Word: huey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brinkley's first book, "Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression," won the American Book Award for history in 1983. He said he currently is preparing a second book on the transformation of New Deal liberalism during the 1930s and 1940s...
...countries where American pop is officially discouraged or limited, however, playing a Huey Lewis tape or wearing Jordache jeans can be an implicit political gesture, a tiny, tinny blow for individual liberty. One young Czech puts it bluntly: "Coke equals America. America equals freedom." In the Soviet Union, VCRS and audiocassette players are inherently democratizing devices. "The new communications technology has changed things completely," says one Moscow father of teenagers. "Tapes can be played over and over, exchanged, copied." In the '50s American moral vigilantes sometimes claimed that rock 'n' roll was the creation of Communist subversives out to undermine...
...infinitely more interesting when Arnold enters the scene. Before Arnold, Connie encounters all kinds of sleazes, but he's both her first, and her first psychotic. And as you watch Arnold smooth-talk the diffident Connie into submission, he seems like a sinister cross between Jack the Ripper and Huey Long...
Something similar occurs in Huey Long, Ken Burns' rather too conventional documentary about the rise and demise of our most successful demagogue. The antique footage of Long on the campaign trail, directing his mating cries at the bedazzled Louisiana electorate, retains its hypnotic power more than a half-century later; he had the great seducer's capacity to enlist his victims' complicity in his lies. The testimony Burns has elicited from the plain people who elected Long Governor and Senator, and were preparing to back his presidential campaign when he was assassinated, makes it clear they have never known...
...does so uncomfortably. For the issue raised but not really addressed by both these films is altogether too complicated to be resolved by civics lessons. There are people like the historical Huey and the fictional Pete who wear their amorality glamorously, who have the ability to move the practice of politics out of smoke-filled rooms and into the chambers of the yearning human heart. Conventional political morality, to which both these films retreat in good-hearted confusion, is inadequate to deal with such creatures. Art conceivably is. But today, media far more devious than a radio mike await...