We live in a time when our minds, our imaginations, are colonized by any number of little bits of business from movies and television.
Some of what we have we share with many. Many of us have “I always have been, and always shall be, your friend.” Many of us have “You can’t handle the truth.” Many of us have, “I’m Batman,” or “Louie, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
We also have a number of bits of business that we retain whereas many others did not, simply because they happen to speak to us in particular.
I remember bits of business from movies and TV shows that nobody remembers, or might be expected to remember.
One I have retained for forty years is a moment from a sitcom not often cited today, that was hot as a sizzling grill back then. It was called Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and doesn’t really matter for my purposes if you remember it, or even that it was a big deal for a cultural eyeblink. All you have to know is that it took place in heartland America and that its protagonist, the put-upon pigtailed housewife of the title, was not exceedingly bright. She had good qualities that I could list if I had to, but right now all you need to apprehend to move on to the next paragraph is that she wasn’t very bright. Okay?
The show had a serial format and for a while there, author Gore Vidal appeared as himself, visiting Mary’s small town in search of material. I forget almost all of what he did except for befriending Mary, an odd relationship between a famous world-traveled intellectual and an obscure stay-at-home person with no real horizons and an unexamined life. And the scene I remember takes place after he leaves town, when a lonely Mary gets him on the phone to chat.
Mary tells the now-unseen Gore that she has an absolutely great idea for a book, that she wants to give him. Really, she says, this is a sure-fire idea. It will no doubt be a great success for him. Are you ready, Gore?
She proudly unveils her big idea: “THE CIVIL WAR.”
From the subsequent conversation, it is clear that this pronouncement doesn’t exactly blow away the author of multiple historical novels.
Why did this moment stick in my head? The takeaway, to me, is Mary’s doomed helpfulness. She’s not a person whose life has much traffic with the strange, alien objects known as books. She is so cut off from the world of a Gore Vidal that she thinks the Civil War is a wholly unexplored idea. She’s not plugged into the culture they represent and has absolutely no idea that the Civil War is one of the most discussed historical subjects on the planet, and that Gore Vidal – a man she knows only for some vague value of “celebrity” – surely knows this.
Mary Hartman has good qualities, but for all her good qualities, is so ignorant, in the literal sense of the term, that she doesn’t know how many millions of words have been penned on the subject of the American Civil War. Has no idea.
I had at that point already encountered some manifestations of the phenomenon that some people find the actual function of books a mysterious and unexamined idea, well beyond their ken.
But it seemed astonishing to me, back then, that anybody could be so ignorant that they thought the Civil War, in particular, had never been discussed.
Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump and Mary Hartman have more in common than just stupid hair.