The Best American Poetry

"God Made Me" [by David Lehman]

from The Yale Review:

Poem of the Week

God Made Me

        Returning from a walk across the Dug Road bridge and into the Ludlowville

woods, Joe carried some violets we had picked. An old man with a handsome 

Labrador going in the opposite direction asked, “Are they for Easter?” “No,” Joe said. 

“For Passover.” Joe was nearly four, I nearly thirty-nine.

        In May of that year, 1987, Joe and I approached the Dug Road bridge, and there

was no one in our path. Joe whispered: “Go quietly over the bridge, so you don’t wake

up the geese.” The next day I repeated his words to him when we came to the place.

He immediately started singing. “Why?” “Because the geese are awake,” he said.

        The day we went to the bird sanctuary at Sapsucker Woods, Joe made up a song,

“Fish Birds on the Sea,” to the tune of the verse introducing “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing

through the snow.” That night I asked him to tell me a story. “Okay,” he said. “Once

upon a time, there was a little boy named Daddy.

        Then, out of the blue, “‘God made me,” he said.

---

How did this poem begin for you?

I seldom leave the house without a little notebook tucked into my jacket pocket or the back pocket of my trousers. Ideas, titles for poems I’d like to write, memories, overheard phrases, quotes, dreams, jests, anecdotes, lists of books I want to read, even mundane lists of errands that need doing may find their way into the notebook. With defunct notebooks, I can be careless. All the better when a lost notebook turns up and on one of its pages a cryptic phrase from 1987 summons a delightful memory. My son Joe made some arresting statements that year, and he even wrote (or dictated to me) a poem a day for several weeks. A phrase about the Dug Road bridge reminded me of walks he and I took that spring. That’s how I came to write “God Made Me.”

David Lehman is a poet and professional writer. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His recent books of poems include The Morning Line and Poems in the Manner Of.

"Green Versus Orange" [by Joe Lehman]

A smart man who has entered middle age should remain on a never-ending quest of introspection and self-analysis. The literary parallel to life’s span is in Charles Dickens’s short tale “The Child’s Story.” An unnamed wandering traveler interacts with ethereal versions of himself at every stop he makes, starting from early childhood, through adolescence, into middle age and then finally old age.  

In his interpretation of the traveler’s meeting his early childhood self, Dickens [left] describes mainly physical sensations and how the newness of the world and its design imakes its impact: “The sky was so blue, and the sun was so bright, the water was so sparkling, the leaves were so green, the flowers were so lovely, and they heard such singing birds and saw so many butterflies, that everything was beautiful.” 

 

When you are born a synesthetic, as I was, the development of physical sensation has a hundred times more potency. A quick google search of synesthesia defines it as a “rare neurological condition in which stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers experiences in another sense.” I have, in the past, written several lengthy poems and essays covering my various experiences in that neurological condition, including the unique way I have seen letters and numbers, words and years. I expect to write something about "Voyelles," the sonnet by the teenage French poet Arthur Rimbaud, in he assigns colors to the vowels.

 

Case in point: I reached the age of awareness when I was five. I remember the 1988 Presidential race: my first taste of observing politics in America. In my kindergarten class, that fall, we wrote letters to the Republican and Democratic nominees, the sitting Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, respectively. And both of the candidates (or one of their staffers) sent a letter back to the class. 

 

I cannot remember anything from what was written in Dukakis’s letter except that it addressed us a bit more formally than Bush’s did. Dukakis began with “dear class” while Bush said “dear kids.” Ironically, the stiffness of Dukakis’s manner made him seem more authoritative in my mind compared to Bush’s casualness. I say ironically, because I suppose being seen as casual must have humanized Bush with the rest of the electorate, and could very well have contributed to his commanding November win. My first lesson in politics then was that a warning not to be aloof from the desires of the masses, or you'll wind up on the losing side. 

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How does having synesthesia come into play here? I’ll explain. We, the class, held our own mock election where the students could cast their ballots for either Bush or Dukakis. I synesthetically experienced the essence of George Bush as a brownish-orange color, while Dukakis evoked the essence of a springtime greenish color. Both colors were sufficiently masculine. The orange color seemed more disciplinarian though, and the green seemed mercurial and lax. I like green better. I went with Dukakis as my vote. I don’t remember who won in my class.

 

It has been written elsewhere that Dukakis intended his campaign to be about issues, while Bush preferred his to be one of symbols. In recorded histories of the ‘88 election, one reads a lot of descriptions of symbols, with Bush looking like a sure winner standing before the American flag, reciting the pledge of allegiance, and eating apple pie. These contrast with the forlorn symbols of prison inmates shuffling through revolving doors and Dukakis’s ludicrous photo op in a battle tank, wearing a helmet that made him look more like Snoopy on one of his imaginary dogfights with the Red Baron. I don’t find many descriptions of what the issues were, but it is clear that Bush successfully defined Dukakis as soft on crime and national defense. Of course, I don’t remember experiencing any of that. But I’ll always remember the orange and the green. 

 

Go figure. 

Godwin's Law [by Joe Lehman]

“As an online discussion or argument grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” So says Godwin's Law, coined by author Mike Godwin. It's like "six degrees of separation" applied to political conversations (or rants), all of which reach their apex with Hitler. I personally attest to the validity of Godwin’s Law applied not just to online arguments but to discussions between and among friends, whether in person or on the phone.

Case in point: I was riding in the passenger seat in a car with my friend  Diane in the driver’s seat. This was close to a decade ago. We were discussing an Iraq War veteran’s impassioned speech before her church group, where the embittered vet called into question the reasoning for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was, he contended, a grievous mistake. The speech did not go over well with the audience. The consensus was that it was an inappropriate choice of venue for the speech. Diane and I mulled over the incident. She said the vet should have chosen a venue more congenial to antiwar advocacy. I countered that an "acceptable" locale or event wouldn’t be playing host to the audience the vet was targeting . He had selected the church group for a reason.  If he had spoken at an official anti war rally, he would end up preaching to the choir. Therefore, I said, it was more politically effective to speak to people not predisposed to agree your position.. Diane blurted out, “Well, would you say that the things Hitler and the Nazis did were politically effective for them?” I said that from Hitler’s standpoint, he was very ‘effective’ in advancing his own agenda. Of course, the discussion deteriorated from then on.

Hitler remains the trigger word, the invitation to the ultimaate unsafe space, that the 20th century left us. I challenge everyone to comment about his or her own experiences dealing with Godwin’s Law in a discussion or argument you may have had in the past.

The Golden Age of Paranoia, part II [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea.

Francis Wheen begins his history of the reputedly paranoid 1970s with his questioning of what main event signified the end of the idealistic 1960s. I’ve read other authors pondering that same question. The certain events that Wheen served up are the usual suspects. He points to August 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s cult followers hacked to death Sharon Tate and four others in L.A. Joan Dideon apparently saw that as the death of the ‘60s. Or, Wheen writes, “the public burial of peace, love and flower power” was the tragic Altamont concert later in 1969, when Hells Angels hired as security guards killed a young attendee, Meredith Hunter. Or else, the ‘60s ended on May 4, 1970, when the national guardsmen gunned down four antiwar protestors. This could make for a keen game to play on long road trips: coming up with the exact event that ended the ‘60s. There are two events that Wheen doesn’t mention, like, for a lot of people it was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in June, 1968, after winning the California primary. 

Personally, I am partial to the idea that the real death of the ‘60s was on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. After all, the ex-Beatle was the last remaining symbol of idealism for the Left, and Chapman was plenty disillusioned after John’s religiously blasphemous “we’re bigger than Jesus” comment. Maybe I see it as the best analogy because I wasn’t born until the early 1980s, and yet my musical tastes are frozen in the 1960s. I have been a beatlemaniac since childhood. I have a distinct memory of feeling a sense of terrible alienation coming of age in the mid-1990s and absolutely hating the crap music everyone else was into. Lousy lonesome childhood indeed. 

More tomorrow

The Golden Age of Paranoia [by Joe Lehman]

Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside. 

Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea. 

More to come soon!...

-- Friday, October 25, 2024

"On Belonging: Past and Present" [by Joe Lehman]

Do I belong? I never felt I did. If I do now, it is because I endeavor to ward off dogma and groupthink. Worry less and less about belonging. Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”

The worst mistake I made in college (2002-2006) was that I chose self-renunciation. I wasn’t being practical or prudent. If I had been more mature and knowledgeable back then and chosen to advance myself, I probably would have realized all or at least some of my ambitions right now. I know definitively that in living out my fantasies I was fulfilling a need for belonging. I sought not to belong to a mass movement, as in the kind that Eric Hoffer defined, but an ideology that comforted me, albeit within obvious limits.

My own form of self-renunciative behavior wasn’t something I engaged in by protesting the war in Iraq regularly; I went to three marches, one in Washington D.C. and two in New York City, and I didn’t enjoy them much at all. Rather, it was more my style to spout out tedious left-wing bromides and clichés whenever I had the opportunity in class. It was an experience most satisfying to me, because I was doing so as a minority of one in my small, mostly blue-collar liberal arts school in rural New Hampshire. I think if I weren’t in the minority, had I gone to a different college with a radical left majority, the chances were, I would have changed my tune and become more sensible and conservative, earlier in life. 

At the time of my collegiate years, I got off on living out the fantasy that I was regurgitating the romanticized images of radicals from the 1960s movement in revolt and tumult. Thinking like an outsider was a fun experience. True, it did win me a few close friends, but it also resulted in a number of bitter enemies. These were students who resented the ideas I’d spout forth in class, and the best way they got back at me was to lull me into a temporary friendship, and then soon after, they’d renounce that friendship and spread horrible insults about me to the community. This was degrading and has led to my being even more insular and reclusive in my early middle age. But the memories have led me to choose my friends more carefully, and not to make the mistake of seeing friendly acquaintances as true friendships. 

          I am glad, though, that for all of my youthful posturing, that is all it ever really came to—just posturing. Most importantly, I always had one north star, or position I didn’t waver on, and that was my love and support of the state of Israel, and the commitment to keeping her safe. I might have considered myself a progressive-minded Jewish boy, but I was never one of those obnoxious progressive Jews that turned Quisling toward their own homeland and people. In fact, in late 2002, my first semester of freshman year, during a student seminar on the impending invasion of Iraq, I made a statement that I would support the war effort if Saddam Hussein were to launch a scud missile barrage against Israel, just as he did during the first Gulf War in 1991. This caused a lot of murmurs of bewilderment and raised eyebrows among the other students in the room, because they saw my taking this particular position as curious and remarkable. 

College is a place and time when a young person experiments in new ideologies and can inevitably overcome such rigid and deceptive thinking. Can I be forgiven for my own ideological experimentation now that I have renounced my initial acts of self-renunciation? It is an often repeated saying that youth is wasted on the young. In my case, I was twice as immature as everyone else and dangerously naive. I believed for so long that I would achieve my life’s goals automatically, that everything had a way of working out over time. I failed to recognize that I was born without many of the cognitive tools and social skills needed to navigate me through life’s many hardships and obstacles. But that is the price that inherently comes with being on the autism spectrum. 

I should have been more career-oriented and less of a ‘lifetime student.’ The question that runs through my mind now on a continuous loop is, Did my past need for Belonging jeopardize my future well-being? One thing is for certain. Now that I define myself as a political realist, I have found a new, safer community to belong to. I embrace realpolitik and am a committed Zionist, without any contradiction or setback. Most of those that could be classified as fair-weather friends have withered away and left me behind. Or I have left them behind, whichever way it should be viewed. 

But I do have many blessings I can count from what I have gained from my collegiate days. First, and foremost, I have my bachelor’s degree; I never let any of the posturing get in the way of being the best student I could be. Some of my fondest memories of college were of my burning the midnight oil, studying in the library. There, it was usually just me and the Asian students. Most other people were out partying. I always respected my elders, the professors who enlightened my mind, and the campus safety officers who kept me secure. And I was always open to revising my thought process whenever I learned something new. I never got bogged down by ideological tunnel vision. 

Today, in 2024, I observe the legion of deluded students at the best Ivy League universities, encamped outside on their campuses, essentially living in their own filth. They are laying siege to the buildings and openly inviting violent confrontation with the police. The students are trafficking in the worst antisemitic vulgarity, and they are harassing and violating the rights of Jewish students. I could have been any one of the students facing danger and discrimination at the time of this writing. It has been of tremendous relief and comfort to me to learn that my alma mater Franklin Pierce University, remains as quiet and apolitical as it was when I was a student there and it was known as Franklin Pierce College. If in the past belonging meant indulging in flights of fantasy, then in the present belonging means being grounded in sensible reality. And I still hold out for hope for success in the future.

Extrapolating on "The Creator" [by Joe Lehman

If Blade Runner and The Terminator depict a dystopian future as imagined in 1982 and 1984, respectively, The Creator (2023) is a perfect projection of the present – a time when the public is passionately debating the very pressing issue of the role that Artificial Intelligence plays in basic living duties, in the stock market, and in filmmaking. For several months in 2023, the Screen Actors Guild made the A.I. the central factor in its strike in Hollywood. And right now stocks like Nvidia that specialize in A.I. are soaring. Technology is the hottest sector of the stock market.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, The Creator opens in a bleak 2055. The city of Los Angeles has been all-but-destroyed by a nuclear strike, with the blame pointed squarely at A.I. robotic beings dubbed “simulants” (a subtle reference to the replicants from Blade Runner). The simulants with some human supporters are based geographically in the Republic of New Asia. The United States military has its base of operations in the USS NOMAD (North American Orbital Mobile Aerospace Defense), which is a shuttle orbiting the atmosphere. NOMAD is waging a ‘forever war’ against the expanding technology.

What makes The Creator so compelling a story is the thesis it advances: that a war against the rise of higher technology could be a grievous lesson in futility, as technology is already interwoven in every aspect of how we as human beings are living in perpetuity. The film presents numerous examples in its images of soldiers utilizing A.I. technology as weapons against the organized simulant armies. At one point early in the story, Allison Janney, playing somewhat against type as a butch NOMAD colonel, draws a parallel from the current situation to the prehistoric conflict of Cro-Magnons versus Neanderthals. Neanderthals had their usefulness too, but we wiped them out into extinction.

Now the very presence of organized A.I. is threatening humankind’s role as dominant species. Of course, in this day and age, it is fashionable to portray the human armed forces in the West as wrongheaded and the simulant society in the East as peace-loving and desiring only tranquil coexistence. It is here that the film is weakest. The filmmakers are channeling the theme of James Cameron’s Avatar. It would have been much smarter to allow the audience to remain neutral and continue questioning the inevitability of technology’s ascendance in the face of human society’s strong Luddite sentiment. It would have been much smarter for the filmmakers not to take sides in the conflict.

Five years following a NOMAD raid that exposed Taylor’s cover and incidentally killed the pregnant Maya, Taylor is recalled to duty. His assignment is to hunt down the child simulant Alphie (Madeline Yuna Voyles). Alpha is an A.I. lifeform so advanced she / it can hack into any technology and disable it altogether. Taylor eventually “goes native,” that is, bonding with Alphie, and the two are predictably being hunted by both sides of the conflict. What chemistry exists between the human soldier and the robot child is not truly very interesting here. Rather, the theme of the murkiness of war between technology and its own consumers should have remained the film’s main focus.

The Peter Pan Syndrome: "I am Charlie Brown" [by Joe Lehman]

I should thank Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Steadfast Tin Soldier (and Jon Voight, for that matter) for shaping me as the man I am now. And of course, I should include Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz in the group. I have a confession to make: I really am Charlie Brown. That is to say, I bear the same traits of wishy-washiness, insecurity, yet cautious optimism that define the late Charles Schulz’s signature character in his venerated comic strip Peanuts. My feelings do bruise easily, and I maintain an outwardly ingenuous façade. And of course, when I was nine-years-old, I held the distinct honor of being cast as the understudy of the lead in the superb musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at my Montessori school.

J.M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan) and Carlo Collodi (creator of Pinocchio) deserve ample credit here too. I am still a child at heart. I believe the term best used to describe my personality is the “Peter Pan Syndrome.” Or as one sometime friend has put it, I am a man-child (or man-boy, depending on which designation is more apt.)

“Peter Pan Syndrome”, as a clinical term, dates back to Dr. Dan Kiley’s groundbreaking book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men who have never grown up, first published, ironically in the year of my birth 1983. Kiley followed up a year later with a sequel titled The Wendy Dilemma: When women stop mothering their men.

In my perusing these two books, I become more and more amazed at how accurately my lifelong psychological disposition corresponds with  Kiley’s findings. Take, for example, this passage from his preface:

“During their late teens and early twenties, these men indulge in an impetuous lifestyle. Narcissism locks them inside themselves , while an unrealistic ego trip convinces them that they can and must do whatever their fantasies suggest. Later, after years of poor adjustment to reality, life seems to reverse itself. ‘I want’ is replaced with ‘I should.’ Pursuit of other people’s acceptance is their only way to find self-acceptance. Their temper tantrums are disguised as manly assertion. They take love for granted, never learning how to give it in return. They pretend to be grown-ups but actually behave like spoiled children.”

I  turned 40-years-old on July 24, 2023, the breaking dawn of middle age, so it would seem that there could be no better time for introspection than right away. It doesn’t come very easy to me to admit that I should have ever been classified as a narcissist. Given my decades of self-doubt (bordering on self-loathing), I find it hard to believe that I could have ever been in love with my own self. But I certainly have been trapped inside myself, as Kiley phrases it. In that respect, I exhibit a more Charlie Brownish type of broken ego, than one as conceited as belonging to Peter Pan. But it could be just as accurate an analysis to postulate that my ego is composed of a relentless duel between the aspects of Peter Pan and those of Charlie Brown. One from my rotating circles of therapists from over the decades once suggested that I suffer from a “narcissistic injury.” To which, I responded, does that mean that I am a narcissist? No, the therapist corrected, it means I have an injury to my sense of self.

The best retort I could give to someone who accuses me of being narcissistic is “you may say I’m self-involved, but hey, I’m the one who has to suffer the punishment of living with myself twenty-four hours a day.”

Indulging in an impetuous lifestyle, during my late teens and throughout my twenties? I plead, guilty, as charged. Did an unrealistic ego trip convince me that I can and must do whatever my fantasies suggest? Again, yours truly pleads guilty. As for pursuit of other people’s acceptance, is my only way to find self-acceptance? Well, I might have to plead no contest here. Because my constant pursuit of other people’s acceptance actually has occurred simultaneously with my compulsion to live out my impracticable fantasies. So Kiley is merely half-right in this instance. It is right now, in real time, during this period of deep reflection that I do so willingly reevaluate that need of mine to please everyone.

But let us back up to the very beginning, so we can best understand all the events that have led up to this, the fortieth year. We’ll start with my early childhood. I was born two months premature. Two whole months is a long time to not have gestated. By all accounts, I probably shouldn’t have survived at all. The hospital incubator and my own resolve ensured my survival. But there were no lack of a heap of birth defects. The doctors that delivered me, did so by lifting me out head-first, using a pair of tongs. Did those tongs’ impression on my tiny skull cause the various mental illnesses that followed? Stages of mania, depression, and anxiety. Just the tip of the iceberg.

The physical disabilities rode on the coattails of the mental ones. Or is it the other way around? Maybe the mental disabilities rode the coattails of the physical ones. The eternal question. Never mind.

There is cerebral palsy—a mild case, but significant enough. Childhood development with just those weaknesses rendering me slower and unathletic went plenty well toward alienating me from my peers. It should be naturally then that such feelings of alienation led to topsy-turvy mood swings, with aggressive outbursts of rage that became more age-inappropriate as I entered adolescence. By the time I reached the age of my bar mitzvah, I was already highly medicated—Prozac, Depakote, Adderall (those are just the starters. I’ve gone through too many different meds in my life to be able to name them all, without at least forgetting one or two.

But early childhood is easily the worst stage of my life because it is at that time that any child possesses the least bit of self-awareness. A child can be highly intelligent; precocious, but not yet wise. It is quite remarkable then that I have never heard the word autism associated with me until adulthood. Looking back now, it makes perfect sense. I’ve lived as a loner from day one.

My religious upbringing played an important role in my childhood. There is the fluctuating conflict between pride in practicing Judaism devoutly, and the feeling of alienation in living as a social minority in a predominantly Christian society. Like all younger people, I was conditioned to confuse popular culture with reality, to some degree. Virtually all television programming was geared toward appealing to the Christian holidays. At least that was how I perceived it to be. That episode of South Park is correct. It is lonely being a Jew at Christmastime. Oh, sure, I could never argue with the fundamental pleasures of receiving presents on Chanukah (those eight crazy nights, to quote the irrepressible Adam Sandler). But it sure was tough to look outside and see Christmas decorations on every other house. The commercial world is the world that children tend to live in. Not seeing any Chanukah-related television programming is quite disaffecting. Another strike against me.

I give my parents, especially my father, the credit for coming from an intellectually superior genepool. My father is an acclaimed poet. Very prominent in literary circles. My mother’s field is graphic design. So, the fact that artistic talent runs naturally through my family is an understatement. Since I first could hold a pencil I’d wanted to be a great writer like my dad. But I don’t think I ever possessed, in my evolution, the ability to discern the understanding that success doesn’t come automatically. I was always lost in my fantasies of how my adulthood was going to turn out. Truly a critical flaw, if there ever has been one. Presumably my first unrealistic ego trip, if I truly adhere to Dr. Kiley’s Peter Pan Syndrome character traits.

If Dr. Dan Kiley is to be deemed successful in his use of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as a basis for examining the minds of emotionally stunted young adult men, then it comes as no surprise to me that Barrie himself must have had some rudimentary knowledge of what I assume was his own emotionally stunted mind. I turn now to the opening pages of Peter Pan: “I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and there are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island… …Of all delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact; not large and sprawl, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and the table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very nearly real.”

Neverland. Everyone that knows of Peter Pan and Wendy and the Lost Boys and Captain Hook is instantly familiar with this mythical destination. Neverland is as recognizable a fantastical place as Oz is in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, and Wonderland is in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, or Narnia is in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, to name but a few. However, reading Barrie’s definition of Neverland as a child’s state of imagination seems awesomely inspired. Every young individual person has his or her own Neverland, unto their mind. The trouble for me is, I have had such tremendous difficulty moving out of it. In college, I dubbed the repetitive mental state, my Shangri-La existence. Clinically, it is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I glance again at Dr. Kiley’s overview of the Peter Pan Syndrome: “A careful and thoughtful reading of [J.M.] Barrie’s original play opened my eyes to a chilling reality. As much as I want to believe the contrary, Peter Pan was a very sad young man. His life was filled with contradictions, conflicts, and confusion. His world was hostile and unrelenting. For all his gaiety, he was a deeply troubled boy living in an even more troubling time. He was caught in the abyss between the man he didn’t want to become and the boy he could no longer be.” Contradictions, conflicts, and confusion.

Perhaps I was compensating when I acted as a class clown, off and on in high school. 

"Angelic Autism: The Boy Who Could Fly" [by Joe Lehman]

        With the exception of Dustin Hoffman’s role in 1988’s Rain Man, a great many representations of autism in fiction, particularly in Hollywood movies, focus on autistic children and young adults. The inevitability that people with autism are bound to face the responsibilities of adulthood is something that filmmakers often sidestep or overlook altogether. As a result, Hollywood movies depicting autistic youths tend to romanticize them, sometimes even rendering them with mystical traits. One such mystical trait is the ability to set oneself free from the constraints of the uncertain world by flying in the style of Peter Pan.

        The 1986 family feature The Boy Who Could Fly, directed by Nick Castle, stars Jay Underwood in the title role, a Peter Pan-like figure of an autistic teenage boy, and Lucy Deakins as his doting Wendy-like love interest. Here is the plot. Millie, a lovely and kind-hearted fourteen-year-old girl, along with her recently-widowed mother Charlene (Bonnie Bedelia of Die Hard), and precocious younger brother Louis (Fred Savage of TV’s “The Wonder Years”) have settled in to a new suburban town. Living next door is Eric, a boy Millie’s age who (we soon learn) is severely autistic, unable to speak or connect socially with others.

        As a natural fish out of water and still grieving the loss of her father, Millie, finds herself drawn to Eric, who spends most of his time sitting on a window ledge, with his arms outstretched, as though dreaming of flying. Eric, it just so happens, was orphaned at a young age, leaving him in the care of his often-disoriented and inebriated, but otherwise, well-meaning uncle Hugo (Fred Gwynne of TV’s “The Munsters”). The other adult figures in the film, including school officials and social workers, observe that Millie has made reaching Eric a project to compensate for her own losses. But Millie’s attraction to Eric is as much romantic as it is figuratively maternal. Just as Wendy Darling play-acts the mother figure to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, she is also Peter’s sweetheart.

        The Boy Who Could Fly is, without question, a youth-oriented film. As such, the young characters are portrayed as always in the right, while the adults are either wrong-headed or perhaps they mean well but are otherwise clueless. Millie has to fight strenuously to prove to her authority figures Eric’s uniqueness and brilliance. She maintains that he should not be institutionalized. Rather he should remain in a mainstream school setting.

The movie is about more than just an autistic boy who dreams of flying and the girl who cares for him. It is also a salute to the kind of transformation that Eric makes from boy to angel. It is this theme that can be considered somewhat controversial: the trope of the autistic boy with mystical traits. The audience is led to believe that there is something special about Eric in an otherworldly way. He has the ability to appear on Millie’s windowsill and then reappear on his own windowsill next door in the blink of an eye. Millie also has a long dream sequence in which she and Eric are flying across the nighttime sky, in a scene reminiscent of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder soaring over Metropolis in 1978’s Superman.

        Without knowing the exact details of the film's surprise conclusion, the audience infers that Eric may in fact be a kind of seraph. There is, however, no plausible explanation offered by the filmmakers for this assumption. Audience members are just expected to run with the idea, no questions asked. These magical themes would be far less likely in a movie aimed at an adult audience. Consider Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, is very much a human being throughout the picture.

    The Boy Who Could Fly is heartwarming and a slice of pure fantasy. The acting is fine. Jay Underwood and Lucy Deakins, as Eric and Millie, are a cute couple to look at. People who have grown up during the 1980s will adore this movie; that much is certain. It is a perennial favorite of this author. It evokes feelings of nostalgia and sentiment. Viewers put off by the film’s folk lore might be more comfortable watching Rain Man instead, but I say why not enjoy both.

-- April 2021 (first published by Challenge Workforce Solutions)

The Boy from the Garden: Review of "Timothy Green" [by Joe Lehman]

 

Lin Manuel-Miranda in The Odd Life of Timothy Green

Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green deserves credit where credit is due, yet leaves its viewer with a feeling of incompleteness in that it doesn’t achieve all that it could. The viewer is presented with the story of a childless couple, Jim and Cindy Green (Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Garner) who one night find that a boy of about ten years old has appeared from out of the soil in their garden—and he has leaves growing out of his legs (leaves, which cannot be removed) and he immediately addresses the befuddled Jim and Cindy as “Mom” and “Dad.”

        The movie wisely does not to go into a long explanation of how this miraculous event came to be, leaving this to the viewer’s imagination. The Greens don’t ask questions, they accept this gift from God or Mother Nature without hesitation and agree to raise the child as their own, all the while keeping his legs covered in long socks so as not to reveal his telltale leaves. Two things are made clear:  he is a composite of all the traits the parents had wished for in a son and he seems to be of a species of botanical origin. This is apparent by his consistent show of basking in the glare of the sun throughout the movie. The kid — the Timothy of the title — of course, is perfect. So well-behaved it is almost too good to be true. The kind every parent longs to have. He goes to school, is oblivious to the jokes and pranks that bullies make at his expense, tries out for the soccer team, proves to draw expertly with a pencil, and even shows talent with a drumbeat.

            Watching Timothy Green evokes the memories of similarly themed films as 1985’s superb D.A.R.Y.L. and 2001’s moodier A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like the preteen-aged boys of those movies, Timothy is not quite human, and it shows in his quirky, offbeat behavior. Unlike the earlier films, Timothy Green fails to explore the full depths of this behavior, preferring to focus more on the parents and their observations of and reactions to this miracle child of theirs. This is a mistake on the movie’s part, as Jim and Cindy, despite the complexities of their characters and their obvious insecurities with being thrust full-time into parenthood (Jim is determined to become an improvement over his own less-than-supportive father Jim Sr., played by David Morse) do not sustain as much interest as the fantastical Timothy.

            Consider the early scene where Timothy is bullied in school for his noticeable differences — he is brand new to this world and needs to be told how things work and what they mean. This theme was visited in D.A.R.Y.L when the boy-robot of the title is winked at by a girl and responds by blinking with both eyes, not knowing the meaning of the gesture. Only in Timothy Green, Timothy’s relationships with other kids are not adequately explored. His friendship with an alienated girl Joni (Odeya Rush) is presented without much dialogue at all. Joni figures out early on Timothy’s secret physical characteristics, i.e. his leaves and origins. But the interplay between the two does not go much further. Joni’s presence does not lead Timothy’s character development in any new directions. This is in direct contrast to the much more dynamic relationship between Daryl and his young friend “Turtle” in D.A.R.Y.L., where Turtle teaches Daryl that, because parents don’t want their children to be too perfect, he needs to display a mischievous side once in a while. Timothy Green does not offer Timothy such opportunities for exploration.

        Timothy spends the most screen time interacting with the adults. These include Jim’s father, Cindy’s sister (Rosemarie DeWitt), who can always be counted on to brag of her own children’s many talents, Cindy’s elderly aunt and uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmett Walsh), her unhappy boss, the town matriarch, played by Dianne Wiest, and the frustrated soccer coach, played by rapper Common. The supporting cast is impressive, and each actor has something to contribute. What is consistent about these characters and their relationship to Timothy is that he manages to bring out the positive side in each of them. This is nice, but could be more interesting if their responses were more varied. They, in turn, bring out Timothy’s vast talents, although he is not quite perfect in all of them — his performance at the pivotal soccer game speaks to that — another wise decision on the movie’s part. The problem is that once the viewer is introduced to Timothy’s many talents, they are left unexplored. Timothy displays his gifts at music and drawing and then does not do much with them.

        Looming in the background is a subplot about the town’s primary base of industry, the beloved pencil factory that is in danger of shutting down, leaving Jim and most of the townsfolk out of work. Timothy’s cheerfully optimistic personality encourages Jim and Cindy to take a step to save the factory, which turns out to be an inspired idea, best not to be revealed in this review. There is of course the obligatory threat from the factory bosses to take credit for this step and the conflict between them and the parents. Such elements are standard movie fare, but effective in this case.

        Ultimately, Timothy Green is a respectable film that deals with its themes with grace and maturity. It is certainly appropriate for the whole family to enjoy. It is charming in many ways. It just does not go the entire distance. There are too many missed opportunities, times when the film left the door open to explore certain elements and ideas and then abandoned them before going any further. It is a pretty good movie that could have been great.

from the archive; first posted September 12, 2012.

Lin Manuel-Miranda in The Odd Life of Timothy Green

Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green deserves credit where credit is due, yet leaves its viewer with a feeling of incompleteness in that it doesn’t achieve all that it could. The viewer is presented with the story of a childless couple, Jim and Cindy Green (Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Garner) who one night find that a boy of about ten years old has appeared from out of the soil in their garden—and he has leaves growing out of his legs (leaves, which cannot be removed) and he immediately addresses the befuddled Jim and Cindy as “Mom” and “Dad.”

        The movie wisely does not to go into a long explanation of how this miraculous event came to be, leaving this to the viewer’s imagination. The Greens don’t ask questions, they accept this gift from God or Mother Nature without hesitation and agree to raise the child as their own, all the while keeping his legs covered in long socks so as not to reveal his telltale leaves. Two things are made clear:  he is a composite of all the traits the parents had wished for in a son and he seems to be of a species of botanical origin. This is apparent by his consistent show of basking in the glare of the sun throughout the movie. The kid — the Timothy of the title — of course, is perfect. So well-behaved it is almost too good to be true. The kind every parent longs to have. He goes to school, is oblivious to the jokes and pranks that bullies make at his expense, tries out for the soccer team, proves to draw expertly with a pencil, and even shows talent with a drumbeat.

            Watching Timothy Green evokes the memories of similarly themed films as 1985’s superb D.A.R.Y.L. and 2001’s moodier A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like the preteen-aged boys of those movies, Timothy is not quite human, and it shows in his quirky, offbeat behavior. Unlike the earlier films, Timothy Green fails to explore the full depths of this behavior, preferring to focus more on the parents and their observations of and reactions to this miracle child of theirs. This is a mistake on the movie’s part, as Jim and Cindy, despite the complexities of their characters and their obvious insecurities with being thrust full-time into parenthood (Jim is determined to become an improvement over his own less-than-supportive father Jim Sr., played by David Morse) do not sustain as much interest as the fantastical Timothy.

            Consider the early scene where Timothy is bullied in school for his noticeable differences — he is brand new to this world and needs to be told how things work and what they mean. This theme was visited in D.A.R.Y.L when the boy-robot of the title is winked at by a girl and responds by blinking with both eyes, not knowing the meaning of the gesture. Only in Timothy Green, Timothy’s relationships with other kids are not adequately explored. His friendship with an alienated girl Joni (Odeya Rush) is presented without much dialogue at all. Joni figures out early on Timothy’s secret physical characteristics, i.e. his leaves and origins. But the interplay between the two does not go much further. Joni’s presence does not lead Timothy’s character development in any new directions. This is in direct contrast to the much more dynamic relationship between Daryl and his young friend “Turtle” in D.A.R.Y.L., where Turtle teaches Daryl that, because parents don’t want their children to be too perfect, he needs to display a mischievous side once in a while. Timothy Green does not offer Timothy such opportunities for exploration.

        Timothy spends the most screen time interacting with the adults. These include Jim’s father, Cindy’s sister (Rosemarie DeWitt), who can always be counted on to brag of her own children’s many talents, Cindy’s elderly aunt and uncle (Lois Smith and M. Emmett Walsh), her unhappy boss, the town matriarch, played by Dianne Wiest, and the frustrated soccer coach, played by rapper Common. The supporting cast is impressive, and each actor has something to contribute. What is consistent about these characters and their relationship to Timothy is that he manages to bring out the positive side in each of them. This is nice, but could be more interesting if their responses were more varied. They, in turn, bring out Timothy’s vast talents, although he is not quite perfect in all of them — his performance at the pivotal soccer game speaks to that — another wise decision on the movie’s part. The problem is that once the viewer is introduced to Timothy’s many talents, they are left unexplored. Timothy displays his gifts at music and drawing and then does not do much with them.

        Looming in the background is a subplot about the town’s primary base of industry, the beloved pencil factory that is in danger of shutting down, leaving Jim and most of the townsfolk out of work. Timothy’s cheerfully optimistic personality encourages Jim and Cindy to take a step to save the factory, which turns out to be an inspired idea, best not to be revealed in this review. There is of course the obligatory threat from the factory bosses to take credit for this step and the conflict between them and the parents. Such elements are standard movie fare, but effective in this case.

        Ultimately, Timothy Green is a respectable film that deals with its themes with grace and maturity. It is certainly appropriate for the whole family to enjoy. It is charming in many ways. It just does not go the entire distance. There are too many missed opportunities, times when the film left the door open to explore certain elements and ideas and then abandoned them before going any further. It is a pretty good movie that could have been great.

from the archive; first posted September 12, 2012.

"The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" [by Joe Lehman]

above: the creators of Superman, Cleveland lads Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, with the product of their joint inagination.

The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run

        After Eliot Ness finished his work in Chicago for the Treasury Department, he went on to become police commissioner of Cleveland. He succeeded, excpet that he couldn't catch the "Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," also known as the Torso Murderer, because he left maybe a dozen or so torsos after disposing of their limbs. Ness did troot out the corruption in the Cleveland police department and he combatted the Purple Gang, the Cleveland counterparts of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Both Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman comics, were inspired by Eliot Ness, as was Chester Gould, who created Dick Tracy.

-- Joe Lehman

"In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders" (part three) [by Joe Lehman]

III.

Why did these former soldiers behave as they did? Was it greed pure and simple? As Ed Mireles opines, “Platt and Matix wanted the good life, and in Miami that means a big home, preferably on the beach, a new car, boats, trips to Disney World and lots of leisure time. That is the common profile of drug dealers and people who commit fraud on a grand scale. So, in that respect, they were normal criminal minded people.” 

Perhaps the most revealing scene near the climax of the movie takes place on the morning of Friday, April 11, 1986, when mere hours before the firefight, Mike Platt is driving his teenage stepson to school. Playing on the radio is a news report announcing U.S. military airstrikes against the rogue state of Libya. The airstrikes were conducted in response to evidence linking Libyan dictator Colonel Qaddafi and his agents to the terrorist bombing of La Belle disco tech in West Germany, which killed two American servicemen, just earlier in the month. (The airstrikes indeed occurred three days after the shootout.) Platt casually exclaims that “it’s about time we did something about that Qaddafi. If you ask me, it’s time to take him out.” Platt’s stepson nods in agreement and then tells Platt that he is writing a term paper on the Vietnam War. It is here, in an unusually rare moment of clarity, Platt reveals the sullen truth, that contrary to his earlier claims of battlefield heroics, he spent his entire Army career based stateside or in Seoul, South Korea, but he never served in Vietnam at all. He was “all ready to go, and then some wimp in Washington pulled the plug.” But, he says almost prophetically, “the way things are going in the Middle East, you might not need to worry about writing the paper. Why don’t you just join the service and kick butt?” The stepson chuckles nervously. It is here that Platt is exposed for what he really is, a narcissistic coward and a braggart, the irony of his prophecy about U.S. involvement in the Middle East notwithstanding.

In the aftermath of the shootout, numerous media reports played up the fact of Platt and Matix’s veneer of being upstanding, law abiding, and patriotic American citizens. But this brings to mind, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s classic saying that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels” in studying the contradiction between the villains’ outward appearances and the reality of their violent criminal activity.

One undisputed fact was that during the shootout, in real life, and as seen on the television reenactment, the bad guys, armed with automatic weapons, took an incredible number of bullet wounds, but managed to continue firing at the agents, who were less heavily armed. Why didn’t they surrender? What was their endgame? Had they actually managed to escape, they would have had to request medical attention; they could not have simply wandered into a hospital with a made-up story. Doctors are required by law to report gun injuries. Yet unbelievably, the dastardly duo made one last-ditch effort to drive away, after limping from their stolen car to a vehicle belonging to some of the deceased or wounded agents. When someone is running on pure adrenalin they act on pure impulse. in mind.

Mireles is shown preventing the killers’ attempted escape by firing final shots into them. The words “It’s over, you bastards” come from the televised Mireles’s mouth. In real life, Agent Mireles recalls shouting some much harsher language. Who can blame him? Two of his buddies—Grogan and Dove were killed in cold blood—and Mireles and the rest of the team were critically injured. As the real Mireles recalls:

“They did not hesitate to fire their weapons and shoot people in cold blood. Was it their military training? Partly yes, the rest was their psychopathic personalities. As far as their ‘not giving up’ goes, that is also, a very large part military training. But somewhere in the DNA mix is their psychopathic personalities. Those two main factors, training and personality, equate to how a person reacts, what a person does.”

Francois Truffaut is believed to have said that it is impossible to make an antiwar film. On screen, the action looks too exciting for the audience to be properly repelled by the idea of combat. The FBI Murders’ climactic firefight is sufficiently action-packed. But Ed Mireles has written in his own account the experience of feeling battle fatigue and survivor’s guilt.

C.S. Lewis once wrote “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’… …by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”

Perhaps, though, with all due respect to Lewis, there are some experiences that can never be familiar to audience members and critics and scholars. These are just a few minutes of combat situations. The televised depiction of the events that culminated in this infamous episode is certainly shrouded in myth and creative license. The FBI Murders’ value is that it takes the things we don’t know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of unfamiliarity.’ That is where the relationship of docudrama to reality merges positively.

"In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders " (part two) [by Joe Lehman]

Oscar Wilde [left], in his 1899 essay “The Decay of Lying,” wrote “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” It makes sense then that the mimetic relation of life and art is a vicious circle, as we see in books and films portraying True Crime stories.  There has been an accelerating demand for True Crime in the past half century since the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood marked its inauguration. NBC wasted no time in producing the TV movie In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders, which aired two years after the shootout. The usually-affable actors David Soul and Michael Gross play against type as the killers, Platt and Matix, in performances that one anonymous internet commentator describes as “too bad to be believed,” and yet they were "Freddy Kruger" and "Michael Meyers" incarnate, and as despicable a pair of murderers as were ever imagined by producers of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween series of dead teenager splatter flicks.”

The FBI Murders is a televised product of the latter half of the Reagan Era. The heroic FBI agents embody the bright, optimistic and virtuous side of ‘Morning in America.’ Ben Grogan and Jerry Dove, the slain officers are played with brightness and enthusiasm by Ronny Cox and Bruce Greenwood. Grogan is the wise veteran agent—"Fifty-three years old, and still the best shot in Miami.” Dove is the vibrant rookie—"I’m thirty years old, I live on the beach, and I drive a sports car.” When Dove’s girlfriend reminds him that he has to go to work, he says “that’s the good part.” The surviving agents are shown in exactly the same light. Gordon McNeill (Doug Sheehan) and Ed Mireles (Ronald G. Joseph) are both devoted family men, who instill a sense of idealism and scout-like preparedness in their children. McNeill is protective of his teenage daughters, to the point that as the two as-yet unidentified maniacs are running around loose, he fears for their safety at social activities as there may be an armored car present nearby. Mireles is shown having a heart-to-heart discussion with his young son, in which, he explains why he hopes he can arrest bad guys without violence. But, he explains, sometimes the use of deadly force is necessary—although he hasn’t yet had to, (but eventually will.) Nearly all of these scenes are fictitious. But they create the audience-friendly atmosphere conducive to recounting the actual events. The film captures the zeitgeist.

The movie’s villains, Platt and Matix, embody the dark and sinister underbelly of ‘Morning in America.’ The themes are greed; avarice; sloth; promiscuity; infidelity and spousal abuse; even religious hypocrisy.

David Soul and Michael Gross play up the “redneck” persona to the umpteenth degree. In fact, they wear it as a badge of honor, even at one point, citing “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer,” the Johnny Russell song, as an ample description of themselves. Though they served as Army Rangers, they seem to have few discernable skills necessary to navigate civilian life, nor do they have the moral inclination to make the effort to do so. Their values are hopelessly selfish and materialistic. Despite several failing business ventures, such as landscaping and installing pinball and jukebox machines, they amass new wealth through chaotically executed armed robberies and the insurance settlement from the bloody murder of Matix’s first wife, Patty.

Despite their outward image as simple family men, they are abusive and unfaithful toward their longsuffering wives and children, to whom they explain their newfound earnings by pretending to be mercenaries contracted by the CIA to assassinate drug dealers. In spite of their Walter Mitty-style fantasies of acting as mercenaries, Matix and Platt, display a squeamishness at the prospect of armed confrontations with drug dealers, who in Platt’s words are “all a bunch of greasers, and they have all kinds of weapons.” They are, as Platt says, “safer going up against cops,” who by 1980s standards, are lighter armed and easier to dominate. There is an obvious correlation between the villains’ brutish behavior at home and their crimes by day.

Matix is a born-again Christian, but it is revealed that he often has used church services as a place to seduce, bed, and then abandon vulnerable young women. The representation of the villains as religious hypocrites, merges with the larger picture of the rot setting into the milieu of religious revivalism in the Reagan Era, where a number of televangelists were ensnared in financially and sexually-based scandals. As Greg Barnhisel writes in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette: “Inevitably, they were felled by the old sins: lust and greed.” Lust and greed. Ed Mireles, the retired surviving agent, in several emails to this author, cuts through Platt and Matix’s façade of humble piety: “Their only motive was money.  They robbed, stole and killed for money to maintain the life style they wanted to have.  Nothing but greed…”

In nearly every scene, Platt and Matix appear as sweaty and crude; grunting their words while munching down potato chips and fast food.

It makes sense that NBC TV was inclined to embellish the true history of the lives and crimes of the two killers, as with both of them rendered dead by the final firefight, they are in no position to answer questions about their motivations or their interactions with each other. The myriad of scenes with Platt and Matix interacting with each other are clearly fabricated. Who knows for sure what their private conversations were really like? The filmmakers get around the dilemma of this type of speculation, by keeping the back-and-forth dialogue plain and simple and without much effort in developing.

Part three of this essay will appear next week.

The Great Miami Shootout (Edited for Television) [by Joe Lehman]

In some ways a Manichean story about the clash between the forces of good and evil, the 1988 television true-life docudrama In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders exemplifies the tendency of such programs to fictionalize what they purport to be true. Retired FBI Agent Edmundo Mireles Jr., in correspondence with this writer, has called the movie “about 50% accurate,” and having “taken a lot of liberties which led to a lot of embellishment and rewriting history to suit a script.” Nevertheless, on its own merit, The FBI Murders is an arresting movie, well worth examining, because it reveals an amazing symbiosis of truth and fiction in the presentation of crime and makes us understand the complicated relation of a docudrama to the events it depicts.

The villains in the movie conceive of themselves as believers in a militaristic code. They cloak their criminal behavior in the guise of commando operations. The heroes are federal agents, some of whom are military veterans and staunch believers in law and order, who engage in violence mainly or only to protect the lives of the innocent. While the movie’s conventions are stereotypical of American society in the 1980s, a decade that has been largely defined by the reign of President Ronald Reagan, these stereotypes convey a nostalgia for the clarity of values extolling right and wrong. Audiences generally flocked to the Rambo and Indiana Jones franchises because they longed for that clarity. The FBI Murders follows this trend. Interestingly in some scenes, agents apply the labels “Soldiers of Fortune” and “Rambos” to the villains. This suggests a fusion of the era’s pop culture icons into both the heroism and the wickedness depicted in the events of the story, which speaks to their lasting power in art and cinema.

In his 1770 speech “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent,” Edmund Burke proclaimed, “When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fail, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” A political party by implication can be translated as a community. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, as depicted in the movie, is a form of clan and community, united in its duty and purpose to root out criminality. The movie’s heroes are a band of brothers. Like any club, this particular Miami-based reactive unit—nicknamed “Funsters” by its members— has its code phrases, its initiation rituals, its training procedures, and its individual monikers for every member.

The backstory is as follows: Over a several-month period from late 1985 to the spring of 1986, Miami, Florida, as well as the surrounding rural areas, were subjected to a series of related violent crimes, committed by two heavily armed, well trained, army ranger veterans, identified later as Michael Platt, 32, and William Matix, 34. Together, these two devoted family men formed a folie à deux—shared psychosis—not dissimilar to that of Hickock and Smith, murderers of the Clutter family in Kansas, as chronicled by Truman Capote in 1966’s In Cold Blood.

Platt and Matix murdered motorists in order to steal ‘drop cars’ for the purpose of committing armed heists of banks and armored cars. During these robberies they maimed and killed guards and terrorized civilians in hails of wild gunfire. It is widely believed that both Matix’s and Platt’s first wives met fatal ends at their husbands’ hands, because the women were inconveniently in the way. According to Mary Thornton of the Washington Post, on Christmas Eve 1984 in Miami, “Platt's wife Regina died of a shotgun blast to the head. Police at the time ruled it a suicide.” Agent Gordon McNeill would later lament this ruling: “If she was a suicide, that would make her the first woman in the history of the FBI to kill herself with that kind of a gun that way.”

Just one year earlier, on December 30, 1983, in Columbus, Ohio, Matix’s wife Patty had been murdered in a purported robbery gone awry, along with a coworker Joyce McFadden at the hospital at which they were employed at. Reporter Michelle F. Solomon recounts Patricia Matix’s demise in vivid detail: “Joyce McFadden has been bound and gagged and stabbed to death. Patricia Matix is stabbed 16 times and her wedding ring is stolen.” There is no doubt this double homicide outdoes the imaginations of the creators of iconic slasher movie characters Michael Meyers and Freddy Krueger.

On April 11, 1986, when cornered by a unit of plainclothes FBI agents, following a highspeed chase, the suspects engaged the officers in a minutes-long firefight that left the two killers, along with the agents Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove, dead on arrival, with several other agents critically wounded. Since then, the case continues to be shrouded in infamy as one of the bloodiest shootouts in law enforcement history.

Part two will be posted next week.

Satan the Godfather [by Joe Lehman]

Usually my inspiration comes to me in my dreams. I’ve just awakened in the middle of the night from a fitful one -- one of those dreams that represent a lack of control, a feeling of powerlessness that comes with lost youth. I found myself back taking a college course in which I was tardy in preparing the work. I came across a file folder labeled “February 1973.” In my sleep I then exclaimed “Oh, that’s the month that G. Daniel Walker escaped and was on the loose again.” With that moment of lucidity, I regained consciousness, got out of bed and rushed to my desk and computer to begin jotting down my thoughts. This is happening in real time now.

            Gerald Daniel Walker (left), a career criminal and murderer, is now a ninety-one-year-old lifer in a California penitentiary somewhere, and yet I remain somewhat afraid to mention him for fear that he has a long reach even while incarcerated. (The next scheduled parole hearing is set for 2023). During his time in prison in the mid-1980s, he was alleged to have acquired a large shipment of brucine poison, which he intended to use against the judges and prosecutors who had previously tried and convicted him in the notorious 1973 William Ashlock killing in Tulare County, California. He was also convicted of the rape and brainwashing of Ashlock’s fiancée, Hope Masters. Perhaps it is for fear of his ‘long arm’ that the producers of the 1985 television miniseries A Death in California, based on Joan Barthel’s 1981 true crime best seller of the same name, decided to dub Walker’s character “D. Jordan Williams” and to cast veteran actor Sam Elliot in the role, despite the fact that he looks and sounds nothing like the real Walker. Those same producers made no changes in Hope Masters’ name. They cast Cheryl Ladd of Charlie’s Angels fame, who resembles the real Hope Masters quite well. They did, however, change Bill Ashlock’s name to “Richard Morgan.” So scary a figure is Walker that I find myself speculating that the producers wnet out of their way to avoid Walker’s vindictive wrath. He is now a nonagenarian and yet I fear I am taking a risk by writing about him now, for as long as he still lives and breathes, he breathes danger.

           According to the Barthel book, Walker had told Masters, after raping and tormenting her, “If you want to know more about me, read The Day of the Jackal. I’m the Jackal. I have a code of ethics.” It’s very interesting to me that this rapacious man should have been inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s classic espionage novel, and the movie version that was theatrically released—in 1973, no less—and has been of particular fascination for me since I was about fifteen years old. My father and mentor, the acclaimed author and poet David Lehman, has recently published a retrospective review of the superb assassination-conspiracy movie in The American Scholar.

            In my own understanding, the Jackal epitomizes a specter of amorality. He is a contract killer who works for no one but himself, looks out for his own interests alone, and easily blends into the crowded masses, moving among them undetected. This character is  G. Daniel Walker’s idol, the embodiment of his ambition to criminal fame and glory. Like the Jackal, Walker compulsively steals the identities of people he comes across and then exploits. Both are targets of massive manhunts, something that surely must have stroked Walker’s already inflated ego. Walker carried a treasured copy of the Forsyth book along with him during his travels from Illinois to California.

            The book and miniseries A Death in California focuses mainly on the one episode in G. Daniel Walker’s lengthy and ghastly trail of terror that led to his final lifetime incarceration. It is the strange saga of how, following his escape from penal custody in Illinois, where he was serving time for shooting and severely wounding a state trooper who had pulled him over while driving a stolen vehicle, Walker made his way out west. There, while masquerading as a newspaper reporter, he befriended William Ashlock and Hope Masters, under the pretense of interviewing Ashlock for a featurette on eligible bachelors in southern California. At their ranch house, Walker shot Bill in the back of the head, sexually assaulted Hope repeatedly and managed to convince her to help him cover up the crime for a period of time. How did he get her to play along?

The answer lies in another notable event that occurred in 1973:  the spectacular bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, where the hostages famously bonded with their captors, leading to the coinage of the term “Stockholm Syndrome.” A year later, in 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and brainwashed her into joining their insurrectional activities. It would seem, though, that while the Swedish bank robbery and the S.L.A. kidnapping cases have entered the broader lexicon of infamous crimes, the strange triangle of Walker, Ashlock, and Masters has been relegated to the archives of true crime lore.

Daniel Walker’s life of crime has been so long and extensive that I imagine there are at least a thousand little stories that could be extracted from his record, some predating the events of A Death in California, others subsequent to the publication of the book and the airing of the miniseries. In 1991, the television show Unsolved Mysteries broadcast a jailhouse interview with Walker, conducted by the late F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler, who is believed to have originated the term ‘serial killer.’ In the interview, Walker, a poised and articulate man, boasts of having committed many unsolved crimes, for most of which he was never suspected or charged. An author could potentially fill volumes to produce a full biography of the fiend and his exploits. A Death in California therefore represents a microcosm of Walker’s biography. We, as readers, must infer that the crimes in which he was convicted of committing are definitive of his savagery as a whole.

I have written on the subject of psychopathy many times before. The question of what defines evil I find a daunting one. As I revisit the life and crimes of G. Daniel Walker, I turn to Paradise Lost, the seventeenth-century epic poem by John Milton, and I am struck by Walker’s resemblance to Satan, as Milton depicts him

Hope Masters, who became so enamored of Walker’s charismatic personality that he was able to break  her will and seduced her, corresponds to Eve, who is tempted by Satan in  the form of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Walker, in his heyday, was a distinguished-looking man. Joan Barthel recounts the effect on Hope when she first meets  him under his alias Taylor Wright (a name stolen from a jewelry salesman whom Walker had nearly beaten to death in Michigan):  

“He was tall and very handsome, with dark wavy hair and a deep tan. He was wearing dark slacks, turtleneck sweater with a white shirt over it, and a leather jacket. He was facing Bill [Ashlock], gesturing toward the mountain with a large carved pipe, the other hand thrust into his pocket, the very image of male ease and casual elegance.”

Hope—then a thirty-one-year-old Beverly Hills socialite three times’ divorced and left with three young children—had previously done modeling work and once had a bit role in a television series starring Robert Wagner. It makes perfect sense that she should make the association in her mind between “Taylor” and Robert Wagner, given Walker’s close resemblance to the popular actor and Hope’s early attraction to Wagner on the set of the show.  

Satan, in Paradise Lost, was once the most favored of God’s angels in heaven. In Book I of Paradise Lost Milton writes:

            “Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view
            Nor the deep tract of Hell, say first what cause
            Moved our grand parents in that happy state,
            Favoured of Heav’n so highly, to fall off
            From their Creator and transgress his will
            For one restraint, lords of the world besides?
           Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
           Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
           Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
           The mother of mankind, what time his pride
           Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his host
           Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring
           To set himself in glory above his peers…”

Satan the Serpent fits G. Daniel Walker to a tee. Almost, that is. Satan was an angel, and Walker is all too human -- and supports the idea that evil exists as something in itself and is not necessarily to be explained away as a perversion of the good.

Walker could never have been revered by God the way Satan was at one time. But Walker had a way of manipulating people, especially women, including his one-time radical Legal-Aid attorney. The lawyer facilitated his escape from the prison ward of a hospital in Chicago, where he was faking an illness, and even accompanied him as he robbed a gas station at gunpoint. Prior to these events, Walker had served time for armed robbery in the state of Ohio, and he had seduced and married the prison warden’s private secretary. He won parole from that charge and had a child with her. He even started a successful advertising business, but he continued to compulsively commit theft and other felonies.

Long after Walker’s murder conviction in California and prolonged seduction of Hope Masters, Walker seduced a female prison worker named Olivia, married her and involved her in several escape plots, frivolous lawsuits, as well as his plot to  poison prison and state officials. These women and all the other individuals Walker has manipulated throughout his lifetime bring to mind Satan’s host of rebel angels. And by their aid Walker aspired to set himself in glory above his peers. Satan and Walker have both committed the sin of pride. Walker considered himself above the laws of man, as Satan had considered himself above the laws of God.

Illinois State Police detective Bob Swalwell, in his dogged pursuit of Walker, provides the consummate foil in this cat-and-mouse game, just as the fictional Inspector Claude Lebel of the French police relentlessly pursues the Jackal in the Forsyth bookAs Barthel writes in A Death in California, concerning a letter Walker mails to his lovesick, but conflicted attorney,

“From his own knowledge of Walker, and from his knowledge of the Chicago underworld, Swalwell discounted Walker’s Mafia jargon, ‘going-to-mattress’ and ‘The Man,’ as simply Walker’s braggadocio, his attempt to sound very big time. And he was also dubious about the ‘price tag’ ending, Walker’s unhappiness, although with a guy like Walker, who could say? Fortunately, Swalwell was not assigned to deal with Walker’s soul. But he didn’t doubt for a minute that some of Walker’s friends, both ex-cons and civilians, were helping him and, Swalwell admitted, doing a pretty good job of it so far.”

Luckily, I, a scholar, do have the time and the inclination to look into Walker’s soul. The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, was first released in 1972, the year preceding Walker’s escape. I suspect that, as with The Day of the Jackal, Walker was highly influenced by the films and the novel it was based on, and he was playing the role of a big shot hit man or crime boss for his own audience and that of his associates. He is not Sicilian, and therefore can never literally be ‘made’ as a mafioso.

In Paradise Lost:

“He trusted to have equalled the Most High,
If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in Heav’n and battle proud
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.

Satan lusts to make war with God in heaven. Walker lusts to be viewed as the Godfather.

The Importance of Martin Guerre -- Part One [by Joe Lehman]

"Martin Guerre: Now and Then; Then and Now" [by Joe Lehman]

PART ONE

“Land to last, as it's passed, man to son, when it's done as planned. Then we'll pray it will stay as good Catholic land.”

After the experience of living through the past four years, this lyric sounds a lot like Make America Great Again. At least, that was the thought that came to mind when I listened to the music of Martin Guerre in the summer of 2018.

I had the privilege of attending one of the original performances of the short-lived musical Martin Guerre when visiting London, England, in late December 1997-early January 1998, when I was fourteen. It has had a troubled existence; rarely has it been revived. I don’t believe it has ever opened on Broadway. As I was so young when I saw Martin Guerre, I didn’t appreciate its meaning. Twenty years went by, and in a dream one night, the memory of the musical came to me. The next morning, I purchased the soundtrack of the original cast recording. The musical, and the story behind it, has held a great significance for me ever since.

The tale of the sixteenth century French peasant Martin Guerre and the imposture conducted by his army buddy Arnaud du Thil was resurrected in the 1982 French-language film The Return of Martin Guerre, as well as in a nonfiction book with the same title by historian Natalie Zemon Davis. Subsequently, the story has been immortalized as a continuing trope in many incarnations, including the 1993 movie Sommersby, starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, where the story is transported to post-Civil War and Reconstruction-era Tennessee, and the titular character and his imposter are veterans of the Confederate Army. It has even taken the form of satire in an episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where the Vietnam veteran Principal Skinner is revealed to be an imposter, a former comrade-in-arms of the ‘real’ Skinner.

It is in Martin Guerre the musical that the story is placed most prominently in the context of bigotry, nativism, and religious intolerance. The history of Catholic persecution of the Protestant Huguenots figures heavily. The setting is the provincial village of Artigat. Strangely, for reasons unknown to me, the word “Huguenot” is never uttered in the show. What is known is that Artigat is populated by a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols are betrothed to marry at an adolescent age, so that their families will merge in attempt to keep their shared land under Catholic ownership. But Martin is unable to perform sexually and in a fit of wanderlust, finds the only way available for French peasant to gain upward mobility: He leaves the village and Bertrande, and joins the Catholic army.

Seven years pass and when Martin is seemingly felled in battle, Arnaud du Thil travels to Artigat and almost accidentally assumes his identity, his land, and his wife Bertrande, who, despite being the one who knows about the fraud, falls in love with Arnaud, and together they clandestinely convert to Protestantism. Guillaume, an anti-Protestant fanatic who is also a jealous former suitor of Bertrande’s, discovers the truth and becomes Arnaud’s main accuser. Arnaud is arrested, brought to trial, where he continues relentlessly to insist he is the real Martin Guerre. The members of the courtroom are divided across Catholic and Protestant lines, in Arnaud’s favor and against it. The surprise witness who is able to provide the ultimate evidence of Arnaud’s imposture is Martin Guerre himself, who reappears to testify to his true identity. The musical sees Artigat burn down in an orgy of violence and Arnaud murdered at Guillaume’s hands. This version differs from the historical record. In fact, Arnaud’s case was tried, appealed, and tried again before he was found guilty and executed by hanging, while Bertrande was returned to her legal husband’s custody. I can only surmise that this modification was made for dramatic purposes. The show ends with the villagers contemplating the consequences of their hateful actions and praying for forgiveness.

French historian Philippe Erlanger in his book St. Bartholomew’s Night chronicles the bloody history of France during the turbulent century of the Protestant Reformation:

The world was changing at a bewildering pace. The old order was giving way. Men had once placed all their hopes in heaven: now they were beginning to look for happiness here on earth again.

 Erlanger describes the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Renaissance:

A society which for a great while had been preoccupied with local quarrels suddenly beheld the horizon torn wide open before it; and at the same time, it became conscious of curiosities, doubts, and wild irrational beliefs.

It seems to be a constant throughout history that with the coming of liberalization and modernization of people and civilization, comes a reactionary backlash equal in force. Erlanger writes:

Intolerance bred intolerance. Fanaticism increased in the same measure as the struggle for liberation of the minds of men.

Erlanger could very well have been describing the political and racial tribalism and its ensuing chaos that exists in present-day America, where the Proud Boys battle Antifa and Black Lives Matter in vicious street confrontations.

Ed note: this is part one of a two-part article. For part two, click here.
from the archive; first posted February 12, 2021.

"Martin Guerre: Now and Then; Then and Now" [by Joe Lehman]

PART ONE

“Land to last, as it's passed, man to son, when it's done as planned. Then we'll pray it will stay as good Catholic land.”

After the experience of living through the past four years, this lyric sounds a lot like Make America Great Again. At least, that was the thought that came to mind when I listened to the music of Martin Guerre in the summer of 2018.

I had the privilege of attending one of the original performances of the short-lived musical Martin Guerre when visiting London, England, in late December 1997-early January 1998, when I was fourteen. It has had a troubled existence; rarely has it been revived. I don’t believe it has ever opened on Broadway. As I was so young when I saw Martin Guerre, I didn’t appreciate its meaning. Twenty years went by, and in a dream one night, the memory of the musical came to me. The next morning, I purchased the soundtrack of the original cast recording. The musical, and the story behind it, has held a great significance for me ever since.

The tale of the sixteenth century French peasant Martin Guerre and the imposture conducted by his army buddy Arnaud du Thil was resurrected in the 1982 French-language film The Return of Martin Guerre, as well as in a nonfiction book with the same title by historian Natalie Zemon Davis. Subsequently, the story has been immortalized as a continuing trope in many incarnations, including the 1993 movie Sommersby, starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, where the story is transported to post-Civil War and Reconstruction-era Tennessee, and the titular character and his imposter are veterans of the Confederate Army. It has even taken the form of satire in an episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where the Vietnam veteran Principal Skinner is revealed to be an imposter, a former comrade-in-arms of the ‘real’ Skinner.

It is in Martin Guerre the musical that the story is placed most prominently in the context of bigotry, nativism, and religious intolerance. The history of Catholic persecution of the Protestant Huguenots figures heavily. The setting is the provincial village of Artigat. Strangely, for reasons unknown to me, the word “Huguenot” is never uttered in the show. What is known is that Artigat is populated by a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols are betrothed to marry at an adolescent age, so that their families will merge in attempt to keep their shared land under Catholic ownership. But Martin is unable to perform sexually and in a fit of wanderlust, finds the only way available for French peasant to gain upward mobility: He leaves the village and Bertrande, and joins the Catholic army.

Seven years pass and when Martin is seemingly felled in battle, Arnaud du Thil travels to Artigat and almost accidentally assumes his identity, his land, and his wife Bertrande, who, despite being the one who knows about the fraud, falls in love with Arnaud, and together they clandestinely convert to Protestantism. Guillaume, an anti-Protestant fanatic who is also a jealous former suitor of Bertrande’s, discovers the truth and becomes Arnaud’s main accuser. Arnaud is arrested, brought to trial, where he continues relentlessly to insist he is the real Martin Guerre. The members of the courtroom are divided across Catholic and Protestant lines, in Arnaud’s favor and against it. The surprise witness who is able to provide the ultimate evidence of Arnaud’s imposture is Martin Guerre himself, who reappears to testify to his true identity. The musical sees Artigat burn down in an orgy of violence and Arnaud murdered at Guillaume’s hands. This version differs from the historical record. In fact, Arnaud’s case was tried, appealed, and tried again before he was found guilty and executed by hanging, while Bertrande was returned to her legal husband’s custody. I can only surmise that this modification was made for dramatic purposes. The show ends with the villagers contemplating the consequences of their hateful actions and praying for forgiveness.

French historian Philippe Erlanger in his book St. Bartholomew’s Night chronicles the bloody history of France during the turbulent century of the Protestant Reformation:

The world was changing at a bewildering pace. The old order was giving way. Men had once placed all their hopes in heaven: now they were beginning to look for happiness here on earth again.

 Erlanger describes the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Renaissance:

A society which for a great while had been preoccupied with local quarrels suddenly beheld the horizon torn wide open before it; and at the same time, it became conscious of curiosities, doubts, and wild irrational beliefs.

It seems to be a constant throughout history that with the coming of liberalization and modernization of people and civilization, comes a reactionary backlash equal in force. Erlanger writes:

Intolerance bred intolerance. Fanaticism increased in the same measure as the struggle for liberation of the minds of men.

Erlanger could very well have been describing the political and racial tribalism and its ensuing chaos that exists in present-day America, where the Proud Boys battle Antifa and Black Lives Matter in vicious street confrontations.

Ed note: this is part one of a two-part article. For part two, click here.
from the archive; first posted February 12, 2021.

"Why 'Nixonland' Matters" [by Joe Lehman]

When I was twenty-five, backpacking through Australia, I carried with me my hardcover copy of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It absorbed me for all seven months of my journey. I took flight to the land of Oz in late October 2008. Nixonland hit the stores in May of that fateful year of financial crisis. Having recently taken it off my bookshelf, I can report that the book holds up well and has a special relevance for us today. It is that rare thing, a thick history book suitable for a college class that is a most pleasurable page-turner.

For those of us born after the end of the ‘60s (I was born in 1983), we have long been used to the romanticized mythology of the era. We conjure up an image of bell-bottom-wearing long-haired hippies, driving around in psychedelic-painted VW buses, getting high on LSD and marijuana, protesting the war in Vietnam, and practicing free love.

Written from a left-of-center perspective, Nixonland has no illusions about the title figure and his presidential predecessor, yet rips the mask off the pastoral vision of acid-tripping dropouts and collegiate idealists to reveal a less pretty picture of moral anarchy, ruined lives, and gun violence. Read this book and your views of that era will lose their rosy hue. Perlstein paints a radical picture of a country gone insane with political brutality, cultural discord, and social decay. Flower people were not always loveable innocents:

           <<<< Love was in the eye of the beholder. At first downtown merchants welcomed the hippie district that sprang up on Plumb Street in Detroit; it was attracting people to their stores. Then they realized that the hippies liked their stores so much because they could panhandle from paying customers (“I wish we could have had the hippies without the dope,” said one merchant, after the forty-three shops on Plumb Street had shrunk down to six.) (185)  >>>>

Nixonland reads like one big Roman chariot race through hell. Stories of race riots, assassinations, bombings, a divisive war in Vietnam, infighting between (and within) left and right, and the reign of a Machiavellian president occupy every page.

One month before my departure to Australia the U.S. economy had come to the brink of collapse, and the Great Recession was in its early stages. On the first Tuesday in November, just over a week after I landed down under, America ushered in the election of the first African-American president. It was, despite the financial calamity, a hopeful moment. In the time since, however, the country has suffered riots, protests, mass shootings, a polarized populace, and a coronavirus sweeping through like a medieval plague. And as I leaf through my worn copy of Nixonland once more, I realize that I am no longer standing apart from the happenings of a chaotic world. The outbreak of COVID-19 did nothing to unify a polarized society. If anything the crisis in civility and the rise of discord have worsened. On Facebook, friendships terminate because of petty political disagreements, and the general tone of debate demonstrates that virtual bullying is as brutal as the physical kind. The Roman Chariot race through Hell that is described in Nixonland seems far more pressing today than it did upon its hardcover publication in 2008.

A history of America from 1964 to 1972, Nixonland goes from “all the way with LBJ” in 1964 to “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” in 1968; and from there to the resurrection of Richard Nixon and his reelection four years later despite a third-rate burglary on the offices of the political opposition at a previously obscure apartment complex called Watergate. In these eight years America went through what Perlstein bluntly calls a “second civil war.” Just as now, factions of left and right were continually feuding. Vietnam cut the population into two opposing camps. Young people declared war on people over thirty, and the reaction came swiftly enough from folks who pledged allegiance to Bob Hope, “God Bless America,” and Sousa marches on July 4th. “Nixon acted not despite the Silent Majority he described as so pure and decent, but in a sense on their behalf, and even at their request,” Perlstein writes. “His paranoia and dread were their own. Across the state of mind known as Middle America, a subterranean viciousness was bubbling ever closer to the surface.” (519)

Perlstein traces Nixon’s ascent to the presidency from the “wilderness” period when, after being prematurely written off, he scraped together the allegiances and alliances that gained him the 1968 Republican nomination for president. During his first term, he aspired to wind down the Vietnam War, engage in détente with the Soviet Union, and open relations with Red China. In two of those aims he may be said to have succeeded; Nixon was a canny politician and had the benefit of an extraordinary secretary of state. Peace “with honor” proved elusive. The ugly war dragged on. It is likely that on his own Nixon would never have committed half a million soldiers to an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, as Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, and the Bundy brothers did. But how to end it?

The foreign policy successes did not lessen the amount of civil unrest in the nation. Perlstein juxtaposes the narrative of Nixon’s rise, his wielding of power, and his overwhelming defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972, with descriptions of horrific crimes committed during the same period. These include massacres committed by the Manson Family in 1969 and Richard Speck’s slaughter of eight student nurses three years earlier. Perlstein also notes the shift in the civil rights and antiwar movements from nonviolence to militancy. “This was,” according to Perlstein “something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence–the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.” As for the personality of Richard Nixon, here was a man who could wake up the day after winning forty-nine of the nation’s fifty states and feel depressed.

Perlstein charts the period through an inspection of changes in pop culture. For example, he contrasts the reactions of liberals and conservatives to movies with polar opposite themes. In 1967, the right flocked to see John Wayne sound the fighting charge in the jingoistic Vietnam film The Green Berets. The New York Times critic panned the movie. Perlstein quotes the arch-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond:

“I have not yet had the opportunity to see this movie,” he drawled. But “I have become convinced that this must be one of the most admirable movies of our generation, after reading the review which appeared last week in the New York Times. . . That set me to wondering what on earth the standards of criticism are that are current in the New York Times for a film that is patriotic and pro-American.” (278)

Meanwhile, the left was infatuated with images of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway blowing away civilians and officers of the law until they meet their own gruesome fate in Bonnie & Clyde. Perlstein defines the reasoning of the movie’s instant fans: “They weren’t bad folks, went the movie’s moral logic, until an evil system forced them to extremity: robbing banks that repossessed farms, killing only when the System was closing in all around them… Bonnie and Clyde made those around them feel alive – all except the squares who were chasing them, who were already more or less dead anyway, with their sucker obsession with honest toil.” (209)

Apparently cinema is the mirror reflecting both sides’ sense of values.

Perlstein describes the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the attempt on George Wallace, and the bitterness that ensued. There were other eye-opening events that presage a scary future. In the “planned riot” in Cleveland in 1968, snipers from the “Black Nationalists of New Libya” executed several police officers; in 1971, during the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York, both convicts and guard-hostages were killed in an assault by state troopers. Perlstein illustrates, too, how the chaos in America dovetailed with violence abroad, such as the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany, at the hand of Palestinian terrorists. His reportage covers both the liberal and reactionary responses of ordinary citizens. A perfect example of an out-of-touch media occurred during the siege of Attica, when New York Times reporter Tom Wicker addressed a group of relatives of the captive prison guards. Wicker launched into an impassioned speech about the hostage-takers’ solidarity over their brutal treatment by the corrections authorities. The relatives responded by hurling insults and epithets at Wicker, protesting his obvious sympathy for the convicts.

Perlstein is able to draw an indissoluble connection between the events on the ground and the complex personality of Richard Nixon, with his uncanny ability to tap into the passions and political desires of the “Silent Majority” of Americans, who yearned for law and order amid the turmoil. These included the northern “hardhats” and the southern “rednecks.” Perlstein argues that Nixon saw the world in terms of the conflict between two student groups from his university days: the Franklins and the Orthogonians. The former consisted of the rich kids, polished and well-bred, who seemed to have the path to success paved for them. The latter group consisted of outsiders and striving underdogs from the lower-middle and working classes. Nixon himself was an Orthogonian; he rose from a hardscrabble background as the son of a California grocer. John F. Kennedy, his arch political rival, was the epitome of a Franklin; a millionaire’s son with matinee idol looks, a good war record, and the habits of a playboy.  According to Perlstein, for Nixon this dichotomy extends to every group of people. Perhaps surprisingly, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein qualify as the Orthogonians of the newsroom. They are plucky questers, piecing together the facts of the Watergate scandal, with shoe-leather reporting, whereas the Franklins of the newsroom are the well-heeled veteran White House correspondents.

Nixonland is the second entry in Rick Perlstein’s quartet of books covering the emergence of the New Right. Before the Storm (2001) chronicled Barry Goldwater’s doomed GOP Presidential campaign of 1964; The Invisible Bridge (2014) follows Nixon's resignation through Ronald Reagan’s challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Most recently, Reaganland tells the tale of the much-maligned Jimmy Carter presidency and Reagan’s emergence in 1980.

What struck me about Nixonland in 2008 and continues to resonate in 2021 is the way Perlstein captures the idealistic cluelessness of the liberal side versus the cold Machiavellianism of the right. Just as Tom Wicker was blindsided by the reaction of his audience at Attica, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern was blindsided by the reactions he faced from the voting public. In one campaign stop, McGovern played a reel of gory photographs of wounded civilians in Vietnam, hoping perhaps to guilt-trip Americans into voting for him as the peace candidate. This was a misfire if only because the vast number of Americans are motivated not by sentimental appeals to their consciences but by practical self-interest. Richard Nixon clearly understood this, as he promised to pull out from the war “with honor” and appealed to patriotic and sometimes nationalistic impulses in the voters’ minds. Meanwhile the Democrats were busy shooting themselves in the foot, nominating Senator Thomas Eagleton for vice president, then ditching him post-convention when it turned out that he was a depressive who had seen shrinks and gone through shock therapy. Yet even in landslide victory, Nixon noted that his congressional coattails were shorter than he had hoped for, and he obsessed about his foes. Foes he certainly had. Nixon’s whole political career demonstrates the saying that even paranoids have enemies.

Today the insurgent progressive left of the Democratic Party seems to have perfected political guilt-tripping almost to a science. As a result, its losses are catastrophic (2016) and its wins often pyrrhic (2020). During the early years of the Obama presidency, I observed that Obama would have fewer problems if he learned the lessons of Nixonland. One lesson is that when facts are overtaken by narrative, it is difficult to overcome the narrative. For McGovern, it was impossible to defeat the label of being the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” Whether Obama’s Democratic successor Biden has ever taken the time to read Nixonland or not, I do not know. He should. It just may improve his chances for a successful presidency.

Click here to read Joe Lehman on "The Return of Martin Guerre."
from the archive; first published May 15, 2021

For those of us born after the end of the ‘60s (I was born in 1983), we have long been used to the romanticized mythology of the era. We conjure up an image of bell-bottom-wearing long-haired hippies, driving around in psychedelic-painted VW buses, getting high on LSD and marijuana, protesting the war in Vietnam, and practicing free love.

Written from a left-of-center perspective, Nixonland has no illusions about the title figure and his presidential predecessor, yet rips the mask off the pastoral vision of acid-tripping dropouts and collegiate idealists to reveal a less pretty picture of moral anarchy, ruined lives, and gun violence. Read this book and your views of that era will lose their rosy hue. Perlstein paints a radical picture of a country gone insane with political brutality, cultural discord, and social decay. Flower people were not always loveable innocents:

           <<<< Love was in the eye of the beholder. At first downtown merchants welcomed the hippie district that sprang up on Plumb Street in Detroit; it was attracting people to their stores. Then they realized that the hippies liked their stores so much because they could panhandle from paying customers (“I wish we could have had the hippies without the dope,” said one merchant, after the forty-three shops on Plumb Street had shrunk down to six.) (185)  >>>>

Nixonland reads like one big Roman chariot race through hell. Stories of race riots, assassinations, bombings, a divisive war in Vietnam, infighting between (and within) left and right, and the reign of a Machiavellian president occupy every page.

One month before my departure to Australia the U.S. economy had come to the brink of collapse, and the Great Recession was in its early stages. On the first Tuesday in November, just over a week after I landed down under, America ushered in the election of the first African-American president. It was, despite the financial calamity, a hopeful moment. In the time since, however, the country has suffered riots, protests, mass shootings, a polarized populace, and a coronavirus sweeping through like a medieval plague. And as I leaf through my worn copy of Nixonland once more, I realize that I am no longer standing apart from the happenings of a chaotic world. The outbreak of COVID-19 did nothing to unify a polarized society. If anything the crisis in civility and the rise of discord have worsened. On Facebook, friendships terminate because of petty political disagreements, and the general tone of debate demonstrates that virtual bullying is as brutal as the physical kind. The Roman Chariot race through Hell that is described in Nixonland seems far more pressing today than it did upon its hardcover publication in 2008.

A history of America from 1964 to 1972, Nixonland goes from “all the way with LBJ” in 1964 to “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” in 1968; and from there to the resurrection of Richard Nixon and his reelection four years later despite a third-rate burglary on the offices of the political opposition at a previously obscure apartment complex called Watergate. In these eight years America went through what Perlstein bluntly calls a “second civil war.” Just as now, factions of left and right were continually feuding. Vietnam cut the population into two opposing camps. Young people declared war on people over thirty, and the reaction came swiftly enough from folks who pledged allegiance to Bob Hope, “God Bless America,” and Sousa marches on July 4th. “Nixon acted not despite the Silent Majority he described as so pure and decent, but in a sense on their behalf, and even at their request,” Perlstein writes. “His paranoia and dread were their own. Across the state of mind known as Middle America, a subterranean viciousness was bubbling ever closer to the surface.” (519)

Perlstein traces Nixon’s ascent to the presidency from the “wilderness” period when, after being prematurely written off, he scraped together the allegiances and alliances that gained him the 1968 Republican nomination for president. During his first term, he aspired to wind down the Vietnam War, engage in détente with the Soviet Union, and open relations with Red China. In two of those aims he may be said to have succeeded; Nixon was a canny politician and had the benefit of an extraordinary secretary of state. Peace “with honor” proved elusive. The ugly war dragged on. It is likely that on his own Nixon would never have committed half a million soldiers to an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, as Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, and the Bundy brothers did. But how to end it?

The foreign policy successes did not lessen the amount of civil unrest in the nation. Perlstein juxtaposes the narrative of Nixon’s rise, his wielding of power, and his overwhelming defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972, with descriptions of horrific crimes committed during the same period. These include massacres committed by the Manson Family in 1969 and Richard Speck’s slaughter of eight student nurses three years earlier. Perlstein also notes the shift in the civil rights and antiwar movements from nonviolence to militancy. “This was,” according to Perlstein “something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence–the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.” As for the personality of Richard Nixon, here was a man who could wake up the day after winning forty-nine of the nation’s fifty states and feel depressed.

Perlstein charts the period through an inspection of changes in pop culture. For example, he contrasts the reactions of liberals and conservatives to movies with polar opposite themes. In 1967, the right flocked to see John Wayne sound the fighting charge in the jingoistic Vietnam film The Green Berets. The New York Times critic panned the movie. Perlstein quotes the arch-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond:

“I have not yet had the opportunity to see this movie,” he drawled. But “I have become convinced that this must be one of the most admirable movies of our generation, after reading the review which appeared last week in the New York Times. . . That set me to wondering what on earth the standards of criticism are that are current in the New York Times for a film that is patriotic and pro-American.” (278)

Meanwhile, the left was infatuated with images of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway blowing away civilians and officers of the law until they meet their own gruesome fate in Bonnie & Clyde. Perlstein defines the reasoning of the movie’s instant fans: “They weren’t bad folks, went the movie’s moral logic, until an evil system forced them to extremity: robbing banks that repossessed farms, killing only when the System was closing in all around them… Bonnie and Clyde made those around them feel alive – all except the squares who were chasing them, who were already more or less dead anyway, with their sucker obsession with honest toil.” (209)

Apparently cinema is the mirror reflecting both sides’ sense of values.

Perlstein describes the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the attempt on George Wallace, and the bitterness that ensued. There were other eye-opening events that presage a scary future. In the “planned riot” in Cleveland in 1968, snipers from the “Black Nationalists of New Libya” executed several police officers; in 1971, during the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York, both convicts and guard-hostages were killed in an assault by state troopers. Perlstein illustrates, too, how the chaos in America dovetailed with violence abroad, such as the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany, at the hand of Palestinian terrorists. His reportage covers both the liberal and reactionary responses of ordinary citizens. A perfect example of an out-of-touch media occurred during the siege of Attica, when New York Times reporter Tom Wicker addressed a group of relatives of the captive prison guards. Wicker launched into an impassioned speech about the hostage-takers’ solidarity over their brutal treatment by the corrections authorities. The relatives responded by hurling insults and epithets at Wicker, protesting his obvious sympathy for the convicts.

Perlstein is able to draw an indissoluble connection between the events on the ground and the complex personality of Richard Nixon, with his uncanny ability to tap into the passions and political desires of the “Silent Majority” of Americans, who yearned for law and order amid the turmoil. These included the northern “hardhats” and the southern “rednecks.” Perlstein argues that Nixon saw the world in terms of the conflict between two student groups from his university days: the Franklins and the Orthogonians. The former consisted of the rich kids, polished and well-bred, who seemed to have the path to success paved for them. The latter group consisted of outsiders and striving underdogs from the lower-middle and working classes. Nixon himself was an Orthogonian; he rose from a hardscrabble background as the son of a California grocer. John F. Kennedy, his arch political rival, was the epitome of a Franklin; a millionaire’s son with matinee idol looks, a good war record, and the habits of a playboy.  According to Perlstein, for Nixon this dichotomy extends to every group of people. Perhaps surprisingly, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein qualify as the Orthogonians of the newsroom. They are plucky questers, piecing together the facts of the Watergate scandal, with shoe-leather reporting, whereas the Franklins of the newsroom are the well-heeled veteran White House correspondents.

Nixonland is the second entry in Rick Perlstein’s quartet of books covering the emergence of the New Right. Before the Storm (2001) chronicled Barry Goldwater’s doomed GOP Presidential campaign of 1964; The Invisible Bridge (2014) follows Nixon's resignation through Ronald Reagan’s challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Most recently, Reaganland tells the tale of the much-maligned Jimmy Carter presidency and Reagan’s emergence in 1980.

What struck me about Nixonland in 2008 and continues to resonate in 2021 is the way Perlstein captures the idealistic cluelessness of the liberal side versus the cold Machiavellianism of the right. Just as Tom Wicker was blindsided by the reaction of his audience at Attica, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern was blindsided by the reactions he faced from the voting public. In one campaign stop, McGovern played a reel of gory photographs of wounded civilians in Vietnam, hoping perhaps to guilt-trip Americans into voting for him as the peace candidate. This was a misfire if only because the vast number of Americans are motivated not by sentimental appeals to their consciences but by practical self-interest. Richard Nixon clearly understood this, as he promised to pull out from the war “with honor” and appealed to patriotic and sometimes nationalistic impulses in the voters’ minds. Meanwhile the Democrats were busy shooting themselves in the foot, nominating Senator Thomas Eagleton for vice president, then ditching him post-convention when it turned out that he was a depressive who had seen shrinks and gone through shock therapy. Yet even in landslide victory, Nixon noted that his congressional coattails were shorter than he had hoped for, and he obsessed about his foes. Foes he certainly had. Nixon’s whole political career demonstrates the saying that even paranoids have enemies.

Today the insurgent progressive left of the Democratic Party seems to have perfected political guilt-tripping almost to a science. As a result, its losses are catastrophic (2016) and its wins often pyrrhic (2020). During the early years of the Obama presidency, I observed that Obama would have fewer problems if he learned the lessons of Nixonland. One lesson is that when facts are overtaken by narrative, it is difficult to overcome the narrative. For McGovern, it was impossible to defeat the label of being the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” Whether Obama’s Democratic successor Biden has ever taken the time to read Nixonland or not, I do not know. He should. It just may improve his chances for a successful presidency.

Click here to read Joe Lehman on "The Return of Martin Guerre."
from the archive; first published May 15, 2021

Hans Christian Andersen’s "Tin Soldier" as Adapted by Jon Voight [by Joe Lehman]

In the early summer of 1996, just before I turned thirteen and a few years before the Internet conquered the world, I used to frequent several independently-owned video rental stores. One evening I rented a recently released VHS film titled The Tin Soldier, the only film that Jon Voight has directed as well as held the starring role.  It was apparent from its cover that the movie’s theme was geared toward someone exactly as old and in need of a lesson as I. Its official tagline read: “A modern-day fairy tale about old-fashioned courage.” 

Jon Voight found his inspiration in the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale The Steadfast Tin Soldier. In a child’s toy collection, a tin soldier with a hobbled leg falls in love with the paper ballerina placed nearby. The soldier falls from an open window and from then on must face a series of overwhelming obstacles as he attempts to return home to his ‘true love,’ the ballerina. 

The movie is not a direct adaptation. It contains the key elements of Andersen’s fable: a toy collection, featuring a one-legged tin soldier and a beautiful toy ballerina. But instead of Andersen’s nineteenth century Denmark, it is set in 1990s’ Los Angeles. As in the Andersen story there is a young boy, only here he has a name and a pensive personality. He is twelve-year-old Billy McClusky (Trenton Knight), a working class transplant from Detroit to L.A., whose recently widowed mother (Ally Sheedy) is a struggling waitress. The father’s death has caused a rift between mother and son. The two are sitting across from each other at the breakfast table. They are brooding silently.

It is Billy’s first day at the new middle school. Two youth gangs occupy turf in the school: Pack 13, which seems  predominantly made up of white ethnic kids, and the rival  Snakes, largely black, who are antagonistic toward Billy from the get-go.   Pack 13’s de facto leader, a burly thirteen-year-old, Clyde (Aeryk Egan), quickly recognizes Billy as plucky and resolute in spite of his being physically small. Clyde insists on recruiting Billy into his gang on a trial basis.

Billy wants to join the science club and to impress a pretty girl named Toni (Bethany Richards), who is equally attracted to him but disapproves of the gang. Upon school’s dismissal that first day, Snakes’ most volatile member, a boy nicknamed “Psycho” (Travis Perkins) chases Billy down the streets into a neighborhood antique toy store owned and operated by the kindly and eccentric Mr. Fallon (Dom DeLuise). Fallon immediately shoos Psycho off the premises  while Billy hides in a corner.

At the toy store, where the toy tin soldier and ballerina lie dormant on the shelves, Fallon lectures Billy on the virtue of showing respect for his elders. He encourages the boy to borrow the tin soldier, telling him that he might learn a few lessons about honesty, integrity and courage from possessing it for a while, as these are the principles the antiques represent. Billy reluctantly accepts the loaner.

At this point the movie takes an enchanted turn. Billy wakes up in the middle of the night to discover, much to his disbelief, that the toy has morphed into a real-life medieval knight named Yarik (Jon Voight), who speaks in Chaucer-style English and professes chivalry and righteousness. The fairy tale, which Hans Christian Andersen wrote in the nineteenth century, reflects a similar code of chivalric conduct and honor.

                  It is concerivable that there are super myths common to fairy tales, folk tales, and children's literature of whatever provenance. The theme of chivalric virtue is a central theme in both the fairy tale and the movie, and this made me turn to the pages of the medieval Song of Roland to seek out what are the traits of a noble knight. The medieval knight’s code of chivalry includes seventeen imperatives. Among them are to fear God and maintain His Church;  to serve the liege lord in valor and faith; to protect the weak and defenseless; to live by honor and for glory;  never to refuse a challenge from an equal; and never to turn the back upon a foe.

         The living and breathing tin soldier presents himself to Billy as a knight “of the Order of Fallon.” Billy is henceforth Yarik’s young squire. Only Billy can see Yarik. Like the tin soldier of the Hans Christian Andersen story, Yarik has come to life with an injured leg.

           At first, neither Billy nor Yarik has an idea of what Yarik’s purpose is. The shining knight looms invisibly over Billy at school suggesting correct answers to a teacher’s questions. But this seems hardly reason enough for Yarik’s presence.

           It is when Billy reveals to Yarik his crush on the lovely and sweet girl Toni that Yarik senses a common mission between them. Both lad and knight yearn for the love of a female. Yarik covets the ballerina Fallon has named Katrina and can sense the growing affection between Billy and Toni. Yarik’s quest is to connect the two adolescents.

           In Andersen’s original story, the tin soldier declares, “that is the wife for me. But she is too grand, and lives in a castle, while I have only a box to live in; [there are] five-and-twenty of us [soldiers] altogether, that is no place for her. Still I must try and make her acquaintance.” Andersen is incorporating the old ideals of chivalry and courtly love in this declaration, for these concepts require a seemingly unattainable romantic devotion.

           In The Steadfast Tin Soldier, the toy survives numerous existential threats. The children place it in a paper boat, where it is swept away at sea, swallowed by a large fish, and eventually is recovered by his owners when the fish is caught and cut open. As Andersen describes the scene: “The flames lighted up the tin soldier, as he stood, the heat was very terrible, but whether it proceeded from the real fire or from the fire of love he could not tell.” A cinder from the stove blows onto the paper ballerina and burns her up too. And so ends Andersen’s tale.


       In the movie, however, the sooner Yarik can complete his quest to unite the two kids, the sooner he will return to his toy-sized metal form and be reunited with his own love Katrina. Just as the steadfast tin soldier of Hans Christian Andersen’s imagination surmounts whatever obstacles fate throws his way, the movie’s knight Yarik must guide his squire through the pangs of adolescence, heavily complicated by his dilemma of avoiding the lure of the youth gangs. “The important thing is to choose your friends, and don’t let them choose you,” is Yarik’s counsel.

         Each supporting character has a crucial role to play. There is Toni, Billy’s love interest, who represents nobility and honor. Clyde is the bully, who represents unchecked power. Street smart and brash, he has ambitions of his own, even if those ambitions are self-defeating. “You know, the only place you can get respect is on the streets, and if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.” And adults who act alarmist over the presence of gangs, to Clyde, are hypocrites who turn to “their precious booze and pills.”

         If Toni represents the virginal, seemingly unattainable object of courtly love for Billy the squire, then it is just as believable that Billy’s wounded mother, who is left unnamed, once played the same role for his late father, a failure to her and their son. When Billy asks her “do you think Dad was anything like me when he was my age,” she replies, “No, you’re nothing like your father. You’re going to make something out of your life.” She is quite young, a sure indication that she was in her teens or early twenties when she had her son. She clings to a tremendous concern for the safety and the passage of her son into young adulthood. They just cannot communicate.

          If Yarik is successfully to advise Billy using 14^th Century values of chivalry, then he must school the squire in self-defense tactics. He shows him how to fight bareknuckle.

          Billy, while wearing Pack 13 ‘colors,’ saves the life of a young African-American boy, a member of the Snakes, pulling him up from the edge of a scaffold. Billy’s sudden heroism confuses the other Snakes, and in order to restore their feeling of stolen honor, they challenge Billy to a one-on-one fight against the rival Psycho. The match is to be held the next night at an abandoned warehouse. Though Yarik disapproves of Billy’s gang activity to begin with, the codfe of chivalry instructs him never to refuse a challenge from an equal and never to turn the back upon a foe.

           Once the task of guiding the boy is completed, Billy realizes that the only paternal figure he has left in his life—Yarik—will soon be returning to his miniature form, Billy sees Pack 13 as the only fraternal organization that cares for him. and Yarik will disappear soon. “Why do you have to go too? You taught me to do things. To be brave. To be a man,” Billy asks Yarik tearfully.

            When, near the denouement of the film, Billy and Psycho go hand-to-hand in a brutal fight, Billy ultimately recognizes the futility of the chaotic rumble that Pack 13 and Snakes have ensnared him in. Toni, having kissed Billy on the cheek for luck, knows she cannot talk him out of fighting when his “honor is at stake.” With Toni and her friends as hidden spectators and the invisible Yarik standing overhead, the two combatants have given each other a hell of a beating. Billy has Psycho pinned down and the rest of Pack 13 is egging him on to finish him off with a hockey stick. Billy suddenly withdraws, shouting “What’s the matter with you people? Am I the only one who can see how stupid this is? This isn’t a fight about honor. This isn’t a fight about respect or space.” He reveals to everyone that his father died in a street fight just like this one. “And it didn’t bring him honor. It didn’t bring him anything. I didn’t fight for my honor today. I saved it by stopping.”

          As Billy leaves the warehouse Clyde sneers, “He wasn’t part of Pack 13 anyway.” And because the fight didn’t end the way the gangs had planned, the rest of the kids stay behind and duke it out, but not before Yarik’s voice materializes in Clyde’s ear, inspiring him to exclaim:  “Anyone who wants to leave can do so right now.” Clyde is surprised to hear himself utter these words. He then qualifies himself by saying, “but anyone who wants to stay and finish this, can stay and fight right now!” The warehouse descends into chaos, but not before a few of the kids decide to heed Billy’s warning and put away their colors and walk away. “Sometimes it takes far more courage to sheathe a sword than to wield it,” Yarik tells Billy as he congratulates him.

           In the end, Billy proves himself to Toni and then he reconciles with his worried mother, and Yarik elevates Billy to the rank of knighthood. Just as the Hans Christian Andersen story ends with the tin knight and the toy ballerina enduring a final goodbye as they burn into the melting pot, in the movie Yarik disappears after Katrina the ballerina appears to take his hand in one final magical dance in the moonlight. He has reverted back into doll form. Billy next returns the tin soldier to Mr. Fallon, who offers the boy a job at his antique toy store, which Billy enthusiastically accepts. Mr. Fallon marvels at how Billy immediately knows where the knight wants to be placed. Right next to the ballerina. “He has his lady, and I have mine.” The film fades to black as Billy and Toni, hands clasped together, walk away from the store down the street, and Mr. Fallon waves farewell for now.

National ‘Caveman’ Day: A Look Back at "The Boys Next Door" [by Joe Lehman]

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that in a state of nature the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Unlike Rousseau, who felt that man in his natural state was noble and that society was to blame for his ills, Hobbes believed that human nature, left unchecked, would result in a lawless world, every man for himself. This was how Hobbes saw America in the seventeenth century.

Hobbes believed in the creation and preservation of a lawful society, one dedicated to establishing the safety and security of peoples. If man, left to his own natural primitive devices, is vainglorious (and vicious), a sovereign authority is necessary to police him. How else to react to sociopathic behavior?

As one who has often pondered the question of the malcontent individual’s place in an enlightened society, I maintain that 1985’s The Boys Next Door, an independent cult classic, is a movie that is worth a fresh look for the light it throws on the problem that boys in America face -- and the problems they create.

The Boys Next Door is a Hobbesian parable. It emphasizes that hostile individuals are among us, acting upon their homicidal tendencies whether because of greed, out of frustration, or on a random impulse. Society requires a capable police department, composed of officers that protect innocent people from predators.

Penelope Spheeris directed The Boys Next Door, one of her first films, starring a young Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield as Bo Richards and Roy Alston, two high school graduates-turned spree murderers in mid-1980s Los Angeles.

The opening credits display dossier photographs of notorious serial killers and mass murderers accompanied by voiceovers emphasizing the seeming “normality” of the killers, and how well they blend into society. This throws the concept of "normality" into question. Is the psychopath "a natural-born killer" or has the social system helped transmogrify him? No doubt there has been a decline in social norms and moral standards. It is nevertheless the individual who must bear full responsibility for his behavior.

The Boys Next Door has a loud heavy-metal soundtrack playing throughout, as well as quick cinematography. The camera angles are widely and intensely shot. This speaks to how rapidly events are spiraling out of control, and the escalating ugliness of the boys’ violent behavior. 

Bo and Roy’s grand ambitions are incompatible with the hard-pressed reality of the future they face. As the trailer’s narrator says, “they’re trapped, and they don’t fit in.” The boys come from dysfunctional families. They are destined to stay in their small town, working at menial jobs, and perhaps raising dysfunctional families of their own. The narrator asks the rhetorical question, “What happens when there is no way out?” What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

The film begins with a typical high school prank. Roy traces a chalk outline of Bo on the pavement outside the school, and then the next morning the boys watch in awe as the other students mill about, speculating about what kind of “crime” could have occurred. A female student carries a book with the initials “JFK” on the cover. It is possible that the naming of the school after John F. Kennedy signifies the slow decline of Kennedy-style idealism (“Ask what you can do for your country”) that once prevailed in the national sentiment. The New Frontier has died, and in its place are two violent members of Generation X, who exist in order to wreak havoc on their country. 

The bald, bow-tie wearing teacher congratulates the graduating class by speaking of what bright futures they have ahead of them. "You have got a unique opportunity to ride the crest of the third wave,” he says. Roy and Bo just roll their eyes, and make ‘jerking off’ motions; they know their futures are bleak. After class, Roy scoffs, “What the fuck does he know about humanity? What the fuck does he know about anything?” As far as the boys are concerned, they are too cool for school if only because school has nothing to do with "humanity." They radiate disdain. It doesn’t help them that the other students despise them back.

Roy considers joining the marines. This would be a healthy outlet for his pent-up rage. But the potential recruiter notes politely that Roy “doesn’t seem interested in the corps, he’s just curious.” After Roy asks, “have you ever killed anyone?” The officer sees the eager expression in Roy's eyes and understands that Roy isn't interested in the ideals the corps stands for. The marines, who consider themselves the most disciplined and honorable of people, would be an unsuitable option for a budding psychopath.

As they begin their odyssey to Los Angeles, the guys stop outside the factory where they are designated to begin working on Monday. Roy laments: “We’ll run the drill press the rest of our lives.”  Bo answers: “It could be worse. We could have no jobs at all.” Both agree: “Either way we’re screwed.”

Although these teenage slackers have probably never heard of Thomas Hobbes, they hold fantasies of living in a Hobbes-defined state of nature. “I mean wouldn’t it be great, if the government declared an official ‘caveman’ day,” Bo says, “I mean you could just knock girls over the head, drag them back to your house, and just completely drill their socks off. You could do anything. You could throw rocks at people. Run around naked. Take a shit, in the middle of the street. Just be totally prehistoric.” Imagine a seventeenth-century America, in which there is no law and order and Bo and Roy can find themselves at home, unrestrained in their appetite for mayhem.

While their small California hometown is almost entirely racially homogeneous, Los Angeles captivates the boys with its multiethnic diversity. In one sense, they are like fish out of water, but somehow they feel right at home in the weirdness of Hollywood. Here, with relative anonymity, they can act without any impulse control or self-restraint. Their roster of victims represents a cross section of different racial and social subsets. One man they viciously beat is an Iranian gas station attendant. They throw a beer bottle at the head of an old woman who is complaining about the Rastafarians smoking dope on the beach in front of all the young people – an act that represents the assassination of a conservative-minded older generation. They murder a homosexual young urban professional, a WASPish-looking teenage couple, and a flighty female astrology buff. 

That Bo and Roy do aspire beyond the drudgery they seem to be destined for is reflected in a scene where Bo stands over the beach, reciting lines from Edgar Allen Poe's poem “Annabel Lee.” The moment is spoiled when the cruder Roy abruptly cuts Bo off from this recitation, telling him to shut the fuck up. He has no patience for great poetry.

The boys are not entirely unaware of their inner demons. Roy confidentially tells Bo that he has a fury inside him that makes him want to kill people, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to act on his impulses until now. Roy justifies his desire to kill by saying after the gunshot murder of a teenaged couple in their convertible, “I gave her two seconds of pain. Girls like that would have given us eighteen years of pain.” Roy is the dominant partner, while Bo is submissive to his rage. Where Roy commits the physical attacks of maiming and killing, Bo makes half-hearted attempts to dissuade Roy from continuing his endless crusade of wanton destruction. He appears genuinely conflicted about the murders of women and girls, to whom he is attracted, and his dependence on keeping Roy’s friendship. In the eyes of the law, of course, both are equally guilty.

After the thugs’ attack on the Middle Eastern gas station attendant, a phony witness comes forward to claim that the crime was perpetrated by two blacks and a Mexican. The falsity of this statement underscores the discrepancy between people’s assumptions of who are responsible for committing crimes and the reality. It would be convenient to suppose that only minorities are violent people, not Caucasian American kids.

In the aftermath of this attack the two detectives from the LAPD’s robbery-homicide bureau enter the picture. The elder is grizzled veteran Detective Ed Hanley (Hank Garrett), who expresses profound disgust at the wanton cruelty inflicted upon the Iranian, and for what? A dispute over a lousy two dollars (“un-fucking believable”). “I can’t calm down. I feel so fucking useless”, says Mark Woods (Christopher McDonald), the younger detective. So affected is he by the escalating body count that, after the shooting deaths of the teenaged couple in the convertible, he equates the criminal situation with an epidemic. Unlike cops as depicted in some currently popular narratives, these detectives exhibit the futility of their own rage as well as compassion for the victims. Following the murder of a homosexual accountant whom Bo and Roy follow home from a bar, Hanley pushes a bigoted colleague up against the wall, snarling that he “has a mouth like a toilet!”

The killing of Chris, the doomed gay yuppie, signals that Roy might be repressing homosexual impulses himself. Bo and Roy had naively entered a gin mill, not realizing that it was a gay bar. When Chris invites Bo and Roy up to his apartment, Roy, panic-stricken, beats Chris and throws him through a glass table. The deadly duo then steal Chris’s 38 caliber pistol and they use it to fire a fatal shot into Chris. Now that they are armed as well as dangerous, Roy’s bloodlust and Bo’s acquiescence to that bloodlust are fully awakened.

The rage that drives Roy’s madness reaches its apex in the final homicide, when he reaches out and grabs a young astrology aficionado named Angie in the middle of her lovemaking session with Bo. Over Bo’s protests, Roy beats Angie and breaks her neck, yelling at Bo, “you fucked that?!!!” It is as though Angie’s and Bo’s intimacy had unwittingly exposed Roy’s latent homosexual attraction to his best friend, and he cannot tolerate letting any woman coming between them.

In the last killing, Bo finally takes a shot with the stolen 38. Ironically or fittingly, Roy is the victim. In the aftermath of a grueling police car chase and then a chaotic foot pursuit through a closed shopping mall, Bo turns the gun on his accomplice, saying “you’re my best friend, Roy.” The frozen look on Roy’s face is one of sheer disbelief, and then instant death: “two seconds of pain, Roy,” is what Bo mutters before Detectives Hanley and Woods, and a phalanx of uniformed officers and mall security guards surround Bo.

“Why did you kill your friend?” Woods barks at Bo as he is taken into custody.

Bo answers hesitantly “because I had to.” But we think of what Roy had said earlier about "two seconds of pain" as a release from "eighteen years" of suffering.

Perhaps, then, Bo’s releasing Roy’s demonic spirit from his body is a merciful gesture. Everything comes full circle when the police trace a chalk outline around Roy’s now-deceased body, an echo of the the prank he and Bo commit in the opening scene. What a hell of a way to spend the weekend.

The case for "Blow Out": 40 years later -- on 7/4/21 [by Joe Lehman]

Brian De Palma directed Blow Out (1981) at the height of his ‘Hitchcock’ period,  during which he helmed such films as Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, and Body Double. All these movies contained homages to Alfred Hitchcock. The film critic Roger Ebert, in his review of the movie, suggested  that Blow Out is a mirror image of mid-to-late twentieth century American history. In his view, Blow Out achieved originality in spite (or perhaps because) of the “cross-references” it makes to other films and to historic events.

Blow Out pays homage to the 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni classic Blow-Up, the story of a fashion photographer who believes he has inadvertently captured the image of a murder in one of his shots. Jack (John Travolta), the hero of Blow Out, is in the same position.

The prologue of the film is the screening of a low-budget slasher movie set at a college sorority house, filmed from the demented killer’s point of view -- much like the beginning of 1978’s Halloween. The scene concludes with the killer brandishing a butcher knife at a helpless young woman in the shower (as in Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]). De Palma had included memorable shower scenes in previous hits such as Carrie (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980). He subsequently parodied the whole gambit in Body Double (1984). In the shower scene in Blow Out, there is one complication: the actress playing the slashing victim is unable to provide a sufficiently terrified scream. It is at this moment that viewers realize they’re watching the filming of a movie within the movie.

At the center of Blow Out is a car crash off a bridge into a river. The scene made the movie’s initial viewers recall the Chappaquiddick scandal. Around midnight Friday, July 18, 1969, when the rest of the world was waiting for the rocket carrying the first men on the moon to reach their destination, Senator Ted Kennedy (allegedly intoxicated) drove off the bridge of that name at Martha’s Vineyard, leaving his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. Kennedy did not report the accident for several hours; he consulted his advisers instead. Had he notified the police, a diver may have been able to rescue Kopechne. A mere decade later, Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but the effort backfired when Roger Mudd quizzed Kennedy on recounting the events of Chappaquiddick in a televised interview. Kennedy also flubbed the softball question Mudd tossed: “Why do you want to be president?

In a way, Blow Out’s crash is a reversal of the events of Chappaquiddick. Instead of the politician escaping the accident, it is the passenger who climbs free – Sally (Nancy Allen), who is what we have been taught to call a sex worker. Jack, the witness to the crash, dives into the river, but is able only to recover Sally. Jack, who happens to be a professional sound effects man for movies, has serendipitously made an audio recording of the accident. Listening to it over and over, he becomes convinced that he heard a gunshot precede the blow out of the limousine’s tire, and that the shot caused the crash. Hence, it was no accident. It was coldblooded murder. Meanwhile, the governor’s own chief of staff, Henry (John McMartin), is hell-bent on covering up the incident, so as not to embarrass the governor’s wife and children. Both sides of the presidential primary race are slimy. But such is the nature of politics. The conspiracy is the truth, and the truth is disadvantageous to all parties.

Blow Out tells the story of a political assassination that almost wasn’t. That is to say, the intent of the conspirators is in dispute. Did they want the governor to be killed, or merely just humiliated—caught messing around with a mistress—and knocked out of the presidential race? This discrepancy of motives is revealed in a telephone conversation between Burke the gunman (John Lithgow) and his immediate superior Manners (Maurice Copeland). Except for Jack, the film’s characters are unwilling to pursue the crimes to a satisfactory conclusion. But Jack perseveres.

Much like the act of peeling layers off an onion, Jack is able to peel the layers of the conspiracy off to reveal more shocking crimes and events that are spinning out of everyone’s control.  And as each layer is peeled off, the onion’s sting grows stronger and is cause for more tears and pain. Burke has snuck into the evidence warehouse and removed the bullet from the busted tire, so as to eliminate any suspicion that a gun was fired. He then proceeds to murder a pair of sex workers, both of whom resemble Sally, to create the appearance of a serial killer on the prowl . Dispatching her in this manner would remove all evidence of the initial crime. The series of three is a staple of murder mysteries, so Blow Out can be seen not only as a political thriller but as a salute to Hitchcock’s handling of the mystery genre.

Just as Hitchcock used such landmark settings as the UN Building and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959), de Palma uses Philadelphia’s patriotic imagery.  The City of Brotherly Love had been a host of the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration. Displayed in many scenes of Blow Out are paintings of Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross-style American flags waving on street corners, and most prominently, shots of the Liberty Bell, which the audience learns is about to be ceremonially rung for the first time in a hundred years. All this suggests that there are sinister currents beneath the surface of innocent Americana.

The making of the horror movie, which frames the movie, parodies the “slasher” craze of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which itself reflected the scary uncertainty of of American society at the time, when the country was plagued by inflation, rising crime, and an energy crisis. Spoiler alert: In the film’s final scene, Jack obtains the “scream” he needs for his unfinished slasher movie. It happens to be Sally’s death scream recorded as Burke strangles her. Throughout the film, Jack’s face seems jittery, worn, stressed and ultimately distressed.  In fact, John Travolta was reportedly suffering from insomnia while playing the role. This was certainly an advantage to his method acting talent.

If you want to see a movie that demonstrates how narrative can often overtake truth, and how life and artifice can change places, I recommend Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. All the mayhem—the many murders and mistruths— occurs during the great patriotic Liberty Bell celebration. I write these words on July 4^th. God bless America.

"Why 'Nixonland' Matters" [by Joe Lehman]

When I was twenty-five, backpacking through Australia, I carried with me my hardcover copy of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It absorbed me for all seven months of my journey. I took flight to the land of Oz in late October 2008. Nixonland hit the stores in May of that fateful year of financial crisis. Having recently taken it off my bookshelf, I can report that the book holds up well and has a special relevance for us today. It is that rare thing, a thick history book suitable for a college class that is a most pleasurable page-turner.

For those of us born after the end of the ‘60s (I was born in 1983), we have long been used to the romanticized mythology of the era. We conjure up an image of bell-bottom-wearing long-haired hippies, driving around in psychedelic-painted VW buses, getting high on LSD and marijuana, protesting the war in Vietnam, and practicing free love.

Written from a left-of-center perspective, Nixonland has no illusions about the title figure and his presidential predecessor, yet rips the mask off the pastoral vision of acid-tripping dropouts and collegiate idealists to reveal a less pretty picture of moral anarchy, ruined lives, and gun violence. Read this book and your views of that era will lose their rosy hue. Perlstein paints a radical picture of a country gone insane with political brutality, cultural discord, and social decay. Flower people were not always loveable innocents:

           <<<< Love was in the eye of the beholder. At first downtown merchants welcomed the hippie district that sprang up on Plumb Street in Detroit; it was attracting people to their stores. Then they realized that the hippies liked their stores so much because they could panhandle from paying customers (“I wish we could have had the hippies without the dope,” said one merchant, after the forty-three shops on Plumb Street had shrunk down to six.) (185)  >>>>

Nixonland reads like one big Roman chariot race through hell. Stories of race riots, assassinations, bombings, a divisive war in Vietnam, infighting between (and within) left and right, and the reign of a Machiavellian president occupy every page.

One month before my departure to Australia the U.S. economy had come to the brink of collapse, and the Great Recession was in its early stages. On the first Tuesday in November, just over a week after I landed down under, America ushered in the election of the first African-American president. It was, despite the financial calamity, a hopeful moment. In the time since, however, the country has suffered riots, protests, mass shootings, a polarized populace, and a coronavirus sweeping through like a medieval plague. And as I leaf through my worn copy of Nixonland once more, I realize that I am no longer standing apart from the happenings of a chaotic world. The outbreak of COVID-19 did nothing to unify a polarized society. If anything the crisis in civility and the rise of discord have worsened. On Facebook, friendships terminate because of petty political disagreements, and the general tone of debate demonstrates that virtual bullying is as brutal as the physical kind. The Roman Chariot race through Hell that is described in Nixonland seems far more pressing today than it did upon its hardcover publication in 2008.

A history of America from 1964 to 1972, Nixonland goes from “all the way with LBJ” in 1964 to “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” in 1968; and from there to the resurrection of Richard Nixon and his reelection for years later despite a third-rate burglary on the offices of the political opposition at a previously obscure apartment complex called Watergate. In these eight years America went through what Perlstein bluntly calls a “second civil war.” Just as now, factions of left and right were continually feuding. Vietnam cut the population into two opposing camps. Young people declared war on people over thirty, and the reaction came swiftly enough from folks who pledged allegiance to Bob Hope, “God Bless America,” and Sousa marches on July 4th. “Nixon acted not despite the Silent Majority he described as so pure and decent, but in a sense on their behalf, and even at their request,” Perlstein writes. “His paranoia and dread were their own. Across the state of mind known as Middle America, a subterranean viciousness was bubbling ever closer to the surface.” (519)

Perlstein traces Nixon’s ascent to the presidency from the “wilderness” period when, after being prematurely written off, he scraped together the allegiances and alliances that gained him the 1968 Republican nomination for president. During his first term, he aspired to wind down the Vietnam War, engage in détente with the Soviet Union, and open relations with Red China. In two of those aims he may be said to have succeeded; Nixon was a canny politician and had the benefit of an extraordinary secretary of state. Peace “with honor” proved elusive. The ugly war dragged on. It is likely that on his own Nixon would never have committed half a million soldiers to an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, as Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, and the Bundy brothers did. But how to end it?

The foreign policy successes did not lessen the amount of civil unrest in the nation. Perlstein juxtaposes the narrative of Nixon’s rise, his wielding of power, and his overwhelming defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972, with descriptions of horrific crimes committed during the same period. These include massacres committed by the Manson Family in 1969 and Richard Speck’s slaughter of eight student nurses three years earlier. Perlstein also notes the shift in the civil rights and antiwar movements from nonviolence to militancy. “This was,” according to Perlstein “something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence–the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.” As for the personality of Richard Nixon, here was a man who could wake up the day after winning forty-nine of the nation’s fifty states and feel depressed.

Perlstein charts the period through an inspection of changes in pop culture. For example, he contrasts the reactions of liberals and conservatives to movies with polar opposite themes. In 1967, the right flocked to see John Wayne sound the fighting charge in the jingoistic Vietnam film The Green Berets. The New York Times critic panned the movie. Perlstein quotes the arch-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond:

“I have not yet had the opportunity to see this movie,” he drawled. But “I have become convinced that this must be one of the most admirable movies of our generation, after reading the review which appeared last week in the New York Times. . . That set me to wondering what on earth the standards of criticism are that are current in the New York Times for a film that is patriotic and pro-American.” (278)

Meanwhile, the left was infatuated with images of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway blowing away civilians and officers of the law until they meet their own gruesome fate in Bonnie & Clyde. Perlstein defines the reasoning of the movie’s instant fans: “They weren’t bad folks, went the movie’s moral logic, until an evil system forced them to extremity: robbing banks that repossessed farms, killing only when the System was closing in all around them… Bonnie and Clyde made those around them feel alive – all except the squares who were chasing them, who were already more or less dead anyway, with their sucker obsession with honest toil.” (209)

Apparently cinema is the mirror reflecting both sides’ sense of values.

Perlstein describes the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the attempt on George Wallace, and the bitterness that ensued. There were other eye-opening events that presage a scary future. In the “planned riot” in Cleveland in 1968, snipers from the “Black Nationalists of New Libya” executed several police officers; in 1971, during the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York, both convicts and guard-hostages were killed in an assault by state troopers. Perlstein illustrates, too, how the chaos in America dovetailed with violence abroad, such as the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany, at the hand of Palestinian terrorists. His reportage covers both the liberal and reactionary responses of ordinary citizens. A perfect example of an out-of-touch media occurred during the siege of Attica, when New York Times reporter Tom Wicker addressed a group of relatives of the captive prison guards. Wicker launched into an impassioned speech about the hostage-takers’ solidarity over their brutal treatment by the corrections authorities. The relatives responded by hurling insults and epithets at Wicker, protesting his obvious sympathy for the convicts.

Perlstein is able to draw an indissoluble connection between the events on the ground and the complex personality of Richard Nixon, with his uncanny ability to tap into the passions and political desires of the “Silent Majority” of Americans, who yearned for law and order amid the turmoil. These included the northern “hardhats” and the southern “rednecks.” Perlstein argues that Nixon saw the world in terms of the conflict between two student groups from his university days: the Franklins and the Orthogonians. The former consisted of the rich kids, polished and well-bred, who seemed to have the path to success paved for them. The latter group consisted of outsiders and striving underdogs from the lower-middle and working classes. Nixon himself was an Orthogonian; he rose from a hardscrabble background as the son of a California grocer. John F. Kennedy, his arch political rival, was the epitome of a Franklin; a millionaire’s son with matinee idol looks, a good war record, and the habits of a playboy.  According to Perlstein, for Nixon this dichotomy extends to every group of people. Perhaps surprisingly, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein qualify as the Orthogonians of the newsroom. They are plucky questers, piecing together the facts of the Watergate scandal, with shoe-leather reporting, whereas the Franklins of the newsroom are the well-heeled veteran White House correspondents.

Nixonland is the second entry in Rick Perlstein’s quartet of books covering the emergence of the New Right. Before the Storm (2001) chronicled Barry Goldwater’s doomed GOP Presidential campaign of 1964; The Invisible Bridge (2014) follows Nixon's resignation through Ronald Reagan’s challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Most recently, Reaganland tells the tale of the much-maligned Jimmy Carter presidency and Reagan’s emergence in 1980.

What struck me about Nixonland in 2008 and continues to resonate in 2021 is the way Perlstein captures the idealistic cluelessness of the liberal side versus the cold Machiavellianism of the right. Just as Tom Wicker was blindsided by the reaction of his audience at Attica, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern was blindsided by the reactions he faced from the voting public. In one campaign stop, McGovern played a reel of gory photographs of wounded civilians in Vietnam, hoping perhaps to guilt-trip Americans into voting for him as the peace candidate. This was a misfire if only because the vast number of Americans are motivated not by sentimental appeals to their consciences but by practical self-interest. Richard Nixon clearly understood this, as he promised to pull out from the war “with honor” and appealed to patriotic and sometimes nationalistic impulses in the voters’ minds. Meanwhile the Democrats were busy shooting themselves in the foot, nominating Senator Thomas Eagleton for vice president, then ditching him post-convention when it turned out that he was a depressive who had seen shrinks and gone through shock therapy. Yet even in landslide victory, Nixon noted that his congressional coattails were shorter than he had hoped for, and he obsessed about his foes. Foes he certainly had. Nixon’s whole political career demonstrates the saying that even paranoids have enemies.

Today the insurgent progressive left of the Democratic Party seems to have perfected political guilt-tripping almost to a science. As a result, its losses are catastrophic (2016) and its wins often pyrrhic (2020). During the early years of the Obama presidency, I observed that Obama would have fewer problems if he learned the lessons of Nixonland. One lesson is that when facts are overtaken by narrative, it is difficult to overcome the narrative. For McGovern, it was impossible to defeat the label of being the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” Whether Obama’s Democratic successor Biden has ever taken the time to read Nixonland or not, I do not know. He should. It just may improve his chances for a successful presidency.

Click here to read Joe Lehman on "The Return of Martin Guerre."