There was this interesting blurb from yesterday's Water Cooler by Lambert Strether:
CA: “California Voters Keep Accidentally Joining George Wallace’s Zombie Political Party” [New York Magazine]. “An April 2016 Los Angeles Times report showing that a vast number of indies who should have been registering as ‘No Party Preference’ voters were instead signing up for the [American Independent Party, a hold-over from the Wallace campaign in 1968]…. it certainly did not help the Sanders campaign, which was counting on indie votes…. If there’s a 20-candidate presidential field and Sanders or somebody else is counting on indies to get them across the line in California, they’d better start getting the word on about the AIP pretty soon.”
Who would have imagined that the American Independent Party exists more than 50 years after the 1968 presidential election. It seems to be limited to California; headquartered in Vacaville.
Last night, thinking about the 2020 presidential campaign, I wondered, If Wallace had somehow managed to get elected in 1968, could he have won a second term in 1972?
Because in many ways Trump's presidency is as if George Wallace had been elected, the main difference being that, as Michael Moore does a good job reminding us in his film Fahrenheit 11/9, Trump won in 2016 by running to Hillary's left on a host of issues, particularly war and peace. George Wallace, with General Curtis LeMay on his ticket in '68, ran as an unrepentant war-pig.
But all of Trump's left-progressive packaging has been ripped off after two-plus years in the White House.
As I drifted off to sleep I thought the only chance that Trump has is if the Democratic Party comes to the rescue. This is not out of the realm of possibility. If Sanders win's the primary, Democratic Party leaders might see their best hope of survival the sabotage of his candidacy.
Why are we here at Taxi Driver? It started last month by discovering a used copy of Devo's last big album, Oh, No! It's Devo (1982). One song, "I Desire," is written by John Hinkley, Jr. I had forgotten about John Hinkley, Jr. He was a forlorn figure that personified the first years of the 1980s. Hinkley attempted to murder Ronald Reagan because Hinckley was living out his obsession with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Hinckley imagined himself as Robert De Niro's character in the film, Travis Bickle, a disturbed ex-Marine and presidential-candidate stalker who, in a bloody shootout, rescues Jody Foster's character, Iris, from a life of street prostitution.
Mr. Hinckley was once psychotic and depressed. After seeing the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” in which a disturbed man plots to assassinate a presidential candidate, he became fixated on Jodie Foster, who played a child prostitute in the film.
Mr. Hinckley began to identify with the main character in the film, Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro.
After Ms. Foster entered Yale University, Mr. Hinckley moved to New Haven to be close to her and left notes, letters and poems at her dormitory. Failing to win her affections, Mr. Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter and was eventually arrested on firearms charges. After the 1980 election, Mr. Hinckley stalked the newly elected President Reagan in an attempt to impress Ms. Foster.
On March 30, 1981, after more unsuccessful trips to New Haven, Mr. Hinckley wrote a letter to Ms. Foster describing his plan to kill Reagan. He waited outside the Washington Hilton Hotel for Reagan to arrive and waved at the president as he went inside to deliver a speech.
Forty minutes later, when Reagan emerged from the hotel, Mr. Hinckley crouched down and fired six shots, hitting four men: Reagan; James S. Brady, the White House press secretary; Timothy J. McCarthy, a Secret Service agent; and Thomas K. Delahanty, a Washington police officer. Mr. Brady sustained permanent brain damage and eventually died from his injuries in 2014.
Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader who said he was inspired by Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary (1973). Arthur Bremer shot and paralyzed George Wallace in 1972, ending the Alabama Governor's aspirations for a national political career. There is very little in common between the screenplay and the Bremer book, other than the narrative convention of a young man recording his thoughts in a journal.
This past Sunday I finished reading An Assassin's Diary, and I was blown away by what an obvious fraud it is. There is no way an unemployed 21-year-old Milwaukee busboy could have written An Assassin's Diary. Absolutely no way. Anyone who has toiled with letters will reach the same conclusion; Gore Vidal did in a 1973 New York Review of Books essay, "The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt."
This sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to understand why there hasn't there been more of a hullabaloo over such an obvious fraud. Bremer crippled the man who is responsible for the birth of the present-day Republican Party. Kevin Phillips designed Nixon's Southern Strategy to co-opt Wallace's nascent third-party juggernaut American Independent Party. In 1968 Wallace had run one of the most successful third-party presidential campaigns in the history of the United States, winning five states.
Wallace relied on two things to garner support: negrophobia and Hippie-bashing. Wallace also pioneered the demonization of the Washington bureaucrat. But his overwhelming appeal to voters was based on skewering the negro and the longhair.
Wallace was running strong again in 1972, when, on May 15, Bremer shot and crippled the Alabaman at a shopping center campaign rally in Laurel, Maryland. Nixon went on to trounce McGovern in one of the greatest electoral routs ever.
It goes without saying that Nixon benefited by Wallace sitting out the election in a hospital bed. Many feel that the 113-page diary found in Bremer's '67 Rambler after the shooting, presumably the manuscript Harper's Magazine Press published as An Assassin's Diary in 1973 (portions of which first appeared in the January 1973 issue of Harper's Magazine), was written and planted by the White House Plumbers in order to convince the public that Bremer's original target was Nixon not Wallace. That is why the most developed passages of An Assassin's Diary are those that describe Bremer's trip to Ottawa to kill Nixon, who was on a state visit to the seat of Canadian government.
If people believed that Bremer originally meant to kill Nixon then they wouldn't suspect that Bremer was a Nixon agent or dupe. The Ottawa passage convinced me that An Assassin's Diary is ghost written. (Vidal argued that there are too many literary references for a high school graduate who only had pornography and comic books in his apartment when it was searched; also, there is too deft a utilization of potboiler conventions, such as front-loading a sex scene, to be the work of an amateur.) The book has been heavily edited. Misspellings are used as camouflage to obscure a skillful professional pen at work. Complicated action flows precisely. Street names are used. The writing is done decorously except for all those ludicrous misspellings. If you kept a journal when you were in your early 20s, as I did, you are aware that it was nothing like the powerful economy of An Assassin's Diary.
Let's take a look. Here is a passage, pages 70 and 71, from An Assassin's Diary. Bremerhas just arrived in Ottawa, and he is waiting alongside the road near a military base for Nixon's motorcade to pass. He is considering trying to get a shot off.
It was a long wait. 40 minutes at least, maybe over an hour. Some cops on bikes roared by people got out of their cars & went to the curbless, sidewalk less road. I joined in.
False alarm. Stayed out of the car 10 minutes, fingers got nume. That wouldn't do. I went back in & turned the heater on, still listening to the radio for news flashes. Earlier, I had seen the emty President's Lincoln Continental & all his cops & cars going in to the Uplands base. Against ten-of-thousands of people & tens-of-millions of dollars . . .
I had worn a 3 inch "Vote Republican" button & a 3 inch "Richard Nixon (with his picture)" button to watch the motorcade. I exchanged looks at Mr. Moustache, my gun inside my pocket. Fantasied killing Nixon while shooting right over the shoulder of that cop.
Came out & went inside again. Longjohn weather. I was conscience of my hands. Didn't want to keep them inside of my pockets & get searched. Didn't want to keep them out & nume them too much.
Some folks there kept their hands in their pockets almost all the time, they weren't questioned & either was I. But I wanted to be careful, didn't know if a stop & frisk law existensed or what my rights were as an American here. Felt added confidence with my suit on & short hair & shave.
Didn't recognize my self clean shaven at first. My head hair came in nice & thick.
People jumped from their cars. Would the assassin get a good view? Everyone moved in close (about 20 people). We were the only people other than the cops for a few blocks.
He went by befor I knew it. Like a snap of the fingers. A dark shillowet, waving, rushed by in the large dark car. "All over", someone said to no one in particular. The following cop cars had 2 antentenas each & probaly walkie-talkies too -- jam proof communications. Umbrella in one hand, pocket in the other, I walked back to my car. I had missed him that day. The best day to make the attempt was over, I thought.
Sort of Jack Kerouac's Doctor Sax in Papa Hemingway's prose banged out on Mickey Spillane's manual typewriter. No way, no how written by a young dude with a semester of technical college. There are plenty of red flags -- reference to stop-and-frisk laws and jam-free communications; the use of synecdoche, "Mr. Moustache" -- that point to someone much older and more experienced. Most likely a middle-aged cognac-drinking operative penned this journal. The biggest tell is the management of the scene's action, which is complex, complete with backshadowing -- "Earlier, I had seen the emty President's Lincoln Continental & all his cops & cars going in to the Uplands base." -- and foreshadowing -- "I went back in & turned the heater on, still listening to the radio for news flashes."
Compare it to my own journal entry, written when I was 24, three years older than Bremer, after six years at Cal Berkeley, four of which had been spent working as an assistant instructor teaching reading and composition. I am writing about a winter cross-country trip I made from New York City to California in a VW bus:
Spent the night in a Pennsylvania (name of town now forgotten); it must've been Northeastern. I pulled off the highway, which ran through this town. My feet were pretty well without feeling. I parked the car next to this old shutdown warehouse and went out to take a piss. It was really cold. The wind was dark and howlin'. The wind was blowing through the cracks in the bus. I unfurled my bedding. My feet were wet and as cold as ice.
I'll never have that freedom again. Driving in the sunset; pointing my nose west; the world was on fire and yellow. It was golden and I couldn't see anything, but I could see enough. Hours driven this way. Hours driven alone without the radio.
Got to California. Oil snakes on the road. Drove miles this way. Big brown and red snakes crawling along with me. I slept a few miles out of Barstow with the truckers; the old bus; I didn't put my blanket over me, and I woke up almost frozen to death. But I got it out and got it over me.
Okay so there you have it. Twenty-four and still very boyish and childlike. This despite reading plenty of Plato, Hobbes, Defoe, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Hardy et al., as well as possessing a good knowledge of the rules of grammar and punctuation. There is no way I ever could have described the Nixon motorcade scene.
The question then is if Bremer didn't write An Assassin's Diary who did? Besides someone affiliated with Nixon, the only other obvious answer is someone at Harper's. But if Harper's was going to completely rework whatever original manuscript was found in Bremer's Rambler why leave all those misspellings? Obfuscation is the only answer. And if obfuscation is the answer then that points to Nixon.
An Assassin's Diary was the second part of Bremer's journal. The first 148 pages, dated March 1 - April 3, 1972, he buried in Milwaukee; they were discovered in 1980 and are now part of the collection of Reynolds-Finley Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Assuming the 113-page source material for An Assassin's Diary is still intact, it would be easy enough to compare the two for inconsistencies. Of course if one was a phony the other one is probably a phony too. But to maintain the fiction, both would have to come from the same pen; otherwise, discrepancies should be noticeable. (There was a Baltimore Sun article from 20 years ago pointing out that Bremer didn't get a fair trial.)
Interestingly, Travis Bickle's famous line from Taxi Driver, "Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets," a sentiment worthy of a Wallace supporter, is not plucked from Bremer's journal but from one of the novels, Angel Eyes (1961), that Howard Hunt wrote under the pseudonym Robert Dietrich. Vidal quotes it in his NYRB essay. The hero of the potboiler, Steve Bentley, talks of Washington, D.C., "with its 'muggers and heroin pushers and the white-slavers and the faggotry . . . . This town needs a purifying rain!' "
Schrader no doubt read Vidal's NYRB piece and purloined that line from Hunt. Did E. Howard contact Schrader after Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or for 1976?
The irony here -- but one that I think is very illuminating -- is that Taxi Driver owes more to the chief of the White House Plumbers than poor little Artie Bremer.
In part 2, we'll look at the film itself and discuss the score of the great Bernard Herrmann.
The United States fought a civil war 150 years ago that has shaped the politics of this country ever since. We are taught that the war was about slavery, but it was really a result of the breakdown of the political system; this at least is the Michael Holtthesis: Political parties became sectionalized as the Whigs were replaced by the Republicans, temporarily but chaotically destabilizing the duopoly.
The energy and movement in U.S. politics over the last 50 years has been about the Republicans gobbling up turf that once belonged to the Democratic Party. The GOP from Goldwater forward has remade itself as the party of Dixie.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Goldwater and Reagan are not the party heroes of this narrative of transformation; rather, it should be George Wallace and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who initiated the Dixification of the Republican Party with his embrace of Kevin Phillips' "Southern Strategy."
Simply put, Phillips saw the political puissance of Alabama Governor George Wallace's third-party run for the presidency in 1968, based as it was on a thinly veiled Negrophobia and Hippiephobia pitched to a belligerent white working class, and decided to appropriate it for the GOP. The rest as they say is history.
Fast forward to yesterday's piece by Nate Cohn, "Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat," which argues that Donald Trump, though ahead across the board with all slices of the Republican demographic pie, has his greatest support among less educated members of the working class in the South and industrial North who are registered as Democrats:
He is strongest among Republicans who are less affluent, less educated and less likely to turn out to vote. His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.
In other words, a repeat of George Wallace.
It was encouraging to see the writers over at FiveThirtyEight at least acknowledging ("The Meaning Of Donald Trump") the similarity of the Trump phenomenon to that of George Wallace in 1968, though they stick to mainstream talking points of why Trump won't win the Republican nomination (without providing any insight into who will). As I've mentioned before, these talking points usually reduce to a faith that the infrequent voters who provide the bedrock of Trump's support will not show up to the polls in 2016; that, and the unstated proposition that the American political system is not truly democratic, that it is a private enterprise administered by two exclusive clubs that can bar entry to whichever candidate it chooses.
The touts at FiveThirtyEight fail and fail miserably because they see history as nothing more than a big, flat data set. (For instance, they bat about Buchanan '92 as being on the same level as Wallace '68. Poppycock! Wallace '68 created the current GOP Congressional majority.) But history isn't flat. History has a distinct shape. And if that shape taking form shows Trump to be similar to Wallace in 1968, then analysts would be wise to look again.
Well, you will say, "No worries for the GOP. Wallace didn't win. Tricky Dick won in a nail-biter. Who is to say that this doesn't augur the same for Ted Cruz?"
The difference is that Wallace, a Democrat governor from the Deep South, ran as a third-party candidate. Trump isn't running as a independent or third-party candidate. Trump is running as a Republican, and he is running ahead among Republicans, even the wealthy ones.
The other huge blind spot in the conventional wisdom, and something that I was surprised to see go unmentioned by the FiveThirtyEighters, is the failure of the Obama presidency. This is never accorded the weight that it deserves. Obama was elected in two landslides as an avatar of hope and change. The promise of his presidency is that we are all in this together, that we are a community; that America stands for honesty and peace and prosperity. We bought that ticket. And it didn't bring us to the promised land; at the end of the Obama road was just the same old Bush-Cheney killing floor.
People are mad. They want to shatter the system because the system doesn't work. Trump is the vehicle to bring this about.
The Road (2006) is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the great Cormac McCarthy. It is a story about a father and son surviving in a brutal post-apocalyptic landscape. The book was made into a less than successful film starring Viggo Mortenson. But the film score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is a good one. Listening to it last week, I realized that movie soundtracks have been an important feature of my sonic landscape the last five years. I have probably listened to Robbie Robertson's soundtrack to Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), not to mention the more recent film score to The Rover (2014) by Anthony Partos, as much as any record.
I think a good film score is an ambient register of the soup we swim in, sort of a sonic amniotic fluid. The Road, Shutter Island and The Rover all point to very difficult bitter times ahead.
In this morning of May Day, a day devoted to the rites of spring and the rights of working people, it is time to approach Hippies vs. Punks from a different angle.
My tendency of late has been to lean heavily on the recordings of one of the most productive and creative bands of the last 15 years. I speak here of the Drive-By Truckers.
For the last month or so, on the train ride home on Friday after another debilitating work week has been crossed off the calendar, I have plugged into Decoration Day (2003).
If you want a stepping-off point for an introduction to the Drive-By Truckers, Decoration Day is a good place to start. It is the band's fourth album. From there I would move backward or hop to the first record, Ganstabilly (1998) and then move forward to Pizza Deliverance (1999):
Before arriving at the third album, the masterful Southern Rock Opera (2001). Southern Rock Opera is a two-disk tour de force exploration of Lynyrd Skynyrd, George Wallace, classic rock, and the "Southern Thing." Itis worthy of lengthy study. The first disk is the more analytic, dense one of the pair. You can kind of get it all in one gulp with the cut "The Three Great Alabama Icons":
Disk two is a straight-up display of pure power. I have probably played disk two as much as any album over the last five years. It speaks to the enduring power of classic rock. Patterson Hood sums it up perfectly in the first track, "Let There Be Rock":
And here we have arrived at a golden truth of Hippies vs. Punks. The clash between Hippies and Punks in the late 1970s is more a mirage of historical perception than an actual moment in the Zeitgeist. Though I think such a moment does exist, and, as I have argued elsewhere, it takes place during the summer of 1976 and then plays out primarily in the years 1977 and 1978, the real clash is earlier in the 1970s. It's less a clash than a retreat from the field of battle.
Southern rock rises, first with the The Allman Brothers Band, and then with Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top; as does Glitter/Glam and Disco. All enervate the Hippies, or point to an abandonment of the belief in a broad social transformation.
This coincides with the rise of classic rock. "Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll." Hedonism absent the goal of liberation from capitalism.
I remember driving along in a Chevy El Camino pickup truck with my father and sister listening to both the summer of 1974. I remember one evening pulling into the driveway of our home, and my father turning off the engine but leaving the radio on. The three of us sat in the dark and listened to "Sweet Home Alabama." It was a powerful new narcotic in 1974.
Nixon was on his way out of the White House. But his "Southern Strategy," as promulgated by a young Kevin Phillips, remains in control of the country to this day. Phillips' idea was to co-opt for the GOP George Wallace's third-party American Independent Party electoral base by tapping the rich vein of white working class resentment and paranoia over any modest material gains for the African-American underclass.
Now, nearly half a century later, the cities are still burning and Dixie has a stranglehold on Congress.
But if you listen to the Drive-By Truckers and the band's truth-telling about white Red State America -- the failed marriages, the alcoholism and drug abuse, the dead-end jobs, the girlfriends faking orgasms, Santa Claus raping his reindeer -- you realize that the white underclass is no different than any other underclass, black or brown, red or yellow.
It is the politicians and the Fourth Estate that pit us against each other so that the plutocrats can continue to call the shots. Maybe there is enough room left within the exhausted neoliberal paradigm -- maybe there is enough juice left in classic rock -- that we can undergo a shift in consciousness, and social transformation will once again become an aspiration of the masses.
