The strange events which transpired last week in Boston got me thinking of many things. I of course am speaking of the two young performance artists who distributed small boxes containing electronic images of cartoon figures from the late-night cartoon show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" throughout the city of John Adams. The police mistook the boxes for terrorist bombs, and after several arrests and an odd press conference in which the two twenty-something culprits who put up the boxes were appropriately "ironic," the television network responsible for the promotion campaign agreed to pay the city of Boston two million dollars to compensate for the money spent on police overtime.
Now, for that same two million dollars the Turner Network (the network in question) could have purchased approximately forty seconds of ad time during the recent Super Bowl, an ad that would have been forgotten on the following Monday. Instead they spent two million dollars on an underground stunt, and the story of their inane cartoon show has dominated the national news for three straight days. Every fat, thirty-year old fan boy who lives in his parents' basement now knows about "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." (I know there are tens of millions of young Americans who fall into that demographic, for I write science-fiction, and if it were not for overweight male virgins who still live at home and have never had a real job because they are on their computers nine hours a day not a single sci-fi novel would ever get purchased.) Now is the time to buy Turner, because their stock is going to rise.
But what really interested me about this story was the fact that none of the authorities in Boston recognized the characters on the electronic boxes before they were told the devices were part of a promotion. (To tell the truth, I had never heard of the cartoon show either.) All of the educated, worldly adults running a modern city that is bull's roar away from Dogpatch were completely ignorant of a large portion of contemporary youth culture. As an aging baby-boomer, I can assure the youth of today that this was not the case forty years ago. My elders knew about the Rolling Stones and underground comic books like those drawn by R. Crumb because they had seen articles in "Look" and "Life" on what the kids were doing. Dick Cavett interviewed Tim Leary and John Lennon on broadcast TV. Heck, Ed Sullivan had the Stones and everybody else who was anybody on his Sunday night show, right after Steve and Eddie and the Italian puppet Popogigio. My elders--I was raised by my grandparents--of course disapproved of the counterculture I and my teenage friends sampled, but they nonetheless were aware of it. Today, popular culture changes so quickly and there is so much of it and it has such a vast array of outlets no one can know it all, and one can know a part of it really well only if he devotes a major portion of his life to absorbing that particular genre. All of us live at the same time, yet we live in different cultures, indeed in different civilizations, and we hold less and less in common with each passing year.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Friday, February 2, 2007
The 22nd Amendment
A recent editorial by one of the editors of The New Republic argues in favor of doing away with the 22nd Amendment and allowing Presidents to serve more than two terms. Lest anyone forget, the 22nd was passed in the 1950s and was one of the last great accomplishments of small-r republicanism in America. Congress, led by the late Robert Taft, pushed the amendment through to prevent any more Presidents following in the footsteps of FDR and holding the supreme office for the rest of their natural lives. The New Republic man finds this a great limitation on the people's will and wants the 22nd done away with and would let anyone hold the office for as long as he or she wishes, provided whoever is President keeps getting re-elected.
Most commentators would not be as forthright as this particular editor, but in fact ever since the Civil War--when we first took our steps toward becoming an empire--there have been movements aimed at creating an emperor, which is what a President for life would in effect be. In recent decades we have not only made the President more powerful relative to the other branches of government by granting him extraordinary war powers and special powers of investigation and allowing him to shape the courts, it has also become obvious that if we wish to manage our empire effectively we have to allow the President to serve for as long as he deems necessary. This is so because the inhabitants of an empire have a far different relationship with their government than do the citizens of a republic. Empires demand that there be absolute domestic peace in the homeland so the government can direct its energies upon its forgein adventures, and the residents of the homeland must be given lavish rewards in oder to keep them happy when the government makes demands upon them that no republic would dare tender. In practical terms, that means the people must be provided for throughout their lives so they do not object when their rulers ask them to fight in distant wars or demand the taxes which keep the empire humming along. Only a leader who has the total loyalty of his subjects and who does not have to worry about the domestic peace can give the people what they want or tell them what they must do, i.e., he must be an emperor. (Failure to produce such an absolute ruler is one of the factors which doomed the European colonial empires of the 18th and 19th centuries, for the people of Britain and France remained citizens and eventually objected to the sacrifices they were being asked to make.) In America the people would object to crowning someone or to a military coop, but we are more than willing to elect a popular President for ever and ever.
Theodore Roosevelt realized America would embrace an absolute leader, so long as that leader was the people's choice. He failed to win a third term in 1912, but polls show he would have been re-elected in 1920, shortly after he died, and, had he lived, he probably would have installed the New Deal his distant cousin Franklin in fact did. FDR ruled until he died, but he was unable to establish a true dynasty. The Kennedys had a more effective plan and would have established a family dynasty had John and Bobby not been murdered and had Teddy and the young generation of the family not been plagued by appititites they could not control. The Bush family has also tried to rule in spite of the 22nd, and after W. has left office, his bother Jeb and Jeb's son George P. will, perhaps, also enjoy terms in the White House. (Bear in mind that a President is more than one person. Every administration is a collection of powerful men and women, and each time another family member is elected President, that collection of power brokers remains in office.) President Clinton's wife is now a candidate, and should she be elected we will have been ruled by members of two families for an entire generation. (We have in truth been ruled by two seperate groups, most of whom have no blood relation to the Bushes or the Clintons, and the primary aim of both groups is to eliminate the other faction.) Had Ronald Reagan not been limited by the 22nd, he would have ruled until he became too ill to do his duty. Bill Clinton, had he been allowed to run again, would still be our President.
Sometime in this century, there will be a successful movement to do away with the 22nd, exactly as the editorialist mentioned above presently desires. When that movement succeds, the nation will have an emperor as powerful and as secure as Augustus, and he will not be kept in power by armies or by secret police or by a new constitution. He will be emperor because that is what a colossus like our government needs to keep it running and because he will be what the people desire. (Should any member of the people doubt the emperor's right to rule, the media can be counted upon to tell him every day that he is wrong.) Which faction this emperor respresents will the great political question of our time, but one can be certain this future ruler will serve as long as he wishes and he will name his successor, and that it will take something very like a civil war to overthrow the continured rule of that ruler's faction. To prevent him from taking power in the first place, would require abandoning our empire, and that we will never do.
Most commentators would not be as forthright as this particular editor, but in fact ever since the Civil War--when we first took our steps toward becoming an empire--there have been movements aimed at creating an emperor, which is what a President for life would in effect be. In recent decades we have not only made the President more powerful relative to the other branches of government by granting him extraordinary war powers and special powers of investigation and allowing him to shape the courts, it has also become obvious that if we wish to manage our empire effectively we have to allow the President to serve for as long as he deems necessary. This is so because the inhabitants of an empire have a far different relationship with their government than do the citizens of a republic. Empires demand that there be absolute domestic peace in the homeland so the government can direct its energies upon its forgein adventures, and the residents of the homeland must be given lavish rewards in oder to keep them happy when the government makes demands upon them that no republic would dare tender. In practical terms, that means the people must be provided for throughout their lives so they do not object when their rulers ask them to fight in distant wars or demand the taxes which keep the empire humming along. Only a leader who has the total loyalty of his subjects and who does not have to worry about the domestic peace can give the people what they want or tell them what they must do, i.e., he must be an emperor. (Failure to produce such an absolute ruler is one of the factors which doomed the European colonial empires of the 18th and 19th centuries, for the people of Britain and France remained citizens and eventually objected to the sacrifices they were being asked to make.) In America the people would object to crowning someone or to a military coop, but we are more than willing to elect a popular President for ever and ever.
Theodore Roosevelt realized America would embrace an absolute leader, so long as that leader was the people's choice. He failed to win a third term in 1912, but polls show he would have been re-elected in 1920, shortly after he died, and, had he lived, he probably would have installed the New Deal his distant cousin Franklin in fact did. FDR ruled until he died, but he was unable to establish a true dynasty. The Kennedys had a more effective plan and would have established a family dynasty had John and Bobby not been murdered and had Teddy and the young generation of the family not been plagued by appititites they could not control. The Bush family has also tried to rule in spite of the 22nd, and after W. has left office, his bother Jeb and Jeb's son George P. will, perhaps, also enjoy terms in the White House. (Bear in mind that a President is more than one person. Every administration is a collection of powerful men and women, and each time another family member is elected President, that collection of power brokers remains in office.) President Clinton's wife is now a candidate, and should she be elected we will have been ruled by members of two families for an entire generation. (We have in truth been ruled by two seperate groups, most of whom have no blood relation to the Bushes or the Clintons, and the primary aim of both groups is to eliminate the other faction.) Had Ronald Reagan not been limited by the 22nd, he would have ruled until he became too ill to do his duty. Bill Clinton, had he been allowed to run again, would still be our President.
Sometime in this century, there will be a successful movement to do away with the 22nd, exactly as the editorialist mentioned above presently desires. When that movement succeds, the nation will have an emperor as powerful and as secure as Augustus, and he will not be kept in power by armies or by secret police or by a new constitution. He will be emperor because that is what a colossus like our government needs to keep it running and because he will be what the people desire. (Should any member of the people doubt the emperor's right to rule, the media can be counted upon to tell him every day that he is wrong.) Which faction this emperor respresents will the great political question of our time, but one can be certain this future ruler will serve as long as he wishes and he will name his successor, and that it will take something very like a civil war to overthrow the continured rule of that ruler's faction. To prevent him from taking power in the first place, would require abandoning our empire, and that we will never do.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Political Books
In the small local library in my small home town, the librarians still use the Dewey System, and on the shelves in high 900's, just before the biography section, they have placed the political books, specifically the books written in recent years by celebrity journalists and authors. I came upon this section again Saturday while looking for Robert Caro's most recent volume on Lyndon Johnson. (I found Randall Woods' favorable treatment of Johnson during the search, but I will have more on that on another day.) The titles are known to many, including those who will never read them: See, I Told You So, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, The Bush Hater's Handbook, Boy Clinton, Stupid White Men, Truth, The No Spin Zone, etc. etc. We know them because their authors are famous, as they all have radio shows, write for major newspapers, have syndicated columns, and appear nightly on cable TV. What is striking about these books is how many of them there are (I counted over a hundred of them in what is a tiny library), how recent they all are (none of them were printed before the Kennedy Administration, and most were written in the past fifteen years), how angry their famous authors are, and how much the books focus upon the President and those who aspire to become President, as opposed to focusing on, say, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, or the organizations that got all of the above elected. (I will write something more about this latter fixation in another entry.)
There obviously is a strong market for this sort of thing, as the internet, talk radio, and twenty-four hour news channels demonstrate this as strongly as the books do, and those who consume these various media clearly like their views serving steaming hot and partisan. And while angry rhetoric is hardly new to America, the famous commentators of today are breaking new ground here. When William J. Bryant more than a hundred years ago raged that the nation's workers should not be "crucified upon a cross of gold" he was using Biblical rhetoric at a time when nearly all Americans believed in the Bible and would know he was accusing his opponents of committing what most of them would consider the worst crime in history. But what Bryant really wanted was for the U.S. to leave the gold standard; that is, he wanted specific legislation passed. Neither he or his audience actually thought their opponents, the supporters of the gold standand, were murderers; they only thought they were wrong. The men and women who write the political books of today believe in something a lot stronger. They think their opponents indeed are murderers, and they add that anyone who disagrees with what they write are immoral, underhanded scum who are capable of doing worse things than slaughtering the innocent.
The rhetoric has become angrier and hotter (and will become hotter as time passes) because the stakes are higher now. Who rules the American government is more important than it once was because the government now has the power to insert itself into every aspect of our lives, from the taxes we pay to what we purchase at the supermarket to the way cheese is made. America herself has grown more powerful in the world than she once was. She is the sole remaining super power (for the time being, at least) and the engine that drives the world economy, to say nothing of our world-wide cultural empire.
Nor are the famous authors and those who support them merely desiring to pass some legislation and thereby make some small altercations in the nation's behavior. William Jennings Bryant was an economic progressive, but a social conservation, and like all leaders and opinion makers of his day, he was certain of the basic goodness of the nation and society within which he lived. Make some modifications, and he would have been content. At least half of our present-day political celebrities wish to change the entire nation, in fact change all of western civilization, and change it utterly. (I will be coy and not state which half wants this; besides, all the writers think their enemies wish to make a massive change in the country.) The other half are terrified their opponents will some day get their way. Since--as I wrote in another blog--it is absurd to think we will ever come to blows as we did in the 1860s, and since both sides know how to play the political game every bit as well as they know how to verbally assault each other, the big change will never come, and America's wrathful conversation with itself will surely go on and will in time make the shouting matches we have today seem like very mild stuff.
There obviously is a strong market for this sort of thing, as the internet, talk radio, and twenty-four hour news channels demonstrate this as strongly as the books do, and those who consume these various media clearly like their views serving steaming hot and partisan. And while angry rhetoric is hardly new to America, the famous commentators of today are breaking new ground here. When William J. Bryant more than a hundred years ago raged that the nation's workers should not be "crucified upon a cross of gold" he was using Biblical rhetoric at a time when nearly all Americans believed in the Bible and would know he was accusing his opponents of committing what most of them would consider the worst crime in history. But what Bryant really wanted was for the U.S. to leave the gold standard; that is, he wanted specific legislation passed. Neither he or his audience actually thought their opponents, the supporters of the gold standand, were murderers; they only thought they were wrong. The men and women who write the political books of today believe in something a lot stronger. They think their opponents indeed are murderers, and they add that anyone who disagrees with what they write are immoral, underhanded scum who are capable of doing worse things than slaughtering the innocent.
The rhetoric has become angrier and hotter (and will become hotter as time passes) because the stakes are higher now. Who rules the American government is more important than it once was because the government now has the power to insert itself into every aspect of our lives, from the taxes we pay to what we purchase at the supermarket to the way cheese is made. America herself has grown more powerful in the world than she once was. She is the sole remaining super power (for the time being, at least) and the engine that drives the world economy, to say nothing of our world-wide cultural empire.
Nor are the famous authors and those who support them merely desiring to pass some legislation and thereby make some small altercations in the nation's behavior. William Jennings Bryant was an economic progressive, but a social conservation, and like all leaders and opinion makers of his day, he was certain of the basic goodness of the nation and society within which he lived. Make some modifications, and he would have been content. At least half of our present-day political celebrities wish to change the entire nation, in fact change all of western civilization, and change it utterly. (I will be coy and not state which half wants this; besides, all the writers think their enemies wish to make a massive change in the country.) The other half are terrified their opponents will some day get their way. Since--as I wrote in another blog--it is absurd to think we will ever come to blows as we did in the 1860s, and since both sides know how to play the political game every bit as well as they know how to verbally assault each other, the big change will never come, and America's wrathful conversation with itself will surely go on and will in time make the shouting matches we have today seem like very mild stuff.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
David and Arthur
It is not an original observation on my part, but I was again struck this week while I was rereading Sir Thomas Malory how highly similar are the story of King David in the Bible and the story of King Arthur in the versions of his history handed down from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Tennyson.
As young boys, both David and Arthur perform feats of strength that eventually lead to their kingships. Arthur pulls a sword from a stone, and David slays Goliath and so gains the attention of King Saul and of the entire nation. To secure his kingdom, Arthur must defeat the eleven kings who gather their forces against him, while David must await the death of King Saul before he can rule. (There is a hint of the illegitimate that adheres to both rulers even after they take their thrones. Was David in the cities of the Philistines when Saul and Jonathan were killed? Why does Arthur need the symbols of his court and his magical sword to prove his royal blood?)
Arthur has a wife who has an adulterous affair with a trusted warrior (Galahad) in his court. David gets a new wife (Bathsheba) by betraying a trusted warrior (Uriah). Arthur has bevy of trusted knights. David has Joab and a host of other warriors. David owns the Arc of the Covenant, and Arthur has Excalibur.
David gets his ultimate betrayal from his son Absalom. Arthur gets his from his son (or nephew, we don't know for sure) Mordred, who mortally wounds him. David receives spiritual guidance from the prophet Samuel. Arthur gets his from the mystical Merlin.
Both stories end before there is true fulfillment for either man. David must endure a terrible old age and is never allowed to build the Temple. Rather than dying, Arthur is taken to Avelon, whence he will one day return to save his people; as he goes, he leaves them in chaos.
There may have been a real Arthur in Britain after the Romans left the island, but whomever he really was, the churchman Geoffrey gave him the qualities of David in order to create an appropriate national myth.
As young boys, both David and Arthur perform feats of strength that eventually lead to their kingships. Arthur pulls a sword from a stone, and David slays Goliath and so gains the attention of King Saul and of the entire nation. To secure his kingdom, Arthur must defeat the eleven kings who gather their forces against him, while David must await the death of King Saul before he can rule. (There is a hint of the illegitimate that adheres to both rulers even after they take their thrones. Was David in the cities of the Philistines when Saul and Jonathan were killed? Why does Arthur need the symbols of his court and his magical sword to prove his royal blood?)
Arthur has a wife who has an adulterous affair with a trusted warrior (Galahad) in his court. David gets a new wife (Bathsheba) by betraying a trusted warrior (Uriah). Arthur has bevy of trusted knights. David has Joab and a host of other warriors. David owns the Arc of the Covenant, and Arthur has Excalibur.
David gets his ultimate betrayal from his son Absalom. Arthur gets his from his son (or nephew, we don't know for sure) Mordred, who mortally wounds him. David receives spiritual guidance from the prophet Samuel. Arthur gets his from the mystical Merlin.
Both stories end before there is true fulfillment for either man. David must endure a terrible old age and is never allowed to build the Temple. Rather than dying, Arthur is taken to Avelon, whence he will one day return to save his people; as he goes, he leaves them in chaos.
There may have been a real Arthur in Britain after the Romans left the island, but whomever he really was, the churchman Geoffrey gave him the qualities of David in order to create an appropriate national myth.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Aetius, the Last Roman
A preoccupation with a particular era of the past reveals a dread about something in our own times that no one dares openly express. We in America have always compared ourselves with ancient Rome. (Aptly, the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire went to the printer the same July month in 1776 as the founders met to sign the Declaration of Independence, and we have been fussing over our own percieved decline ever since.) Like the Romans, we started as a humble republic based on agriculture. Both we and they owed a profound cultural and political debt to other nations; they were beholden to the Greeks and the Etruscans, and we to the British and (to a lesser degree) to other Europeans. After the destruction of Carthage, Rome found itself owning an empire, much as we did after two bloody World Wars. Both America and Rome have become multicultural states in every sense of that recently coined word, both created powerful central governments, and both we and the Romans needed to be constantly entertained. We in America have not yet elected an emperor to govern us nor have we thrown convicts to the lions, but we so fret about losing the virtues and the religion of our ancestors that someone like Bill Bennet can make a living doing the fretting in public, exactly as old Livy once did. Who does not fear that mad emperors and ravenous lions await us not far in the future?
The Roman heroes we venerate today are those who fought against the long decline into empire and eventual decadence. Conservative scholars praise Cicero, the valiant lawyer who stood first against the conspiracy of Catiline and latter spoke out against the ambitions of Caesar and Marc Anthony. For his trouble, the brave man got his hands nailed to the Senate wall. Liberals venerate failed reformers like the Brothers Gracchi, who tried their hands at the redistrabution of land and were torn to pieces in seperate riots. Everyone praises the tragic last general Flavius Marcellus Aetius (396-454 A.D.), the man who somehow threw together an army in 451 and defeated Attila at Cholons, near modern Orleans. Here was a man who overcame the opposition of everyone else of any stature and did the impossible, and in his victory possibly saved Western Civilization from an even more dreadful Dark Age.
But closer examination shows how futile were the stuggles of these heroes. Cicero was in fact a moderate caught between the designs of wealthier and more ambitious men who rarely heeded him when he spoke truth to power, and when they did hear him, he succeeded only in making the ambitious angry. The Gracchi wanted to help the people, but they also wanted to grasp the absolute power of the state two generations before Caesar actually did, and they would have made themselves tyrants who would have ruled as ruthlessly as Augustus did, had they not been killed. Poor Aetius (of whom there are no less than six books printed over the past five years) lived in a time when the Roman Empire was a pastiche of temporary agreements made by powerful families and barabarian tribesmen. He himself had lived among the Huns and entertained barbarian sympathies. In his lifetime everything was either conspiracy or bloody outrage, and to no one's surprise, brave Aetius was eventually murdered by the Emperor Valentonian III who feared the general as a potential rival.
The point is, once a nation or a people decide to go down a cerain path, there is nothing well-meaning and courageous individuals can do to save it. I do not believe in inevitability or in any historical dialectic; I only believe that nations have a natural lifetime, just as men do, and once they have progressed from frontier society to republic (or kingdom) and then to empire, there is only once course left for it to take. This is the unspoken thing we know about Rome and about us, and it is why we think if are only brave and have right on our side, then we can make our outcome different. To think otherwise is to admit we are about to know a time of great, nearly unbearable sorrow.
The Roman heroes we venerate today are those who fought against the long decline into empire and eventual decadence. Conservative scholars praise Cicero, the valiant lawyer who stood first against the conspiracy of Catiline and latter spoke out against the ambitions of Caesar and Marc Anthony. For his trouble, the brave man got his hands nailed to the Senate wall. Liberals venerate failed reformers like the Brothers Gracchi, who tried their hands at the redistrabution of land and were torn to pieces in seperate riots. Everyone praises the tragic last general Flavius Marcellus Aetius (396-454 A.D.), the man who somehow threw together an army in 451 and defeated Attila at Cholons, near modern Orleans. Here was a man who overcame the opposition of everyone else of any stature and did the impossible, and in his victory possibly saved Western Civilization from an even more dreadful Dark Age.
But closer examination shows how futile were the stuggles of these heroes. Cicero was in fact a moderate caught between the designs of wealthier and more ambitious men who rarely heeded him when he spoke truth to power, and when they did hear him, he succeeded only in making the ambitious angry. The Gracchi wanted to help the people, but they also wanted to grasp the absolute power of the state two generations before Caesar actually did, and they would have made themselves tyrants who would have ruled as ruthlessly as Augustus did, had they not been killed. Poor Aetius (of whom there are no less than six books printed over the past five years) lived in a time when the Roman Empire was a pastiche of temporary agreements made by powerful families and barabarian tribesmen. He himself had lived among the Huns and entertained barbarian sympathies. In his lifetime everything was either conspiracy or bloody outrage, and to no one's surprise, brave Aetius was eventually murdered by the Emperor Valentonian III who feared the general as a potential rival.
The point is, once a nation or a people decide to go down a cerain path, there is nothing well-meaning and courageous individuals can do to save it. I do not believe in inevitability or in any historical dialectic; I only believe that nations have a natural lifetime, just as men do, and once they have progressed from frontier society to republic (or kingdom) and then to empire, there is only once course left for it to take. This is the unspoken thing we know about Rome and about us, and it is why we think if are only brave and have right on our side, then we can make our outcome different. To think otherwise is to admit we are about to know a time of great, nearly unbearable sorrow.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
New and Improved
There is a show biz legend that it was a movie, namely the production of James Jones' "From her to Eternity," which gave the marketing world the concept of new and improved. It was said that Frank Sinatra, whose voice was changing and whose teenage fans had grown up and were no longer buying his recordings in large numbers, wanted a role in a major motion picture so he could launch a new career as a serious actor. (Mario Puzo wrote a fictionalized version of this story in The Godfather, in which he claims a Sinatra-like singer gets the part because the Godfather makes a the film's producer an offer he cannot refuse, to say nothing of what he does to the producer's horse.) Whatever the truth was, Frankie got the role, won the Oscar for best supporting actor of 1953, and went on to have an even larger career as an adult entertainer. According to the legend--and for all I know, the legend may actually be true--this is the one major notion, this idea of making a comeback as something different, that governs modern advertizing and public relations and yet does not come from the offices of Madison Avenue. Wherever the idea of new and improved was thought up, it has given the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American public life.
The key to making new and improved work is making sure the person or thing being brought back is much different from the person or thing it was before. In the case of a product, the change may be wroght simply by new packaging and a small physical change, thus Tide detergent can become the New Tide by adding some new chemicals and going into a new box. (There is an implication here that the old version of the product was not very good at what it did before the change took place, and there is therefor a second implication that the consumer buying the new product might have some reason to dislike the old version.) Although the change has to be noticable, or else a company may have a fiasco, as Coca Cola did when they brought out New Coke, a soft drink whose only innovation was a taste that was rather like that of Pepsi. People in the public's eye have to do more; they have to become, to some degree, the opposite of what they were before. Bill Clinton--and, yes, our politics are mostly public relations--was able to come back from the off-year defeats of 1992 by declaring the era of big government was over and by becoming the champion of welfare reform. Richard Nixon made a comeback in 1968 by presenting himself as a veteran, level-headed statesman, and no longer the political warrior had been in the previous decade. I have long felt that even the racist ex-Klansman David Duke could have had a successful career, if he had but renounced everything he had proclaimed before and had become a born-again liberal, thus making himself the enemy of everything he had once been. (Whether his heart had to change is another matter. But then, did Mr. Clinton's and Mr. Nixon's hearts really change?)
Which brings me to that shining example of a man who re-invented himself again and again with breath-taking agility, that cultural icon we should all celebrate: Sonny Bono. Blessed with no discernable talents (but owning more brains than I dare say anyone ever credited him with), Mr. Bono was able to have a profitable career that lasted for as long as he lived, while other truly gifted entertainers burned themselves out in a few years. Sonny got his start as a producer of pop records, then made himself into a faux hippie while he sang top forty tunes with Cher. Later he and his soon-to-be ex-wife would be the family-friendly hosts of a wildly popular TV variety show. Later Sonny would become the lovable loser and bit role actor in the "Airplane" movies and on D-grade TV shows. He ended his life as a much beloved Republican congressman. If he had not been killed in a ski-ing accident, it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that old Sonny could have re-invented himself into a wildly popular president, maybe as Democratic one. Perhaps, had he won the presidency soon enough, an aged Frank Sinatra could have sang at Sonny's inaugeration ball.
The key to making new and improved work is making sure the person or thing being brought back is much different from the person or thing it was before. In the case of a product, the change may be wroght simply by new packaging and a small physical change, thus Tide detergent can become the New Tide by adding some new chemicals and going into a new box. (There is an implication here that the old version of the product was not very good at what it did before the change took place, and there is therefor a second implication that the consumer buying the new product might have some reason to dislike the old version.) Although the change has to be noticable, or else a company may have a fiasco, as Coca Cola did when they brought out New Coke, a soft drink whose only innovation was a taste that was rather like that of Pepsi. People in the public's eye have to do more; they have to become, to some degree, the opposite of what they were before. Bill Clinton--and, yes, our politics are mostly public relations--was able to come back from the off-year defeats of 1992 by declaring the era of big government was over and by becoming the champion of welfare reform. Richard Nixon made a comeback in 1968 by presenting himself as a veteran, level-headed statesman, and no longer the political warrior had been in the previous decade. I have long felt that even the racist ex-Klansman David Duke could have had a successful career, if he had but renounced everything he had proclaimed before and had become a born-again liberal, thus making himself the enemy of everything he had once been. (Whether his heart had to change is another matter. But then, did Mr. Clinton's and Mr. Nixon's hearts really change?)
Which brings me to that shining example of a man who re-invented himself again and again with breath-taking agility, that cultural icon we should all celebrate: Sonny Bono. Blessed with no discernable talents (but owning more brains than I dare say anyone ever credited him with), Mr. Bono was able to have a profitable career that lasted for as long as he lived, while other truly gifted entertainers burned themselves out in a few years. Sonny got his start as a producer of pop records, then made himself into a faux hippie while he sang top forty tunes with Cher. Later he and his soon-to-be ex-wife would be the family-friendly hosts of a wildly popular TV variety show. Later Sonny would become the lovable loser and bit role actor in the "Airplane" movies and on D-grade TV shows. He ended his life as a much beloved Republican congressman. If he had not been killed in a ski-ing accident, it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that old Sonny could have re-invented himself into a wildly popular president, maybe as Democratic one. Perhaps, had he won the presidency soon enough, an aged Frank Sinatra could have sang at Sonny's inaugeration ball.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
The Best Bar in America
In a recent edition of "Esquire" (no, I don't have a subscription; I read it at my gym, where I can puruse the ads for clothes and automobiles I cannot afford while I am on the treadmill) there is an atricle concerning the best bars in the U.S. I have already forgotten which establishment won, but I am certain it was some metrosexual watering place wherein the champagne costs at least two hundred dollars a magnum and everyone mentions who their parents were, some place far from France yet bearing a French name. It doesn't matter what the winner was, for it was surely someplace I will never go.
For my money, the best bar I have ever been in is the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie, Wyoming. Originally catering to railroad workers, (the U.P. tracks are visible from the front windows) the Buckhorn features a wide array of wildlife, some it stuffed and mounted on the bar's walls but most of it seated at the tables in the form of aged cowboys, forty-year-old college students who will never graduate, and an assortment of drunks no twelve step program could hope to cure. The bar forever won my heart the night a young co-ed from the local university wandered in and asked Gabe, the Mexican-American bartender if she could have a martini; Gabe sighed and told her: "I'm sorry, Miss. The Buck isn't that kind of place." The kind of place it is one where the clients buy beer by the gallon pitcher and tell stories about the bullet hole in the mirror behind the cash box. (Some say the shooter was just taking a practice shoot at a patron at the bar and that the second shot hit home. Some claim the gun man shot an image in the high, long mirror by mistake. I was a college student in town at the time and know in fact the shooter was a husband trying to kill the man who had stolen his wife. The gunman had paused long enough to down a half-price pitcher the Buck serves at five o'clock, and the drinking had thrown off his aim. Since his wife was a regular at the bar, I suspect that like most of women one meets there she was hardly worth the trouble.)
I had to clean up the bar one morning after another man had been stabbed to death inside the front window of the Buck. I was a student working part-time for a local industrial laundry and was sent down with extra towels to clean up the mess after the body had been taken away. The owner and I scrubbed at the floor with soapy water for a good hour, but we could not get the red stain out of the old wood, so we moved a table to cover up the spot. "No one can see much when we turn the lights down," the owner told me. He added, with considerable regret, that the dead man had been a good drinker and would be much missed.
There used to be a chess board on one of the Buckhorn's front tables. Both the red and white sides were kept laid out, although no one ever played a game or even pretended to do so. Two retired railroaders usually sat there and kept track of the trains as they roared past. ("There's the 11:50 manifest," one of them would say as he checked the train against his pocket watch.) When two drunken frat boys sat at the table while the old railroaders were away and actually moved some of the pieces, the old men declared that the world had gone to hell, and they never again returned to the Buck.
The best aspect of the Buck was that no one who writes for "Esquire" or has a subscription for the magazine would ever go there, not if they objected to having the hell beaten out of them.
For my money, the best bar I have ever been in is the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie, Wyoming. Originally catering to railroad workers, (the U.P. tracks are visible from the front windows) the Buckhorn features a wide array of wildlife, some it stuffed and mounted on the bar's walls but most of it seated at the tables in the form of aged cowboys, forty-year-old college students who will never graduate, and an assortment of drunks no twelve step program could hope to cure. The bar forever won my heart the night a young co-ed from the local university wandered in and asked Gabe, the Mexican-American bartender if she could have a martini; Gabe sighed and told her: "I'm sorry, Miss. The Buck isn't that kind of place." The kind of place it is one where the clients buy beer by the gallon pitcher and tell stories about the bullet hole in the mirror behind the cash box. (Some say the shooter was just taking a practice shoot at a patron at the bar and that the second shot hit home. Some claim the gun man shot an image in the high, long mirror by mistake. I was a college student in town at the time and know in fact the shooter was a husband trying to kill the man who had stolen his wife. The gunman had paused long enough to down a half-price pitcher the Buck serves at five o'clock, and the drinking had thrown off his aim. Since his wife was a regular at the bar, I suspect that like most of women one meets there she was hardly worth the trouble.)
I had to clean up the bar one morning after another man had been stabbed to death inside the front window of the Buck. I was a student working part-time for a local industrial laundry and was sent down with extra towels to clean up the mess after the body had been taken away. The owner and I scrubbed at the floor with soapy water for a good hour, but we could not get the red stain out of the old wood, so we moved a table to cover up the spot. "No one can see much when we turn the lights down," the owner told me. He added, with considerable regret, that the dead man had been a good drinker and would be much missed.
There used to be a chess board on one of the Buckhorn's front tables. Both the red and white sides were kept laid out, although no one ever played a game or even pretended to do so. Two retired railroaders usually sat there and kept track of the trains as they roared past. ("There's the 11:50 manifest," one of them would say as he checked the train against his pocket watch.) When two drunken frat boys sat at the table while the old railroaders were away and actually moved some of the pieces, the old men declared that the world had gone to hell, and they never again returned to the Buck.
The best aspect of the Buck was that no one who writes for "Esquire" or has a subscription for the magazine would ever go there, not if they objected to having the hell beaten out of them.
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