OUR SITUATION

I’ve had several things I want to write about “in process” - either thinking about them or putting them on the page and trying to make them make sense. But I keep thinking these past few days about what I am going to be doing at 5pm tonight, and how we got there. 5pm Pacific Time - 8pm Washington time; the moment the House Special Committee to Investigate the Events of the January 6 Attack on the Capitol (the official name) is called into session and we all begin (hopefully) to learn the most important - and worst! - “unknown history” in the history of this country.

I find it amazing that this is all taking place literally within days of the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the first time those of us old enough at the time to understand what we were reading in the papers and seeing on television for those two years saw how far some people would go in the pursuit of power, the threat they could pose to the existence of the country as we knew it. Here we are, 50 years later, and the difference is - the story is worse. It isn’t a small group of burglars caught in the DNC offices and a cadre of presidential advisors - it’s an entire political party and a political movement that no longer believes in the core tenets of what makes the United States the United States.

I was here in Hollywood when Reagan’s Iran-Contral scandal broke. I wrote a screenplay about it, “Permanent Interests,” the title taken from Prince Metternich’s statement at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 - another time when politicians were busy putting Humpty-Dumpty together again in the wake of Napoleon - “Nations have no permanent friends, or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.”

Except the screenplay wasn’t about Iran-Contra only it was. It was about a completely different, fictional event. The producer who bought the screenplay (it ultimately didn’t get made, like every other movie I wrote “on spec” that I really really wanted to see) once asked me “Why didn’t you just write about Iran-Contra, since it’s so obviously what you’re talking about?” To which I replied, “I wrote about the next one.” He was surprised by that - “The next one?” “Yes, the next one. There will always be a next one, because there will always be people who will think a shortcut like this will get them what they want.” He thought about that a long silent moment, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s why I bought this. You’re right... Goddamnit.”

There is a direct line between the events we read about that morning after the arrests at the DNC offices in the Watergate on page six of the local newspaper 50 years ago - if it was covered at all, there at the beginning - and the events we are going to learn about tonight.

And one reason why that will be true is because Gerald Ford - the last Republican I actually respected (check out the story I tell about his wartime service, saving his aircraft carrier in the middle of a typhoon, where he was almost swept into the stormy sea, in “Tidal Wave” ) - pardoned Richard Nixon and allowed him to avoid the consequences of his actions. Another reason will be because no one was held responsible for an event four years earlier when the Nixon campaign actively interfered with the almost-successful negotiations to end the Vietnam War in 1968 because ending the war wasn’t in their interests in winning the election that year. That was an event followed a decade later when the Reagan campaign interfered with the negotiations over the Tehran Embassy Hostages and told America’s enemy that if they denied President Carter the “victory” of gaining the release of the hostages, delaying that until Reagan was president, they would get a “better deal.” And they paid their “IOU” five years later with Iran-Contra.

Like I said, there will always be another one. Somebody will always see a shortcut to achieving the power they want, and will try to take it.

That’s what happened on January 6, 2021.

What to do? If that screenplay had been made into a movie, I doubt it would have changed anyone’s mind or put things on a different course. Like the way David Simon says he would never do a sixth season of “The Wire” because if that didn’t get their attention, nothing else he would do would break through.

That doesn’t stop Simon from doing “Treme,” or “The Deuce” or “We Own This City,” taking us by the shoulders and shaking us and screaming “Goddamnit! Look at this shit! This is what we do! Stop!” He’s a hard-head.

All I can do now is write That’s Another Fine Mess and tell you “There will always be another one.”

I wish the events tonight and in the further hearings to come next week would finally break through. But the Watergate Hearings didn’t really break through, and Iran-Contra didn’t break through, and the discovery of the diplomatic sabotage of 1968 and 1979 didn’t break through, and “The Wire” didn’t break through. So I don’t think there will be any Final Breakthrough now.

But that doesn’t mean I am a pessimist. I am in fact an optimist as the result of events that happened since June 15, 2015, when Donald Trump came riding down his golden escalator into our national nightmare.

In fact, I have to thank Donald Trump for making me an optimist.

As a result of everything that happened after that day - the things we’re going to see exposed tonight - I woke up. A lot of other people did, too. Trump came along and grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me out of the bed and screamed in my face, “Look at this shit! This is what we do! Stop!”

No, he actually didn’t, but what he did - that did it. That broke through my own slumber.

Now, the only question I ask when deciding whether I will politically engage with any individual or group is, “Are you in favor of democracy?” The only acceptable answer is “Yes!” As a result, I am now friends with people who - seven years ago - had I been driving along and seen them lying bloody in a ditch by the side of the road, I would have driven on and thought to myself, “Good.”

That’s because it turns out that all the things that would have made me do that, the differences I had with them, aren’t that important. Oh yeah! They are important arguments about where we ought to go and what we ought to do and how we ought to get there. But that’s “Policy,” and you’re supposed to disagree over policy and argue about it. Like I did 40-odd years ago in Sacramento, sitting in Frank Fat’s restaurant with a guy from the other side of the aisle, arguing over something that was before the legislature that our bosses had to deal with, swilling enough whiskey to finally get down to the real nitty-gritty of whatever it was and draw what we didn’t at the time know were Venn Diagrams on Scotch-soaked and Bourbon-soaked cocktail napkins, figuring out what each of us could live with that would move things along somehow. Progress, such as it was, was made.

What we never argued about, or even discussed, or likely ever thought about (I know I didn’t), was whether or not both of us believed with all our hearts in the system under which we could have those arguments. Of course we did! It was such a given, it would have been ridiculous to have raised the question, “Do you believe in democracy?”

Over the forty years that followed, things devolved, and the arguments over Policy became “existential issues,” and those who didn’t agree too often became defined as “the enemy.”

And from that, here we are. I’ve read a hundred books on how we got here, and they’re all saying different things, and they’re all right one way or another. We all did a good job of snowjobbing ourselves.

And then “It can’t happen here” happened.

It suddenly became clear what the real dividing line was. And who ended up on which side was pretty interesting. I lost some old friends who ended up Over There. And discovered some new ones who were unexpected as we all looked around at what there was on Our Side.

That “other side”? They really are The Enemy. If they win, we lose. Everything we think is important. And not just till the next elections. Forever. I wasn’t happy when Reagan won in 1980, but I knew I would live to see that gone. I do not have that belief when I look forward to the election of 2024.

And so I have no trouble being friends once again - as I was 40 odd years ago - with people I absolutely know for a fact I can go from Zero to Screech in 60 seconds with over different views of Policy. Like we’re supposed to do. I can do that because I know for a fact that when it comes to The Really Important Stuff - the belief in a system that allows that argument, secure in the knowledge one of us isn’t headed to jail as a result of the argument’s outcome - we’re not only on the same page, we’re on the same word of the same line in the hymnal.

What we’re about to learn starting tonight will hopefully convince all of us who watch and are horrified, that the fact we are horrified is the Good Reason to ally regardless of anything else.

To be sure we survive This Time. So we can limp along to the Next Time that will always come along, perhaps better able to deal with that as a result of what we learn from this.

That may not sound like all that much of a great result, but it is. Surviving this crisis so we can stumble along to survive the next one is the bottom line of the 100,000 year history of that small insignificant biped, Homo Sapiens, who walked over the hill out of the Rift Valley into the middle of a million-year drought, and ended up Here.

Hopefully, tonight will clarify that. I don’t think we’re going to get a stronger set of hands on our shoulders, shaking us while screaming “Look at this shit! This is what we do! Stop!”

What comes from this will be not on the people in Washington to resolve, but on all of us. “Do you believe in democracy?” It’s the only question that needs to be asked, and the only answer that needs to be heard is “Yes!”

Thanks to all of you who read That’s Another Fine Mess, and to the paid subscribers who keep it running. I hope you new readers will find a reason here to join the supporters.

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