Posted 9:39 PM by Michael

LATEST POSTS: Deep Snooze The, uh, truth about, uh, that Watergate thing • Bubba Mullah Falwell and Islam • Sin Visible The Church thinks differently • The Two and Only Bob and Ray, miracle men • Things Left Undone Notes for the next day after

DEEP SNOOZE

To judge by the press, the world is fairly consumed at the moment by a single question—who was Deep Throat? Was it W. Mark Felt? Pat Buchanan? Old suspects like Kissinger, Haig, Rosemary Woods?

Meanwhile, most of America is consumed by a single question rooted in a complex mystery—how do I work the damn Memento DVD? The identity of Deep Throat, on the other hand, is right up there with "what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?" on the list of questions that most people have long since stopped pondering—that is, most people who are not in the endlessly self-fascinated fraternity of the press.

Even a couple of years ago, Timothy Noah in Slate was marveling at the notion that no one seemed that interested when an article in The Atlantic pretty convincingly fingered FBI bigwig Mark Felt (who just happened to have all kinds of connections to one Bob Woodward). For people who still pine for the rich vein of commentary and parody that Nixon offered in the 70s, the idea that the rest of America barely remembers him is hard to accept. There are still enough Nixonhounds out there that no less than two Nixon movies (the unintentional comedy Nixon and the intentional one Dick) got greenlighted in the last few years and promptly died of indifference. Somewhere out there, David Frye is still wagging his jowls, denying his crookdom.

But let's remember that Nixon isn't even the most recent president to face impeachment. After Monica, Watergate seems as dry as the Sherman Adams scandal. It's like a 70s movie (say, Peckinpah's The Getaway) that seemed so thrilling when you saw it back then, and now seems, despite a certain gritty verisimilitude, to be kinda dull next to the much more hyped-up thrillers of our time.

But to the press... now there's a different story. To them, after all the sleaze they've bathed in during the Monica-Chandra years, Watergate seems like a golden moment, when what they did was true and right and above all, validated by that mysterious grownup in the parking garage who told the kids with long hair that they were on the right track (or berated them, like a tough but loving drill sergeant, for not trying harder). For the press, All the President's Men isn't a political story—it's a tale of youthful promise golden and unattainable in this imperfect world, like Le Grand Meaulnes or A Separate Peace or (note 70s Redford connection) The Great Gatsby. Deep Throat is the page one story across the water, to be gazed at and never had again.

So, who was Deep Throat? Well, he was more than one person. He was Mark Felt or somebody like him, plainly, some of Woodward's information clearly had an FBI source. And it suddenly looks really, really good that it was also Pat Buchanan—you know that one just feels right, that Loose Buchanan is exactly the sort who would tattle to the press he officially hated... after extracting a lifetime pledge on a stack of Bibles never to tell. He did damage to Bush Sr. in New Hampshire, who would say that he wouldn't be capable of stabbing Nixon in the back in a parking garage?

I think Felt (and/or others) had the real info that helped the Post. But it was Buchanan who would have created the myth of Deep Throat by insisting on all the spy play, and secretly thrilling to his fame. And that puts a whole new perspective on the way the Deep Throat scenes with Hal Holbrook in the movie play—if it was Buchanan, suddenly the grownup gravitas of Holbrook needs to be replaced by a jittery, manic, two-timing juvenility, thrilling to the danger and the hugeness of his role in history, even as he flirts with self-destruction and hears the secret police around every corner.

If Spielberg can change E.T., we can imagine a 30th anniversary edition of All the President's Men with the Buchanan Deep Throat that really was replacing sober Hal. Dennis Hopper, for instance, would have been the right age and type at the time; so would Bruce Dern. The authentic picture of Deep Throat might be Hopper's speed-freak acolyte of a leader gone mad in Apocalypse Now—or maybe the twisted veteran Dern played in Black Sunday, who was so bummed by the 70s he just wanted to blow everything up.

Posted 1:38 PM by Michael
BUBBA MULLAH

A Muslim group has condemned Jerry Falwell for things he said about Islam.

Where to start? Or is this beyond commentary, let alone parody?

How could a Muslim group be surprised that Jerry Falwell thinks Islam is a false faith and a pernicious one? Obviously they think the same about his. And considering that Falwell got into trouble right after September 11th for suggesting that the attacks were a righteous punishment for something he didn't like (a DVD release of The People Vs. Larry Flynt, I think), there's more congruence between the two points of view than there's difference.

In fact, the only difference I can see is the society around the two fundamentalisms. Falwell lives in a society where even Southern Baptists dare not commit wholesale murder (as they did as recently as the 1960s against the integrationist heresy)—and where, if you speak the obvious tenets of your primitive creed in public, such as that all other religions are false and their adherents doomed to boiling pitch for all eternity, you have to hire a PR agency to get you out of trouble. Muslim fundamentalists are under no such societal restrictions, though once again we find them taking advantage of our western ways to whine in public in a way they plainly wouldn't at home, since no one would even know why they were complaining (he called Mohammed a pedophile? Well, what do you expect from the slave-lackeys of the Jewish blood-drinkers? We will have his tongue for calling us violent!)

It is again to the West's credit, if not to Falwell's, that our mullahs have to behave themselves according to a considerably more civil standard than in the Arab world, where becoming more extreme is as sure a path to popularity as it is here for new Fox TV shows.

Posted 3:49 PM by Michael
SIN VISIBLE

At a sort of religious town hall meeting in Chicago recently, Catholic parishioners reacted with scornful disbelief when a priest suggested that there needed to be some "wiggle room" in a zero-tolerance policy for pedophile priests. "Is that the same wiggle room that the Church allows on divorce or abortion?" was the general response.

This same point has been made by others—that on a graduated scale of morality running from, say, cussing to genocide, the Church takes a much harder line toward some things that many don't believe belong on the List of Bad Things at all (i.e., divorce, homosexuality) than on other things that seem unspeakable and horrifying (using one's position as a priest to rape seven-year-olds). From a criminal justice perspective, in which Bad Things are purely linear and the worse/further down the scale something is the longer a sentence you get for it, this seems a case of badly screwed-up priorities on the Church's part.

From the Church's perspective, however, it makes sense—and in some ways may even be more realistic about human nature. The danger in the linear view of crime and/or sin is that it makes it easy to draw a cut-off point—ordinary people may cheat on our taxes and have affairs, but there's a line beyond which lie the monsters who do what you or I would never do (rape seven-year-olds, deal heroin, stick up gas stations, ethnically cleanse the neighborhood). Where the Church knows that (in theory) we are all capable of anything; sin is in all our hearts, temptation always exists. There but for the grace of God go I.

For the Church, it's the state of sin or sinlessness that matters more than the individual sin—which is why continuing in a lesser sin like divorce or homosexuality is worse than a single act of utter depravity. Thus it was possible for the notorious Crusader-turned-child-murderer Gilles de Rais to make a genuine repentance. He still got burned at the stake for his horrible crimes, but it is a matter of faith that he then walked straight into Heaven, soul cleansed—as unjust as that may seem by modern standards.

Unfortunately, I think that this point of view starts to present its own temptations when, like so many priests today, you don't believe what you're saying about divorce and homosexuality and birth control any more than your parishioners do. If you're cutting divorced parishioners slack outside the official system, the temptation is surely there to cut your fellow priests slack as well for their adult affairs (straight or gay). It's only fair, right? And if the system in turn encourages you to see the priest who raped an altar boy as having succumbed to a temptation that could have overcome any of us, and as having made a genuine repentance, then that doesn't leave much of anybody or anything for you to condemn morally. Call it laissez-faire Catholicism.

Hypocritical though the criminal-justice model may be, for allowing us to draw a distinction between ourselves and the monsters that is by no means as clear as we'd like to believe, the Church's approach is worse if it discredits the notion of any distinction at all. When everybody's a sinner, everybody gets a pass. To force a large body of men to preach a moral orthodoxy (on birth control, homosexuality, divorce) in which few of them actually believe must have the effect of eroding the solidity of their moral convictions on every other subject. The Church has become a machine for producing publicly prudish, privately tolerant libertines.

Is there a way out? Obviously I think that the popular suggestion on the right (weed out the gays and shore up the orthodoxy!) is what produced this crisis, not the solution to it. I don't see any way other than the one that the Church has always taken (eventually) and always denied that it was doing: change with the times. The Church has accepted human progress before. It cooperates with other faiths it once sought to destroy, it has become a voice against war and the death penalty after long holding the record for most blood spilled. It will eventually find a way to take all these "sins" that no one believes in any more off the list, even as it denies doing any such thing. And then, with these distractions removed, maybe priests will be able to see the sin of child rape as clearly as the rest of us do.

Posted 5:28 PM by Michael
THE TWO AND ONLY

As the father of Letterman writer/Farrelly Brothers actor Chris Elliott, Bob Elliott could hardly be a more perfect specimen of an older generation of comedians. So it's easy to think of Bob and Ray, the comedy duo he formed with Ray Goulding from 1946 until Goulding's death in 1990, as representing the tail end of a tradition of classic radio comedy which—however fondly recalled—is as dead today as ventriloquism or trained dog acts. Or, for that matter, as dead as Albert Brooks' father, who (in a manner unimaginable now) actually made a living on radio as a Greek dialect comedian called "Parkyakarkus."

But consider that both the critically acclaimed comedy Election and The Simpsons have made in-jokey reference to a school assembly parody on an album by the counterculture comedy troupe Firesign Theatre—which itself was a fairly close lift of an anarchic commencement scene from Bob and Ray's "Lawrence Fechtenberger, Interstellar Officer Candidate." Somehow I doubt there are many third-generation references to Parkyakarkus, or even to Jack Benny or Fred Allen, turning up in hip indie films today. It's the kind of recurring subterranean riff Greil Marcus could build an entire alternative history of America on.

In fact Bob and Ray weren't so much the last of a breed now gone as they were the first of a type that has never been more omnipresent—the smartass morning dj. That's not to blame them for the dick jokes that fill today's airwaves; two cleaner comics were never born, even in Boston. But it is to give them credit for sweeping away the blanket of smarm that once covered mass media, annihilating it so completely that—like the subject of an H.L. Mencken book review—it survives now only in the brilliant ridicule it provoked.

We forget how much of radio and early TV was taken up with homespun schmaltz like The Breakfast Club and Tony Won's Scrapbook and especially Arthur Godfrey, whose folksiness and prickliness and relentless shilling Bob and Ray sent up for decades as "Arthur Sturdley." It's bracing to hear how, in Bob and Ray's hands, the familial humbug of these shows inevitably gives way to the kind of bickering that suggests real families—"Oh dry up, you old windbag," the hostess of "Aunt Penny's Sunlit Kitchen" is wont to snap to her announcer-"nephew" Danny.

When a Queen For a Day-type program reunites a brother and sister after 60 years (they turn out to have nothing to say to each other and can't wait to get back to the bus station), mass media's pretense of caring lasts about ten seconds before Ray is crabbily urging the frail old woman, "Could you hurry it up, lady, we've got a show to do!" (You have to think for a minute to realize that that's Ray urging Ray to hurry up-so he can meet Ray.)

From local radio in Boston and New York in the 40s and early 50s to national syndication, television in the 60s, and NPR in the 1980s, Bob and Ray carried on the work of destroying professional broadcasting begun one Halloween by Orson Welles. They exploded the idea that radio was theater of the mind with feats of daffy surrealism like "Matt Neffer, Boy Spotwelder," in which the sound effects man clumps Matt and his friend Todd up four flights of stairs, Todd carrying on a conversation all the way, only for Matt to undercut him at the end by blandly announcing "I'm over here in the sewing room, Todd."

Ray Goulding was the great character actor of the pair, a big, hearty Irishman who played the deluded dreamers who were their most famous characters, like the butterfly trainer who spends two years training creatures who rarely live that long, or the historian who didn't like to stop to check facts when his writing was really flowing, and as a result made errors like calling our first president Nelson Washington.

But it was goggle-eyed, deadpan Bob Elliott who made perhaps the pair's greatest contribution to American attitudes by relentlessly puncturing the serenely stupid professionalism of the news anchor, the stentorian cluelessness of the self-important interviewer. Hear enough of Bob Elliott, and you can never watch Peter Jennings again.

He was Wally Ballou, winner of 17 major diction awards who can't interview a light bulb collector without dropping his exhibits, who goes out to do a man on the street interview and interviews... another man on the street interviewer. (That was Bob finding Bob, incidentally.) He was the one who had the world's largest jukebox on his show, then couldn't find a quarter in the studio to play it. Elliott may not be Albert Brooks' father, but Wally Ballou is plainly father to Brooks' flop-sweat-soaked character in Broadcast News.

Once their media-subverting work even carried with it real courage. Joe McCarthy was dead five years before Hollywood dared make him The Manchurian Candidate; but Bob and Ray watched the Army-McCarthy hearings every afternoon and came back the next morning integrating what they'd heard into their soap opera parody "Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife," with Ray as the slurring, insinuating Zoning Commissioner Carstairs, producing doctored photos to railroad Mary and Harry Backstayge for building a 26-story home in their suburb of Skunk Haven. (In equal opportunity satire, Bob also does a dead-on version of McCarthy's pious opponent, Joseph Welch.)

One of their successors has (quite exaggeratedly) called himself "King of All Media," but Bob and Ray, who over 44 years had successful careers in radio, TV and as a stage act (and even sold a few books and records, too), would never have dreamed of claiming vainglorious dominance over something so plainly preposterous as American mass culture. In fact, much as boxing fans enjoy hypothesizing the results of, say, a Joe Louis-Mike Tyson matchup, I like to imagine what the pair would have done with their most famous modern heir in New York morning drivetime comedy. Perhaps "Howard Sturdley, Extra Large King of All Mediums?"

Posted 5:28 PM by Michael
THINGS LEFT UNDONE

I saw the end of the world once. I was watching a movie with some friends when a streak of orange flame appeared out the window, so still in its spot in the sky that it had to be miles up in space. There are not many things that would produce such a sight in Kansas, and all of us said "Holy Jesus!" or more scatological words to that effect.

Then it was gone, and because there was nothing else we could do, we went back to our movie, each wondering if, in a moment or two, the night sky would turn to high noon and an instant later the house would be blown apart around us as we baked to a crisp.

This really happened—in fact, it was even the Russians who were responsible, as we learned from the next day's paper. The orange glow was a space station or satellite of theirs which fell to earth some time around 1985. But what's interesting to me now was our reaction: in a state where people are so used to tornado warnings that they routinely keep radios and playing cards in the basement, we didn't budge from our chairs. If the end of the world in fire was coming, all we could do was shrug and wait for a hideous death. While watching the rest of the movie.

That kind of passivity and inability to act to save your skin is, I suppose, understandable in a group of ordinary citizens. It is a good deal less encouraging, or forgivable, when it comes from our president, our secretaries of State and Defense and Transportation, our Attorney General and the directors of our major intelligence and crimefighting agencies.

I understand why all those worthies went to the airwaves to cover their collective butt on the possibility that a terrorist attack will happen again in the United States. They had gotten beaten up in the press over what could have been known before September 11th, and the conspiracy hounds were salivating, since there are always people who, observing that 2 was seen in both Minnesota and Florida, will leap straight past "the FBI should have put 2 and 2 together" to "the president himself knew 4 all along."

What worries me is that announcing that a terrorist act will happen again seems to be the only thing they're doing about it. Like us, they've accepted the orange streak in the sky as an inevitable fact, and they're just sitting in their chairs waiting for it and watching the movie. So when the next one comes, as they say it will, look over this list, and see which of these things which might have prevented it have been done:

• Passenger-profile-based rather than random airport security checks

• A restructuring of the CIA, including the replacement of director George Tenet by a non-insider; or the creation of an entirely new intelligence agency to ultimately supersede it

• A serious overhaul of the FBI, dedicated among other things to rooting out sexism the way the Army has worked to rid itself of racism

• A bipartisan congressional investigation into intelligence failures

• The termination of SDI, our Maginot Line in space, since it is now obvious that the bomb that comes our way will not be carried on an ICBM launched from a recognizable state

• A well-funded program to help the former Soviet states keep track of their nukes—and their nuclear scientists

• Serious pressure on the Saudi government to stop the funding of terror and of extremist madrassas in other countries, both by the government and by Saudi citizens

• Nation-building in Afghanistan, to ensure that a few years from now we aren't facing a strongman there (to be initially fawned over by certain parts of our government, as Saddam Hussein and others were in their time)

• Lifting of textile tariffs, to help Pakistan develop industry and get all those future terrorists off its streets and into jobs

• "Regime change" in Iraq, and a clear message that the same awaits anybody else who decides a nuclear or biological weapons capability would be a worthwhile project for a small, poor country

• Willingness to consider whether the tax cut passed last year is unaffordable in the present emergency

Many of these things would be politically difficult—but when is that ever not true? If you're not going to do hard things when you have 90% approval ratings, when are you going to do them? For a Bush to kill SDI, to get really tough on his oil business pals the Saudis, to say that the tax cut has to be at least slowed would be as startling, and as powerful, as it was for that anticommunist attack dog Dick Nixon to be the man who met with Mao. Remember that George W. Bush is the descendant of two presidents, however, and if his father was Nixon's Chinese ambassador, on the other side he comes from one of the timekillers who occupied the office to no effect while waiting for the Civil War, Franklin Pierce. The mere fact of being in office during a crisis is no guarantee of action—or of honor in the history books.

On September 11th Rudolph Giuliani, asked what the likely death toll of the World Trade Center attack was, replied (in one of the finest phrases ever to come extemporaneously out of a politician's mouth), "More than any of us can bear." But if that were really true, we wouldn't be passive, we'd be tearing the world apart to keep it from happening again. The fact that we have accepted the inevitability of another such attack without doing everything we know we need to do to prevent it suggests that, as it turns out, 3000 dead was well within our capacity to bear. Perhaps next time we'll find out if 100,000 or 10 million is closer to the mark.

POSTSCRIPT (6/2): Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom referenced this piece but questioned my inclusion of two items: SDI and sexism in the FBI. Here's why I see those as significant, if not perhaps top-tier issues. SDI is simply a weapon for fighting the last war, as surely as the Crusader is. It's not only ineffective against the threat we actually face, it encourages the sort of attack by which a Saddam induces an al-Qaeda to attack us without leaving an easy-to-spot trail back to him. Recognizing all this would be the first step toward putting resources into things that would be effective—and would free up a serious chunk of change and manpower at our top labs.

As for rooting out sexism at the FBI, well, that's an indirect weapon to be sure. But surely the good old boy, white socks and black shoes culture at the FBI is a big reason why nobody listened to people like Coleen Rowley—why she was still being blown off until days ago. At the very least, I suggest the entire FBI should be forced to watch the first series of Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren....

POST-POSTSCRIPT: (6/4) And another blog, Rat's Nest, does me the surprising courtesy of delving deeply into several of the items on my list, to which (for time reasons) I can only discourteously respond briefly right now with some quick points more of amplification than disagreement, since I mostly don't disagree:

1) Just because passenger profiling (in other words, grilling Arab men—if we're going to advocate it, let's be honest about it) wouldn't have been politically feasible before September 11 doesn't mean we shouldn't be serious about it now; there are a whole lot of ways that we were slack for years (all of a Democratic administration and the first several months of a Republican one) that we shouldn't be now. I'm not interested in hanging this on Clinton, Bush, the FBI, the CIA or anybody else besides al-Qaeda; that's a (literally) deadly distraction. But the fact that the FBI didn't even come close to stopping September 11— or rather, the fact that Minneapolis was getting close and Washington stopped them like a brick wall— requires some serious shaking up of priorities and structure. And if top officials lied to Congress, as it seems pretty clear they did, they should go to jail. And if that sounds harsh, it beats the hell out of being in the Hoover building when it collapses.

2) As for the point that the problem was the FBI and CIA not talking to each other, that could be. I suspect one of the big problems we have is too much of certain kinds of information and not enough perceptive analysis. I remember what somebody said about East Germany's Stasi— that they were hands-down the best spy service in the Soviet world, they knew absolutely everything that was going on in East Germany, except that the regime was a week away from collapsing. (A great book on this subject is Timothy Garton Ash's The File, in which journalist Ash gets his own Stasi file from 20 years earlier and finds it a very weird memoir of his own youth, sometimes more perceptive than he was, sometimes totally clueless.) So anyway, no, I don't really have a plan for fixing the CIA as such— just a deep-seated conviction that a once-vital agency has turned into an employment plan for WASP mediocrities.

3) As for whether the FBI could be turned too PC by the "Loony Left"... well, it seems an unlikely danger at the moment, any more than rooting out racism put the Army in danger of having too much of da funk!