Redemption
is a funny thing. Drink a few cocktails, smoke a few doobies, snort
a few lines of coke, make a few rotten business deals, and then embrace
Christ as your savior, then Middle America will forgive you enough
to elect you President. Do five years in prison for conspiracy to
commit murder and, Eldridge
Cleaver aside, your credibility is finished.
That
was conundrum that faced J.H. Hatfield in 1999, when St. Martin's
Press pulled Fortunate
Son, the biography of then-Texas governor George
W. Bush in which Hatfield alleged Bush had been arrested in 1972
for cocaine possession, but had had his record expunged due to his
family's political connections. Not only did Hatfield refuse to
name his sources for the accusation, opening St. Martin's up to
a possible libel suit and a backlash from a Bush White House, but,
as it turned out, the author himself was a convicted felon. Whereas
Hatfield may not have been The
Smoking Gun, for conspiracy theorists, the obvious suggests
itself: Could the Bush family, knowing that the story about the
cocaine arrest would eventually come out, have leaked it to a hack
writer with zero credibility in order to diffuse the situation before
it broke in, say, the New York Times?
Enter
Sander
Hicks, the founder of New York City independent press
Soft Skull.
With the righteous fury of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, he bought
the rights to Fortunate Son and set about trying to make
this bit of oddball journalism once again available to the American
public. The
documentary Horns and Halos is the story of the
real-life relationship of Hatfield and Hicks, as it was captured
by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky's video cameras, as they worked
bring out the Soft Skull edition of Fortunate Son by the
2000 election, discredit George W. Bush, and, in so doing, perhaps
begin to put back together the pieces of Hatfield's shattered life.
That's
only half the movie, though. The other half is watching Sander Hicks
move across the screen like a tiger through the Indian jungle, or
maybe like Daniel Striped Tiger through Mr. Rogers' back set. Horns
and Halos was filmed when Soft Skull was based out of the Lower
East Side and Sander still headed the company himself, so we have
the pleasure of seeing the man in his natural environment. (Hicks
is now working on a biography of Karl
Rove, the Bush confidant who Hatfield finally revealed
was his primary source on the cocaine allegations, and Soft Skull
has moved to Brooklyn.) His angular, Calvin Klein model ectomorphic
build, his punk rawk fashion sense, the working-class street cred
his job as a building superintendent gives him combined with his
intellectual prowess all come together like Voltron to make him
the very first sex symbol of the twenty-first century radical Left.
Girls, come to SEE Sander talk on the phone! THRILL as Sander angrily
sweeps the stairs! SWOON as he performs with his punk band, White
Collar Crime!
J.H.
Hatfield may have been a dupe, or he might have been delusional,
or he might have been on to something. His credibility, to be sure,
was never great. But that's not the lesson you take away from the
movie. The lesson is that America needs would-be Jack the Giant
Killers like Sander Hicks. In a world where news comes from media
organizations that are owned by corporations that care only about
the bottom line, where a story's entertainment value is valued more
than what it says about our world, and where those with enough power
and connections can suppress the truth about themselves, we need
writers like Hatfield and publishing houses like Soft Skull. No
matter how tragic the ending of Horns and Halos, and no matter how
pessimistic its true-life drama may be about the possibility of
redemption, we have to keep on rooting for the little guys.
Click
here to order Fortunate
Son from Soft Skull Press.