Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. – John Milton, Paradise Lost.
I’ve always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength,” said Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s main strategist. “It always seemed to me that McGovern – not as the anti-war candidate but as the ‘change’ candidate – would appeal more to Middle America than he would to any other group. They’re the ones with the most to gain from change and they’re the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.
But if McGovern loses in November, control of the Democratic Party will instantly revert to the Ole Boys, and McGovern himself will be labeled “another Goldwater” and stripped of any power in the party.
He showed me a pencil-written analysis of the voting trends. In most black districts, Humphrey was beating McGovern two to one. In the white labor districts, McGovern was easily taking Humphrey. The blacks were clearly the only bloc in the state that had not gone all out for.
Both McGovern and Wallace, he said, draw on the same pool of extremely alienated blue-collar voters, a group that is constantly getting deeper into bitterness, cynicism, and resentment about the current government.
But Muskie was the one who could beat Nixon or unite the party or was the clear leader – or any of those other phrases of antiquity.
The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians Handbook is George Wallace. He doesn’t do plant gates and coffee klatches. Wallace is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones. But to hell with these theories.
Muskie is already finished,” he said then. “He had no base. Nobody’s really for Muskie. They’re only for the Front-Runner, the man who says he’s the only one who can beat Nixon – but not even Muskie himself believes that anymore; he couldn’t even win a majority of the Democratic vote in New Hampshire, on his own turf.
Sincerity is the important thing on TV. A presidential candidate should at least seem to believe what he’s saying – even if it’s all stone crazy.
Right,” I said. “But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco.
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.
I still suffer hate and pain in my heart every time I see the word “Duke” on a TV screen, and that rotten Thing happened nine years ago when that Swine Christian Laettner hit that impossible last-second shot against Kentucky. I still have a Memory Block about it – but as I recall it was in the East Regional final that is still known as “the Best basketball game ever played.” Geez, it Was and remains the Worst Shock I’ve experienced in my Life.
Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails – eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed – even for a day – into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and then thunder out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker’s daughter.
The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas.
This is the horror of American politics today – not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed – but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.
He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who march between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour – you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.
Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.
Admittedly, the ride can be pleasant if you don’t mind the rhythmic repetition of a never-ending Maypole dance. If I came home now, I’d hit the merry-go-round at one of the annual, frenzied peaks. And, like so many others, I could forget the existence of anything but the ride: sleep-walking through the low spots, and always looking toward the next peak.
If I don’t have a job by then – and the kind of job I want is scarce as hell – then I’ll be off again. Where I’m going to get the money to go bouncing around the country like this is a real interesting problem: but I shall find it somewhere. I’ll have to.