Books, Arts & Manners: Worst Guys Finish First

ALL extremism—Left or Right, black or white—is heinous. Conservatism can be perverted into sclerosis; radicalism easily turns into despotism. The satraps of the Right are as atavistic as the firebrands of the Left, and the permissiveness of the knee-jerk liberals does at least as much damage as the stodginess of the reactionaries. A movie such as Bob Roberts, pretending to be a courageous political fable, is only an elaboration of radical-populist skits and songs from the old Greenwich Village cabarets and jazz joints—as brave as, say, a satire on some snake-handling cult pretending to be an attack on Christianity.

Tim Robbins, the writer, director, co-songwriter, and star of the film, who grew up as the son of a Greenwich Village folk-club manager, says his parents weren’t radicals or hippies, though his mother aroused him one night when he was 11 with the news that he should be very proud of his sister: “She was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War.” The mentality that informs Bob Roberts is the spirit of 1968, which, for all its gallant attitudinizing, was not quite the equal of that of 1776. Bob Roberts is a young right-wing demagogue from Pennsylvania, a candidate for the Senate on a platform that ostensibly stands for solid yuppie values such as fighting drugs, and thereby deflects attention from graver issues. For behind genial, clean-cut Bob, campaigning by means of folk-like songs he writes and performs accompanying himself on the guitar, lurks the threat of right-wing totalitarianism.

JS

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John Simon

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ALL extremism—Left or Right, black or white—is heinous. Conservatism can be perverted into sclerosis; radicalism easily turns into despotism. The satraps of the Right are as atavistic as the firebrands of the Left, and the permissiveness of the knee-jerk liberals does at least as much damage as the stodginess of the reactionaries. A movie such as Bob Roberts, pretending to be a courageous political fable, is only an elaboration of radical-populist skits and songs from the old Greenwich Village cabarets and jazz joints—as brave as, say, a satire on some snake-handling cult pretending to be an attack on Christianity.

Tim Robbins, the writer, director, co-songwriter, and star of the film, who grew up as the son of a Greenwich Village folk-club manager, says his parents weren’t radicals or hippies, though his mother aroused him one night when he was 11 with the news that he should be very proud of his sister: “She was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War.” The mentality that informs Bob Roberts is the spirit of 1968, which, for all its gallant attitudinizing, was not quite the equal of that of 1776. Bob Roberts is a young right-wing demagogue from Pennsylvania, a candidate for the Senate on a platform that ostensibly stands for solid yuppie values such as fighting drugs, and thereby deflects attention from graver issues. For behind genial, clean-cut Bob, campaigning by means of folk-like songs he writes and performs accompanying himself on the guitar, lurks the threat of right-wing totalitarianism.