Watergate, the Kennedys and how the American dream took a Trumpian turn

2 weeks ago 8

An old mate and I were yacking the other day about the urgency, sometimes, to turn off the assault on the senses that is the daily news; in particular, the endless stream of madness issuing from the United States of America, the claptrap of its president and the embarrassing fawning of the lickspittles gathered around him.

We got talking about the sanctuaries we seek for respite.

My favoured escape is to re-read old books that got my youthful imagination racing: The Great Gatsby, anything by John Steinbeck, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe ...

US President Donald Trump with Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr; Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men, and the late Robert F. Kennedy.

The death of Robert Redford led us to reminisce about a couple of Redford’s old movies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the near-perfect con-trick caper The Sting. Perfectly escapist pleasures, though we couldn’t bring ourselves to mention All the President’s Men (1976), in which Redford played Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) brought down the crooked president, Richard Nixon.

Though it’s a fine work, it’s too sharp a reminder that the current US president is getting away daily with behaviour so appalling, it makes Nixon’s Watergate scandal seem so small-scale, it would barely get a mention today.

It is, of course, the progress of years that promotes this sort of regressive, grumpy pondering.

Birthdays – one of which came my way this week – become imbued with changing significance as life saunters by.

For a child, a birthday is an exciting achievement. My grandchild can barely wait to be six: she will be a lot more grown up than five.

Eighteen was the great trophy when I was young: a driving licence, a drink in a pub without looking over the shoulder, the end of high school. Liberation.

Somewhere along the track, birthdays discard their gloss until eventually, there comes the ticking down and the looking back.

A long time ago, my father was celebrating his 80th birthday when he drew me aside. “Son,” he began, whispering. “I know the years tell my age, but I don’t feel I’m much older than I was when I was about 25 or 30. Does it ever feel like that to you?”

“I think everyone feels that at some point,” I told him.

“That’s a relief,” said my father, expelling a great sigh. “I thought I was the only one.”

Barry Humphries, comedian, author and satirist, said something similar.

“It’s a totally unfamiliar experience. You don’t notice it, you see,” he said of growing old. “I find growing old is sad only in the sense that the world looks exactly the same as it did when I was young.”

The world doesn’t look anything like what it seemed when I was young, it happens.

But Humphries and my father were talking about something more poignant: that age had rendered them all but invisible within a world they still saw in the colours of youth.

My mate and I were talking about something different again as we discussed our excursions into the past to avoid the present.

For a moment or two, we hit upon the sweet, moody memory of the 1973 movie, American Graffiti.

It was set in small-town America over a single night in 1962, when a group of high school graduates, about to fly off to new lives, paid reluctant farewell to their teenage years, cruising the main street and confronting uncertainty about the future.

Its soundtrack of rock ′n’ roll, doo-wop, early surf music and ballads overlaid by the voice of the late US radio DJ, Wolfman Jack, still has the power to overwhelm listeners of a certain age.

My mate and I did not live in small-town America in 1962, but its central theme of innocent longing resonates among those of us who were young even in Bob Menzies’ less exciting Australia.

America’s sense of moral certitude – and by extension, the Australia that relied so heavily on US supremacy – was shattered the following year when president John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The culture of the 1960s became dominated by an increasingly meaningless war in Vietnam in which 1.3 million civilians and military died (most of them Vietnamese, though almost a quarter of a million were Americans and their allies, including more than 500 Australians).

In 1968, both Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.

All these years later, that once-great nation that had such a cultural impact on the West, including Australia, has devolved to the point its president and his family openly enrich themselves while sooling the tamed Justice Department onto political enemies, universities, liberals, media companies, journalists and satirists.

This same president, turning his back and his ire onto oppressed peoples everywhere, spouts dangerous, utterly uninformed nonsense linking a common painkiller with autism, standing next to a black-sheep Kennedy with no scientific or medical background who as the US Secretary for Health (!) is undermining decades of the fight against communicable diseases by spouting more nonsense about vaccines.

As my mate and I continued our quest for sporadic havens, we inevitably got to the pleasures of watching the footy.

But the AFL has lost its mind, we decided.

How else to interpret the pro-women and anti-homophobic league’s decision to pay American rapper Snoop Dogg $2 million to entertain the crowd at the grand final?

Here is a fellow who built his career on the most vilely misogynistic lyrics and who has a history of homophobia, however much he claims to have cleaned up his act in recent times.

Maybe he understands hypocrisy.

Why, having declared in 2017 he would roast any black artist who performed for Donald Trump’s inauguration, he performed himself at the inaugural Crypto Ball in Washington on January 17 this year.

It billed itself as an event “intended to honour the 60th Presidential Inauguration, America’s first ‘crypto president’, President-elect Donald J. Trump, his incoming cabinet and administration”.

Happily, the actual grand final, which is to say the game itself, pinnacle of Australian football, remains one of the great shelters for the heart from the doings of the world.

Pity the season’s over this weekend. We’ll need to find other clouds at which to shake our ageing fists.

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