Brilliant but dumb, if you know what we mean, and certainly, by the end, not playing with a full deck. His early Marxist-Freudian notions made some sense, such as the idea that you can’t revolutionize politics without revolutionizing the people who make them, or that thinking about yourself constantly can make you neurotic. And we’ll lay dollars to doughnuts trauma really does eventually show up as tight muscles and shallow breathing, although, frankly, his emphasis on the regenerative powers of the orgasm seemed a little simple-minded even at the time. But it wasn’t until his discovery of orgone energy—the life force which he found to be bluish green in color—that some of us got up and moved to the other end of the bus. Before you could say “deadly orgone energy,” Reich was babbling about cosmic orgone engineers—“CORE men”— from other planets and comparing himself to such historic martyrs as Jesus, Socrates, Nietzsche, and Woodrow Wilson (that “great, warm person”). He died in a federal penitentiary in 1957, having been hounded for years by the FBI and convicted, finally, of transporting empty orgone boxes across state lines. GEORGE IVANOVITCH GURDJIEFF (1874-1949)
The Paul Bunyan of mystics, Gurdjieff spent twenty years pursuing “truth” through the wilds of Asia and North Africa, crossing the Gobi on stilts, navigating the River Kabul on a raft, clambering blindfolded through vertiginous mountain passes, chatting up dervishes and seers, unearthing a map of “pre-sand” Egypt, digging through ruins, hanging out in a secret monastery, and soaking up ancient wisdom and esoteric knowledge. If you’re wondering what he learned, we suggest you do the same, as Gurdjieff certainly isn’t going to tell you: His summa, All and Everything, is 1,266 pages in search of an editor. You could try wading through the explications of P. D. Ouspensky, the Russian mathematician who was Gurdjieff’s top disciple for a while, remembering, however, that Gurdjieff thought Ouspensky was an ass for trying to explicate him. Never mind. Just ask yourself, “Would I really buy spiritual guidance from a man who once raised cash by dyeing sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries?” If your answer is no, you probably would have missed the point anyway.
Family Feud
The symbology (donkey and elephant, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Strom Thurmond) seems carved in stone and the structure (wards and precincts, national committees and electoral colleges) as intrinsically American as a BLT. Imagine your surprise, then, when we remind you of something you learned for the first time back in fifth grade, namely, that this nation of ours, purple mountain majesties and all, began its life without any political parties whatsoever. George Washington—whose election in 1788 had been unanimous and unopposed, and who at one point found himself being addressed as “Your Highness the President”—was above even thinking in terms of party loyalty. The rest of the Founding Fathers considered “factions,” as they put it, straightening their periwigs, to be unscrupulous gangs hell-bent on picking the public pocket. James Madison, for instance, while an old hand at lining up votes and establishing majorities on specific issues, assumed that those majorities would (and should) fall away once the issue in question had been resolved.
But then there was Alexander Hamilton, who, having managed to dictate foreign policy to Washington and domestic policy to Congress for the better part of two administrations, finally gave Madison and Jefferson no choice but to take action against him. Hamilton was a Northerner, a federalist (as opposed to a state’s rightser), an industrialist, a venture capitalist, and a power broker. Jefferson you know about: Southerner, agrarian, progressive, and all-around Renaissance man. Thus began the power struggle that would result, by 1796, in the formation of two rival parties—Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, ancestors of our Republicans and Democrats, respectively.
The blow-by-blow (including how Jefferson bested Hamilton and what the difference between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy is) we’ll save for another time. In the meantime, take a look at this chart for the big picture:
Note that for almost two hundred years the same two parties, variously named, have been lined up against each other; third parties—Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose, Robert LaFollette’s Progressive Action, Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats, and, more recently, George Wallace’s American Independence—while a godsend for political commentators trying to fill column inches, have had little success with the electorate. (By contrast, H. Ross Perot had surprising success in the 1992 presidential election, but don’t get too excited: Perot’s United We Stand America was technically not a political party at all, just a not-for-profit “civic league.”) Nor is this a country where we think much of, or where most of us could define, coalition as a political form.
As to how you can distinguish Republicans from Democrats today, we’ll content ourselves with quoting from a letter from a friend: “Republicans hire exterminators to kill their bugs; Democrats step on them…. Democrats buy most of the books that have been banned somewhere; Republicans form censorship committees and read the books as a group…. Democrats eat the fish they catch; Republicans hang theirs on the wall…. Republicans tend to keep their shades drawn, although there is seldom any reason why they should; Democrats ought to and don’t.”
Back to you, George.
American Mischief
THE TWEED RING: The gang of crooked politicians that ran New York City like a private kingdom throughout the mid-1800s. Led by William Marcy “Boss” Tweed and operating through Tammany, New York’s powerful Democratic political machine, these boys were the stuff old gangster movies are made of. Although the “boss” system was widespread in those days and political machines were always, by their very nature, corrupt (essentially, they provided politicians with votes in return for favors), none could match the Tweed Ring for sheer political clout and uninhibited criminality. During its reign, the group bilked the city out of at least $30 million (a conservative estimate); Tweed himself got $40,000 in stock as a bribe for getting the Brooklyn Bridge project approved and a lot more for manipulating the sale of the land that is now Central Park. He also got himself elected to the state senate. The ring was finally broken in the 1870s through the dogged efforts of the New York Times, Harpers Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast (whose caricatures helped demolish Tweed’s gangster-with-a-heart-of-gold public image), and Samuel Tilden, a Democratic reformer with his eye on the presidency. Tweed died in prison; though his name is now synonymous with political corruption, some commentators point out that without crooks like him, there never would have been enough incentive to get this country built.