Let’s Get Real

What is reality?

That used to be a perennial topic for the late-night college dorm, the philosophy class, and the readers of Philip K. Dick. But now it’s a serious existential question that we need to be able to answer, to coin a phrase, for real.

Our country is polarized partly because its sources of information are polarized. The level of mistrust that has been driven into the electorate, almost exclusively by the right wing, has even reached the spheres of science and academia. Whenever one chooses to deny the very nature of objectivity, “common sense” is useless. 

I’ve never thought much of most vast-conspiracy theories. Not because so many are ludicrous, like the space lasers that intentionally started California’s recent forest fires (for what reason?), or the scientific cabal that has perpetrated a phony pandemic (for those sweet fat research grants, I guess). I’m a conspiracy skeptic because of simple human incompetence. Think about how many thousands of people it would take to fake a moon landing and keep the secret for decades; it just isn’t possible. Even when the paranoids turn out to be correct — Watergate, for instance — the conspiracy begins to break down the moment the first guy faces jail time. 

But true-blue tinfoil-hatters are limitless in their unhinged creativity. Remember when the QAnon cultists gathered in Dallas early this month to await the reappearance of John F. Kennedy Jr.? After the deceased honoree failed to show, a group of them went to a Rolling Stones concert and decided that Keith Richards was actually JFK Jr., that Michael Jackson had taken over Mick Jagger’s body, and that Elvis was playing keyboards in a mask. Some of them stuck around Dallas for the Kennedy assassination anniversary and were disappointed yet again. 

It’s possible, even likely, that somebody is amusing himself by deliberately making fools of these people. But even the craziest notion finds takers these days. People like this cannot be reasoned with because they live outside the bounds of empirical reality. And after four chaotic years of Pavlovian training under the previous president, it’s hard to blame them.

The loser of the 2020 presidential election has a simple playbook: repeat a falsehood often enough and some people will believe it. In fact, it turns out to be many people. His current chart-topper, very popular with his base, is that the election was somehow stolen from him. Two-thirds of Republicans believe him, according to a recent poll. We shouldn’t be surprised. Hillary Clinton warned us this would happen during a debate on October 19, 2016:

You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my e-mails. They concluded there was no case; he said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering; he claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.

TRUMP: Should have gotten it.

(LAUGHTER)

CLINTON: This is — this is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks. And it’s funny, but it’s also really troubling. 

Just to make sure you heard that right, the golf cheater said this to a rally crowd the next day: “I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win.” (P.S.: Of course, he broke that promise and pledge. Disturbed by the manhood-threatening fact that he lost the popular vote, the orange sociopath continued to allege voter fraud for his entire term in office — in an election, mind you, that he won.)

It’s one thing to tell a lie, to repeat it. But now even an easily debunkable falsehood finds purchase among the increasingly batty right-wing base. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to bother the liberals. This sector of the electorate is nourished by a media ecosystem so strident that Fox News feels soft by comparison. You may not know what One America Network is, but fans of the chicken-bucket lover sure do. 

We seem to have separated into not disagreeing but warring camps. The opposition is no longer loyal. The divide isn’t just Democrat (we want to govern and we want everyone to vote) vs. Republican (we want to provoke our followers and we want fewer people to vote). Not just urban (we pack many cultures together) vs. rural (we live among people like ourselves) or rich (cut my taxes) vs. working class (help me take care of my family with dignity). I think the main cultural delimiter these days, America’s Sorting Hat for the twenty-twenties, might be the quality of education. 

I’m not necessarily talking about whether or not you have a college degree: there are sound arguments to be made that its benefits may not outweigh the sickening tuition debt many graduates will have to carry (though college towns do tend to be “blue” in every single state). More important is something that is taught even earlier in competent schools, and that is the ability to sort through competing ideas to arrive at the logical truth. A good school doesn’t teach you what to think, but how to think. 

I made four or five attempts to read L. Ron Hubbard’s DIANETICS, just out of curiosity, before finally giving up. I can’t get fifty pages in before being bothered by a rhetorical device that’s hard to ignore. Hubbard tells the reader that one should always have a dictionary nearby when reading a book; that’s good advice. When he uses unfamiliar words, the author helpfully defines them in footnotes. It’s easier to depend on those footnotes than take the trouble to look up a word, so the dictionary gradually becomes unnecessary. Before long, Hubbard is defining words that he himself has coined, such as “engram,” making the dictionary irrelevant. By now all your information comes through the good offices of the gatekeeper, the author. You depend on him for everything.

It’s very similar with right-wing media, both social and electronic. I was at a friend’s house the day James Comey testified before Congress, and for fun we spent a couple hours that afternoon switching between Fox News and MSNBC. The progressive channel was far-ranging, but what really impressed us was the discipline of Fox. Comey was a liar and a traitor: the talking heads changed but the message did not. If you watched Fox News exclusively, that was what you took away. And the level of distrust in the media sown in the years of the serial philanderer has chased many right-wingers away from traditional information sources which, if ever they dare to criticize, are anointed “fake news.”

If all you hear from the media and your online friends is unanimity, if everyone you encounter feels as you do, it’s not much of a stretch to be convinced that the election actually was stolen. Everybody agrees! What’s missing is the desire, sometimes even the ability, to independently corroborate, to employ four simple words that you’ll never hear from the casino-running failure: I could be wrong. If you believe every reference except, say, Fox News is fake, then there’s nowhere else to go. You’re every bit as trapped as when you try to read DIANETICS. 

I intended to use Pauline Kael as an example of living in such a bubble: she reportedly said she was mystified at Richard Nixon’s election, because she didn’t know anybody who voted for him. So I checked with some sources that I trust — as I had with the Hillary Clinton and champion liar quotes from 2016 — and was surprised to find that Kael has been misquoted all these years. What she actually said was this: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” If I were a Fox News habitué and Tucker Carlson repeated this urban legend (because it makes liberals look dumb), I’d have to take it as fact. But facts are verifiable. And the verification process is how I discovered my mistake. 

That’s how science works too. “Evolution’s nothing but a theory,” we used to hear from televangelists and the like. Well, all science begins as theory, which is constantly tested until it becomes accepted truth, and even then something like quantum physics can come around to bust everything up again. “Trust, but verify,” said Ronald Reagan. (He was actually quoting a rhyming Russian proverb; I checked that one too.) 

Without independent verification, nothing is true. Or anything is, as those QAnoners in Dallas kept proving. This is the chasm that separates rational people from the current conservative zeitgeist, which on the one hand opposes any mask or vaccine mandates tooth and nail, yet simultaneously finds the chutzpah to knock President Biden for failing to end the pandemic. This isn’t just the “wacko birds,” as John McCain memorably described them, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Can one faction’s repudiation of provable fact be sustained? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure what it’ll take to break the fever. A healthy democracy requires (at least) two competing political parties to make sure new ideas get fair examinations. But debate is impossible when one side is constantly shouting and champions nothing but blind opposition. (The Republicans had no platform in 2020.) 

Last May, Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois congressman who was basically drummed out of his party, was asked how many House Republicans actually believed there was election malfeasance in 2020. “Five, probably, if that, maybe,” he replied. But the vast majority cannot tell the truth in public. They’re afraid of their most extreme voters, which, astonishingly, have become most of their voters. There’s always somebody more outrageous waiting to fight in a primary. So there we are. Fear is a lousy motivator for governance, and we’ll all keep paying the price until the blessed day when chaos, terror and ignorance finally stop winning elections.

A Breath Of Fresh Air

We saw a play about a month ago, and it was tons better than streaming. It was just like we were there in person — because we were!

It’s remarkable how quickly you can break a habit. It had been a full seventeen months since I’d seen a live show, and now it felt a little like we were treading on forbidden territory, getting away with something naughty. We were outside in the bucolic setting of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park waiting for the curtain of MERRY WIVES, and I couldn’t help looking all around just to drink it in like a first-time visitor to the city. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone, because I detected a palpable collective sigh of pleasure at the return of Free Shakespeare In The Park.

MERRY WIVES is a very loose adaptation of THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR by Jocelyn Bioh, who with director Saheem Ali resets the plot beats of Shakespeare’s (relatively minor) farce in a Ghanian and Nigerian neighborhood of Harlem and holds the resulting single act to just under two hours. Dramatically I felt some aspects of this transition were more effective than others, but let’s let the professional theatre critics hash all that out. What’s more important is that it’s been decades since I felt any more jazzed just to be sitting in an audience.

The real star at any Delacorte show is the ineffable grace of nature. The long summer day is still sunlit by the 8pm curtain, so we begin in natural light. But darkness falls as gradually as the movement of the minute hand. The stage lighting emerges, asserts itself, finally takes over. The temperature eases a few degrees and invites a wafting breeze that audibly rustles leaves in the trees surrounding the theater. Somebody could be reading an excruciating piece of legislation aloud and you would still be happy to be there.

But this one is special. Everyone in the theater, onstage and off, realizes it. As a Zimbabwean drummer opens things up by leading the audience in a chant of various African greetings, the joy of coming together for renewal of this great New York institution ricochets around the venue. A little later, other cast members also triumphantly welcome back “live theatre in New York City!” to a shouted ovation. Hold on, they seem to say, we’ll get going in a moment. But first, let’s all enjoy this moment — and remember what it’s like to be with each other.

Last year the Public Theater had to cancel its Free Shakespeare In The Park season for the first time ever, and when 2021 dawned there was frankly no better clarity. But as a miraculous scientific effort produced and distributed a vaccine in record time, it began to appear possible that one summer show — not two as usual — could be mounted. At first the Public expected to fill only a fraction of the Delacorte. As time passed that fraction grew larger. When MERRY WIVES finally began performances in July, the producers, coordinating with city government and the medical community, had established some ground rules which seemed respectful of everyone.

There are two classes of seating at MERRY WIVES: Full Capacity and Physically Distanced. To sit in the former section (the better seats in the house), you must have proof of full vaccination. In the latter (generally to the sides), that’s not necessary. Everybody must wear a mask to enter, exit, or move around. But Full Capacity audience members may take off their masks once they’re sitting in their seats: Physically Distanced people must wear masks throughout. In this way the Public has managed to make available roughly 1468 of the Delacorte’s 1800 seats.

Of course this theater is outdoors, which helps. In a couple of months, as the season ramps up at the Public’s Astor Place complex and its cabaret space, Joe’s Pub, distancing won’t be possible, so indoors, no vax, no tix. But tonight, thought of the fall is far away, and it disappears entirely at MERRY WIVES’ climax.

So far we’ve been treated to a clever forced-perspective Harlem street corner, with manual turntables (that is, stage crew come out and manually revolve the units) to reveal the interiors of three buildings off the street. But then the set opens up, literally. For the tumultuous scene of the “fairies’” mischievous torment of Falstaff, the set pieces are pushed aside and the background becomes the now-dramatically-lit majestic upstage trees and vast, open night sky. The set change is breathtaking, heart-pounding, not just because of its physical beauty but also because it reminds us how privileged all New Yorkers are to share such a place. And now comes the urgent, colorful, kinetic, culture-bending pageantry of the scene itself. Chills.

Maybe I’m just rhapsodizing. Maybe all that deprivation starved me into indulging myself. At minimum I was so very happy to be in a theater, this theater, on this night, in this city, and I’ll never take such an experience for granted again.

Out

We went out the other night.

We went to one of our favorite places in the city and had dinner together. We hadn’t been there in sixteen months. If 2020 was the most horrific year of my lifetime, 2021 may be shaping up as a series of exhalations, tiny at first but growing greater every day. We rejoice in aspects of life that we used to take for granted. Not any more, we don’t.

A little over a year ago New York City was the epicenter of COVID-19, with five percent of the entire planet’s cases. Unlike the spreading expanses of Phoenix, Houston or L.A., our city has grown vertically. When lots of people live in close proximity to each other, that’s the perfect killing ground for a virus. Most New Yorkers were rightly terrified and intent on masking, distancing and washing, but the disease was insatiable.

During the worst of it, in late March and April, sirens screamed day and night as EMTs raced from building to building. There were triage tents set up in places like Central Park when hospitals suddenly overflowed. Some people didn’t leave their apartments for weeks. Beyond the tragic loss of life and health, not to mention the gut-wrenching damage to hundreds of beloved small businesses as their hard-earned customers instantly vanished as if raptured, our city’s personality changed. As the plague spread to the rest of the country and we began to stabilize (albeit at a still anguished rate of carnage), the new normal was astonishing.

You might say New York “mellowed,” but it’s more dramatic than that: this usually frenetic city dialed it back to near-zero. One of the loneliest things I saw was this Jerome Strauss photo in The New Yorker in early May:

That’s Park Avenue, normally one of the busiest streets in the city. It looked like a ghost town, an unused movie set. I don’t know what time of day the shot was taken: you’d see the same desolation in the morning rush hour or at high noon. Park Avenue was all but deserted, all day long. Toward the end of the month I remember noticing something that wasn’t there: the honking of horns. Not even a midnight car alarm (mankind’s single lousiest invention). That weird off-center feeling many New Yorkers have when they’re way out in the country? All the time.

We were cooped up but we were safe. Our grocery-store trips were like commando raids, we let stuff “rest” for a day and bleached every surface we touched. Our personal low point was probably the two weeks Linda self-quarantined after tending to her dying father in Arizona. But beyond profound grief was only mild inconvenience, so we’re aware of how lucky we are. Rarely in the last 34 years have I regretted not owning an automobile — public transportation or two walking feet is how you get around here, and it’s tons cheaper — but I did fantasize about hopping in my car and safely distancing us to somewhere peaceful and unpopulated.

Then things started crawling back. Reopening of barber shops was a big day. Distanced outdoor dining, making the city look more European. (Restaurant tables in New York are crammed too close together anyway.) A yellow cab on Park Avenue — then a sweet, sweet car horn! Perverse, right? The other night we rode down Park and traffic was a little backed up. We were so excited to see that. The first post-pandemic location crew I saw was like the first robin of spring: they were shooting HALSTON in my hood and were pumped to be working at all.

I think the single most harmful thing the loser of the 2020 presidential election did while in office (okay, besides inciting a deadly riot) was to turn mask-wearing into a political statement. Disappointingly, it turns out that many in the “basket of deplorables” — Hillary didn’t contend that all the loser’s supporters were in that basket, only half. I’d say she was being kind — are so self-centered that the notion of masking to protect one’s neighbors just rankles them. I was walking down Lexington Avenue one morning and a guy was headed toward me unmasked. I stepped aside as usual to let him pass, but instead he turned and walked straight toward me, for no other reason than to intimidate. It was mask rage. Bro, that’s deplorable. 

But disregarding the medical advice of experts in the name of “freedom” — for the loser it was nothing more than personal vanity — really makes no sense when the doctors are only trying to keep you alive. If you think Tony Fauci and company are exaggerating the pandemic for some nefarious reason, well, there’s not much I can say to you — which happens to be the crux of our country’s deep partisan divide. 

Especially since those experts are responsible for one of the two greatest scientific achievements of my lifetime: sending men to the moon and back, and super-speeding development of a vaccine against a novel virus. Operation Warp Speed is one of the few things for which the loser actually deserves some credit, and it’s the key to near-normalcy as more of us become “fully vaccinated.” Anti-vaxxers also cause me some head-scratching, because without them we might never achieve “herd immunity.” I don’t think masks will ever disappear entirely (the upside: we had an historically low flu season this year), and even after vaccination I’m still leery of multi-passenger transport and crowded theaters. I have to go to Lisbon this summer for the wedding of a family friend, and I’ll enjoy being there but not getting there. COVID booster shots will probably become an annual event, but consider the alternative. It could easily have taken years. It only took months. 

What is dissipating at last is the low-level anxiety, the constant funk, that has gripped us for nearly five years now. The loser’s electoral defeat helped a little, but by then we were already deep into the grinding punishment of this pestilence. The arrival of a vaccine means it will all be over one day, if we can only convince enough of the doubters. Now it’s little things like a traffic jam or a bunch of location trucks that we suddenly savor. Last year was a time of fearful extremes. This year may be what we’ve so sorely needed: our first taste of normal.

Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021

Rush Limbaugh built an empire on unfairness, and boy, did it catch on.

Most Americans are too young (*sigh*) to remember when radio and tv broadcasts were subject to the “Fairness Doctrine,” established in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission. Along with an “Equal Time Rule” which applied to political candidates, the regulation mandated the presentation of opposing points of view on controversial issues or political endorsements. What right did the FCC have to stick its nose into local broadcasters’ business? Because the airwaves are owned by the public and only temporarily licensed to for-profit companies.

One of the signature features of 60 MINUTES when it debuted in 1968 was a segment called “Point/Counterpoint,” in which liberal Nicholas von Hoffman and conservative James J. Kilpatrick debated a particular topic. As Shana Alexander took over for von Hoffman in 1975, making the segment a de facto battle of the sexes, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was just going on the air. In SNL’s early years Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd had a ball satirizing these debates: “Jane, you ignorant slut!” That line was funny because the real thing was all about ideas, not personalities, and 60 MINUTES’ back-and-forths were conducted with the utmost propriety. The fact that such a respectful atmosphere now feels innocent, even quaint, can be traced directly back to El Rushbo.

There was talk radio during those days, it was just very different. When I lived in Georgia in the early Seventies, on long car trips I loved tuning in to WRNG (“Ring Radio”), an all-talk station in Atlanta. Each jock had a four-hour show and spent it all on telephone call-ins. The host could steer callers toward a topic, but the real stars were the civilians on the line. You could hear crazy tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists, but a later caller would usually inject a dose of reality. Even then, though, I noticed that the ranters were more entertaining. One of the WRNG personalities was a guy named Neal Boortz. He was still doing his thing as late as 2013, but something had long since changed. For WRNG he was a forensic referee, but over time he morphed into fire-breathing right-wing bombast. This is how it happened:

In 1987 the Reagan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine, claiming that there were so many media voices in the marketplace that it was no longer needed. Now you could say whatever you wanted without opposition or reproach. The following year a radio syndicator hired a glib 37-year-old Sacramento jock at exactly the right time, and offered his conservative-oriented show for next to nothing as long as you agreed to run three or four minutes of “national” ads. The rest of the commercial time was yours. THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW was eventually carried on more than 600 stations, the reach ever larger and larger as the show moved around to bigger stations at contract renewal time.

By the late Eighties the radio business had been fighting to stay standing in the midst of several cultural hurricanes. For decades a leading and lucrative format had been “Top Forty,” or repeated playing of popular rock and pop singles. But since the late Sixties music fans had been enticed by the clarity and range of album-oriented FM stations. Then in 1981 MTV went on the air and supplanted Top Forty radio as the best way to “break” new acts and records. The business was anemic when Rush came along and changed everything — and AM was just dandy for talk, which doesn’t require a Bang & Olufsen rig to enjoy. Most broadcasters will tell you that Rush Limbaugh is the guy who personally saved the AM dial by paving the way for so many others.

While Rush was emerging to lead the conservative ecosphere, I was in New York working in the book business. One day in 1992, when I was at Bantam, a competitor of ours, Pocket Books, released THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE and it shot to the top of the bestseller list. I had never heard of Rush Limbaugh, but a ton of book buyers sure had. I asked our publicity czar, Stuart Applebaum, if he could explain the new publishing pheenom. “Conservatives don’t have anything to read,” he said. (They do now, even have their own imprints; one of them, Regnery, recently picked up Sen. Josh Hawley’s discarded book after he basically fist-bumped the murderous Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol, triggering a Simon & Schuster morals clause.)

I had to know, so I got a pal to send me a copy and took it home. Although I had still never heard the sound of Limbaugh’s voice — the thing that made him famous — I think I managed to get a load of his public persona all the same. He was an extreme reactionary, brash but so over the top that he was funny too. He clearly saw himself as an entertainer, not a journalist. Some of his provocations were nothing more than a way to get under the skin of the other side, to “own the libs.” Heck, El Rushbo invented owning the libs. But he did it with unrepentant flair. For example, his network was modestly called “Excellence In Broadcasting.”

When I heard him speak for the first time, we were in the same room. The following year, I happened to be in the David Letterman studio audience for Rush’s first guest spot, promoting his second book SEE, I TOLD YOU SO on Dave’s old NBC late-late show. By now people outside the Limbaugh fan base were vaguely aware of him, so he knew he was in the lion’s den. He demonstrated comfort and good cheer, got that faux-boastful personality stated, and ably dealt with a rather hostile crowd (“Let the wrestling begin,” said Dave at one point) while getting his jabs in at the Clintons to groans but smiling all the time. Looking back, I think Rush always resonated not just for what he said, but the way he said it. 

Yes, the media probably did have a liberal bias — truth itself has a liberal bias — so to many conservatives it was a novelty hearing a point of view that actually reflected their own. Rush was speaking for them so accurately that his fans took to calling themselves “dittoheads.” Damn right, Rush: ditto! But anybody can spout reactionary wisdom. What set Limbaugh apart were his terrific performative chops — he could vamp like a jazzman — and a carefree attitude that deflected so many incoming bad vibes like the ones in that NBC studio. 

That verbal Fred Astaire touch is why Rush is irreplaceable. Today’s conservative stars, especially on the Fox News Channel — whose high concept on its launch in 1996 was basically “Rush Limbaugh On TV,” and whose slogan “Fair And Balanced” owned the libs at gut level — are stern and humorless. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and all the Fox blondes are simply selling outrage, not right-winger fun, and that’s hard to sustain. Remember when Dubya’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System remained at “elevated” risk for terrorism every day for months? You can’t keep it up. For longevity you need a song and dance man, a “rodeo clown,” as Glenn Beck memorably described himself. Which brings us to that orange guy, the one with the bizarre combover who cheats at golf. That doofus was nothing but a Rush Limbaugh imitation, and a poor one at that.

Talk about dittoheads. They even amazed the game show host turned candidate: he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. He may or may not have been surprised when a violent mob did exactly what he told them to do, but there’s no denying he was fascinated. His whole reason for being was owning the libs. He was cruder and dumber than Rush, but even the old broadcaster had to be impressed by the idea of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union address. Hi, libs!

The portly loser of the 2020 election took his cues and even some of his cadences from Rush, who never missed a chance to use Barack Obama’s middle name, now as much a part of conservative nomenclature as is “Democrat,” as in “the Democrat majority in Congress,” and was all in on “birtherism.” At least Rush was most often punching up, a concept that eluded Mr. Obama’s successor (all bullies are frightened when they must face real power). But not always. The fast-food fan’s shameful pantomime of a physically lesser-abled reporter mirrored Limbaugh’s odious burlesque of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s condition, one of the lowest moments of his career. The guy with the crotch-length neckties has a propensity for grade-school derisive nicknames, his bathetic attempt to emulate Rush’s genius for coinage, as with his word “feminazi,” which is both malevolent and funny at the same time. Of course, Limbaugh once held up a photo of thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton and called her the “White House dog” on the air, so he has certainly wallowed in similar disgusting muck.

Most of all, Rush Limbaugh spent three decades stirring the cauldron of conspiracy that now composes the entire Republican Party. Reason is for saps. You can believe yourself the victim of a vast government conspiracy while at the same time believing the bureaucracy to be incapable of the simplest actions. You can hate “blue-state bailouts” when your own red states depend on them to subsidize your existence. You can scream for law and order while you are commandeering a state or federal capitol building. You can call for deportation of undocumented immigrants while taking advantage of their willingness to do highly physical or unpleasant jobs. The way things ought to be, Rush explained, and then see, I told you so. 

When the word spread that Rush had passed away yesterday morning from complications of lung cancer, one Facebook poster quoted Bette Davis: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” While I wouldn’t go that far, Rush Limbaugh was responsible for encouraging the bitter tribalism that keeps Americans from solving common problems. But he couldn’t have done it without the complicity of his audience. I hope enough dittoheads will be forced to use their own brains now and perhaps rediscover comity in the bargain.

The Last Days Of Pomp

Never before have we had a president who is such a squaller, who so urgently needs a time-out, who has so utterly dispensed with dignity. This embarrassing regime ends as no other ever has. On top of his lies, grift, cowardice, ignorance and cheerful commission of every single deadly sin (roll call: Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth), the leader of the free world has also become the unchallenged king of sore losers. Other presidents have served as role models. For this one, parents must avert their children’s eyes.

Friday brought two of what we fervently hope to be among the last wheezing gasps of America’s own Dark Ages. In the morning, the White House chief of staff ordered the FDA commissioner to approve a covid vaccine that very day or submit his resignation, and the former was done. Then the Supreme Court summarily rejected a transparently desperate lawsuit brought by Texas against the electoral voters of four other states.

The FDA do-si-do is illustrative of the lame-duck administration in several ways. The president’s red-hatted admirers will certainly see it as a bold, forceful move to cut red tape and get stuff done; that’s certainly how it’s being spun in the lumbering, credulous MAGA universe. But the FDA was already preparing its emergency approval for Saturday. POTUS’s strong-arm tactics bought exactly half a day. And, more important, bragging rights — though for these birds, the sun coming up qualifies as braggable. But Saturday is a slow news day and besides, these people have always been tempted to fuck with the system just for the hell of it. This might have been one of their last chances, along with throwing sand into a pandemic relief bill.

Also, note that the threatened firing didn’t come from the leader himself. It never does. The president dislikes (fears?) one-on-one conflict and has never terminated his people in person, not even in his private business. Those who believe “You’re fired!” to be the chief executive’s personal catchphrase have been fooled. That was only a character he played on tv, where nobody was really getting “fired” at all. He enjoyed posing for photos with his finger pointed and an angry face mouthing an “f,” but in real life that never, ever happened, nor did it happen Friday. The uncomfortable stuff is always done by hirelings.

Then, in the afternoon, SCOTUS nailed shut the coffin of a final, hanging-by-the-fingernails effort to usurp electoral votes in four battleground states that Joe Biden won. The suit, incredibly, was led by the AG of Texas but, just as incredibly, joined by 17 other attorneys general and 126 GOP House members, including leader Kevin McCarthy (hmmm…so the elections that you won were fraudulent?); the usual suspects in the Senate, including the increasingly unhinged but nevertheless reelected Sen. Lindsey Graham; and the president himself. The Supremes swatted it away to the dismay of the big chief, who assumed that any of his appointees would automatically side with him on any issue. After all, that’s how it works at his real estate company.

Why would all those Republicans follow Master Orange off a cliff? The best explanation I’ve heard is: pure cynicism. Any thinking being understood that this litigation was going absolutely nowhere, so there would be no downside to joining it, and it would look to the GOP base like bold support for the big guy. Consequence-free MAGA bona fides. Prep work for the next election.

As for the Oval itself, why would it continue to litigate the outcome of a decisive election a month and a half later? (Besides the unintentional entertainment provided by Rudy Giuliani and other henchpeople.) Again, there’s a simple explanation. Making the MAGA gang believe the election was “stolen” is lucrative — north of $200 million in small donations so far, mostly money that the soon-to-be-former president can use any way he wants. For example, solid gold flagsticks at Mar-A-Loco.

Our final worry before the eruption of pending litigation against Individual 1 the moment he descends into private citizenship is the damage he can do on the way out. Nobody expects to see him at the Biden inauguration five weeks from now, but in the meantime there are lots of fires to set, fertile ground to salt, and china to break before he assumes private-sector martyrdom. Never before has an American transfer of power been so grudging and venal. It’ll be one last middle finger flung against us all.

So Near And Yet So Far

It was “unseasonably warm” last Saturday, and in November that means pleasant. I cracked the window in my kitchen onto a cool, calm and collected day. Then a roar started on the street below. Cheers, honking, DIY percussion. It was the sound of the Giants winning the Super Bowl, or an ethnic parade — Puerto Rican Day or Steuben Day — or the nightly noise for Covid first responders. Then it struck me, just an instant before the bulletin pinged on my watch. Four interminable years of anger, disgust and embarrassment were finally coming to an end, and the pent-up frustration popped out like a champagne cork. It was a taste of euphoria I could really use, because except for this, I wasn’t a fan of the election results.

The big one is not nothing. The most soul-affirming aspect of the 2020 election is that in a few short weeks, once again we won’t have to care what Donald Trump says any more. He already seems diminished, a gimme-hatted old man whacking his way through the golf course and flinging a pathetic thumbs-up sign. He is still “firing” senior officials, but now his lame-duck actions (I’ll bet he despises that term, but that’s exactly what he is) are next to impotent. In presidential terms, this is A Time For Tantrum. 

Another yuge benefit is being able to wave buh-bye to the nest of incompetent toadies who are currently in charge of the federal bureaucracy. Almost all of them richly deserve to be sent skidding on their asses down Pennsylvania Avenue, but I’ll particularly shed zero tears for Betsy DeVos or Bill Barr. No more Wilbur Ross. No more Mnuchin or Miller. No more Jared! I confess I will miss one: “President’s personal lawyer” and repeated butt-dialer Rudy Giuliani, whose penchant for unintentional humor has brightened many a day, culminating in his hilarious Saturday news conference at the now-world-famous Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia. Soon all these bums will be literal history.

But not really. While it’s fun to ding-dong about the wicked witch (Jim Carrey, playing Joe Biden, convulsed the SNL audience last Saturday by slipping into his Ace Ventura character to comically taunt Trump with the hated word “loser”), these birds aren’t going to fade away, and neither are the 71 million voters who looked at the last four years and decided they were just fine with that. Earlier in that same SNL episode, host Dave Chappelle noted, ”I would implore everybody who’s celebrating today to remember, it’s good to be a humble winner. Remember when I was here four years ago, remember how bad that felt? Remember that half the country right now still feels that way.” Those millions — who were, by the way, definitely not gracious winners in 2016 — are an object lesson for our neighbors around the world. 

The fact that this election was even close is stunning. Before Trump traded on his notoriety as a tv game show host and utter shamelessness as an egocentric sputtering windbag, it was preposterous to imagine such a mendacious, ignorant, self-centered sociopath anywhere near the White House. His narrow victory in 2016 left the international community slack-jawed, partly because the victor received millions fewer votes, which is counterintuitive and a little nutty. Four years later the US may have come to its senses temporarily, but any statesman can only interpret the results as evidence that we could easily elect a populist fool again. Imagine a candidate just as mean as Trump, but not as dumb or lazy. International leaders already have. In blunt terms, they have concluded that the American electorate can no longer be trusted.

In fact, El Presidente himself won’t even be going away. He could even run for another term in 2024, which would throw the jockeying to be his successor into chaos, which happens to be his specialty. (Being President was fun for him: you just play golf, watch tv, and rule over MAGA crowds. Now, though, will come the lawsuits, and they are legion. Trump lawyers: get your retainer in advance, bill him monthly, and make sure the checks clear.) Predictably, Trump has started to brag that he received more votes than any sitting president in history. That’s technically true, but his opponent got roughly five million more than that! So he did beat Obama in total vote count — that’s the reason he’s bringing it up — but to his chagrin, his predecessor achieved something that was beyond Trump’s ability. He earned a second term.

Twice in the last twenty years, the Electoral College superseded the popular vote. Al Gore beat Dubya by half a million votes and Hillary beat Trump by three million, but neither one entered the White House. Now Biden looks like he’ll be up by five. The Republicans may be a minority, and a dwindling one at that, but they’re strategically located just precisely enough to keep a national election so close that it takes days to sort it out. I don’t think a Republican can ever again win the popular vote in a two-candidate race, and they must agree because they’ve basically quit trying. Now the game plan is gerrymandering and suppression. Not get out the vote; get the vote out.

Which leads me to the reasons I’m moping today. Most of what Trump did via executive order, which is most of what Trump did, can be undone just as easily. We can fumigate the Oval Office, rejoin the Paris climate accords, affirm our commitment to NATO and WHO, and declare detente in some ill-advised trade wars. But we have to look downballot to find the real damage. 

The Democrats’ failure to flip statehouses means Republicans will be in charge of most redistricting for yet another ten-year census cycle. It’s going to be harder and harder to vote, even to keep yourself on the approved list of registered voters, if you’re black or a college student or live in a city or watch PBS or might be likely to vote Democratic for any other reason. More power will be concentrated among fewer people, because that’s how you keep the Electoral College and the Senate competitive even as they represent ever fewer citizens.

The Senate. Democrats thought they had a chance to flip what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body but has become the place where legislation goes to die, thanks to Mitch McConnell’s stubborn intransigence. It could still happen, if Georgia’s blue-turning voters can win two runoffs in January. That would make it 50-50 with Vice President Harris as a tiebreaker. But Democrats should have just learned not to place their bets on a long shot. It’s more likely that McConnell will still be in charge of the docket, slow-walking judicial appointments as he did to Obama and preventing any whiff of progressivism from ever reaching the Senate floor. He’ll even be able to deny Biden’s cabinet nominees, which was once all but a courtesy — but as the hypocrisy-laden examples of Merrick Garland and Amy Coney Barrett prove, McConnell’s capable of a little chaos himself. 

Oh, forgot one thing. All of a sudden, budget deficits are about to become a terrible idea again — just when the only thing we need worse than a vaccine is a fiscal stimulus bill to help the desperate Americans who are suffering today. Let’s hope that there’s some compassion left on the senatorial right, if not in MAGAland itself.

So getting rid of the worst president of my lifetime, if not of all time, is definitely a step forward. It’s worth celebrating. Like all those crowds outside, I felt much better on Saturday than I had on the previous Tuesday, when it looked at least possible that our national nightmare might continue. But this was not a great election for progressives, and a lot of hard work went for naught. Our last chance to pull this one out is in Georgia. Help if you can. But above all, take care of each other.

A Republican Tells The Truth

While breathlessly awaiting the new REAGANLAND, the fourth and final volume in Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of the rise of American conservatism over barely more than a generation, I read another book that has lots to say on the same subject. Perlstein’s new one (due at my house tomorrow!) is about how the right addressed the Carter years; it ends as Ronald Reagan is about to take the oath of office, and that’s not too far from where Stuart Stevens’s political memoir begins. The title? IT WAS ALL A LIE.

Stuart Stevens has been one of the busiest Republican political consultants since his first campaign in 1978. He has worked on several Presidential races, most recently as the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s attempt to deny Barack Obama a second term. But his hand has really made a difference at the Congressional and state level, where he’s handled dozens of campaigns and won most of them. 

I worked with Stuart in 1979 on a campaign for governor of his home state of Mississippi. I was a writer and producer for the candidate’s ad agency and wrote as needed, pretty much everything except speeches. In those days the Republican Party was just gaining a foothold in the Deep South, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War. The candidate was new to politics, a college football hero and well-respected businessman, warm and genuine. I tended to side with the other team politically, but it was my job and I tried to do my very best.

Also advising the campaign were a few key figures in late-century Southern politics, Mississippians who had dusted themselves off after Barry Goldwater’s embarrassing landslide loss in 1964 and now determined that they would slowly but surely establish the Republican brand in the South. You can read about them in Perlstein’s first volume, BEFORE THE STORM. I got a taste of GOP orthodoxy from them the first time I used the phrase, “the Democratic Party.” One of the ringleaders, Wirt Yerger, corrected me. “Tom, it’s the Democrat Party. We’re democratic too!” Listen closely and you will frequently hear that usage among true believers. It has turned into a cagey pejorative (the other guys aren’t democratic!), so much fun that even Trump, that dimmest of bulbs, has picked it up.

These were not the kind of Republicans who sport MAGA hats and American-flag shirts, not the yahoos who chant and jeer at Trump rallies, whose T-shirts read I’D RATHER BE A RUSSIAN THAN A DEMOCRAT and who worry over pedophiles in pizza parlors. These were sensible, realistic men (mostly) of means (mostly) who thought the less government interfered in their daily lives, the better. It did not take them long to completely flip the “solid South,” making it next to impossible to succeed with a “D” after your name, and they have run things ever since.

But the changes they set into motion had their own vitality, and morphed into something that became harder and harder to recognize. Political science students have had a field day tracing the roots of GOP extremism. Did it start with the revocation of the broadcast Fairness Doctrine in the Eighties, giving rise to partisan right-wing radio? Was it Newt Gingrich’s smashmouth takeover of Congress in 1994, achieved by nationalizing every election and marking the beginning of the end of Congressional civility? However it happened, the Republicans in Stuart Stevens’s wing have been watching the devolution of their party in horror, in anger, but mostly in sorrow. IT WAS ALL A LIE is a mea culpa from a man who understands perfectly well that the malevolent jack-in-the-box that is Donald Trump isn’t the cause of our current climate but a symptom of it. He is painfully aware that he himself is one architect of that climate.

The author introduces race as the “original Republican sin” and confesses to using it to siphon off votes from his opponent in his first campaign. He notes that the party uses “family values” not just as an ethos but “as a club against political opponents.” The politicization of Christianity “as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power.” The party’s intellectual leaders are “paranoids, kooks, know-nothings and bigots.” “Truth” is malleable. Cowardice and fear are rampant in the party: “the base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise.” 

But to me, the most dangerous Republican offenses over the last few decades have been financial ones. First, deficits don’t matter unless a Democrat is in the White House: watch how pious GOP leaders suddenly become, basically on Inauguration Day. Yet what was the first order of business in 2017? A budget-busting tax cut. 

And second, a whopper which has been trotted out for decades but just won’t die: tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the economy. ”A belief in the power of tax cuts is about as close as it can be to a definitional core belief that exists in the Republican Party,” writes Stuart. In the Reagan years they even ginned up a theory, “trickle-down economics,” to give the idea a patina of respectability. But as a moment’s reflection will reveal, this notion is absurd. Wealthy people do not inject their tax cut into the general economy by spending it: they invest or save it instead. Nothing “trickles down.” To truly stimulate an economy, tax cuts should go to the least wealthy, who will spend immediately. But it isn’t hard to imagine the donors phoning all over Congress the morning after Trump won: “OK, pal, we gave you complete control of the government at great personal expense. Now cut my frickin taxes, or don’t ever call me again!”

I think Stuart is occasionally a little too hard on himself, but it must have taken a great deal of soul-searching to even begin page 1. And he is correct: he was complicit in promoting some ideas he knew to be misleading or false (in the age of Trump, we now call such things “lies”), and he did this for years and years. Of course, coming clean is easier if you’re not an elected officeholder who has to face the voters. One of Stuart’s former clients is a profile in courage, his goodness so out of touch with the rest of his party that they don’t know what to do with him. If there’s a single sitting Republican that Stuart Stevens can still be proud of, it has to be Mitt Romney. Today, Stuart is trying to atone by working with the Lincoln Project, a consortium of Republican hotshots who are using their mighty powers of persuasion for the benefit of mankind: to get rid of Donald Trump. They’re fishing for “Biden Republicans,” today’s equivalent of “Reagan Democrats.”

So where does that leave me? After all, I was right there alongside Stuart for that 1979 gubernatorial campaign. Though I don’t remember deliberately lying, ever, it’s true that our novice candidate was being given talking points — probably even opinions — by the secret masters of the Southern GOP. “Republican” still connoted “freed the slaves” in the hearts of many good ole boys. Our guy was presented as a rebuttal: white, handsome, down-home, reverent, levelheaded, you know. I’m not certain that Wirt, Stuart and the others even expected to win; they wanted to demonstrate that in 1979 a Republican candidate could mount a respectable statewide campaign in Mississippi, and they did exactly that.

I had one more thing to ponder. Election day. While I personally liked the candidate I was working for, I thought his innocence would make it easy for kingmakers to put thoughts in his head, words in his mouth. I had even witnessed as much. I strongly preferred the “Democrat” candidate. But how am I going to take somebody’s money, then turn around and proactively oppose him? I starting thinking about this in October, and it may sound like a trifle to you, but I lost sleep over it. Finally I Solomoned it out. For the first and only time in my voting history, I declined to vote in one particular race. 

We lost. But look what happened instead. On election night I gave a ride home to a key Republican donor’s winsome daughter, who was taking it pretty hard. I continued to gallantly console her for several months thereafter, so I had that goin for me. As for Stuart and company, today’s electoral map is so red that it looks like Dixieland has been attacked by vampires. They lost that one battle, but they definitely won the war.

8/19/20: A great Politico interview with Stuart.

Hail To The

Hail to the Redskins,

Hail victory!

Braves on the warpath,

Fight for old D.C.!

I could cutely perform the Washington Redskins fight song — at least that monosyllabic first verse — when I was but five years old. I was “bred and buttered,” as the Irish say, in Norfolk, Virginia, and in that same year, 1955, our only pro team called it quits: baseball’s Norfolk Tars, Piedmont League affiliates of the New York Yankees. Norfolk’s local allegiance therefore went to the nearest major-league city, and to us that was Washington. Our official baseball team became the Washington Senators. Our official football team was, as ever it had been, the Washington Redskins. I learned that song from the many fans in my family and happily remember basking in their delight at my pre-game shows. 

Usually hosting my Young People’s Concerts was the first football fanatic I ever knew: my mom’s younger brother Bill. At a time when pro baseball was still America’s Pastime — late 50s, early 60s — he was all in for the Skins. Uncle Bill’s house was a Redskins shrine, with merchandising crap on mantelpieces, posters on the den walls, you name it. He dressed out for every game in jersey, cap and scarf — indoors, to watch tv. He changed clothes slightly if it was an away game; there was some sartorial superstition that I’ve thankfully forgotten. Uncle Bill lived and died for the Washington Redskins. 

On December 16, 1979, a friend of mine with Dallas Cowboys connections hosted me at Texas Stadium for Roger Staubach’s last regular-season game with the Cowboys. Their opponents would be those Washington Redskins. Uncle Bill asked me to call him from the stadium when it was over to describe the excitement. The Skins were in position to deny the Cowboys the NFC East title and were leading 34-21 with only four minutes to play. But Staubach went out in a blaze of glory and won 35-34. I didn’t have the heart to find a phone to call my uncle. I knew how much he’d be suffering. 

What would Uncle Bill have thought if he had lived long enough to see the Redskins give up their team name after using it for 87 years (the first four in Boston)? I think it would probably have jolted him pretty hard. But then what? How would he have sorted it out?

Frequent repeated use can strip a word of its power to shock or disturb. Lenny Bruce even had a bit on the subject, repeating the n-word until it detached from its roots in hatred and sounded silly. Now that Black people have staked their claim to that word (they can use it but others can’t), and “queer” belongs to those who are (and has thus been sapped of its power to demean), a little bit of the edge has been sanded off.

Similarly, the word “redskin” doesn’t blare out because it’s been used for most of a century in a non-pejorative way by white people, whose little ones have even “hailed” them. But let’s try an experiment. Let’s change the team name to the Washington Rednecks. That can’t possibly offend anyone, right? Well, maybe rednecks themselves — but heck, they’ll probably just be flattered! Now it’s a little clearer.

I used to edit frontier novels a while ago, and one of my favorite editees was a writer/poet named Robert Conley. I visited him in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Nation and the end of the Trail of Tears. In hanging out with Robert and his friends over most of a day, it gradually dawned on me that, as I expected, they didn’t use the term “Indian,” but I also hadn’t heard “Native American.” I asked about that, and was told that the term sounded to them like it was invented by some prissy white college professor, and since then I’ve tried to avoid it too. (Keep in mind, though, I was in deepest Oklahoma: to say it’s a conservative part of the country would be the understatement of the century.) Where you or I would use either of those terms, these guys simply said “Cherokee.” I didn’t find out about “redskin” because it didn’t even occur to me to ask.

Baseball’s Atlanta Braves should probably think about this too, as well as the Cleveland Indians and the Kansas City Chiefs. I always thought “braves” connoted, well, bravery. Courage. But then again, I always got a kick out of the team mascot’s name: Chief Noc-a-homa. I’ve seen no less a worthy than Jane Fonda doing the “tomahawk chop” at Turner Field. And of all those terms, “redskins” seems the most demeaning to me, much more than “braves.” But I have to keep reminding myself that it doesn’t matter what it seems like to me, because I’m not Cherokee. I guess that’s where the cultural dissonance begins. Why would any “redskin” ever fight for D.C.?

The sports leagues must have had America’s first conquered people on their minds (some believe the second is the Southerner) when they built themselves out, because those team names and many more like them go way, way back. But if this moment in history gives us a chance to do a little sweeping up around the nomenclature, then it doesn’t really matter how many layers of dust have collected. My Uncle Bill might have — probably would have — grumbled. But I’m positive he would have eventually dusted himself off, gotten with the program, and started worrying about how much it was gonna cost him to replace the houseful of cheesy merch that marks the territory of a true fan.

Not my uncle’s place. Too sparsely decorated.

 

The Masque Of The Red, White & Blue Death

At Prince Prospero’s masque, Jane Asher (c.) and Vincent Price.

Trump loves to brag about how he boldly fought the novel coronavirus by restricting entrance into the US from China. But now we know that, true to form, neither he nor anyone around him had thought through the possible consequences. His hip-shot action made American citizens, particularly in already-infested Europe, so instantly nervous about repatriation that they stormed back to the US at once. 

Many of them landed at airports where the customs officers were unprepared and overwhelmed. Eyewitnesses tell us that the returning travelers waited in long lines in close quarters which were already, as Stephen King wrote about THE STAND’s superflu, “crawling with death.” They weren’t tested or traced. Thus did COVID-19 make its way into the most heavily populated parts of the United States, the ones with international airports. Not even a king can command a virus. And Trump was only a spectator, squandering weeks that could have been devoted to preparation which would have saved thousands of American lives.

We shut-ins make strange connections these days, and all this made me think of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. Not only the Edgar Allan Poe story that so unnerved me as a child, but also the 1964 Roger Corman movie that remains the best of his Poe “adaptations.” I just re-read the story and “Hop-Frog,” a lesser-known Poe tale which is also folded into Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell’s screenplay, and watched the film again, both after many years. Once you discover similarities to our present situation, you can’t shake them off. It’s no longer just an imaginative dark fantasy. In many disturbing ways, our daily life is Poe made real.

“The Masque” (the short story) and THE MASQUE (the picture) got to me as a youngster because of the plague’s creepy inexorability. It’s the same frisson that made the Mummy, to me, the most terrifying of the classic Universal monsters. Sure, you can outrun the Mummy, or flee by air or ocean. Sure, he just shambles everywhere he goes. But once you have incurred the Mummy’s wrath, he will never ever stop coming until he finds you and kills you. It may take years, decades, but you will never be rid of him. He’s getting closer every second, even while you’re asleep.

Price and Patrick Magee are two very bad boys who get a kick out of inequality.

How naive, how arrogant of Trump to think that restricting traffic from one country — or at least attempting it in his typically hamhanded way — was enough to stanch the spread of a novel virus about which we knew next to nothing. Poe’s Prince Prospero — could there be a more apt fictional name for our current president? — was less naive about the Red Death (“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous”), but every bit as arrogant. He invited the knights and dames of his court, a full thousand of them, to “the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.” It was not called Mar-A-Lago, but you can be forgiven the mistake. “A strong and lofty wall girded it in” with “gates of iron” whose bolts were welded shut. The abbey was “amply provisioned.” “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.”

Are you getting chills yet? 

“The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’” Even as a grade-schooler, I thought to myself, they think a locked door is going to keep out a disease? 

After five or six months of merry, bibulous quarantine, Prospero decides to throw a masked ball for the ages. This very moment as I write this, Trump fans are gathering in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the first public appearance in months by their prince. Trump campaign rallies are, for all practical purposes, giant parties, celebrations of the minions of MAGA. Some foolish people have even declared today “National No Mask Day,” for the notion of protecting one another from the spread of coronavirus has, incredibly, become politicized. I don’t expect to see many masks inside that Tulsa arena tonight, even though a hot, crowded indoor environment where people are screaming and chanting is absolutely perfect for this disease to flourish and spread.  

The masque is the centerpiece of Poe’s story and of Corman’s beautiful film, thanks in great degree to superb art direction by Daniel Haller and cinematography by Nicolas Roeg(!). Leading the revelers to thumb their noses at the contagion outside is Vincent Price as Prospero, who has never been smarmier — and the screenplay adds a Satanic subplot for him and Hammer scream queen Hazel Court that is not in the Poe story. You even get a good look at Jane Asher, who at the time was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend and muse. It’s great fun and looks far more expensive than it is — “the money’s on the screen,” as they say.

Jane Asher takes a bath, to everyone’s delight.

I hope I’m not spoiling anything when I reveal that the Red Death finds its way into Prospero’s bash, just as I expect COVID-19 to crash Trump’s Tulsa rally and the Republican National Convention’s nomination acceptance night in another arena Petri dish. It was moved to Jacksonville because the governor of North Carolina would not agree to suspend distancing guidelines for the sake of political optics. Ignoring the whole of epidemiological science isn’t just ill-advised; it represents true madness. Please don’t let this end like Poe’s tale, the final line of which Corman puts up as a title card at the end:

“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

See How They Run

The coronavirus lockdown coincided with my six-week rehab period after a hip replacement. (I got the new hip just a few days before the hospital indefinitely postponed all elective surgery.) So I can’t go out to a restaurant or a movie or a concert or a play or a game or a museum or anything else. But I knew I’d be housebound. I just didn’t expect all of you to be in the same boat with me.

When I survey such a chasm of time one good thing remains, an opportunity like poor old Burgess Meredith thought he had in that postapocalyptic TWILIGHT ZONE episode. Books. Lots of books. Especially big fat ones that had formerly intimidated me with sheer spine size. Thus it was that I plucked a honker off the shelf that had been sitting there for nearly thirty years: WHAT IT TAKES by Richard Ben Cramer. 

Everybody had told me over the years that this was the single best book about a Presidential campaign ever written, better than Teddy White’s, better than all the op-edders whose tomes come out like clockwork these days. I always said, yada yada yada. I trust you all, don’t get me wrong, but this sumbitch is a thousand pages long! Now, newly hipped, I had no excuse, just a truckful of hours in front of me — so what the hell; I cracked it expecting to snooze though about a hundred pages. 

Friends, this is the single best book about a Presidential campaign ever written. 

It covers the 1988 race, in which you may remember that George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis to become the 41st POTUS. But that two-man general election battle appears only in a modest epilogue at the end. The overwhelming majority of the book deals with the primary competitions, on both the Democratic and Republican sides, in which the prize is the party’s nomination in an election without an incumbent on the ballot. What distinguishes Mr. Cramer’s work from Theodore H. White’s masterful MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT volumes isn’t the accuracy of the journalism, but its deeply personal nature. White appears to be everywhere, sifting through mountains of third-party research as well as his own field work, to produce a fly-on-the-wall chronicle of an almost unimaginably grueling journey. Mr. Cramer digs deeper, so that the reader isn’t on the wall but inside his subject’s psyche. The level of empathy he thus achieves is far beyond anything I’ve ever seen before. 

Mr. Cramer fulfills the promise of his title in two ways. We follow along on a physically and emotionally debilitating slog, which wreaks a tremendous toll not only on the aspirant himself but also his wife (the candidates are all men) and children. That’s what it literally takes to seize a major party’s nomination for president. But there’s a second meaning: we reach into the personal histories of each of Mr. Cramer’s subjects deeply enough to find out what it takes to seriously imagine yourself in the nation’s highest office. In other words, what kind of guy runs for president in the first place — and how does he then go about it?

The author intended to profile six main subjects divided equally between parties, but campaign events dictated a different combination. So we follow Vice President George H. W. Bush and Senator Bob Dole on the Republican side, and four Democrats: former Senator Gary Hart, Congressman Dick Gephardt, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis — and Senator Joe Biden, whose candidacy in 2020 makes this report unexpectedly timely. Other abiding figures also make their appearances, including a pugnacious George W. Bush (“Junior”), the pre-Fox News Roger Ailes, and of course Ronald Reagan, whose relationship to his veep’s effort to succeed him was fraught with unwanted drama. 

The first commonality you notice is that all six of the candidates are alpha males who demonstrated leadership skills and a competitive spirit early in life. You could have picked each one out of a grade-school class and said, that kid could be President one day. Our most recent two Republican Presidents were born to privilege and used that status as leverage throughout their lives, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Only one of these guys — Bush — was descended from money, and he made up for it by flying daring combat missions over the Pacific (he was such an obvious preppy that his nickname aboard the aircraft carrier wasn’t “Butch” or “Curly,” but “George Herbert Walker Bush”) and trudging around in the west Texas dust trying to start an oil business on his own in the early Fifties. The rest of them were classic hardscrabble overachievers, each with something to prove. And when they all compete against each other, sparks fly, but there can only be one winner.

Mr. Cramer’s reporting is legit. He interviewed more than a thousand people. Every depicted scene comes either from eyewitnesses or from independently published reports verified by eyewitnesses. The author read back every section to “the candidate, to a family member, or to closest aides — whoever seemed likeliest to know about the events described.” In other words, this is exactly what really happened.

The book flies — it took me less than a week to gulp it down, and I invariably couldn’t wait to get back to it — for two main reasons. One, after a more legato opening section where we calmly get to know each of the distinctive personalities, Mr. Cramer juggles six intertwining narrative arcs at increasing speed over 130 chapters (the book moves fastest when whirling through the scandal that quickly derailed Gary Hart’s campaign; the chapters are “Saturday Night I,” “Saturday Night II,” “Sunday, “Monday,” “Tuesday” and “Wednesday”). Two, Mr. Cramer’s writing style is informal and thrillingly compelling, a kind of cross between a slightly calmer Tom Wolfe and a slightly medicated Hunter S. Thompson. Here he is, inside the mind of Lee Atwater, Bush’s blues-guitar-playing Southern hatchet man:

This was part of Atwater’s southern fire-wall strategy, Lee’s determination to erect an unassailable, insurmountable Super Tuesday bulwark, so that even if Bush lost Iowa…even if he fell on his face big-time and pissed away his lead (and Governor Sununu’s help) in New Hampshire…even if Bob Dole got hot and swept the lesser early contests in Minnesota and South Dakota…even if Jack Kemp convinced the tax-cut-and-Star-Wars crowd that he was the Real and Rightful Reagan Heir…even if Pat Robertson’s eye-in-the-middle-of-the-forehead charismatics crawled out by thousands from under church pews…still, even so!…one way or another, George Bush was going to look like a winner on March 8. This was defense by suffocation — you look to see where the other guy’s breathing, then mash down the pillow of Bush, Inc.’s superior resources.

Man, that’s how I want my campaign journalism to read! The whole book is that colorful, even when representing family and friends in moments of jagged agony or tearful tenderness, and there are plenty of each. The level of access is nothing short of phenomenal. The reader has a backstage pass that gets through any imaginable door.

With a sole flukeish exception — his own son in 2004, when Dick Cheney’s terror-tinged slogan was basically Vote for us or die! — George H. W. Bush was the only Republican to win the popular vote over the last 32 years. Absent a candidate with Reagan-like charisma (and that would be exactly who?), the GOP may never win the popular again. They’re outnumbered, and it gets worse every cycle. (Which of course is very different from saying they won’t continue to occupy the White House.) The main takeaway from this magnificent book is not how little personalities have changed over the years, but that the seeds of Republican national electoral dominance were carefully tilled in fertile soil for more than a generation. In our republic, determination is truly what it takes.