A thread for Rick Perlstein's THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

Reagan was an actor. To the best of my knowledge, he never had any training in acting, but fell into it naturally. I suspect he's hard to psychoanalyze in part because his inner life seems to have been very plastic and formless, and his intellect was built upon a hodgepodge of random personal experiences and Reader's Digest types of influences. The fact remains that he was very good at what he did, so he wasn't dumb. I'd call him a genial self-made man, bright but malleable, who took direction well and had a mastery of simple ideas.

he never had any training in acting

well he went through the star machine. idk if that counts as training in acting or not; probably not. but one of the keyer things the book identifies is his total cheerful acquiescence to all of the process' insane human-product indignities, the ones which more vivid presences, actual stars, were rebelling against all over.

at some point he's beaten out for a role by erroll flynn and a fanmag perlstein quotes calls reagan "the least temperamental person in hollywood ... sometimes temperamental pays off!"

I don't remember if Perlstein remarks on the phenomenon whereby the cold fury Reagan showed as governor evaporated as the seventies unfolded. Conservatism rolled and raged, he kept smiling.

yeah! no remarks on this in the book so far but i was youtubing some classic berkeley-induced rage and it was v surprising to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCr3nL78qWs

yeah, he's an angry motherfucker back then, you wish someone w/ a gun and good aim had shown up sooner.

(i can say that cuz he's dead)

is that the "if they want a bloodbath let's have it" speech?

sadly no but it does contain an excellent description of stoner filmstrips:

THEY CONSISTED OF COLORED SEQUENCES THAT GAVE THE APPEARANCE OF DIFFERENT-COLORED LIQUIDS SPREADING ACROSS THE SCREEN. FOLLOWED BY SHOTS OF MEN AND WOMEN, ON OCCASION. SHOTS OF MEN AND WOMEN'S NUDE TORSOS, ON OCCASION.

I have to find the clip of Governor Reagan meeting with the Board of Regents, denouncing them, throwing a pencil down, and stalking out of the room.

gyrating on occasion

In that youtube he gives a odd-looking shake at about 21 or 22 seconds which is very actorly to my eye, like he's getting into the role almost by slithering into it like a new skin.

that's just a flicker of his annunaki form

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MWEAA9a-Xc

those long panorama sequences (all the newspaper headlines and movie plots and ultradetailed descriptions of tv broadcasts)

I eat that kind of thing up--I'm always looking for omens and coincidences--but I thought Perlstein maybe overdid it a bit in the new book. You could pick up a newspaper from 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, or tomorrow, and if your objective is to connect a bunch of stories that suggest the world is on the brink of collapse, you could probably find them.

yeah i agree. lots of "in washington this politician said america would be ok ... but if you read beyond the front page, you saw that in wisconsin, a man had been shot." in general tho i don't think his thesis is wrong.

What a historian has called TV's first reality series began in the second season [of General Electric Theater], when [Reagan's] "total electric house," housing "television's first all-electric family," was still under construction. Reagan strolled around the site as his electrical contractor demonstrated how you, the viewer, might wire your property for "full house power." Nancy, in her first screen role since Donovan's Brain, broke comically into her husband's technical meanderings to delivery the bottom line for the ladies: "Well I'm glad we have it. Because we're going to have some wonderful electric equipment and we want to have all the entertainment and pleasure and comfort out of that equipment that we can!"

there's some good reagan-in-berkeley quotes in this classic john dolan piece:

http://exiledonline.com/reagan%E2%80%99s-cheshire-snarl/

i was in high school during the years chronicled. while i remember the individual crises and a larger sense of creeping dread/disillusionment, the world-on-the-brink theme leaves me wondering if a) i was too young & sheltered to grasp the end-times zeitgeist or b) perlstein exaggerates a bit for dramatic effect.

could've done w/less reagan bio and more on the rising religious right. during 1973-76 the post-hippie jesus freak movement morphed into the moral majority.

for the religious right business William Martin's With God On Our Side is a good read.

I haven't read any of Perlstein's books yet; feel like I have to work up the energy to get lost in them

will look for that. perlstein mentions hal lindsey's apocalyptic mega best-seller the late great planet earth. one of those paperbacks i remember seeing everywhere back then. never knew lindsey was a born-again doomsayer. i thought he was just another pre-newage crank/guru.

the rise and fall of TV preachers - televangelists as they were known - is also worth exploring. i saw jim bakker for the first time around 1976 and was transfixed. never seen anything like it on TV - curing people over the air while soliciting donations, tammy faye emoting like crazy. it was bizarre and uh, prophetic.

The one whose bizarreness transfixed me most was Ernest Angley in the early '80s. He was like something from the WWF.

Ernest is back in the news:

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/10/21/1021-Televangelist-Ernest-Angley-urged-vasectomies-abortion.html

Asked for, and received, this for my birthday:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51-sjuXJb6L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

In time, god will forgive me.

Nixon's resurrection was one of the more bizarre occurrences in a very bizarre era.

Dick looking like Tony Hopkins in that photo.

Buchanan's publishers hoping to reel in the Perlstein crowd with that sleeve, as if if they were the Eagles tempting fans with Long Road Back to Eden by including a sticker that sez "not INCLUDING THE HITS "HOTEL CALIFORNIA" AND "TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT"

I know Pat will express deep sorrow over the harm the Southern Strategy left in its wake.

Up to 1974 in The Invisible Bridge, I'm finally into stuff I remember having an informed take on, even as a child: Hank Aaron 715. (Sure, I remember the Year Without Christmas Lights, but in elementary school we were simply told that we were really having an energy crisis....probably most kids believed it too, unless they had conspiratorial minded parents...I actually don't even know if we were or not, never really looked into it).

I was a bit worried when I found out this book would be 800 pages on just four years. The culture-reading stuff in Nixonland struck me as more convincing than the stuff I've been seeing in Bridge. I don't think Perlstein's handling of the cultural significance of Hank Aaron is particularly insightful at all (and he is no Bill James on baseball stats argumentation).

The racism directed against Aaron was widely noted, publicized and deplored at the time. For that matter, Aaron's 715th home run (which was nationally televised) was much more widely celebrated than Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record (different time & circumstances I know, but still).

So, Frank Sinatra didn't think much of it eh? To whom was Frank Sinatra's opinion on anything a matter of significance in 1974? I feel like Perlstein is grasping a bit here to put this into the 'divisive' narrative.

Meanwhile, I'm still wondering if Reagan's tedious stopped-clock routine on Watergate is supposed to be viewed as prescient. I'm guessing it's-a-gonna-be.

Anyway, I love these books, but I'm not sure if every bit of culture-reading is all that convincing for Perlstein's grand argument. (My only criticism of him as a writer in general is that he does tend to keep hammering his theses - trust your reader a bit more, pal).

Finally, I may be making a fool of myself by critically commenting while still reading the book.

I saw him and John Dean at the Miami Int'l Book Fair yesterday; he and Dean were chummy, whispering in each other's ears calling each other "Brother Perlstein" and "Brother Dean."

When asked whether Nixon or Reagan were most responsible for the partisanship Perlstein didn't blink: "No. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was responsible."

That event was shown on C-Span2. It will probably be rerun today.

I'd have to reread the Aaron section again, but when I read the book I thought Perlstein caught the mood around Aaron's record pretty well. The hate mail was voluminous. (There were factors above and beyond PEDs that mitigated the excitement around Bonds's record--home-run weariness, chiefly, and that McGwire's record had only stood for three years, so the number 70 hadn't acquired any special resonance yet.) So, I agree with Vic that Aaron's record was justly celebrated by most of the country, but there really was a lot of hate out there.

That event was shown on C-Span2. It will probably be rerun today.

Also streaming here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?322768-3/book-discussion-nixon-defense-invisible-bridge

^^^ alfred at ~42:40

in the act of tut-tutting Perlstein's shirt to my friend

xpost clemenza:

Perlstein, if he had to write about Aaron, missed an opportunity to complicate his story. Wikipedia did it better in their Hank Aaron article (the section "breaking Ruth's record,") which includes far more interesting stuff than Frank Sinatra's dismissal (too insignificant to mention?):

Snoopy getting 'hate mail' in Peanuts (with Lucy coming out explicitly for Hank Aaron)(what a bizarre storyline!);

Sports Illustrated laying down the gauntlet (would 74 be remembered as a triumphant "moon walk" for Aaron or for the "hate mail, cobwebs & goblins that lurk in baseball's attic"?);

& Vin Scully's stirring extemporaneous liberal oration on the record breaking moment, a move to turn it into a great civil rights moment.

Both the racism & the reaction against racism were big stories, in other words; Perlstein's instinct to surprise us with the truth about the past isn't working well here. It is definitely not to Perlstein's credit that he put that bit in the photo section: "note the sparse crowd" in Atlanta, and how Aaron supposedly produced much better attendance records on the road than at home. Maybe, maybe. However, one fact works hard against Perlstein here: the all-time Atlanta Braves attendance record at County Stadium was set on the Monday night that Aaron hit 715.

The racism Aaron endured, just like the racism Jackie Robinson endured, is enshrined as part of their triumphant stories, especially as told to children: they become part of the "feel-good" stories of America, because the racists in these cases have long since become cartoonish villains that we are all now 'better than'. When Perlstein shows us in Nixonland that Martin Luther King was despised all over America, that newspaper editorials pronounced his assassination as the merely regrettable result of MLK's own lack of respect for the law, Perlstein has real reach, that's a real public service: because all that stuff has been completely washed. It's been recast as mean southern rednecks vs. the obviously saintly MLK.

But one big difference: it's pretty hard to find a newspaper writer actively disparaging Aaron's achievement at the time (for what it's worth, Perlstein doesn't produce one). Meaning, maybe, that something had changed between 68 and 74, at least in the newsroom. It's not hard to show that lots of white people hated Aaron, (this would make it nice and simple); it's hard to show how lots of white people actually could love Aaron, and love themselves for loving Aaron, and still support all kinds of racist moves in other parts of the society.

what the fuck:

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/608378399640416256

https://twitter.com/WilliamTurton/status/609014235931230208

dude is verified! twitter is such a trash company

thieving a great writer's account is so worth it for these fire tweets

https://twitter.com/rickperlstein/status/611995859253772289

Comments inspired by new bio though.

We need to kill great men as soon as they die lest their corpses become anchors to which we’re chained before a final hurl into the sea.

extremely well-put and of course too true

So that H.W. Brands bio is good if you like idea-free biographies. With a guy like Ronald Wilson Reagan, this intellectual abdication is a menace.

aw man, i just ordered it! was wavering between this one and the lou cannon book.

"In the context of the stuff I’ve been thinking about today Perlstein is a fascinating writer, a liberal writing Whig history as horror, where the placid teleology of progressivism is recast as the docile idiocy of teenagers in a slasher flick, with Perlstein in the audience shaking his head as liberal America insists on skinny dipping at midnight or just going to see what that noise in the cellar was."

Ha! (from http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/144218061581/llcooljasonalexander-bowiesongs-tomewing )

Leave me alone! I'm submitting my REAGANLAND manuscript on April 15!

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) March 4, 2019

Excellent. Where does Reaganland end? The hallowed Reagan basically holds sway over the party right up till 2016, although I think Perlstein could end this volume earlier and start Trumpland before Trump actually steps to the fore. Palin would be a good place to start the one after the new one, or maybe all the insanity around Gingrich (and, to a lesser degree, Herman Cain) in 2012. Gingrich's debate showdown with John King would be a good beginning for Trumpland.

His books typically don’t cover more than a handful of years iirc so I’d be very surprised if this one went beyond ‘88, if it even goes that deep

Next Up: Poppy Bush Interzoneland.

(My phone's auto-complete correctly offered both Bush and then Interzone after typing Poppy)

Bushland actually would make sense for '88 to Jeb's coronation in the summer of 2015 (even if that all exists in the shadow of Reaganland and involves a lot of the same people). In any event, looks like he's making this series his life's work. Hope I'm around long enough for the whole thing.

I'm ready to write it as soon as I figure out how to weave Roxette into it.

Reaganland will be 1976-1980.

This piece from 2012 is just scarily on the mark for current era. And. as we look towards Romney's potential role during the Biden administration, a good reminder about Romney's past. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

Reading this now. I find these books to be oddly comforting. The parallels to whatever is going on now to, say, West Virginia in 1972 makes me think "this country has always been insane". This one, yes, but especially Nixonland. The 70s were fucking ~insane~.

Most interesting insane decade ever.

Still holding out hope for a bringing-it-all-back-home final book.

The 70s were fucking ~insane~.

Living through the 70s is what formed all the now-insane boomers.

I love when Perlstein points out the obvious about the audience for some right wing knuckle-dragging talking-point. Like here where Reagan had just recorded a long form talk-to-the-camera speech:

One reviewer -- Elizabeth Drew -- found it "rather poor. Reagan jumped from subject to subject, just as he had in his early speeches when he shuffled his 4x6 cards; he talked too fast about too many things [...]" But New Yorker writers did not have a vote in North Carolina Republican primaries.

In Nixonland, it was the opposite -- when some horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing bureaucrat would spout statistics that would lead to Perlstein would write something like "it all made so much sense" to liberals, only to have Nixon pull the rug on them again with some inanity.

Picking up The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland from my local library tomorrow. Just finishing Season 2 of Mindhunter, which mostly deals with the Atlanta child murders, so I guess late '70s/early '80s is where my brain is right now.

Picking up The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland from my local library tomorrow.

That is a lot of pages. Glad my copy of Invisible Bridge auto-renewed...twice.