A Drunk With A Gee-Tar

Endless misery. Unspeakable pain. Desperate futures.
Here are some touchstones that I remember as I watch; one of my favorite movies, one of my favorite musicians, and one of my favorite books.

”A drunk with a gee-tar” is how ol’ Lonesome Rhodes described himself in Elia Kazan’s 1957 ‘A Face in the Crowd’.

Lonesome shot into the heart of America because of his amazing ability to act the naughty but homespun son. Even more quickly he became THE media superstar at a time when the media was all radio and a nascent television with its three channels. Being a superstar to those captive audiences meant money in the bank for Lonesome and the circles he now ran in. Lonesome finds his level at last as a malevolent Will Rogers. Drunk with power he snarls,

“whole country’s just like my flock of sheep! Hillbillies, hausfraus – everybody that’s got to jump when someone else blows a whistle. They’re mine!” Of course he eventually got his savage comeuppance and plunged to the anonymous depths from which he came. Like Humpty Dumpty he had a great fall and all the king’s horses and “All the King’s Men” couldn’t put Lonesome together again.

The Southern liberal genius, Robert Penn Warren, wrote a book with that nursery rhyme phrase as its title. The character of Willie Stark is a scantily clad portrait of Huey Long, the hugely popular populist, ‘a chicken in every pot’, ‘Kingfish’ of Louisiana. Randy Newman wrote a song about Huey called ‘Kingfish’. The first verse is :

“ There’s a hundred thousand Frenchmen in New Orleans
In New Orleans there are Frenchmen everywhere
But your house could fall down
Your baby could drown
Wouldn’t none of those Frenchmen care”

Huey’s thousands of endless and always bombastic speeches, (for he did love the sound of his own voice), trumpeted that he was in constant pitched battle with the snotty French down in New Orleans. Huey’s legendary and flagrant corruption only further enraptured the grindingly poor white farmers of those Depression years. They reckoned that he was stealing money from the rich bastards and was giving it to them, a drawlin’ Robin Hood. He was a monstrous rogue and a brutal one but he got things done. Roads. Schools. Jobs. But he was right, they hated him in New Orleans and in Washington too. The feeling among the intelligentsia and all genteel folk was that this strange bird was imminently going take Louisiana to secession from the Union. They may have been right. He did have an awful of paramilitary around him. Then of them educated but deranged Jews shot Huey right in the gut. He died a few days later. Huey’s dissolute brother, Earl, stepped, though disastrously, into Huey’s shoes.

Our George has little in common with these rough Southern fellows not inbred in Texas.

1. George cain’t play the gee-tar.
2. George didn’t care when houses fell down, let alone care when babies drowned.
3. George is unable to speak a sentence to say nothing about a lucid speech.
4. George hasn’t ever done any good stuff for the poor.
5. George isn’t just hated in New Orleans although now they rightly hate him more than the rest of us do and that's stating the impossible.
6. George’s brother, Jeb, has a Schiavo chance of ever ever ever being the third Bush cowboy in the Oval Office.


The milk and human kindness thing curdles as I watch our Gulf cities screaming for help. Then I watch 'The Man Without A Plan' talk stone cold jaw dropping gibberish about a magnificently restored porch to be enjoyed in the very near future, hehhhehh. Then the curdling leads me to channel Pat Robertson and I wonder where we can get us an educated but deranged Jew.