Contemporary Caravaggio

La Guia ("The Guide") by Rigoberto A. Gonzalez (National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

     If you go to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., you will see the expected portraits of the presidents: Gilbert Stewart's clench-mouthed George Washington, waiting for his rendezvous with a dollar bill; Lincoln, looking almost handsome, sitting pensively in a chair. 
     But half the building is the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and there you will find  both various art work, with an emphasis on the Victorian, as well as large temporary shows. 
     When I was there, they were showing examples of outstanding contemporary portraiture, including the above, by Rigoberto Gonzalez. 
     I liked it for its drama, the old-fashioned skill in rendering the human figure. It had the story-telling quality of paintings before television, and we wonder what is going on. Are they caught—they seem to be raising their hands. What are they looking at?
     Gonzalez was born in Reynosa, Mexico in 1973, and came to this country when he was 9 years old. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1999 and received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2004.
     A fan of baroque artwork, he wants his paintings to tell stories, although of course the stories the painting tell in part depend on the viewer. The "guide" in this painting is the teenage girl at left, by the way, helping two older immigrants through a river toward their new home.  
    What story they are telling depends, in part, maybe in large part, in who is looking at the painting. How do you feel about these people? Concern? Contempt?
    They are of course the newest American citizens, or would, if we let them. That many would look at the above with only scorn and rejection—there is a lot of that going around—seems reason enough to post it here. Your grandparents might have come here through Ellis Island, but Ellis Island closed in 1954. 
    I looked into Gonzalez's work. He often uses violence in Mexico as a theme, such as, below, in the enormous 2011 canvas, "Shootout in the Border City of Juarez." Twenty-feet wide and nine feet high, he based it on renaissance crucifixion paintings. I'm only showing part of the painting, to see the detail.
       "I've always had this interest in doing things that are terrible and beautiful," Gonzalez once said. "My hope is that it has a cathartic quality to it. You can't keep suppressing it. I want you to talk about it, show the work, engage the public, start a discussion."
      Okay, I'll begin. Above the portrait of Lincoln is this quote from the 16th president:
     "The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
    He was referring to the Civil War. Now we are engaged in a struggle equally divided, though not as bloody. Where are we heading as a country and in what light, when we turn around and view this era, 2018, will we think of ourselves, how we behaved, what we did and did not do? 

"Shootout on the Border City of Juarez."

Irish pro-choice landslide should resonate in the supposed land of the free

Hydra and Kali by Damien Hirst

     Simple question:
     When facing choices, do you prefer deciding yourself or letting someone else decide for you?
     What kind of choices are we talking about? Doesn’t matter. Could be something trivial: what flavor of ice cream to order. Or more important: what color to paint the living room.
     Or even something truly significant: what political party to join. What religion to follow.
     Got your answer? Good. Set it aside.
     This isn’t a trick. I’m not going to condemn you if you answer, “I want others to make decisions for me.” Many people do. They join fraternities, the military or other organizations where following directions is tantamount. Nothing to be ashamed of. There is a pressure in making decisions, a weight in assuming responsibility for your choices.
     Some alternate. I, for example, generally like to make my own decisions — chocolate chip cookie dough, white walls. Sometimes I yield to decisions made by others long ago: my parents were Democrats and Jews, so I’m sympathetic with the idea that government should help those in need and in no hurry to embrace unfamiliar faiths that seem even more contrived and arcane than my own.
     Sometimes I want someone else to decide: “Honey, which tie goes better?”
     So I understand, and even sympathize a little, with those who would offload their choice regarding an issue as significant as abortion, surrendering to a higher power: to the government, or some religious authority. It has to be a wrenching decision, to snuff about this tiny, aborning life, and if you could remove it from yourself, or from others, and decide it with permanent finality and unwavering certainty, you are free from the stress of deciding. As are they.

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L'etat, c'est lui.

    
     Donald Trump believes that, because he has the power to end the Mueller investigation, he cannot be subpoenaed by it. Because he can pardon himself if convicted of crimes, he cannot be accused of them.
     Is he right?
     The argument set out in a letter by his lawyer claims that since the president can "if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon” that he can also refuse to testify before the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
     A court will no doubt decide this, in the months to come. But clarity can be found now by simplifying it to a more mundane level, by asking a few hypothetical questions:
    Can a police chief, who has the power to hire and fire officers, be arrested?
    Can a county sheriff, who has authority over prison guards, be put into jail?
    Can a senator, who has the power to pass laws, himself violate a law?
    Can a president?
    The answer of course is yes, yes, yes and yes. Because if it isn't "yes" in every case, then we no longer have a society of laws, but a society of men.
    Men like Donald Trump.
    Not a society of rules, of order. But a society where ordinary citizens follow orders. The orders of men like Donald Trump.
    Every American is facing a choice, right now. Respect the United States, respect its laws and traditions. 
    Or respect Donald Trump. 
    Follow our morals, values and laws. 
    Or follow Donald Trump.
    It's that simple. 
    Simple, yet so many don't get it. Trump supporters, having put their bets on Trump, whether out of economic anxiety, racial bias, seething resentment, ordinary fear, free-floating malice, Republican habit, gender bias, or whatever pathology causes a supposedly freedom-loving American to support a would-be tyrant, refuse to be put off by whatever new low Trump sinks to. They are willing to pay any price, bear any blunder, meet any transgression, support any traitor, oppose any relief, to assure the continuation of the Trump era. 
    It is shocking how many people bend their knee to him. Past rivals, abused and trivialized on live television, now kiss his ring. Politicians who fought and struggled against Barack Obama's every act—try to bring more health care to more Americans—roll like puppies at the feet of this demagogue.
     I see on Facebook the common meme that someday Trump supporters will regret their support. I severely doubt this. First, because if you go down South, you will not find aging bigots who battled civil rights tooth and nail now hanging their heads in shame. I never see those people. It is far easier to deny folly and keep denying it than to eventually face it. People, generally, are cowards. Hence the popularity of Donald Trump.
     The only time such reckoning has a chance is when the people lost in follow are soundly defeated. The Germans, crushed, began to sincerely wonder whether they had erred, morally, with all this Nazi business.
     Keep that in mind, foremost in mind, this November. Unless these guys lose, we all lose. We won't be given many chances to reverse this. It will set in, settle in our bones. It might already have done so. It might already be too late. Some days, it feels too late.
     Because second, he may prevail. The abused system of laws and standards and decency gives way, day by day, inch by inch, and we stagger toward the same power-driven, money-driven dystopia we find in so many other countries. A world where Russia has won. It's so strange. They couldn't defeat us through strength, through bombs and armies. But they have us on the mat through guile, their tool in the White House, the evidence of his perfidy being quashed before it has come out. And 40 percent of the American people eager for it to happen.
    We could not only end up with Trump, but worse to come. If you can gaze at Trump's words and actions and endorse that, put your words and your heart and your vote behind it, I believe you can endorse anything.
     Here's what I don't understand: What do his supporters get? What's in it for them? A frisson of self-love? As bad as betraying your country is, at least Trump and his family and cronies get a payday, in money and power and perceived status. What do their supporters get? Nothing, but a pat on the heads, a few facile lies, a couple sympathetic judges and country in ruins. Maybe that's secretly what they wanted all along, chaos. Finally, a reason for all those guns.

Is Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt?

"Five Antique Torsos" (detail) by Damien Hirst

    I suppose, this being my own personal blog, freed from the musty standards of decorum lingering around actual publications like the smell of sulfur at the mouth of certain caves, I should take a moment to dissect the controversy swirling around Samantha Bee's calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless cunt."
    First, let me say, up front, that I don't have a dog in this race. I am not leaping to Bee's defense. Though I've seen dozens of promotions for her program, "Full Frontal"—they run continually on TBS during "The Big Bang Theory"—I wince in expectation when they come on. Bee strikes me as both unsubtle and unfunny, her voice a monotone shout, and the promotions are anything but: they don't promote her, but undercut her, and never made me for a moment tempted to tune in.
     In other words, if she went off the air tomorrow I'd care not a bit. The program itself means nothing to me.
    Onward, to the matter at hand...
   "Feckless" is a good word, meaning,  when used in relation to things, ""ineffective, feeble, futile, valueless," according to my mighty Oxford English Dictionary and of people, "destitute of vigour, energy, or capacity; weak, helpless."
     "Feck" actually is a word, too, by the way, meaning: "efficacy, efficiency, value; hence vigour, energy." 
    I really can't judge if Ivanka Trump is indeed feckless because, in the continuous slow motion train wreck, the ongoing national disaster that is her father's administration, she doesn't merit notice. I can't tell if she is energetically pursuing some goal or sighing and puffing up her bangs and flipping through a shoe catalogue because I haven't been paying attention to her. Besides, nothing anyone could say about Ivanka Trump would make me cringe the way I already did when certain Jews, hopeful that she would counterbalance the Pandora's Box of hatred her father kicked open, hoped aloud that Ivanka, being Jewish, might be "our Esther," referring to the Purim story of the beautiful queen who interceded to save the Jews. Ivanka would protect us.
    Talk about feckless.
    As for "cunt"—sorry mom, no kindergarten asterisk in place of the "u" here, I need to reserve them for footnotes, like this one *—it remains "one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock," according to feminist Germaine Greer, who nevertheless deployed it in conversation as far back as the 1950s. 
    "On one occasion," Christine Wallace wrote in Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, "she walked into a Melbourne cafe and pronounced loudly, 'I'd like to wrap my big juicy cunt around ...' naming the man who was her current object of desire. To say this attracted attention in late 1950s Melbourne is a considerable understatement."
     I assume the hunky man fled from Greer as from a house afire. I certainly would. The word is not in my vocabulary, because of its blend of coarseness and sexism. I can call a man "a dick," if warranted, and often do, now that I think of it. But I can't see myself calling a woman a cunt, except perhaps under some extreme circumstance that I shrink from contemplating.   
     It is worth noting the full context of what Bee said, since the rondo of outrage typically divorces offenses from their frame. On Sunday, Trump had Instagramed photos of herself nuzzling her son, even as outrage over her father's policy of separating refugees from their children peaked.
      “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child,” Bee said, “but let me just say, one mother to another: do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

    Right wing commentators thrashed like piranha in a pond. The White House denounced Bee's "vile and vicious" words. 
     Is the word "vile"? While the subject is open to debate, it seems to me the word is more taboo than what I'm required to refer to as "the n-word" which gets a surprising amount of play, both among African-Americans, and also in literature and the sincere use of odious bigots. "Fuck" is as common as breath itself. But "cunt" carries a sting of obscenity without much counterbalance of non-offensive use. Henry Rawson called it "the most heavily tabooed word of all English words" and I certainly would agree: I can't think of any songs that use it**, which can't be said for "fuck" or that other word.
    At least now. But these things change, and are subject to geographical differences and changes in fashion over time. In 2004, the Chicago Tribune, back when it had a woman's section, featured on its front page a story on the word, spelling it "C*NT" in the headline, detailing, if I recall correctly, its supposed acceptance in England.***
    Then editor Ann Marie Lipinski got word of the word being spotlighted, after the section had been printed. She ordered every available Trib hand dragooned and rushed to Freedom Center to yank 600,000 WomanNews sections out of the papers. They might have done too good a job: I could not find an image online, though I would love to see it and post it here, and briefly worried that perhaps it was a false memory. But Michael Miner described the incident in his Hot Type column at the time.
    Though if I had to rank the shocking facts in the above paragraph, I would order them 1) The Tribune had a Sunday section called WomanNews 2) the Tribune once printed 600,000 copies of its newspaper and 3) the Tribune came close to running a story on the popularity of the word "cunt." 
     This might be a topic where less is more. Time to wind up. If you just have to read more, Katy Waldman does a good job picking apart both the controversy and the etymology on the New Yorker's web site. 
     What this boils down to, in my mind, is a collision between the culture of grievance and the ever-changing realm of language. Democrats were nodding and laughing when Bee used the word. Republicans, so adept at equating unequal events, lunged at the crudity to balance out Roseanne Barr, even though calling Valerie Jarrett the daughter of an ape feeds into the worst racist negations of humanity, while Bee, being herself female, in a less culturally-roiled month could have defended tossing a sisterly c-word toward Ivanka without raising an eyebrow. To me, her groveling apology was worse than the crime itself. If you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.
     But then again, I don't think Bee should be on television, based on all her words that aren't cunt. She just isn't good enough. Though to be fair, maybe the problem is that the person making her promos does a lousy job, picking the wrong bits to highlight. It could be a fantastic show—I've never watched it, so shouldn't judge.
     I wouldn't have touched this topic ... no, wrong word choice ... I would have let the matter slide ... no, I wouldn't have probed ... oh the hell with it. But I noticed a quip on Facebook that I felt duty bound to immortalize; alas the person repeating it didn't note the source. It observed that Ivanka Trump "is not deep enough or warm enough to be a cunt." I think that sums up the situation perfectly. 

* I underestimated her. "Honey, I'm your mother. C'mon," she said, when I tried to warn her off. "Now I HAVE to read it. She said something true."

** On Facebook, a reader offered up Marianne Faithful's 1979 betrayed lover's lament "Why D'ya Do It?": "Every time I see your dick I see her cunt in my bed." Ah the 1970s, we were so forthright in those days. Another offered The Police's 1981 "Rehumanize Yourself," a song particularly apt in our era of resurgent nationalism:

          Billy's joined the National Front
          He always was a little runt
          He's got his hand in the air with the other cunts
          You've got to humanize yourself

*** Bill Savage, who gets around and is the platinum bar of veracity, confirms this:

     “Cunt” is indeed a commonplace and not particularly offensive word in the UK and Ireland, especially in Scotland and urban Ireland. Was talking with a friend who’s married to an Irish guy, about how she had to train him about how that word is heard in the US. In Dublin Irish, it’s practically a punctuation mark. They also use “whore,” pronounced “hoor,” in a way that grates on American ears. Also, on “feck”: that’s a common Irish dialect pronunciation of “fuck,” and someone might be described as a “feckin’ hoor of a cunt” in a pub discussion without raising any eyebrows. Two (three) nations, again divided by a common tongue, to paraphrase Churchill.

Bigotry obvious in Roseanne Barr debacle; less so, the value of professional PR

    My first job out of college was writing publicity in Los Angeles. I sat in a bare office—desk, chair, window facing a parking lot—in Century City, grinding out capsule biographies of 12-year-old BMX bicycle racers, stiff-arming the creeping conviction that, at 22, my life was now officially over.
     The sun-kissed little hellions could not be expected to pause from their moto whips and 540 barspins to write their own profiles, of course. Such things were not done. Writing your own publicity was the realm of the amateur, of mimeographed church newsletters and bulletin board rummage sale announcements. A professional operation like the BMXL—the Bicycle Motocross League—was expected to hire a slick firm staffed with fresh Northwestern graduates such as myself, who would drape them in properly-spelled glory.
     A sensible dynamic which came pouring back to me this week as I sat gaping, open-mouthed, along with the rest of the country, watching Roseanne Barr's reborn career implode, along with ABC's top-rated program, after the comedian sent out a tweet late Monday suggesting that former Obama administration adviser Valerie Jarrett is the progeny of an ape.
     Since many Americans seem clueless as to why this particular insult is different than any random cruelty, a bit of history:
     The United States was founded a slave-owning nation. Our Constitution was an elaborate tap-dance lauding liberty while enabling slavery. But you need more than disingenuous laws to own slaves. You need the slave-owner's mindset. Convincing yourself that some human beings are your personal property based entirely on the color of their skin is a complex self-deception that requires you to believe they are inferior to you. Deciding they are non-human helps, and Roseanne said what every daughter of Dixie felt in 1850, a time when Americans eagerly hardened their hearts, perverted their religious faith and deformed their ethical standards to tell themselves this. After all, money was involved.

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'He really has a deft way with him'—Tony Fitzpatrick on Rick Telander

Swallowtail

     I'd hate to have to decide who is cooler, Rick Telander or Tony Fitzpatrick. 
     Rick is a revered sports columnist who became a star at Sports Illustrated before jumping to the Sun-Times. Tony is a respected artist who performs one-man shows at Steppenwolf and whose visual creations are collected in museums around the world. 
      Rick was the kid for 15 years in "The Sportswriters" on TV. Tony plays mysterious security guard Jack Birdbath in the "Patriot" TV series on Amazon Video.
      Rick played one-on-one with Michael Jordan. Tony hosted the Uptown Poetry Slam when it first began at the Green Mill. 
     See? It's impossible.
     And though I know both men and flatter myself that I am friends with both, I had no idea they knew each other—Rick met Tony 30 years, writing about the Slam. Nor that Rick is an artist. Nor, until a few weeks ago, that he was having a show at Tony's gallery. 
       My first thought was that I should write something, about the wonder, this sports-writer-turned-artist. Then I dithered: maybe I shouldn't—bias, both are pals—then that I should. I ran it past my editor, and he said fine, 
    Then Robert Chiarito beat me to the punch with this sprightly interview with Rick for Chicago magazine.
      Which left me ready to drop the idea. But I had already talked to Tony about the show, and figured his remarks would make for something of a bookend to Rick's observations. Anyway, the show opens Friday, June 1, from 7 to 10 p.m. at Adventureland, 1513 N. Western Avenue. Rick will be there. Tony will be there. There will be beer and wine. And, for what it's worth, I will be there too.

Songbirds

     "He's actually been making this stuff since he was a kid, he just doesn't talk about it. About six years ago, he started coming around, showing me his work, the stuff he made as a result of his trips to the UP. He's kind of a nature kid, and he liked what I did."
     Were you an inspiration? Because I see a connection.
     "He maybe looked at some of the things in my studio. It opened a couple doors to him. But he's got his own thing. He responds to nature in a way that touches me. He really has a deft way with him, making figures and making images. He's obviously a guy who has thought a lot about it. At the age of 69, this man has a second act. That's not the usual way it goes in America. I've encouraged it over the last half a dozen years. Watched him evolve and have something to write about besides the vanities of athletes, the constant push me and pull you between the millionaires and the billionaires. 
     "I think this is in large part his respite from that. It was always there."
     You guys have known each other a long time.
     We first met 35 years ago. He wrote the first press about me I ever had. He said, 'I've been making drawings since I was a kid, I don't really show them to anybody.' Back then, 28 years old, I said 'Why wouldn't you?' I think he came from the culture of being a former jock, went to Northwestern on a  football scholarship, wrote for Sports Illustrated all those years. Perhaps maybe one part of his psyche was he really didn't feel like sharing this with anybody.
     "I didn't really show anybody my art until my junior or senior in high school. I wanted to have ownership in my own life. I suspect, in a very different way, that might resonate for Rick. Don't ask about the mechanics of how thinks. He makes art in part about storytelling. He's always saying, 'It has to be beautiful.' I'm like, 'No Rick it doesn't.' Beauty is sometimes a side product.
    "One thing I really liked is  his fearlessness with art-making. He's not afraid to get in there with watercolors and pens and ink and collage elements. He draws very well, it's been kind of a remarkable symbiosis. I learn a lot from him.
     "Last year, my son brought a few of Rick's pieces in here and said, 'Let's do a show. He's not getting any younger.'  At first I thought I would have to talk him into it, but he's all in. He's ready to show people, ready for people to meet Rick Telander, the other guy. We think we know people from their bylines and what they observe. Part of the thing about making visual art, much say you look outward have to look deeply inward, Rick maybe surprised himself. And me; I'm thrilled we are able to do this." 

"I think the story is more important than the truth"

"The Nose" by Alberto Giacometti 

  
     Lies have a long afterlife for a reason. They scratch an itch, tell a satisfying story. Donald Trump's constant untruths boost his fragile ego, his false claims about the press are a cynical attempt to blunt valid criticism now and undercut damaging revelations certain to come in the future.
    Besides, accepting something at face value as true, because somebody says it's true, or there are news clippings assuming it's true, is easy. Much harder to ask, "Did this really happen?" and start to dig. That takes time, and energy.
    Which can be in short supply with a breaking news story. But are in abundance when writing an advance obituary. So I was disappointed to see a New York Times obituary of Dick Tuck by Robert D. McFadden repeat tales I knew to be untrue, stories that Tuck had admitted were untrue.
    Yes, it was a long time ago, while researching my first book, "If At All Possible Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks." But the book was published by St. Martin's Press, featured on the cover of Rolling Stone and on Good Morning America. It wasn't a best-seller, but it wasn't a secret either. McFadden, a Pulitzer Prize winner, couldn't have wondered whether these marvelous events in fact occurred. It isn't as if the University of California at Santa Barbara isn't still there. 
    Maybe it's best just to reprint the Tuck section from my book:

     Of all the pranksters in this book, perhaps the most vexing case is Dick Tuck. Famous for his determined hounding of Richard Nixon, Tuck has attached his name to some delightful pranks—the time he arranged for an old lady to embrace Nixon the day after his 1960 TV-debate drubbing and say, "Kennedy got the best of it last night, but don't worry dear, you'll do better next time." The time he signaled for Nixon's campaign train to pull out of the station while the candidate was delivering a speech from a platform at the back. The time he tricked Nixon, during a visit to San Francisco's Chinatown, to have his picture taken under a huge sign which said, in Chinese WHAT ABOUT THE HUGHES LOAN? alluding to a scandal dogging Nixon at the time.
    So well-known was Tuck for his deeds that when the Watergate scandal first broke, Nixon's henchmen initially blustered that it was merely a Tuckish prank.
     It would be wonderful to say that Tuck is an exception to the Hugh Troy Syndrome—legendary pranksters whose feats melt away when examined closely. Sadly, that is not the case.
     The reason Dick Tuck falls within the book's scope of interest at all is that he traces his Nixon-baiting career to Nixon's run for California's Senate seat in 1950, when the Trickster waged a brutal campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas.
     A junior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Tuck was a campaign worker for Douglas. He was also in the history class of professor Harry Girvetz, who was contacted by Nixon's campaign headquarters—Tuck says—looking for an advance man to coordinate a campus appearance by Nixon.
     Girvetz, Tuck says, asked him if he would take the responsibility. Tuck accepted.
     "I picked the largest auditorium I could find," Tuck told a newspaper in 1973. "There was nobody on campus at the time and this place must have seated 2,700."
     Tuck also chose a time of 4 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. Since most classes were held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the campus was largely deserted. "We went to the beach Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Tuck.
     "Of course, only about forty people showed up. Then I held it up so latecomers could arrive. Well, Nixon and everybody there began getting impatient."
     While waiting for the latecomers to arrive, approximately half the people who had shown up left. Nixon impatiently insisted that they get going.
     "Finally, the meeting started and I got up to introduce him. During the introduction I proposed one hundred and three questions for Nixon to answer during his talk."
     "And then I turned to him with a flourish and said: 'And now here's Richard Nixon, who will speak to us on the World Monetary Fund."
    The appearance was a humiliating failure, and as Nixon was leaving, he called Tuck over and asked him his name. Tuck told him.
     "Well, Dick Tuck," Nixon said, "you've just made your last advance."
     A nice tag line to a great prank. The problem is, the entire thing is a lie; worse, one that Tuck has been repeating as true for the past 40 years.
     After examining 30 years of credulous newspaper articles, happily detailing Tuck's various exploits, I tracked down Tuck in New York, and he repeated his stories for me.
     They sounded true enough—filled with detail and largely consistent. Then there were all those clippings. And I certainly wanted to believe him.
     But the rally story started to unravel owing to Tuck's use of Professor Girvetz. No doubt mentioning a professor by name struck Tuck as the sort of small detail that adds veracity to a tale.
     But he overlooked the fact that Girvetz was famous as a liberal Democrat—a building at U of C-Santa Barbara is named after him. The notion of Nixon's campaign staff, no matter how harried, contacting a famous Democrat to set up a campaign visit struck me as highly odd. The archivist at U of C was interested in my quest, and combed the student newspaper for news of the rally. Nothing.
     I called Tuck back to see if he could provide me with more information—perhaps the date of the rally, or the name of a friend who attended. Suddenly, he was no longer the ebullient man I had spoken with before.
     "Your desire for truth troubles me a little bit," he said. "I think the story is more important than the truth."
     To give Tuck credit, under pressure, he finally admitted that not only was the disastrous University of California rally a fiction of his, but so was the train story and other pranks he is credited with.
     In his defense, Tuck claimed that the truthfulness of a story is secondary to its effect—look at Santa Claus, he said.
     But what he fails to see is that the lack of truth completely undermines the value of anything presented as fact. It taints the moral of the story. The reason people embrace Tuck's pranks is not because they are wonderful, timeless tales. People love the punch line—tricky old anal-retentive Nixon, the wily puppet-master, reduced to a laughingstock, red-faced in the empty hall, failing to finish his speech as the train pulls away.
     Tuck's pranks appeared to play upon Nixon's defensiveness, egotism, and lack of humor. To see the importance of it being Nixon, imagine playing a prank on Jimmy Carter, somewhere in Africa, pressing a rag soaked in sugar water against the lips of a starving infant. Not quite the same image. 
     Remember, what brought Nixon down was not the Watergate break-in, per se. Rather, it was his lying to cover it up, shameless and on television, gazing into the camera and distorting the truth for his own benefit.
    Kinda like Dick Tuck.

     I contacted both the New York Times and McFadden and informed them of the problematic sections of the obituary. Neither responded. Which is also disappointing. I'm open to the idea that, as people tend to do when they possess a bit of personal knowledge on a subject, I'm exaggerating the significance of this lapse. But it seemed at least worth mentioning. Truth is either important, or it's not.