Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair

Title: The Destructionists

Rating: 4 Stars

For the noblest reason, the Republican Party was founded in 1854. It was founded by anti-slavery advocates that were against the expansion of slavery into the Western territories (in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act). Even though they didn’t, as a platform, specifically oppose slavery in the Southern states (thinking it would be unconstitutional to do so), it was the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln that spurred the South to revolt. As a result of the defeat of the Confederacy, under the leadership of Republicans, slavery was outlawed everywhere. Citizenship and the right to vote was granted to all (yes, I know, only to men, equal rights for women was a future battle). Considering the state of the Republican party today, it seems somehow mind blowing to me that an entire national party was established for purely moral reasons.

There are many other shining moments in Republican history. Think Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive movement, breaking up monopolies and creating the Food and Drug Administration to protect our food supply. Think of battle hardened Dwight Eisenhower presiding over the 1950s, a time of incredible growth and change in the US while at the same time managing an uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union to keep us out of World War III. Even think of Richard Nixon, who despite his manifold flaws, visited previously closed China, held strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union, took us off the gold standard, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. I’d even throw in Ronald Reagan, who had a honestly held distrust of liberal economic policies, restored luster to our country after the dismal 1970s, and nearly signed an agreement to dramatically reduce nuclear weapons.

My mother is 85 years old and, as far as I know, has never voted for a Democrat in her life. What I just described is the Republican party that she knows and even now, is the party that she believes in and still somehow sees.

That party no longer exists. Whatever notions of morality or honor or citizenship or good stewardship are completely gone. What we have instead is simply the desire for power. It does not matter if the power is acquired legitimately or not. If voter suppression is required to keep power, then so be it. If blatant, overt, repeated lying is required, then so be it. If to keep power, you have to perpetually keep your constituency angry and scared, then so be it. If you have no other recourse then to actually delegitimize the democratic process, then so be it.

What makes me most angry is that they don’t really even do anything with that power. They have no agenda. They have no overarching goals. In fact, they don’t even have a platform. Notoriously, the Republican National Committee said that the 2020 Republican platform was whatever Donald Trump said it was. It’s just not Trump. Mitch McConnell said, early in Obama’s administration, that his number one priority was making Obama a one term president. The only thing that they do is throw red meat to their angry, scared voters. Demonize immigrants. Demonize Islam (while taking away rights from women in the name of Christianity). Demonize large cities where Democrats live. Demonize brown people that have the audacity to demand equality. Demonize vulnerable people that look or act differently. And, weirdly enough, give rich people and corporations tax breaks.

How did this come to pass? That’s what The Destructionists tackles. Having spent more than twenty years covering Washington DC, Dana Milbank had a front row seat to much of it.

Some people might start by blaming Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy or, even more, the scandal of Watergate. I don’t buy it. By the time his tapes were released and the truth of his criminal behavior came to light, he had virtually no support in the Senate. It was inevitable that the House was going to impeach and it was estimated that he might not get more than ten Republican votes in the Senate. He resigned to avoid being convicted. Compare that to Trump, who still had the support of nearly all Republicans in the Senate, even after his actions directly caused the first invasion of our Capitol since the war of 1812.

No, Milbank blames, and I happen to agree with him, Newt Gingrich. I say that having been here the whole time and witnessing it. Gingrich wanted power and was willing to do anything to do it. He pushed aside the previous long time Republican leader, Bob Michel. Even though Michel was in the minority, he was able to work with Democrats to get Republican priorities passed. In fact, around half of Ford’s, Nixon’s, and Reagan’s priorities were passed even though the Democrats had the House during that whole time. Once Gingrich took over, he ruthlessly established the pattern of strict partisanship that his successors continued on. Clinton had around twenty-five percent of his priorities passed while Obama was down to around thirteen percent. The total number of bills passed was reduced by at least half.

The partisanship wasn’t just in making law. The partisanship was everything and everywhere. It was warfare simply for the sake of war. Since I’d seen it all over the past thirty years, this book was a kind of a hate read for me. It was a laundry list of contempt and disgust. He put it all in the book and, to my horror, I got to relive it.

Here are some of the ‘highlights’ that Milbank discusses:

Vincent Foster’s tragic suicide led to a whole conspiracy of the Clintons committing multiple acts of murder. The fact that multiple investigations all came to the same conclusion of suicide had no effect.

George W Bush nominated the monumentally unqualified Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Apparently she didn’t know the legal definition of such terms as reasonable suspicion.

Let’s not forget about Jack Abramoff. He set up a pay to play scheme that laundered millions of dollars to Republicans.

The Brooks Brothers riots of 2000 was when well dressed young white men descended upon election offices in Florida and caused such a disturbance that the recount effort was suspended. This, of course, laid the foundation for what happened in 2020, when Pennsylvania Republicans were chanting “Stop The Count” while Arizona Republicans were chanting “Count the Votes”.

When it comes to lying, it’s hard to top the Iraq War. Evidence was fabricated / grossly misinterpreted / grossly extrapolated to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 terrorists and that he was actively attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. The Bush administration got the war that they wanted.

The election of Barack Obama was not seen so much as a sign of progress but as a time for ever more irrational conspiracies. Whether he wasn’t born in the US or that he’s somehow secretly a Muslim, there was no end of attempts to ‘other’ Obama.

The election of Donald Trump just kept the lies coming. There was the caravan of immigrants that were going to overwhelm our borders. There were the Middle Eastern terrorists that were allegedly blending into Southern border immigrants. Of course, let’s not forget Pizzagate. Pizzagate is nearly amusing until you realize that at one point some twenty-three percent of Republicans believed that the government was being run by a cadre of satanic pedophiles.

I know that the argument is that both sides do it. Here’s the thing. Both sides don’t do it. There is no mainstream Democratic equivalent to Donald Trump. There is no Democratic equivalent to Pizzagate. Don’t get me wrong. There are corrupt Democrats. Just think of William Jefferson. The FBI found $90,000 worth of bribe money in his freezer. There are Democrats who are ambitious to a fault. At the outer fringes of the party, there are conspiracy theorists. The difference is that all of that is what the Republican Party is today. These aren’t one offs. This is the party now.

To return to where I started this post, the Republican party was originally started as a anti-slavery moral crusade. Now, here we are in 2022 where tens of millions of Republicans think that a national election was stolen from them and that Democrats are satanic pedophiles.

Where do we go from here? I have no clue and honestly, Milbank doesn’t either. He has vague hopes that, as the aging white cohort terrified of losing their place gradually leaves the scene, that the upcoming multi-cultural generations will inevitably lead to political change.

At this time, I don’t share those hopes.

Not A Hero To Be Found Here

Title: Vanity Fair

A little while ago, I stumbled upon the 2018 television series adaptation of Vanity Fair. Inspired by watching that, I re-read Thackeray’s novel, which I hadn’t read in well over twenty years.

For those not familiar, Vanity Fair is essentially the tale of two women. On the one hand, you have Rebecca (Becky) Sharp. Her father a penniless artist and her mother a French dancer, Becky has to make her way through life with no advantages. She has to scrape and scheme for everything that she’s got. Contrast that to Amelia (Emmy) Sedley. The daughter of a seemingly successful businessman, she lives a life of upper middle class luxury. She blithely makes her way through life as every door is opened to her. That is, at least, until her father’s business fails and they are reduced to poverty.

The two meet at a boarding school. Becky is treated there as a charity case while Emmy is held in the highest regard. The two become friends. That is, as much as the ever conniving Becky can have a friend.

At this point in the novel, set in the year or two before the battle of Waterloo, marriage is on the minds of the young women. It’s been long assumed by all that Emmy will marry her childhood friend, George. George is kind of a decent sort but has a wandering eye, is somewhat feckless, and seems to be in no hurry to marry Emmy. When Emmy’s father’s business fails, George’s father, aiming for a higher marriage for George, forbids George to marry Emmy. It is George’s best friend, William Dobbin, who is not so secretly in love with Emmy, that selflessly encourages George to do the right thing by Emmy and marry her. When he does, George’s father disavows and disinherits him.

With help from Emmy, Becky tries to ensnare Emmy’s awkward but successful brother Jos. She nearly succeeds but Jos humiliates himself and runs back to India. Later Becky marries Rawdon Crawley, the scion of a wealthy family. Due to Becky’s low birth, Rawdon is cast out of the family and they have to scrape by anyway that they can.

George dies at Waterloo, leaving Emmy a bereft widow. Both Becky and Emmy now have infant boys. Emmy dotes on hers in memory of her beloved husband while Becky barely acknowledges her child.

The novel continues on for some twenty years. It charts the dramatic ups and downs of Becky’s fortunes as various plans come to fruition or to ruin. At the same time, it describes the downward spiral of Emmy as her father’s continuing failures in business drags the family deeper into poverty. The nadir is when Emmy must give up her boy Georgy so that he can have the advantages that she wishes him to have and to keep her family from becoming completely ruined.

Where will Becky end up? Will Emmy ever recognize, acknowledge, and return the deep love that Williams feels for her? These are the burning questions that Vanity Fair will answer.

The series is quite faithful to the novel. When first published, the novel Vanity Fair was itself serialized in twenty parts, so having an eight part television series makes sense.

The subtitle to Vanity Fair when it was first published as a novel was, “A Novel Without A Hero”. This is a completely true subtitle. There’s not a conventional heroic figure to be found. Becky Sharp, undoubtedly the most interesting character, is completely without scruple with not even a single maternal bone in her body. She thinks nothing of ruining simple honest tradesmen who make the mistake of giving her their products on credit. She runs out on landlords. She barely tolerates Rawdon. She wants to claw her way to the top of the social hierarchy and will stop at nothing to do so. At the end of the novel, she does end up with Jos but (spoiler alert for a 150 year novel) she in all likelihood poisons him for a one thousand pound inheritance.

The other protagonist is Emmy. She is a weak, boring, milquetoast figure that lets the world trample all over her. She really is rather insufferable.

Their respective husbands are scarcely better. George has no problem walking all over the ever compliant Emmy. Having been seduced by Becky so that he will lose all of his money gambling to Rawdon, on the eve of the Waterloo battle George leaves a note to Becky asking her to run away with him. As for Rawdon, he is a very handsome but not very bright soldier that is bewildered by Becky’s machinations.

Let’s not stop at these characters. Jos is a pompous ass. George’s father values nothing that doesn’t have a price tag. Emmy’s parents think nothing of dragging Emmy down into their desperate pit of poverty. Nearly all major and minor characters are caricatures of striving ambition, selfish or foolish wealth, overweening pride, or naïve ignorance.

Probably the most positive character is William Dobbin. Even here, Thackeray paints him basically as a dullard. His love for Emmy is essentially the only thing that he has in his mind. His actions as a consequence have nobility, but as a person he remains uninteresting.

This is not a criticism. I’m sure that that is what Thackeray intended. Indeed it is a novel without heroes. In fact, the whole heroic narrative is exactly what Thackeray was lampooning. There is no knight on a white shining horse. These are all deeply flawed characters that, by nature of being deeply flawed, renders them human.

In my opinion, Thackeray takes this to an extreme. He takes his caustic pen to everything that he sees. No matter what country or what society (low or high) that his story lands in, the people are all exposed to his harsh bright light. No one gets off easy. Thackeray is relentless in showing that everyone is a fool and/or a knave.

This mercilessness in the novel is why, surprisingly enough, I actually preferred the series. Beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted, it smoothed, if ever so slightly, the caustic edges of Thackeray’s characters enough to lift them above mere caricatures. In particular, Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharp and Johnny Flynn as William Dobbin brought their characters to life. Flynn was also wonderful as Knightley in the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Perhaps his type is stolid nonromantic leading men in 19th century English novel film adaptations.

So, yes, in a shocking upset, if you’ve never read Vanity Fair and are interested, I’d actually recommend watching the television series.

An In Cold Blood / Bernie Madoff Mashup

Title: The Adversary

Rating: 5 Stars

It’s a tragic tale. A man, Jean-Claude Romand, is a highly respected doctor working at the World Health Organization (WHO). He regularly attends international conferences. He confers with French government officials. He is developing cures for fatal diseases.

One night, his house catches on fire. His wife and two children die in the blaze. He is found alive, but unconscious. For days, he hovers between life and death. His best friend, Luc Ladmiral, thinks that it’d be best for him to die so that he wouldn’t have to experience the profound grief of losing his entire family.

And then the tale turns. His wife and two children had all been shot dead with a rifle before the first started. Romand had taken an overdose of barbiturates in a failed suicide attempt as the fire raged around him. Even worse, in a house in a completely different town, his parents and their dog had been found shot and killed with the same rifle. Romand is not just a highly respected doctor but apparently also a spree killer.

And then the tale turns again. There is no record of Romand working at the WHO. There is no record of him registering for any of the conferences that he claimed to attend. The high government officials that he claimed to consult had never heard of him. Even worse, there is no evidence that he ever even graduated from university, let only become accredited as a doctor. For the previous eighteen years, starting before he was even married, he was living a lie.

He did attend university for a while. At one point, during finals, he apparently just decided to skip them. From that point on, he deceived everyone. He pretended to go to classes. He was able to figure out how to continue to get student identification even though he was no longer attending. Upon pretending to graduate, he pretended to become a doctor. He then pretended to get a job at the WHO. In the early days, he would head to Geneva to the main WHO building. There were public spaces there in which he could hang out. He was able to get free WHO periodicals that he’d take home and read. He was able to get free WHO stationery to keep the lie alive. He claimed that his work was too critical to have a WHO phone extension. He had a phone service that his friends, even his wife, had to use if they wanted to get hold of him while allegedly at work.

Yes, he was able to fool his wife for eighteen years. They had two children together. Once, he drove them to the WHO building and pointed at the window of his alleged office. That was as close as they ever got to going inside.

How was he able to live? Well, he was able to convince his retired parents, his retired in-laws, his wife, and even his mistress, that WHO had a special investment fund that returned an average annual eighteen percent interest. Even though this was clearly too good to be true, all of these people trusted him enough to give them their hard earned retirement, proceeds from a house sale, or other investment money. Of course, he didn’t invest it. He used the funds to manufacture the lifestyle of a WHO medical doctor.

Again, I have to repeat it. He did it for eighteen years. To be able to keep up that ostentatious of a lie for so long beggars belief. There were so many times that even a simple check would have exposed him. Such was everyone’s faith in him that no such check was ever attempted.

It’s not absolutely clear what ultimately triggered him to violence. It could have been his mistress. She had an immediate financial need and so asked for her investment money back. Of course, that money was long gone. In fact, all of his accounts were on the verge of being overdrawn. It could have been his wife. Someone asked her if she was bringing her children to an WHO Christmas party. This could have triggered her to ask questions.

Whatever. While the children were asleep, he killed his wife. Later, the children woke up and he watched television with them, telling them that their mom was sleeping. Then, one by one, he killed them. He packed the gun up and went to his parent’s house. He lured his father upstairs and shot him in his childhood bedroom. He went downstairs and shot his mom in the sitting room. The dog came in whining and he shot it.

He then picked up his mistress on the ruse of going on a dinner date with an important person. He pretended to get lost. They got out and he tear gassed her, attempting to kill her. Somehow she managed to get him to stop, and amazingly, she promised not to tell anyone. They got back into the car and drove back.

The next day, he poured gas all around the house and on the corpses of his family and set it all on fire. He then took an overdose of barbiturates. They were years out of date, so they lacked potency. Romand was aware of this, so it might have been a feigned suicide attempt.

How do we know all of this? Romand did survive and he did recover. Despite getting away with it for so long, he was not exactly a criminal mastermind. There was a trial where his confession was heard. The author, Emmanuel Carrere, like Truman Capote In Cold Blood, established a relationship with Romand and was able to dive into his psyche.

It’s a fascinating, mysterious story. As I reading this, I kept going back to the Bernie Madoff story. In both cases, there’s no doubt how the story is going to end. Both of them are living a fraudulent life where their exposure is inevitable. There is no escape. The world will come collapsing around them. Obviously, the scale of Madoff’s fraud is colossal in comparison, but in Romand’s more contained world, the collapse is just as complete. They were both hamsters running furiously in a wheel with no way to get off.

This book was written in 2000. The events took place in 1993. Romand was still a fairly young man when all of this happened (in his 30s). France does not have the death penalty. I looked him up, and sure enough, after twenty-six years, he was paroled in 2019. He is still alive and apparently residing in a Benedictine monastery with an electronic bracelet to monitor his movements.

The sub title of this book was A True Story of Monstrous Deception. Indeed it was, and I found it fascinating.

A Film With An 8 Track Film Score

Title: Licorice Pizza

Rating: 4 Stars

First of all, this film is not about licorice pizza. That sounds gross. Licorice pizza is slang for an LP (get it, LP’s are round like pizza and black like licorice). Licorice Pizza is a local chain of record stores in Los Angeles whose heyday was in the 1970s.

This is a story that evokes a specific time and place. The time is around 1973. The place is San Fernando Valley.  Many of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films are set in San Fernando Valley or, more broadly, Southern California (eg Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice).

On picture day at his school, fifteen year old child actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) meets twenty-five year old photographer’s assistant Alana Kane (Alana Haim). Very self-confident and mature for a fifteen year old, Gary manages to coerce Alana to meet him for dinner (at Alana’s insistence, only as friends). Even though she is much older, Alana seems a bit adrift and begins to be drawn into Gary’s orbit.

They proceed to have some adventures together. Alana agrees to chaperone Gary on a New York trip for a promotion tour. In auditions, it becomes clear that Gary, tall and large for a fifteen year old, can no longer continue his career as a child actor. Undeterred, he gets into the water bed business. With his brash self confidence, he is a natural salesman. This continues on until the oil crisis of 1973. The crisis destroys the water bed business.

Alana joins a mayoral campaign. While helping Alana film a commercial with the candidate, Gary overhears the candidate say that pinball is on the verge of being legalized. Armed with this inside information, Gary decides that his next venture will be a pinball arcade.

In all of this, there is attraction, jealousy, and tension between Alana and Gary. Is the age difference too much? Does it matter?

Anderson does a great job evoking 1973. I was ten years old then. I remember when water beds were the coolest things in the universe. I had a friend that had a water bed. There was a pinball arcade within walking distance of my house that we loved to hang out at. The settings were all familiar to me. The living rooms and the kitchens were just as I remembered them.

There is strong acting in this film. Both Hoffman and Haim are quite good, which is surprising because this is the acting debut for both of them. In fact, Hoffman wasn’t even considering a career in acting until he was offered this role. Haim is a musician in a band with her sisters. The entire film relies upon the believability of this relationship. Entrusting that to two new actors seems like a serious risk. Be that as it may, it pays off. Hoffman and Haim make the characters interesting and their relationship compelling.

Other actors do strong work here as well. Bradley Cooper plays an over the top Jon Peters that has to be seen to be believed. Apparently Anderson previewed the character with the actual Jon Peters. Peters said that he’s not that crazy but that he definitely would have hit on the girl. Hilariously enough, Anderson wrote that into the scene as well.

Sean Penn plays a character inspired by the actor William Holden, trying to impress the young Alana with his Korean War stories and improvised motorcycle stunts. Tom Waite plays an over the top director (possibly inspired by Sam Peckinpah) that goads Penn into his dangerous stunt.

This really does seem to be a very personal film for Anderson. Cooper Hoffman is the son of a frequent collaborator of Anderson, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. I did not know that going in, but once I learned it, I couldn’t unsee the resemblance, both in appearance and in acting style, between the father and son. Apparently, many of Cooper Hoffman home movies growing up were filmed by Anderson.

Anderson was inspired by an elementary art teacher. Unbelievably, that art teacher is the mother of Alana Haim. In the film, the family scenes of Alana featured her actual sisters and parents.

That’s not the extent of the family connections. Anderson’s daughters also appear in the film. I’m not sure what the connection to Anderson is, but, in another acting debut, Leonard DiCaprio’s father, George, plays a water bed salesmen.

All of these personal connections seemed to give the film an intimate feel. The naturalist acting of Hoffman and Haim made me feel as if I’m actually in the scene watching them as an observer.

All of these things together make Licorice Pizza a well crafted film.

Universes of Hotdog Fingers And Pinatas

Title: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Rating: 5 Stars

Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen so many films that I’ve become jaded. Sure, I can find some small independent films that will surprise me, but mainstream films seem to follow pretty predictable paths.

And then there are films like this one.

The overarching theme is pretty well trod. There’s the multi-generational family at odds with each other. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn, the woman in the middle. She, with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), somewhat frantically run a laundromat on the verge of being shut down due to IRS troubles. Tired of being ignored, Waymond is planning to divorce Evelyn. Her father Gong Gong (James Hong) disowned her because of her marriage to Waymond and even now, all of these years later, sits in judgment and finds her lacking. Evelyn’s daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) has a fragile relationship with her mom, not helped by the fact that she’s gay, a fact that Evelyn keeps from Gong Gong.

So far we have a pretty conventional family drama. Will Evelyn ever slow down to appreciate the gentle loving Waymond? Will Evelyn come to terms with the different path that Joy is taking? Will Evelyn finally realize that she’s good enough even if she doesn’t receive her father’s approval?

And then things take a turn.

As they are on their way to an appointment to meet their IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis is nearly unrecognizable here), Waymond suddenly changes. He’s still the same guy but he’s now way more confident and competent. He explains that he is from a different universe. In fact, there are many parallel universes.

The universe that Waymond is from has created technology that allows people to jump across universes. His universe is the Alphaverse. He’s making these jumps because there is a malevolent force named Jobu Tupaki that was actually the Joy in his Alphaverse. The Evelyn in his Alphaverse worked Joy so hard in universe jumping that her mind splintered and Tupaki can now see all of the multiverses at once. Tupaki is taking all of the matter from all of the multiverses and is using it to create an everything bagel, thus endangering all existence.

The Alpha Waymond has been jumping all around the many multiverses looking for the Evelyn that will be able to take on Tupaki. He chooses Evelyn because she has been such a failure in her current universe. Since she has been the greatest failure of all of the Evelyns, she has the capacity to be the most powerful of them.

Got all of that?

Once Evelyn masters universe jumping, we see all kinds of different versions of Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy. In one, she’s an action hero movie star (much like Michelle Yeoh herself). In another, she’s a chef in an Asian steakhouse. And then it gets weird. There’s a universe where all members of it have hot dog fingers. There’s another where she and Joy are just two rocks. In another, they appear to be pinatas. Even the apparently normal universes contain oddities. In the steakhouse universe, her co-worker is being manipulated in a manner similar to the Pixar film Ratatouille, except that in this case it’s a raccoon that is the chef (ie Raccacoonie). In each of these universes, Evelyn is able to use the skills of that particular Evelyn in her fight against Tupaki.

What started as an Asian multi-generational family drama morphs into a martial arts film which morphs into a Matrix-like alternative reality film which morphs into a nihilistic philosophical film (what’s the point of anything if you have everything?) which morphs into an absurdist comedy of people walking around with hotdog weiners instead of fingers which morphs, of course, back to the Asian multi-generational family drama.

It’s all pretty wonderful, creative, amusing, and amazing. It’s from the same people (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known collectively as the Daniels) that made Swiss Army Man (which, if you haven’t seen, you must, starring Paul Dano as a suicidal man marooned on an island and Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse that has washed up on the beach (and no, I’m not making that up)). I can hardly wait for what they’ll come up with next. The Daniels have the potential to become their generation’s Charles Kaufman.

Since the pandemic, I haven’t made much of an effort to watch new films. Even so, I have to say that this film and RRR have proven that fun, challenging, and innovative films are still being made in 2022.

Plan For Yankeedom Domination

Title: American Character

Rating: 4 Stars

Colin Woodard has written one of my favorite nonfiction books, American Nations (I wrote about it here). His thesis is that our notion of thirteen colonies uniting to overthrow British rule and then becoming one integrated nation of Americans is flawed. In fact, the colonies were formed over a long period of time by religious dissenters, Dutch traders, slave holders from Barbados, Scots-Irish borderlanders, and British aristocrats, among others. Each of these groups has different ideas of how to govern, who should govern, and even more broadly, how society should be structured. Woodard identified eleven such groups, gave each a name, and called collectively them the American Nations.

In fact, even during the Revolutionary War, some of these groups actively supported the British (eg New York City was peaceably occupied by the British for nearly the entire war). Once independence was achieved, instead of being one happy family of Americans, these various nations fight each other for supremacy. This struggle, centuries later, continues on today.

Fundamentally, the struggles boils down to what should be the function of the American federal government. Should it be focused on the common good or on individual liberty?

If a person is from the Northeast (Yankeedom nation) or the Pacific Coast (Left Coast nation), the answer is obvious. The priority should definitely be on making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to be successful. What does this mean? Well, public education should be freely available to all. Infrastructure should be in place for all to use. Laws should be passed to guarantee that no one is discriminated against.

If a person is from the South (Deep South nation) or Virginia (Tidewater nation), the answer is equally obvious. Individual liberty is the highest priority. Specifically, the priority is the individual liberty of the wealthy. After all, if you’re rich, you’ve earned it and you deserved it. If you’re poor, well, it’s your own fault. It sucks to be you.

Therefore, public education is unimportant. In fact it’s self defeating because it just gives ideas to those whose lot is manual labor. The primary role of federal government is defense. Taxation is extremely limited. The government that they hold up as their shining example, with its aristocratic philosophers resting upon the labors of slaves, was ancient Greece.

Broadly, American history can be seen as a struggle between these two ideas. For example, as I’ve written about extensively, no matter what Lost Cause apologists have said in the past, the root cause of the Civil War was slavery. The Deep South states were the first to secede upon Lincoln’s election. They were willing to (and ultimately did) sacrifice everything for the right of their aristocratic slaveowners to own other human beings. During the Civil War, while the Southern legislators were, um, otherwise engaged, the Yankeedom legislators took the lead and implement many federal programs (eg railroads, public universities) that yielded benefits to all.

With the death of Reconstruction, the age of Laissez-Faire arrived. The Southern elite rose up and reclaimed their place. Black code laws were implemented. Supreme Court accepted segregation in Plessy v Ferguson. Large corporations were formed and created monopolies. Competition was destroyed. Strikes were broken up using federal troops. Labor unions were defanged. Salaries for working people plummeted so much that husbands, wives, and children were forced to work just to eat and live. This was the height of Social Darwinism. If someone was hungry or homeless while someone else had millions, that was simply survival of the fittest. States like Nevada and Montana were effectively run by businesses. The Supreme Court consistently upheld corporate rights over state laws attempting to control them.

By the way, if you were to ask a Libertarian today when was America at its greatest, there’s a very good chance that they would say 1880.

This continued on until the world collapsed in 1929. Andrew Mellon, the long running Treasury Secretary, tried to fix it using standard libertarian business practices, making the problem much worse. The election of Franklin Roosevelt ushered in a new era. The government stepped in big time with new programs and massive infusions of cash. This helped, but it was World War II that ended the Great Depression. It was during the war that government size and influence grew even more substantially.

This continued on until the 1960s. With the failure of the Vietnam War and then Watergate, faith in the competence and morality of federal government was wounded. Another key factor was the passing of significant civil rights bills. These bills were inspired by Yankeedom’s ideal of equal opportunity for all. However, in doing so, the Deep South nation was able to tap into other nations’ (eg Greater Appalachia, Far West) sense of grievance to create a new bloc of voters that was able to stop if not reverse these gains.

Starting with President Reagan, even as the size of government increased due to the growth of the military; environmental, safety, and labor regulations were rolled back. The tax rates on the most wealthy were reduced from 50% to 28%. The tax rates on the poorest increased from 11% to 15%. Even when democrats like Bill Clinton were elected, they governed from the middle with such actions as reforming welfare by drastically restricting it.

Now we’re in a time where it appears that we’re at a crossroads. Consistently the nations of Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast face off against the Deep South, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, and the Far West. What path will the United States take next? Woodard has a plan to move forward.

There are two things to keep in mind. One is that Woodard appears to be from Maine (he currently lives there). That puts him pretty firmly in Yankeedom. Therefore his plan is to create a platform of ideas that would appeal to multiple American nations (eg Midlands, Greater Appalachia, and Far West) but that also work towards the common good. Since I was born, raised, and lived for over fifty years on the West Coast, I’m firmly in the Left Coast nation. As such, I firmly support Woodard’s platform of ideas. However, I’m not at all sure that the citizens of the other nations would be so inclined.

The reason why I say that is because of the second thing. This book was published in 2016. That is, it was written before the election of Donald Trump. Donald Trump, if nothing else, made obvious that overt ploys to grievance, racism, sexism, anti-intellectualism can still be a winning ticket.

It was interesting to see how Woodard was able to weave his concept of American nations into the fabric of American history. Given all that’s happened since 2016, it’s hard for me to see how making high minded commitments to fairness will resonate and create some new grand voting bloc majority.

There’s No Gate Like OG Gate

Title: Watergate A New History

Rating: 5 Stars

As I read any history of Watergate, two thoughts keep running through my mind. One is how unnecessary the break-in was. Nixon had an impressive set of accomplishments. He negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leaders. He opened up China by visiting Mao Zedong. He took the US off of the gold standard. Significant progress was made in the Middle East peace process. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. Although he did it using brutal methods, he ended US involvement in the Vietnam War.

In opposition, the Democratic Party was in shambles in 1972. In George McGovern, they nominated a candidate that was probably unelectable in the general election. To make things even worse, he fumbled his vice presidential nomination so that McGovern ended up looking as shifty as Nixon, no mean feat.

There was no question that Nixon was going to win the election. All of the nonsense of breaking into the office of the Democratic National Committee was absolutely superfluous.

The second thought that I have is how inevitable it was. Nixon was deeply insecure and paranoid. Convinced that he was surrounded by enemies and that those enemies were doing things even worse to him than he could ever imagine, his responses to these wild imaginings was going to inevitably destroy him. Once the thread around the Watergate coverup started being pulled, it exposed a whole myriad array of crimes that included wiretapping, using the CIA to stop an FBI investigation, dodgy tax filings, safes full of cash, payoffs, an FBI Director burning evidence, and the imprisonment of a White House Chief of Staff, a White House Domestic Policy Advisor, and an US Attorney General.

When you read a one volume history of Watergate, especially one as well written as this, it really does feel like reading fiction. The large number and wide variety of characters, each with their own motivations, and seemingly uncountable intersecting plot lines remind me of War and Peace. The immensely talented but deeply flawed man at the center of it all is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Richard III or maybe some Greek hero brought down by his fatal flaw.

It’s difficult for me to even begin to summarize all of the facets of Watergate. Instead, I think that I’ll just list some interesting bon mots. If they seem interesting to you, then there’s a very good chance that this book will be up your alley.

The Watergate burglars weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. Hunt and Liddy were monitoring the burglars from a nearby hotel room. When the burglars were arrested, Hunt and Liddy left in a hurry. When investigators later searched the hotel room, they found spy equipment, sequentially numbered $100 bills, letters and mail mentioning E Howard Hunt (?!), and burglars’ address books, including entries for “W. House”. Like I said, not exactly masterminds.

A former New York police officer was used to deliver cash payouts to the families of the arrested burglars. For security purposes, he only spoke on pay phones. He spent so much time on pay phones that he started carrying around a bus driver’s coin changer on his belt.

By the end of Watergate, Nixon’s paranoia has become contagious. All of the major parties involved in Watergate were taping each other and trying to manipulate each other into making confessional statements.

By now, most people know that Woodward’s / Bernstein’s infamous anonymous source was Mark Felt, then the number two person at the FBI. The fact that the guy that was literally one step away from being the FBI Director was skulking around in the middle of the night to talk with a reporter seems insane. What might be even more insane is that Felt’s motive for doing so was, well, not exactly altruistic. Upon Hoover’s death, Felt expected to be named Director. When Nixon instead named someone from outside the agency, L Patrick Gray, Felt was infuriated. His leaks weren’t meant to expose some coverup that he disapproved of but to make Gray look bad so that Felt could take over. What’s even more amazing to me was that Nixon knew, almost from the outset, that Felt was the main leaker. Here the nation was, playing parlor game of who Deep Throat was and Nixon was like, it’s gotta be Mark Felt.

Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, always seemed like an innocent party who was a bit too loyal to the man with whom she worked many years. However, on the tapes, Nixon is heard asking her if she has any cash and she admits that she has $100,000 in cash in a safe. This is not something that you usually hear from an innocent party.

As a child growing up during this time, I remember seeing Martha Mitchell on the news. The network news kind of painted her like a crazy person. No doubt she was a drinker, but that doesn’t change the fact that, while she was talking on the phone to the reporter Helen Thomas, an FBI agent broke into her room, yanked the phone out of the wall, and essentially held her captive.

I knew about the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon wanted to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor. He ordered the Attorney General to do so. He refused and resigned. He then asked the Deputy Attorney General to do so. He refused and resigned. He then asked the Solicitor General to do so. Since there was really no one left in the hierarchy, the Solicitor General felt obligated to stay and did as he was asked. What I did not realize was how severe the resulting political firestorm really was. Almost immediately, the mood of the nation flipped towards favoring Nixon’s resignation. What’s significant here is that the Saturday Night Massacre occurred in October of 1973. He didn’t end up resigning until August of 1974. In October of 1973, Agnew had resigned and Ford had not been confirmed as Vice President. Therefore, if Nixon had resigned in October as the nation was beginning to demand, the Speaker of the House, the Democrat Carl Albert, would have become President.

During the last six months or so of Nixon’s administration, he’d almost completely checked out of the actual job of President. There was a day in which he only had two minutes of activity (one phone call). Another day he had something like 12 minutes. Other than that, he just sat brooding in his hideaway office.

At the height of the Yom Kippur War, it appeared that Soviets were using it as an opportunity to insert 50,000 Soviet troops into the Middle East. Kissinger contacted Nixon but found him drunk and depressed. Kissinger met with the Defense Secretary, the CIA Director, and the Joint Chiefs Chairman. They decided to move the US military from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 3 without any consultation with Nixon (you know, the Commander in Chief and all of that). The Soviets backed down and withdrew their troops.

That was just a taste of some of the shenanigans taking place in the last couple of years of the Nixon administration. Graff does a great job telling the overarching story of Watergate while also integrating little entertaining nuggets of information that brings the characters to light.

At least for the moment, my compulsive periodic need to read about Watergate has been sated.

“You Are So, So Much A Crook”

Continuing on from my last post, I’m still in the midst of reading a recently published history of Watergate. One of Nixon’s most famous quotes from this time, was “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.” During the 1970s, if you were a Nixon impersonator, that was a line that you just had to use. Well, regarding the veracity of Nixon’s statement, let’s check the, um, tape.

Here’s a partial list of, at best, sketchy if not downright illegal moments during his presidency.

Chennault Affair: I talked about this in the previous post but it’s crazy enough to deserve a re-mention. While running for President, Nixon covertly met with the South Vietnamese ambassador and enlisted Anna Chennault to sabotage the ongoing Vietnam Peace talks in Paris to prevent Vice President Humphrey from getting any credit.

Huston Plan: Concerned about “left-wing extremism”, Nixon asked an aide to develop a plan to counteract them. This plan, built in conjunction with members of the FBI, included domestic burglary, illegal electronic surveillance, and opening mail. At one time it advocated setting up camps where such dissidents would be kept. Nixon actually approved it, but of all people, J Edgar Hoover objected to it. If Hoover thinks that you’ve gone too far, it might be time to do a little self examination.

Kissinger Wiretaps: Enraged at yet another newspaper leak that he felt endangered national security, Kissinger worked with Hoover to identify likely culprits of the leak. Eventually some eighteen people, including people that worked on the National Security Council and at the White House, had their phones covertly wiretapped. The wiretaps continued for close to two years. The leaker was never identified.

Ellsberg Burglary: As I wrote about in the previous post, the Watergate break-in and subsequent coverup was instigated by the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. Ironically, these papers had nothing to do with Nixon. It did lead to the formation of the Plumbers, a White House led group dedicated to finding leaks (get it?). Daniel Ellsberg confessed to leaking the Pentagon Papers. Wanting to dig up dirt on Ellsberg, the Plumbers successfully broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, looking for Ellsberg’s file. Perhaps they were looking to move that Ellsberg had mommy issues?

ITT Affair: The ITT corporation was in the midst of an Justice Department anti-trust investigation. Upon donating $400,000 to the 1972 Republican National Convention, the investigation was, amazingly enough, rapidly concluded. Jack Anderson (as discussed in my last post, the journalist that Liddy and Hunt seriously contemplated killing) published a memo from an ITT lobbyist, Dita Beard, specifically admitting to the quid pro quo. In the ensuing uproar, Beard disappeared, later to reappear in a Denver hospital. Her doctor, apparently not believing in patient confidentiality, said that she was an irrational drunk. Hunt (disguised in a red wig and using an assumed name), was dispatched to Beard’s bed with an envelope of cash. That was enough for her to ‘recover’ her memory and to recant the memo.

Vesco Donation: Robert Vesco was a successful businessman that had run afoul of the Security Exchange Commission (SEC). Vesco proposed to give Maurice Stans, working on Nixon’s reelection campaign, $500,000 to make the the problem go away. Later, $200,000 in cash was delivered to Stan’s office. That was enough for Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, to set up a meeting between the SEC and Vesco. Vesco ended up having to flee the country, ultimately ending up in Cuba. He continued his fraudulent activities there, eventually ending having to serve 13 years in a Cuban jail. He later died in Cuba, but there are some that believe that he faked his death.

Milk Price Fixing: The dairy industry, represented by the Associated Milk Producers, wanted to raise milk price supports. Nixon’s lawyer told them that “contributions would be appreciated”. They responded with $100,000 cash in a briefcase. that was apparently insufficient. They later promised $2,000,000 to Nixon’s reelection. Amazingly enough, the next day the milk price supports were adjusted upward, even though they’d last been set only two weeks earlier.

George Steinbrenner: Yes, I’m talking about the owner of the Yankees. Steinbrenner had been a major donor to the Democratic Party. Noticing that he was not making his usual annual donation, House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill contacted him. Only agreeing to speak to him in person, Steinbrenner told O’Neill that his company was under federal investigation on multiple fronts, including safety standards, working conditions, and antitrust. He was told that his problems would disappear if he contributed to Nixon’s reelection. Steinbrenner offered $25,000, but that was not nearly enough. He was provided a list of sixty pro-Nixon organizations. He was told to donate $3,000 to thirty-three of the organizations.

Since I’ve already written about it, I’m not even including Vice President Spiro Agnew’s receiving of envelopes full of cash as part of his long running Maryland graft.

It’s kind of amazing that they actually found time to, you know, run the country.