The political reporting of William Monahan

Of writer-director William Monahan's past political reporting, there isn't much, and of what there is, it's all published in New York Press. He's covered politicians ranging from Hillary Clinton, to Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Bob Dole, and George W. Bush. He sort of specialized in the New Hampshire primary, covering the stump speeches in 1996, and then in 1998 he covered the history and culture of the event before the primary date had even been set. In 2000, he covered George W. Bush on the NY campaign trail, in so much as he had an encounter with him, of which you can read about below, in Mr. Monahan's own words from his essay "A Glimpse of Bush" (illustration to the right republished with permission from Tony Millionaire), and Holy God.¹

With nothing else to do I took out my notebook and started organizing some notes. It was while I was doing this that George W. came down the aisle, greeting each member of the press, and he finally came down toward me. I thought of pretending to be asleep, but the tour was far too papal. I grasped his hand. This was not much of a man in front of me: a person who took every advantage and just became a cowboy apostle. Yet I was looking at probably the next president of the United States:

"William Monahan. New York Press"

"Am I supposed to know what that is?"

I gave him that one; after all, it was his plane. Universe, too, maybe.

"It's a weekly in Manhattan."

"A weekly," he said. (Later I wondered if he was thinking, Is it Catholic? In appearance I could have been a deranged Maynooth father in mufti come to bitch him out for breaking bread with a bigot, or being one.) "Well, I better be particularly nice to you. What day's it come out?" Meaning, this paper, in relation to the election.

"Day of," I said, meaning, this paper, in relation to the election.

"Well I better be real nice to you. Can I get you anything? A coffee? Something to eat?"

The candidate was antic; the mediums sycophantic. It seemed a developed and harmonious relationship. I said, "Already very generous, thank you." I think what happened then, I'm afraid, is that I had the arrant balls to ignore him. He passed on. I started transcribing mental notes from Long Island. The candidate came back and looked at me.

"You do know the rules," he said.

"Sure," I said, grandly and at hazard.

"What are they?" asked the candidate.

I had no idea, and had to inarticulately concede it.

"That everything here—" he indicated the plane—"is off the record."

I hadn't written anything down except the names of cookies and the way Long Island looked from the air, but I figured that he was still having fun.

"Oh, yeah, obviously."

"Then what," asked the Governor of Texas, suddenly about as fun as Caligula, "are you writing?"

I sat there, looking the candidate in the eye, glazed with fever, realizing that here was a seminal and useful encounter: the first guy in my life I cannot tell to fuck off. What could I say? Shut your ass before I kick it off you, your dad was worth 50 of you, you fucking prick, and that's your problem anyway, isn't it, you fucking meatball? Why don't you go back up to the front of the plane and brand a couple lobsters for me? Who the fuck are you, you fucking prick, telling me anything at all? Much less what the "rules" are, Your Excellency, you evil fucking pinhead? I'm a novelist. You're just the president—and only maybe. Shut up. Christ and Holy Mary will spare me from further intercourse with pricks with wired courtiers and security details.

If I had not been running a fever of 103 I probably would have gotten Tasered for a misinterpreted bon mot, or ended up on the national news as a crazed loner who sawed the head off the Republican nominee with a complimentary yogurt knife. Motherfucker telling me not to write. Worse, assuming I was one of these five-dollar wire service mediums.

I went to sleep. I must have snored, because I jolted awake again. I wanted off the plane more than I have wanted anything in my life. I am far from perfect, but I'm a lot more perfect than anyone who will put up with that sort of thing—from a president, or God for that matter.

There was a media event in Buffalo (a rigged GOP circle jerk designed as the theatrical backdrop for the release of "news"), but I'd already figured that one out, and I got on the bus and went to the hotel. I had a few drinks (not with the Bush cavalcade, of which I had ceased to be a part, but some people from a Sesame Street roadshow, which seemed cleaner), made a few calls and went to bed. Buffalo is a nice place for a dismal experience. I ran out of Kleenex and toilet paper, blowing my nose.

And that was the last of Mr. Monahan's political reporting, though the first instance of his political reporting seems to have been his column "Straw Dogs," covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary for six weeks.^2—7 Years later, when he returned to New Hampshire at the end of 1998, he mulled upon how the primary defines New Hampshire, in his essay "Up New Hampshire: Dark Thoughts in Dixville Notch," seemingly indicating at one point that he was a registered Democrat at the time: "the only thing good in this country at the moment is that Republicans are accidentally minting registered Democrats like pennies, one of them being me."⁸

Then in 1999, Mr. Monahan was interested in covering the 2000 NY Senate race but eventually begged off. Here is his explanation, as reported by New York Press publisher Russ Smith in his Mugger column:

"Belay the Hillary offer. Just say she's bogus and leave it at that. I have a theory that she's actively attempting to exhaust disgust. When critics are speechless and everything's been said she'll just waddle on to victory. She loses in New York, she notches up a defeat for women everywhere, thereby winning. She has no brains whatsoever. It's fucking unwatchable."

The following week, Russ Smith published another quote from Mr. Monahan, in which he rants further about his reasons for passing on the assignment to cover the Rudy-Hillary race, re-iterating that Hillary Clinton holds an extremely low brain cell count:

"What's frightening about Hillary is what's frightening about Bill Gates. They know they have a crap product; they don't care. That may be an angle. Hillary has no talent, no brains, she's sort of this virus-like thing, that should, maximum, have been a low-rent personnel officer, but escaped from the petri dish and hit the road, wearing that sick smile, altitude-sick, totally out of her depth, but on the march.

She's gotta know she's gravely unsuitable and actively bad for people, who deserve better. She doesn't care. She wants what she wants. That's what creates the late-century nausea.

There's also a tragic component in a literary sense: She's making a huge, overreaching mistake, and the only thing she's gonna accomplish is making Giuliani look like a combination of Thomas Jefferson and the Christian savior. I saw her on tv talking to the U.S. citizens as if they were illiterates to whom she had brought religious tracts and wagons of food paid for out of her own personal First Lady Treasury and almost lost my lunch.

So it's insane. I could do it. I wouldn't like it. But I could get something out of it if the nausea is just gotten over with, which is the thing I was missing."

While Mr. Monahan has hardly ever been kind to the politicians he's covered, he is particularly menacing toward Democrats. An anonymous comment on the Sadly, No! blog from someone called "forked tongue" alleges that Mr. Monahan despised liberals in general, not just Hillary Clinton as demonstrated above:

Since nobody asked, I had a few run-ins with Bill Monahan, screenplay winner for The Departed, and at the time at least (mid-late 90s) he was a drunken reactionary fucktard. Not exactly a wingnut, kinda more a South Park contrarian–claimed to hate conservatives, but REALLY FUCKIN HATED liberals. Wrote several pieces of ain’t-I-cute race-baiting and a stirring paean to Steve Forbes on libertarian grounds in a local pennysaver called New York Press

There is a grain of truth in the comment made by the anonymite named "forked tongue". Steve Forbes was definitely Mr. Monahan's favorite candidate in the 1996 New Hampshire primary. In "It Doles for Thee," he writes: "In the Forbes ascendancy there is a promise of the end of interest politics, of an impending altruistic and sensible vote, and a very worldly one, too. ... [The people of New Hampshire are] liking Forbes because they do not like the government, and because Forbes is a sensible revolutionary choice."³ As for the "ain't-I-cute race-baiting" pieces that the anonymite refers to, there are certainly essays by Mr. Monahan that could be interpreted as such. I'll leave a treatment of that for a future blog entry, but off the top of my head the essays "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume: Don't Burden Yourself"⁸ and "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist"⁹ could be considered race-baiting depending on your definition of the term. So there may indeed be something to "forked tongue"'s comment about Mr. Monahan's apparently confessed hatred for conservatives, yet apparently greater and more evident hatred for liberals. Applied to most writers, the previous sentence would probably be ridiculous, but Mr. Monahan's hatred of most politicians is so conspicuous in his political reporting that it merits serious attention. His misanthropy is really one of the defining characteristics of his journalism.

Back to then-Presidential hopeful George W. Bush: after only a day with the Bush campaign on the NY campaign trail in 2000, Mr. Monahan had had enough. In his hilarious essay "A Glimpse of Bush," he reports that he shortly "stopped traveling" with them for "moral and practical reasons." He found the entire experience to be pretty dismal, which is what he seems to have figured covering Hillary Clinton would have been like.¹

Mr. Monahan has been described by his colleague Dawn Eden as "libertarian-leaning," and he indicates in his essay "The Angel Factory" that he's a constitutionalist. He writes, "If I were the pope instead of a constitutionalist, and you didn't like this essay and got hit by a bus before you repented, you'd barbecue everlastingly in hell."¹⁰ He even adds, "I've got a handful of ideas that I'd probably die for, if it was absolutely necessary; and though none of them came from anyone else—except the ones that came from the United States Constitution—the severity of my stances on some of the things I believe in probably reflect Catholic thought, that original admiration of the backbone of the martyrs."¹⁰ That gives you a bit of an idea of Mr. Monahan's politics, as they were in the 1990s.

It would be interesting to hear Mr. Monahan's opinions on President Barack Obama. In the 2006 film The Departed, written by Mr. Monahan, the fictional character Costello says:

Twenty years after an Irishman couldn't get a job, we had the presidency. That's what the niggers don't realize. If I got one thing against the black chaps it's this. No one gives it to you. You have to take it.

That was before Barack Obama ran for President and won.

Take-away question: What strong opinions does Mr. Monahan hold about President Obama?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "A Glimpse of Bush: Happy Cowpoke George W. Hits the NY Campaign Trail", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 10 (March 8–14, 2000), pp. 1, 15.
2) "Hillary on Golgotha: New Hampshire in the Primary Sense", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 5 (January 31–February 6, 1996), pp. 1, 18, 20.
3) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: It Doles for Thee: And Other Notes From the North", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 6 (February 7–13, 1996), pp. 1, 26–27.
4) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Fairytale in New Hampshire", New York Press,  vol. 9, no. 7 (February 14–20, 1996), p. 20.
5) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Stop the Weasel", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 8 (February 21–27, 1996), pp. 27–29.

6) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Steve, Pat & the Strangler Fig", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 9 (February 28–March 5, 1996), pp. 20–23.

7) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: We Just Get Close", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 10 (March 6–12, 1996), p. 21.

8) William Monahan. "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume: Don't Burden Yourself", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 25 (June 21–27, 1995), p. 14.
9) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
10) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.