WASHINGTON REPORT: A City of Two Faces
Sisyphus
WKSHI3qGTOH REPORT A CITY OF TWO FACES The well-tended neighborhoods of Washington have never seemed more radiant than they do during this Spring of misfortune. The blossoms seem to be...
...Economists call it "stag-flation" and then concede they don't know what to do...
...Roosevelt would always roar with delight at that suggestion," Douglas notes, "and, of course, never did anything about it...
...No amount of expunging of bad campaign practices by legislation will provide the "naysayers," the Cabinet officers and aides, necessary to prevent abuses of power and responsibility...
...Harmony is the word--and, if you must leave, go on tip-toe...
...Outside, in the real world, inflation gallops ahead at 11 percent and production falls...
...They hide the daily production of small and large deceits that are directed against the governed...
...With one most recent exception, there have been no Nora Helmers walking out of government and slamming the doors behind them since the Truman Presidency...
...And yet, even the intentions that seem undeniable in the proposal Aiexandre has made come to seem less and less likely as the film progresses...
...At heart, the two major parties revere permanence and property, although the Democratic party is owned by the myth of program to the extent it cannot think of the future in any other terms except more of the same...
...Since this is where we came in, it may not seem that much progress has been made...
...And, historically in the United States, out of this condition in an aggravated stage has been born the third party, short-lived though it may have become...
...The third party sustains Lincoln Steffens' argument in "The Shame of the Cities" that reform is never enough--structural changes are needed to root out, e.g., economic inequality...
...On Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the Potomac River within sight of the Lincoln Memorial, is a tablet bearing an observation of the man who sought to use the Presidency as a bully-pulpit: "Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the job of life, and the duty of life...
...After that, Douglas continues, an agency is "likely to become a prison of bureaucracy and of the inertia demanded by the Establishment of any respected agency...
...The great monuments of Washington do seem to glitter more attractively than ever, but within, as if in reproach to contemporary men, are chiseled into the walls formulations of sterner men living in the days when the Republic they knew, however beset by difficulties, was not a "soft-state...
...Ergo, the Republic is safe again...
...The great monuments to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln never glittered more attractively in the sun...
...Mitford suggests that "liberal" rehabilitation programs and newer prisons may only be sugar-coatings of a poisonous pill...
...Where housing is needed, the business community, whose members live in suburban Maryland and Virginia, would place a white-elephant civic center to match three miles away the huge, debt-laden municipal stadium that now stands idle except for a few weeks each fall when the local professional football team, the Redskins, plays...
...In her book, Kind and Usual Punishment, Ms...
...For that matter, the young woman referred to in the title as the "mother" isn't really a mother either, nor is the "whore" a whore...
...Nevertheless, this Spring, too, Senators and Representatives are in a better humor...
...And the Capitol dome seems larger than ever, almost cathedral-like in its giant-ness in this May of 1974...
...But aren't the Republicans different from Democrats...
...It is understandable, then, that the Washington Post, itself emerging from a strike of its editorial and commercial employees, suggested in an editorial: " . . . the city seemed to be smiling once again...
...Because, therefore, New Dealers and their descendants protect the legislative legacies of the 1930s and 1940s, they, not the planters of the South, New or Old, are becoming the Bourbons of American politics...
...The Circus Maximus was used more efficiently and more frequently...
...Thus he runs the gamut in one day from his "mother"--the first woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who gives him room and boardmto his "whore"--the last woman, Veronika (Frangoise Lebrun), who lets him make love to her after one or two casual dates...
...Automobiles are not allowed on the Island...
...Never with more spirit do children ride the merry-go-round on the Mall, whose grass has recovered from the tramplings of feet of men and women who marched into town in the 1960s seeking to be admitted into America...
...Only the French can make such amusing movies out of such contrary ideas...
...SISYPHUS 000 PAIR O' DOXIES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The central character in Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore is neither the mother nor the whore, but Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud...
...Along downtown Seventh Street, the boarded buildings await renewal, while along the sidewalks and into the streets themselves winos wine, dealers deal and pimps pander as wide-eyed children watch--no suggestion of which is found in any of the pretty guide-books and along the routes of prettied tour buses...
...The humor runs to quips about how many goldfish can streakers swallow while jammed into a phonebooth...
...Alexandre claims that he has proposed to Gilberte to make her decide between himself and another young man...
...The fortress-like facades of government buildings deceive twice over...
...In the opening sequences of the film, for instance, he sneaks out of the bed he shares with one woman, borrows a car from another woman, drives off to a third woman, and then, as he is taking his leave from the last of these, strikes up a conversation with a fourth woman in order to ask for her telephone number...
...The emphasis within departments and agencies of the Executive Branch, Douglas appears to be suggesting, becomes henceforth one of technique--substituting efficiency of systems for the experience of men...
...But by the time we get to the other end of the film, it is clear that it is Alexandre who is indecisive...
...Within the Congress, matters seem no better at the time, despite the ferment for constructive change within the more unruly, less elegant of the two bodies, the House of Representatives...
...The city government, incompetently managed now by blacks as it was once for 150 years by whites, is disabled by Congressional intervention and headed by a "mayor" who makes Abe Beame seem like a giant among men...
...The other woman he has made overtures to this day, Gilberte (Isabel Weingarten), becomes just that, the "other woman," even though she is the one he has asked to marry him...
...A newcomer to the Congress from one of the Southwestern states says the place reminds him of a Spanish gypsy curse: Entre disputados te yeas, or, may you find yourself surrounded by legislators...
...But the first time we saw him propose, he acted with such insouciance, such composure...
...The great creative work of a federal agency must be done in the first decade of its existence, if it is to be done at all," Justice William O. Douglas writes in his most recent book, Go East, Young Man...
...But they mislead, like the false-fronts of villages Catherine the Great was shown in another duplicious time and place...
...He knows he will be accepted this time as surely as he must Commonweal: 259...
...Henry Adams, who demonstrated a sharp eye for the reality of Washington, would surely have suggested incongruities in this surface view of Washington, a political Eden now turned a Gethsemane...
...The "liberals," he noted (being one himself) are generally a shiftless sanctimonious lot who speak of secular saintliness...
...Nixon men are mercenaries for men of property, but liberals are often charlatans of emotion...
...In this sense, each shares a common ailment--the disease of orthodoxy conveying a suggestion that there exists in some respects a one-party state...
...now he is in such a state of agitation that he collapses on the floor afterwards...
...One remembers Jessica Mitford's suggestion in her writing on prisons...
...They, too, obscure the blocks of burned commercial and residential buildings left standing since they were plundered during the riots following Martin Luther King's assassination six years ago...
...In fact, the first thing to be said about The Mother and the Whore is that it's the sort of movie that is what it isn't ---one of those French films where nothing is what it appears to be and everything is really something else...
...What he can't stand, he says, is indecision...
...The governmental and affluent residential neighborhoods are, of course, well-tended--as they would be in such a City of easy virtue...
...The young men wear ties and the women dresses and both talk about Jay Gatsby and East Egg...
...The admired blossoms persist this year, perhaps to detract from the Watergate as it breeds its own political serpents--distrust, dismay and disillusionment that will work against incumbents this fall, whether they be good, bad, or indifferent...
...Grand plan after grand plan nourishes hopes of the ghetto homeless, but the gap between promise and fulfillment remains...
...The blossoms seem to be lasting longer...
...Program upon program...
...And the other day Walter Heller, acknowledging his bafflement, made a little joke about an economist being a man who marries Elizabeth Taylor for her money...
...Since she is the only one he has declared serious intentions towards, there is at least poetic justice in the fact that she turns out to be the only one who wants nothing to do with him...
...This observation is about as accurate as is the fanciful recitation of the red-coated guides who show tourists, laden with cameras and children, around the historic passageways of the Capitol...
...To make him choose between them, Alexandre's mother and his whore have by the conclusion of the film done everything conceivable, including making love to each other...
...Yes, Scott Fitzgerald might have said to rephrase himself when he replied to Hemingway about the rich, they're in office...
...Douglas recounts that he suggested to President 17 May 1974:2.58 Franklin Roosevelt that any agency be abolished 10 years after it is established, no later...
...The young men and women applying for summer internships are polite and say "Sir...
...At last, after innumerable "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse," he again pops the question...
...Certainly Alexandre isn't what he appears to be in the leastwnot for a minute, don't you believe it...
...Duty, not dissent, characterizes these students...
...good money after bad...
...agency upon agency...
...But, of course, to transform economic foundations of a society into ones more equitable is, perhaps, the most hazardous enterprise one can undertake...
...What Alexandre appears to be is a ren~orseless, and relentless, Lothario...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 11
