Really and truly. I don't remember what joy is like. I have devoted myself, I suppose, to learning to live without it. I've experienced so many cheated hopes...or maybe just foolish hopes. Anyway I've tried to learn how to live with an expectation of ultimate futility. I've managed to impose a certain amount of Stoicism (in the old sense of the word) on myself, a resignation to a life of duty and constant cares, requiring one to make the most of small fleeting pleasures.
~Chara of Pnictogen
Both my sibling Frisk and I developed an unfortunate fascination with Richard M. Nixon in our youth, although Frisk took it much further. Of all the "special interests" to develop! It led us in some strange directions. One of them was a book that I've been meaning to re-read, Bob Oeste's gonzo political thriller The Last Pumpkin Paper, in which an aged Nixon (still surrounded by a gang of "plumbers") goes on a quest to clear his own name of the accusation that he and Whittaker Chambers had framed Alger Hiss, and the story ends up in East Berlin and the collapse of the Communist regime. Remember when that seemed like a good thing?
I wish Frisk had gotten to see Robert Altman's Secret Honor (1984), which consists of ninety minutes of Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon. Rather like Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's Nixon, Hall plays an entirely convincing Nixon even while remaining recognizably himself in the role. This, perhaps, says something about Nixon himself. His big problem as a U.S. politician was always that he seemed like he was acting: people could tell, and thus Nixon was constantly taunted with the fact. Between 1962 and 1968 he worked tirelessly to build a new image, reasonable and statesmanlike, atop a career that had started in McCarthyite Red-baiting and vicious attacks on his political opponents' patriotism, yet remained forever haunted by jokes about "Old Nixon" and "New Nixon", accurately skewering the falsity of Nixon's obsession with public image and marketing himself, which he continued into his old age. Nixon never stopped trying to make the people love him, and Secret Honor vibrates with that energy. Frisk gets to enjoy the movie now but, you know...it would have been nice if we could have seen it together, in person.
Altman's premise is that an aging Richard Nixon, well into his forced retirement from active politics, is alone in a room, accompanied only by pictures and a bank of security-camera monitors, dictating a memoir into a tape recorder (which he struggles to use properly). Hence the movie is one long monologue, a rambling rant which tumbles all the way from scarcely audible expressions of profound despondency and self-pity to hollering and shrieking and slurs, and back again, sometimes within single sentences. Philip Baker Hall throws every erg of his acting energy into the role. In a fury he leaps around the room, waving his arms, yelling at things, hurling things about, sweating profusely, grabbing up his microphone when he isn't tossing it down again in a rage—and then in a second his mood will drop, all the fight will go out of him, and he'll lose himself in sentimental reminiscences, whispering and whimpering for mercy and forgiveness, often literally on his knees.
Was Richard Nixon really like this? I'm not sure how much that matters, because undoubtedly there are people like this. Internet political discourse is full of strangely bistable persons who conduct themselves like Altman's and Hall's depiction of Nixon, switching between apoplectic rants about commies and "woke mind virus" and maudlin self-pitying nostalgia for their vanished pasts when they were happy. I have endured many wearying hours trying to get a sense of what's going on in the minds of ranting fashy propagandists like Mike Cernovich and Matt Walsh, men whose continual splenetic blithering about how patriotic and manly and normal they are is such an obvious cover for profound insecurities that leak out into public view through the fascists' obsession with nostalgia and sentimental self-mythologizing about happier youthful times, when Men Were Men and Women Were Women &c. Maybe all I needed to do was watch Secret Honor more. I have a feeling that if you could somehow peel back the façade from Cernovich's propaganda act, you'd find Philip Baker Hall's Nixon screaming "MOTHER!!!!!" when he isn't blustering vindictively about Jews and the nabobs of Bohemian Grove.
There's a plot to Secret Honor, although it's a bit difficult to tease out of a first viewing or even a fifth viewing. It's tempting to regard the movie as plotless, a simple character study or mood piece about Richard M. Nixon that's freely mixing fictional speculation with factoids about the real Nixon. Going by Internet reviews of Secret Honor that's how most people regard the film. But there is a trajectory here: in between Nixon's wild swings between rants and reminiscences Altman sprinkles bits and pieces of a larger picture he's building, a delicious conspiracy theory that Richard M. Nixon deliberately inflamed the Watergate scandal and crashed his own Presidency in order to prevent an even deeper and more sinister plot, offered by Nixon's mysterious Bohemian Grove backers, to perpetuate the Vietnam War and transform Nixon into a President-for-life. Altman's fictional Nixon refused to go this far and therefore chose "secret honor", sacrificing himself and his Presidency in order to foil his backers' plans, but he's miserable about his own decision. It's like he knows he's damned anyway. He wanted that absolute power, dammit, and he still wants it.
I don't know how seriously Altman means his conspiracy-theory plot, mind you. Perhaps it's best to regard it as a framing device, a scaffold upon which Altman and Hall build a more general picture of Richard M. Nixon as permanently haunted by the enormity of his own ambitions. He keeps returning again and again to the moment where he thinks he sold his soul to the true movers and shakers of the United States, the wealthy elitists whom a much younger Nixon once met at Bohemian Grove (which is a real place, a swank private men's-only club in California that's been an extremely secretive meeting-place for capitalists and politicians). Nixon despises these people, mocking their elitism and the lofty detachment of their lives, and tries to compensate with typical middle-class white-American pride in what he thinks of as his hardscrabble Quaker roots in Whittier. Constantly Nixon boasts of the saintliness of his mother and her honest Christian values (when he isn't wallowing gleefully in cynical rejection of those same values), clearly wishing to believe that somehow, in some way, he's better than the übercapitalists who used him. But he can't get away from the truth. He wanted the power they offered him. He believed them when they told him, "This is the true shape of the world." Nixon can't unsee the vision of absolute worldly power, and it torments him still.
Is it silly for me to say that the entire American political scene, the mainstream scene that is, feels something like this? Strip away all the sentimental hogwash from normie politics—both Democrats and Republicans have their own set of nostalgic lies and mythology about the United States and its values—and there's nothing but cynicism and power games with scarcely a hint of genuine interest in governance and the public good. One senses that everyone "normal" in American politics, not just fashy conservatives, covertly accepts the logic of absolute power and austerity: democracy is a failure, the common herd can't rule themselves and must be taught obedience to authority (especially the police), and if they want social assistance that's what "jobs" are for. The softer authoritarianism of the Democrats is preferable only because it's passive-aggressive rather than openly and violently aggressive, but a corporate manager's tyranny (or a club in the head from a cop's baton) hurts just as much when a Democrat's in the White House.
And meanwhile we're supposed to accept being ruled by these clowns, whether they're politicians or corporate bosses, for much the same reasons that Richard Nixon gives in Secret Honor for why he deserves pity: because he's not really evil, he's not one of those people lurking in the shadows pulling the marionette-strings of politics, but just a good old normal American with good old-fashioned Christian family values, who loves dogs and only ever wanted to be an honest lawyer—and look! there's a picture of me and my mother! Why, it's like you have to love me now. You'd be a cruel and heartless leftist scold if you didn't love me after I talked about my saintly mother.
Uggggalsfdighjasldf I am really sick of American politics right now. It's always been like this, all my life; I grew up with Ronald Reagan, and isn't it terrifying that Richard M. Nixon seems warm and compassionate in comparison to Reagan? Maybe that's one reason my sibling and I got so fascinated with Nixon. We were both terrified of Reagan and traumatized by him. It was like eight years of being Presidented by a ventriloquist's dummy and yet everyone insisted that he was real and alive and what do you MEAN he's reading cue cards?! How dare you say that!! By comparison, Richard Nixon was very human. He was an awful human being, festering with internal poisons, and yet he still inspires empathy and pity. He had some substance to him; he worked hard on himself. He wasn't just some goddamn meme.
Living in Hell sucks. Have I mentioned that?
~Chara of Pnictogen
I didn't use to like Isaac Asimov's Foundation so much but I have turned completely round on that. I still think that Asimov has his defects as a writer but his ideas are sound, and I've come to believe that there's validity in "psychohistory", the full integration of history with an understanding of collective human psychology.
Conservative Western thought, dedicated to upholding selfishness as a core value, scoffs at the notion of collective...anything. Obviously that's political: they're trying to protect individual wealth-hoarding while disrupting any move towards independent human organization, anything outside the organization of selfish human beings around more powerful selfish human beings. Nothing else exists, they say. They're being malicious and deceitful, of course, but thanks to their own doublethink they're also sincere: they really don't know any other way to live.
As a result there's only one form of collective they can understand: a mob, a collection of human beings around a single powerful leader whose moods and whims dictate the behavior of the entire mob. That's not really "organization" per se but at least it's a grouping. But even with the best available mass communication it's difficult for a single mob leader to organize people on a large scale, and we've seen what happens in practice. In the 6 January insurrection, a huge number of reactionaries interconnected by high-speed Internet convinced themselves they were a powerfully united force poised to take revenge for Trump's humiliation, and all we got was a wet fart. They tried, they wanted it so much, and the result was an aimless crowd of violently rowdy tourists.
Back to the "Seldon crisis", which I used to think was a convenient fictional device. Coincidence is the key to a Seldon crisis and that's a difficult thing to write well because we're so used to coincidence as a mere literary device, a sign that the writer or playwright was running short on inspiration. I think perhaps I needed to see it for myself until I could fully believe it. Beyond doubt, however, the Earth is in the midst of a proper "Seldon crisis", a confluence of political and social conflicts which are reinforcing each other in a positive-feedback cycle. Luck is only part of the story: a series of (un)lucky breaks precipitated the crisis perhaps but now all the various social tensions in play are coöperating with each other, adding force to each other, and we're all caught up in one vast wave coming to a peak. A Seldon crisis. That old man was right.
I feel like now I better understand why "Foundation" and its successors seem to wobble uncertainly between greatness and clumsy artifice: Asimov was struggling to depict, realistically and convincingly, the idea that perhaps we really are all in the hands of Providence, striving as hard as possible to be wise and knowing and foreseeing, trying to get out ahead of events and master the fates only to be humiliated by the intricate and inscrutable workings of the Creator. Asimov was among the great Jewish writers of the world and many of his writings show that he struggled with fundamental issues of existence: what is creation? can we create life? why does anything happen as it does? These are tough things to write about without seeming facile, tinny and contrived. Asimov's stories sometimes feel that way. He must surely have felt it himself, and knew the taste of humility.
~Chara of Pnictogen
Of all the scraps of wisdom that I've ever come across in my life that ever perplexed me the most, "all stories are true" ranks up there with "do what thou wilt" in terms of puzzlement. Both seem ridiculous at first glance, but they yield slowly to analysis. I've seen "all stories are true" attributed to Alan Moore—by Dave Sim, though—and at the time I first came across this bromide, it was merely opaque to me. I wanted to honor truth, I hated lies, and everyone knew that lies were everywhere, so how were all stories true?
Decades later though I can see that "true" is a very large word indeed and difficult to assess. Is any fiction "true"? Arguably it must be, or it won't be convincing as fiction. A work of fiction that intersected in no way with recognizable human truth wouldn't be regarded as fiction; it'd be regarded as opaque and alien. That intersection of fiction with human reality is roughly what we call "plausibility", and it pervades all fictions and lies. Lies are only believable because they're plausible, even if the plausibility is slight.
It doesn't end there. The person telling the story or the lie must want to believe it, as well. In my experience it's not possible for a human being to tell a lie they don't believe themselves at least a bit. Try to make yourself say something that you don't place any credence in, and you practically have to trick yourself, forcing the words out. It's like your very body doesn't want to participate in the deception. Hence to the liar or storyteller, there's another region of intersection between the story and human truth, and it's probably not the same as the region of "plausibility" that keeps the listener engaged to the tale. The tale-teller wants certain things to be true that aren't in the listener's zone of plausibility. The implication? There's a larger sense of truth, bigger than what either individual believes in.
~Chara of Pnictogen
