Monday June 06, 2005

MY WATERGATE. I’m glad the Mark Felt thing has died down. I will admit that it was a minor pleasure to see Pat Buchanan and Gordon Liddy and, Lord love us, Charlie "Grab ‘em by the balls and their heart and minds will follow" Colson, and their various blogospheric enablers, trying to blow-dry their own soggy reputations by denigrating Felt. (What lover of American political comedy could resist hatchet-man Colson telling Aaron Brown that "the ends don’t justify the means"?)

And it was a considerably less minor pleasure to hear Alberto Gonzalez announce that he would not prosecute Felt for violation of FBI protocols – "The Department has a lot of other priorities," the AG said, and I thought, yeah, it would be pretty hard to secretly intern Deep Throat in one of our neo-gulags right about now.

But the revelation of Felt’s role has mainly been an excuse for a creaky-jointed victory lap of journalistic greybeards who, whatever their achievements or accidental proximity to history in the Golden Age, have been for the most part criminally derelict in the years since Watergate. We have lived to see the New York Times progress from establishment scourge to apologist for its own pro-Administration credulity in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Where be thy Pentagon Papers now? Get you to your publisher’s chamber, and tell him, let him paint the paper an inch thick with Style Sections, to this end journalism has, if not must, come; make him laugh at that.)

What then is the real, enduring legacy of Watergate?

In any case, the whole hero-or-villain discussion is ridiculously irrelevant. All news investigations have mixed motives. They’re about bagmen running around with parcels of information, and hungry journalists trying to make something of them. That’s why we remember the Dreyfus affair for Zola’s "J’Accuse," and not for its coverage in the Revue des Deux Mondes and Le Siecle. That’s why Zola stepped up to perform this public service in the first place, in those days when artists were not exempted on grounds of elitism, as they are now, from national debates. (Actually the attacks on Zola were the model for the you-artists-are-stupid strategy well-used in our own time, but at least back then it was new and obvious in its crudeness.)

That Felt may have been motivated by an institutional grudge is no shock to fans of Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, which suggested the Director’s "reaching beyond the grave" to strike at Nixon. In fact, if I recall aright, having absorbed Watergate as a teenager working in a Subway sandwich shop, blasting the Ervin hearings from a radio as I worked (imagine any fast-food chain employee getting away with that now!), the crisis was as much an entertaining unraveling of a mystery as it was a political paroxysm – in fact, the historical achievement of de-Nixonizing America, pleasurable as that was, is much more remarked upon now than it was at the time. We didn’t like Nixon, but we weren’t rooting for a coup. We did like seeing a famous kingpin, previously thought untouchable, taken down. Who thought of John Dean as a hero?

The real aftermath of Watergate was not, contrary to the poli-sci crowd’s pleadings, so much anti-Republican, or even anti-corruption. It was anti-certainty.

After Watergate came movies like Chinatown and The Parallax View and Shampoo and Executive Action -- and political movements like Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13 in California-- all based on the idea that the certainties of a previous age were now suspect.

Suspicion was the order of the day, as were movements primed to exploit that suspicion.

Allegedly-liberal Hollywood and the allegedly-conservative Republican Party both profited handsomely from a prosecution that caused Richard Nixon to resign. Think of that! Their successes have much less to do with justice -- and even less to do with politics, at least as it is commonly understood -- than they have to do with exploitations of opportunity.

Though Hollywood has always been America’s dream factory, it has also been properly fitted to produce, as the times require, nightmares. Today America is largely unwilling to toss and turn over the state of the nation, but it is still prone to bad dreams, provided they are about serial killers, boogeymen, terrorists, and environmental disasters -- anything but what faces them in the here and now. These nightmares Hollywood happily continues to supply. If a Michael Moore comes along with a deliverable audience willing to obsess on political malfeasance -- if any artist (including the auteurs whose work is cited above) comes up with a creepy-crawly of whatever sort that might make a buck -- well, so much the better for the nightmare machine! He will have his moment in the sun, and then we will go back to the next version of Kiss The Girls.

And while the GOP was briefly pledged to Nixon – indeed treated him back in the day as a reclaimed son, the outcast who had by God made good – the Party was yet and ever more ardently pledged to victory, and showed it. When it found -- after the Nixon defenestration and the brief, busybody liberal ascendancy that followed it -- a bullshit Libertarian meme left squalling like a newborn babe in its lap, they of course ran with it; and when its operatives found a way – brilliantly, it must be admitted – to somehow link this babe, forever mewling "me, me, me," with millenarian Christianity for the greater good of the Republican voter base, who could blame them for making the most of this fortuitous cross-exploitation?

Despite the recent grumblings of some of the sitcom villains of Watergate, it must be said: if you would seek Mark Felt’s monument, look around you. The inability to nail Reagan for his frankly treasonous Iran-Contra crimes is only one further proof that the myth of WoodStein and a regnant Fourth Estate is just that – a myth. Some powerful constituencies -- not the press, much less the public -- rose to the occasion and took power from it. You want to honor Mark Felt? Or dishonor him? Knock yourself out.
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