COME BACK LYNDON!
by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea
God,
how we miss L.B J.!
The
confession comes with weeping violins, thunder off-screen and shadows gathering
in the corners. There is the gnashing of teeth and the commotions at the other
end of the alimentary tract causing a noticeable tightening of the ass-hole,
while the liver dies a little, and the damage to key glands and trunk-line
nerves will not be discovered by conventional medicine. Still, the confession,
at last, must come. We were there; we marched with the others and chanted,
“Hey, hey, L.B J., how many kids didja kill today?”; yes, we signed the
petitions and wrote to the Congressmen, we even gave some credence to Garrison
and Mark Lane and MacBird; we longed for the day and dreamed of the day
when that Texas Turd was sent home to gather flies on the banks of the
Pedernales and was replaced at the Helm by somebody, anybody, who didn’t have
the soul of a cattle-rustler and a face like a study in the mesmerization of
the anal sphinctre. Back in
Well,
we didn’t get somebody. We didn’t even get anybody. By the malice of a
left-handed and sardonic God, we got “Richard Milhouse Nixon.”
We
repent all of our sins and heresies; we recant in public. We want L.B J. back.
The next time our troops withdraw from Vietnam into another Asian country, we
want old Lyndon there to explain it, with those crafty lines of ham Summer
Stock piety crinkling around his eyes — not “Nixon” with that no-echo sound in
his voice that makes it seem as if his throat is lined with styrofoam, and that
Insect Trust remoteness from all human emotion. Confronted with the alien, the
perhaps mechanical, the possibly Outer Space quality of seemingly motiveless
malignity in “Nixon,” we are beginning to appreciate how American, how human,
how down-home Lyndon Baines Johnson really was.
And
the L.B.J. jokes — remember them? They were so folksy and real and earthy —
remember? Remember, “Terrible accident at the L.B.J. ranch today — somebody
left the gate open and the cattle all went home”? Remember the legends about
his enormous schlong, and Paul Krassner’s great line, “When he calls a joint
meeting, everybody cringes”? Remember, “The White House reporters can now tell
when L.B.J. is lying. When he scratches his ear, he’s telling the truth. When
he rubs his nose, he’s telling the truth. But when he opens his mouth — he’s
lying!” Who tells jokes about “Nixon”? Perhaps the computers at the
Remember
the quick adrenalin flashes and the screams of rage in the old anti-Johnson demonstrations,
the most exhilarating hate-trip many of us have ever been on? Do you know
anyone who hates “Nixon” that way? Turn anywhere, look at the hardest-working
and most dedicated peace crusader you know, and is there any personal feeling
toward “Richard Nixon”? Never. At the most there is distaste and an attenuated
metaphysical dread, a hunch that behind the seeming void of the public persona
might be a secret so dreadful that the human mind would crumble on confronting
it. Worse: that there is no horror behind the void, nothing but another void,
which conceals a still deeper void, in a mad series of 0-dimensional Chinese
boxes regressing infinitely always to another void, another mask, and still
another void masking yet another void, forever?
History
is a game for any number of players, but that’s the key — you need real players
to enjoy it. The one thing that, sooner or later, any hyperactive participant
(as we sometimes think we are) has to learn is that a good game requires a
spirited opposition. We of the Left need a Right. Realizing that, you come to
see that your enemy is not really your enemy in any total sense — he is as
necessary to you as your friend. At that point you come to value the fact that
your enemy is a human being; who can work up a good political enthusiasm
against a moving van, the tobacco mosaic virus or the weather in
People
have humanized hurricanes and other disasters, they have even anthropomorphized
the plague bacteria and projected malice into its invasions, but it is simply
impossible to humanize or anthropomorphize “Richard Nixon”. The best public
relations brains in the country have worked on the job for years, and all they
produce when the TV cameras turn on is the same dead-level computer read-out of
some very unconvincing used-car salesman’s pitch of fading memory. How
different it was when L.B.J. said, “With a heavy heart, I once again resume
bombing,” and the delivery was so Riverboat Gambler that you could feel an almost
tactile relationship with the conniving but human sonofabitch who
rehearsed the words over and over until they almost captured the ring of sincerity.
L.B
J. was a bad father, a father you could hate, an old Huck Finn’s Pap of a
reprobate who lied his head off and stole everything not nailed down but probably
cackled with obscene glee over every swindle and laughed like hell when he told
his cronies about it. You might want to ride him out of town on a rail, but you
knew he’d make out all right in the next town and swindle the folks there, too,
and you had a sneaking admiration for that incorrigibility. But nobody can
think of “Nixon” as a father, good or bad, or any kind of brother, or even a
very remote cousin. Being conquered by the Martians would be existentially
believable compared to being governed by “Nixon” — at least the Martians, if
inhuman, must be protoplasm. Who is that sure about Nixon? If he abruptly answered
a press conference question with “That — does — not — compute,” who would
really be surprised or feel aught else but that a buried suspicion had been confirmed?
Even
“Nixon’s” admirers don’t admire “him” and this clearly communicated early to “his”
circle who thoughtfully built up Spiro as a human and believable spokesman whom
people could love and hate.
Consider
what could have been “Nixon’s” finest moment, the day he announced that he was
against abortion because of his belief in “the sanctity of human life.” Imagine
how Lyndon-Baby would have handled that line, every crease on his face
emphasizing the depths of emotion an spiritual revelation, the quiver in his
voice on the key words “sanctity and “life,” the whole effect mounting to a
crescendo of righteousness on a level with Fields himself saying, “What? Five
aces in the deck? What scoundrel could have done that?” Do you member any of
“Nixon’s” performances? Nobody does; Nobody remembers any of “his” speeches.
They just remember that “he” was on TV again and said something, and no one can
quite recollect whether “he” was selling “his” latest invasion or
Or,
look at the other side of the picture. Recall the great oration that terminated
L.B J.’s three decades of opposition to racial equality, that Falstaffian performance
in which he pledged all his loyalty to civil rights and concluded raptly, “And
we shall overcome.” It was pure Rod
Steiger, right out of the scene in The Harder They Fall where Steiger,
the gangster, tells his gunsels to “show some respect” for the man they’ve just
killed. You felt a deep human identifica for L.B.J. and Steiger in those scenes
and wished that they could succeed in making someone believe them, wished
almost that you could believe them for a moment. Can you imagine “Nixon”
handling that bit? Can you hear him saying, “We shall overcome,” and getting
any response any more sympathetic or antipathetic than a yawn?
Obviously,
given that people aren’t completely stupid or tasteless, it is hard at times to
understand how come the American electorate made the trade — the monstrous
human being for the robot monster. The best explanation we’ve found is the
Conspiracy Theory. In our novel, Illuminatus! (to be published by Dell
later this year) we dramatize the notion that just about every catastrophe in
history can be explained by the machinations of the Ancient Illuminated Seers
of Bavaria, a conspiratorial organization which runs international finance, all
major political parties everywhere in the world, all communications media, the
Catholic Church, and the Chicago Transit Authority. While doing the research
for Illuminatus! we came across the fact that on April 1, 1968, Johnson
was opening his morning copy of the New York Times while spooning a heavily-sugared
wedge of grapefruit into that lugubrious face (which, as he himself quite
frankly stated after viewing Peter Hurd’s portrait, was “the ugliest thing I
ever saw”), when a pink slip fell out. The message read, “It’s April First, and
you’re It,” and it was signed, “The Fellas.” Under this there appeared a
peculiar symbol, printed in red, an eye inside a glowing triangle. A somewhat
similiar eye can be seen — if “Nixon’s” stewardship of the economy has left you
any bread — on the U.S. dollar bill, back side on the left.
Shortly
after receiving this message, Johnson opted out of the 1968 Presidential race.
We learned these facts in a teen-ager’s magazine called Teenset for
March 1969 in an article on the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria by a writer
named Sandra Glass. The writer disappeared before the article was published, Teenset
changed its name to Aum, and Aum itself subsequently ceased
publication.
Assuming
— as do most Illuminati experts such as ourselves, Howard Bickler and Robert
Welch of the John Birch Society — that Johnson’s masters are the ones who
continue to rule the country through “Nixon,” can anyone visualize them disposing
of “Nixon” by sending him a pink slip? They would simply pull the plug.
We
blamed the war on the Democrats. When the Ghostly Old Party gave us “Nixon” as
its nominee, the proceedings were as genteel as a wake in
So,
you Illuminated Seers, if you be human and not a race of inter-planetary
invaders who are all “Nixons,” you, too must be fed up with the banality of
this particular brand of evil. You’ve outdone yourselves this time. Let us have
a man back in the White House. A shrewd, stupid, crafty, clumsy, eating, breathing,
spitting, belching, balls-scratching, nose-picking, guilt-ridden, boasting,
overcompensating, naive, corrupt, evil and innocent human being — another
L.B.J. or the original L.B.J. himself, brought back for a re-run. Do not, O
Illuminati, leave us out here in the twilight with no more for host than a
sincere Coca Cola machine.
Mssrs Wilson and
Shea apparently underestimated our ability to become angry, even at inanimate
objects, such as a “sincere Coca-Cola machine.” This was a curious failing of
the well-documented prescience they demonstrated
in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. After the 1976 election, Bob Wilson told me they
had thought they were writing
fiction, but for the previous two years,
every morning he opened the newspaper, he realized they had written the
headlines. (The basic question of Illuminatus! was “What if ALL the conspiracy
theories they’d been reading as editors of Playboy’s Forum were true?” and if
that were the case, what sort of government would we have?))
Robert
Shea died