Believe Muskie

"I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination."
~~ Hunter Thompson







------------------------ [excerpt, The Great Gatsby] ------------------ On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more.  On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.  Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.





Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound.  And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world. 


Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.




And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.  He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. 





He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.


Gatsby believed in the green light.... -------------------------- [end, excerpt]


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------------------------- [excerpt, Fear and Loathing:  On The Camaign Trail '72] -------------------- Mankiewicz -- a forty-seven-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who was Director of the Peace Corps before he became Bobby Kennedy's press secretary in 1968 -- has held various job-titles since the McGovern campaign got under way last year....


Two weeks before voting day in New Hampshire, Mankiewicz was telling his friends that he expected McGovern to get 38 percent of the vote.  This was long before Ed Muskie's infamous "break-down scene" on that flatbed truck in front of the Manchester Union-Leader.




When Frank laid his prediction on his friends in the Washington Journalism Establishment, they figured he was merely doing his job -- trying to con the press and hopefully drum up a last minute surge for McGovern, the only candidate in the '72 presidential race who had any real claim on the residual loyalties of the so-called "Kennedy Machine."


Beyond that, Mankiewicz was a political columnist for the Washington Post before he quit to run McGovern's campaign -- and his former colleagues were not inclined to embarrass him by publicizing his nonsense.  Journalists, like The Rich, are inclined to protect Their Own . . . even those who go off on hopeless tangents.


So Frank Mankiewicz ascended to the Instant-Guru level on the morning of March 8th, when the final New Hampshire tally showed McGovern





 with 37.5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, and "front-runner" Ed Muskie with only 46 percent.


New Hampshire in '72 jolted Muskie just as brutally as New Hampshire in '68 jolted LBJ.



  He cursed the press and hurried down to Florida, still talking like "the champ," & reminding everybody within reach that he had, after all, Won in New Hampshire.


Just like LBJ -- who beat McCarthy by almost 20 points and then quit before the next primary four weeks later in Wisconsin.


But Muskie had only one week before the deal would go down in Florida, and he was already locked in . . . he came down and hit the streets with what his handlers called a "last minute blitz" . . . shaking many hands and flooding the state with buttons, flyers & handbills saying "Trust Muskie" and "Believe Muskie" and "Muskie Talks Straight" . . .


When Big Ed arrived in Florida for The Blitz, he looked and acted like a man who'd been cracked.  Watching him in action, I remembered the nervous sense of impending doom in the face of Floyd Patterson when he weighed in for his championship re-match with Sonny Liston in Las Vegas. ------------------------------ [end, excerpt]





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Ramblin' outa the wild West
Leavin' the towns I love the best
Thought I'd seen some ups and downs
'Til I come into New York town


People goin' down to the ground
Buildings goin' up to the sky




Wintertime in New York town
The wind blowin' snow around
Walk around with nowhere to go
Somebody could freeze right to the bone


I froze right to the bone
New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years
I didn't feel so cold then




I swung onto my old guitar
Grabbed hold of a subway car
And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride
I landed up on the downtown side


Greenwich Village




I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block
Got on the stage to sing and play
Man there said, "Come back some other day


You sound like a hillbilly
We want folk singers here"




Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play
Blowin' my lungs out for a dollar a day
I blowed inside out and upside down
The man there said he loved m' sound


He was ravin' about how he loved m' sound
Dollar a day's worth




And after weeks and weeks of hangin' around
I finally got a job in New York town
In a bigger place, bigger money too
Even joined the union and paid m' dues


Now a very great man once said
That some people rob you with a fountain pen
It didn't take too long to find out
Just what he was talkin' about
A lot of people don't have much food on their table


But they got a lot of forks 'n' knives
And they gotta cut somethin'




So one mornin' when the sun was warm
I rambled out of New York town
Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for the western skies
So long, New York


Howdy, East Orange



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{"Talkin' New York" - 1962 Bob Dylan album, produced by John Hammond, Columbia / Capitol}


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