Media: Wilbur Mills and Lenny Bruce
Murray, Michael
port of military dictatorships around the world, even to creating military dictatorships where none existed; to our consequent violent and often effective opposition to democratically elected...
...The 29 November 1974:214...
...I'm gonna clear the air once and for all, and confess...
...Recordings of his performances are selling briskly...
...to the inflation that is the unavoidable consequence of military spending on our scale...
...Accepting the danger of jokes in public forums on these subjects, we compare notes over the phone, at parties or in supermarket lines, exchanging weird "scenarios" which might explain the Resignation, the Pardon and so on...
...Anti-Communism abroad has killed thousands of American youths in two absolutely pointless wars and is now conducting a permawar in Indochina...
...Commonweal: 213 It is coincidental but interesting that in this atmosphere there is now a new interest in the life and works of the late comedian Lenny Bruce, a man whose jokes were so public and apparently so dangerous that many people did not consider them funny or even permissible...
...Watergate was merely the last major gift of anti-Communism to the American people and was hardly the worst...
...It is one of today's pieties that Lenny Bruce was ahead of his time...
...For all his passion for truth, his vision was one-dimensional and circumscribed by the word of strip-joints, jazz, narcotics and obsessive sex in which he lived...
...This liberation of our wild imaginings is probably a job for satirists, however, rather than investigative reporters---the plain facts are really not suflicient-- and indeed recent events have unleashed the satirist in everyone...
...It said, 'We killed h i m . . , s i g n e d . . . Morty.' ") Most of all, he ripped into the barriers of taste that society has built around sex...
...His defenders who compare him now to Swift are overstating the case considerably: granting that "Lenny was his own act," in Nat Hentoff's phrase, and that he cannot be fairly recaptured in transcripts, imitations or even recordings, hi~ body of work, by any definition, was pathetically slim...
...Yet even to condemn him this way is to ennoble him unnecessarily and make him seem more interesting than he is...
...MICHAEL MURRAY MALLE DE MOVIE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN As the title of Louis Malle's new film, Lacombe Lucien, indicates, the central character always gives his name backwards, the way a bureaucracy would...
...to establishing something very close to an economic military dictatorship in our own country...
...The columnists have been warning of the dangers to privacy and good taste in all this, and admittedly a sweeping iconoclasm in the media can confuse issues, obscuring the distinction between private lives and public performances...
...Probably too much has been and will be made of Lenny Bruce...
...He doesn't have such stature, even as a brute...
...The fraudulent nature of anti-Communism as policy may also be studied in its achievements, or lack thereof...
...We did it...
...to devoting a steadily increasing part of our industry to military manufacture and the consequent administrative corruption of industry: military industrialists have lost the basic business ability to figure costs correctly and to make things that work as they are supposed to because the Pentagon requires neither of these...
...It has also unleashed a peculiar kind of political charlatan upon us...
...WILBUR MILLS AND LENNY BRUCE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MEDIA Should we be surprised that there have been so many jokes in the media about Wilbur Mills...
...He was finally driven to shock just for the sake of shocking, in his desire to penetrate the deadening layers of maturity which he saw around him...
...There is a primitive honesty in this world, perhaps, but he was mistaken to believe that it represents the "truth," a basic heritage that we are all afraid to face...
...We still seem to need some ultimate, distasteful insight, blasting through the bizarre yet maddeningly prosaic and maturely presented facts that we have been offered...
...Anti-Communism came into existence to stave off what was seen as a Soviet threat to engulf the world, starting with Europe, and to "roll back," in Nixon's words, the Red tide in Eastern Europe...
...We want to know about the real relationship between Nixon and Zeigler, Ted and Joan, Rockefeller and Ronan...
...Take pills...
...Mills has taken the brunt of a frustration that has been teasing us for months: Having established that so many majestic figures in government are all too human, we now seem to want to know everything...
...When he discovers a Jewish tailor (Holger Lowenadler) in hiding with his daughter and mother, Lucien terrorizes the whole family with his attentions to the daughter, eventually bringing about the arrest of all...
...Sometimes the explanations were not accepted and the anti-Communist crusader went to jail or retired to private life...
...is the center of a bitter journalistic battle...
...At the moment, there is little sign of such an awakening...
...The tide has not been rolled back an inch nor has there ever been anything like a serious effort on anyone's part, including Nixon's, to roll it...
...In a fundamental way, he was a brother to that small band of performers who come up for air on the late-night TV shows and talk about how recently they left Vegas and how soon they will be going back...
...As a teenager during the closing days of World War II in France, he falls in with the local Gestapo group and quickly shows himself a fitting associate for them...
...It has corrupted the noble concept of foreign aid, sending shells instead of soybeans and tragically delaying if not making impossible the self-sufficiency of many third world peoples...
...Wander about in a daze...
...As the supreme anti-Communist of this anti-Communist troupe, Nixon naturally took in more money than the rest of them put together, told bigger lies, caused more harm, betrayed more people and ended, in the tradition, by retiring to private life to avoid going to jail...
...Lenny Bruce's medium was nightclubs, at first glance an unpromising forum for serious satire...
...to our consequent violent and often effective opposition to democratically elected regimes...
...He was, at his best, an exceptionally funny man, but most of his career was devoted to demolishing the hypocrisies inherent in the notion of "good taste...
...I did it, my family...
...What was it like during Nixon's last White House days...
...If it causes us to re-examine the anti-Communist base of our actions in the world and against ourselves, Watergate will have been a very cheap price for an absolutely essential educational leap...
...Meanwhile, the Soviets have demonstrated that they can't ~take Communist Yugoslavia, let alone the world...
...But when institutions and conventions become corrupt or oppressive, it can be therapeutic to peek rudely behind the curtain, to see precisely how ridiculous the Wizard really is, standing there in his undershorts...
...Wilbur Mills, a safer target, has finally given us some good dirt to get hold of, a foothold for dark fantasies...
...In his relationship with this family, Lucien proves a young man who has needs and cravings, but no emotions--a wandering appetite, like a shark...
...It is not likely that Lenny would have paid much attention to the embarrassments of Wilbur Mills, but his fantasies about life within the White House or in Rockefeller's camp in recent months can be imagined, and they might have helped satisfy our craving for catharsis...
...Indeed, Lucien (Pierre Blaise) is himself nothing more than a petty bureaucrat, one of society's official and anonymous gangsters...
...Yet we cannot escape the feeling that the sallies of Johnny Carson, Russell Baker and the rest are not savage enough, childish enough--irresponsible enough - - t o meet our needs today...
...to causing to exist an ever increasing number of nuclear warheads which any child knows are simply dangerous to have around...
...Did he drink...
...Anti-Communism became policy in the wake of the savage and sinister Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia early in 1948, a takeover preceded by essentially similar actions in Poland, Hungary and Rumania and by the forthright occupation in World War II of the former Czarist Baltic provinces...
...In one sense, he was a child who could not accept the careful accommodations of adulthood, the arranged pretenses and self-protective structures of grown-up life...
...He was arrested so often for obscenity that it is hard for many people to separate their understanding of what he accomplished from their outrage at his persecution...
...He fantasized, for example, about Cardinal Spellman's panic at being suddenly confronted with the return of Christ and Moses to earth, about the mysterious and kinky refusal of the Lone Ranger to accept a thank-you, about the Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus ("All right...
...He was, in the words of Brian Glanville, "a brave voice calling from the nursery...
...Books by and about him are in print, and a best-seller called Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce...
...Actually the nature of the politicians attracted to anti-Communism should have given us fair warning: from Joe McCarthy and Tom Dodd of Connecticut and many others including the young Nixon, right to the old Nixon we have learned about at last, there was quite regularly an element of funny business with funds...
...Like most satirists, he viewed basic moral precepts as absolutes ("Ten Commandments don't say, 'Thou shalt not kill sometime,' ") and he rejected all of society's taboos as simply "lies...
...The recent play about him is being revived outside of New York (currently in Boston...
...In his last years, his satire, when it was not a tantrum of abuse, was often a self-righteous lecture...
...Anti-Communism at home has unleashed hundreds of agents to violate the constitutional rights of citizens, including military agents assigned to spy upon political dissenters...
...His death itself, from an overdose of narcotics in 1966, is widely considered to be a direct result of cruel police harassment...
...We found a note in the basement...
...Although spiritually a member of this tribe, Lenny Bruce was never able to contain his improvisations within the boundaries of taste prescribed by the networks or even the nightclubs...
...Even given the shifting standards of permissiveness over the past ten years, however, the question-- today as then--is how far can one go with public jokes about private matters...
...He quickly became a stock character in Johnny Carson's monologues, along with Ralph, the used-car salesman, and he has been depicted in newspaper cartoons careening through the Capitol corridors with a girl over his shoulder, bubbles wafting around his head...
...Nat Hentoff and others have blasted the author, Albert Goldman, in various papers and magazines for distorting the facts about the man, and so Lenny is once again a figure of controversy...
...If it can cause us to wake up from the anti-Communist dream which has long ago turned into a nightmare, Watergate will be worth its costs...
...A movie, with Dustin Hoffman, has just been released...
...money somehow stuck to their fingers and had to be explained away...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 8
