Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project - Posts Tagged "purim"
Opposites Attract
And away from the gallery, back in the lobby, against every wall and window; there were Kennedy girls in candy cane dresses, and Johnson girls opposing them, each type milling past Paula with avid looks on their shining white faces; here and there were the Symington girls, too, serious and sad for the fate of their man, not even having fun here at the big hotel; then came all those Stevenson girls, squares, folkies, and hipsters, each one a librarian at heart. Paula drank it in. No wonder her husband loved it so. It was the circus coming to town.
That circus metaphor comes courtesy of John Erlichman, who used it to describe the fun of posing as an advance man for Nelson Rockefeller while actually working for his old college classmate, Bob Haldeman. (“Say, you weren’t one of those bastards Bob Haldeman sent down here to spy on us, were you?” Bell asks Mercer at one point. “We caught a few of you guys last fall, over in Los Angeles. Driving our motor cars. Trying to screw our secretaries. Reporting back to Wilshire at the end of every day.”) Erlichman being one of Nixon’s key White House aides, and a man whose career was destroyed in the Watergate scandal of 1972.
But it’s a great saying, no doubt. Politics used to be nothing if not fun. There were parties, parades, rallies, all the time. There was drinking and eating and travelling around. There was exhaustion and exultation. There was the thrill of movement and meeting new people. (I wonder if Hillary Clinton feels any of that, wrapped in that miserable cocoon of hers.) Yet simultaneously politics was (and remains) serious stuff. Bell goes to Chicago with no lesser agenda than to alter world history. He puts down his shoulder and he works. And he is surrounded by others with the exact same agenda.
GATE CITY borrows many of its high notes from the Yom Kippur liturgy, though, and nicely enough this duality has its basis there, too. Because the rabbis used to teach that a direct connection existed between Yom Kippur– the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar– and Purim, the most joyful. They even believed that these two holidays were actually the same holiday, with the same meaning and the same importance. Yet on Yom Kippur, we fast and pray; while on Purim we put on masks and drink ourselves into oblivion.
What is shared in both sets of ritual is a recognition of our limits as human beings. That no matter how hard we try to change this fact, our lives remain subject to forces beyond our control. And sometimes we laugh at that; and sometimes we struggle with it; and sometimes we do both.
At least Henry Bell does, in Chicago, at the Republican Convention of 1960.
That circus metaphor comes courtesy of John Erlichman, who used it to describe the fun of posing as an advance man for Nelson Rockefeller while actually working for his old college classmate, Bob Haldeman. (“Say, you weren’t one of those bastards Bob Haldeman sent down here to spy on us, were you?” Bell asks Mercer at one point. “We caught a few of you guys last fall, over in Los Angeles. Driving our motor cars. Trying to screw our secretaries. Reporting back to Wilshire at the end of every day.”) Erlichman being one of Nixon’s key White House aides, and a man whose career was destroyed in the Watergate scandal of 1972.
But it’s a great saying, no doubt. Politics used to be nothing if not fun. There were parties, parades, rallies, all the time. There was drinking and eating and travelling around. There was exhaustion and exultation. There was the thrill of movement and meeting new people. (I wonder if Hillary Clinton feels any of that, wrapped in that miserable cocoon of hers.) Yet simultaneously politics was (and remains) serious stuff. Bell goes to Chicago with no lesser agenda than to alter world history. He puts down his shoulder and he works. And he is surrounded by others with the exact same agenda.
GATE CITY borrows many of its high notes from the Yom Kippur liturgy, though, and nicely enough this duality has its basis there, too. Because the rabbis used to teach that a direct connection existed between Yom Kippur– the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar– and Purim, the most joyful. They even believed that these two holidays were actually the same holiday, with the same meaning and the same importance. Yet on Yom Kippur, we fast and pray; while on Purim we put on masks and drink ourselves into oblivion.
What is shared in both sets of ritual is a recognition of our limits as human beings. That no matter how hard we try to change this fact, our lives remain subject to forces beyond our control. And sometimes we laugh at that; and sometimes we struggle with it; and sometimes we do both.
At least Henry Bell does, in Chicago, at the Republican Convention of 1960.
