Charlie
Coyne, John R. Jr.
Dalton Trumbo, after years of blacklisting, was finally unleashed to realize his epic allegory (Johnny Got His Gun) and brought forth an outdated molehill. The director. As I said, we are...
...Happily, the whole subject is lately in eclipse...
...And a grand treat it was...
...The single most significant result of the conventions last summer is that the networks are rerunning every old Ronald Reagan movie they can dig up...
...Jeremiah remonstrates with his countrymen: "Even the stork in the heavens knows her times...
...Naturally, all sides to the debate over ecological risks suspect their opponents of rationalizing unstated motives...
...they install sympathizers in high elective and appointive office...
...and the turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming...
...But they'll settle in...
...Interestingly enough, the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that, under a wide range of conditions, when evidence contradicts belief, belief is reinforced...
...Later, when we finished the roll call and the mood turned mellow, Charlie put on the collected speeches of Douglas MacArthur and told me about himself...
...There were drums...
...Is the global atmosphere warming, cooling,, staying the same, or doing some combination of the above...
...But that was incidental...
...The "Pollyannas" suspect that the "Cassandras" are in the service of a decadent (and largely elitist) political reaction against bourgeois culture and capitalist economics...
...There he is, a swivelhipped, jean-clad artiste, usually in early middle age, a man who would otherwise spend his days riding a motorcycle but instead swaggers around the set waving his phallic lens and speaking profoundly on The Tonight Show...
...Yet Schneider is no polemicist, and his tone is entirely free of mockery or any other form of stridency...
...I never saw Charlie again after that...
...In 1980, of course, it will all begin again, and some of those things will still be part of the burden we'll have to shoulder once more--things like the CBS delegate count, votes prefaced with "the beautiful island of Guam, where America's day begins," John Connally, Jerry Brown, maybe Teddy Kennedy, Amy Carter, Bill Moyers, "New Mexico, the land of enchantment," David Brinkley, Roger Mudd's kid, Moyer's kid, balloons, frisbees, porcine faces, that obese lady the cameras zoom in on who looks like she's zonked out on Hostess ho-ho ding-dongs and Old Mr...
...It is important to emphasize, though, that all respectable argument on such issues emerges from the protoplasm of scientific reason...
...Perception, experience, "common sense' '--these are simply not relevant tools...
...Such problems are perceived only in a halflight, which makes them more intriguing and, paradoxically, more believable...
...Now that's no cause for rejoicing, to be sure, for those four things can be awfully boring...
...But at least until November, we have only four major things to contend with--Gerald Ford, Robert Dole, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale...
...Do we ? BOOK REVIEW The Genesis Strategy Stephen H. Schneider (with Lynne E. Mesirow) / Plenum / $14.95 Eugene Bardach The prophets of ancient Israel were, as everyone knows, largely ignored, despised, and dishonored...
...It'll be hard at first to settle down again to the daily grind back in Sweat, South Dakota, or Bump, Texas, And there'll be one or two conventioneers who'll have a hell of a time explaining to the little woman John R. Coyne, Jr_9 a Washington writer, was formerly a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford...
...He was going to Miami in '72, and he hoped to continue to go until he was called to his reward by the Big Pol in the sky...
...Is the ozone shield (against ultra-violet radiation) being depleted by fluorocarbons, or is there a "natural sink" for these, or does the natural rate of ozone replenishment offset any likely depletion...
...Indeed ecological jeremiads seem often to contradict experience and perception, for the oceans are not boiling and the seasons come dutifully in their course...
...But if he wasn't there in body, his spirit permeated Kemper Arena--and for that matter Madison Square Garden-for Charlie is the quintessential national convention delegate...
...Contemporary prophets of ecological doom fare a lot better...
...The "Cassandras" suspect that the "Pollyannas" are enslaved by the habit of optimism, addicted to material comfort, and victimized by pseudo-eternal verities about the subordination of nature to man...
...Peccei and his brethren, I believe, lies in the fact that Jeremiah was talking about things people could see and hear, the misdeeds of everyday life, whereas ecological jeremiads, conversely, refer to intangible long-term trends, to "rising" specters, to "increasing stress on the biosphere," and the like...
...Do we...
...It was an LP, with a dozen or so versions of that memorable work--Duke Ellington played it, if I remember correctly, and people like Sammy Davis and the Ubangi maiden sang it...
...In political polemics such suspicions are made into accusations...
...They draw large audiences...
...I don't remember what he did for a living--sold drapes, perhaps...
...Charlie With the process of selecting our Presidents in the hands of convention delegates, we don't have anything to worry about...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...A memorable evening indeed, lacking only a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "My Kind of Guy, Ted Agnew Is...
...We shall see...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 27 why they have to visit old Doc Gooch for a shot or two of penicillin...
...How often have our wavering thinkers debased their judgment before a movie that is patently absurd, or dishonest...
...He says a good many unflattering things about our governmental institutions and about scientists in their employ...
...He believes that we are rapidly heading towards big ecological troubles, perhaps catastrophes...
...It was a handsome, sprawling, one-story Southwestern house, and Charlie, a happy fellow with pink eyes, was especially proud of the sound system he'd just installed...
...But the conventions are over, newsmen no longer have to crib from one another in order to try to analyze the latest unanalyzable move by John Sears, and the delegates have all gone home to sober up...
...Scientific reason is remarkably protoplasmic...
...But where it will all end, knows God...
...The words of Jeremiah are certainly more plangent, more deeply possessing...
...How to explain the relatively greater success of these latter-day prophets...
...Outside of that, the results are mixed...
...So many movies no longer purport to tell a story or raise a laugh or illustrate an idea-with the demise of reading, they are the original source, the model for life to imitate...
...And given the Republican civil war this time round, he may not have made it to the Kansas City convention...
...Charlie broke out some funny Republican convention hats and some noisemakers, and he and his friends marched around the house, singing along and shouting, "four more years...
...The Old Testament prophets appealed to experience and perception, whereas the latter-day prophets appeal to theory and reason...
...Movies are in their childhood...
...I can't remember his name now, but I'l...
...How confusing it is to recall which was which when we open the pages of a news magazine and fred a feature story on one...
...Boston lemon flavored gin, the refugees from every Shriners convention ever held, Cl~trke Reed, benedictions, Sam Donaldson, Sonny Bono, Dan Rather, foolish hats, Evans and Novak, body odor, Tony Orlando_9 We still have those four major things to carry until November, and on election eve there'll be things like CBS vote projections to carry...
...The much-lauded end of the studio system has, like universal popular suffrage, not necessarily improved the quality of the product_9 As the potential of television has evaporated into Newton Minow's vast wasteland, the demands on the cinema grow...
...I don't expect to be guilty of eulogizing these creatures, but hope to be able to decide what, if anything, should be done with them...
...And with the process of selecting our Presidents ultimately in the hands of men like Charlie, we don't have anything to worry about...
...But earlier in the year, before the conventions, just think of the things we had to carry around with us--Morris Udall, Birch Bayh, Henry Kissinger, detente, Fred Harris, Martin Luther King, Sr., Scoop Jackson, George Wallace, primaries, the CBS-New York Times poll, Terry Sanford, Jerry Brown, Tom Hayden, Proposition 15, Frank Church, David Broder...
...These can be very sharp indeed when barbed--as they often are--with the edge of mockery...
...And although he didn't say so, I'm sure that Charlie believed that heaven would very closely resemble one huge and continuous political convention, with an eternal supply of signs and hats and noisemakers and bands and speeches and roll call votes...
...Tomorrow is another day...
...There is a growing understanding of the historic value of film...
...The difference in favor of Mr...
...Or with the cinema as whole...
...At some pernicious moment in recent times, "movies" became "films"--with all the pretense that suggests--and were turned into creatures of their audience...
...And tonight, he told us, we were in for a special treat...
...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976...
...He argues his case not merely as a scientist but as an unabashed political advocate...
...Let me tell you about one...
...Reason has a dark underside, known since Freud as rationalization...
...Seemingly every prediction that grows from it quickly induces an opposite prediction...
...Our interests didn't quite coincide...
...they receive grants from private philanthropists and liberal foundations...
...Comedy is inevitably handicapped in a heavy-handed and self-pitying era such as ours...
...The show becomes a harangue, and that, mixed with a misunderstanding of theatre and the temper of our unsubtle age, adds up to a national bashing of the head...
...but my people know not the ordinance of the Lord...
...Of course, the prophets of ecological catastrophes have not been completely effective, and converts to the belief in ecological catastrophe are still a minority...
...As I said, we are presently assailed by the notion that directors represent the essential ingredient of fdms, and most of them have learned to behave in time-honored uniformity...
...After a few drinks, Charlie disappeared into another room...
...But now phase one is finished, the conventions are over, and we can forget about certain things for good--things like 16c, the Mississippi delegation, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, James Buckley's vice presidential candidacy, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, William Ruckelshaus, and, praise be, Richard Schweiker, the most forgettable thing of all...
...The fanciful image of a generatxcm ago (Jack Oalde, Lanny Ross, June Ailyson) gave way to the bizarre world of the early '60s: fraternity brothers at State eternally shuttling between the beach and the gym, which in turn led to the inimitable late '60s--a universe of blearyeyed, dull-voiced, idealistic youth storming the administration building (Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement, etc...
...Stephen H. Schneider is a climatologist at the Natural Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado...
...The important thing was that since 1964, Charlie had been going to Republican conventions as a delegate...
...Compare this to the utterances of Aurelio'Peccei, wealthy founder of the Club of Rome and promoter of the "limits to growth" idea: "The specter of famine is...rising again on the planet--but for the first time so huge as to be called megafamine...
...I met him in Phoenix, where I'd gone to teach in 1971...
...This was revealed to me in the course of my undergraduate career (not so many years ago) when I observed that behavior was so often modeled on cinematic themes, a particular irony since movies have so consistently misunderstood and caricatured university life...
...And suddenly there was a woman with a Ubangi voice shrieking something nearly unintelligible which proved to be "Nixon's the One...
...Respectable scientific opinion can be found in support of all positions...
...call him Charlie...
...Suddenly the lights went down, and the strobe lights came on, and Charlie's air-conditioned house literally shook with the noise...
...What is revealing is that the ostensibly intelligent audience seems in fact to encourage it...
...These stylistic virtues are not Eugene Bardacb teaches public policy at the Unwersity of Cakfornia, Berkeley...
...Yet, it must be admitted that those of Peccei are more lingering, more obsessing...
...After a political mumble I'd given to a small group in Phoenix, Charlie invited me to a party at his house...
...There were trumpets...
...Not content merely to entertain, movie-makers now seek largely to educate, a laudable goal, but ultimately dangerous inasmuch as it takes an educated person to do the educating, and most movie people, in whatever capacity, are not overburdened with learning, or even, alas, talent_9 When a vaudevillian manqu~ seeks after the truth, the result is more often than not emharassing (Last Tango in Paris, Shampoo, Carnal Knowledge, etc...
...There is an increasing abundance of them, although statistically there must be few masterpieces...
...Convention delegates are remarkable people, not like you or me...
...Surely it cannot lie in their superior rhetoric...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
