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http://operationyellowelephant.blogspot.com/2005/07/operation-yellow-elephant-overview.html

Friday, July 08, 2005

OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT Overview

 

 

One of the General’s readers pointed out that there isn’t a good, one stop place to learn everything you need to know about OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT. Hopefully, this post will serve that purpose. Check back often for updates.

The objective of OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT is to recruit College Republicans and Young Republicans to serve as infantry. They demanded this war and now viciously support it. It’s only right that they also experience it.

The 56th College Republican National Convention (June 24-26) and the Young Republican National Convention (July 6-10; directions) are the settings for most of the ops.

The General encourages his readers to take the initiative to create materials and to plan and conduct special operations. Please let him know what you’ve done and he’ll try to post it.

Regular readers know that the General is a proud heterosexual, Christian conservative. He is not trying to embarrass the College Republicans. Rather, he believes that by encouraging them to enlist, he is pushing them to be more vocal about the good work their doing to make our homeland safe–things like holding affirmative action bakesales, holding immigrant hunts, almost single-handedly funding Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin, relieving the elderly of the burden of having money, and punching out Joan Jett.

2/08/06: Air America: Al Franken: John Dickerson, Plame, McClellan, Rove, Libby, Bush, protecting sources

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2/08/06: Air America:  Al Franken:  Franken interviews John Dickerson (excerpts)

Al Franken:  John Dickerson is the senior political correspondent for Slate magazine, former White House correspondent for Time magazine.  In the former role he’s gotten into a little controversy here and maybe trouble… He was the White House correspondent for Time magazine, very, very good White House correspondent, asked President Bush the embarrassing question:  What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made since 9/11?  It’s only really embarrassing in the sense that the President couldn’t answer it. Most people can pick a mistake that they’ve made and actually turn it into a positive…  And the President, as you remember, paused at times where you could drive a truck through it or an entire convoy of trucks…  So one of the most respected members of the White House press corps.  Now he’s moved on to Slate...

John,  we’ve been talking about the controversy you’ve been caught up this week — I don’t know how serious you consider it but some people do.  You were, as White House correspondent for Time magazine privy to the fact that Matt Cooper had talked to Karl Rove and that Karl Rove had outed Valerie Plame — not by name but by identity — to Matt Cooper.  Tell me if I got this wrong:  That there were subsequent articles you contributed to in one way or another in Time magazine about the controversy of Plame gate.  There were things like quoting Scott McClellan saying the White House had nothing to do with this… where you guys knew what he was saying wasn’t true.  And that you allowed it to stand without saying, We know this not to be true.  Which I understand why you would do that, but there are some people who are peeved about this.

John Dickerson:  Yes, there are some people…  I think that’s right.  I think if you look at the articles… when they were written it was all very carefully written.  And the reason you can’t just come out and say,  They’re big liars!, They’re big liars!, is because you end up giving up a source.  Now the people who hate Karl Rove and hate the President say, You’ve gotta give up your source. 

Franken:  Do you really give up the source, or do you just go, They’re big liars…., and not say who…

Dickerson:  Well, you can’t do that for two reasons.  One, you’ve got to show your proof.  You can’t just they’re big liars and we know something you don’t but we’re not going to say anymore.  And if you do say they’re liars, and you’re talking about whether you know Karl Rove was involved or not…

Franken:  Wait a minute!  Why can’t you say they’re big liars and not show the proof because you don’t show your proof all the time?

Dickerson:  Well, but you can’t say, in that instance if you say we’re certain we know when you’re talking about Karl Rove.. if you know, you know it’s Karl!… There’s not a huge universe of people…

Franken:  …There’s a huge universe of people in the White House!  Not a huge universe but a universe…

Dickerson:  When Scott McClellan was saying Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were not involved, you can’t say, We know they were but we’re not going to tell you how.”

Franken:  Wasn’t he saying, there was no one in the White House involved.  That’s what I thought was quoted.

Dickerson:  Well, I’ll have to go back and look at the articles.  In the clips of Time pieces various people have cited on the web, it’s been the Rove and Libby parts..

Franken:  Oh…

Dickerson:  I may be wrong, but…

Franken:  You’re in an odd position…

Dickerson:  But the point is this: you have a source and you make an agreement with that source not to blow their identity.  You have to keep that agreement.  And the reason you do that, even in a situation where all those people who hate Karl Rove and this White House and want them to be outed, you’ve got to remember that the same protections that protect the people who came forth about the NSA wiretaps — and people come forward about things all the time knowing their cover isn’t going to get blown.  Sometimes it’s in an instance people would like because it uncovers an NSA wiretapping scheme they don’t think is appropriate, and sometimes it protects people they hate and would like to see run out on a rail.  You can’t pick and choose.

Franken:  Is there any distinction, however, between a whistleblower who is outing something that the government is doing which is possibly unconstitutional, and a whistleblower who’s outing a whistleblower.

Dickerson:  Sure, there is.  But the point is that when you make a promise to somebody, you make the promise.  It stands.  You don’t say, Well, I’ll keep this promise until I decide not to! Or until I decide I’m going to out you!  It’s not the way you do it.

Franken:  And Matt Cooper had made that promise, that it was off the record or something.

Dickerson:  Yes.  In my instance, these were not conversations that I had.  So I’m certainly not going to play with the arrangement that other people make and sources they have…

[  ]

Franken:  The president?  Did he out Valerie Plame?

Dickerson:  No, not to me.

Franken:  Okay.  Did anyone else in the White House do it?

Dickerson:  Not to me.  I never talked about…

Franken:  ….Not to you!

Dickerson:  … Wilson’s wife or Valerie Plame. 

Franken:  Anybody else in the White House talking to anybody else in the Time magazine press organization?

Dickerson:  Well, as we know, they talked to… Libby and Rove talked to Matt Cooper.

Franken:  Libby did too.

Dickerson:  Right. This has all now been a part of the Grand Jury…

Franken:  Okay.  I thought Libby talked to other people as well.

Dickerson:  But you asked about the Time organization and…

Franken:  Okay, okay. All right, all right.  You have to live with this!

Dickerson:  [laughs]

Franken:  But you’re going to get some tough questions on this show.  You know that, don’t you.

Dickerson:  Sure. But you can see how you can make a promise and then you decide to just break the promise.  You can’t have a press that works, functions without an anonymous source.  I mean maybe in a perfect world we’d like no anonymous sources ever.  But if one person decides, well I’m going to break this because in this instance it’s compelled.  Of course, if it’s a murder or some other situation, perhaps you have a situation where you’re saving lives by breaking a confidence, that’s another matter.  But in order for the system to stay whole, you have to keep your promises.

Franken:  I’m with you.  But I am going to continue to ask you tough questions.  How’s the book going?

Dickerson:  [laughs]…It’s coming along.  We’re getting there.  If only news events wouldn’t keep interrupting so frequently. It’s coming along…

Franken:  So what news events have kept you away from doing the book you owe your publisher. 

Dickerson:  Well, we had this — and it’s all still on track!  don’t think it’s late or anything — we had this Plame business.  The whole reason I wrote about this is that there were some documents that came out in the course of an exchange of documents between Libby and the court and Fitzgerald in which the conversations I had when I was in Africa were talked about in the court documents.

Franken:  That was the Africa trip in which the secret document was floating around.

Dickerson:  Right. Although nobody knew that at the time.  But yes, that’s where Powell left with the document that had Plame’s identity in it. 

Franken:  And by the way, it’s been shown now that Plame was an undercover agent and all these rightwing people — you know, apologists for the White House — had been saying, Oh, she wasn’t under cover.  But Fitzgerald discovered that she was undercover.

Dickerson:  Right.  That’s right.  Although there’s still massive debate about it.  And one of the things that Libby’s trying to do to knock the case down is challenge that notion.

Franken: But I thought he discovered that within the last five years she had been doing undercover work overseas and the CIA had been trying to hide her identity.

Dickerson:  That’s right.  And they’d been actively trying to hide her identity.  Libby’s going to try and challenge that in court.

Franken:  But that’s it.  That’s the definition.

Dickerson:  I know it’s the definition, but definitions have definitions that sometimes get unwound in court.  In these most recent filings, January 31st, that looks like it’s one of the areas they’re pursuing.

Franken:  Is he going to be convicted before he’s pardoned?

Dickerson:  Well, let’s see.  The trial begins in ’07.  Oh, I’m sorry!  I was taking you seriously…

Franken:  No!  I’m actually serious!

Dickerson:  Well. the trial starts in January ’07, so I don’t know how long that trial takes but it’s going to take a while because…

Franken:  So conceivably he could do a few months in prison. 

Dickerson: I don’t know.

Franken:  He could appeal and stuff like that, I suppose.

Dickerson:  Right….

Joe Klein……..

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Web Exclusive | Joe Klein

Cheney’s Thousand-

Yard Stare

Did the Vice President’s behavior exhibit a disdain for accountability or a reaction to emotional trauma?

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Posted Saturday, Feb. 18, 2006
“In less than a second, less time than it takes to tell,” Dick Cheney mused last week, his quail-hunting expedition had gone “from what is a very happy, pleasant day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing something I love—to, my gosh, I’ve shot my friend. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before.” It was perhaps the most eloquent, emotionally unguarded moment from the notoriously buttoned-up Vice President. He seemed stunned, uncertain for once. And the haunted look in his eyes reminded me of what soldiers in Vietnam used to call the Thousand-Yard Stare—the paralytic shock that comes from seeing the impact that even low-caliber weaponry can have on human flesh.

The Vice President’s hunting accident occasioned a familiar explosion of public inanity. We seem to have a primal need for these circuses; they are the postmodern equivalent of scapegoat sacrifice. There was the embarrassing, self-righteous reportorial melee in the White House pressroom. There was the predictable patter of late-night comedians, although the jokes didn’t seem quite so funny this time; a man had been shot. There were the cable-news shouting sprees, most of which had to do with the public relations process—Had Cheney erred in not informing the press immediately?—rather than the substance of the case. There were the attempts to inflate the belated revelation of the accident into a metaphor for the arrogance and secrecy that have defined the Bush Administration. And yes, the Vice President’s behavior did seem to be another manifestation of his well-known disdain for accountability.

But Cheney’s stubborn diffidence may have been something else entirely: a consequence of the incoherence and confusion that come with emotional trauma, as well as an understandable desire to protect oneself and one’s friends from the ravening horde at a moment of personal anguish.

The possibility of vice-presidential anguish was barely mentioned by most commentators at first. Cheney is a tough customer; Oprahfied “sharing” isn’t his way. But then, there he was, with that haunted look in his Fox News interview, saying, “[T]he image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling …” Hunting had given him “great pleasure” in the past, but he wasn’t so sure now. In fact, he sounded a lot like the combat veterans I’ve spoken with over the years, for whom the living nightmare of firing a weapon under questionable circumstances is a constant theme.

“Cheney’s the sort of guy who thinks in terms of black and white,” former Senator Bob Kerrey, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said. “But now he’s used a weapon the way a soldier often does, with unexpected results that come in shades of gray. Maybe now he’ll have a better sense of what he has sent our troops out to do.”

At 65, Cheney is too old to be a baby boomer, but his five draft deferments during the Vietnam War make him an honorary member of the tribe, as does his infamous explanation of why he didn’t fight: “I had other priorities.” The failure to serve—and the relative safety and affluence of our upbringing—has been a defining quality of so many baby boomers who have come to political power, and there have been consequences. Bill Clinton often seemed daunted and uncertain in his dealings with the military. Bush and Cheney have been the opposite. They rushed to war in Iraq without adequate cause or preparation. This is not to say that military service is a requirement for leadership in time of war; neither Abraham Lincoln nor Franklin Roosevelt was a combat veteran. But for 50 years there has been a growing cultural chasm between the military and the rest of society. Those of us who haven’t served have a special responsibility to listen to and try to understand those who have. The most common complaint I’ve heard from troops recently returned from Iraq is that Americans are oblivious to what soldiers have to do every day over there. At the heart of that lament, inevitably, is the debilitating emotional cost of combat. 

One valuable metaphor emerged last week. The New York Times described the possible legal charges that could be brought in a hunting accident. “Mr. Cheney could be charged with negligence, defined as failing to understand the dangers involved and disregarding them, or recklessness, defined as understanding the dangers and disregarding them.” Which is perhaps the neatest summary I’ve seen of the public debate surrounding the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq. Absent further evidence, the Administration seems guilty of negligence—a cavalier insensitivity to the unimaginable calamities that attend the use of lethal force. And while I have little faith that Cheney’s awful experience at the Armstrong Ranch will change his views of war and peace, I do hope that it gives him pause and that he gains wisdom from the intimate knowledge that there are experiences other than “pleasure” that can attend the firing of a weapon.

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Group Think at S.N.L.

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What does ‘Saturday Night Live’
have in common with German philosophy?

 

Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” was married to one of the show’s writers, Rosie Shuster. One day when the show was still young, an assistant named Paula Davis went to Shuster’s apartment in New York and found Dan Aykroyd getting out of her bed–which was puzzling, not just because Shuster was married to Michaels but because Aykroyd was supposedly seeing another member of the original “S.N.L.” cast, Laraine Newman. Aykroyd and Gilda Radner had also been an item, back when the two of them worked for the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, although by the time they got to New York they were just friends, in the way that everyone was friends with Radner. Second City was also where Aykroyd met John Belushi, because Belushi, who was a product of the Second City troupe in Chicago, came to Toronto to recruit for the “National Lampoon Radio Hour,” which he starred in along with Radner and Bill Murray (who were also an item for a while). The writer Michael O’Donoghue (who famously voiced his aversion to the appearance of the Muppets on “S.N.L.” by saying, “I don’t write for felt”) also came from The National Lampoon, as did another of the original writers, Anne Beatts (who was, in the impeccably ingrown logic of “S.N.L.,” living with O’Donoghue). Chevy Chase came from a National Lampoon spinoff called “Lemmings,” which also starred Belushi, doing his legendary Joe Cocker impersonation. Lorne Michaels hired Belushi after Radner, among others, insisted on it, and he hired Newman because he had worked with her on a Lily Tomlin special, and he hired Aykroyd because Michaels was also from Canada and knew him from the comedy scene there. When Aykroyd got the word, he came down from Toronto on his Harley.

In the early days of “S.N.L.,” as Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller tell us in “Live from New York” (Little, Brown; $25.95), everyone knew everyone and everyone was always in everyone else’s business, and that fact goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the show’s cast. Belushi would stay overnight at people’s apartments, and he was notorious for getting hungry in the middle of the night and leaving spaghetti-sauce imprints all over the kitchen, or setting fires by falling asleep with a lit joint. Radner would go to Jane Curtin’s house and sit and watch Curtin and her husband, as if they were some strange species of mammal, and say things like “Oh, now you are going to turn the TV on together. How will you decide what to watch?” Newman would hang out at Radner’s house, and Radner would be eating a gallon of ice cream and Newman would be snorting heroin. Then Radner would go to the bathroom to make herself vomit, and say, “I’m so full, I can’t hear.” And they would laugh. “There we were,” Newman recalls, “practicing our illnesses together.”

The place where they all really lived, though, was the “S.N.L.” office, on the seventeenth floor of NBC headquarters, at Rockefeller Center. The staff turned it into a giant dormitory, installing bunk beds and fooling around in the dressing rooms and staying up all night. Monday night was the first meeting, where ideas were pitched. On Tuesday, the writing started after dinner and continued straight through the night. The first read-through took place on Wednesday at three in the afternoon. And then came blocking and rehearsals and revisions. “It was emotional,” the writer Alan Zweibel tells Shales and Miller. “We were a colony. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but we were Guyana on the seventeenth floor. We didn’t go out. We stayed there. It was a stalag of some sort.” Rosie Shuster remembers waking up at the office and then going outside with Aykroyd, to “walk each other like dogs around 30 Rock just to get a little fresh air.” On Saturdays, after the taping was finished, the cast would head downtown to a storefront that Belushi and Aykroyd had rented and dubbed the Blues Bar. It was a cheerless dive, with rats and crumbling walls and peeling paint and the filthiest toilets in all of New York. But did anyone care? “It was the end of the week and, well, you were psyched,” Shuster recalls. “It was like you were buzzing, you’d get turbocharged from the intense effort of it, and then there’s like adrenal burnout later. I remember sleeping at the Blues Bar, you know, as the light broke.” Sometimes it went even later. “I remember rolling down the armor at the Blues Bar and closing the building at eleven o’clock Sunday morning–you know, when it was at its height–and saying good morning to the cops and firemen,”Aykroyd said. “S.N.L.” was a television show, but it was also an adult fraternity house, united by bonds of drugs and sex and long hours and emotion and affection that went back years. “The only entrée to that boys club was basically by fucking somebody in the club,” Anne Beatts tells Shales and Miller. “Which wasn’t the reason you were fucking them necessarily. I mean, you didn’t go “Oh, I want to get into this, I think I’ll have to have sex with this person.’ It was just that if you were drawn to funny people who were doing interesting things, then the only real way to get to do those things yourself was to make that connection.”

2.

We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works, whether it’s television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book “The Sociology of Philosophies,” Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves:the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch’ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another’s spouses. Freud may have been the founder of psychoanalysis, but it really began to take shape in 1902, when Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler would gather in Freud’s waiting room on Wednesdays, to eat strudel and talk about the unconscious. The neo-Confucian movement of the Sung dynasty in China revolved around the brothers Ch’eng Hao and Ch’eng I, their teacher Chou Tun-i, their father’s cousin Chang Tsai, and, of course, their neighbor Shao Yung. Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts at the same time, then Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Académie Suisse, Manet met Degas at the Louvre, Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre’s studio, and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois on the Rue des Batignolles. Collins’s point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction–conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re onto something. German Idealism, he notes, centered on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Why? Because they all lived together in the same house. “Fichte takes the early lead,” Collins writes,

inspiring the others on a visit while they are young students at Tübingen in the 1790s, then turning Jena into a center for the philosophical movement to which a stream of the soon-to-be-eminent congregate; then on to Dresden in the heady years 1799-1800 to live with the Romantic circle of the Schlegel brothers (where August Schlegel’s wife, Caroline, has an affair with Schelling, followed later by a scandalous divorce and remarriage). Fichte moves on to Berlin, allying with Schleiermacher (also of the Romantic circle) and with Humboldt to establish the new-style university; here Hegel eventually comes and founds his school, and Schopenhauer lectures fruitlessly in competition.

There is a wonderful illustration of this social dimension of innovation in Jenny Uglow’s new book, “The Lunar Men” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), which is the story of a remarkable group of friends in Birmingham in the mid-eighteenth century. Their leader was Erasmus Darwin, a physician, inventor, and scientist, who began thinking about evolution a full fifty years before his grandson Charles. Darwin met, through his medical practice, an industrialist named Mathew Boulton and, later, his partner James Watt, the steam-engine pioneer. They, in turn, got to know Josiah Wedgwood, he of the famous pottery, and Joseph Priestley, the preacher who isolated oxygen and became known as one of history’s great chemists, and the industrialist Samuel Galton (whose son married Darwin’s daughter and produced the legendary nineteenth-century polymath Francis Galton), and the innovative glass-and-chemicals entrepreneur James Keir, and on and on. They called themselves the Lunar Society because they arranged to meet at each full moon, when they would get together in the early afternoon to eat, piling the table high, Uglow tells us, with wine and “fish and capons, Cheddar and Stilton, pies and syllabubs.” Their children played underfoot. Their wives chatted in the other room, and the Lunar men talked well into the night, clearing the table to make room for their models and plans and instruments. “They developed their own cryptic, playful language and Darwin, in particular, liked to phrase things as puzzles–like the charades and poetic word games people used to play,” Uglow writes. “Even though they were down-to-earth champions of reason, a part of the delight was to feel they were unlocking esoteric secrets, exploring transmutations like alchemists of old.”

When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly–in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative–a mutual-admiration society. “Their inquiries ranged over the whole spectrum, from astronomy and optics to fossils and ferns,” Uglow tells us, and she goes on:

One person’s passion–be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks–fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects. Letters between [William] Small and Watt were a kaleidoscope of invention and ideas, touching on steam-engines and cylinders; cobalt as a semi-metal; how to boil down copal, the resin of tropical trees, for varnish; lenses and clocks and colours for enamels; alkali and canals; acids and vapours–as well as the boil on Watt’s nose.

What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it “philosophical laughing,” which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.

Uglow tells us, for instance, that the Lunar men were active in the campaign against slavery. Wedgwood, Watt, and Darwin pushed for the building of canals, to improve transportation. Priestley came up with soda water and the rubber eraser, and James Keir was the man who figured out how to mass-produce soap, eventually building a twenty-acre soapworks in Tipton that produced a million pounds of soap a year. Here, surely, are all the hallmarks of group distortion. Somebody comes up with an ambitious plan for canals, and someone else tries to top that by building a really big soap factory, and in that feverish atmosphere someone else decides to top them all with the idea that what they should really be doing is fighting slavery.

Uglow’s book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two –the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity–you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. You get Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and a revolution in Western philosophy. You get Darwin, Watt, Wedgwood, and Priestley, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And sometimes, on a more modest level, you get a bunch of people goofing around and bringing a new kind of comedy to network television.

3.

One of “S.N.L.”‘s forerunners was a comedy troupe based in San Francisco called the Committee. The Committee’s heyday was in the nineteen-sixties, and its humor had the distinctive political bite of that period. In one of the group’s memorable sketches, the actor Larry Hankin played a condemned prisoner being led to the electric chair by a warden, a priest, and a prison guard. Hankin was strapped in and the switch was thrown–and nothing happened. Hankin started to become abusive, and the three men huddled briefly together. Then, as Tony Hendra recounts, in “Going Too Far,” his history of “boomer humor”:

They confer and throw the switch again. Still nothing. Hankin starts cackling with glee, doubly abusive. They throw it yet again. Nothing yet again. Hankin then demands to be set free–he can’t be executed more than once, they’re a bunch of assholes, double jeopardy, nyah-nyah, etc., etc. Totally desperate, the three confer once more, check that they’re alone in the cell, and kick Hankin to death.

Is that sketch funny? Some people thought so. When the Committee performed it at a benefit at the Vacaville prison, in California, the inmates laughed so hard they rioted. But others didn’t, and even today it’s clear that this humor is funny only to those who can appreciate the particular social and political sensibility of the Committee. We call new cultural or intellectual movements “circles” for a reason: the circle is a closed loop. You are either inside or outside. In “Live from New York,” Lorne Michaels describes going to the White House to tape President Ford saying, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night,” the “S.N.L.” intro: “We’d done two or three takes, and to relax him, I said to him–my sense of humor at the time–“Mr. President, if this works out, who knows where it will lead?’ Which was completely lost on him.” In another comic era, the fact that Ford did not laugh would be evidence of the joke’s failure. But when Michaels says the joke “was completely lost on him” it isn’t a disclaimer–it’s the punch line. He said what he said because he knew Ford would not get it. As the writers of “Saturday Night Live” worked on sketches deep into the night, they were sustained by something like what sustained the Lunar men and the idealists in Tübingen–the feeling that they all spoke a private language.

To those on the inside, of course, nothing is funnier than an inside joke. But the real significance of inside jokes is what they mean for those who aren’t on the inside. Laughing at a joke creates an incentive to join the joke-teller. But not laughing–not getting the joke–creates an even greater incentive. We all want to know what we’re missing, and this is one of the ways that revolutions spread from the small groups that spawn them.

“One of Michaels’s rules was, no groveling to the audience either in the studio or at home,” Shales and Miller write. “The collective approach of the show’s creators could be seen as a kind of arrogance, a stance of defiance that said in effect, “We think this is funny, and if you don’t, you’re wrong.’ . . . To viewers raised on TV that was forever cajoling, importuning, and talking down to them, the blunt and gutsy approach was refreshing, a virtual reinvention of the medium.”

The successful inside joke, however, can never last. In “A Great Silly Grin” (Public Affairs; $27.50), a history of nineteen-sixties British satire, Humphrey Carpenter relates a routine done at the comedy club the Establishment early in the decade. The sketch was about the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed in the war, and the speaker was supposed to be the Cathedral’s architect, Sir Basil Spence:

First of all, of course, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the German people for making this whole project possible in the first place. Second, we owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Coventry itself, who when asked to choose between having a cathedral and having hospitals, schools and houses, plumped immediately (I’m glad to say) for the cathedral, recognizing, I think, the need of any community to have a place where the whole community can gather together and pray for such things as hospitals, schools and houses.

When that bit was first performed, many Englishmen would have found it offensive. Now, of course, hardly anyone would. Mocking British establishment pieties is no longer an act of rebellion. It is the norm. Successful revolutions contain the seeds of their demise: they attract so many followers, eager to be in on the joke as well, that the circle breaks down. The inside becomes indistinguishable from the outside. The allure of exclusivity is gone.

At the same time, the special bonds that created the circle cannot last forever. Sooner or later, the people who slept together in every combination start to pair off. Those doing drugs together sober up (or die). Everyone starts going to bed at eleven o’clock, and bit by bit the intimacy that fuels innovation slips away. “I was involved with Gilda, yeah. I was in love with her,” Aykroyd tells Shales and Miller.”We were friends, lovers, then friends again,” and in a way that’s the simplest and best explanation for the genius of the original “S.N.L.” Today’s cast is not less talented. It is simply more professional. “I think some people in the cast have fun crushes on other people, but nothing serious,” Cheri Oteri, a cast member from the late nineteen-nineties, tells Shales and Miller, in what might well serve as the show’s creative epitaph. “I guess we’re kind of boring–no romances, no drugs. I had an audition once with somebody who used to work here. He’s very, very big in the business now. And as soon as I went in for the audition, he went, “Hey, you guys still doing coke over at SNL?’ Because back when he was here, they were doing it. What are we doing, for crying out loud? Oh yeah. Thinking up characters.”

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