On Merle Haggard

Johnny Cash may have sang the “Folsom Prison Blues,” but it was Merle Haggard who actually lived them, at San Quentin in the 1950s. He was right in the middle of living them, in fact, when Cash came to Quentin to sing them. Changed his whole damn life, pretty much. Before making it to the big house, his crimes had all been juvenile offenses—truancy and larceny and the like—but at the age of 20 he held up a bar in Bakersfield and got three years max-security. That’s when he heard Cash sing in a way that changed him all around. He had direction, now. Some of the guys were intent on breaking out, and offered Haggard the chance to go along with them. He said thanks but no thanks, because he already had a different kind of escape plan cooking. Once he was free, he finally took it, and they still haven’t called him back there.

On Estes Kefauver

One of the certifiably great spectacles in the countless-ring circus that is political life in America, the Senate committee investigation hearing, as public absurdity, has been around precisely as long as television has, for reasons that are obvious and not at all coincidental. When the U.S. government decided in 1950 to look into just how it was that organized crime got itself organized, it was Estes Kefauver who headed the hearings. The Kefauver Committee was born when television was born, and they grew up together with all the same modes and moods of adolescent dysfunction.

If the hearings could never give Kefauver the boost he needed to reach the presidency, at least they gave him something nearly as valuable in a world where celebrity is the coin of the realm: they gave him fame, and not necessarily in the sense that the Greeks meant. The whole debacle looked like a casting-call for pre-Code Warners, with Kefauver as the casting director, and America getting to gawk along in their living rooms. A rival in the Senate of the venerable Albert A. Gore, also of Tennessee and the Democratic persuasion, Kefauver functioned in a style at least as enigmatic as his consummate doppelganger’s, albeit in ways entirely different. David Maraniss, biographer to both Bill Clinton and to Albert Gore’s son, claims that Kefauver was to Gore what Clinton would later be to Gore, Jr.— similar in ideology but not at all in personality:

“Kefauver’s eyes were as soft as Gore’s were hard. That those eyes might have been softened by excessive alcohol (Albert, in contrast, did not drink) was less important on a superficial level than the fact that they seemed inviting and friendly, not distancing. If Kefauver became perhaps too close to some of his female constituents, as historians later documented, his ability to connect on a personal basis with the average voter was striking, and in direct contrast with Albert Gore….Kefauver understood, as Bill Clinton later did, the powerful effect that a soft personal touch could have on voters.”

And, Maraniss might have added, on viewers as well, which were becoming increasingly indistinguishable as one and the same. When mobsters had to sit before the all-too-organized criminals who comprised their federal government and then answer for their deeds, a star was born in America, and so was an entire way of political life.

On Iron Maiden

The thing about cover art is that it graces only the cover, and you can use it to judge the album no more than you can judge the book by it. That said, sometimes the cover art penetrates deep into the work in insidious ways, and nowhere is this truer than in the case of Iron Maiden’s work. All that heavy-metal cartoonery, their mascot Eddie always inhabiting a different environ consistent with the album’s thematic conception—it goes to show that, contra Kiss, a band can use visual art to enhance good music, not simply as gimmickry to distract from music that is less-than-good.

In grade school in the mid-1980s, all the older kids wore Iron Maiden shirts—it was how one signified one’s edginess as a high-school grown-up. But kids too grow into high-schoolers, and sometimes they graduate, and then, rarer still, they actually behave as if they have graduated. And the appeal of Iron Maiden not only endures but enhances. All those songs based on literature sometimes achieve a state of literature themselves (“Brave New World,” “The Wicker Man,” “Lord of the Flies”). And even when they’re nothing more than mere transcriptions of someone else’s literature (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), they can transcend the literature from which they borrow, because they’re literature set to music. It’s literature that fucking rocks, and that’s a rarer thing altogether to behold. Meanwhile, history goes neither forgotten nor ignored, and the student of the past (high school or otherwise) can learn more from a song like “Alexander the Great” than from all the bloodless lectures ever delivered—to say nothing of an irresponsibly elided film like Oliver Stone’s Alexander.

The cover art wasn’t just neat, cool, or awesome; it was conceptual. It was concept art made to adorn concept albums, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that one particular artifactual representation of it—specifically, that of Powerslave—I’ve found striking enough to wear not only on a T-shirt, for my body, but on a banner-poster, for my wall. There are plenty of examples of this vivid imagery contributing to packaging as an enhancer of content: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Piece of Mind, Somewhere in Time, Fear of the Dark. Just because school’s out doesn’t mean you stop appreciating the high finer things. Usually it can mean the very opposite. What a concept.

On Nelson Rockefeller

Way back in another millennium, before the Democrats became the official party of Civil Rights and the Republicans became the official party of their suppression, Nelson Rockefeller was able to sneak up from behind Jack Kennedy and make a move to outflank him on the left. It wasn’t the first or the last time Kennedy would leave himself open from that angle.

The occasion was Kennedy’s introduction of a voting-rights bill, in 1963, and Rockefeller, who fancied Kennedy’s office and was then showing incipient signs of aspiration towards its attainment, spoke out as governor of New York at an NAACP rally upstate. Taylor Branch sketches the scene in his Civil Rights chronicle Parting the Waters: “Trenchantly, Rockefeller attacked Kennedy’s much-publicized plan to make racial progress through presidential appointments, charging that the President’s most critical appointments had been four Southern judges of well-known segregationist views….The best civil rights judges in the South, and indeed the department’s only hopes for racial justice through the courts, were Eisenhower appointees; the most egregious segregationists were Kennedy’s, and they were more than four in number.”

That Rockefeller could even pull this political stunt says a lot about Kennedy, of course, but it says just as much about Rocky and his beating if not bleeding liberal heart. It’s almost enough to forgive him the crime of having been the one to bring Henry Kissinger into the realm of public policy. He supported the arts, conserved the wildlife and its environs, funded public transportation (with revenue obtained at bridge and tunnel tolls), and even opposed the death penalty (except in cases involving the murder of police officers). Rocky was all about law-and-order, sometimes at the expense of everything else, as would later be fully demonstrated at Attica.

Parenthetically, this may be the place to note that none other than Ted Bundy ran his campaign in Seattle during the presidential quest of 1968. That quest went cold, just as the quest of ’64 had gone cold when his bitter divorce made headlines. But such a taint didn’t prevent the nomination of Adlai Stevenson some eight years earlier. That was a different party, though, with different values from the Republicans even back then. That’s only further evidence that Nelson Rockefeller had been running on the wrong wing all along.

On Lee Harvey Oswald

After the open-topped limo had already turned onto Elm, street of the scene of the crime, the wife of John Connally, the Texas governor soon to catch some of the metal meant for Kennedy, turned to the president and said over all the cheering, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” To which the president replied, “No, you certainly can’t.” It was in the moments following that Lee Harvey Oswald kept his appointment with history.

It was one of the few things he ever attempted successfully. From the Marines, he had received an undesirable discharge. From Russia as a day-laborer, he had derived as much satisfaction as Russia had derived from him. From his assassination attempt on General Walker, the most you could say is that he didn’t get caught, and left some bullet fragments in the general’s hand. From the Cubans, he had received exactly nothing—directly proportional to what he gave back. Until November 22, that is. This ostensible proponent of communism, he was in fact the very embodiment of communism’s failures. He was anti-communism’s living advertisement.

Then he became its monument, precisely two days after Kennedy died. The assassin had been assassinated, on live TV. It still defies credibility. Then the assassin’s assassin died. The rumors of conspiracy, already begun, became frenzied and ever more elaborate. Eventually, Lyndon Johnson was forced to order a committee, to be led by Senator Earl Warren. What little the Warren Commission didn’t satisfactorily explain has been satisfactorily explained since, and yet, despite the solidity of these explanations, the theories persist, acquiring proper-noun status by the persistence of their own legend and lore. It’s all been knocked down: the Grassy Knoll, the Dictabelt Recordings, the Backyard Photo, the Carcano Rifle (its accuracy and the competence of its operator), the Autopsy, even the Magic Bullet.

That last one was an object of particular ridicule and sport for Oliver Stone, in his grossly irresponsible piece of conspiracy-theory porn JFK. Who ever thought that “Back and to the left” could work as either movie-theater melodrama or punchline, let alone both. Gerald Posner deals with this and all other absurdities in Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK:

“The backward movement is the result of two factors. First, when the bullet destroyed the President’s cortex, it caused a neuromuscular spasm, which sent a massive spasm of neurologic impulses from the injured brain shooting down the spine to every muscle in the body. ‘The body then stiffens,’ said Dr. John Lattimer, ‘with the strongest muscles predominating. These are the muscles of the back and neck…’ They contract, lurching the body upward and to the rear. The President’s back brace likely accentuated the movement, preventing him from falling forward. At the same instant the President’s body was in a neuromuscular seizure, the bullet exploded out the right side of his head. Dr. Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, focused on that to discover the second factor that drove the President’s head back with such force. Dubbed the ‘jet effect,’ Dr. Alvarez established it both through physical experiments that re-created the head shot and extensive laboratory calculations. He found that when the brain and blood tissue exploded out JFK’s head, they carried forward more momentum than was brought in by the bullet. That caused the head to thrust backward—in an opposite direction—as a rocket does when its jet fuel is ejected. Because the bullet exited on the right side of JFK’s head, it forced him to be propelled back and to the left, exactly what is visible on the Zapruder film.”

Which still doesn’t explain why Robert Kennedy never cooperated with the Commission. For that, you’d have to turn to Castro and Cuba. Bobby understood that much more than his brother’s legacy was at stake in any reinvestigation of the Bay of Pigs along with all subsequent acts spook skullduggery and foreign adventurism. It all would have been traced and pursued if the investigation had followed its complete course. Kennedy may have tried to kill Castro, but Castro did not kill Kennedy. What killed Kennedy was one American’s loneliness, his dissolution and disillusion, his alienated angst. And his bullets, of course. Meanwhile, 36 years later, Castro still lives.

On William Rehnquist

When FDR decided to try and load up the Supreme Court with justices likely to reflect his own political point-of-view, he didn’t hold a Fireside Chat announcing to the nation that he would now proceed to packing the Court. Instead, and with characteristic craftiness, he sought out a side door, by looking to implement a mandatory retirement age. Nobody was fooled, not even the public who heard the Fireside Chat that Roosevelt did give, when he let loose that he was going to save “the Court from itself.” The Court didn’t want to be saved, apparently, and the Senate didn’t want to save it either. Roosevelt’s measure failed. To replace six judges, all at once under a single administration, would have been an excessive load of power to give to one party (six was the maximum that Roosevelt’s proposal allowed for). Although Roosevelt’s tactics and intentions left a lot to be desired in the interest of fairness, there’s no question that he was on to something vitally important when he recommended a maximum age for justices. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the case of the Honorable William C. Rehnquist.

It’s an isolated case, as far as we know, but as long as the laws guarantee a lifetime appointment, we never know when it’ll happen again, or whether it’s happening right now. The year before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court justice, he was prescribed the powerful soporific Placidyl to treat the insomnia that followed a serious back injury. Ten years into his term, Rehnquist was still taking it, he was hooked, and his dosage sometimes exceeded three times the recommended limit of 500 milligrams. Nobody in the general public—and very few people out of it—knew about this at the time. One doctor who treated Rehnquist after he was hospitalized with severe delusions and paranoia, attendant with withdrawal, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Rehnquist was having “bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts,” which should have surprised no one who would hear him claim, in a moment of ostensible lucidity, that the Court had “no business reflecting society’s changing and expanding values.”

Rehnquist died while still on the bench, just shy of 81 years old. It had been 34 years since he’d started taking Placidyl, and 11 years since he would have been forced to retire under FDR’s proposal. That proposal was proposed at a time when the life expectancy was significantly shorter than in 2005, and was hence abundantly generous by its own terms, had it lived and then survived into the 21^st century. It’s no wonder Rehnquist didn’t want to acknowledge society’s values. He was too busy subverting them, under a heavy medicated cloud of self-interest.

On Clancy Martin

It’s not unheard-of for a professor in the hard humanities—the theoretical-logical humanities—to make a jump into the realm of fiction-writing and to succeed there. In our own era, we’ve been blessed with the dense and elaborate puzzle palaces of Stephen L. Carter, professor of law at Yale, whose success, artistic and otherwise, at creative writing would seem to be at odds with the demands of his day job. Now there’s Clancy Martin, a professor of philosophy specializing in existentialism, who’s penned a hard and compact bildungsroman, How to Sell, about coming of age in the luxury-jewelry trade—at just over 300 pages a brief vivid burst of American fever-dreaming by way of Canada. What the hell does any of this have to do with the study of existentialism? As it happens, just about everything.

The novel’s details, so carefully chosen and perfectly arrayed, come plucked from the tray of Martin’s own hard experience. It was existentialism, as both way of life and academic pursuit, that saved Martin from the jewelry business, which he had entered and re-entered, between stints at school, at the urging of his older brother in Dallas. By the time he was ready to write his doctoral dissertation, under Robert Solomon on Nietzsche’s theory of deception, he had learned more about the subject in practice than perhaps anyone ever should.

That education is the subject of the current novel—which is, after all, just that. The base of Martin’s experience has been melted down into a different kind of alloy, with more than just the narrator-protagonist’s name being altered. Yes, Bobby Clark leaves high school and Canada at age 16 to join his brother in Dallas, whereupon sex, drugs, and violence ensue, but beyond that we’d do ourselves a favor to read the book under the conditions its author has intended. Changes have been made not just to protect the innocent, the semi-innocent, and the not-at-all-innocent, but also to protect the interests of narrative, of story, of the kind of serendipities and suspense that the fiction-writer will lend to his work when he’s writing not to be admired but to be enjoyed—and is hence admired all the more for his efforts.

That’s the kind of novel that How to Sell is, just as it’s the kind of novel that Carter’s are. Seemingly incongruous at first, this phenomenon makes all the sense in the world when considered a certain way. For How to Sell is, of course, not just about how to sell, but about all those metaphorical moments wherein lying, cheating, and stealing stand for the same thing—stand for selling by dire means. Martin’s achievements, as a philosopher and translator, are already substantial—as chair of his department at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, as translator of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as the author of many existentialist texts respected in their field. There was no move left to make except to tell his story in the best way he knew how, even if that meant telling it in a way that rendered it, in its particulars, a somewhat different story. Existence is what happens when we’re existing, and all the apparatus of post-modern fiction and epistemological philosophy at some point has to come to terms with the pure product of this experience. It’s amazing how many kinds of training are required before we come to this realization.