Word: mees
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mee's actual meeting with "the old malefactor" doesn't come until the end of A Visit To Haldeman and Other States of Mind. But the anticipation of the meeting carries the reader through an otherwise rambling book that includes tales from Mee's boyhood, the story of his fight with polio, his theories on the recent death and inevitable rebirth of the republic, and imagined conversations with Nixon and "Exxon"--an archetypal business executive who informs Mee that present governments are outmoded and that multinational corporations will inevitably rule the world. They will, Exxon says, be responsive only...
...Mee's narrative is a wild journey, frequently crossing from his personal consciousness into the national political consciousness and back again without warning. But then, that is perhaps the best way of dealing with a political phenomenon like Watergate that turned people inward, and turned many off to further political events...
...times, Mee seems self-indulgent, as when he describes at great length his battle with polio at age 14. But he inevitably goes on to link the personal with the political: his bout with polio serves both as an explanation of why he turned to writing--to apply his mind since his body wasn't working too well--and as an allegory for the condition of the country. Just as people recover from illness, Mee writes, so democratic republics will revive even if they lapse into oligarchy, as America has. The logical connection between one person's physical health...
...Mee reads political events in the lives of individuals, casting his book into a nebulous category somewhere between literature, biography and history. Mee opens the book squarely in the middle of the "post-Watergate era" in the spring of 1975, by describing an encounter with a character clearly fitted to what doomsayers are fond of calling "post-Watergate morality." Mee's acquaintance Richard, who "looks like a million dollars before taxes," is a successful and influential man--a status the reader inevitably must link to the fact that he "moves in the worlds of politics and finance, of embezzlement, larceny...
...Mee's acquaintance Richard provides the cynic's stereotype of an inevitably cold and ambitious road to success, it is Nixon himself who becomes a target for the blame. Mee doesn't claim that Nixon personally brought down the republic, of course, noting that it had fallen long before, but Nixon becomes a focus of his disappointment in a string of broken presidential promises that stretch back at least through Johnson's administration...