Movie Quote of the Day (‘Born Yesterday,’ on the ‘Struggle Between the Selfish and the Unselfish’)

[Reporter Paul Verrall is discussing Harry Brock, a vulgar, hot-tempered, corrupt tycoon, with the businessman’s mistress, Billie Dawn.]

Paul Verrall [played by William Holden]: “Harry's a menace.”

Billie Dawn [played by Judy Holliday]: “He's not so bad. I seen worse.”

Paul: “Has he ever thought of anyone but himself?”

Billie: “Who does?”

Paul: “Millions of people, Billie. The whole history of the world is a story of a struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.”

Billie: I can hear you.

Paul: “All that's bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness can even get to be a - a cause, an organized force, even a government. And then it's called fascism. Can you understand that?”

Billie: “Sort of.”

Paul: “Well, think about it.

Billie: You're crazy about me, aren't ya?”

Paul: “Yes.”

Billie: “That's why you're so mad at Harry.”

Paul: “Listen, I hate his life, what he does, what he stands for—not him. He just doesn't know any better.”

Billie: “I go for you, too.”—Born Yesterday (1950), screenplay by Albert Mannheimer and Garson Kanin based on Kanin’s play, directed by George Cukor

This Day in New York City History (‘Beau James’ Walker Inaugurated Mayor)

Jan. 1, 1926—In a pattern that held true for his attendance at major public meetings for the next seven years, Jimmy Walker was late—by 90 minutes—for his own inauguration as New York mayor.

This time, he had a valid excuse: he and wife Allie were helplessly mired in the traffic that had come to clog the streets of Gotham with the rise of the automobile—a problem he intended to alleviate once he took the oath of office.

As he becomes the focus of the same ceremony, Zohran Mamdani maintains a relationship with the electorate significantly different from Walker’s, going beyond the fact that the former is an insurgent with democratic socialist sympathies while the latter was a product of the Tammany Hall political machine.

No, those who cast their ballots for Walker (and even many of those who didn’t) couldn’t help liking him; Mandami’s voters believe in him. If that trust is ever broken, God help him.

Sharing a hotel room with Walker on a trip to Albany, Gov. Alfred E. Smith, remarking on his protégé’s slender form in multicolored pajamas, compared him to a candy cane. In time, the wisecrack assumed a double meaning. Like that confection, Walker was fun to take in but not as substantive as might be wished.

By the conclusion of his time in office—induced by a wide-ranging corruption probe by Judge Samuel Seabury—Walker earned several nicknames, including “Gentleman Jimmy,” “The Night Mayor,” “The Jazz Mayor,” and, inevitably, given an incurable tendency to tardiness that even delayed him from meeting with President Calvin Coolidge for 40 minutes, “The Late Mayor.”

But I prefer the one I heard nearly half a century ago, the title of a 1957 biopic starring Bob Hope: “Beau James,” a moniker that underscored his reputation as a dandy.

If you want a more complete idea of Walker’s colorful personality, then I urge you to read my blog post from nearly 16 years ago that took as its point of departure Red Smith’s dazzling reminiscences.

But the post you’re reading now focuses on several of the flamboyant politician’s policies—and the extent to which his managerial strengths and weaknesses, along with the contemporary environment, affected his ability to implement them.

In the attached blog post from nearly five years ago, longtime NYC archivist Kenneth Cobb paid Walker the compliment of taking his work seriously—something that the mayor all too often did not. 

Similar to Bill O’Dwyer at City Hall 20 years later, Walker was a glad-handing pol with great ability to maneuver others toward a desired outcome, but often beset by stress and ill health and disposed towards delegating matters to energetic but hard-pressed staffers.

In contrast to O’Dwyer, Walker’s ailments were more severe and self-induced. His epic nocturnal partying required him to sleep it all off, exacerbated his allergy towards handling difficult problems early in the morning, and drove him towards frequent vacations, including to Europe and Palm Springs—a total of 143 days in his first two years alone. 

The result: for seven years, New York not only had a “night mayor,” but a part-time one.

The place to start in assessing Walker is his inaugural address, where he outlined several key areas of concern: health, business conditions, housing, transportation, education, parks and recreation, child welfare, and police and fire protection.

This is the kind of speech almost any New York mayor would give. In fact, its surprising aspects, considering Walker’s prior reputation as a witty party leader in the State Senate and his subsequent bantering with the press, are its lack of memorable lines and overall seriousness.

It turned out that Walker did achieve some of his goals, including:

*establishing the Department of Sanitation—implementing “the first major improvement in the city’s sewage problem in its history,” according to Donald Miller’s history of Jazz Age Manhattan, Supreme City;

*creating a City Committee on Plan and Survey that ended up watered down by Democratic borough sachems and eventually eliminated through budget cuts in the Depression, but not before advancing the ideal of an objective master plan for the city;

*expanding parks and playgrounds by purchasing thousands of acres;

*enhancing public health by consolidating 26 municipal hospitals under a single commissioner, authorizing massive hospital construction and modernizing Bellevue’s psychopathic division;

*supporting civic aviation by initiating construction of Floyd Bennett Field, the city’s first municipal airport;

*maintaining the five-cent subway fare;

*presided over the opening of the first section of the Independent (IND) subway system; and,

*spearheaded construction of the West Side Highway.

Ironically, the beginning of the end for Walker began within only a few days of his greatest political triumph: a reelection victory in November 1929, as he took 60% of the vote compared with 25% for Republican Fiorello LaGuardia and 12% for Socialist Norman Thomas.

But the stock-market crash that occurred on “Black Tuesday” at the end of October meant that the mayor could no longer count on a vigorous private sector to fund his ambitious new programs—and that there would be less patience for stunts like signing into law a pay raise for himself as the first order of business in his second term.

Franklin Roosevelt, now in charge in Albany and with his eye on the White House, instigated the Seabury inquiry that turned up the heat on Walker through the spring and summer of 1932. 

But in the end it was Walker’s mentor Al Smith—no longer in office but out of patience with the "candy cane's" blatant philandering and laziness—who delivered the coup de grace, bluntly telling him, “You’re through.” That night, at the beginning of September, Walker wrote his letter of resignation, effective immediately.

Charm and generosity have enabled many politicians to survive all kinds of disasters, and Walker demonstrated those attributes to an unusual degree.

You will find no argument from me that he was fiscally fraudulent. (Herbert Mitgang’s history of the Seabury investigation, Once Upon a Time in New York, leaves no doubt on that score.) 

But his corruption pales next to the current Presidential administration, and unlike the present Oval Office incumbent he spurned attempts at naming after himself initiatives he had championed. “The mayor of New York still believes himself to be a public servant and not a potentate,” he said.

Moreover, for everyone who rightly recalls the bribes and what Walker termed “beneficences” that came his way for those courting favors, you will discover someone else with ancestors who survived in difficult times through charity arranged or personally distributed by him.

Quote of the Day (Joseph Addison, on ‘When Vice Prevails’)

“Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.” —English essayist and playwright Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Cato: A Tragedy (1713)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on the Law, Politics, and People)

Logan Roy [played by Brian Cox]: “The law? The law is people. And people is politics. And I can handle the people.”—Succession, Season 3, Episode 3, “The Disruption,” original air date Oct. 31, 2021, teleplay by Ted Cohen and Georgia Pritchett, directed by Cathy Yan

Quote of the Day (Desiderius Erasmus, on ‘Conniving at Your Friends' Vices’)

“Conniving at your friends' vices, passing them over, being blind to them and deceived by them, even loving and admiring your friends' egregious faults as if they were virtues—does not this seem pretty close to folly?”— Dutch monk and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

It also seems pretty close to complicity in an emerging American autocracy.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Psalm 55, With Lines Influencing Henry James)

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
    because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they bring[a] trouble upon me,
    and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
 
My heart is in anguish within me,
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
yea, I would wander afar,
    I would lodge in the wilderness,
I would haste to find me a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest.’”—Psalm 55:2-8 (Revised Standard Version)

These biblical verses are the source of not one, but two prominent book titles. One phrase gave rise to one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy: Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 title, Fear and Trembling.

The other might not be as recognizable to those who have read a novel whose title echoes another verse here: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

Contemporary readers of this work from the mature period of American expatriate novelist will hear the character Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, explicitly likened to a dove because of her innocence, and leave it at that. (James, incidentally, left a clue to the real-life source of the character through the initials “MT”—Minny Temple, a vivacious, innocent cousin who died of tuberculosis at age 24.)

But readers in James’ own time, familiar as they were with the Bible—especially in the King James version—would have heard an echo in Psalm 55’s “wings like a dove,” and would think back to the entire passage—someone beset not just by the “terrors of death,” but also “the noise of the enemy” and “the oppression of the wicked.”

Milly, like the narrator of the psalm—though without knowing it (at least initially)—is at the mercy of conspirators: in this case, the cash-poor lovers Merton Densher and Kate Croy, who hope that, by Merton marrying the soon-to-die Milly, he will inherit her money, freeing him to wed Kate.

James’ personal religious beliefs appear to be unconventional, a byproduct of his father, Henry James Sr., who rejected orthodox Protestantism and became a follower of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But traditional faith can leave an indelible imprint, and James—Junior, like Senior—would likely hear that phrase “wings like a dove” reverberate in the imagination in contemplating the object of the web spun by Croy and Densher.

Kate and Merton have committed the worst kind of transgression in exploiting the innocence of another human being. That violation will not go unpunished.

In the quest for material possession that justifies and finally undermines the love of Croy and Densher, the novelist might have found an equally apt literary allusion from Psalm 68: “The women at home divide the spoil, though they stay among the sheepfolds—the wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with green gold.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, with Alison Elliott as Millie, Linus Roache as Merton, and Helena Bonham Carter as Kate.)

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on How Kleptocracies Spread From Russia)

“Since the 1990s, the kleptocratic model created in Russia has spread much further. From Angola to Zimbabwe, dictators with access to hidden sources of wealth are better able to resist demands for political change. They can hide their families and their property abroad. They can finance bribery and influence operations. The aura of secrecy they build is also part of what keeps them in power. Ordinary Russians, ordinary Chinese or ordinary Venezuelans are not allowed to know why their rulers, and their rulers’ friends and their families, are billionaires, because they’re not meant to have any influence or understanding or knowledge of politics at all. That lack of knowledge creates a sense of helplessness, apathy, even despair.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “Follow the Money,” The Financial Times, Aug. 31-Sept. 1, 2024

With Donald Trump’s election to a second term, the United States has officially joined—or, I should say, rejoined—the ranks of the dubious global fraternity of kleptocracies—i.e., governments with leaders who seek personal gain and status at the expense of those they govern.

In an interview last month with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitutional Center, Applebaum not only discussed how the kleptocratic model exemplified by Vladimir Putin (pictured) operates in autocracies across the world, but also how it figures in the case of Trump, whose “primary concern at all times is himself and his own finances and his own power.”

Even while President, Applebaum notes, the autocrat-curious politico maintained the practice he’d begun in his days as a New York real estate mogul of selling condos in Trump-branded or Trump-owned buildings to anonymous people, whose intentions—including whether they were out to bribe or influence White House officials—were unknown.

The potential for conflicts of interest was clear, a situation only worsened by how Trump flouted prior Presidential procedures for blind trusts. Though ostensibly turning over management of the Trump Organization to his two eldest sons after becoming President in 2017, he still received updates on the family-owned trust and remained its chief beneficiary.

Just as the Former and Future Guy made a farce of the notion of a “blind trust,” the Supreme Court did so with the belief that justice is blind. 

In a preview of its extraordinary deference in this past session in granting Trump broad immunity from prosecution for “official acts,” the Roberts Court dismissed in 2021 two cases involving his violations of the Constitution’s “emoluments clauses” for preventing Presidential corruption. (See Ciara Torres-Spelliscy’s excellent summary from that time for the Brennan Center for Justice.)

I have taken particular interest in Trump’s use of the U.S. government as a virtual slot machine for the Trump Organization because one instance of it occurred not far from my family’s ancestral homeland in County Clare, Ireland.

In September 2019, taxpayers footed a $15,000 bill for Secret Service lodging for Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Ireland. The lucky beneficiary of this largesse? Trump’s Doonbeg resort, which he had already spent $41 million to buy, renovate and operate without returning a profit to that point. 

It was all part of a pattern in which Trump made $82 million from his three properties in Ireland and Scotland through often convoluted and unnecessary travel itineraries and exorbitant tacked-on charges, according to Rebecca Jacobs’ June 2023 report for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

Even while in office, the Trump Organizations maintained ethically and legally questionable investments involving Trump International Hotel, New York’s Trump World Tower, Dubai’s Trump International Golf Club, trademarks in China, and royalties from The Apprentice and its spinoffs in multiple countries.

Then, while Trump planned his return to power, son-in-law Jared Kushner, while publicly withdrawing from campaign appearances, secured a $2 billion investment from a Saudi Arabian fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as $157.5 million in management fees from foreign investors for work expected to be completed in 2024.

Let’s stop for a second on that last item. Mohammed bin Salman—you may remember him as “MBS,” the shadowy potentate credibly charged with ordering the October 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Is it necessary to spell out the obvious implications of the Kushner deal for diplomacy and influence peddling?

The naturalist writer Frank Norris titled his 1901 novel of corruption by a massive railroad conglomerate The Octopus. With the resounding victory of MAGA forces this week, American voters have given carte blanche to the Trump Octopus.

Presidents' financial misdeeds are not as easy to understand as their infidelities, but they are more important to know if we hope to grasp how the long-term interests of the American people can be subverted. 

Despite Trump’s war against the group he calls “the enemy of the people,” the press owes it to the republic to continue and even amplify its reporting on the President-elect’s festering corruption—and Americans in turn owe it to themselves to pay attention and act accordingly.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘All the King’s Men,’ on a Would-Be Dictator Warding Off Peril)

Jack Burden [played by John Ireland] [narrating]: “He roared across the state making speeches. All of them adding up to the same thing: 'It's not me they're after. It's you!' Willie hollered 'foul.' He knew if you hollered hard and loud enough... people begin to believe. Just in case they didn't, he organized demonstrations.”

Willie Stark [played by Broderick Crawford]: “Tell the boys to get the hicks out. Bring them in from the sticks. Empty the pool halls. Turn ‘em out! Turn the yokels out!”

Jack: “In case anyone hollered back, he organized spontaneous slugging. Willie pulled every trick he ever knew and added a few more.”—All the King’s Men (1949), written and directed by Robert Rossen, adapted from the novel by Robert Penn Warren

Seventy-five years ago this Thursday, this adaptation of All the King’s Men premiered in New York City. Though a remake came out in 2006 starring Sean Penn, the earlier version remains, for many, the gold standard, going on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

During production of the first version, the cast and crew involved in translating Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen never uttered the name “Huey Long,” recalled star Broderick Crawford.

In fact, the state depicted onscreen was left intentionally unnamed, even blurred, with not even a Southern drawl, let alone the down-home Louisiana cadences of Long.

The plot of the movie, when you get right down to it, could even have been set in the American Heartland—a place like Ohio, maybe even Michigan.

Michigan—these days, the state is no longer the uncontested world center of the automotive industry, as it was during the making of this film, but a laboratory for far-right coups—not only against its governor, but, through the courts and otherwise, the Presidency of the United States.

At least Stark/Long started out with good intentions, and actually built things while in office: a highway program of 13,000 roads, free textbooks for schoolchildren, LSU Medical School, and an expansion of the state Charity Hospital System. The former occupant of the Oval Office now seeking a return only destroyed while in office. 

Re-read some of that dialogue above: “It’s not me they’re after. It’s you!” It’s all too easy to supply the contemporary follow-up: “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution."

Back in 1989, the late New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, sourly surveying a local real-estate developer who’d just taken out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, warned, “Beware always of the loudmouth taking advantage of the situation and appealing to a crowd’s meanest nature.”

That loudmouth runs from the semi-fictional Willie Stark to the all-too-actual Former Guy.

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Agnew Resigns in Disgrace)

Oct. 10, 1973—Less than two weeks after defiantly vowing that he would not resign as Vice-President even if he was indicted, Spiro Agnew did exactly that, pleading no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption.

John C. Calhoun had resigned as Andrew Jackson’s Veep over policy differences, but Agnew was the first to leave the office in disgrace.

The investigation that brought him down, though separate and distinct from the Watergate scandal involving his boss, Richard Nixon, furthered the growing national impression of an administration reeking with corruption, and fed the possibility that, if one of the two highest elected officials in the land could be forced out, so could the other.

Perhaps because he largely faded out of the spotlight after his time in office, perhaps because he increasingly became viewed as a useless occupant of a once-useless office, Agnew and his crimes have been largely forgotten.

Outside of The Baltimore Sun—in effect, during his days as governor of Maryland, his hometown newspaper—hardly any major newspaper has observed the anniversary of the departure of a politician once the proverbial “heartbeat away” from the Presidency.

I am writing this blog post partly to fill this informational gap. 

Fundamentally shallow, ill-informed, unscrupulous, and unworthy of high office, Agnew demands our attention because he tapped into what has become apparent in the years since as some of the worst instincts of the American people: zenophobia, resentment, and alarming credulity about the greatest canards about the press and dissenters.

Only in his second year as governor of Maryland in 1968, Agnew received Nixon’s backing as Vice President after having swerved from a relative racial moderate to an uncompromising champion of “law and order” who requested and used the National Guard after unrest following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

He could facilitate Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to peel white voters away from their traditional Democratic voting patterns—yet did not command conservative allegiance the way that California Governor Ronald Reagan did.

To Nixon’s chagrin, Agnew increasingly built a base in that very voting bloc, largely because he gleefully seized the attack dog role that the President assigned him, in speeches featuring alliterative phrases crafted by speechwriters William Safire and Patrick Buchanan. 

The right-wing contingent of the GOP ignored Agnew’s gaffes and racial/ethnic slurs (e.g., “fat Jap,” If you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all”) and embraced him as its champion.

Even though he had become disenchanted with Agnew’s poor management skills, his predilection for hitting the golf course rather than learning policy, and his lack of seriousness and temperamental steadiness, Nixon ironically found in 1972 that he could not dump the Veep from the ticket without alienating the conservative wing of the party.

Only a couple of months into the following year, just when Agnew had emerged as a strong contender to succeed Nixon at the end of his term, the Vice-President picked up the first hints that he was being investigated for extorting money from contractors while governor of Maryland. Amazingly, he continued to carry out the scheme while Vice President.

Following a script that Donald Trump would follow far more successfully more than 40 years later, Agnew demonized reporters and sought to quash the investigation as a witch hunt (even, as Rachel Maddow revealed in her podcast and book Bag Man, enlisting George Bush—then head of the Republican National Committee—in the effort).

It all came to naught. Agnew’s call for his impeachment before the Senate—where, he calculated, he stood a better chance of surviving than in a court of law—led Nixon to decide that this was a threat to his own political future.

Moreover, Attorney General Elliot Richardson regarded as untenable any scenario in which Nixon, if impeached, could be succeeded by Agnew, himself a crook.

The path was paved for a deal that, even at the time, many (including the young prosecutors investigating Agnew) regarded as what UPI’s Mike Feinsilber called at the time “two standards of justice, one for the powerless and one for the strong.” 

“Accused in 40 detailed pages of having pocketed well over $85,000 in kickbacks," Feinsilber explained, “Agnew was given lighter punishment than others get for stealing a car.” That “punishment” turned out to be a $10,000 fine, a three-years probation sentence, and disbarment by the Maryland court of appeals.

After saying goodbye to Nixon, Agnew never spoke to the President again. When the Veep showed up at his old boss’s funeral in 1994, many in Nixon’s family and inner circle may well have welcomed him as much as a skunk slipping into a perfume factory.

After all, he had charged, in a memoir published seven years after leaving office, Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, had urged him strongly to resign: “The President has a lot of power—don’t forget that.”

“I interpreted it as an innuendo that anything could happen to me,” Agnew recalled. “I might have a convenient ‘accident.’”

By the way, that memoir was titled Go Quietly…Or Else—a title more appropriate about an encounter with the Mafia than about service to the American people. Altogether in keeping with the undignified, unsavory liar and crook who produced it.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (J.R.R. Tolkien, on ‘An Eden on This Very Unhappy Earth’)

“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.”— English novelist and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (1981)

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on an Earlier American Crisis of the Spirit)

“I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.” —American poet-editor Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Democratic Vistas (1871)

Quote of the Day (Tacitus, on Roman Servility and Hypocrisy Under the Emperors)

“Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery—consuls, senators, knights. The higher a man’s rank, the more eager his hypocrisy, and his looks the more carefully studied, so as neither to betray joy at the decease of one emperor nor sorrow at the rise of another, while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery.”—Ancient Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120 AD), “The Annals” and “The Histories,” translated by Alfred Church and William Brodribb

This passage, on virtually the first page I opened to in this volume by Tacitus, transfixed me. You can sense the barely contained anger at the opportunism, cravenness, and cowardice of his time.

Many of us will find such behavior all too familiar in contemporary Washington, particularly among GOP politicians, as they weigh, tremblingly, just how much distance they should put between themselves and a certain former President without incurring his wrath, or how much they can continue to do the bidding of the National Rifle Association without losing their self-respect.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1964 film, The Fall of the Roman Empire. Many would say that the empire’s collapse was presaged by its widespread corruption.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on ‘Where the Wealth's Displayed’)

“Where the wealth's displayed

Thieves and sycophants parade
And where it's made
The slaves will be taken.” — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, “Dog Eat Dog,” from her CD of the same name (1985)

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on ‘The Moral of All Human Tales’)

“There is the moral of all human tales:
   'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
   First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,
   Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.” — English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1812)
 
Over the weekend, while watching a DVD of the 1935 horror classic, The Bride of Frankenstein, I groaned for a second as I listened to that sequel’s opening, a framing sequence featuring author Mary Shelley and her circle. The moment that offended me came courtesy of actor Gavin Gordon, playing one of the Shelleys’ dearest friends, Lord Byron.
 
Whether taking the initiative to try it himself or doing so at the urging of director James Whale, Gordon, a Southerner, spoke his lines in the plummiest possible English accent. To eradicate the impression, I found the above quatrain, much to my relief.
 
The tough-minded observer of the human spectacle behind these verses was nothing like the creature of the film: a pompous poet in love with his own voice, even while speaking to his friends. In his forecast of the fate of great powers, the real-life Byron also identified the third stage in which America finds itself now: “Wealth, vice, corruption.”

Radio Quote of the Day (Bob and Ray, on a Corrupt Mayor of 'Skunk Haven, New Jersey')

Journalist [played by Bob Elliott]: “The story of this man’s trial has been front-page news of most newspapers across the country for the past several weeks. He is the corrupt mayor of Skunk Haven, New Jersey, Mayor Ralph ‘Moody’ Thayer. Mayor Thayer…?”

Mayor Thayer [played by Ray Goulding]: “Thank you…”

Journalist: “…Down through the years, through your various administrations, you've managed to riddle each and every department with corruption, from the top all the way through even to the visiting nurse association. I’d like to ask you a question, and don’t answer right away. Give it a little thought. Would you say it's easier to be corrupt now than it was, oh, ten or fifteen years ago?”

Thayer: “Oh, my, yes! Here ten or fifteen years ago it was a disgrace to be corrupt. Now it's a rich, fertile field. I would recommend it to anyone with a devious mind, who is willing to put in long, long hours without working hard.”—Bob Elliott (1923–2016) and Ray Goulding (1922–1990​), “Corrupt Mayor” routine, in their Bob and Ray: The Two and Only LP (1970)

I came across a transcript of this skit (which I have only reproduced in part) while leafing through Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss, Tom Davis’ 2009 memoir of serving as a writer and occasional on-air performance in the early years of Saturday Night Live. I did a double-take when Davis wrote that he and his SNL partner Al Franken “owe no greater debt than to Bob and Ray.”

I was so surprised because SNL humor, especially in its formative years, has tended towards an edgy, irreverent brand of humor seemingly at odds with the older Boston-originating radio comedy legends. (Indeed, in a 1984 interview with Bill Wedo of The Morning Call, Goulding, in a none-too-subtle slap at this style of humor, noted, “You watch them doing jokes about cripples. I don't see anything funny about a cripple.")

Nevertheless, in an appearance on the TV show, the initially reluctant Bob and Ray were convinced by Franken and Davis to perform a skit mocking Rod Stewart’s “"Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

I have another reason for liking Bob and Ray’s “Corrupt Mayor” skit: It evokes knowing chuckles and nods of recognition from anyone hailing from New Jersey. Despite its small size, the state enjoys a well-earned reputation as one of the most corrupt states in the nation. In fact, a 2019 review of political scandals in the Garden State referred to “A Jersey Tradition,” and Steven Malanga’s article from the same year in City Journal castigated “The ‘Miserable’ State.”

What makes this tradition so long-lasting—and such a rich source of comedy for the likes of Bob and Ray—is its bipartisan. In a 2014 post on the burgeoning “Bridgegate” scandal, I took note not only of the culture of contempt that then-Governor Chris Christie imparted to his aides, but also to the arrogance of his Democratic predecessors over the prior decade, Jim McGreevy and Jon Corzine.

“Skunk Haven,” indeed! Pick any spot on the map and you won’t be far from the home and power base of today’s counterpart to Mayor Thayer!

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Consequences of Declining Hometown Journalism)

“Retail corruption is now a breeze, since newspapers and other media can no longer afford enough reporters to cover all the key government meetings. You wake up one day, and they’re bulldozing 20 acres of pines at the end of your block to put up a Costco. Your kids ask what’s going on, and you can’t tell them because you don’t have a clue.

“That’s what happens when hometown journalism fades — neighborhood stories don’t get reported until it’s too late, after the deal’s gone down. Most local papers are gasping for life, and if they die it will be their readers who lose the most.”—Crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, in his last column for The Miami Herald, “With or Without Me, Florida Will Always Be Wonderfully, Unrelentingly Weird,” The Miami Herald, Mar. 12, 2021

(The attached photo of Carl Hiassen, originally appearing on the author’s Web site, was taken by Joe Rimkus Jr.)

Quote of the Day (Adlai Stevenson, on ‘Those Who Corrupt the Public Mind’)

“Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”—Adlai Stevenson Jr. (1900-1965), Illinois governor, two-time Democratic Presidential candidate, and American ambassador to the United Nations, in the campaign speech, “On Communism,” delivered in Albuquerque, N.M., on Sept. 12, 1952, in Speeches (1952)

Gov. Stevenson could hardly have conceived that at least one corrupter of “the public mind”—i.e., a demagogue-- could do so precisely as a means of stealing from the public purse—through violating the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, that is.