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To get into heaven,
don't snap for a seven
Live clean, don't have
no fault
Oh, I take the gospel,
whenever it's possible
But with a grain of
salt
--"It Ain't
Necessarily So," from Porgy & Bess
by George and Ira
Gershwin
Edward Kennedy Ellington celebrated his 70th birthday at the White House, where he received the first Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by the newly inaugurated chief resident. Although Duke Ellington was a widely celebrated bandleader, and already recognized as among the greatest composers in American history, when the original Medal of Freedom was conceived by Harry Truman in 1945 the intention had been that certain U.S. cabinet secretaries could use it for recognizing outstanding civilian contribution to the war effort. It wouldn't be until 1963 that the scope of the award expanded.
But Harry S. Truman was indeed a big music fan, and later invited Ellington to the
White House. During his visit on September 29th, 1950, Duke gave the president a manuscript copy of the score to his first major extended
composition, Harlem, which had recently been commissioned by Arturo Toscanini and the
NBC Symphony Orchestra. Per the syllabus
for the New York Philharmonic's Take Note
educational program, on that occasion Ellington "wrote to the President
that the proceeds of Harlem would be used 'to help fight for your civil
rights program — to stamp out segregation, discrimination, bigotry, and a
variety of other intolerances in our own American society.' ” A year and a half after becoming president when Franklin Roosevelt died in office, Truman, a Missouri-born member
of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, had formed the President's Committee on Civil
Rights, the most pro-active civil rights step yet taken by a modern president. Later, on July 26, 1948, further risking his already unlikely chance of being re-elected in the upcoming presidential election, he had signed Executive Orders 9980 and 9981, abolishing
racial discrimination in the federal work force and in the armed forces, thus initiating the beginning of desegregation. Edward
Kennedy Ellington and Harry Truman were mutual fans.
To the amazement of many, so were he and Richard M. Nixon. On April 29th, 1969, the 100th day of Nixon's first term in office, Ellington received
acknowledgement at last for his unparalleled activities as a worldwide musical
ambassador. Similar in some ways to Bing
Crosby's movie musicals that contributed so greatly to helping reinvigorate a
postwar nation, his performances around the globe with the Duke Ellington
Orchestra had helped re-establish America as the leading exporter of the music
this world can never get enough of. His
sophisticated jazz, swinging sense of style and profound humanity got people
from Fargo to Moscow up on their feet and dancing.
In The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public
Culture, and the State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) Penny M.
Von Eschen reveals that two years later, Duke Ellington's 26-city tour of the
USSR in Sept./Oct. 1971 was accorded legendary status at the U.S. State
Department, for its significant role in helping to thaw relations between the two Cold War-embattled nations. "The
political context," she writes, "was critical: Ellington's trip
followed the announcement of Nixon's impending visit to the Soviet
Union." The Russian jazz fans had seen
visits from Benny Goodman in 1962 and Earl Hines in 1966, but no one
since. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's
misguided economic policies had made food increasingly difficult to come by, but
they were momentarily forgiven by the 126,000 ecstatic jazz fans who paid as
much as $50 ($283 in today's dollars) for a scalped ticket to see the legendary
jazz icon and his orchestra. "For
some Soviet fans it was [as] if modernity itself had walked in the door with
Ellington," writes Von Eschen, who then quotes Ellington's close friend
and noted jazz critic (but no fan of Nixon's), Leonard Feather, who
characterized the 1971 tour as "the greatest coup in the history of
musical diplomacy."
It would be easy to look at an award like the Presidential
Medal of Freedom (thus renamed during John F. Kennedy's term in office) and try
to read political cronyism or pandering into a particular president's choices,
but research doesn't support the argument. It may be that George H.W. Bush's award to
Douglas Dillon in 1989, or Bill Clinton's to Morris Udall in 1996, were political
thank-you notes, not to mention a few awards over the years that may have been the thank-you-in-advance notes
sometimes popular in election years. But in looking at a list of the musicians who have received this country's highest
civilian honor, the choices have largely indicated a president's personal
tastes. In re-establishing the award
just before his untimely death, John F. Kennedy had selected Pablo Casals, Rudolf Serkin and
Marian Anderson. During Ronald Reagan's
presidency, he chose (among others) Pearl Bailey, Eubie Blake, Frank Sinatra, Count
Basie and Kate Smith to receive it. It's
hard to argue with giving any of those people a medal, no matter what your
political allegiances are.
This last May 29th, the president's medal was given to Bob
Dylan, another honoree I wouldn't argue with.
Many people remember that he is associated with the civil rights
movement, including a performance as part of the historic Great March on
Washington on August 28, 1963, at which Martin Luther King delivered his
stirring "I Have A Dream" speech.
What many people do not know is that later that same year, chafing at being pigeon-holed, he had
occasion to say a few unexpected words about music and political protest. On his receiving the Tom Paine Award that December
13th at the Emergency Civil Liberties Union's annual Bill of Rights dinner, he sensed
that his recent celebrity was being exploited for something he didn't entirely agree with. He received the award, but said he was accepting it on
behalf of Philip Luce, an American who had led a group to Cuba in protest of
the U.S. embargo against that country.
Then he startled the crowd by saying, “There's no black and white, left and right, to
me anymore. There's only up and down,
and down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking
about anything trivial such as politics.” His comments shouldn't have come as a shock to anyone familiar with his music, but the crowd responded by booing him. Later, in Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary film about
Dylan, No Direction Home, the
songwriter said: "I was up close when King was giving that speech. To this day it still affects me in a profound
way." But as for his use as a
movement figurehead, he commented, "You know, they were trying to build me
up as a topical songwriter. I was never
a topical songwriter to begin with. For
whatever reasons they were doing it ... reasons, not really ... that didn't
really apply to me."
The Political Season
Musical taste is based on freedom of choice. Whether you are the
President of the United States or President of the Professional Musicians Local
47 in Los Angeles, you get to decide what music is pleasing to you based
strictly on your own preferences. Performing
it or listening to it, you get to decide for yourself what sounds good to your
ears. It's personal. You can like whatever sort of music you wish,
and it should be easy to allow others to like whatever they like, and make their own
choices. Your choices and theirs can be
as different as can be, exist side by side, without ever interfering with each
other.
Not so with politics.
The concept of the word politics, which derives from the Greek politikos, means "of, for or
relating to citizens." In the arduous
business of governing thee and me, and the navigation of that murky swamp known
as public policy, it seems the basic urge to collaborate with the rest of
humankind is so great that eventually one becomes involved in managing other
people's lives--where possible, getting them to adhere to one's own beliefs and
ideals, and where it's not, at least preventing them from interfering with
one's own. As the citizenry grows and
mistakes are made, the bad decisions and their consequences are regretted,
rationalized, and explained away; or they run afoul of another basic urge, the
disastrously self-defeating desire to abdicate one's responsibilities and
obligations to someone else.
In a "civilized" society that isn't ready to perish, nearly all aspects of
daily existence that one finds difficult to confront and deal with are abandoned in favor of letting someone else take care of them. If acted on soon enough, these abandoned areas can eventually be organized, and become known collectively as government. This includes an ever-growing list of duties,
everything from maintaining our national security and defense to putting out
our fires, inspecting the purity of our food, delivering the mail and teaching
our children to read. It goes from
there. But the more of our lives we
relinquish to others, the less control we have over the outcome. Have you ever paid someone to do a something for you that
you could have done better and more efficiently yourself? Of course you have.
Complaint and argument eventually take the place of
public discourse, followed by demands for solutions to the problems we have abandoned
and placed on our government--that growing entity composed of all the people we
have hired with our tax dollars to take over our original responsibilities.
Soon it becomes the "responsibility" of every
citizen, regardless of education--or lack of it--to have opinions and complain about how the governing should be
done. What is a government for, if not for
complaining and telling them how to do it?
They're not called public servants for nothing, right?
Democratic forms of government are eventually reduced to a large bureaucracy of governing bodies, with the voting citizens functioning only to decide
who will be allowed to represent us in controlling everything we have lost
control of. And as the various governing
bodies grow, we develop the additional problem of how to maintain some control over
all of the people who govern them, those people we expect
to be in control of all the people who are now managing those aspects of daily
life for us.
As the size of this sea of governors and governing bodies
swells, our ultimate political ambitions in a democracy appear to deteriorate finally
into a desire to acquire and maintain at least what Alexis de Tocqueville
called "a tyranny of the majority."
Our political affiliations become an accumulation of those requisite
associations formed not out of any natural affinity for the people involved,
but out of a desire for acquiring the power of numbers, the power of gathering hordes
of like-minded people who agree with us and will join forces with us, that we
might gain control of all the people who do not agree with us.
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
We've been reminded often of this dismaying fact of life
since Shakespeare first published its preamble in 1623, as a line for Trinculo
to speak in The Tempest, "Misery
acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." Over two centuries later the dark-and-stormy
Lord Bulwer-Lytton's thoroughly modern comment in his 1849 novel, The Caxtons, was that "poverty has
strange bedfellows." However, it
was Mark Twain's friend, writer and editor, Charles Dudley Warner, who finally
wrote the sobering phrase that we all now quote: "Politics makes strange
bedfellows."
But note that neither the Bard, the Lord, nor the Hartford Courant Editor (whose other
famous line, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does
anything about it," has also been famously mis-attributed to his friend
Twain for well over a hundred years) ever uses the word "enemy" to
describe one of these associations.
That's because a bedfellow, no matter how antagonistic or offensive one otherwise
finds him, is in fact a friend in at least one important respect, maybe
more. Dictionary.com says a bedfellow is
"an associate or collaborator, especially one who forms a temporary
alliance for reasons of expediency." The online Macmillan dictionary says such a
person is "someone or something that is connected with another person or
thing in some way, often unexpectedly." Characterized by enlightened (or not) self-interest, hard to explain later, strange and uneasy though these coyote-ugly liaisons may be, they are
alliances. A bedfellow is still someone
you are in bed with. And as much as you might wish it weren't so,
the relationship usually lasts longer than one night.
Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by
the son of... We are in the political season,
as it is called in these election years.
Hatfields & McCoys
Not coincidentally, at 9:00 p.m. on this last Memorial Day,
aka Opening Day Eve of said political season, the History Channel aired its
first-ever scripted drama, experiencing great success with 13.9 million viewers
across most of the demographic spectrum, and over the ensuing two nights set
the record for the most-watched broadcast on advertising-supported cable
television (exclusive of sports), ever.
Though not overtly about politics, the timing of the Hatfields & McCoys series was
unmistakable, and held the possibility of an intelligent, allegorical look at
all the basest and most detestable aspects of "civilized" existence, including
the currently base, detestable state of American politics. Once past some of the usual fiddle-and-banjo
Dixie clichés about hillbillies and moonshine, the camera told the story, and an
entirely new kind of drama unfolded. The
History Channel's insistence on factual correctness provided a level of detailed
accuracy rarely seen in historical fiction, or even in much historical
documentary.
This is an informed, ambitious work designed to do far more
than entertain. The story could well
have been entitled "The American Civil War, Part II," inasmuch as it
is the story of how a psychotic ex-Confederate initiated and sought to
perpetuate a blood feud by indiscriminately killing a homeward-bound Union
soldier. As familiar as that beginning
might sound, however, Hatfields &
McCoys soon departs the simplistic civics-lesson platitudes we are
accustomed to accepting as the story of the postbellum South.
The warring hill folk align mostly according to family
ties. These may be strange families with
stranger bedfellows, but as we get to know them, they begin to look
uncomfortably familiar. Eschewing sweeping
generalities and corny stereotypes, the film's good writing, direction and
acting from a cast headed by Kevin Costner, Bill Paxton, Mare Winningham and
Tom Berenger, results in a real story about real people whose lives have been
mocked and sneered at for decades. If it
has a shortcoming it's that, as Los
Angeles Times TV critic Mary McNamara said in her review, "when faced
with a choice between historic detail and story, Hatfields & McCoys
errs on the side of detail."
Such a problem.
The difficulty of getting the details right hasn't
traditionally been a reason for television producers to lose sleep--in fact,
the tradition has been to dismiss such concern for facts as silly, justifying their
less-than-fact-based product by saying they are just "giving the customers
what they want." How nice it is to
see that an accurately told, meaningful story is what the customers want.
That doesn't mean Hatfields
& McCoys is an easy film to watch.
We are all inured by now to visual images of point-blank gunshots and exploding
arteries, but the bleak devastation and economic privation of the
Reconstruction South still take some getting used to. It will be a long time before the psychic
wounds heal well enough that this war, the brother-against-brother battle that
cost more American lives than all subsequent wars combined, will be
understood. It will be longer still before
Americans consider that, just as much as racial animosity and cultural dissonance,
this civil war was the result of political machinations and misguided governance north
of the Mason-Dixon Line as well as south of it, on Virginia's Potomac River as well
as the Tug Fork of West Virginia's Big Sandy River.
True, if you feel the need to confirm any personal beliefs
or prejudices about a society polarized between liberal and conservative, rich
and poor, religious and secularist, educated and ignorant, you'll find some of it
here. But fortunately for you, if you
are looking for insight into the human condition, you'll find much more of that.
When William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield
finally realized that he could put an end to all of the insanity while there
were still a few of his family among the living, he did so--partly because he
knew that it takes two to tango, and he was tired of the dance, i.e., if he could
allow his counterpart, Randolph McCoy, to proceed unobstructed with whatever he
thought would even the score, and not contest it, the feud would die; and partly
because something had changed in Hatfield's mind. The feud's driving animus--embodied symbolically and factually in his drunken,
blood-crazed uncle Jim Vance, whose senseless original murder of Union partisan
Asa McCoy had started it all, and whose endless provocations were only meant to
stoke the raging fire of insanity and keep it burning--was blissfully dead at last,
at the hand of McCoy ally "Bad" Frank Phillips, an ex-Pinkerton gunman. Twenty-five years after Vance had started it,
after the eventual involvement of two different state governments, an 1888 U.S.
Supreme Court ruling allowed Ellison "Cottontop" Mounts and seven
others who had been taken from West Virginia to Kentucky without proper
extradition for their part in murdering Alafair McCoy, to be tried. All were imprisoned for life except Mounts,
who was hanged at 12:37 p.m. on February 19, 1890.
That ended it for the Hatfield and McCoy families, just as
"Devil Anse" Hatfield had anticipated, although the two families'
descendants did hold a joint family reunion one hundred ten years later on June 10th, 2000,
to symbolically put an end to it for all time.
That should have ended if for the rest of us, too.
But it didn't.
To this day, the ingrained, nearly Jungian symbology of
North vs. South, and its tormented social model of the Hatfields and McCoys, is
kept as luridly alive as ever in our national dialogue, as defined and dictated
by our daily newscasts and print media.
Instead of North vs. South or Hatfields vs. McCoys, it is The Rich vs.
The Poor; The Insured vs. The Uninsured; Socialists vs. Capitalists; Patriots
vs. Apologists; Government Employee Unions vs. Union-Busting Governors; Republicans
vs. Democrats; Occupy Wall Street vs. the Tea Party; ad nauseam.
"AMERICA DIVIDED!," a grim-faced news anchor intones
sternly each day (no doubt advised to do so by his producers) while a solemn
black-and-white graphic of the same message appears at the bottom of the
screen. But who is dividing it?
The people who profit from the division, of course. People like the news anchor and his employers. Such individuals want you to believe a cancerous
political division is threatening to destroy us all. They encourage you to "stay informed,"
i.e., continue listening to them day after day, finding guidance in their tidal
flow of information and counsel, hoping to learn what to do next in working
your way through the confusions of conducting your life.
So that we may mend the division? Not exactly.
Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews use their electronic bully pulpits to shout,
badger and scream at you, night after night, lecturing you unceasingly about how
we are a politically and culturally polarized nation. Worse yet, their other message is that instead
of mending the divide, we should each dig in our heels and battle the half of
the American population who disagree with our personal political beliefs--after
all, there are only two sides, right?
The battle lines have been drawn, and you're either "fer us or agin
us," as the Hatfields and McCoys would say.
Every day our elected representatives go to work on Capitol
Hill and endeavor to guide the ship of state.
But every night they are undermined by commentary accompanying sound
bytes and video clips edited with scientific precision to create the impression
that compromise, the very essence of the political process, is impossible--and
since none of them can agree on anything, that the problems are unsolvable. Have a nice day.
If people didn't spend much time watching television, you
might dismiss this concern. But they
do. And contrary to popular wisdom, the
older people get, the more they watch.
According to the Nielson Company, teenagers between the ages of 12-17
watch the least television of any age group, averaging a mere 23 hrs. 41 min.
per week. Once people reach voting age,
the average climbs... and climbs, until it peaks at an average of 47 hrs. 33
min. for the 65+ age group.
I won't take it beyond one single point. Media influence on the electorate? Are you kidding? When the age group that watches the most
television is the same age group with the greatest likelihood of voting, the
impact of television news is pretty significant.
So when these pundits and media vultures who are accepted as
your eyes and ears start preaching that there is an enormous, unnegotiable
chasm separating you from half of the people in the country (or more, if one
accepts the thumb-in-the-eye, incompatible-with-everyone model), where does
that leave you?
Sitting in your chair, waiting for the next bulletin. Just as it was intended to be.
So you need to ask yourself if you really believe that Sean
Hannity or Rachel Maddow know so much more about the complexities of the
nation's governance, and its impact on our lives, that they should be listened
to so closely. Is Rush Limbaugh really
privy to the The Truth? Does Brian
Williams really learn things at those Beltway cocktail parties that give him
Big Insights you could never expect to attain yourself? Are Dennis Miller's Bristol Palin jokes any worse
or better than Bill Maher's? Is David Gregory's
opinion really any more valuable than your Starbucks barrista's?
I'm not suggesting that everyone in the news media is bad,
or that you should cut yourself off from all outside information sources and influences. The people I've mentioned have
occasional moments of clarity. But you
could live quite well without them, and maybe lead a happier life. Because, while your cable provider or internet provider can supply
you with opinions from the entire gamut of political views, facts are in short
supply, no matter which of them you listen to. No matter which sources of information you
use, all are influenced in their reporting by individual viewpoints, prejudices
and opinions. Quite aside from that, each
network boss' or newspaper publisher's agenda can and does trump any one of their own views, and dictate
what any one of them says. If that
talking head you are watching wishes to be on the air tomorrow and collect a
check at the end of the week, he or she has not only gotten the memo, they've
got it framed. They are doing most of what
they do for money and power, selling you viewpoints like barkers at a
carnival.
Finding the Off
Switch
Sorting the wheat from the chaff can be tedious, sometimes
impossible work. But facts are unquestionably
what you need. It's a big world, and
it's getting bigger. The planet's many cultures,
the multiplicity of concerns and interactions, and the permutating implications for all of
us, have reached daunting proportions. But
no matter how big it all gets, no matter how tempting it would be to have an
oracle or seer you could rely on for filtering and interpreting it, you will
never be able to trust anything as much what you can see with your own
eyes.
In fact, there is great danger in drawing conclusions and
making decisions based on anything but what you have observed for yourself. That means you are in for a lot of work.
The 1976 movie Network
won four Academy Awards for telling a truth so terrible that it made people
laugh, a truth that is even truer and more terrible in the era of cable news
than it was then. It is the story of
network news anchor Howard Beale, "the first known instance of a man who
was killed because of lousy ratings."
Paddy Chayevsky's acidly satiric screenplay and Peter Finch's brilliant
acting (as well as that of William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall,
Beatrice Straight, et al) brought the corruption of the Information Age into disturbingly
sharp focus.
Finch's Howard Beale, after discovering he's going to be
sacked in two weeks because of sagging ratings, decides to literally go out
with a bang. An alcoholic whose life is
already in shambles, Beale unravels and announces on the air that the following
Tuesday he will kill himself during a live broadcast. In the intervening days he begins
ranting dramatically, detailing his views on the dissolution of our culture at
the hands of his employer, the fictional UBS television network, its parent corporation
CCA, and the Saudi conglomerate which is buying CCA. His rants have a unmistakable bell-like ring
of truth. As the saying goes, just
because you're paranoid doesn't mean no one is after you.
This farcical Shakespearean tragedy has several unhappy
endings, and continues to have them on both sides of the blurred and
often-moved line between fact and fiction.
Within a few weeks of the film's release, Finch was dead of a heart attack
at age 60, and four years later Paddy Chayevsky, dead of cancer at age 58. It wasn't for lousy ratings that they had died,
though, but for the sins that would be committed in television news for all the
decades to come. Any flicker of truth that
has managed to find a way into the information stream pouring from this
proverbial tube/screen has been used to sell us layer after layer of
distortions, confusions, and lies.
The greatest of these lies is that we are a divided people
who can't talk to each other. True, it's
difficult to assign all the blame for forwarding this fiction to the electronic
news media. The print boys do their fair
share, too. There are people in
advertising agencies and PR firms who will do anything for a buck, so wrapping
a destructive communication in a pretty package is fine with them. And of course, there is that politician who
has no qualms about employing any and all of these people and their skills to
gain ascendancy. Divide and conquer is
the oldest strategy in history. To spare
your enemies and use these heinous tactics on your fellows is the filthiest
crime there is.
Why? Because we need
each other, and we know it. In hard
times, we need each other even more, and we know it. We need to pull together. Nearly everyone
understands this quite well.
But it's obvious that not everyone accepts the idea, because
when times are this hard, someone is making it hard. When the majority of us 314 million Americans
are working harder than ever, spending more wisely and focusing our energies
more discerningly than we have in three generations, and the situation still
refuses to improve, something is deadly wrong.
Someone--some ones of us--are pushing down even harder than the
majority of us are pushing upward. How
hard are these few psychos working to stop the thing from getting
anywhere? Harder than the combined
efforts of all the rest of us to get it working again. That's a lot of push-down. But it's not a class or race or political party or
philosophy or type or income bracket or demographic category that is pushing down. It is a person who tells you the solution as
a society is to engage in name-calling, subterfuge and division. You vs. All of Them is the battle cry of
the insane.
Sadly, in these difficult, contentious times, a person
promulgating the concept of a politically divided America is accepted more easily
than during the good times. People are
looking for answers even more earnestly than ever. The purveyors of chaos and preachers of doom
know this, depend on it in fact, because without your acceptance of their
simplistic black-and-white dichotomies that pit one generalized philosophy or
position or group against another--You against the Other--they'd have no power of
persuasion over you, and no "solution" to sell you.
People harbor grudges, of course. Some carry on feuds, vendettas fueled by
personal hurts and wrongs, real or imagined.
No sane person would dispute that there are indeed a few real enemies in the world, evil beings who demonstrably seek
the destruction of all things good and well intended.
Cats and Dogs Sleep Together
But it isn't the Liberals and Conservatives. They are not natural enemies any more than
are union workers and non-union workers, small businesses and big corporations, Gentiles and Jews, or blacks and
whites. I don't believe I've ever asked
someone how they voted in an election, or whether they were Republican or
Democrat. I've never had a single friend
who condemned or deserted me because of my political philosophy, religious beliefs
or work affiliation, let alone sought my destruction for it. I can count the number of times in my life
that I've been asked by anyone (other than a pollster or hospital
administrator) to place myself in one of these artificial societal categories--to
indicate whether I am Republican or Democrat, gay or straight, Christian or Jew,
pro-life or pro-choice, etc.--on the fingers of one hand. More to the point, in each of these cases the
inquiry was a result of the inquiring person's imperceptiveness or
unwillingness to have a real conversation.
On the other hand, if you cloister yourself and never
associate with anyone outside a small, unchanging circle of like-minded priests
and priestesses devoted to your own orthodox ideology, the noise that glass seal on the
fire alarm makes when you break it will be nothing compared to the alarm.
In 1972, just weeks after one of the few actual landslide
presidential elections in American history (Republican candidate Richard Nixon
received 520 electoral votes, his Democrat opponent George McGovern got 17, and
Libertarian John Hospers, 1) Pauline Kael, the iconic film critic for the New Yorker magazine, is famously quoted
as saying she couldn't believe Nixon had won, because no one she knew had voted
for him--apparently due to the infrequency of her trips away from Manhattan
into any other part of New York, whose voters had helped elect Nixon. Whether it was her line or someone else's, the
more revealing quote (according to Israel Shenker's New York Times article of December 28, 1972, covering the lecture she gave
at the Modern Language Association) quoted Kael
as saying, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who
voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But
sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
Spooky.
Brilliant writer and wit though she was, she really did need
to get out more. Just like Nixon, who was
pacing around the West Wing a couple hundred miles south of her, as he
considered who among his detractors and pursuers needed to be assigned to his
famous enemies list, she seems to have been living her life in a small,
closed-in world that had far more in common with Nixon's than the one her many
devoted readers lived in. While the
esteemed pioneer of film criticism huddled in her darkened movie theater, hypersensitively
detecting the presence of a Republican voter in the audience, Nixon roamed the dim
hallways of the White House confiding his growing paranoia to the presidential
portraits on the walls. Both were seeing ghosts. Neither seemed to know any real flesh-and-blood
people.
Think of the world problems that Richard Nixon and Pauline Kael
might have solved by having tea together in the Rose Garden one June afternoon. Just to chat. Not for bitter arguments or venomous debates,
but just for a chance to talk to someone outside their closely controlled inner
circle of sycophants and power brokers, someone who could disagree with them, without being disagreeable. They might have come out of their oddly
calcified shells a little. Like two
agoraphobics, they could have taken just a few small steps outside, and sat
down at an umbrella-covered table in the shadow of the big white Georgian house
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I've inadvertently engaged in a handful of political
arguments in my life, been witness to hundreds more, and all but two
or three occasions have been an utter waste of time.
Commiserating with a partisan who shares your views can feel good sometimes,
help let off a little steam, but done excessively just entrenches one's position
without much examination or evaluation.
If it isn't too depressing a conversation, it may occasionally help
establish some solidarity and get the person to vote--or to stop whining and
register to vote--but it has little long-term value. The really intense discussions, the
emotionally enflamed arguments, have either been in defense of a position, or were
an attempt to persuade someone to change his or her mind, which is just as big
a waste of time. The point of a real
conversation between civilized people isn't to change anyone's mind, or to change
your own--it's an opportunity to shut up and hear what someone else has to
say. Someone with a different viewpoint
than your own, someone who will let you walk a mile in their shoes. If there is any merit in someone else's
views, anything of use to you, you'll recognize it--now, or later when you've had a chance to think about it. But you have to stop talking and let the other speak before you can hear it. Once you have digested the other
person's viewpoint--uncensored, uninterrupted, uncontested--you often learn
something.
So if Pauline had accepted Richard's invitation, he could
have had her picked up in a nice limo and flown by Marine helicopter to the
South Lawn, then regaled her with jasmine tea and biscuits served on White
House china. He would likely have made
the first overture by going on and on rapturously about his new favorite film, Patton.
She would have gasped for air and said she thought it was a long, boring
tableau of a story about a comic-book hero whose only reason to live was to
wage war. He'd have said, "I'm
winding things down in Viet Nam, you know." She'd say, "Sure you are. That's what you said last year." And he'd say, "No, really, Henry's
working on it." It would have taken
a few minutes for her to make up her mind, but they'd have had a second cuppa,
and he would have invited her to come back for tea again next month to screen a
John Wayne picture over a big bowl of popcorn, freshly popped by the White
House Executive Chef. She'd have responded
with something brittle but not too insulting.
Pauline and Richard.
I really miss those two. I
sometimes got so angry reading her brilliant prose as she flayed my favorite
directors, like Stanley Kubrick for 2001:
A Space Odyssey, or actors, like Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston in Rancho Deluxe, whose performances were
rendered with letter-perfect Montana sensibilities... or when she praised bad
acting, like the strangely cast Slim Pickens, again in Rancho Deluxe, playing his role like he was from another planet in
the same cracked voice he always used whenever he put on a Stetson. But I used to get even angrier at Richard
Nixon--along with everyone else in the Woodstock generation--for all the usual
reasons, for Viet Nam, for the Draft, for Kent State, for Watergate, for John Lennon's immigration blockade, but mostly for looking so frightened and sheepish when
he finally resigned, because when he and everything he stood for finally flew away from the White House on
August 9th, 1974, he took away the things I disagreed with and hated and thought about
and cared about the most. Because in the
end, shadowboxing is never as fun as landing a real punch. That's what sparring partners like Richard
and Pauline are for. Each of you wears
headgear. Nobody gets hurt.
The Antidote
My neighbor sometimes sticks a sign in his nice front lawn
during the political season, but in the 18 years we've lived across the street
from each other, we've never really discussed politics. The vicissitudes of our two versions of self-employment,
or the cost of supporting his two collegiate kids in a collapsed national
economy, yes. Sports, jazz, literature,
yes. Politics, almost never. It doesn't come up in conversation. He's
never asked me how I will vote (or have voted) in an election, or what my party
affiliation is, and I've never asked him.
We both have a pretty good idea of what the other's political views are,
which are occasionally contrary to our own. But
if he has something he wants to talk about, I just let him talk about it. If what he has to say has a political angle,
that isn't what is important--what is important is that it concerns him. So I listen.
He isn't a member of a class or category to me, he's a friend.
He told me a story about his college days that says more
about his politics than any lawn sign. He
says he and a friend made a pilgrimage to upstate New York to see a writer they
both admired, one I also admire greatly, the novelist Frederick Exley. They found him in a local Watertown bar and
had drinks with him--though they were probably out-quaffed two drinks to each one
of theirs. Published in 1968 and subtitled
A Fictional Memoir, Exley's A Fan's Notes is one of the most radical
novels written in the 20th century.
Likely begun when he was institutionalized in Harlem Valley State
Hospital in Dover, New York, it is brilliantly written prose that combines
self-deprecating hilarity with the chilling truths of self-discovery, warts,
bunions, calluses, contusions and all. Though it
bears a passing resemblance to Ken Kesey's great One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published a few years earlier, it
bears a greater one to Jack Kerouac's On
the Road. Exley's novel dives so
deep, and in such a distinctive and personal voice, that a reader cannot escape
the knowledge of what it is to be obsessed--with football heroes, greatness, manic and maniacal creativity, the next sweet breath of life. The politics of locking up Frederick Exley
in a madhouse and treating him like a prisoner of some spiritual war,
bombarding this soul with electro-convulsive shock, goes beyond any
humane version of politics into the deathly realm of enforced will. It is
useful to be reminded often of why Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to
his friend Benjamin Rush, defending himself against some ignorant bigots who
opposed his election, that "...I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal
hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
I learn a lot by talking to my neighbor. The topic is rarely as important as the fact
that we are talking and listening to each other. Displaying a little friendly common sense and
genuine concern for another human being go beyond any political party or
category of social interaction. It is
simply friendship.
So my plan for the summer is to make some new friends, and
encourage people I know to do the same. I want to meet and talk to and befriend Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Independents, Democrats, Republicans, Union Members, Non-Union Members, Gays, Straights, Socialists, Capitalists, Lance Armstrong Fans, Lance Armstrong Detractors...
If I meet someone who has raised his daughter to be a good Liberal
who's since turned out to be a damned Neo-Con--and who asks my advice--I will first of all tell him that I don't really believe in giving advice, because he knows much more about his own life than I ever will, and is better off consulting with himself. If he insists on asking me what I think, I'll tell him the same thing I would if he said he'd raised his daughter to be a good Conservative who then turned out to be a flaming Liberal. I'd say to talk to her, i.e., let her talk while you
listen; don't interrupt her, challenge her, or in any way argue with her. Hear her out.
No rebuttals. Thank her for her viewpoints and taking the time to talk. Then move on. If she wants your advice, she'll ask for it.
If I meet a woman who solicits my thoughts on a son she raised to be a good
Christian, and he's turned out to be an apostate, an atheist covered in garish
tattoos and metal studs, the advice will be the same. An uncle who wants his gay daughter to move
out of the house, or a gay niece who wants to run away or move out of her father's house,
the same advice. A mother who can't
stand her liberal employee's politics, or a father who can't abide his boss' conservative politics,
the same advice.
Most of all, I plan to try to take my own advice.
I also plan to take Howard Beale's advice and turn off my television more often,
go for lots of walks and meet as many new neighbors as I can. I know quite a few of them, but I can't
believe how many of them I've never met.
Plus, a few people have moved away and new ones have moved in, and I want
to meet them.
In addition to that, I plan to listen to a bunch of Duke Ellington
recordings I've not heard before, plus listen again to the all the ones I have. I want to check YouTube for videos of the Duke that have been posted since the last time I checked. I think I'll try giving Ken Burns' Jazz another chance. I
plan to listen to as many new and different recordings as I can find, either ones
I've never heard of, ones I've heard of and am curious about, or ones I
discarded without giving a real chance.
If I hear anything I really like, I plan to write about it and spread
the word. Music has healing power. It brings people closer, soothes wounds,
bridges divides.
The last thing I want to do is print out a copy of what Richard
Nixon and Edward Kennedy Ellington said to each other unscripted (except for Nixon's citation) on stage that evening,
when Duke received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and file it under "just when you think you know somebody," then stick it up on the
wall over my desk where I can see it every day:
NIXON:
"For the first time during this administration, I have
the honor of presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I think it is most
appropriate that that medal be presented to Duke Ellington.
"When we think of freedom, we think of many things. But
Duke Ellington is one who has carried the message of freedom to all the nations
of the world through music, through understanding, understanding that reaches
over all national boundaries and over all the boundaries of prejudice and over all boundaries of
language.
"Because he has an unusual gift, a gift that he has
shared with us, his own fellow citizens, and with the citizens of the world, we
believe that this citation fits him particularly well. I will read it to you.
" 'The President of the United States of America awards
this Presidential Medal of Freedom to Edward Kennedy Ellington. Edward Kennedy
Ellington, pianist, composer, and orchestra leader, has long enhanced American
music with his unique style, his intelligence, his impeccable taste. For more
than 40 years he has helped to expand the frontiers of jazz, while at the same
time retaining in his music the individuality and freedom of expression that
are the soul of jazz. In the royalty of American music, no man
swings more or stands higher than the Duke.' "
ELLINGTON:
"Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you, ladies and
gentlemen.
"This is the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And the word 'freedom' is one, coincidentally, that we are using at the moment in
our Sacred Concert.
"And, of course, we speak of freedom of expression and we
speak of freedom generally as being something very sweet and fat and things
like that. In the end when we get down to the payoff, what we actually say is
that we would like very much to mention the four major freedoms that my friend
and writing-and-arranging composer, Billy Strayhorn, lived by and enjoyed.
"That was freedom from hate, unconditionally; freedom from
self-pity; freedom from fear of possibly doing something that may help someone
else more than it would him; and freedom from the kind of pride that could make
a man feel that he is better than his brother."
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