Palin It Backwards

I'm rereading Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby by listening to an audiobook narrated by Alex Jennings, who portrayed Prince Charles in "The Queen." Published in 2009, it's an affectionate and affecting performance in which the brilliant actor gives distinctive voices to maybe 30 characters, male and female, young and old, poor, rich, and pretending to be rich.

For a few (especially sadistic Yorkshire schoolmaster Wackford Squeers and an insinuating gigolo, Mr. Mantolini), Jennings seems to have been inspired, and naturally so, by performances from the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1982-83 production. For a couple of others, he channels Luigi Vercotti, the nightclub owner portrayed by Michael Palin in Monty Python's Piranha Brothers skit.

Dickens may also have influenced the Pythons. A passage in chapter 22 foreshadows one of their most famous skits. Nicholas and his friend Smike, on the way to Portsmouth, stop at an inn and ask about dinner:

"Why--what would you like?" was the landlord's no less natural answer.

Nicholas suggested cold meat, but there was no cold meat--poached eggs, but there were no eggs--mutton chops, but there wasn't a mutton chop within three miles, though there had been more last week than they knew what to do with, and would be an extraordinary supply the day after tomorrow.

"Then," said Nicholas, "I must leave it entirely to you, as I would have done, at first, if you had allowed me."

In Monty Python's "Cheese Shop," the dialog between customer John Cleese and proprietor Michael Palin goes like this:

"Now then, some cheese please, my good man."

"Certainly, sir. What would you like?"

"How about a little Red Leicester?"

"I'm afraid we're fresh out of Red Leicester, sir."

"Oh never mind, how are you on Tilsit?"

"I'm afraid we never have that at the end of the week, sir. We get it fresh on Monday."

"No matter. Well, stout yeoman, four ounces of Caerphilly, if you please."

"Ah. It's been on order, sir, for two weeks. I was expecting it this morning."

"It's not my lucky day, is it?"

Rich, Arch, And Gays

TV critics irregular Ehrlichman, Nixon, and Haldeman

Some mornings former President Nixon would tell aides in his New York or New Jersey office that he just happened to see something fascinating or shocking on television while trying to find the news or a football game. We suspected that our still-overachieving boss didn't want anyone to think he was wasting his time. He did happily admit that he and Mrs. Nixon enjoyed watching "Murder She Wrote" and "Barnaby Jones" together.

By the late 1980s, he was urging us all to get C-SPAN, because for the first time he was able to watch uninterrupted senatorial hearings, think tank panel discussions, and other high capital dramas that for a politics and policy junkie such as him were the equivalent of pure heroin. (I had to tell him that because of the way his administration had set up the cable TV system, Jersey City, where I lived, hadn't yet let a cable contract, hence no congressional debates on Congress St.) And yet still, every once in a while, the easy availability of Carnegie Endowment seminars on U.S.-Russian relations notwithstanding, he'd tug on his lower lip with the end of his reading glasses and say, "I ran across the damnedest thing last night when I was trying to find the Mets game..."

In May 1971 in the White House, the President did the same thing with his aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The White House tape recorder captured his synopsis of an episode of "All in the Family" which he'd just happened to run across. The first episode of Norman Lear's epochal sitcom had been broadcast to rave reviews four months before, which suggests that as culture mavens, RN and his aides were behind the curve.

And yet as the tape below discloses, Messrs. Nixon and Haldeman were wise to Lear's moves. Archie Bunker dressed like a slob, Haldeman noticed; that meant you weren't supposed to like him. The former football player in the bar turned out to be gay, the President noted; that meant the show was twisting your melon when it came to assumptions about how gay people looked and acted. Postmodernists ought to have a field day studying a critical analysis of a cultural expression being performed by the individuals who were essentially among the objects of the expression itself.

The conversation turns from Archie Bunker (just like Meathead, RN keeps calling him Arch) to a dialogue on homosexuality that has made this tape segment the talk of the internet. The three men exhibited assumptions and anxieties about homosexuality -- I understand why they get up to that, but it shouldn't be glorified -- that were typical of their generation. The President, for instance, had been born in 1913. I'm surprised how few commentators and bloggers have pointed out that the chat occurred 38 years ago, just as gay liberation was picking up steam. George Carlin and Monty Python were still getting laughs with routines based on the same cultural stereotypes being indulged in the White House. By the same token, on another occasion President Nixon predicted that we'd have gay marriage by 2000, making him more progressive than the majority of California voters in 2008.

Fourteen seconds of the conversation have been bleeped by the National Archives on the grounds either of national security (doubtful in this case) or potential embarrassment to a living person. My guess is that the President and his aides were discussing national figures (not, the usual speculation to the contrary, J. Edgar Hoover, who is dead) or colleagues who were or may have been gay or lesbian.