Amusing Pranks From Nixon’s Presidency

I’ve just started reading Watergate: A New History, by Garrett M Graff. Every couple of years, I feel compelled to read a  book about Watergate. I last read one back in 2018 (which I wrote about here; I have to say that my blog title of Conspiracy of Dunces still holds up).

I’m only a third of the way through this one (it clocks in at around 680 pages), but it’s a banger. I simply can’t read enough about Watergate. It’s the perfect mix of political drama, true crime, and clownish buffoonery.

Just because I’m having so much fun reading it, I feel obliged to drop a couple of the more amusing / interesting / weird anecdotes.

As I mentioned in my previous Watergate blog post, it all started with the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked them to major newspapers. The newspapers then published. The Federal government tried to stop them from publishing further, but that horse was already out of the barn and judges ruled against them. Nixon, outraged at the leak, made it a priority to stop future leaks. This led to the formation of the Plumbers, and ultimately to the ill fated break-in of the Watergate complex, which in turn led to a coverup that, when exposed, brought down Nixon and sent many people to prison.

What’s weird is that the Pentagon Papers was a deep dive into the lies and missteps of the Kennedy / Johnson administrations regarding the Vietnam War. Considering the fact that American soldiers were fighting and dying in a war in which Americans were being lied to, this was explosive stuff indeed. However, it had nothing to do with the Nixon administration, so you’d think that, if anything, Nixon would welcome the opportunity to have some mud thrown at the Democratic Kennedy / Johnson administrations. Indeed, at first, Nixon seemed to take that approach.

Apparently, someone then thought about Anna Chennault. Before the 1968 election, the Johnson administration tried very hard to end the Vietnam War. There were intense but apparently fruitful negotiations taking place between the US, the North Vietnamese, and the South Vietnamese governments at the Paris peace talks. With Vice President Humphrey rapidly erasing Richard Nixon’s lead in the looming election, Nixon and his campaign staff worried, if the Johnson administration managed to bring about a cease fire between the North and the South Vietnamese on the way to a possible peace, that it would be catastrophic to Nixon’s election prospects.

Enter Anna Chennault. She secretly arranged secret meetings between Nixon and the South Vietnamese ambassador (that only came to light in the 1980s). Beyond that, Chennault stayed in regular communication with the South Vietnamese, intimating to them that they would get a better deal if they waited until Nixon was elected.

Yes, while the US government was negotiating a peace agreement, Nixon was backdoor sabotaging the negotiations. I’m not sure if that qualifies as treason, but it certainly approaches the line. Given that the war continued until 1975 and that some 20,000 more American soldiers died (not to mention all of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian casualties), this is a pretty horrible thing to contemplate.

So, while Nixon knew that the so-called Chennault Affair was not in the Pentagon Papers, he knew that if this information ever came to light that it would be disastrous to him. That was his true purpose for becoming so obsessed with stopping leaks.

Having so narrowly won the 1968 election, Nixon and his campaign staff were going to pull out all of the stops during the 1972 campaign. Nixon, being his usual paranoid self, was convinced that the democrats were going to pull all kinds of dirty tricks on him in the upcoming election. Therefore, it seemed only fair play for him to respond in kind. John Dean brought on former White House Plumber G Gordon Liddy to head up this effort, promising him large sums of money in support.

G Gordon Liddy, as usual, took his role just a bit too, ummm, intensely. He named his plan Operation GEMSTONE. It involved the following: kidnapping leaders of the radical left, drugging them, and holding them in Mexico until the end of the convention; outfitting a luxury houseboat with spy equipment, bringing on prostitutes, and enticing Democratic party leaders into compromising positions; multiple ‘black-bag jobs’ breaking into campaign offices to steal information; eavesdropping on the Democratic nominee by using a specially equipped spy plane; and bizarrely enough, hiring Cuban operatives to sabotage the Democratic convention’s (held in Miami) air conditioning so that the delegates would get unbearably hot.

Liddy presented this to the head of the Nixon campaign, John Mitchell, who just happened to also be at the same time the US Attorney General (you know, the guy that should be on the look out for blatant illegal acts). At the conclusion of Liddy’s presentation, Mitchell paused, took the pipe out of his mouth, told Liddy to come back with something a bit more realistic, and also told Liddy to personally burn the charts that he just presented.

In the competition for biggest maniac in the Nixon orbit, Chuck Colson would have given Liddy a run for his money. In many ways, Colson was more dangerous because he had Nixon’s ear. His office was right next to his. Nixon had a tendency to semi-randomly ramble about a whole variety of ideas. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had learned to kind of tune Nixon out when he was gestating on some of his wackier ideas. However, Colson, known as the guy who gets things done, would take some off-hand comment from Nixon and would run with it.

Nixon was convinced that there were materials like the Pentagon Papers at the Brookings Institution. He ordered Colson to have someone break in, rifle all of the files, and steal anything that seemed valuable. Colson’s plan to accomplish this (and I’m not kidding and don’t forget that this guy sat less than 100 feet from the President) was to: start a fire, have his people enter Brookings disguised as firemen (before the real firemen show up), break into a safe, steal the materials, and then slip away in the confusion. One of the people tasked to do this finally called John Dean and told him that this was nuts. Dean went to John Mitchell, who called Colson and said they didn’t need the material anymore.

The Committee to Reelect the President (famously known as CREEP) was absolutely awash in cash. When I say cash, I mean the green stuff. If someone needed funds, the finance manager would simply reach into the safe, grab potentially tens of thousands of dollars, put it into a manila envelope, and hand it out. After the Watergate burglars were caught, E Howard Hunt needed cash in Los Angeles. Liddy went to the CREEP safe, took out five thousand dollars, strapped most of it to his legs, tucked some of it in his socks, and then flew to Los Angeles to give Hunt the cash.

As part of their efforts to stop leaks, Liddy and Hunt focused their attention on Jack Anderson. Anderson was one of the most prominent journalists in the nation and had broken several stories that the Nixon administration considered to be dangerous to national security. Clearly, if you’re Liddy and Hunt and you have a journalist breaking possibly dangerous stories, the obvious solution would be to assassinate him. Some assassination ideas that they considered were: spreading a massive dose of LSD on the steering wheel of Anderson’s car in the hopes that that would initiate a crash, staging a fiery automobile crash, swapping out Anderson’s aspirin for poison, or a mugging gone wrong. Liddy volunteered to be the actual assassin. Luckily for Anderson, the ‘go’ order never came down from the White House.

Paranoia in the Nixon administration didn’t just stop at Nixon’s cronies. A Navy liaison to the National Security Council admitted, as he was being polygraphed, that he’d been regularly stealing White House files and supplying them to the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was Admiral Thomas Moorer. Caught, he probably expectedly to be cashiered. Instead Nixon reappointed him, thinking that Moorer would be more compliant to Nixon, given that Nixon now had dirt on him.

All of this was happening in the White House at the same time that the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, from his White House office, was receiving envelopes of cash as part of graft that he started from way back when he was county executive in Maryland (another insane story told in a book that I wrote about here in another blog title that has stood the test of time, Hail to the Thief).

All of this just shows that a hundred years from now when people like Bill Clinton and George W Bush are trivia answers that no one will remember, Richard Nixon will live on.

Grifters, Killers, and Rebels, Oh My!

Title: Rogues

Rating: 4 Stars

I had really high hopes for this book. I like to read Patrick Radden Keefe. His discussion of the opioid crisis and the Sackler’s family role in it in Empire of Pain was masterful. Wrapping a true crime mystery around a history of the Irish Troubles in Say Nothing was amazing. So, seeing that this was a collection of long form articles about grifters, killers, and rebels sounded like it was going to be right up my alley.

This reminded me of David Grann. His set of profiles (The Devil & Sherlock Holmes) is possibly my favorite collection of long form journalism that I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. The two nonfiction books of his that I’ve read, The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, are both considered classics and either have been or are in the process of being made into films. Having said that, I was pretty much meh on those two. I think that he’s a stronger writer when it comes to the magazine sized long form pieces. Perhaps the shorter length narrows his focus.

With Keefe, since I really enjoyed his book length nonfiction, I thought that I would absolutely love his long form articles. I was even more excited when I saw the subjects of these articles. They include the drug lord El Chapo, the brother of a Lockerbie bombing victim obsessively trying to find the truth behind it, a mass shooter, the plot to bring an international arms dealer to justice, and the person behind The Apprentice that inadvertently served as the vehicle that ultimately led Donald Trump to the White House.

Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy reading them (after all, I did give the book 4 stars). It might have been unrealistic expectations, but I just didn’t feel as engaged with them as I did when I was reading a Grann long form article.  With Grann’s articles, you’re so invested with them that there’s a page turning urgency when reading them.

The articles were interesting to read. They were fact filled. They were well written. I just didn’t feel pulled into them. They read to me like reporting. They were long versions of something that I’d find in a newspaper. Keefe is capable of more. I remember feeling viscerally angry while reading Empire of Pain and I was completely absorbed while reading Say Nothing.

Just to reiterate, they are interesting articles. The article about Judy Clarke was compelling. She’s a defense lawyer specializing in death penalty cases. She’s not one of those lawyers interested in getting DNA evidence introduced to exonerate an innocent man. No, her clients are all decidedly guilty of their crimes. The article focuses on her defense of Dzhokkar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. Seen on videotape planting the bomb (near a child, no less) and then later nearly dying in a police shootout, there is no question of his guilt. If you were to survey Americans, I’m pretty sure a clear majority would wish him dead. Despite that, Clarke passionately hates capital punishment and has spent her entire career fighting to save those that most people want dead. Trying to understand her is interesting reading.

Another article was about Amy Bishop. I’d never heard of her. She was a neurobiologist that had recently been denied tenure. At a department faculty meeting, she took out a gun and started shooting. Six people were shot and three were dead. Since the stereotype mass shooter is male, the fact that she was a woman makes her an interesting subject. The bombshell is later dropped that this wasn’t her first shooting. She’d apparently accidentally shot and killed her brother many years previously. Now the mystery deepens. What really happened with her brother? What is going on her head? We never find out.

The one article that completely pulled me in was on Anthony Bourdain. Published the year before he committed suicide, Keefe was seemingly able to get to the essence of Bourdain. His love of life and his seemingly desperate attempts to suck as much out of it as possible, while at the same time coming to grip with the fact that he was entering his 60s and having to look aging squarely in the face made the article seem to be almost a premonition for his ultimate suicide.

If long form journalism is your thing, then if you haven’t, you really should check out Grann’s collection. Rogues does not measure up to that level of excellence but the subjects that it covers make it worthwhile to read.

Little Women’s Father’s Odyssey

Title: March

Rating: 5 Stars

Continuing my journey through the Pulitzer Fiction Prize winners, I tackled March. This was one of the novels that I held off for a while. I’d last read Little Women some twenty-five or thirty years ago. It was OK but not exactly my cup of team. I’m not exactly the demographic that that novel was shooting for. The fact that March is in the same universe as Little Women wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement to me.

Little Women is the story of four young sisters coping while their father is off serving as a chaplain for Union troops during the Civil War. The novel March is the story of their father. It’s centered around his time serving the Union, but it jumps back in time reviewing key moments in his life.

Mr March (I might have missed it, but I never learned his first name), as a young man, started out as an itinerant peddler. In his travels, he alights upon a plantation in Virginia. There, he meets a cultured slave owner and an educated, sophisticated enslaved person named Grace. The owner, Mr Clement, excited to meet an intellectual young man, encourages him to stay for a while. Stunned at Clement’s vast library, March agrees. While there, March, upon Grace’s request, surreptitiously begins to teach a young Black girl to read. When Clement discovers this, in a rage he orders Grace to be viciously whipped. Shocked that such a seemingly sophisticated man can behave so barbarously hardens March’s abolitionist beliefs.

Later March meets, falls in love, and marries Marmee. In due course, she gives birth to four daughters, the now famous Little Women. In Marmee, March has more than met his match in her hatred of slavery. Her adulation of the fierce John Brown leads March to later finance some of Brown’s investment opportunities. These investments, essentially fraudulent, collapse and March loses his fortune, forcing him and his family to live in much reduced circumstances.

Later, when some local troops are getting ready to head out to fight to save the Union, March is called upon to make a speech. As he’s giving his inspirational words, he looks over at his wife. His wife’s eyes seem to be full of fervor. At that moment, with that inspiration, he spontaneously decides, at the age of thirty-eight, to join the Union cause himself, serving as a chaplain.

While serving, he witnesses fierce battles. As chaplain, there isn’t much that he can do. In one battle as he and other soldiers are desperately trying to retreat from battle by swimming across a river, he kicks a drowning soldier away from him that was going to drown them both. The guilt of this act eats at him.

He also understands that his troops don’t find his extreme abolitionist beliefs to be particularly soothing. They are more interested in more traditional religions than his transcendent beliefs, so he feels that he’s failing in the role of chaplain.

He volunteers to serve as an educator for recently freed Blacks. He moves to a plantation that has just recently been abandoned by its Southern owner. A Northerner named Ethan Canning is desperately trying to work the previously enslaved on the plantation to harvest much needed cotton for the Union cause. While there, March witnesses the Black people still being worked and treated as if they were still enslaved. He begins to question his purpose. However, he does make progress teaching the former enslaved to read and write. He sees their desperate hunger for learning as proof of a common humanity.

Unfortunately, this takes place in the early years of the Civil War (1862) where the outcome is very much in doubt. The Union soldiers essentially abandon the protection that they were providing the plantation and secessionists come back, torture Canning, destroy the crops, and re-enslave the plantation workers. March is helpless to stop the violence.

He catches a bad fever and barely survives the trip back North. Marmee comes to DC to nurse him back to health. March is a broken man. All of his ideals have fallen apart in the face of reality. He feels worthless and that the only thing that he can do now is to dedicate his life in the service of all of those that he’s failed. It is up to Marmee and Grace (who has amazingly reappeared in his life) to convince him that his life is with his family and it is there that he can do the most good.

The stories of battle and of plantation life are graphic and horrific. You see a man with the best of intentions struggle with coming to terms with the mismatch between his ideals and the reality in which he lives.

The relationship between Marmee and March is also handled well. Even though they are happy and in love, there is trouble between the two. Most of the novel is told in the first person from March’s perspective. There is one small section that is the perspective of Marmee. There’s a Rashomon like quality to how the two of them view identical shared events. While March believes that his wife inspired him to give his fortune away to Brown, Marmee is actually shocked that he did so without consulting her. Similarly, even though March believed that his wife willed him to volunteer to join the Union army, in actuality she hated the idea of a middle-aged man with four daughters abandoning them.

It was a gripping story. I know that it’s a bit trite to say that war is hell and that slavery is a brutal evil, but this novel placed you in the middle of all of this unspeakable horror. The fact that you are seeing this through the eyes of a peace loving, vegetarian minister makes it that much more shocking. You see his ideals get shredded in front of him.

A-B-C, Easy As 1-2-3

Title: A Place For Everything

Rating: 2 Stars

Sometimes I get seduced by the idea of a book. In this case, it’s a history of how we’ve ordered content, with a special emphasis on how alphabetical order assumed its primary role. This seems like such a prosaic subject that we all take for granted. After all, when we begin to read, one of the first things we learn is our A-B-Cs. When we see a list of names, they’re usually in last name alphabetical order. The fiction books in a library are also sorted in last name order. Was it always that way? If not, then how did we end up here?

It seems to be a mundane topic. Could someone actually tackle the question and present it in a compelling way? Well, at this time I have to say no. A Place for Everything is chock full of information. Especially when discussing developments in medieval times, Flanders typically had at least five and many times closer to ten examples per page of what she was discussing. I can only imagine the astounding amount of research that she put into this book. She truly displayed a breathtaking range of information.

A glut of information does not necessarily make for a particularly readable book. I found myself skimming over the myriad references in an attempt not to lose sight of the larger point that she was trying to make. Even though it was a relatively thin book (less than 240 pages, not counting notes, glossary, or bibliography), I struggled a bit to get through it. This struggle is the primary reason I only gave it two stars.

Like I said, it was chock full of information. Even though the subtitle of the book is The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, it was actually much more than that. It was a historical survey of the struggle to organize content, starting with the Sumerian Cuneiform and ending with Wikipedia.

In the early days of writing, there was so little of it that there wasn’t a tremendous need to organize it. Also, writing was limited to a very few. A scribe (or really, any ordinary person) can keep a couple of hundred things in their head. If you needed something, you could just ask the equivalent of a librarian and they would know where it is and give it to you.

This was the state for the first thousand or more years of writing. Eventually, the Library of Alexandria acquired such a significant number of scrolls that a different approach had to have been taken. Thus, the first ordering of content began. It apparently was based upon subject and then first letter alphabetization.

When these early attempts of alphabetization took place, usually they were within the context of some other organizing principle and usually they stopped at first letter alphabetization (if they got really tricky, they might go down to the second letter). Even so, there was at best a modest need for such sorting. The largest of monastic libraries consisted of at best several hundred volumes. Since all books were individually copied by hand, there just weren’t that many books.

One reason why alphabetical order didn’t catch on in these days was because most of the largest libraries were in monasteries. Since most works were in Latin, the word for God was Deus. It was offensive to the monks that any book about God would not be first in order. If there was an order of books in a monastery, it was something along the lines of God, angels, saints, people, and animals.

Once Guttenberg developed movable type for European alphabets, the book game totally changed. In the first fifty years after his invention, four times as many books were created than were written in all previous history. With so many books, libraries became much larger and the need for searching and locating books became that much more important.

Along with publishing, the development and popularity of inexpensive paper also changed the nature of content. Specifically, the wide availability of paper led directly to increased complexity in both government and business affairs. This flood of paper led to ever more increased attempts at organization.

Over time (and by time I mean a span of centuries), concepts like indexes, glossaries, catalogs, bibliographies, and encyclopedias were developed. In all of these cases, even though other attempts of order were introduced and utilized, ultimately alphabetical order always won out.

As we get into modern times, we see more innovations. Even though it seems commonplace today, it wasn’t until the 1870s that ringed binders came into being.

In 1876, the Dewey Decimal System was introduced. This system of classification, developed by Melvil Dewey, is still very much in use. I volunteer at an elementary school library and I just today was filing nonfiction books using it. I find it fascinating that this system, something that I’ve known and used my entire life, is actually quite problematic. For example, the entire span of 200 to 289 is dedicated to Christianity while the thousands of other religions all exist in the 290s (eg Islam is just 297). Also, women were originally categorized next to etiquette, as if that’s all that they were good for. Even worse, Dewey himself is problematic. Anti-Semitic and racist, he hit for the garbage human cycle when he had to resign his position after four women accused him of assault in a ten day period.

Organization / categorization of languages that are not based upon an alphabet is an interesting problem. The Japanese solved it using a technique called Iroha. Iroha is a Japanese poem written sometime in the 9th to the 11th century. It’s unique in that it uses every single Japanese syllabary exactly once. Japanese children memorize the poem just like we do the ABCs and it is used to define word order.

The final thing that I was left with as I read is how organizational techniques that I’ve used are now becoming increasingly obsolete. For example, most of my life white and yellow pages were essential. Every year, an updated set would be delivered to my house. I used to use them regularly. In fact, when I was a child, time was devoted in school teaching us how to use them as a critical skill. Much to my shock, a yellow pages book was recently delivered to my house. The children that live at the house treated it as if they were reading Sumerian clay tablets. They simply couldn’t believe that we ever found it useful.

Similarly, an important part of my elementary education was learning how to use the library card catalog. I definitely remember using it to find books for various research projects. Nowadays, with the availability of simple web searching, card catalogs are nowhere to be found.

These are just two of a myriad set of skills that I’ve managed to develop in my life that, due to obsolescence, I will never put to use again.

Gen X Trapped In Amber

Title: Reality Bites

Rating: 4 Stars

Generationally, I’m kind of on the cusp. Conventionally, the Baby Boomer generation is identified as being between 1946 through 1964 and Gen X was 1965 through 1980. I’ve always had the idea that the main reason that the Boomer dates were chosen was because of the transposition of the last two digits. The authors Strauss and Howe wrote a popular book about the various American generations called Generations (how original!). In their case, Gen X (called the 13th Generation in their nomenclature) was 1961 to 1981. In one case I’m a Boomer and in the other I’m a Gen Xer. Other authors provide different dates.

Regardless, although I’m probably a very young Boomer, my affinity has always been with Gen X. Much of that has probably to do with how I feel about the Boomer generation in general. That feeling can be summed up by the title of a book that I read, “A Generation of Sociopaths” (I wrote about it here).

So, given that I have that affinity, it’s kind of amazing that I’ve never seen Reality Bites. Reading Chuck Klosterman’s book, The Nineties, put this film back on my radar. Released in 1994, it still stands as the representative Gen X film. It stars Wynona Ryder (born in 1971), considered one of the Gen X icons. It also stars Janeane Garofalo (born in 1964, another cusper like me!), one of the most popular comedians of that generation. Appearing in it and also directing it is Ben Stiller (born in 1965, go cuspers!), yet another big player in the Gen X cultural world.

Four friends have recently graduated college. Lelaina (Ryder) is a TV production assistant and aspiring documentarian. Her roommate Vickie (Garafalo) is a manager at The Gap but is afraid, due to her promiscuousness, that she might have HIV. Troy (Ethan Hawke) is a directionless, aimless musician who, after being fired from his twelfth meaningless job, is now bunking on their couch. Sammy (Steve Zahn) is celibate because he is secretly gay and does not want to come out to his conservative parents.

Into this group lands Michael (Stiller) when he and Lelaina have a car accident. After this meet cute, the sparks fly between them. Not only that but Michael is an executive at an MTV wannabe network and is interested in putting Lelaina’s documentary about her friends on the air.  This proceeds to stir up Troy’s latent jealousy.

And that’s how the story unfolds. Lelaina is fired from her TV job and falls into a depression. Michael and Troy fight for her affections. Her documentary is released but it disappoints her. As she begins to pull herself out of her funk, will she choose the straight, ambitious Michael or will she choose the slacker, soulful musician?

If you need a hint regarding who Lelaina will choose, as Chuck Klosterman mentions in his essay on the film, selling out was considered to be the high sin for Gen X. You should produce your art and just let it go. You should never promote it or seek to become rich and famous off it. The work is the reward. In the film, you see this lack of ambition manifested in Troy’s utter lack of ambition and in Lelaina’s reluctance to let her work be shown and her horror when she discovers how the network has commercialized it.

That is in direct opposition to today’s world, in which the hustle is the reward. The attitude today is to grind it until you can make it. Once you become rich and famous, then you flaunt it on Instagram.

The fact that I’ve been writing this blog for seven years, have written over 850 posts, and not once have even lifted a finger to try to raise my profile, worry about SEO, or any other nonsense like that is probably proof enough that I’m a Gen Xer at heart.

The lack of ambition in Reality Bites is not the only attribute that marks it as a Gen X film. All of the characters are products of divorced parents. Both of Lelaina’s parents are uninterested in helping her or providing guidance (other than some ‘time to grow up’ kind of comments).

Sammy’s gay struggle and his, as it turns out, justifiable fears that his parents will condemn him were very much of the 90s. In a similar vein, the sexual liberation and promiscuity of the 1960s and the 1970s gave way to the very real idea of dying from sex via HIV / AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, so Vickie’s fears were also of that moment.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a college education was pretty much a ticket to the middle class. Not many people were graduating and the US economy was growing at a rate to easily accommodate the influx of new graduates. In the 1980s and 1990s, this began to change. The four of them graduate from college but there’s a whole what’s-next vibe to their life. They’d followed all of the rules and were now ready to start their new lives as real adults, but there were no guides or templates for them to follow. Vickie seems to not have much more of a plan than being a Gap store manager. After Lelaina loses her job, she discovers how valueless her fancy class valedictorian college degree is when she can’t even get a fast food job. The world has changed but no one has told them and they have no milestones to follow.

By now, you’ve probably guessed that Lelaina chose Troy. It’d be interesting to see, if the film was remade today, if she’d choose differently. Sure, Mike wears a suit, has a nice haircut (what a sellout!), and is seemingly only vaguely knowledgeable about Hamlet (thus implying a problematic lack of intellectual pretension),  but it’s clear that he deeply cares about Lelaina’s happiness and is willing to support her documentarian career. Meanwhile Troy, with his disheveled hair, can barely be bothered to stop smoking pot long enough to get off her couch. He mocks her documentaries and openly says that, because of who he is, that he will occasionally be cruel to her. The two of them fall for each other at a point where Troy is at a singularly vulnerable point in his life. Eventually that will wear off and in all likelihood they’ll be verbally fencing again.

In which case, they’ll get married, have children, and will bitterly divorce, so we can look forward to their Gen Z children’s films about their angst.

It’s The White Patriarchy, Stupid

Title: Jesus and John Wayne

Rating: 4 Stars

It is an interesting question. When I was growing up, I went to church. I went to Sunday School. The Jesus that I was taught was loving and compassionate. I was taught the parable of the Good Samaritan. I was taught about Jesus posing as a beggar to see who would provide him succor. I think that I needed to memorize the Beatitudes, including phrases like “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called Sons of God”. Later, I remember many Christians being shocked at Bill Clinton’s immoral behavior. They supported those attempting to impeach him because, after all, character matters.

Now here we are in 2022. An overwhelming percentage of evangelicals still support Donald Trump, a rude, brash, bragging, twice divorced, thrice married man that had an affair with a porn star immediately after his third wife gave birth to his son and then paid off the porn star to keep her silent. He couldn’t name a biblical verse to save his life. His major policy, which again had significant evangelical support, was to build a wall to keep poor immigrants out from ‘shithole’ countries.

On the other hand, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, serious and committed Christians all, are held in contempt.

How did this happen? The simple answer is that evangelicals, like everyone else, vote their political interests. Republicans typically nominate conservative justices. Since conservative judges are usually sympathetic to religious interests, this support has yielded positive outcomes for evangelicals. After all, just look at the recent repeal of abortion rights.

In this book, Du Mez makes a different argument. Her thesis is that they know exactly who Donald Trump is and they like it.

Throughout American history, there has been a militant component in religion, but it wasn’t always in the forefront. During World War I, many religious leaders used their pulpit to encourage the fight. After all, this was going to be the war to end all wars. However, at its conclusion, it was clear that the results of this horrific war was in no way going to measure up to that promise. Lost, religious leaders fumbled for a way forward. Multiple paths were open.

Following in the steps of figures like Billy Sunday, Billy Graham became an important leader. It was Graham that sparked a nation wide movement of evangelism. The Jesus in Graham’s sermons was a strong and virile warrior. Graham saw the US struggle against communism as a Christian apocalyptic fight. He developed a close relationship with Dwight Eisenhower, thus first establishing the first tight relationship between politics and religion. Graham’s nationwide appeal was the template for national leaders like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to begin spreading national messages that transcended the power of local ministers. These messages were transmitted via nationwide televised programs and an increasing number of Christian publishers and bookstores.

During this time, the dominant Christian theory was based on patriarchy. At the top was God / Jesus. Below that was the church and the church leaders. At the domestic level, the father was the unquestioned authority. The woman’s job was to joyfully submit to her husband. To the children, the father’s word was law.

In this world, women do not have autonomy. Feminism is nothing less than an attack on their beliefs. Abortion links to feminism and forbidden sexual freedom. If a husband has an affair, it’s because his wife wasn’t attentive enough or attractive enough meet to his demands. If a husband is harsh, verbally if not physically, it’s the wife’s behavior that needs to change.

Men, taking their example from the now hyper masculine Jesus, are violent by nature. Men are all warriors. Churches seek to satiate this nature with planned MMA fight nights and fight clubs.

The enemy was obvious while the Soviet Union existed. Christianity was in an existential battle with communism. Once the Soviet Union fell, evangelists were cast somewhat adrift. Some tried to make do with talk of a New World Order. A godless world government would deprive Christians of their right to worship.

All of that changed on 9/11. The enemy became obvious. Christianity was in a holy war with Islam, and in a holy war, all gloves come off. The evangelists were unstinting supporters of all wars against Muslim nations. In 2004, Jerry Falwell gave a sermon entitled “God is Pro-War”. With their aggressive warrior mentality, evangelical Christians became a large presence in the military. One of the architects of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners were routinely tortured, was Lt Gen Jerry Boykin. Among other things, he claimed that the Global War on Terror was a battle against Satan and that God placed President Bush in power.

A common theme among the evangelicals is that they are victims. Communism was out to destroy Christianity. Islam’s goal is to wipe out Christians. Feminists are trying to make men weak like women.

In the same vein, civil rights are trying to raise people of color up to the level of white men. Make no mistake about it, behind the words of these Christians is ever present racism. It’s no mystery that the overwhelming majority of leaders in this Christian movement are white men.

It’s probably no shock that all of this emphasis on patriarchy has brought the evangelical community to a state where many of its leaders have fallen. There’s the obvious examples of such leaders as Ted Haggard, Jim Baker, and Jimmy Swaggart. Du Mez lists many other examples. Some are horrific cases of child abuse. In many others, examples include classic acts of toxic masculinity such as shouting, insulting / verbal abusive language, and other exercises of power. After all, a patriarchy has gotta patriarch.

This brings us to the title of the book. Evangelical leaders see no better example of manhood than John Wayne. Swaggering and tough, he is ever the gentlemen to women who know their place. Whether in his cowboy films or in war films like The Green Berets, he is taking on and killing people of color.

This brings us to Donald Trump. Given all of that that I’ve just written, it should be clear that Donald Trump, despite all of his obvious flaws, is precisely the leader that the current evangelical community desires. Even better, his mistaken belief that the election was stolen from him and that some mysterious deep state is conspiring against him plays into their own paranoid beliefs of being constantly under threat.

It’s a match made in heaven.

You Wore Me Down, Chuck

Title: The Nineties

Rating: 5 Stars

For those long term readers (and I know that you’re legion) of this blog, you know that I have had serious problems in the past with Chuck Klosterman. We’re about the same age. We have about the same cultural influences. He writes about said cultural influences. Given that, his books are ones that I should buy and just devour with joy. Before The Nineties, I’d read five of his books. I found one of them tolerable and I was actively annoyed at the other four. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s his writing style. Maybe it’s his opinions. Maybe, despite being relatively close to age, our paths have been so divergent that I just can’t relate to his thoughts, analysis, and feelings.

The nadir came when I read his 10,000 word essay on the Kiss rock band. It was so self indulgent that, when I finally finished it, I was so enraged that, if I’d seen him walking down the street, I would have attacked Gene Simmons with a baseball bat, even though he had nothing to do with the writing of the essay.

Over the years, I repeatedly swore off Klosterman. Never again will I be fooled by a clever title, I said. Never again will I peruse the essays in the contents and think, these seem good, maybe I’ll give him another chance. Despite such firm resolutions, I would see his latest and feel myself getting suckered in and think, this time will be different, just to be disappointed again.

This time I was serious. I was done with Klosterman.

And then I saw this book: The Nineties. A collection of essays that was exclusively focused on the 1990s. I was twenty-seven in 1990. This was kind of my decade. I was young enough to be engaged in mass culture yet old enough that I made a point of keeping on top of world events.

If there was any chance that Chuck and I might have a moment together, this was it. Even though I’d sworn him off, yes, I gave him another chance.

And he blew me away. I enjoyed reading every single essay in this book.

I’m not sure why. It could be that this topic (an entire decade) was so broad that he couldn’t do his usual deep navel gazing on whether or not Tool and Nickelback deserve the hate that they receive or if Wilco or Pavement is creating the most significant alternative music. God, how I don’t care.

He starts off by discussing how the 90s culture was a reaction to the 80s culture of corporate vapidity. In the 90s, to sellout was a legitimate criticism of an artist.  You saw that in the 90s with the ultimate Gen X film, Reality Bites, and with the music of Nirvana.

Communication changed during the 90s. At the start of the decade, very few people had cellphones. There was no texting. If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to call a number, hope that they were home, and hope that they picked up. That’s another thing. For most people, when the phone rang, you had no idea who was calling. It could have been your dad telling you that your mom had just died or it could be someone trying to sell you a magazine advertisement. You didn’t know, so you had to answer the phone. In fact the relative few people that had cell phones were kind of considered assholes. They’d walk around with these big blocky devices with an antenna shooting out of it. Usually, the first words out of their mouth would be something like, “I’m on a cell phone”. Forget about getting a new phone every year. As Klosterman said, in the early 90s, getting a new phone every year would just about be equivalent to getting a new toilet every year.

It was in 1991 that the Soviet Union fell. Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia. Well, years later, it became time to choose a new president. Yeltsin was running again, but the front runner was the leader of the Communist Party. Yeltsin’s ratings were horrible and he was clearly a barely functioning alcoholic by this time (such that during a state visit to the DC, a drunk Yeltsin, in his underwear, in the middle of the night, tried to hail a taxi on Pennsylvania Avenue to get pizza and no, I’m not making that up).

There was no way that the US was going to let the Communist party get back into power again. They sent some high powered election political consultants and they took over and crafted the campaign that ultimately led, against all odds, to the barely cognizant Yeltsin being reelected. Keep that in mind when we mutter about Putin intervening in our elections.

Klosterman covered the 1992 US Presidential election. He profiles how George HW Bush, in the aftermath of the very successful first Gulf War and with an 89 percent approval rating, managed to blow it. He discusses how an odd, runty, Texan billionaire named H Ross Perot managed to maybe or maybe not play a decisive role in handing the election to Bill Clinton. We see how Bill Clinton wins despite many allegations of sexual indiscretions.

If the 1992 election wasn’t interesting enough, how about the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore? Klosterman discussed the significance of Ralph Nader voters, liberal / progressive voters all, who threw the election to Bush in Florida, ushering in eight years of conservative rule that was anathema to all that they stood for. He also discussed, the 5-4 ruling of the Supreme Court to stop the manual recount in Florida. The base partisanship of that ruling has led us to this point in our history where our politics are now seen as being exclusively binary.

There were many big moments in the 90s that consumed the national attention in a way that might not ever be possible today. The biggest of them all was OJ Simpson. To this day, I can recollect where I was watching the Bronco chase (at a restaurant, ignoring my food, staring mutely at a screen over my head, watching a white Bronco move slowly on an empty interstate). Some 95 million people watched the chase. Later, CNN basically became 24 hour OJ trial for months.

Those are just a couple of events discussed. Among many other topics discussed were: Rodney King and the riots (and yes, I can remember exactly where I was when I saw Reginald Denny get pulled out of his truck and brutally beaten live while the TV helicopter hovered above this impotently blowing its horn in a pathetic attempt to stop the attack), Seinfeld, Michael Jordan, Garth Brooks, Titanic, Matrix, Oprah, the Oklahoma City bombing, Clarence Thomas, Columbine, and Y2K. He goes in depth on events that were huge at the time that they occurred but by now have been forgotten. A great example of this is the murder of Chandra Levy and the role, if any, that US Congressman Gary Condit played in her murder.

If you’re young and didn’t really know what was going on in the 90s, this book will serve as a great primer to that decade. If, like me, you lived that era, reading this book is like taking a walk through a park that you once loved but have mostly forgotten about.

The Deconstruction Of Film Via Vampires

Title: Irma Vep

This is a saga that spans over 100 years.

Way back in 1915, Louis Feuillade wrote and directed a silent film. It was called Les Vampires. No, it was not a film about Dracula. The Vampires are a criminal gang led by a man known as the Grand Vampire. Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire) is a night club performer, member of The Vampires, and a general femme fatale. Irma Vep spends much of her time in a tight fitting black suit that is the inspiration for every cat woman suit ever made. Phillipe is a journalist working to expose The Vampires. Moreno is a hypnotist that is after The Vampires money and falls in love with Irma Vep. The film is the battle between Moreno and The Vampires and Phillipe’s attempts to bring them all to justice.

Here’s the thing. Feuillade apparently couldn’t tell this story in the time normally allotted to a conventional motion picture. In fact, the film is nearly 400 minutes long. Realizing that people probably wouldn’t sit through a 6 1/2 hour film in one sitting, he broke it up into 10 parts of varying lengths. In all honesty, I did not actually watch all 400 minutes. In the year 2022, that’s a pretty big ask to watch that long of a silent film. I watched approximately a quarter of it. It allowed me get a good feel for the film.

Despite this being during World War I and despite some episodes being banned for violence and immorality, it became a huge hit in France. Years later, it has attained a high spot in critical regard, considered the forerunner of the crime drama genre and developing techniques that were later used by such directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.

Fast forward to 1996. A French director named Oliver Assayas writes and directs the film Irma Vep. It won’t be clear from the plot description, but the film is a comedy poking fun at French cinema.

In this film, a director named Rene Vidal is remaking Les Vampires. Controversially, Vidal has hired an Asian actor, Maggie Cheung, to play Irma Vep. The film Irma Vep is about the making of this film.

Rene Vidal is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. Maggie Cheung plays, um, a Hong Kong actress named Maggie Cheung. Maggie, whenever she puts on the Irma Vep suit, appears to take on the spirit of the silent film Irma Vep. She creeps around at night in hallways and roof tops. She sneaks into rooms and steals jewelry.

After a day of filming, Vidal considers the result horrible and storms off. He has a nervous breakdown. He’s replaced by another French director, who immediately decides that he wants to fire Maggie and hire a French actor. Zoe, a costume designer, makes a pass at Maggie and is refused. Maggie leaves the set to meet Ridley Scott to talk about working on a big budget film. Eventually Vidal’s version of the film is found and shown. It’s a completely nonlinear hallucinatory film with scratches and splices. At the conclusion, it’s not clear if this is the film that will be released or will be replaced with whatever the new director comes up with.

OK, back in the real world. Oliver Assayas and Maggie Cheung fell in love and got married. Maggie moved to France and became a successful actor in European films. They later got divorced and Maggie retired from acting. She’s been little seen since.

In 2020, nearly twenty-five years after he completed Irma Vep, apparently Assayas decided that he wasn’t finished with Irma Vep. Somehow he sold HBO on an eight part series called Irma Vep that he would write and direct. I can barely imagine the pitch meeting: “You see, I’m a French director obsessed with a 400 minute silent film that made a French language comedy based upon it 25 years ago and now I want you to give me a ton of money so that I can make a series in English that expands that universe even further.”

Whatever. However it happened, I’m glad that it did. If the Irma Vep film wasn’t meta enough, this takes it into a whole different level. The director starring in this series is still Rene Vidal. In this universe, the film Irma Vep was made. The actor playing Vidal is Vincent Macaigne. Interestingly enough, he seems to be about the same age as the Vidal actor in the 1996 film. Such anomalies are embraced in this series. This Vidal is at times gentle, sweet, and almost cringing while at other times is almost homicidal in his rage.

The actress playing Irma Vep is named Mira Harberg (played by Alicia Vikander). Mira is trying to make a pivot and start acting in more serious productions. She sees this series as that springboard.

Since the series is so much longer than the film, much more detail is added to the series. The actors for Phillipe and Moreno are much richer in detail. The actor playing Phillipe is a prima donna full of self doubt. The actor playing Moreno pretty much steals the show. He’s a German actor that is a force larger than life. He can only act when he’s on crack cocaine, forcing members of the crew to find crack dealers. At one point, he autoerotic asphyxiates himself into unconsciousness. Expected to remain in a coma, he comes to, escapes from the hospital, and shows up on set eager to act.

If all of this isn’t complex enough, there’s a whole different thread running through the series about Feuillade and the making of the original Les Vampires. The same actors play roles in this thread. For example, the actor playing Vidal is also playing Feuillade. The same actor plays Irma Dep in both films.

It’s actually even more complex than that. In the series they sometimes show the original scenes from Les Vampires and sometimes show the same scenes but played by the actors in the series.

So, for example, Alicia Vikander plays an actress named Mira Harberg, she plays Mira Harberg acting as Irma Vep, she plays Musidora, the original actor that played Irma Vep in 1915, and she plays Musidora playing Irma Vep.

Got that? Keeping all of that straight must have been an unimaginable difficult acting task.

There’s all kinds of callbacks to the Irma Vep film in the series. Vidal has a breakdown and leaves the film (although he does come back to finish). Zoe again makes a pass at the Irma Vep actor but is again rebuffed. At the completion of the film, much like Maggie, Mira leaves for a much larger, much more high profile film role. When Mira puts on the costume, she also seems to be taken over by the spirit of Irma Vep. She sneaks around and steals jewelry. In the costume, she seems to have the ability to move through solid walls. Vidal has an Asian ex-wife named Jade. In this world, Jade was the star of the Irma Vep film. Serving as a proxy for Maggie Cheung, she appears here in the form of a guiding spirit for Vidal.

As with the film, much of the humor of the series derives from the basic absurdity of the film making business.

How do these all compare? Les Vampires is interesting from a historical point of view. The film Irma Vep is a great look at 1990s independent French film making. And the series does a great job lampooning the state of the industry now. It was a pretty serious time commitment but I found all three to be interesting and entertaining.

I can hardly wait to see how Assayas  will approach Irma Vep in the year 2050.