Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 19

Lawless

New movie adapted by Nick Cave from The Wettest County in the World.

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An Aside to Ronald Reagan

[Eldridge Cleaver challenging Ronald Reagan to a duel. It was published in Ramparts in ’68, as far as I can find. You're welcome.]

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I have never liked Ronald Reagan. Even back in the days of his bad movies — bullshit flicks that never turned me on to any glow—I felt about him the way I felt about such nonviolent cowboys as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry: that they were never going to cause any action or allow anything to happen. They were just there, occupying space and wasting my time, my money and my sanity. There was a sort of unreality in their style. One knew that movies were into a make-believe bag, but the unreality espoused on the screen by the flat souls of such Pablum-fed actors as Reagan reflected to me—black ghetto nigger me—a sickening mixed bag of humorless laughter and perfect Colgate teeth, with never a hint of the real funk of life. Insipid, promising nothing and delivering even less, a Reagan movie was nothing to get excited about. There would be no surprises.

But what happened was that Ronnie landed a TV show. Equipped with opulent sponsors and some slick script writers, the mediocrity of his grade-B spirit was glossed over and concealed by the make-up of a rhetoric fashioned by a committee of crew-cut wordmongers. With all this going for him, it was natural for him to turn to politics when Hollywood’s keenest make-up artists began to find it increasingly difficult to deal with the wrinkles that were slowly turning his face into a replica of well furrowed, depleted single-crop soil.

He was in the best of all states to get into his thing. California had demonstrated its ability to relate to the politics of the absurd by electing to office such blobs of political putty as Richaird Nixon and Max Rafferty. And having picked the proper place, he could not have chosen a better style. Ronnie used a pat formula that said: pick the toughest problems confronting the people and launch blistering attacks upon all sincere efforts to come to grips with these problems; offer as an alternative a conglomeration of simple-minded clichés and catch phrases that go back to the Mayflower; sing The Star-Spangled Banner and smile broadly, effusively, as you wave the flag at the people; use a fighting “I’m fed up” form of delivery, and always remember that when nothing else works, there is always the tried and proven gambit of demagogic politicians, especially in California—viciously attack the perennial whipping boys of the American Dream: subversion concealed in the words of textbooks, the “decadence of universities and the misguided students being duped by a handful of professors who are under the subtle influence of the Communist Conspiracy.”

Well, it worked. Mickey Mouse is governor and Donald Duck is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. That is what we have to worry about. And deal with.

It has been said that the people get the rulers they deserve. I do not believe, however, that America has the rulers it deserves. The State of California, emphatically, could not deserve the rulers it has. Yet we have them, and this is an election year. And what an election year: this is the nightmare election year of the American Dream.

Everything is out in the open this year. Nobody is trying very hard to conceal anything. As usual, the key issue in the election is what to do about the niggers —only this time, the question is being rewritten to read, what to do with the niggers. From the point of view of the niggers themselves, the question has also been rewritten and now reads, what are we going to do about this shit?

A surprising development—one which offers the possibility, perhaps the only possibility, of a monkey wrench being tossed into the smoke dreams of the racists—is that a sizable portion of white Americans are in revolt against the system. So the issue of Law and Order, or Crime in the Streets, becomes key.

In California, Mickey Mouse looked out from his perch in Disneyland for an opening to get himself back into the act, having been kicked off the stage in Miami by a pig who had been in the game a little longer. From where he lurked, Mickey Mouse fixed his blank stare on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. He had received a tip that a situation tailored to his needs existed on that campus. Eldridge Cleaver – the apotheosis of the American nightmare: loudmouthed nigger, ex-convict, rapist, advocate of violence, Presidential candidate—retained by the Berkeley subversives to teach a class on the University campus, i.e. to corrupt the morals of lily-white American youth. So Ronnie Baby, doing his Republican duty, emerged from his pen to take up the cudgels of battle: “If Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children, they may come home some night and slit our throats. Therefore, the people of the State of California will not stand for this!”

Right on, Mickey Mouse. There are those of us who know what you are into, and we don’t like it. Furthermore, we are going to deal with it, with you, to put an end to your absurd oinking in the faces of the people. So that all those bullshit changes that you went through with the Board of Regents, forcing them to emasculate the course in which I was to participate as a guest lecturer, don’t mean shit. It displeased you, I understand, that even the Board of Regents did not buy you whole hog; that, in fact, they agreed to allow me to deliver one lecture.

Big deal. Who in the fuck do you think you are, telling me that I can’t talk, telling the students and faculty members at UC Berkeley that they cannot have me deliver ten lectures? I’m going to do it whether you like it or not. In fact, my desire now is to deliver 20 lectures. You, Donald Duck Rafferty, Big Mama Unruh, and that admitted member of the racist John Birch Society who introduced that resolution into the Legislature to censure those responsible for inviting me to lecture in the first place—all and each of you can kiss my black nigger ass, because I recognize you for what you are, racist demagogues who have their eye on the ballot box come November. The students and the faculty members at Berkeley are trying to salvage the American people from the brink of chaos that you pigs have brought on. Your thirst and greed for power is so great that you don’t care whether or not in your lust you destroy the vital processes of a barbaric society that is trying in its parts to become civilized.

I don’t know what the outcome of all this will be, but I do know that I, for one, will never kiss your ass, will never submit to your demagogic machinations. I think you are a cowardly, cravenhearted wretch. You are not a man. You are a punk. Since you have insulted me by calling me a racist, I would like to have the opportunity to balance the books. All I ask is a sporting chance. Therefore, Mickey Mouse, I challenge you to a duel, to the death, and you can choose the weapons. And if you can’t relate to that, right on. Walk, chicken, with your ass picked clean.

Quote

From a Guardian piece aboutMaurice Sendak:

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To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. Sendak’s own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up (“All crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes”) and pinch his cheeks until they were red. Looking back, he sees how desperate they all were, these first-generation immigrants from Poland, with no English, no education and, although they didn’t know it in 1930, a family back home facing extinction in the concentration camps. At the time, all he saw was grotesques.

That included his parents. If he had come from a happy home, says Sendak, he would never have become an artist, at least not the kind of artist he is. Sendak’s picture books acknowledge the terrors of childhood, how vicious and lonely it can be. In his latest book, Bumble-Ardy, the hero is a piglet who loses his neglectful parents to a slicing machine on the first page and is left in the care of an aunt. When Bumble turns nine, she throws him his first ever birthday party and, in the manner of most Sendak stories, things take a dark turn: older pigs gatecrash and, in a kind of porcine burlesque, wreck the place. The pictures are feverish and transporting – and, although the book ends in forgiveness and a hug between aunt and nephew, the sense of precariousness around Bumble remains. “I refuse to lie to children,” says Sendak. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

The rest.

Sidewinder

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Good Morning from Werner Herzog and Hank Williams

This from The Guardian:

Some years ago, Werner Herzog was on an internal flight somewhere in Colorado and the plane’s landing gear wouldn’t come down. They would have to make an emergency landing. The runway was covered in foam and flanked by scores of fire engines. “We were ordered to crouch down with our faces on our knees and hold our legs,” says Herzog, “and I refused to do it.” The stewardess was very upset, the co-pilot came out from the cabin and ordered him to do as he was told. “I said, ‘If we perish I want to see what’s coming at me, and if we survive, I want to see it as well. I’m not posing a danger to anyone by not being in this shitty, undignified position.’” In the end, the plane landed normally. Herzog was banned from the airline for life but, he laughs, it went bust two years later anyway.

And this from Minnie Pearl: An Autobiography:

The boys were worried that Hank was ill and unable to perform. They kinda insisted that he perform, and it made me unhappy. Then I walked backstage and they were bringing him up the steps, and the look he had on his face was of such implication that I never will forget it. He said, “Minnie, I can’t work. I can’t work, Minnie. Tell ‘em” I had no authority. They went ahead, and he worked and it was bad. A.V. Bamford told me to stay with him between shows. He said, “He may listen to you. You may be able to keep him from getting any worse than he is.” Maxine Bamford and Hank and me and someone else drove around with him. This was between shows, and we were trying to keep him from getting anything else that would make him get in worse shape than he was. We started singing. He was all hunkered down, looking out of the side of the care singing. He was singing, “I Saw the Light,” then he stopped and he turned around, and his face broke up and he said, “Minnie, I don’t see no light. There ain’t no light.”

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Quote

Whatever you happen to think about cliché, this will change it. From Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

German text of the taped police examination, conducted from May 29, 1960, to January 17, 1961, each page corrected and approved by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist— provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny. Some of the comedy cannot be conveyed in English, because it lies in Eichmann’s heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him. It is funny when he speaks, passim, of “winged words” (geflügelte Worte, a German colloquialism for famous quotes from the classics) when he means stock phrases, Redensarten, or slogans, Schlagworte. It was funny when, during the cross-examination on the Sassen documents, conducted in German by the presiding judge, he used the phrase “kontra geben” (to give tit for tat), to indicate that he had resisted Sassen’s efforts to liven up his stories; Judge Landau, obviously ignorant of the mysteries of card games, did not understand, and Eichmann could not think of any other way to put it. Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school— it amounted to a mild case of aphasia— he apologized, saying, “Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language.” But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché. (Was it these clichés that the psychiatrists thought so “normal” and “desirable”? Are these the “positive ideas” a clergyman hopes for in those to whose souls he ministers? Eichmann’s best opportunity to show this positive side of his character in Jerusalem came when the young police officer in charge of his mental and psychological well-being handed him Lolita for relaxation. After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant; “Quite an unwholesome book”—“ Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch”— he told his guard.) To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk”— except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

PopMatters

Just a quick post to point at a new review of Satan Is Real from PopMatters. My favorite bit:

It’s hard to believe, given the beatings their father would administer, that the Louvin boys maintained a mischievous and rebellious streak, but the book’s early chapters are filled with tales of antics gone wrong. Those episodes, though, paint their father not only as a man with a savage temper, but also as a man who had use only for usefulness.  His anger at a persimmon tree being chopped down?  Mainly due to the fact that it was a fruit-bearing tree that the family needed. His response to the mutt puppies that resulted from the boys sneaking a bulldog in to breed with a prized bloodhound? He told Charlie to put them in a sack and brain them against a fence post to kill them.

The rest.

By the way, I keep getting asked if I’ll ever work on another book like SIR. And I keep giving the same answer. That is, that there’s really only one famous person on earth who interests me much at all right now. And it’s for pretty much the same reasons listed here. I’m still waiting for the phone call, though.

Also, since I haven’t posted anything in awhile, here’s this from a lyric notation on Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” per The Official Woody Guthrie Website:

I love a good man outside the law,

just as much as I hate a bad man inside the law.

And this, Kris Kristofferson talking and singing about Sam Peckinpah:

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There. That seems like I’ve done my blog duty.

Good morning from Tommy Lee Jones and Cormac McCarthy

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Pike — Éditions Gallmeister

I just got the final cover for the Éditions Gallmeister edition of Pike. Just beautiful, in my opinion.

Original:

Promotional band: 

When I go away

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And even better, a short film inspired by and featuring music from Dirt Farmer.

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