Not last night but the night before a certain girlfriend who manages to force me into occasionally watching interesting stuff on tv (like the news or a well made documentary) instead of the junk I prefer, took a look at my tv guide and highlighted this documentary called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Although it was on only pretty late, we somehow managed to fight off sleep and stayed up until the midnight hour, around which our carefully selected show started. When it had finally started, we were instantly ‘grabbed’ by it. Apalled and fascinated simultaneously.
This guy, this Lee Atwater, somehow managed to be the perfect guy for the most horrific job in the world, namely: be the republican party’s spin doctor for presidential campaigning and forced both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush into being presidents by pretty much inventing the word ‘slander campaign’. Now I don’t know how you guys feel about the international influence those two, or should I say three, presidents had on the world as a whole, but I feel it’s safe to say this guy Atwater pretty much personifies the saying ‘the devil’s advocate’.
Lee must have been a real devil, a real ruthless, cynical, natural born machiavellist. But the weirdest and saddest of all is, he was pretty cool. He was funny, a great guitar player (He briefly played backup guitar for Percy Sledge during the 1960s and frequently played with bluesmen such as B.B. King) and his cynicism also worked truth provocing. When asked by a reporter about his unscrupulous methods, he simply stated ‘we never tell how me make sausages’. It’s exciting to see this guy change from the guy you love to hate into the guy you hate to love in only 86 minutes.
He was really a whole lot like Alex Keaton (Michael J. Fox), the only republican family member in the left wing, baby boomer, post hippie Keaton family in the tv series Family Ties. We all know that if power is dominated by an extreme, rebellion will be dominated by the counterpoint of this extreme, meaning ‘when the parents are hippies, their son is a huge fan of William F. Buckley Jr.’ Atwater, being rased in the South, grew a natural anti-establishment feel from the inferiority complex the south had obviously always suffered from (in their minds the South had lost the civil war from jewish New York stock brokers who basically had nothing to do with the country God had in mind for them gunslinging American good ol’ boys), plus he experienced a tragic death in the family which, according to the documentary, caused him to lose faith in god and happiness.
In short the absence of love in this man’s life caused him to have a bizarre understanding of the words ‘responsibility’ and ‘compassion’. So the lack of understanding of those two words in the life of one individual, one genius strategist, has proven tremendously important for the recent history of the US, and the now of the world. Nowadays that’s being called ‘one man can make a defference’. Finally, in the end of the documentary, Atwaters last years of his life might be best be defined as ‘Lee experiencing the wrath of God’. I don’t know, but I was like ‘no matter how bad your judgement is, you just gotta know when you’re really making a big fucking mess’, ‘What goes up must come down’, ‘what goes around…’ and so on. A must see on both political and humane level.
