HISTORY
The study of history can be reduced to the simple phrase: “What the hell happened?”
Our ability to connect cause and effect definitively is small.
An event may be grasped from different perspectives, with differing access to information; the information itself may be false or incomplete and certainly will, at best, be tainted by the bias, conscious or not, of the observer.
Autobiography, a particularly tainted form of history, must always be discounted as the work of the self-obsessed. This is true of all jailhouse tell-alls, where the writer will admit to any but the most horrific of crimes, ascribing those to Jimmy or Moose, the writer himself looking on aghast.
Psychoanalysis is the purchase from a warped observer (committed to his own theories) of a moot account. It is very much a form of contact mind reading. Here the blindfolded magician holds the hand of an audience member and leads him to the Hidden Object. It’s explained that the Blindfolded Seer holds the fellow’s hand to keep him from bumping into things, but of course it is the audience member who is unconsciously leading the performer.
Like all magic tricks and illusions, this is dismaying when revealed; for we then learn it is not the performer who was supplying the magic but we ourselves. We who allow the waving of a magic wand to relieve us of boring knowledge that a rabbit was not actually pulled out of a hat, that we’ve been induced to lead ourselves to that conclusion. The wand freed us of the knowledge that the beast came, and could only have come, out of a hat that only appeared to be empty and which in fact contained a rabbit.
A true, which is to say useful, understanding of history must function like an analysis of a magic trick. a) What did I actually see? (What historical reports can reasonably be accounted accurate?); b) What must have been the conditions predicate? (What can I reasonably accept as facts which might have led to the reported event?) History thus is like Freud’s understanding of psychoanalysis as “the art of the obvious.”
John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre. He then leapt to the stage and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis.”
He was a second-rate actor, the younger brother of Edwin Booth, the most famous of contemporary thespians.
But in leaping to the stage and declaiming, John Wilkes became literally the most famous actor ever to’ve trod the stage. He is the direct progenitor of generations of performers who misuse the spotlight to assert the superiority of their political views.
In 2007, the Writers Guild of America went on strike against the studios, demanding higher DVD residuals and residuals for New Media, which is to say pie-in-the-sky. The strike failed, thousands of folk were driven out of work (among them those on my television show The Unit—pre-strike, twelve million viewers a week; post-strike, goose egg).
The Guild (of which I was, and believe I still am, a member) demanded writers march on the picket line, which led me to the only cartoon I sold to the Los Angeles Times.
I was asked by members of my own writers’ staff to picket. I told them they were out of their minds to strike. I got hate mail from those I’d employed—indeed discovered—suggesting I was a less than admirable fellow.
During the fourteen-week-long strike, the Guild instituted “teaching Thursdays” on the picket line. Here the class-conscious “workers” convened study groups on the history of the Labor Movement, of their gallant forebears, and of the construction of plot—this last knowledge moot, as most of the self-dispossessed never worked again. Their jobs were eliminated by the studios, who saw the wisdom of sidelining union members and their funny ways. The studios wiped out hours of Dramatic Programming, replacing it with “Reality Shows,” which hired not writers but “editors” (writers who weren’t in the union).
The striking writers, like the actors, were too close to a fantasy—in their case, worker solidarity in the face of oppression.
The truest wisdom is that of the poker game, “Don’t play ’em if you don’t got ’em.” And the striking writers’ foes were two: the studios; and the strikers’ out-of-work brethren (the vast majority of Guild members), happy, by voting, to participate once again in the entertainment—powerful, if only as destroyers.
Did the studios oppress the workers? Well, they hired them.
I came up with a gag, some time back, but never got the correct film in which to use it.
We come to the obligatory soft-music/hard-extremities “love” scene. The music assures the audience they have not waited in vain. We see two bodies, moving, sinuous, so close we cannot determine which is which. The music swells, the camera pulls back to reveal we’re watching a couple of eels.
A friend of mine, a very famous actor, told me he was doing a “love” scene with the female star. He was wearing the flesh-colored cache-sexe, meant to prohibit actual intromission. The scene ended, he saw he’d lost the device, and he said to his co-star, “I beg your pardon: was I fucking you?”
It’s a long way from Tipperary.
And since we’ve descended to bawdy.
A fellow director was flying to New York to see Rex Harrison—that nonbinding politeness called “offer of a part, subject to a meeting.”
Rex was appearing on Broadway with Claudette Colbert. My friend had to make the curtain, but his plane was late arriving.
He jumped into a cab at LaGuardia, and told the driver, Forty-Fifth and Broadway, here’s a hundred bucks if you make it before the eight o’clock curtain.
The driver pulled out and floored it. There they went.
The driver said, Where you going?
My friend said, To see Aren’t We All.
Driver: Who’s in it?
My friend: Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert.
The driver pulled over, put it in park, and turned to my friend. “Claudette Colbert?” he said. “Claudette Colbert…? I FUCKED HER MAID!”
Are these examples too coarse?
The military teaches that one can assess the quality of a new command by three things: morale, esprit de corps, and humor.
If those three are present, the command is healthy. If not, not.