ustxtxb_obs_1967_10_13_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

seedy “Joke” shops. Again let me quote the book jacket: Others are sure to suggest it is the most foulmouthed book to come along since publishers were pups. We say: we can’t tellit’s too funny to measure. If you don’t believe us, crack this book open. Anywhere. FIFTY POSES! EVERY ONE A BEAT TY! ART MODELS! VIETNAM. TEXAS. Norman Mailer. The words simply don’t mean anything. They are syntactical anchors that are used to make dreaming look like journalism, and journalism look like dreaming. They burn holes in the page that stare back at you, hollowly, brownrimmed. The only one I know, have tried to know, is Texas. And of course it is unknowable. It is just a large area of real estate near Mexico. An economic colony of the Northeastern part of this nation. But all great empires must isolate their dream of guilt. And Texas, which unknowingly had supplied the dream of powerthe Western, movie, novel, dream now supplies the hell of the dream turned nightmare. It is nice to have a place like that. The British had the South Africans, those nasty, people, The Americans have Texans. They do all the dirty imperialistic things. All that comes to New Yorkand all that came to London is good clean money, starched and drycleaned. The sweat that made it carefully rendered odorless. This money is good for buying canapes if you want to have a party, invite your friends and deplore the empire. Whoopie. Let’s go up to Harlem. And I don’t mind it, really. It is pretty interesting to read Mailer and Manchester and discover that you are living in somebody else’s dream: That in their sweaty nightmares the dirt under your feet, the sky above your head takes on theological significance: That the people you had thought were fairly ordinary sons-ofbitches assume Dantesque proportions in their prose: That the trivial fortunes and banal pastimes you have observed are actually ciphers for some medieval allegory of guilt and despair. It is interesting, but it is not very important. What is important is my new novel, a fictionalized biography of Susan Sontag. It is called, Stokely Carmichael, You’re Breaking My Heart. It is going to be a Symbolic Commentary On Our Society. 0 Bare Breasts in Oak Cliff Dallas After a run of several months in north Dallas at $2.50 a ticket, the movie “Hawaii” was released to the neighborhood houses and I got to see it for $1.75 here in Oak Cliff. The crowd was more than double the usual Sunday matinee attendance at this theater, even at the jacked-up prices. Presumably, most Oak Cliff people didn’t care to drive across town and pay $2.50 to see “Hawaii.” But the word: was out that the native girls wore ,sarongs and grass skirts and were running around topless. Now this is something you -don’t often see in Oak Cliff. Oak Cliff is a vast bedroom area west of the Trinity River from Dallas proper ; Most visitors to Dallas don’t even ,know we are here. The world at large hears very little from us As we don’t often make the papers. However, both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had bedrooms, here. In case you haven’t seen it, “Hawaii” is a Mirisch Production about the first New England missionaries to settle in those islands and bring civilization and the fear of God to those poor. primitives. The young preacher in the film is a clumsy and self-righteous New England country bumpkin, a zealot with the hypnotic stare of Billy Graham. Really, he is a character out of Charles Dickens, tophat and all, a kind of young Scrooge fanatic in his devotion to his Protestant God. Now in Oak Cliff, this is blasphemy and heresy. In these parts the mere mention of the name Billy Graham evokes a special excitement. He is the latter-day emissary of the Lord God and Jesus Christ. And to mix up a heroic early New England fellow missionary, a Brother in the Faith to Graham, who bears a suspicious resemblance to Graham, with a bunch of bare-breasted girls in a motion picture, is a sneaky trick of the movie moguls. Mr. Jones is in manufacturing in Dallas and a longtime resident of Oak Cliff. Oak Cliff is some 300,000 people, almost entirely rural and small-town Southern white, moved to the city. We once made Robert Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” with Robert N. Jones the oddity of our having ten churches on Tenth Street. All Protestant. All white except one. This is the heart of the Bible Belt. Yankees moving to Dallas almost invariably settle in ,Dallas proper, the Park Cities and other northside suburbs. We coun l 5y people move` into east Dallas, Pleasant Prove ;. Oak Cliff. On our eastern fringe, which we strangely call South Oak . Cliff, ‘,there is a recent heavy encroachment of Negroes. North of us but b’el’ow the cliff and down in the river bottom is a slum area called West Dallas inhabited by Negroes mostly, a few thousand Mexican-Americans, and the most backward of the whites. So there are no synagogues in Oak Cliff and almost no Jews. By my count there are only five Catholic churches in Oak Cliff proper. Normally voting better than 60% Democratic, this area voted against the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960. largely because of the Catholic issue. We had a chance to elect rich, urbane Republican Jim Collins to Congress, but we stayed with good old Democrat Joe Pool. We turned out and voted for that East Texas Baptist, Ralph Yarborough, every time. And with lopsided support from West Dallas and South Oak Cliff, we sent liberal Oscar Mauzy to the State Senate. You tell me what all this means. I live here and I don’t know. HAWAII IN THE early nineteenth century was a trading post for American whaling vessels working the Pacific. The curious double standard of New England morality shows up at its vvorst in the picture, as lusty sailors, at sea for months, take pleasure in the island rum and the island girls. The film’s message seems to be that the missionary, in putting clothing on the natives and destroying their heathen idols and much of their folklore, has possibly desecrated a paradise on earth in his zeal to win converts for a heaven hereafter. What is more, he is a spoilsport who won’t let his housemaid get drunk with the sailors. It is the greatest blow to Oak Cliff sensibilities that the whaling captain, that handsome sinner, seems to steal the leading part from the staunch misisonary, as he three times almost steals Julie Andrews, the missionary’s wife. And having done the right thing, Julie becomes a martyred saint of the Protestant cause and working in Hawaii to the bitter end with her fanatic husband. All of which is insidious and snide propaganda against the missionary movement and against those sterling values and virtues of Protestant Oak Cliff. How can anyone believe that having a Billy Graham for a husband, and then being unfaithful and running away with a sailor would be anything but mortal sin and eternal hellfire? Oak Cliff is dry. There are ten churches on Tenth Street, all right, but there also are about fifteen liquor stores and a number of bars along Industrial Blvd., just across the river. The whole county used to be wet, some eleven years ago. There was a string of night spots and dance halls out Davis Avenue, the old highway to Fort Worth. The two principal streets here are Jefferson and Davis. Jefferson Davis, you will recall, was president of the Confederate States of America. Pappy’s Showland on West Commerce was, during and after World War II, a rowdy night club in a huge tent. Local option killed it. Today this is a clean, quiet place to live and raise kids. They roll up the streets about 11 p.m. Not long ago there was a October 13, 1967 7