When Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign fell apart in 1980, it
belly-flopped with a flourish. As I wrote a few years ago in a
look back at Brown’s career,
The governor brought in Francis
Ford Coppola to produce a live half-hour TV special in Madison,
Wisconsin, shortly before the state’s primary. The results might be
the biggest blot on Coppola’s filmography: Brown’s microphone died,
the program opened with a pair of typos (“Live from Madisno,
Wisoc”), and images that were supposed to appear behind Brown
instead materialized on the candidate’s face. Coppola later said
the show “looked as if it were a transmission from some clandestine
place on Mars.”
When I wrote that, I wasn’t able to get ahold of the program, so
I had to rely on second-hand accounts. Since then the special has
been posted online, and what a wonderfully weird half-hour of TV it
turns out to be. It isn’t the biggest blot on Coppola’s
record: It has a deranged-video-art quality that makes it kind of
entertaining, and it’s certainly more watchable than Jack. But
the sound is out of sync, the images behind the candidate sometimes
feel like another show is intruding on the proceedings, and Brown
looks like he has holes on his face.
In the closing seconds, an offscreen voice says, “It’s gone
much, much better than we even could have dreamed of.” I can only
assume that man was working for the Carter campaign. The typos at
the beginning of the program were the perfect foreshadowing for
what was to come.
(A belated correction on those typos, by the way: “Wisconsin” is
misrendered as “Wisci,” not “Wisoc.” Such are the perils of
relying on secondary sources.)
The speech’s content is interesting too, inasmuch as it’s a
snapshot of a particular moment in the history of both Brown and
the Democratic Party. Before I share my thoughts on that, here’s
the video, which has been split into two parts:
The Jerry Brown of 1980 was socially liberal, but those issues
are almost entirely absent here—the only time they come up is when
someone in the audience asks what he’d do to pass the Equal Rights
Amendment. (To hear Brown’s rather bizarre reply, go to 9:52 in the
second video.) And while it’s clear that the candidate disapproves
of America’s interventionist foreign policy, the only time he
addresses what was then a current military issue, as opposed to
Vietnam or another topic of the past, is when he calls for cutting
the MX missile. Otherwise this is a talk about economics: taxes,
spending, regulation, trade.
On many of those issues, Brown sounds rather libertarian. He
says the solution to inflation is to turn off the printing presses.
He denounces deficits. He calls for indexing the income tax to
inflation, and for reducing a variety of government levies. And he
is fiercely critical of protectionism. (In an interesting contrast
with his ’90s attacks on NAFTA, he calls for creating a North
American Economic Community with Canada and Mexico.)
But he also calls for energy
rationing. He says we should reindustrialize the country with a
corporatist “strategic plan” formulated by government, business,
and unions working together. (Like many people who endorsed such
ideas in the ’80s, he cites Japan as a model.) He endorses
subsidies for bullet trains and fuel-efficient cars. In a departure
from his other views on global trade, he suggests that we stop
private companies from purchasing foreign oil, arguing that such
imports should be government-to-government transactions instead.
And as a form of national service—this might qualify as another
social issue, come to think of it—he calls for reestablishing the
Civilian
Conservation Corps. (This is actually an improvement on an
earlier iteration of the idea. Brown previously favored mandatory
service, but here he says it should be voluntary.)
And he does it all while Francis Ford Coppola is making him look
like Max Headroom’s sober brother. This video fiasco isn’t just a
funeral for the New Age ’70s. It’s an opening fanfare for the
glitch aesthetic of the ’80s.
(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club,
go here.)
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1pLWF5W
via IFTTT