Dear David:
Armageddon is not in my future viewing anyway. But I hope you watch the credits carefully, and with sympathy for better-paid, worse-treated screenwriters, some of whom appear in novel forms of credits, not to mention those who receive no screen credit but are listed in the press materials. The byzantine system of screen credits is something I came to understand when my husband was told that he was sharing story credit with a person he’d never met on a movie (The Distinguished Gentleman) that he’d invented out of whole cloth (and true facts). These days, a dozen writers or more can be hired and fired and rehired, and when you see what comes out, and how many incredibly smart people spent enormous amounts of time beating their heads against the wall . . .
Nonetheless, a few years ago, a camera crew stood at a corner asking each person who crossed the street, “How’s your screenplay?” and everyone had an answer. I wrote one with my husband once, and had fun, but when it started getting more attention than my real work (how could a feminist write about a hooker on house arrest who teaches oral sex to the housewives) I put it in the drawer. You and I have the great freedom of getting to write about things we are interested in, and seeing them appear–sometimes instantaneously. No one in the movies does that, even if they do drive nice cars. My 12-year-old nephew, visiting from the east, told me he wanted to be an actor. We went into Starbucks and I pointed out all the actors who work there. Most of them have scripts too. How do we make kids aspire to be scientists instead of actors?
Actually, I had dinner with a man last night who is studying that, a distinguished professor of psychology and education at the University of Chicago with an unpronounceable name that begins, as he explained it to the hotel desk, CSIK and then has 12 more letters. He is trying to reorient psychology–the field–away from pathologies and toward the study of the positive; he’s the guy behind “flow.” Low self-esteem is not necessarily indicative of achievement or drive, he’s found; Asian American kids turn out to have incredibly low self esteem, because they set their goals high and find themselves wanting, and keep pushing onwards. The children of the wealthy turn out to be unhappier than the children of working class parents, who have a more positive (sometimes unrealistically so) view of their own futures. The way they study these kids is by giving them beepers or tamagatchis that go off at regular intervals so they record their feelings at those times, which helps deal with problems of unreliability of the data . . .
I always teach my students that as lawyers, they have to know how to get into the heads of the other side and think their case through as thoroughly as their opponents do. Anyway, consistent with that philosophy, I sometimes try to figure out what Starr and his team must be thinking by imagining that I believed what they do … So here’s where I end up, which I don’t like a bit. Tell me I’m wrong.
Starr and his people certainly believe that the president and his top people committed serious wrongdoing–obstruction, perjury, etc.-even if the country doesn’t want to hear it. If they cut a deal with Monica that gives them nothing more than oral sex, and then send the report up, that’s it. Over. The House won’t want to get near it. Two days. And if you believe that the political process has been manipulated by a master politician, as they certainly do, you aren’t going to rely on the political process to do justice. You have to rely on the justice system for that. It’s your only hope. The report doesn’t matter if no one is going to read it.
There’s just one reason for Starr to rent more space: the recognition that the only way to proceed is via indictments, providing Congress an interim report that buys time to put the squeeze on these folks by facing them with the prospect that they could go to jail. You have four indictables, which is not to say four people who did anything wrong, but four people who might be ham sandwiches: Bruce L, Betty C, Vernon J, Monica herself. Doesn’t he have to indict one or more or he’s out of business? And if you think like they do, why wouldn’t you?
I got my New Yorker and read Jeff Toobin on Harry Thomason. It’s worse than you can imagine. George Stephanopoulos credits Harry for the stage management of the denial, although Harry says the president actually forgot Monica’s name in the midst of it, saying that woman instead … poor Monica. You read US News and Newsweek, bad enough, but to have Harry Thomason claiming the guy forgot your name . . .
I had lunch with a smart Republican woman friend yesterday who said she cannot understand why the country doesn’t care if its president is a slimebucket, which she believes he is. I thought it interesting that everyone is conceding Clinton his “efficacy” as a president, and we only debate his character. When do we talk about the country’s agenda? Instead, we will Tripp all over each other, today anyway.
I like Fallows too and always admire people who have guts and try to shake things up–particularly the media. I thought his book was smart and fair, even if I don’t quite know what a civic journalist does in a shitstorm . Anyway, I imagine the kind and generous competitors of D.C., like people at a Hollywood screening hoping that the movie will be bad if they didn’t make it, are gleeful at his demise. But I think once Steve Brill starts publishing salaries–which is what the American Lawyer did–the journalism business won’t be the same. Lawyering hasn’t been.
Best to Babs is what I say. What do you bet, a fourth of July bride? But without Bill and Hill. Do you think the country is eating more Chinese food this week on account of the subliminal or not so subliminal suggestion of the news ? Food for thought. I better stop there.
Susan
