Just as the fancy Japanese bidet in your Tokyo penthouse could not exist without the Roman Aqueducts, given that all things, from utile objects to abstract art, remain entangled with all that came before them, the 1978 film Who’ll Stop The Rain would not itself be a film without every shooting, bombing, riot, Carlos The Jackal sighting, Debbie Harry growl, Larry Graham bassline, sidewalk overdose, and candle-topped chianti bottle downed through the years that preceded it.
That, of course, is a function of cultural evolution, but also because time is the delusion that our very limited brains require to process linear narratives. For instance, out on the savannah of 200 million years ago it was vital to have sense of before the antelope is killed, as well as after the antelope was eaten, in order not to become the antelope yourself. In reality, all moments exist simultaneously, there is no past or future, there are only patterns which are constantly updated by the electromagnetic field that is the universe, and any individual’s observations of those patterns may be correct, but are certainly not temporally fixed, or possibly even real.
Anyway, quick sidebar on the Second Amendment: does anyone find it odd that we are not taught during such rudimentary schooling as we tend to receive that the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights was largely pushed for by the Southern states to ensure they could maintain militias to control slaves, and in particular hunt pesky runaways? See, Jefferson Davis wasn’t yet born, but he was already afraid of the brilliant Toussaint Louverture and his Haitian rebellion. It had little or nothing at all to do with protecting unarmed citizens against government tyranny with private musketry, since in 2026 we labor under precisely that tyranny but somehow the camo-prepper militias with their storage-unit barrels of armor-piercing bullet are NOT manning the barricades outside of Urban Outfitters. Even the National Rifle Association, regularly going to bat for the rights of domestic abusers and the mentally ill to conceal-carry, seems totally fine with Alex Pretti being shot nine times by the Feds, primarily for carrying a licensed, holstered gun.
See, there’s the Ruby and then there’s the Ridge.
Tyranny is both pigmented and leftist-excepted.
Who’ll Stop the Rain is often thought to be based on the Creedence Clearwater Revival tune of the same name, from the 1970 release Cosmo’s Factory on Fantasy Records. This is a reasonable assumption, given the popularity of many other John Fogarty numbers like “Fortunate Son,” which is about Baron Trump volunteering for infantry duty, and “Run Through the Jungle,” which is about the lunacy of violence in Second Amendment America being so extreme that it’s actually 22% safer in Da Nang.
In actuality, the film is based on the book Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone. Robert Stone is possibly the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of, or at the very least have once mistaken for someone else. Dog Soldiers fits nicely in a run of similar-era books in which masculinity is thoroughly examined in an unapologetically masculine way. Among my personal favorites are Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, James Dickey’s Deliverance, Newton Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone, Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die and anything by Iceberg Slim. To those who would recoil at such anachronisms, I invite you to spend time with the lovely prose of these authors, but more importantly, with their critique of the impossibility of defining manhood. Except to say that it is not a Stetsoned dude on a spackled roan puffing a Marlboro short. Heroes generally do not exist in these books. All the characters are pained contradictions, caught in difficult situations in which the well-meaning become resigned to their doom, where ethics is a con and empathy a map to show exactly where to stick the shiv. Mainly though, being masculine in the mid-1970’s was one long, tortured poem about all the ways you could attempt not to Give In To The Man, weighed against all the ways in which you would eventually Give In To The Man regardless.
The hidden secret of these terse, muscular authors and their gut-punching sentences is how remarkably sensitive and astute they are without ever daring to admit to it, how full of artistry and resigned compassion in the subtext, how hamstrung by self-loathing while trying to hide that on some level they’re more attracted to their male characters than their female cutouts.
Which is not a skill they teach you at spearpoint out on the timeless savannah.
The Seventies Man was deeply corrupt, and back then we almost sort of admired the gall of it. Today it’s a schtick completely without purpose or charm, embodied in the animal who is Donald J. Casino Bankruptcy. “The Plumbers” picking a few locks at the Watergate Hotel was one thing, Melania’s fake visa, Don Jr.’s toothy certitude, Hegseth’s White Nationalist Impotence, billions in meme coins and Stormy payoffs, Les Wexner’s Nosferatu smile, gratis Qatari jumbo jets, and gilded ballrooms are another thing entirely.
Not to mention the chugging coal-fed train of lie after lie after lie that only nameless billionaires can dark-money-buy.
Unsurprisingly, the characters in Who’ll Stop the Rain stand zero chance against The Man. This is especially poignant today, since before all evil was conveniently embodied in the form of Jeffrey Epstein, even Nixon/Agnew seemed vaguely human, while remaining unforgivable swine. At that time evil was not yet a person, but a machine. Evil was the CIA and IBM and Guatemalan coup corporations and nationalized oil fields and raving mad generals and industrial-political incarcerations and the idea, bizarrely, that in a country founded on Individual Liberty it was not okay to take heroin and sip honey-and-lemonade all day, listening to complex music on glossy vinyl more or less non-stop until you died.
Jeffrey Epstein is a symbol that transcends personhood. He is like Zelig, the tabula rasa of amorality, the effluent of a system of wealth hoarding and monarchical/evangelical control that goes back to the Dark Ages. But, in truth, none of us are really single people. We’re simply patterns of electrons that have adhered and dispersed again and again for the last 13.8 billion years. We were all forged in exploding stars, our carbon and helium and hydrogen, the calcium in our bones and iron in our blood. These units do not disappear when we die, they are recycled perpetually, and each one of us is comprised of so many electrons that it is almost mathematically impossible that you do not have one in your body, right this second, that was once in both the liver of a brontosaurus and the triceps of Jeffrey Epstein.
In the same way, but as its literary obverse, poetry is really about one thing: the mystery and wonder of the degree to which all matter in the universe is connected. You can be a fan of Quantum Mechanics or go old school and stick with Einstein’s stubborn General Relativity, but either way all particles in the universe are entangled.
Poetry, that literary mercury, that shimmering beauty and half-drinkable poison, either cleverly or contextually or subtly, through cadence and pause and silence, manages to remind us of the fools we are to see the world through the fallacy of individuality.
Which brings us to Red, White, and Blues, a hot-presses new poetry collection from the mind of the mighty Mr. Sean Murphy. This is not the usual review, mainly because you don’t need one. So, let’s dispense with the expected format, the “darings” and “startlings” and “preternaturally talenteds.” No, this essay will achieve full, back-arching summation without a breakdown of particular lines or linguistic devices. Instead, it is a chance to communicate what anyone who has made it this far needs to know: there are many poems in Red White, and Blues that tackle the political-cinematic entanglement of such fine films as Chinatown (They’re Sisters, Moron), Apocalypse Now (It required a Pole, Joseph Conrad, to write decisively about America’s black heart), Wall Street (Every scene with Darryl Hannah is pure waterboarding), and Blade Runner (if not the greatest film of the 80s, certainly the most copied), and as both a poetic and aesthetic device, it rocks, and rockets, and red glares, and lands in a smear of grassy ash and portent.
But Murphy also has the temerity to find art in such artless personalities as the Reverend Joel Osteen, a man so ostentatiously fraudulent that he bleeds lard. It’s an ambitious Sinai to attempt to summit, as a lesser poet could run through Proust’s ink budget attempting to pen readable verse about Evangelical Christianity. Not to mention its broadband purveyors and their un-taxed greed, but Murphy treads softly so as to hit hardest, punching holes in the void where Osteen’s soul should reside, without resorting to a single rhyme. In so many words and on just as many worlds, Murphy solves the Osteen Problem like Nils Bohr on a bender: the beauty of the rendered image in order to find the (lack of) humanity in its subject.
We should begin taxing all churches, and heavily, tomorrow.
Anyway, the money-poem, the woodsman’s cut, the razor’s line and the heart of the matter in Red, White, and Blues, is a little piece called “Richard Nixon’s Fix,” and it is not only full of wisdom and purpose and meaning and bemusement at the mindless fuckery of the rich and powerful, but at length breaks down the film “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”
So now that we’re full circle, let’s remember it’s not the song, and, if we’re honest, barely even the book, since the film is a beast of its own device, a mug of hot water in which the sharp pekoe teabag of Richard Stone was briefly dunked, so Murphy nailed the subject not to the cross but to the page, for all of us to gaze upon the aspirant male god who was a very young Nick Nolte.
Now, I suspect that you, like me, are aware that Nick Nolte has crap politics, and in real life seems to have been a whole lot like his character Jack Cates in 48 Hours, which I saw in the theater as a youth and profoundly loved, quoting lines from it for years, but if you take that VHS out for a spin right now, I guarantee you’ll learn much about what was considered an acceptable, even hilarious, level of The Man standing on black men’s necks, not very many years ago.
Red, White, and Blues needs you to know that Nolte IS America, from his beautiful, unlined face in the NFL-damning “North Dallas Forty,” to his real-life police mugshot, which looks like a blood-spattered Ralph Steadman drawing of such debauchery and lunatic excess that you want lead Nick home by the hand, spoon him microwaved Campbells, and talk quietly for many days on end.
Which is priceless, and not coincidentally, exactly what our country itself needs right now – a dark room, soothing bop-era Miles, lots of curling stray hairs gently behind the national ear while whispering, “it’s going to be okay.”
Anyway, Sean Murphy, with judicious alliteration and tangy metaphor sprinkled over forty-six lines, (that’s 14-18-14, which the English professor you never particularly liked will remind you is a Sonnet Sequence) embodies Nolte, who in turn embodies Masculinity, which, for good or ill embodies the two-hundred-year-old fever dream of dipshit ‘Merica.
Which, as Jack Cates would say to the en fuego talent of young Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley, “And what the fuck else do you want from a poem?”
Truer words were never pentametered.
Bottom line, Y’all need to acquire yourself a copy now. And since the collection also takes a hammer to Rodney King and Roy Cohn and Donald Rumsfeld and the towering jazz-saint Charles Mingus, before finally arriving like a fangy viper in the mailbox of Washington Post owner Mr. Jeff Bezos, it might be wise get your book while mingling with the lovely and helpful and carbon-based and entirely interactive members of your community, down at your local brick and mortar store.
Image by Ralph Steadman.
