Washington Report: Part Imperfect, Future Imperative
Getlein, Frank
play was an affront to the conscience of Catholics. Following up the first installment of Fo's play, the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Ugo Poletti, sent a telegram to Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti...
...Their resentment was made of bone...
...As to Ford's benefactor, he continued his impersonaOf ]~.mt'l Jannings in the last scene of The B/ue Ange...
...The war between property-owners and juvenile trespassers is ancient, but here is something distinctly new...
...All he had to do was obey the rtding of the Supreme Court and turn the tapes over to the proper authorities asking for them...
...La Repubblica, a Socialist-leaning daily, hailed the play as "one of the most extraordinary pieces of comic popular theater that can be admired in Europe today...
...Precisely: I am the state and the law and the Constitution...
...His plaintive column (we find out later) seems to bring respite...
...My direction was always very clear . . . . I believe in the nobility of man . . . . At various times in my life, I was a member of the S.D.S., the A.D.A., the N.A.A.C.P., CORE, the A.C.L.U...
...The other parties from the Liberals ("Pluralism does not mean saying the same thing with different voices, but being able to say some~ thing different like the theater of Dario Fo") to the Communists ("We too have been affronted by certain television transmissions without, however, resorting to a call for censorship") have condemned any attempts to ban Fo again from national television...
...The Christian Democratic Party is calling for the censorship of Fo (who is scheduled to present 15 television shows this spring and next fall...
...The more I see of Nixon's replies," Ford said, "the more I'm convinced that my reason for the pardon has been validated...
...There were other strains, a touch, for example, of Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar ordering the rub-ont of Eddie, a gang member about to turn honest CommonweaL" 359 and talk...
...I begin (the first time) in that special land so many of us inhabit so much...
...It begins not once but three times...
...Is it possible that if the so-called "intelligence" agencies paid their own way, the mails would easily make a profit instead of losing money all the time?mand all that petty crime...
...This time an article by Marjory Potts...
...What is happening to me...
...It was like trying to reason with the sullen pips on a stack of dominoes...
...Following up the first installment of Fo's play, the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Ugo Poletti, sent a telegram to Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti protesting what he called a "blasphemous and anticultural transmission...
...As she walks from the train to her Brooklyn home, two scrawny fourteen-year-olds make obscene remarks to her -and she wants to smash their heads together...
...As he sank into renewed fantasies about "getting" his enemies, particularly Ellsberg, he became more and more a caricature of a kind of party imitation of Robinson in the role...
...I Banned the Bomb...
...This was exactly the spirit in which Nixon dealt with Dr...
...Leonard's stoop...
...Not all Italian Catholics, however, found the play offensive...
...Leo10 June 1977:360 but that he saw himself as a gangster and saw gangsterism as not merely justified by the situation but even dictated by it: had he acted as an honest man, he would have failed in his duty to the country...
...There is a political dimension, however, to this sidewalk drama...
...How many lawyers arguing did he have to listen to before deciding to give the incriminatil~ tapes to the criminal incriminated on them...
...Well, they're both gone now, the Monster and the Pardoner, but, as the Highland Ballad asks plaintively, Will he no come back again...
...Moreover, if the crook president has selected a crook vice-president--like calls to like---when the crook vice-president is forced to resign, don't let the crook president appoint the successor vice-president: make advise and consent really work and get in the office someone indebted to Congress for the job, not to the crook president, let alone to a military climber like AI Haig...
...Did Farmer Macgregor, upon throwing Peter Rabbit out of the garden, chew over the cud of his political allegiances...
...That is the overwhelming lesson of the Nixon show...
...Complaining of the slobs, Mr...
...Potts fantasizes "castration for rapists, speedy trials for quick executions, an end to protection for kid punks...
...He speaks of "apologizing" to the slobs and he reminds himself of his motley of mortgages, his hard work and debts, his immigrant forebears...
...devote a quarter of his time in the White House "listening to lawyers arg, ins about the tapes and so on" rather than concentrating his efforts on pressing government problems like the economy...
...And in the third, had he allowed justice to take its course, he would not really have had to spend all that time in arguments about the tapes...
...FRAN~ GETLEI-bI' nard feels pressed to mention that he is a "middle-class liberal...
...In the realm of the intellect, if that phrase applies anywhere in the whole rotten business, Ford is now imitating Chevy Chase imitating Ford...
...Besides this primitive chemical warfare, he also wields publicity...
...Not a castle-in-the-air hovering over his typewriter but a thirteen-and-a-half T]WREE TALES OF A CITY PETER STEINFELS foot-wide Westside Manhattan house, complete with a stoop and a flowerbox and attached to a Westside Man-" hattan street, a sidewalk and (here the trouble begins) some slobs...
...Nowadays crooks lack honor and have to be held for downs...
...Next time out he'll wrestle him.gel] to the grotmd...
...A million small rages, for "middle-class liberals," against themselves and their political beliefs...
...Where have we seen that combination before in art embattled, self-pitying national leader...
...Leonard being the very soul of melancholy these days...
...Potts is riding the subway and fantasizing...
...Continued on page 382) Commonweal: 361...
...It ends, I believe, at one point...
...On the record of the Big Broadcasts now concluding, a couple of easy things, no Amendment to the Constitution required...
...Nixon, in fact, went on to compare the movie to "any Toistoyan novel," specifically to Anna Karenina in addition to War and Peace...
...Private measures...
...Both are poignant and ring true...
...Mr...
...David Frost, the interviewer, brought up the question of whether the Monster's having just had two screenings of Patton influenced him in making the secret, un-Constitutional and, in the event, utterly disastrous invasion--or "incursion"---of Cambodia...
...But burglary, breaking and entering, wiretapping and mail-opening, all the dements of the infamous Huston plan approved by Nixon, these were indeed rights inherent in the presidency, please pass the pry-bar and get ready with the nitro, Bugsy...
...Unlikely...
...she writes...
...Cultural and political provincialism," concluded Paolo Grassi, former president of the Scala opera house, now president of the Italian RAI-TV, "ridiculous factionalism: first a pseudo-political gathering of forces for and against Zefftrelli's Jesus, then opposition between Jesus and Mistero BuOo as if we were closing ranks in two trenches . . . . " MAtO0 H,~MOm~ (Margo Hammond, who writes regularly for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications, b an American treelance writer currently based in Rome...
...view of the results of his concentration it would have been a good idea for him to have something else to think about...
...There'll aways be a Nixon and by all odds every once in a while one of them will make it to the top...
...She is remembering the peace and warmth of her home and her rage at news reports of mothers murdered before their children's eyes...
...That's probably coming up, if not in the final broadcasts, certainly in The Book...
...Marjory Potts, it should be noted, is director of public information for the Legal Aid Society...
...In the second, what he was concentrating on, of course, was the handling of the Mayaguez affair, in which he came on like Chevy Chase gone berserk and heavily armed...
...She is fantasizing about the pearl-handled pistol she imagines holding ready for any attackers...
...Begin again...
...A logical extension of Nixon as Louis XIV: we stop government crimes against citizens by declaring such crimes not to be crimes anymore...
...Freed from the necessity to listen to lawyers arguing about the tapes due to his statesmanlike delivery of the pardon on schedule, the great government problem that Ford put his giant brain to work on was the problem of government agents in the FBI, the CIA and elsewhere committing burglary, interfering with the U.S...
...I went on Freedom Rides...
...He went on, of course, to compare himself to Lincoln and the dissent over the American war against the Indochinese to the Civil War, which, interestingly, he referred to as "The War Between the States...
...There are the usual recourses...
...No, of course not, said the Monster, and went on to make two points: Patton is "an interesting movie, I recommend it . . . it's like Tolstoy's War and Peace...
...The slobs did not come with the house...
...Yes, of course, he'll come back again...
...He remonstrates with the slobs...
...Zeffirelli, himself a Florentine Catholic, echoed the sentiments of the hierarchy attacking the play as vulgar and anticlerical...
...John Leonard, wrote a plaintive column there, which in itself does not distinguish this column from all his other columns, Mr...
...So, too, is the match between two Nixonian favorites in the White House screening room: Patton and The Sound o/Music: militaristic rigor and vigor on the one hand, sentimental claptrap on the other...
...Potts's grave...
...Ellsberg, whose psychiatrist's office the Nixon hit men, Hunt and Liddy, burglarized in the hope of finding and peddling material discrediting to the man who had released the Pentagon Papers...
...she is recalling the beating heart and unwanted hatred with which she reads of "hideous crimes day in and day out...
...The slobs came with a nearby junior high school...
...Robinson puffs on his one-dollar Havana and says, "Yea_h, too bad Eddie couldn't be here, he always liked a good funeral...
...When you think of it, it is astounding that he has not yet compared himself to Jesus Christ, sacrificed for the sins of the world, yet a willing victim for the cause is so important...
...And, "Well, I've seen The Sound o/Music twice and it hasn't made me a writer, either...
...He speaks of "feeling so guilty . . . I can't even cope with the usurpation of a stoop...
...They incrust it with whatever cardboard they do not eat for lunch...
...Leonard's account, on the face of it, is trivial...
...Also from the land of the New York Times, and occurring about two days after John Leonard's plaintive column...
...The reviews...
...Story two...
...Can Nixon have read "any Tolstoyan novel...
...For reasons not clear at all, The Monster seemed to draw the line at murder: more accurately, perhaps, he seemed to draw the line at publicly claiming the right to murder as inherent in the presidency...
...The Italian Communists, on the other hand, are calling for an investigation into the amount of state funds that were spent to air Jesus o/ Nazareth, "an operation of such low artistic-cultural merit and of such pressing clerical importance...
...Leonard revealed that he has not only a psyche and a family and a cat and a television set but a house...
...Then he mentions it again...
...I ask your patience...
...Ford's solution...
...Had he not pardoned the man who made him president, not only would he have been guilty of base ingratitude (a thought Ford did not say) but he would have had to...
...The police...
...mails--has anyone ever studied the relation between the mucking up of the mails by those two agencies and the overall deterioration of the mail service...
...What to do...
...What you didn't expect was for The Pardoner to surface here the next day and yet once more defend The Pardon, explaining that The Monster's television appearances have proved once more how right he, the Pardoner, was to hand over The Pardon, payable in thirty days, to the man who gave him his job...
...He tells them "of the fouling of one's nest, reciprocity, the environment, John Rawls' Theory of Justice, the social contract, and the Strategic Air Command...
...She speaks of "loss of faith" and clashes with her husband, who "clings to reason...
...In the first place, if Ford was concentrating on the economy, in...
...Meanwhile the "case of Dario Fo" as well as that of Zeffirelli's Jesus have become political issues...
...School officials...
...My own guess is, One: AI Half, who said, Jerry, send the tapes to San Clemente, or I release the evidence that you promised Pardon in return for the job, a federal offense and an impeachable one and as long as you're up, please pass me NATO...
...One of its brighter citizens, Mr...
...Ford's explanation this time for turning loose the master criminal while the subordinate members of the gang were jailed had a special quality of absurdity...
...Leonard is understandably distressed...
...At last the Master Criminal let it all hang out: "When the president does it (illegal acts), it's not illegal...
...Another aspect of Nixon's defense of gangsterism in the cause of Nixonism is its throwback to The Pardoner during his head days as successor...
...The Comunitd di base (a Catholic social action group) sent a telegram of solidarity to Fo which alluded to the scene in Mistero Bu~o satirizing Pope Boniface VIII: "It helps us understand how the common people have judged the Church of Christ when that Church has yielded to the temptation of power...
...In the movie, the touring car comes around the comer as Eddie walks up the steps of the church: the familiar rat-a-tat-tat, Eddie sprawls dead on the steps and there's a flat cut to Eddie's very elaborate funeral, presided over by Robinson: the mob admires the flowers, the "Good Luck, Pal," horseshoe of roses and the rest...
...Hitler comes to mind...
...Leonard decides on the latter-- a garden hose with which he will douse the slobs...
...Ms...
...They occupy Mr...
...Mr...
...They represent a turning of the times, a million small rages against public disorder, crime, pornography...
...Nixon even used the gangster movie word, "punk," to describe Ellsberg...
...The movies, in fact, provided one more key, if one is still needed...
...At the same time, throw the crook vice president in the cooler for a bit...
...In this particular plaintive column, however, Mr...
...Let Congress, when the next crook moves himself toward impeachment, carry forward the process: resignation is not enough: impeach him, convict him in the Senate and throw him in the slammer, at least overnight...
...In the old days, people like Nixon and Agnew took what was called "the honorable way out" by shooting themselves...
...Alas...
...They bombard his sidewalk with pop bottles...
...An enormous applause, an impetuous and profound applause, is echoing along the entire peninsula," wrote the television critic for Corriere della Sera, "an applause coming from the common people (and much of Italy is made up of common people...
...I mean of course the New York Times...
...Hitler comes to mind, too, of course, in the very heart of the third-Frost-Nixon freak show...
...But the comparison is instructive...
...Nixon is an eternal anti-verity: CL Tartuffe, Widmerpool in A Dance to the Music o/ Time, Foma Fomitch in Dostoyevski's A Friend ot the Family...
...Aside from the baffling assumption that if watching Patton might lead him to invade a neutral country, watching Julie Andrews as the Baroness yon Trapp might make him a writerbhe evidently thinks writing is a form of singing, another gangster conclusion, since the mobster who sings to the police is asked to sign a written confessionmaside from that, it is staggering to hear the movie Patton compared, even remotely, to War and Peace...
...The gain in this admission was not the news that Nixon as president acted as a gangster: we knew that: M Y TALE this week is of young adults and unemployment and government and crime and the spirit of the times...
...You can take the White House away from Nixon, but you can't take Nixon out of the White House as long as it is run by his owri chosen instrument for the continuation of Nixonism by other means...
...Potts still anguishes over the victim of legal injustice, but she is shaken and torn...
...WASHIHCITOM REPORT PAST IMPgRgECT, IMPgRA Ifg You expected The Monster to act like The Monster and he did, right on schedule and in prime time...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 12
