The Celluloid Trickster

The sole film—of which I am aware—featuring W is Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now, all of the films that somehow use the Trickster have been brought together in one essay. Someday, W will get his from Hollywood, too. If this is (fair & balanced) expectancy, so be it.

[x Slate]
Tricky Dick Flicks
The trouble with Nixon movies (including Sean Penn's new one).
By David Greenberg

The films in which Richard Nixon has been a character, an icon, a point of reference, or a joke include Nixon, Dick, Secret Honor, All the President's Men, The Killing Fields, The Parallax View, The Ice Storm, Forrest Gump, The Buena Vista Social Club, Point Break, Maid in Manhattan, Tricia's Wedding, Sleeper, Missing, The Big Lebowski, Shampoo, and Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country. To name but a few.

Not many of these movies have featured Nixon as a main character. And among those that have done so, only a few—notably Philip Baker Hall's volcanic Nixon in Secret Honor (1984)—have risen above David Frye-style mimicry or hackneyed villainy. Why should this be? In his virtuosic new book Nixon at the Movies, Boston Globe reporter Mark Feeney nails down part of the problem: "As Oliver Stone found out, the movies can hardly do justice to Nixon, for nothing they can show can provide weirder or more compelling images than did the man's own overwhelming actuality." (Philip Roth made a similar point about Nixon in 1961, using him as an example of someone who was "so fantastic, so weird and astonishing, that I found myself beginning to wish I had invented" him.)

It's not surprising, then, that the 37th president most often figures in cinema not as a character but as a touchstone of an era of frustration and corruption in which the American Dream seemed to be grinding to a halt. One classic example is Constantin Costa-Gavras' Missing (1982), about the plight of a left-wing American journalist killed in Chile in 1973 by a U.S.-supported right-wing junta. In the film, a large official portrait of Nixon hangs prominently in the climactic scene, as the U.S. ambassador baldly lies to the missing journalist's father. In Hal Ashby's Shampoo (1975), which is set on Election Day, 1968, Nixon's image pops up on TV screens throughout the film as an omen of America's darkening future. It is in this vein that Tricky Dick appears in The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a movie that opens this week.

Thankfully, Feeney doesn't focus narrowly on Nixon in the movies, so he never gets bogged down explaining the symbolism obvious in some of these films. Instead, Feeney construes his subject far more broadly—hence, Nixon at the movies. Feeney uses many films in which Nixon isn't referenced at all, from Double Indemnity to The Conversation, as lenses for interpreting the president and his times. And most originally, he ponders Nixon's infatuation with the silver screen, revealing the loner president to be a compulsive moviegoer who watched more than 500 pictures while in office. "The moviegoer's fundamental yearning and loneliness," he writes, "… find an unmistakable embodiment in Nixon."

The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the debut film from director Niels Mueller, does traffic in Nixonian cliché, but it would surely have provided some rich material for Feeney. For just as in Shampoo, Nixon's flickering visage on the TV screen recurs as a trope in Assassination, signaling a distant and menacing power whose influence permeates the characters' world.

Assassination clearly owes many debts to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976). For starters, there's the last name of Sean Penn's Sam Bicke, the film's aspiring assassin. And although Nixon didn't figure explicitly in Scorsese's film, critic David Thomson, for one, glimpsed his shadow in it. "Put it like this," Thomson wrote (in a quotation Feeney reprints), "two people—Richard Nixon and Travis Bickle—got away with things in the mid-seventies that should not have passed." In Assassination, similarly, Penn's Bicke is nearly a Nixon doppelgänger, a struggling, friendless loser who can't get over his resentment of those who have it easier than he does. Both men, in a bid for immortality, tape themselves, only to have their recordings serve as the ultimate self-incrimination.

Both are bad salesmen, too. Where Nixon inspired the joke, "Would you buy a used car from this man?" Bicke is a down-on-his-luck, inept office-furniture huckster going through a divorce who can't accept or cope with the mounting setbacks and small humiliations in his life: his wife's wish to be rid of him; the lies he must tell customers to sell his wares; the Small Business Administration's rejection of his application for a loan to start his own company. Even his boss's demand that he shave his mustache stings. So he decides to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House to kill the president.

Yet if Assassination's story is trite, it does successfully evoke the dead-end frustration that Nixon's presidency embodied in the early 1970s—a time now safely enough in the past to move beyond nostalgia and into history. The despair of the years from 1963 to about 1975—the years from Dallas to Watergate—seemed to induce in many Americans a shocking readiness to turn to assassination as an answer to personal or political problems. Everyone remembers or knows about the shootings of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, and George Wallace, and probably also the attempts on Gerald Ford's life in September 1975. But Nixon had his would-be assassins—and not only Samuel J. Byck, as his name was really spelled. In November 1968, three Yemeni men were arrested for conspiring to kill the newly elected president, and in August 1973 the Secret Service discovered a scheme to murder him on a visit to New Orleans.

The frequency of such assassination plots in these years wasn't mere coincidence; it was one of the scarier symptoms of the erosion of the traditional bonds of political authority that led to Nixon's ouster. On both political extremes, violence seemed like the best way out of a bad fix. The paranoid Nixon and his paranoid staffers mirrored the fringes of the antiwar left: Each side dreaded attacks from the other, and each used that fear to justify its own embrace of violence. White House aides, even professorial types like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, understandably capitulated to doomsday scenarios involving radicalism—"We have simply got to assume that in the near future there will be terrorist attacks on … members of the Cabinet, the Vice President, and the President himself," he wrote in a memo—while underground papers brimmed with blasts at Nixon, the FBI, and the police for employing force as a routine instrument of political repression. Violence was as American as apple pie—on this much H. Rap Brown and Nixon could agree.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon only touches on the period's broader political climate, as when, in one series, Bicke flirts with joining the Black Panthers as an outlet for his frustration. But if the film's politics are underdeveloped, Penn's portrayal of Bicke is rewarding as a study in psychology. Penn makes palpable the loneliness and desperation that overcome Bicke as his life falls apart, making violence an appealing option. In one dark scene, Bicke readies himself for what he deludedly hopes will be his history-making feat by breaking into his ex-wife's house, finding his trusty old golden retriever—at this point his sole remaining friend—and shooting him.

In Nixon at the Movies, Feeney describes how the 1999 comedy Dick underscores Nixon's friendlessness by showing him unable to get his own dog's name right. (He calls King Timahoe "Checkers.") Recalling Harry Truman's quip that those who want a friend in Washington should get a dog, Feeney observes that Nixon couldn't even find companionship in man's time-honored best friend. Nixon, he writes, "was alone, so alone." Sam Bicke is just as lonely but far less powerful. Like a lot of Nixon movies, Assassination relies too much on easy symbolism. Yet in Sam Bicke, a wretched and deranged furniture salesman, Mueller has nonetheless found a fitting metaphor for Richard Nixon's America, a landscape of isolation, violence, and encroaching despair.

When Nixon himself does appear in movies, as Feeney notes, it's usually as a sight gag (a poster of Nixon bowling in The Big Lebowski) or a punch line ("Whenever he used to leave the White House, the Secret Service counted the silverware," says Woody Allen in Sleeper)—or, alternatively, as a stock symbol for political corruption (as in Shampoo), criminality (robbers wear Nixon masks in Best Seller and Point Break), or the crimes of the American system (in Missing). The instant associations that Nixon triggers are so numerous and rich that an intelligent and subtle film like The Ice Storm can use him to invite a range of readings—to betoken debased authority in a universe where parents have affairs while moralizing to their children; to emphasize the characters' inability to be intimate; to underscore the pervasive inauthenticity of the lives of its anomic suburbanites, who have become estranged from their political environment, their families, and even themselves.

David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.

Copyright © 2004 Slate

Why The Hell Not?

If the Terminator can be elected governor, why not the Kinkster? Instead of "I work for a Jewish carpenter," I would rather have a bumper sticker that reads: "My governor is a Jewish cowboy." And that beats hell out of "My governor is Nazi on steroids." If this is (fair & balanced) fantasy, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Dome Improvement
by Richard ("Kinky") Friedman

As your governor, I’ll tell the truth, give power to young people, and send Californians packing. Have I mentioned my plan to invade Oklahoma?

MANY OF US REMEMBER, in that dim and distant corridor of childhood, a book titled If I Ran the Zoo. What’s that? You don’t remember reading it? Okay. Push pause.

There once was a zoo that some folks liked to call Texas politics. In this zoo were doves and hawks, bulls and bears, crocodiles and two-legged snakes, and lots and lots and lots of sheep. But the ones who ran the zoo were not really animals. They were people dressed up in elephant and donkey suits who’d lined their pockets long ago and now went around lying to everybody and making all the rules. Even as a child, I knew I never wanted to be one of them, a perfunctory, political party hack. This did not stop me, of course, from growing up to be a party animal.

Unless you’ve been living in a double-wide deer blind, you know I’m running for governor in 2006. Well, I’m a rather indecisive person, so I’m not entirely sure I’m running yet. I have to weigh the impact the race may have on my family. You may be thinking, “The Kinkster doesn’t have a family.” But that’s not quite right, folks: Texas is my family. And I intend to give Texas a governor who knows how to ride, shoot straight, and tell the truth, a governor as independent-thinking and as colorful as the state itself.

By running as an independent, I plan to demonstrate that even if the governor doesn’t really do any heavy lifting, he can still do some spiritual lifting. There’s a place above politics that has nothing to do with bureaucracy, where good things can get done by an outsider who is in time and in tune with the music flowing from that old, beautiful instrument: the voice of the people. Unfortunately, where I come from, that instrument is an accordion.

Being independent is what Texas is all about. Here, someone running from the outside may, in fact, have more of a chance than elsewhere of being taken seriously. In Minnesota, few people took Jesse Ventura seriously until, in the wink of an eye, he put them in a reverse figure-four leg lock. His confrontational style, however, did not serve him well, and he lasted only one term. He never figured out that wrestling is real and politics is fixed.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is another story. Even far into his campaign, he was written off by a good part of the electorate. Then something happened to change all that: The people of California sensed that the world was watching. (They were right. We were watching Scott Peterson.) Now they’re talking about running Arnold for president. Many Texans are taking note, thinking that if they can get rid of politicians in California, maybe we can get rid of Californians in Texas.

So how does an independent candidate get taken seriously, particularly one who believes that humor is one of the best ways of getting to the truth? And the truth is, if we don’t watch out, Guam is going to pass us in funding of public education. Beyond its obsession with shaking down lobbyists, the Texas Legislature has proved that it is neither a visionary nor an efficient institution. The Fraternal Order of the Bulimic Moose could probably do a better job. A good spay-and-neuter program may be the answer. As my father always said, “Treat children like adults and adults like children.” But for God’s sake, whether you have to go around them or over them, let’s get something done, even if it means invading Oklahoma so we can move up to number 48 in affordability of health care.

Here is where the spiritual lifting comes in. Though the governor of Texas holds a largely ceremonial position, he must be able to inspire people, especially young people, to become more involved in the welfare of our state. As I drive around in my Yom Kippur Clipper—which sports a bumper sticker that reads “My Governor Is a Jewish Cowboy”—I am constantly impressed by the young people I run into, sometimes literally.

Take the fellow I met recently. He was a grocery clerk in Del Rio, and he seemed quite bright. As I was talking to him, a customer walked up and asked for half a head of lettuce. The clerk said he’d have to check with the manager, and he walked to the back of the store. Unnoticed by the clerk, the customer walked back there too, just in time to hear him say to the manager, “Some a—hole wants to buy half a head of lettuce.” The clerk, suddenly seeing the customer standing next to him, then turned and said, “But this kind gentleman has offered to buy the other half.” Later, the manager, complimenting the clerk on his fast thinking, told him that a large Canadian chain was buying the store and suggested he might climb the ladder quickly. “Everyone in Canada,” responded the clerk, “is either a hooker or a hockey player.”

“Just a minute, young man,” said the manager. “My wife is from Canada.”

“No kiddin’,” said the clerk. “Who’s she play for?”

Young people like this, I believe, can be an inspiration to us all. When I’m governor, many of them will be running the place, and no doubt I’ll be running after many of them. Everyone knows we’re not going to get any action or inspiration from career politicians. They’re so busy holding on to their power they never have time to send the elevator back down.

If my petition drive to get on the ballot in March 2006 is successful, I’ll become the first independent candidate to run for governor since they dragged a heavily monstered Sam Houston out from under the bridge. At the very least, I plan to be a candidate people can vote for rather than against. Speaking of which, I was showing a friend around Austin recently, and he was very impressed with what he saw. “That’s a beautiful statue of Rick Perry you all put up,” he said.

“That is Rick Perry,” I said.

Richard ("Kinky") Friedman is a polymath: singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, and gubernatorial candidate.

Copyright © 2004 Texas Monthly

The Emperor Has No Brain!

This is the guy who proclaims that Social Security is broken? The village of Crawford, TX is missing an idiot (most of the time). Weisberg publishes verifiable W quotes, not hearsay. If this is (fair & balanced) buffoonery, so be it.

[x Slate]
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg

"It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 21, 2004

Jacob Weisberg is the editor of Slate magazine and three previous editions of Bushisms.

Copyright © 2004 Slate

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Tom Teepen tells it like it is about the Social Security crisis. W's Chicken Little impersonation is galling. As if he has to worry about living in retirement. If this is (fair & balanced) quackery, so be it.

[x Cox Newspapers]
Social Security ain't broke; why are they trying to fix it?
by Tom Teepen

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

And all the alarms to the contrary aside, Social Security ain't broke. True, within a dozen or so years it will have to tap its surplus to make up the difference between what it owes retirees and current payroll taxes and by about 2042 it will have to start fudging benefits if it is to stay solvent.

This prospect plainly calls for preventative action but it does not present a catastrophe that therefore calls for, in effect, beginning to dismantle the system altogether.

And don't be misled. Dismantling it in the long run is the real agenda behind President Bush's push to bankroll personal, private investments with part of the Social Security taxes. The resulting Nirvana that we are encouraged to imagine has today's younger workers retaining Social Security's fail-safe benefits while icing the cake with swag from their years in the stock market, a get-rich-slowly scheme born of an ideological animosity, not of necessity.

The political quarters drumming this plan are the current version of the same politics that denounced Social Security originally in the 1930s and have lived with it all these years only with gritted teeth and quiet fuming.

The game now is to misuse the accumulating stress on the system, which is indeed real, to create fear of a total collapse and to sell younger workers on the notion that they somehow should have a right to make investments for their personal gain, which they are led to fancy would be cannier and more remunerative than investments the government makes.

But Social Security is not an investment scheme and was never meant to be. It is a social insurance program, and as that it has succeeded beautifully. Where poverty had been the common condition of old age, it is now a relative rarity, and Social Security operates with awesome efficiency, with only about 1 percent overhead. The real case the right has against Social Security is not that it has failed but that it has worked. The right just hates that.

Social Security can continue working. Substantial adjustments are necessary. We need to move the retirement age up incrementally to reflect modern longevity. Incrementally, too, payroll taxes should be extended to higher earnings. Annual Social Security increases should be pegged to an index that would slow them.

Painful, to be sure, but there is no freebie at hand. Bush's radical proposal would have the government borrowing one to two trillion dollars to float the transition — and that, of course, is in addition to the deep deficits he has already run up and that he is using to begin cutting federal support for education, scientific research, environmental protection and other productive investments in our future.

Privatizing Social Security would turn retirement into a crapshoot, with the brokerage houses the only sure winners. A cohort with the bad luck to be retiring in a recession would face a financially cramped old age or would have to turn to the government in hopes of being rescued by federal revenues after all.

Social Security has confronted shortfalls in the past and each has been forestalled by adjusting the system rather than by overthrowing it. A truly conservative president would learn from that past rather than dismissing it.

Tom Teepen writes an editorial page column for Cox New Service twice a week. He is also a contributing columnist to the publication Liberal Opinion Week. He was editorial page editor of Cox Newspapers' Atlanta Constitution for 10 years until his move to Cox in 1992. Teepen had earlier been editorial page editor of Cox's Dayton Daily News.

Copyright © 2004 Cox Newspapers