Reflections on a Near Assassination

Now has the summer of our discontent passed all endurance. Rising Strongman Bone-Spur escapes by the narrowest margin the violence that karma had in store for him. Instead, he rises ever higher as a well-and-truly certified—no longer a merely hoped-for—messiah before his adoring throng.    

All obstacles in his way have been cleared out as well, the crooked made straight and the rough places made plain, by an array of judges, from august presences on the Supreme Court to a negligible neophyte of his own appointing, who have placed him beyond all impunity. The noble opposition, with a strong record to stand on, is driven into frenzy and despair by the vanity of its leader who denies to himself—and would fecklessly deny before our eyes—the manifest unlikelihood of his being able to carry out his office for another four years.  

With apologies to William Butler Yeats, the best do not lack all conviction, merely plausibility, though the worst are indeed filled with passionate intensity. And so our orange-maned autocrat slouches in a Milwaukee arena, relishing even while surely scorning the line of erstwhile opponents coming to pay him homage.    

Watergate Redux

So scorching a sun of wrath cannot be approached directly, so let’s try to sidle up to it by means of a comparison. Conveniently, a good one approaches—the semi-centennial of the Watergate scandal’s grand finale. 

I’ve posted about Watergate here before, on the fiftieth anniversary of its onset, 17 June 1972. Three weeks from now, on August 9, we will come to the fiftieth anniversary of its conclusion with Richard Nixon’s piteous speech of resignation to the American people. Everything he had done, and the accomplishments were many, Nixon declared, he had done for the good of the nation. He was leaving office “with great sadness,” indeed feeling it “abhorrent to every instinct in my body,” so that “the wounds of this nation” might begin to heal. Contrary to my memory, he did not invoke his saintly mother at this moment; that came a little later in bidding farewell to his staff. 

Chinatown

One thing I do remember is seeing Chinatown for the first time two nights before, at the Strand Theater on [Eli] Whitney Avenue in Hamden, Connecticut. I was taking a break from completing my dissertation prospectus which was to be defended, at the tail-end of a two-hour oral qualifying exam, sometime in September. My mind was concentrated indeed, whether from trying to compass my subject or from the prospect of being hanged. 

So off we went to watch what I have since come to regard as the single best-crafted movie ever made. I’ve blogged about Chinatown before too, so you can read my rationale there. My overriding impression on leaving the theater that sweltering August night, was of the resonance between the film and the news, between the horrifying corruption at the heart of Chinatown and its counterpart in the White House. Two days later, typing my final draft while watching Nixon chopper off to the west, I rejoiced that the nation had reached a happy ending. The conclusion in Chinatown was anything but. I should have been warned. 

Slender Threads of Deliverance

The nation’s happy ending turned out to hang on a few threads. A judge—“Maximum John” Sirica—who did not accept the Watergate burglars’ perjured testimony and dug further. That opened up the mare’s nest of lies and power-plays lying beneath the event and its cover-up. A Senate that voted unanimously—77-0!—to authorize a select committee to investigate the matter. Their televised hearings would fixate the country across the long summer of 1973. A Supreme Court that unanimously rejected Nixon’s claim of executive privilege in trying to hide incriminating audiotapes from Congress. Three senior statesmen from his own party—the House and Senate minority leaders and Barry Goldwater (Barry Goldwater!)—who called on Nixon to tell him that he surely would be impeached and convicted. Nixon immediately threw in the towel—as it happened, the same night we were watching Chinatown.  

It is inconceivable that any of these links could hold today. For Nixon’s claim, denounced at the time, has become the law of the land: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Our rough beast, slouching toward the inaugural podium next January 20, will have his innings. 

Criminal Rivalries

Just one thing stands in his way, and this will hold. The Washington Post’s crucial exposé of Watergate was fed by a regime insider, FBI Associate Deputy Director Mark Felt, who was aggrieved at having been passed over for the head job upon J. Edgar Hoover’s death. Felt became “Deep Throat,” the key source for Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. On a far larger scale, the supposedly resolute ranks running Hitler’s Third Reich were rife with jealousy, backstabbing, lethal plots, and incompetence. When power depends on proximity to the Leader, very sharp elbows will be deployed to get there and stay there, and the gang’s effectiveness will suffer in consequence.

There, gentle reader, lies your hope. I put mine in the wrong place that evening. I was ready for the sort of underplayed but consummate victory Humphrey Bogart pulled off in The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon—a hero courageous, utterly incorruptible, always a step ahead of the game. “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler memorably put it. “A complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man … the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Such was not Jake Gittes, the private eye of Chinatown. Way too infatuated with his style, fatefully short on substance. Brave enough, quick of tongue, and kind of savvy but in the pinch bewildered, pathetically outmaneuvered, and swept out of the way by the tide of corruption he finally comes to fathom, way too late. “Forget it, Jake,” says his friend when the full scale of evil has been revealed before our eyes. “It’s Chinatown.” Where we’re bound too. 

Sweet Hour of Prayer

You might be worried—or have been broiling all along—over the second sentence in this post, that reference to violence and karma. Let me clarify with a twist on an (apocryphal?) saying by Mark Twain: “I wish the death of no man but some funerals I have witnessed without grief.” Notice my original reference is to karma, not to justice or Christian grace. Karma fits the world of Proverbs where everyone gets what they deserve and everything is just so.  

We live instead in the world of Ecclesiastes where “the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful, but time and chance happen to us all” (Eccles 9:11!). The Preacher ends his twelve-chapter recitation on vanity by enjoining us nonetheless to “fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone” (12:13). 

That’s a hard pull, especially in that most Trumpian of hours, 4:00 a.m., when you can’t get back to sleep and the mind runs off in an endless stream of lies and lurid exaggerations of peril, dread, and doom. Fortunately, the morning after the near assassination our pastor supplied an antidote. She called us to prayer, especially the Lord’s Prayer. And so in hopes that the kingdom, power, and glory belong to another Messiah, I repeat my mantra: “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

Praying hands image by Tep Ro from Pixabay