One Hand Jerking (41 page)

“
Whew
,” he finally whistled into the microphone, “Vaughn Meader is
screwed
. . . .”

There was an instant explosion of laughter. And Lenny was right. JFK impressionist Meader had been scheduled for appearances on
Hootenanny
and
To Tell the Truth
, but he was canceled out of both, even though he had planned other material for
Hootenanny
and would not have appeared on
To Tell the Truth
as JFK. Yes, Vaughn Meader was indeed screwed.

Ah, but not David Frye—
he
could do Lyndon Johnson.

In 1960 I was a misfit among misfits attending a comedy workshop at a Times Square rehearsal loft. A group of would-be stand-ups met every week and tried
to make each other laugh. There were two performers who did impressions: Vaughn Meader, whose specialty was John Kennedy; and David Frye, whose specialty was Richard Nixon. So it became an attachment beyond ordinary political considerations that motivated Meader and Frye to root respectively for Kennedy and Nixon in the presidential campaign.

When Kennedy won, Meader seized the opportunity. He bagan to comb his hair with a flamboyant pompadour dipping across his forehead. He consciously regressed to the Boston accent he had previously tried so hard to lose. And he made a comedy album,
The First Family
, which broke sales records and turned him into a star. As for David Frye, he would have to depend on his impressions of Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum.

After Kennedy's assassination, Meader dropped out of comedy, moved to San Francisco and became a late-blooming flower child. He returned to New York in 1968, and attended a few Yippie meetings. We invited him to play
Bobby
Kennedy at our counter-convention that summer in Chicago. But then, in mid-March, Kennedy announced that he was going to run for president.

On March 31, Meader asked me for a tab of LSD. That evening, President Johnson went on TV and announced that he would not seek re-election. My phone rang immediately. It was Vaughn Meader. In the middle of tripping, he had just seen LBJ, and wasn't sure if this was an acid hallucination or an April Fool's Eve joke. But it was true—LBJ was out of the race.

“
Whew
,” Lenny Bruce whistled from the grave, “David Frye is
screwed
. . . .”

Frye's luck returned when Richard Nixon was elected that November. But in August 1974 Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office.

“
Whew
,” Lenny whistled, “David Frye is screwed
again
. . . .”

I asked David Shaw, media critic for the
Los Angeles Times
, if he knew of any reporter who had asked George W. Bush what that three-dimensional rectangular
thing
was under the back of his jacket during the first debate. Shaw said he didn't know of any.

Then, at a presidential press conference, Mark Slackman posed this question: “Sir, we still haven't heard a plausible explanation for the bulge under your suit in the first debate. Sir, were you being prompted by a hidden transmitter?”

Slackman is, of course, a reporter in the comic strip
Doonesbury
.

Bush gave his answer the next day, on ABC's
Good Morning America
. “I don't know what that is,” he said. “I mean, it is—I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt.”

Yeah, right, and Saddam Hussein married Osama bin Laden in Massachusetts and they adopted a Chinese baby.

But Bush wasn't being prompted by his senior adviser, Karen Hughes, whose job it had been to advise him not to refer to terrorists as “folks.” No, Bush was being prompted by God Him-or-Herself. You know, God, the One who Bush says he is on a mission from. God, the One who Jerry Falwell says is pro-war. God, the One who told Pat Robertson that Bush would be re-elected, and then Robertson went ahead and defied God's will by revealing that Bush wasn't concerned about American casualties in Iraq.

Bush once proclaimed, “God is not neutral,” which is the antithesis of of my own spiritual path, my own peculiar relationship with the universe—based on the notion that God is
totally
neutral—but I've learned that whatever people believe in, works for them.

Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, believes that the “God supports Bush” theme holds great currency among Bush's base because Bush wants it to. “It is a belief the president encouraged, and that Karl Rove has encouraged,” says Lynn. “It is, I think, extremely dangerous for people to believe that God is a Republican or a Democrat or a Naderite or even a Libertarian.”

I'm writing this five days before the election. I predict that either there will be a relatively landslide victory for Kerry, indicating that the polls were skewed—bypassing cell phones, Vote or Die campaigns, disillusioned Christians—or the results will be so close that 50,000 Democratic lawyers will end up battling back and forth in the courts with 50,000 Republican lawyers—dragging out, appealing again and again, stalling around—for, oh, say, at least four years, until finally John Edwards, his pompadour prematurely grey, argues the case unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme Court, which by then will be packed with Bush's reactionary appointees. Is that the way the world will end, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with a bloodless bi-partisan
coup
?

Now that George Bush has been elected to a second term, the arrogance of his administration will undoubtedly increase suffering in this country and around
the world. Yet, in the words of William Blake: “Under every grief and pine/ Runs a joy with silken twine.” Not to mention Monty Python: “Always look on the bright side of life.”

So, in terms of the cultural divide, even though
The Passion of the Christ
—which finally made Jesus more popular than the Beatles—has supposedly defeated
Farhenheit 9/11
, Michael Moore has written “17 reasons not to slit your wrists” for his choir. A few examples:

“Admit it: We like the Bush twins and we don't want them to go away.”

“The only age group in which the majority voted for Kerry was young adults (Kerry: 54%, Bush: 44%), proving once again that your parents are always wrong and you should never listen to them.”

“Gays, thanks to the ballot measures passed on Tuesday, cannot get married in 11 new states. Thank God. Just think of all those wedding gifts we won't have to buy now.”

“It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again.”

Of course, it wouldn't be illegal for Dick Cheney to run for president. Oops, I take that back. It
would
be illegal. Cheney has already served two terms as president, in the guise of vice-president. Moreover, Karl Rove is no longer the clandestine flasher who pops out from behind a tree in the park. Now he's in the middle of the street and all over TV, opening his raincoat and shouting, “Hey, lady, take a look at this!”

Ironic Times
, the satirical online weekly produced by three former writers for
Not Necessarily the News
, has published “Top reasons why Democrats should not commit suicide: Iraq slides into endless, bloody chaos; U.S. standing in world plummets; Economy sinks into another recession; Terrorist attacks; New TV shows stink”—all these “will be blamed on Bush.”

That same point was made by syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, who stated that now Bush won't be able to blame Democrats and liberals for whatever happens domestically and abroad.

It's always been my nature to seek blessings in disguise, a real challenge in these insane times, but at least I won't have to watch John Kerry shooting a goose again while wearing a camouflage outfit apparently to fool the geese. If elected, he promised to send 40,000 additional troops to Iraq. As president, it would've been his fate to watch a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War testify before Congress: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

At a Republican victory party, a reporter asked an 11-year-old boy why he wanted to be president. “I would like to be president of the United States,” he replied, “so that I can lead the country to war.” Four more years of trickle-down barbarism.

But, even as I find myself singing that popular '60s favorite, “Eve of Destruction,” I remember an old maxim which insists that things need to get worse before they can get better. Some consolation, huh?

Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
has been playing in movie theaters. I covered her trial for two publications at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum—the
Berkeley Barb
and
Playboy
. Patty was on trial for robbing a bank with her kidnappers. Here's an angle that wasn't in the documentary.

Patty's parents sat in the courtroom, listening to a communique from their princess, abdicating her right to the throne: “I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area or, two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army. . . . I have chosen to stay and fight. . . .”

At the end of the tape, SLA leader Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze issued a triple death threat, especially to Colston Westbrook, calling him “a government agent now working for Military Intelligence while giving assistance to the FBI.” This communique was originally sent to San Francsco radio station KSAN. News director David McQueen checked with a Justice Department source, who confirmed Westbrook's employment by the CIA.

Researcher Mae Brussell traced his activities from 1962, when he was CIA advisor to the South Korean CIA, through 1969, when he provided logistical support in Vietnam for the CIA's Phoenix Program. His job was the indoctrination of assassination and terrorist cadres. After seven years in Asia, he was brought home in 1970 and assigned to run the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville Prison, where he bacame the control officer for DeFreeze, who had worked as a police informer from 1967 to 1969 for the Public Disorder Intelligence Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

If DeFreeze, who conveniently escaped from prison, was actually a double agent, then the SLA was a Frankenstein monster, turning against its creator by becoming in reality what had been orchestrated only as a media image. When he threatened his keepers, he signed the death warrant of the SLA. They were
burned alive in a Los Angeles safe-house during a shootout with police. When DeFreeze's charred remains were sent to his family in Cleveland, they couldn't help but notice that he had been decapitated.

Consider the revelations of Wayne Lewis. He claimed to have been an undercover agent for the FBI, a fact verified by FBI director Clarence Kelley. Surfacing at a press conference in Los Angeles, Lewis spewed forth a conveyor belt of conspiratorial charges: DeFreeze was an FBI informer; he was killed not by the SWAT team but by an FBI agent because he had been “uncontrollable”; the FBI then wanted Lewis to infiltrate the SLA; the FBI had undercover agents in other underground guerrilla groups; the FBI knew where Patty Hearst was but let her remain free so it could build up its files of potential subversives.

At one point, the FBI declared itself to have made 27,000 checks into the whereabouts of Patty Hearst. It was simultaneously proclaimed by the FDA that there were 25,000 brands of laxative on the market. That meant one gastrointestinal catharsis for each FBI investigation, with a couple of thousand loose shits remaining for the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover to smear across “No Left Turn” signs. Patty Hearst had become a vehicle for repressive action on the right and wishful thinking on the left.

The prosecutor asked her, “Were you
acting
the part of a bank robber?”

“I was doing exactly what I had to do,” she replied. “I just wanted to get
out
of that bank. I was just supposed to be in there to get my picture taken, mostly.”

Ulysses Hall testified that after the robbery, he managed to speak on the phone with his former prison mate, DeFreeze, who told him that the SLA didn't trust Patty's decision to join them. Conversely,
she
didn't trust
their
offer of a “choice,” since they realized she'd be able to identify them if she went free—and so they made her prove herself by “fronting her off ” at the bank with DeFreeze's gun pointed at her head.

In 1969, Charles Bates was Special Agent at the Chicago office of the FBI when police killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark while they were sleeping. Ex-FBI informer Maria Fischer told the
Chicago Daily News
that then-chief of the FBI's Chicago office Marlon Johnson personally asked her to slip a drug to Hampton; she had infiltrated the Panther Party at the FBI's request a month before. The drug was a tasteless, colorless liquid that would put him to
sleep. She refused. Hampton was killed a week later. An autopsy indicated “a near fatal dose” of secobarbital in his system.