Ink-Stained Hustlers

Rough being Richard Nixon this week, with his diabolical influence being plotted well into the 21st century (he resigned in 1974 and died in 1994). Steve Donoghue blames him for Iraq, calling Nixon's national security fixation "an inky stain on the nation, and it spread forward in time" to what Donoghue calls an illegal war launched by his former operatives. In his March 29 Rolling Stone interview with Jon Stewart (not available in full on-line; I'm a proud subscriber), Bruce Springsteen also waxes metaphorical in saddling Nixon and his men with Wall Street greed, the subject of his new song "Easy Money":

That's the street criminalization of the big-money Wall Street hustle. That's the guy that's saying, "Everybody else is getting theirs, and not paying for it, I'm going out to get mine." That hustle has been legitimized over the past four years, when you have the level of risk and greed at the top of the financial industry, and people basically walking away, relatively scot-free, completely unaccountable. That lack of accountability is the poison shot straight into the heart of the country. It goes back to Watergate. Watergate legitimized the hustle at the top of the game -- it legitimized every street-corner thug. You almost had the country brought down by it, basically. All the radical hippies, longhairs -- no one ever came as close to sinking the USA as the guys in the pinstriped suits.

Antichrist? But Where's He On The Life Issue?

Rick Perlstein argues that Christian evangelicals are already getting over their worries about an LDS nominee and president:

[Their critical language was] strikingly similar to the way they characterized Catholics generations ago. As the Baptist college president quoted by the [New York] Times put it, they fear "the Mormon Church will use [Romney’s] position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people." But they're getting over it. Here is Billy Graham's much more political son Franklin, for instance, speaking in December on the air of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network: "the fact that he is a Mormon doesn’t bother me at all."

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the right comes around too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

But it's not exactly a matter of discarding religious prejudice. The faithful have just realized that the purpose of political activism is obtaining policy outcomes. Perlstein notes the antipathy to Barack Obama shared by evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics and shows how they first linked up over abortion and gay rights. Romney will probably win them if they're sure he's not squishy on social issues. But the most theologically conservative won't ever get over his religion. Untold thousands are saying to themselves even as they vote for Mitt: "Nice guy. Too bad he's going to hell."

Even more interesting than the demons of religious prejudice that conservative evangelicals and their political toadies are keeping under wraps for politics' sake are the ones they're proudly taking out for a walk. In 2010 Newt Gingrich and others in and out of government made constitutional history by arguing that U.S. citizens who were Muslims should not be permitted to worship as they choose within a certain distance of the World Trade Center. Just as insidious is the implicit conservative evangelical proposition that mainline Christians --such as Obama, for instance -- aren't Christian at all.

Milhous And Son

In his first outing as a regular Rolling Stone columnist, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein writes about lessons he thinks Mitt Romney learned from his father, George, and from the way Richard Nixon defeated him in the 1968 GOP primaries. Father and son are shown above in 1964. Perlstein describes the elder Romney as a paragon of progressive Republican rectitude whose critique of the Vietnam war was misunderstood and unfairly devalued. In 1968,

[Nixon ran] what you might call a robotic campaign, just [BSing] about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked [George] Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote. When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy's left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts' healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

Nixon's famous for promoting the truism that Republicans should run to the right in primaries and the center in the general. Perlstein makes some intriguing points. But if the main one is that Mitt Romney's following Nixon's advice, he's hardly the first, and he won't be the last as long as the nomination process is so heavily influenced by social conservatives. I'm not arguing in favor of inauthenticity as a leading political virtue. But the fact is that no one admitting to the mortal sin of being a moderate can be nominated in today's GOP, leaving the candidate who may still believe in the broad-gauge, non-ideological party of Lincoln, Rockefeller, and Nixon the choices of not running, changing parties, or playing hide the pragmatist.

Perlstein believes that Romney, if he's nominated, will stay right during the general election. "[T]he party won't have it any other way," he writes. But Romney's outfoxed the party so far, evading one conservative challenger after another in the GOP fire swamp (though he was singed last night in South Carolina). What activists will expect from him in return for their eventual grudging support is something he'll have to take into account. Nixon's advice the day after the convention would be: "You owe them nothing." By the same token, some on the right may decide that a Romney loss would be better in the long run. If a few conservatives end up staying home, so be it, because with or without them, only the Massachusetts moderate has a chance against Barack Obama.

Psy-Optics

I was wondering why I was having trouble getting especially worked up at the idea of the brass in Afghanistan using psy-ops on visiting legislators, as alleged in "Rolling Stone." Here's why, from Juliet Lapidos at "Slate":

The idea that, given a U.S. senator as a target, a psy-ops team could "plant" the urge, Inception-style, to give the Army more resources is fairly nonsensical. Psy-ops teams use persuasion, not mind control. If [Gen. William] Caldwell [shown here with Sen. McCain] really did want [whistle blower Michael] Holmes and others to compile detailed profiles of John McCain and others, including their voting records and opinions on hot-button issues, he might as well have assigned such research work to his public affairs staff. (The difference between psy-ops and public affairs is that the purpose of the former is influence and it's supposed to be directed at foreign audiences exclusively, whereas the latter merely informs audiences both at home and abroad. But the distinction can get hazy. A 1997 Army field manual on public affairs notes that the discipline helps the United States "achieve information dominance" and "contributes to the preservation of public support," which seems to edge into influence.)

If military personnel have really broken the law, they should be held accountable. Senators and congressmen are entitled to receive strictly factual briefings, whether in Kabul or wherever they interact with government personnel. I also could understand how a member might get upset learning that the Pentagon had used taxpayers' money to study whether his having been bullied by his high school football coach might make him more inclined to fork over funds for killing the Taliban.

But people of substance engaged in important work always go into meetings hoping to bring back something for their side, and generals are no different. If you're canny, you'll want to learn a little something about the person you're talking to first. Call it psy-ops, or call it empathy.

What astonishes me is the idea that you could be a member of Congress and be all that susceptible to being emotionally manipulated. Wouldn't the members of most congressional delegations have spent the 16-hour flight reading about Afghanistan and getting ready for the meetings themselves? If not -- if the generals are taking these conversations more seriously than the congresspeople -- where's the real scandal?

Do You Remember (The Alamo)?

The current "Rolling Stone" (to whose print edition I'm fated to subscribe until it dematerializes) has a disturbing article about Phil Collins, whose hits in the '80s and '90s with Genesis and as a solo artist manifested an easy, soulful sensibility that I found irresistible. He also did a great job producing Eric Clapton's mid-'80s comeback albums, "Behind the Sun" and "August."

His outstanding work notwithstanding, some extremely unpleasant art rock devotees identified Collins as the cause of all their problems after he took over from Peter Gabriel as Genesis' lead singer in 1975. In every field of human striving, there's a fanatical cabal that sucks every glimmer of joy out of life in the name of some ideal of purity. In Collins' case, they sent him hate mail because they didn't like his pop songs.

What's really disturbing, the RS article discloses, is that it seemed to get to him. He's also lost a good deal of his hearing and, as the result of a neck injury, the ability to grip anything with his hands -- not only drumsticks but eating utensils. While he's preparing to tour behind a new album of Motown covers, he won't be playing the drums, and he's considering retiring from music afterward. He admits to having had suicidal thoughts.

The great joy in his life, besides his two sons, whom he's raising at his home in Switzerland, is his collection of Alamo memorabilia, one of the world's best. So arriving in San Antonio this afternoon for an Episcopal schools conference, having just read the RS article, I found it synchronicitous indeed to get a chance to hear his upbeat voice narrating an account of the Battle of the Alamo written to go along with a carefully constructed 13- by 15-foot model showing the Alamo compound circa 1836.

Collins purchased the model last year and gave it to a small private museum, the History Shop, on Houston St., not far from where the compound's northeast corner would've been on the morning in March 1836 when the forces of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna launched their first assault. They eventually killed all the defenders, sparing only the woman and children huddled in the sacristy of the old mission church in the southeast corner (the building, below, which most people think is the Alamo).

A young woman named Megan was on duty when Kathy and I visited this afternoon. She showed us a small excavation, perhaps four feet deep, that had revealed horseshoes (which, given the museum's location, might have been left by elements of the Mexican army) and a cannon ball. We also met El Paso-born History Shop staffer Art Duke, who assisted with the dig. He told us that Collins would be back in town soon for an Alamo anniversary event.

His narration takes 13 minutes as spotlights illuminate key moments and positions inside and outside the compound. It's not a "don't mess with Texas" show but rather one that acknowledges ambiguity and unanswered questions, such as how many of the new Texas Republic's best were holed up and died there (estimates ranging from 180 to 225). Being fair to all who fought their hardest for a cause they believed in, he calls one Mexican officer who died while trying to rip the Texas flag from atop the Long Barracks a hero. He should be careful, because Texans make Peter Gabriel fans seem like pansies.

Gergen Goes To The Matt

For a round table conversation conducted the day after the election and recounted in its Nov. 25 issue, "Rolling Stone" brought together presidential (you can pretty much name the president) adviser David Gergen (in the left-hand corner), pollster Peter Hart, and RS contributing editor Matt Taibbi (below right, preparing to hammer the veteran in the kidneys), who's written a series of bomb-throwing investigative pieces about scheming, grasping Wall Street fat cats. Some highlights:

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"

Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?...

Had the president's fundamental approach for the past two years been about jobs, he would have been a lot better off coming into the election. People would have felt that he was on their side. He helped to stabilize the major banks, which prevented us from going over a cliff, and he deserves credit for averting another Great Depression. But he clearly made a strategic miscalculation in assuming that the stimulus would keep unemployment under eight percent. In retrospect, it was a blunder to spend so much time on health care instead of jobs. If Franklin Roosevelt's most important accomplishment of his first two years had been a health care bill, we'd have all said that was nuts....

The media has spent way too much time on the Tea Party and Christine O'Donnell and far too little time on the emergence of moderate-right Republicans like Rob Portman and John Kasich in Ohio. There are as many traditional conservatives coming into office on the Republican side as there are Tea Partiers. You have to remember, this was not a vote for the Republican Party — it was a negative election about what was going on in Washington. That's why the Republicans are smart to be humble about this election. I think both parties are now on probation. The voters are basically saying, "We'll put you guys in there, and if you don't solve this, we'll throw you out."...

Taibbi: Obama brings [former Clinton Treasury secretary and Citigroup chairman Bob Rubin] back into the government during the transition and surrounds himself with people who are close to Bob Rubin. That's exactly the wrong message to be sending to ordinary voters: that we're bringing back this same crew of Wall Street-friendly guys who screwed up and got us in this mess in the first place.

Gergen: That sentiment is exactly what the business community objects to.

Taibbi: F--- the business community!

Gergen: F--- the business community? That's what you said? That's the very attitude the business community feels is coming from many Democrats in Washington, including some in the White House. There's a good reason why they feel many Democrats are hostile — because they are.

Taibbi: It's hard to see how this administration is hostile to business when the guy it turns to for economic advice is the same guy who pushed through a merger and then went right off and made $120 million from a decision that helped wreck the entire economy.

When Gergen said it was vital that Democrats and Republicans work together the next two years, Hart ended the exchange on a pessimistic if highly literary note:

David draws an eloquent picture, as he always does, of how we would like the world to be. But during the Clinton period in the late Nineties, there wasn't Fox News. Fox not only demonizes everything the president says and does — it has become the major vetting group for Republicans, and it will not allow any kind of compromise to exist. It's like the ending of The Sun Also Rises, when Lady Brett Ashley nestles in the arms of Hemingway's hero and imagines what their life together might have been like. She says, "Wouldn't it be nice?" It would be nice, but I don't think we're going to get there.

Definitely Gathering Moss

Sitting in an airport a couple of months ago, great American folksinger and songwriter Tom Russell, stuck with an old copy of "Rolling Stone," experienced discouragement:

Over 90% of their 500 best songs ever written [as identified by RS] were written before 1970. The summation is there ain’t been much to be excited about in the last forty years - with all our bleating, digital gadgetry, conferences, alliances, SXSW, “how to write songs” cartoon books, posturing circus rap, and lack of human artistic character. The chaos has led us, with our little IPOD head phones on, into the death throes of popular song.

Or maybe, Tom, it's just the people who drew up the list. For instance, you wrote this one, "Isaac Lewis," just a few years ago. Sure beats "Stairway to Heaven."

Rolling Paper

Some things never change at "Rolling Stone," including its devotion to the inalienable lights of stoners. Two generations of sixties-inspired addiction and drug dependence notwithstanding, in the Nov. 12 edition managing editor Will Dana lauds President Obama for bringing President Nixon's war on drugs to an end. Dana also crows:

Drug warriors like to claim that the medical-marijuana movement is just a sneaky way to talk about full-on legalization. The thing is, they are right. And there's nothing they can do about it.

Meeting The Beatles Again For The First Time

Inspecting an alien audio medium in "Men In Black," Tommy Lee Jones says, "I guess I'll have to buy the White Album again." He'll have his chance in a couple of weeks. As Brian Hiatt writes in the Sept. 3 "Rolling Stone," when the Beatles' catalog was issued on CD in 1987, critics said the sound was shrill and grating compared to vinyl. Expectations are high for the Sept. 9 release of newly remastered Beatles CDs, a development enabled by an agreement among Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and the widows of George Harrison and John Lennon. From painstaking digital transfers made from the closely guarded original tapes followed by the latest remastering, all overseen by a team of Abbey Road engineers associated with Beatles producer George Martin, these little miracles will ensue, writes Hiatt:

"Love Me Do"...loses its dusty, distant haze of age, and "The Long and Winding Road" no longer has what [chief engineer Allen] Rouse described as a "muffled" quality to it. Otherwise, it's a matter of suddenly noticing details: McCartney's nimble bass line on "And Your Bird Can Sing," the vivid three-dimensionality of Starr's opening and closing high-hat on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the cinematic quality of the choirs and orchestra on "Good Night."

The RS cover story, by Mikal Gilmore, recounts the band's slow-motion breakup. It wasn't just that Lennon tried to force his mates to accept Yoko Ono as the fifth Beatle, as most seem to believe. It was also differences over money and management and Lennon's self-consciousness about McCartney's greater output (at that particular moment) as a songwriter. After Lennon announced the breakup at a 1969 meeting where McCartney was trying to persuade the Beatles to go on the road again, Ono told a journalist:

We went off in the car, and he turned to me and said, "That's it with the Beatles. From now on, it's just you -- OK?" I thought, "My God, those three guys were the ones entertaining him for so long. Now I have to be the one to take the load."

What do you expect from four young guys with all that money and fame? Of course I had to spend the weekend listening to their albums. First, "Beatles 1," with their 27 #1 hits. The first dozen, from "Love Me Do" through "Day Tripper" (who wrote that opening lick, the Beatles or Eric Clapton?) are miraculous, but then you hit some mediocre songs, beginning with "We Can Work It Out," in which freshness gives way to self-importance. For the bridge, Lennon wrote, "Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friend," while McCartney wrote in the verse, "Try to see it my way...Why da ya see it your way?" We can work it out, as long as I win. The song doesn't synthesize competing melodic and thematic ideas and ends with a ponderous, awkward cadence. The Beatles wouldn't part for another four years, but the seeds were planted.

I can also do without "Paperback Writer" (ambitious pop stars making fun of ambitious writers), "Yellow Submarine," "Eleanor Rigby" (faux empathy), and "Lady Madonna" (as if the Beatles were conducting their home lives particularly admirably).

The Beatles' last #1, "The Long and Winding Road," has a sappy string accompaniment which was added on, I learned from the Gilmore article, by Phil Spector and recently removed by McCartney for a pared-down re-release of "Let It Be." At the time, Spector said of producer extraordinaire Martin, "I don't consider him in my league. He's an arranger, that's all." In retrospect, Martin comes out on top, and not just because the "wall of sound" is behind bars. After "Beatles 1," I listened to the Martin-produced "The Beatles" (aka the White Album) straight through for the first time in years. Maybe it's because I first heard it when I was an impressionable 14 (I got it for Christmas in 1968), but it's still astonishing in breadth and scope. It rocks, it soars, it shimmers, it tantalizes. As Gilmore writes, the Beatles had been listening to the Band, and you can tell from "Rocky Raccoon" and "Don't Pass Me By." It's got a song about candy, George Harrison's "Savoy Truffle," and social commentary that works, especially the "Piggies" out on the town eating their bacon (even as the Beatles were in the process of cooking the goose that laid their gold records).

Is "Back in the USSR" the greatest Beatles song? It's certainly their most confident straight-out rocker, plus an affectionate Chuck Berry and Beach Boys parody. And that's what's most amazing about "The Beatles" -- its tongue-in-cheek sophistication, as if the band is letting us in on something. They parody things that have been barely invented, such as heavy metal with "Helter Skelter." Songs fall apart at the end Wilco-style, like Lennon's "Dear Prudence." "Long, Long, Long" and especially "Good Night," with its soporific vocal and creepy strings (Spector should have done so well), sound pre-apocalyptic. In "Revolution," the Beatles refused to pander to the prevailing elite Zeitgeist. (Lennon probably wouldn't have liked that statue of Mao at the Nixon Library.) But something was going on. Something was about to happen. This amazing record captures it.

Blink, And You're Broke

Listing him as No. 9 in its April 2 list of the 50 most important, creative, brilliant people in the universe, "Rolling Stone" praises White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for his "balletic" political talents:

Emanuel started the [Obama stimulus] bill not with an our-way-or-the-highway proposal but with broad outlines and a dollar figure -- letting Congress take ownership of the details.

Would that include details such as the AIG bonuses? So now we know that neither the White House nor members of Congress read the bill. Talk about blinkered leadership.