, and when Perry's unmistakable, undeniable stupidity did get him in serious trouble, it was because he came across as stupid in the wrong way, less Fred Flinstone with nukes than sad, senile old thing. (Earlier, Perry had fought off complaints about his debate performance by saying that the alternative to not being able to string three words together is being articulate, and he'd hate to be that, because then he'd be like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Incidentally, is there any clearer evidence of Republican mass stupidity than their conviction, as a group, that however things were under George Bush, things were obviously just terrible as could be when Clinton was president?)

Right now, Herman Cain's belligerent pride in his own stupidity may be the only thing helping his career stay afloat; lots of people clearly love it, especially since they see it as a way of telling the media they can take their concerns about not electing a complete moron to the highest office in the land and stick them where the sun don't shine.Daniel Drezner recently wrote a post in which, following Cain's performance before the editorial board of the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, which in turn came after Cain's mocking the idea that he should know anything at all about who's running things in the part of the world where we have two wars going, he wouldn't be writing anything more about Cain, because it's just too fucking awful. (Of course, make no mistake, just because Cain has never made a public utterance that wasn't proudly butt-ignorant, Drezner wants you to know that " I don't think Herman Cain is stupid.") But, as David Weigel points out, "Cain hasn't changed. His position when he got into the race was that advisers would be called on to guide his foreign policy. His position now is that he's not a foreign policy guy, and in a Cain White House, he'd call on his advisers to guide foreign policy. Cain was doing perfectly fine in the polls for a very long time with exactly this position. He's fading now not because of his flubs, but because a sexual harassment scandal makes voters doubt his morals. Foreign policy isn't a driving issue in 2012. The deal Cain was always making with voters was that he didn't sweat details. This is the businessman theory of politics: People who succeed at business are, naturally, prone to succeed at anything else. Give them a government to run and they'll do it better than the bureaucrat class." This is a stupid attitude Weigel is describing, but it's no stupider than the idea that Bush, who was also going to farm out his decisions to a gang of wise motherfuckers, ought to be president because his daddy used to have the job and he already knew where the light switches were in the bathrooms. For Republicans, at this stage of the game, picking a candidate is all about the personalities involved, and what they most want is somebody whose personality is calculated to piss off or appall the people they hate. Whatever motivates Cain's solid history of dumbass pronouncements, they weld him closer and closer to the hearts of many Republicans because he's so angry about being called on them, asked about them, and just being held to any standard at all. He came down from the CEO's penthouse office with a ghosted advice manual under each arm; why shouldn't he just be given the presidency? He says he'd be great; where does some elitist fact checker get off, calling a job provider a liar!?

In related news, Daniel B. Klein, the "libertarian economist" who made news last year with an op-ed piece that, based on "a set of survey questions that tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles," argued that "he American left was unenlightened, by and large, as to economic matters," or to put it in the blunter terms favored by Fox News stories on the piece, that liberals are stupid. Fox News will not be doing any stories on his follow-up piece in The Atlantic, in which he points out the flaws in his own methodology and concedes that, based on a later surbey, "under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that 'myside bias'—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups." In other words, although many liberals are indeed pretty stupid, in terms of their tendency to think past the assumptions they base on their preconceptions and biases, this is something they share with a more or less equal number of non-liberals. I didn't do any surveys myself, but I could have told Klein this was the case and saved him some work, because I already knew it as a result of not having spent the last forty years of my life trapped at the bottom of a coal mine.

But to say that most people, whatever their political persuasion, thinks with their glands and not the evidence of their eyes and ears as filtered through their brains, still cannot fully account for the Republican party's embrace of stupidity as a precondition for leadership. For a start, it is wrong to classify the contemporary Republican party as "conservative". because true conservatism, whatever its lapses, is a reality-based school of thought that respects learning, scorns flattering appeals to the stupid, and seeks to actually conserve some things besides low tax rates for millionaires and the right to call anyone who doesn't agree with you a "class warrior" if your opponent is wearing a tie and a "smelly hippie" if he is not. Towards the end of his life, William F. Buckley appeared genuinely troubled by the fact that the party claiming to represent his ideology had, out of political expediency, turned itself into the anti-brain contingent; onetime pretenders to the throne of the Smart Conservative, such as George Will, don't seem, to have a problem with it. I guess they know their audience. In the meantime, the man seen as the most rational and in-touch of the Republican presidential candidates, Jon Huntsman, is seen as unelectable within his own party because he's not stupid, while the other one who has been known to claim to believe sensible things is regarded as a contender because he's now willing to claim to have repudiated all those sensible beliefs. Mitt Romney is supposed to be the responsible Republican front-runner, because he says enough crazy, stupid things to be acceptable to voters within his party, and also because the media and the party professionals believe he's actually a smart guy who's just pretending to be stupid until he has his hand on the Bible and is reciting the oath of office. They're openly signaling to people on the fence that it's okay to vote for Romney, because everything he says between now and Election Day is a bald-faced lie: he really knows better! This can't be good for the children.

Knock on Wood

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that this happened to appear so quickly on the heels of this. It's interesting to compare the two articles, in part because they're about equally clueless, but in different ways. Franklin's apparent inability to see a difference between a witty article, written for a political magazine, "that analyzed the Starr Report as if it were a nineteenth-century novel", and the kind of hollow, overblown academic writing that "James" was making fun of, at the same time she was participating in it, that (in the view of someone who was reading some of it at the time) tended to flow less from a genuine desire to extend the parameters of academic inquiry that a reluctance to do anything so tired and uncool as actually engage with a meaningful text--this is a fair match for Letham's whining about how Wood wasn't so much judging the merits of his work, on its own terms, as punishing him for not being a nineteenth-century gentleman novelist. The upshot of both pieces is that Wood is an anal old poopy-head who's too busy being the George Will of literary criticism (with one key difference--Wood can write) to get down where the cool cats are today.

One problem both pieces share in this regard is that neither of them is written from the vantage point of where the cool cats are today; Franklin is complaining about having been made cruel sport of back in the '90s, and Lethem has needed eight years to get himself together enough to respond to the book review in question. One way this serves their purposes may be that, if Wood were to respond to such belated protests against the harsh sentences he handed down way the hell back in the day, he might look even sillier than they do. If they'd lodged their grievances back when the grievances themselves were fresh, some good old literary feudin' might have ensued, and we could have at least applauded them (Franklin especially) for their courage. You also have to wonder just how delighted Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's famously prickly literary editor, was to have this screed come across his desk. Back when Wood wrote the offending piece for TNR, he was the magazine's star critic, but four years ago, he decamped to The New Yorker. At the time, Wieseltier made some comments to the effect that he hoped that the change of venue wouldn't cause Wood to become infected with soft uptown values, so that he lost his edge and started liking stuff, and Wieseltier is the kind of guy who can't say that he hopes you don't catch cold without making it sound like he's predicting the sad inevitable. Is Wieseltier still made that Wood left, or has he been paying attention enough to know that he has indeed been saying kind things about some novels that are almost as hip 'n' happening as Lethem's? Then again, maybe James Wood just has a cold. All the ocelots wait until the lion is doped up on Nyquil and half-conscious before tiptoeing up to his head and whispering in his ear all the things they've been thinking about him for eight to fifteen years.

This Week at The A. V. Club

The Wavy Gravy Movie: Saint Misbehavin'

Cheers: "The Tortelli Tort"/ "Sam at Eleven"

Come Back, Mark Harmon, All Is Forgiven!

I hate to even pretend that I have a dog in this race, but... seriously? You know who Bradley Cooper is to me? Bradley Cooper is the guy who used to play the investigative reporter on Alias. You know what that character was? That was one of the first instances I know of where an actor on a TV series had the rug pulled out from under him thanks to the instant feedback that the Internet had made possible. Cooper's character was this friend of Sydney Bristow who had no idea what she was up to but sort of knew there was this secret-spy stuff going on somewhere and was determined to get to the bottom of it, dammit! I've read that the producers thought he'd be a fan-favorite character, and that it was only after discovering, from sampling Internet buzz, that everyone who watched the show thought he was a lame-ass, clueless joke of a human being that they started reveling in how out of the loop his character was and started using him as the show's punching bag. After two seasons and change, they wrote him out of the show by putting his character into witness protection, just because it had gotten more sad than funny. I know women who still lament the fact that Lena Olin wasn't permitted to paint a wall with his brains.

George Clooney used to have bad parts on TV shows before getting dropped down the chute that deposited him back on the unemployment line. It's kind of funny now, because you come across those shows while channel surfing and go, "Whoa, that guy went on to become George Clooney!" You see Bradley Cooper in the trailer for Limitless or The A-Team and go, "Whoa, that guy from Alias who couldn't investigative report his ass out of a paper bag got hired to be in a movie! That's gonna suck." As far as I know, his big success was The Hangover, where he was the guy pictured at the back of the poster who got to feed straight lines to Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, and maybe People decided he's a really sexy movie star because hit movies have sexy movie stars in them, and a lot of people would hesitate to hang that designation on Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis. Whatever, I don't get it, but maybe getting things like this isn't in my job description. I do know that with this to throw up over, Kissinger is finally going to get some heat taken off him over winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Live Death

Bill Wyman has a piece about live rock albums, a species that I didn't realize had died out until Wyman pointed it out. I grew up in the golden age of sludgy-sounding two-LP sets, or at least the golden age of listening to them after you'd inherited them from your older brother, so this does feel like the end of an era.

It's a great piece, though I have to admit that one area where I part company with Wyman is his contempt for "the rise of the boutique live DVD, in which an antiseptic, camera-friendly "show" is set up to film. I hate these; the insular feel is the antithesis of a real concert. (It's why I've never warmed to Stop Making Sense, the bee's knees to some folks.)" I had a religious experience at Stop Making Sense, which I remember seeing four times in one week, in those last five minutes when "seeing" meant "at a movie theater, having paid money to get in." (If I remember right, I was alone in the theater except for the first time, and two of the three other people in the room that time left once they figured out that no car chase would be forthcoming. Small town.) I'd seen a bunch of "classic" rock-concert movies from the '70s by then, and could never figure out why they kept cutting to crowd reaction shots, as my desire to see, say, Led Zeppelin do their thing could in any way be served by seeing some other people getting to see Led Zeppelin do their thing. What Wyman describes as "antiseptic" and "insular", I would describe as "actually getting to see the performance promised by the name on the label, shaped to the demands of the medium." But then, on reflection, I'm not sure that I've ever had as good a time at an actual rock concert as I have at Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme's films with Neil Young, or for that matter Richard Pryor Live in Concert. Sometimes I think I'd be a really good living brain in a jar.

Arsenic and Old Letters

A crime novelist whose name is new to me has conjectured that Jane Austen was murdered:

Author Lindsay Ashford moved to Austen's village of Chawton three years ago, and began writing her new crime novel in the library of the novelist's brother Edward's former home, Chawton House. She soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen's letters, and one morning spotted a sentence Austen wrote just a few months before she died: "I am considerably better now and am recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."

Having researched modern forensic techniques and poisons for her crime novels, Ashford immediately realised the symptoms could be ascribed to arsenic poisoning, which can cause "raindrop" pigmentation, where patches of skin go brown or black, and other areas go white.

Shortly afterwards she met the former president of the Jane Austen Society of North America, who told her that the lock of Austen's hair on display at a nearby museum had been tested for arsenic by the now deceased American couple who bought it an auction in 1948, coming up positive.

Ashford says that chronic arsenic poisoning gives all the symptoms Austen wrote about in her letters, unlike other possibilities which have been put forward for her death, from Addison's disease, to the cancer Hodgkin's disease and the auto-immune disease lupus. Arsenic was also widely available at the time, handed out in the form of Fowler's Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis.

"After all my research I think it's highly likely she was given a medicine containing arsenic. When you look at her list of symptoms and compare them to the list of arsenic symptoms, there is an amazing correlation," Ashford told the Guardian. "I'm quite surprised no one has thought of it before, but I don't think people realise quite how often arsenic was used as a medicine. [But] as a crime writer I've done a lot of research into arsenic, and I think it was just a bit of serendipity, that someone like me came to look at her letters with a very different eye to the eye most people cast on Jane Austen. It's just luck I have this knowledge, which most Austen academics wouldn't."

Although Ashford thinks that, based on her symptoms and on the fact arsenic was so widespread, it is "highly likely" that Austen was suffering from arsenic poisoning after being prescribed it by a doctor for another disease, she explores the possibility that the novelist was murdered with arsenic in her new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen. "I don't think murder is out of the question," she said. "Having delved into her family background, there was a lot going on that has never been revealed and there could have been a motive for murder. In the early 19th century a lot of people were getting away with murder with arsenic as a weapon, because it wasn't until the Marsh test was developed in 1836 that human remains could be analysed for the presence of arsenic."

It's kind of funny that, given how likely it is that Austen might have innocently poisoned herself by overmedicating, Ashford, given her specialty, was able to make the leap necessary to bring theories of foul play into this. But what I like the most about this is that it confirms my suspicion that a writer will do anything to avoid sitting down and getting to work on the project at hand. Stick one in the home of Jane Austen's brother, and not only will she "soon became engrossed in old volumes of Austen's letters", but it's only a matter of time before she starts picking them apart to find an excuse to devote her energies to something, anything, besides writing what she's supposed to be writing in that house, even if it's writing something else. Maybe the solution to the economic crisis is to stick Lindsay Ashford in a house with a laptop and some dusty volumes of the letters of John Maynard Keynes and see what she comes up with.

Enlighten Up

Jonathan Demme has served as director on episodes of two TV series this fall. A Gifted Man, which lists him as one of the executive producers, is typical of recent Demme: smooth, glossy, insultingly contrived, and overflowing with good intentions and kind vibes. If you tried eating popcorn with it, it would taste like granola. Enlightened, Mike White's HBO vehicle for Laura Dern, is more like early Demme, the stuff he was doing in the '80s that made me want to take a bullet for him, and Demme's recent episode, "Sandy", was a standout chapter in the series so far. Dern's character, a former drug user and unstable basket case who is now trying not to just to put her life back together but to become a "good person" and useful member of society, got a visit from a friend she made in group therapy while she was in rehab (Robin Wright). Dern's character is also trying to find a place in her life for her ex-husband (Luke Wilson), without directly addressing the fact that she still has feelings for him, and when Wright stays over at Wilson's, all this stuff comes bubbling up that she can't deal with gracefully.

What links this episode, and Mike White's work in general, with Demme films such as Melvin and Howard and Something Wild, is its genuine interest in people who are far outside the mainstream of American life, and its ability to see the comedy in their lives without holding them up to ridicule. (Economically speaking, people like Melvin Dummar are closer to the mainstream of American life than they were when Demme made a movie about Dummar's life, not to mention when Dummar was living it. Dern's character works at a big company, but after her public meltdown, she's been shifted to an underground lair that's basically a holding pen for people the company doesn't want seen on the premises but who it isn't sure it can fire with impunity.) I'm a fan of White's, though I confess that his compassion for the weird, self-serving characters in his scripts for Chuck & Buck (starring White himself) and The Good Girl (both directed by Miguel Arteta) seemed so unusual when I first saw them that I wasn't sure the movies weren't really condescending towards them; it wasn't until White directed his own script for Year of the Dog (starring Molly Shannon, in the performance of her life, as a lonely corporate drone whose life is gradually changed, upended, and finally redeemed by her feeling for animals) that I fully got on his wavelength.

White provides his lead performers (who have mostly been actresses, when they haven't been himself or Jack Black) with tremendous opportunities, and he and Laura Dern are made for each other. But despite some great reviews, Enlightened has apparently turned out to be a hard sell; the crowd at Entertainment Weekly has practically started taking up a collection so it can keep its heat turned on through the winter. It's about my favorite half-hour of TV these days, and I regard it not just as a great show in its own right but as a welcome antidote to all the King of Comedy/Burn After Reading-style sludgefests out there that amount to creating a character or group of characters as stupid and repugnant as possible, for no apparent reason except that they're easy to both create and jeer at, as if the world were so lacking in people you can easily feel superior to that there were an urgent need to make some up. This has not been my experience.

This Week at The A.V. Club

Castle: "Heartbreak Hotel"

Raising Hope: "Jimmy and the Kid"

AVQ&A: The TV Parents We Want

Cheers: "Give Me a Ring Sometime"/ "Sam's Women"

Supernatural: "Season 7, Time for a Wedding!"

Hell on Wheels" "Immoral Mathematics"

Stockholm swooning: 22 films where women fall in love with their kidnappers: Bandits; Captivity; The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing: The Sheik; Sleeper; Tattoo

Two Cents

As someone who doesn't follow college football--and I'm sure that, just as people employed by distinguished journals of opinion wrote in 2001 that non-Catholics had no right to an opinion about the pedophile priest cover-ups, I'm sure there have already been plenty of people arguing that people who don't give a shit about football, and maybe people who aren't principally fans of whatever team it is we're talking about, have no right to an opinion on this--I have mixed feelings about all this. I was aware that the higher education system is a disposable minor organ in relation to its reason for being, football and basketball programs, but still, it is hair-raising to learn that one of them is in the business of shaping people whose response to seeing a man rape a child in front of him was to tiptoe down the hall to call his daddy to ask if he thinks he ought to maybe tell his boss, or the people who tried to burn down the campus to protest the fact that Satan himself didn't get to wave at them from the field for the billionth time. (I've also been a little taken aback to hear so many commentators who claimed to be sympathetic to the idea that Mistakes Were Made also express dismay that Joe Paterno was fired over the phone, instead of having a stripper sent over to his house with a bottle of champagne and a box of chocolates, to soften the blow.) On the other hand, having finally been given an image to put to the name "Joe Paterno"--I'd probably heard the name a thousand times but couldn't have told you what he looked like or what he did for a living--it's nice to know who Al Pacino will next be playing on HBO.

Section of Russell Pearce's Wikipedia Entry That Won't Be There Thirty Minutes From Now

"On November 8, 2011, Pearce was defeated in the recall election by challenger Jerry Lewis. The election result clearly illustrated that Arizona voters would not tolerate Pearce's underhanded tactics and unrealistic stands on immigration and other issues. The voters are looking to move Arizona's economic engine and educational policies forward with a more civilized tone, leaving unproductive, inflammatory political rhetoric behind. "

As Pearce was circling the drain last night, he went on TV and said, “It doesn’t look like the numbers are going in my direction on this, and I’m OK with that.” It's sweet the crushing defeat and public humiliation brought out his Zen side. It's too bad that he didn't adopt this philosophical attitude before trying to cling to his office with the help of such tactics as ginning up a sham rival candidacy and targeting voters from robocalls urging them to sit out the election to protest the fact that both the incumbent, Pearce, and the man who now has his job, Jerry Lewis, are both Republicans. The last decade or so has taught us that Republicans have no problems with winning ugly. If you lose this badly while playing this ugly, maybe pretending to not care about the outcome is a good a way as any to tell yourself that you still have some dignity.

Lust and Cain and the Whole Damn Thing

I have, from time to time, taken the opportunity to share my views on just what it is that happened twenty years ago when Anita Hill got her late invitation to Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings for his post on the Supreme Court. I've always believed that Hill was telling the truth, because it seemed too much to ask that she had talked all that shit to friends and counsellors years before, just on the off chance that Thomas would one day be nominated to the highest court in the land and she would then have the chance to dynamite his career, especially since she seemed to not want to dig it all up herself and had to be dragged before the Senators kicking and screaming. By contrast, Thomas, who had spent the first days of the hearings insisting that he had never really formed an opinion about abortion, had already made clear his eagerness to lie under oath whenever necessary in order to get the job. On the other hand, I wasn't sure I thought that the frat-house crap that Hill said that Thomas used to talk around the office constituted sexual harassment. She really did seem to have been traumatized by having been in the same room with him and his filthy mouth, but I regretted the fact that she never told him directly how he was making her feel and gave him the chance to prove himself a decent human being, albeit one that you might not want to bring home to mother. I think that, by denying that anything like what she described had taken place, instead of trying to explain what he'd thought was going on, he'd squandered a chance to initiate a real conversation about sexual harassment, and proven himself a self-righteous, mealy-mouthed scumbag in the process. A number of people have told me that my thinking on this is, to put it softly, naive, and that I just don't understand that, for a woman trapped in an unpleasant work environment, the thought of confronting a male boss who's obtuse or worse about his conduct is like swatting a bear on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, a bear that might at the slightest provocation stand up on its hind legs and shred her career. I readily concede that this may be true. I miss a lot, not only because I'm a man, but because it's a wonder that I can even spell "career." This is why I was living in a shoebox in the Bronx eating tainted fast food products before I somehow wangled my current position as a kept man.

In any case, in a political culture where almost everyone is not just content but ravenously eager to just label those who disagree with them as liars motivated by nothing more than partisan spite, my opinion on all this is not widely shared or often voiced. Now along comes Martin Peretz, who in the course of appearing to make some obscure point about Herman Cain, makes my point, or one that seems close to mine, about as badly as possible. First, Peretz takes note of the allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Cainand notes that "I have not the slightest idea of whether the accusations are true. But I hope that there will not be a widespread assumption that the complaints are accurate without further proof. The question of proof, moreover, is also often contorted. And paying someone off to be quiet is certainly not evidence of guilt. Sometimes it is just getting rid of a nuisance." Then he writes: "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas never paid off anyone. So there wasn’t even a simulacrum of hard evidence against him. What there was was a campaign against him. And accounts of his loose talk. He was confirmed by the Senate. But Anita Hill won the case in public opinion. No Supreme Court justice has gone to the court with more rancor against him than Thomas. The clincher in the argument against him was, as Hill, then a professor at the law school of the University of Oklahoma, put it, that Thomas had harassed her with inappropriate discussion—yes, inappropriate discussion, not improper physical deeds—of sexual acts and pornographic films after she had turned him down for a date."

He is charged with sexually abusing women in his employ long, long ago. And, if it’s a habit as these tendencies tend to be, it is likely to come out. However, he has resolutely denied the charges. I have not the slightest idea of whether the accusations are true. But I hope that there will not be a widespread assumption that the complaints are accurate without further proof. The question of proof, moreover, is also often contorted. And paying someone off to be quiet is certainly not evidence of guilt. Sometimes it is just getting rid of a nuisance. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas never paid off anyone. So there wasn’t even a simulacrum of hard evidence against him. What there was was a campaign against him. And accounts of his loose talk. He was confirmed by the Senate. But Anita Hill won the case in public opinion. No Supreme Court justice has gone to the court with more rancor against him than Thomas. The clincher in the argument against him was, as Hill, then a professor at the law school of the University of Oklahoma, put it, that Thomas had harassed her with inappropriate discussion—yes, inappropriate discussion, not improper physical deeds—of sexual acts and pornographic films after she had turned him down for a date."

I confess that, because Peretz seems to be hinting at believing something close to what I've always believed about this, the sense of eye-rolling sarcasm accompanying "yes, inappropriate discussion, not improper physical deeds" makes me feel a little unclean. The second-worst of it is Peretz's claim that, because someone thought that Hill's charges against Thomas were serious enough that he ought to be made to answer to them, there "was a campaign against him." The worst of it is the ludicrous blooper that Hill, the woman who didn't want to go public with her charges in the first place, "won." Here's how what she won: the right to have a self-described right-wing smear artist spin a book, which he has since recanted, around the nifty that Hill was known to be "a little bit nutty, and a little bit slutty", and the chance to turn on her TV at any point since the allegations against Cain broke and hear his defenders dredging up the term Thomas coined to describe his own martyrdom twenty years ago, "a right-wing lynching." One of Cain's accusers has begged to be left alone because, she says, she doesn't want to be another Anita Hill. She doesn't want her life destroyed because she may have dared to relay something done to her by a powerful man with a lot of powerful friends trying to pump up his career.

(And let it be noted here that the worst allegations against Cain are much, much worse than the worst made against Thomas. Let it also be noted that, while Peretz is surely right that it's in the nature of corporations and those who run them to write a check to get rid of an annoyance, the most troubling thing about all the money that got paid out over the years to shut up people who said that Herman Cain hit on them is not that the money got paid, but that Cain has been openly lying about how many checks got written and how much money went out. As with Thomas and Hill, if it comes down to he said-she said, shouldn't the one who's proven himself to lie easily and often be at a disadvantage?) When Peretz confidently asserts that Hill "won", all he means must be that the kind of Georgetown liberal that a radical leftist turned military jingoist like Peretz must feel scornful towards think that Clarence Thomas is kind of a sleaze. Thomas may be bitter all the bedamned about this, but in the meantime, he has a lifetime appointment to an institution that gives him nearly limitless capacity to reshape our country, and there are enough people who profess to love him, if for no better reason than that it pisses off people they loathe, that he will never lack for speaking fees. Andrew Breitbart says that he crucified Anthony Weiner's penis because the vile Weiner had the audacity to say mean things about, and question the ethics of, Thomas and his wife with the funny hats. Nobody really thinks Breitbart needed a reason, so doesn't it say something that that's the reason that he thought would cloak him in the most nobility. It is indeed a shame that two newly prominent black Republicans have been the recipient of these particular kinds of charges, not least because they tap into subterranean feelings about black studs on the loose. But as Peretz might have noticed, it's Cain and his supporters who've done the most to explicitly link Cain's current troubles with those of Thomas in 1991, because they're playing to people who think that Thomas was so badly treated by crazy women and the liberal media that to make the comparison is to resolve Thomas of any suspicions of actual wrongdoing.

You get a sense of where Peretz's head is at--and how much of it has never left 1971--when he veers away from his main theme, whatever that is, to drag in Mitt Romney's father George, who took a lot of ridicule when he said that he'd been "brainwashed" by the U.S. military on the subject of Vietnam. Peretz seems to go there just so that he can add parenthetically, "Of course, we were all brainwashed on Vietnam, the right by the military, the left by the “idealists” who persuaded us that the Viet Cong was an idealistic peasant insurgency rather than a mask for the vicious government in Hanoi. No, Ho Chi Minh was not a good man. He was a butcher." No argument, but does Peretz now really believe that everyone who didn't think the Vietnam war was both necessary to American interests and going swimmingly--which was the brainwashed-by-the-Pentagon position--was against the war because they supported the Vietcong and thought that Ho Chih Minh was Mr. Miyagi? That was the hard-left loony position, and the number of people who held it were always dwarfed by the number of people who had no illusions about the Socialist paradise but didn't think that America had any business there anyway. Saying otherwise is like dividing the American public, circa 2001. between those who were gung-ho for invading Iraq and those who opposed it because they thought Saddam Hussein was a sweet old thing--which may be what Peretz thinks about that, too.

I'm not really altogether sure what Peretz's main point is supposed to be in this essay. That's a recurring problem with a man who can't really write. I have a feeling, though, it comes down to what Mickey Kaus used to write about George W. Bush, which was basically that, although he really was kind of destroying the country, by golly, Mickey liked him, because he was fun and hang-loose and not concerned with doubts, and not at all like those high-minded, educated liberals who used to be Mickey's crowd but who now just sort of got on his nerves. Although Peretz has too much pride to want anyone to think he thinks that Cain should be president, he sort of likes him, and this seems to be because he thinks he's all right for a millionaire. Peretz thinks that Ross Perot got an easier ride in 1992 and that "he was taken seriously by the press and credited or debited, as it were, with President Bush and Dan Quayle’s defeat and Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s victory." (The first of these statements is untrue, unless Peretz just means that he was taken seriously as a potential spoiler.) He writes that "Herman Cain is also a rich man, but in dimensions so much lower than Perot that he comes across as a middle class man." That seems to be part of why he finds Cain more likable than Mitt Romney, too. I agree that income inequality in this country has gotten so out of control that a man as untouchably rich as Cain can come across as middle class, but surely this is more an item for an Occupy Wall Street manifesto than cause to join the bewildering throngs who find Herman Cain lovable. If anything, Cain's self-made identity, combined with his sympathy for people even richer than himself, may be what makes him so proudly devoid of sympathy for anyone who's out of work or sick and uninsured, all those losers he councils to "blame yourself." Maybe. having hoped for the revolution in their youth, Peretz and Kaus now look out at the people scraping to get by and also see just rabble and losers. But to look at Bush and Cain and think that what they radiate is something endearing to to make some of us wonder what drugs you took in the '60s that are just now kicking in.

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