I'm reading "Like Marie Antoinette," a book review written by Mario Puzo in 1968 and published in the NYT. The book under review is "The Jeweler’s Eye," by William F. Buckley Jr.
There are a lot of things I want to blog about this morning, so why am back in 1968? It's because of the first thing I wrote about this morning, the NYT obituary for Kathy Boudin. I was struck by the sentence, "During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige." Stickup? That strikes me as gangster slang, lacking the formality I would expect from the NYT in the account of this event that took place 4 decades ago.
Does the NYT generally use "stickup" to describe serious matters? I searched its archive, and the Mario Puzo article caught my attention:
What gives this book a sort of special charm is that Buckley, like Marie Antoinette before him, is more innocent than malicious. His philosophy may be pure but it is surely impractical. Would a Negro fight in Vietnam for the freedoms granted him by the state of Mississippi? Would anybody, if Mr. Hunt* has all the money, fight Russia and Red China to save Mr. Hunt's money and none of their own? Sure they should, as good Buckley Americans. But would they? Buckley is as royally condescending to his betters as he is to peasantry. He derides Arthur Schlesinger for talking such nonsense as that the best defense against Communism may be the social welfare state. Again this is surely innocence at work. He doesn't quite get Schlesinger's drift, which is, obviously, that when a force stronger than yourself says, "Your money or your life," you hand over the money, and if you're really smart you hand over some of your money before anybody gets tough about it. It would [seem] unnecessary to simplify in such a fashion, but Buckley still thinks he is being begged for a handout; Schlesinger knows it's a stick-up. I do not mean to cast aspersions on the welfare state with this analogy; after all, a stick-up within the legal framework of our society -- via the vote, etc. -- is the last word in exercising individual freedom.
It's a gangster word, and Puzo knew it. He had "a forthcoming book on the Mafia," it says. This book, with the familiar title, "The Godfather," came out in 1969.
"Stickup" makes the Brink's robbery seem like a tawdry street crime. I would see it as heartless murder and part of a commitment to terrorism. But those who were committed to the values of the Weather Underground might object to "stickup" because they had such grand goals. To take Schlesinger's idea seriously, it was something akin to tax collection.
_____________________
* Mr. Hunt was H.L. Hunt. He one of the richest men in the world (with something like $2 billion). As you can tell by the "Mr. Hunt," Puzo had already referred to Hunt:
In another essay, "Let the Rich Alone," [Buckley] argues that billionaires like H. L. Hunt should be allowed to make as much money as they please. Ten billion? Twenty billion? It doesn't matter, just let the poor guy alone. But then Buckley whirls around and says that college students should not be allowed to invite Communist speakers to address them.
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26 comments:
What a great analysis. I was bothered by the word "stick-up" too, but couldn't really understand why. WFB was very popular with the center right because he hit all the notes: Libertarian economics, Social conservativism, Anti-communism. Later in the 1990s after the Cold war ended, he more or less dropped the last two and became a Neo-con. No doubt if he had lived he'd have been a Never-Trumper and loved Mitt Romney.
stickup? what Else would you call it?
MILLION dollar robbery resulting in the death of 3; 2 of which were police: gunned down in the street?
Communist Insurrection; which unlike modern 'insurrections' resulted in MASS MURDER?
STICKING IT to THE MAN! and Killing his lapdog thugs?
Come on! This is the NYT! they can't make the left sound like Bad People.. So a little stickup
Puzo nailed Buckley as the arrogant grifter.
"a stick-up within the legal framework of our society -- via the vote, etc. -- is the last word in exercising individual freedom."
Kudos to Puzo. That the state is a form of organized crime is an old idea. That the welfare state is a particular kind of stickup is a nice twist. That it is the last word in exercising individual freedom--really, the last--nicely exposes the contradiction of democratic capitalism.
Buckley's name comes up in the Kathy Boudin obituary, by coincidence: "Even the arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. signed a letter to the parole board asserting a belief in 'the possibilities of human rehabilitation and transformation.'"
"Hold-up" may be more acceptable than "stick-up" in formal usage, but "robbery" is probably the accepted term.
We think, or the people who set up internet quizzes that presume to tell people what their ideology is, that we are still arguing about fundamental principles, as Buckley and Schlesinger and Puzo are (or assumed they were). But actual debates now are usually more pragmatic and more about the details of policy. For the most part, though, people aren't sure about the details, so they fall back on those big picture arguments about fundamentals.
Buckley didn't come off looking too well in those debates about fundamental principles in the Fifties and Sixties. As a general principle the welfare state won out over laissez-faire. But liberals or progressives became so tangled up in their own policies and rhetoric that in later years Buckley didn't look so terribly wrong. Not because people were rejecting the welfare state as an idea or a fact, but because big government had become so big and so much a part of our lives that its failures in practice became clear to see, and the demands for its further expansion were harder to justify.
"That strikes me as gangster slang, lacking the formality I would expect from the NYT in the account of this event that took place half a century ago."
Aw, com'm on, AA. Time to wake up and smell the coffee (to use another oldish phrase).
The NYT has changed lots and lots. Here's an example. In the years 1905-1909 various members of Congress introduced bills to amend the Constitution that would enable fedgov to impose a federal income tax. These efforts finally paid off, and in 1909 Congress sent out to the states a proposed amendment saddling citizens with a further taxing burden. Four years later, in February, 1913, this became the 16th Amendment.
Here’s a quote from a NYT editorial, titled “An Unnecessary Amendment,” dated July 8, 1909, "When men once get the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they are not easily cured of it.”
Stickup...what politicians have been doing to taxpayers forever.
Aside: the now steaming series The Offer - the making of the Godfather movie is riveting television.
Puzo's categorization of voting to take stuff from somebody else as "the last word in exercising individual freedom" has a nice ambiguity to it. He appears to have meant it as an endorsement of the welfare state, but there's a Road to Serfdom interpretation that works much better as a 50-years-ahead prediction of the rise of thought and speech control by the left.
Tell us more about that forthcoming book on the mafia.
Buckley loathed police so much that he led efforts to free a serial killer of women, who then killed more women, and he lobbied for Kathy Boudin's release. What a fraud. And National Review writers labor to conceal their master's culpability. Buckley and the New York Times, hand in hand, editorialized for her release and lied for her.
News reports fail to list her real crimes and ludicrously repeat defense lies that she was unarmed and unaware her colleagues intended to murder more police in the Brinks murders. She participated in building the bombs intended to kill hundreds of soldiers and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix: happily, three of her colleagues blew themselves up instead, and her parents and Dr. Spock helped her escape after the explosion. She conspired in other BLA cop assassinations and tried to murder a judge and his family, including children. A brave neighbor put out the fire bomb detonated under the family's car. She never stopped saying and writing that she was a political prisoner -- she lied about ever feeling remorse.
Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn had children while insisting other white women shouldn't reproduce the race. They took special pleasure in the sexual "re-education" acts forced on new Weatherwomen and in the torture murder of Sharon Tate and her nearly-born child. They called themselves "the forks" for the fork thrust into Tate's stomach -- and her baby. Well now, as my brother wisely observed, fate has finally stuck a fork in her.
Buckley thought he was his father, or he wanted to honor the values of his father, a tough old-school, up-by-the-bootstraps oil man, so he became a spokesman for laissez-faire ideas. It was common in the Sixties to say that Buckley wanted to return to the world of William McKinley or William Howard Taft. I think he found out later that he wasn't a tough-minded capitalist, but a word man, a part of the expressive culture of his day, and that he wasn't actually so different from the liberal and leftist word men and women he tangled with. Hence his disillusionment in later years. He came to fear that a populist movement wouldn't have any room for him and his Manhattan ways. He probably would have become a NeverTrumper had he lived longer, but I suspect he was beyond caring as much about politics as he once did.
Buckley even said in his later years that if he were young he might be a socialist. It wasn't that he believed that socialism was good or would work, but he missed the adventure of taking unpopular ideas and stands and making them succeed and prevail and become mainstream. From the point of view of 2000 it seemed like capitalism had won. That job was done, and Buckley was left without a mountain to climb. The Cold War, the great struggle for freedom had, it seemed, been won, and ordinary politics, ordinary business, and ordinary life didn't satisfy Buckley's romantic, crusading side.
Buckley became, I suppose, a neo-con in the old sense, in the sense that most on the right are neo-cons. That is to say, he wasn't the free market fundamentalist he was in his youth. But he had real difficulties with second generation neoconservatism and the endless wars for global democratization. He was very conflicted about Bush's wars. He relished defeating the remnants of American isolationism during the Cold War years, but he had an isolationist (or realist) streak himself, and that came out in his last years.
Heartless Aztec said... "Aside: the now streaming series The Offer - the making of the Godfather movie is riveting television."
Wife and I completed the first three episodes on Paramount+ last night and we would both agree, this is great TV. And some of the best scenes are of Puzo (Patrick Gallo) and Francis Ford Coppola (Dan Fogler) hiding out in a house somewhere in LA writing the script.
After purging colleagues he deemed anti-semitic, Buckley weirdly giggled in print about his siblings burning a cross on a Jewish neighbor's yard, treating the extremely disturbing act as youthful hijinks.
Little wonder his magazine continues to purge, or defame, or alienate real conservatives. It's what they have always done.
"Esto es un robo."
"Manos arriba."
"Arriba!"
"Todos ustedes - Arrimense a la pared."
"Donde esta la caja? Abrala."
Might "stickup" be used in an effort to avoid repetition? The obituary riffled through a number of words to denote her crime, not using any of them more than once.
I used to notice that the NYT crossword seemed like a time capsule for preserving Damon Runyon-era tough guy slang. Ngram shows "stickup" and "stick-up" being widely used back then.
Is it really a "stickup" when the guard is murdered?
I guess "robery-homicide" was too much for someone espousing lefty values.
At least they said, "the gunmen killed a security guard" instead of "during the stickup a security guard was killed..."
"What're we gonna say about the robbery? There's no excuse for that. There's no such thing as justifiable robbery."
- Louise Sawyer, 'Thelma And Louise'.
I guess we know why they went with "stickup".
It's nice that Boudin is finally dead.
I was too big a fan of Buckley's when I was a young debater, and in college. I look back on it with some embarrassment. I admired his wit and style too much. He wasn't that good a guy, in a lot of ways, and on substance I find more to disagree with than I used to.
So it's not that I'm offended on behalf of my hero when I say that Puzo review was lazy, sloppy, and trite. He seemed to argue more with his interpretations of Buckley than with his actual writing. Reminds me of the exchange:
Critic: "You think that ___!"
WFB: "I'm the world's foremost expert on what I think."
I also think the left much preferred having a man with an unprofitable magazine, a fine but niche interview show, a caricature of an accent, and a limousine-heavy lifestyle as a highly visible spokesman for the right. They didn't have to hate him, for the most part; they could just point and say to others, "Look how out of touch he is!" The Marie Antoinette comparison is a fine example.
The obit is as sympathetic as the subject matter allowed. For example, "With the Weather Underground fading by the mid-1970s as the war ended, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of having been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list."
Yeah, right.
It was written by Maggie Haberman's Daddy.
Mario Puzo's nonfiction essays are as compelling as his novels.
I remember first watching Firing Line with my mother. She told me that it was sad about Buckley that only liberals could understand what he was talking about.
I think I’ll watch that, Heartless Aztec, to see just what your description of “steaming” means in this instance.
I’ve never found anything “steaming” to be riveting, l’ve only glanced at it to make sure I didn’t step in it.
In his fun mobster Las Vegas book, Fools Die, Puzo suddenly presents the protagonist with a decidedly unexpected love interest, who has a brain aneurism and is dead just a few paragraphs later. As best I could ever tell, this happened to her because she didn't fit well with the rest of the plot and characters. Why she wasn't edited out completely is a matter for Puzo's publisher. Via such details books sometimes are enjoyed.
Stickup? Yeah, and she never smiled, either.
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