"What drove you to want to try to assassinate President Ford?"/"Well, everybody asks that. And the thing is that everybody was talking about it."

"They say, 'Where did you get the idea?' I don’t know about the rest of the country, but in San Francisco people were saying this all the time. Number one, we elect our presidents. We don’t appoint them. And Gerald Ford was appointed — and he was appointed by a crook, if you will pardon the expression. So it wasn’t a unique feeling. It was partly that there were other people who had talked about it, who I thought were much more important to what we were thinking of as a revolution, and we really, truly thought there was going to be one. And I thought somebody like me — I was a nobody — it would be better coming from somebody like me and not destroying these people I thought were leaders. If they did this, it would destroy their leadership."

Said Sara Jane Moore, who was sentenced to life in prison but was out on parole and talking to CNN in 2015.

I'm blogging about Sara Jane Moore not because her reason for trying to assassinate Gerald Ford is chillingly resonant today: She got the idea from the way everybody was talking about it.

I'm blogging about her because I see her obituary in the NYT: "Sara Jane Moore, Would-Be Assassin of President Ford, Dies at 95/A mother of four on the fringes of radical leftist movements, she fired at the president outside a San Francisco hotel in 1975. She had hoped to spark a revolution, she said."

And here's a bit of Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme in the Stephen Sondheim musical "Assassins":

"What in the hell are you trying to do?"

                "What in the hell are you trying to do?"

A New Yorker cartoon, published in the April 25, 2016 issue, by the brilliant William Hamilton, who drew cartoons for more than 50 years. He died in a car crash on April 8th. Driving in Kentucky, near his horse farm, he ran a stop sign and got hit by a truck. His cartoons showed people of a particular class — "the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding on to their diminishing privileges."

“He took a rarefied world and broke it down into terms that would seem familiar to any socially insecure high school student anywhere,” [his daughter and son-in-law] wrote.

As Mr. Hamilton himself once put it: “I see a lot of the people I draw. They’re my friends.”...

Mr. Hamilton’s fascination with high society came from “being near money, but far enough away that I couldn’t quite get my fingers around it,” he told The New York Times in 1988.... “We lived on one of those dwindling trust funds,” he once said, “with a hint of money in the past, but not much in the present.”

I found the "What in the hell..." cartoon when I clicked to The New Yorker's new set of cartoons looking for one I'm seeing people sharing on Facebook. Ah! All the cartoons about about Trump. Click here and scroll through. For example, people playing bridge and one says: "One no-trump. Oh, please, God, no Trump." The one that I'd seen on Facebook has Trump taking the oath of office — Bible omitted, intentionally or unintentionally? — and saying: “... and will to the best of my ability, which is terrific ability, by the way. Everyone agrees, I have fantastic ability. So there’s no problem with my ability, believe me....”

Some are a lot funnier that others. One should not have been published.


“I know we strictly bust ghosts, but I feel this is a shot we need to take.”

I can't get my mind around why The New Yorker thought assassination ideation was justifiable. Was it because the assassins — the "Ghostbusters" characters — are women? Somehow violence by women doesn't count as real violence? It's only a joke — a Squeaky Fromme joke. It's funny until it's not funny. Or do we in some strange, unexamined way believe that women have a violence privilege?

40 years ago today: Squeaky Fromme, 2 feet away from President Ford, points a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol.

A Secret Service agent grabbed the gun, which contained bullets, but had no bullet in its chamber.

Last year, a tape of her interview with a mental health examiner was released. In the interview, done shortly after her arrest, Fromme explained the "X" mark that she and other followers of Charles Manson had on their foreheads:

"Well, it has different levels. On one level it is a cross that's a following cross. On another level it is an 'X' and the 'X' is we are marked out of the system as it stands. We don't go along with it."

She commented on her use of LSD:

"I became aware of the possibilities of different realities as seen through different eyes, as seen through the Chicanos for example. I traveled in my mind into their world, the east Los Angeles. And then I traveled into the ghetto and I traveled into high society."

Here's some video containing interviews with Ford and Fromme looking back on the incident. Notable quote from from: "Of course, I could have shot him, and to me, his life didn't mean more to the redwoods to me."



The comments there (at YouTube) don't take assassination too seriously: "She didn't kill anyone." "Fuck. We could have been rid of that dip-shit." Even those who seem to take it seriously can't be serious: "She remains unrepentant of her actions and her mullet."

Fromme is now 66 years old. She's been out of prison since 2009.

"There's another national anthem playing/Not the one you cheer/At the ball park."

"It's the other national anthem, saying/If you want to hear/It says, 'Bullshit!'"



A song lyric, from the musical we saw last night.

(2 more performances, tonight and tomorrow. Buy tickets here.)

ADDED: As I was playing the song at the link — "Another National Anthem" from "Assassins" — Meade said: "What is that, 'South Park'?" And he saw the play last night! I said, "Yeah, it does sound like 'South Park.' Now you know where 'South Park' gets its inspiration.'"

AND: From a review in yesterday's NYT of a production of "Assassins" in London:

Some are fired by political ideals, like the magnetic John Wilkes Booth... the naïve anarchist Leon Czolgosz... the Depression-era firebrand Giuseppe Zangara... and the failed Communist Lee Harvey Oswald... taunted into taking his fatal shots by the commanding ghost of Booth.

Others are narcotized by the cult of celebrity: the sniveling John Hinckley... clutching his tattered photo of Jodie Foster as if it were a religious relic, or the sweat-begrimed Samuel Byck... ranting with grim earnestness into the tape recorder hanging around his neck, composing an urgent bulletin for Leonard Bernstein. (A reeling snatch of “America,” from “West Side Story,” is heard.)

And then there are the lost souls like Charles Guiteau... outraged when he was denied a job at the White House of President James A. Garfield; Lynette Fromme, a.k.a. Squeaky, a frail flower child...  whose perorations on Charles Manson are delivered with the moist-eyed innocence of a teenager mooning over a boy-band member; and her companion in delusion, the much-married, dithery and unhinged Sara Jane Moore....

"I think we're going to see somebody, you know, some sort of Squeaky Frromme, some sort of Mark Hinckley figure..."

You mean John Hinckley? Or Mark David Chapman? Or are you just making everything up?

MSNBC in full fantasy mode, raving about assassination and racists — and editing out the inconvenient fact that the man with a gun was black.

"The parole board does not hold my life in its hands. And I don't want to be too critical, but men tend to think they do."

"Charlie never thought he did. He never expressed all this desire for power, this desire for acceptance."

"Charlie" = Charles Manson. The statement is from Squeaky Fromme — Lynette Fromme — who will be released on parole.