The Future While It Happened
Jr, Aram Bakshian
"The Future While It Happened" To add a delightful touch for the leather fetishists and sado-masochists in the crowd, the nude bey and girl cling together, childlike, and...
...Not all_of the victims are gangsters...
...According to Lubell, greedy self-interest lies at the heart of most people's voting motivation...
...Not all of the victims are themselves killers...
...Then, in 1972, with the economy still healthy enough so that the mass of gainfully employed Americans felt financially secure, they resoundingly rejected old liberalism and new populism together, in the rather sorry form of George McGovern...
...Lubell's premise that, again and again, self-interest is decisive hardly qualifies as a novel idea, but it is good to see a longneglected contributor to these pages, Dr...
...But self-interest, while not the only, is certainly the most powerful of these factors...
...So here is the equation: well-to-do plus sexually active equals threats to society...
...In Magnum Force, the epitome of hardhattism, the policeman is striking back with a vengeance...
...In the Roosevelt coalition, bern as itwas of the Great Depression, this meant that blacks, blue collars, left-wing intellectuals, and many hard-hit white collars all looked to government to bail them out of a sticky financial fix...
...By concentrating On carefully selected community samplings, and by interviewing in depth instead of relying on brief questionnaires with confining, prefabricated answers, Lubell manages to soak up not only the immediate, direct political trends, but also the fine strains of economic interest, regional background, prejudice, and perspective that cause a given person or group to vote a particular way in an individual election...
...I~t it pass, for Isubell considers himself neither a moralist nor a reporter...
...Nor can it be an eye for an eye...
...It involves no character development whatsoever, except for the spurious Jekyll-Hyde personality changes when a meek person is revealed to be a psychopathic killer...
...Nevertheless, he has a truer reporter's instinct than any of the sleek, bland, dinner-hour pundits who monopolize the screen--even if he does tend to oversimplify things at times...
...From here on out, as they saw it, most new domestic programs would deal not with the mass of working Americans, but with groups like welfare mothers and unemployed slum dwellers (many of them conveniently color-ceded...
...through the window to the ground twenty floors below...
...After all, one thing is always true of coalitions: They are never permanent...
...It was he, after all, who long ago entitled his study of altruism in American politics, What's in It for Me...
...The motive for all of these murders cannot be gangsterism...
...It is what Sam Lubell hears and notes during his interviews---the gripes, hopes, fears, and resentments of individual citizens (and their evolution over the past two decades) that makes his book unique...
...Actually, reading America's mind would probably be a better way of describing it...
...All of these are the flaws of movies made for television...
...What he has found during some of his recent brain probes makes for interesting reading...
...Roundheads and Cavaliers, choose your weapons...
...There is a constant struggle going on over whether movies will take their dominant inspiration from good theatre or bad television...
...It is totally predictable from start to finish...
...After this rich diet of social futurism though, the movie serves up only the thinnest of soups...
...The Alternative March 1974 23...
...There is no acting...
...Blue-collar workers, college students, minority group members, or pensioners-that is the one question they all want answered...
...Recently Herman Kahn and other social scientists have been saying that the lowermiddle classes are in revolt over the ease of life and sexual libertinage of the uppermiddle classes...
...Camera angles and framing are reminiscent of television advertisements for tires...
...Coupled with emotional irritants like rioting, ever-higher taxes, and forced busing, and added to the numerous failures of the New Frontier and the Great Society at home and abroad, this caused a major realignment...
...For the sin of enjoying what should be forbidden, for bringing into the open what should be clandestine, the death penalty has been revived...
...One sees very little of him on television, even when, as occasionally happens, a network commissions him to do a poll...
...With prosperity (and the more gradual passing of the old Depression trauma that stayed with many voters long after the Depression itself was past) many members of this coalition of dependency began to perceive that big government had given them just about everything they needed from it...
...Facial expressions are always fixed in a smile or a frown...
...He glories in the titl~ of opinion analyst and, ever since his remarkably accurate forecast of voting trends in the 1952 presidential election, he has spent most of his time taking America's pulse...
...Magnum Force has them all, and for long periods of watching Magnum Force, the viewer will find himself wondering when the Alka-Seltzer commercials are coming on...
...Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them proved that most of the nation was fed up with traditional Democratic liberalism in 1968...
...Watergate...
...Women are treated with contempt as sex hungry subhumans...
...On the other hand, if the economy does not plunge, and the Republican Party doesn't panic or commit suicide, my guess is that, come 1976, we will see a moderately conservative Republican elected to the White House at the same time that beth major parties continue to lose prestige with the voters and large segments of the electorate continue to cast about for new faces, new labels, and more permanent political home...
...In individual cases where they still felt a need, such as medicare, they continued to support further government involvement, but these became the exceptions...
...George Washington Plunkett, vindicated...
...I italicize "raw" because once Lubell starts injecting his own prejudices as an old-line liberal, their value begins to drop sharply and you must edit as you read...
...The Future While It Happened S AM LUBELL IS A SMALL, frog-like man with thick glasses and a croaking voice...
...Harris, Gallup, and the race of onedimensional statisticians they have by Samuel Lubell Norton $5.95 spawned could learn a lot from Sam Lubell, but it is the politicians rather than the pollsters who have the most to gain from studying his raw findings...
...Once they decide on the answer (sometimes correctly, sometimes not), they almost invariably vote accordingly...
...And lest all the swingers draw any comfort from Dirty Harry Calahan's killing all the leather covered executioners, remember their leader's words . . . "Heh, heh . . . There's plenty more where they came from...
...The theory is simply that the hardhats are enraged that the uppermiddle classes are getting away with something that the hardhats feel is forbidden or at least shameful...
...To add a delightful touch for the leather fetishists and sado-masochists in the crowd, the nude bey and girl cling together, childlike, and plead for mercy as the remorseless killer blasts them apart...
...energy problems, and the economic hitches attending the latter could drive many of the members of the new coalition back into the arms of a charismatic demagogue with a liberal program artfully embellished with a few Wallace-style trimmings...
...The people around the swimming pool and the pathetically pleading bey and girl on the waterbed are obviously being rubbed out for the sin of their fleshly appetites and their satisfaction...
...Personally, I suspect that Lubell's simplistic, almost naive brand of cynicism fails to do justice to a myriad of far more objectionable factors than self-interest~hatred, fear, envy, rage, stupidity, and, most dangerous of all, misguided altruism, to name only a few...
...Where will it go from here...
...At one point the leader of the killers explains that the victims are people who "are threats to society...
...With Magnum Foree, score a big one for Captain Video, and for Herman Kahn...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
