In 2010 a documentary was made of Jack Rebney, Winnebago salesman. For years, outtakes from a promotional film for the Winnebago company featuring Jack Rebney as its spokesman had gone viral. Apparently the appeal here was that Jack had a special talent which was his capacity to cathartically curse when he was frustrated with a failed shot or technical mishap while filming his Winnebago commercials. A tall man with a fine speaking voice, he had been a broadcaster for news programs at an earlier time, but I am getting ahead of myself. What matters is Jack’s way with curse words. When he said shit or fuck it was as if they were newly coined. Inherent in the cursing was, to me, a kind of catharsis, of the quietly desperate man finally voicing his discontent at work, at life, at everything. See a YouTube sample from the video and the movie trailer.
Millions of people have viewed his cantankerous cursing and have relished his being a curmudgeon or so it seems as we listen to him go after the inanimate things of life, Iowan flies on a windshield, a cabin storage door that doesn’t close and technicians giving him a hard time during filming. Jack just had a way with fuck and shit. And when the outtakes were “somehow” shared with the suits at Winnebago Jack was let go, although he served the company well and still speaks kindly of them.
For years these outtakes gathered hordes of fans who we learned made numerous tape copies. Eventually they became so degraded they were almost unviewable, but that voice of Jack lambasting everything with shit and fuck and motherfucker rang clear and true. Of course, it went viral, on You Tube, all that flotsam and jetsam of social media. Finally a young director (Ben Steinbauer), and it is critical that I say young, became curious about Jack Rebney and decided to pursue his dream to make a film about this man — was he still alive? did he know of his web “fame”? was he really that angry, for he was sometimes labeled the world’s angriest man, which I find rather handsome and wholesome.
So here is a kind of shortening of what occurred: a search is done, contact is made with Jack; film crew and the director go visit him; Jack, at first, acts as if he is not a crotchety old man (he purposely lies and puts on the crew) and that leaves the director with his cock up his ass –no film to make; they part, and all this is filmed in Manton, California, in the northern part of the state in which Jack lives alone with his pit bull, Buddha, and is the caretaker of property which has some good fishing. Jack lives in what he calls a “hovel,” bookcases lined with the Bible, the Koran, books on neurology, for Jack apparently is an autodidact and throughout the documentary, three and four syllable words flow from his lips such as “ebullient” and “historicity” and they seem rather comfortable on his lips while shit and fuck snarl from his mouth.
Enough with backstory. I sensed that Jack who was pushing eighty and eventually goes blind because of glaucoma really needs some rejuvenation if not refueling by being with his species, annoying, intrusive, and probing as they are revealed through the director, deus ex machina. At almost seventy-two I empathized with Jack. We are not made of brick and mortar no matter how sterling our ethical principles are (“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, statesmen and divines” — Emerson). Often we have to relent, flex and become moderate and seek out the Grecian golden mean in order to get by in this world. I took to this man’s right to be a curmudgeon, to assail the present world as corrupting and corruptive. He keeps asking the director as to his need to do this: who cares? what is your purpose, young man? why is this important? and who needs this kind of attention? He is never really heard, for we have director as marketer. Except he doesn’t have Jack’s panache to sell Winnebagos.
And then, for me, comes the great bolt of lightning (Shazam) when in anger at the director he rails at his world (this was about 2008- 2010) by shouting that we are blind in this country, that Dick Cheney is the war criminal he is, that if he had hot red pokers he’d stick them up the asses of Rove, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and take great pleasure in observing their agonies. And the director now gets heated and goes after and assaults Jack for this political outrage, that he didn’t come here for that — milkmaid is upset because the cow doesn’t give milk — and that all he wants to do is make a film and not hear his rage. And at this point I saw right through this American director, oh is he American, this digital marketer, suborning Jack’s needs for his own opaque feelings, for he, the director is clearly transparent for he is making a product to market. I am watching Soylent Green.
When I heard Jack sum up Cheney I almost leaped from my seat and yelled at the screen. For in our so-called exceptionalism, our being a slave nation for over 150 years, for almost exterminating the indigenous native populations, the Three-fifths Compromise (black man as fraction), we feel it is inconceivable that our country could produce war criminals — but we have, Andrew Jackson for one, Brigham Young for another, and Cheney and all the rest. What is mortifying to me are all the soldiers, the “treasure” as we like to term it, who have lost limbs and suffered disabilities. In denial soldiers have not united here and there to bring charges against the men who sent them off. That is mind-boggling. Soldiers as mentally conditioned slaves — talk about what this system does to us. I read that the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush and Cheney of crimes against humanity earlier this month. And so Jack Rebney sees through all this shit and calls out a truth, and this young weasel of a director is more concerned about his anger and rage at a Winnebago. Young man go to war and have your “junk” blown away and report on that and then I’ll listen to your rage.
By this time in the film I was fuming. What is left is a so-called friend who Jack helped out years ago when he was destitute and who is now allied with the director himself, chaperoning the completely blind Jack to a film festival which highlights all of Jacks outtakes as the angriest man in the world. It is touching to see Jack lauded and he is touched, I believe so, nevertheless, that is it and Jack and his “friend” and the director drive him back home to his hermitage, and his dog, Buddha, and his blindness. Ah, the missionary impulses in us all, let’s put bras on the natives in Hawaii and teach them modesty. Fuck and fuck that. Jack has been subtly proselytzed. Jack has been used and partially colluded in that, but I can feel his need for human contact although he is as fed up with the human species as was Gulliver at the end of that book when he refused to be rescued for he had seen too much of humanity in his travels.
One of the multi-layers in this film is the generational one, such as bringing in fifty and sixty-year-old women in hats, tap shoes and spangles to dance (every community in America apparently has such a group) before eighty-year-olds in a home, demeaning to both. The galling assumption in giving that which is not wanted and then taking pleasure in the goodness of one’s own efforts. Jack was reified in this documentary, turned into an object long after he had been objectified by the web. When this director goes to bed this night, may a long lost and surviving vampire turn the tables and put a stake through his heart, and may that same bat visit Cheney and do the same.
Addendum –Email sent to my son prior to this blog:
Saw Winnebago Man with Jane; a few thoughts — unimpressed with the cinematography; I know you could do better. All kinds of ethical issues came to mind — the director has his needs (!) and he just went about pursuing them regardless of Rebney’s needs. Whose life is it anyway? When Rebney blamed our current state of affairs on Cheney, Jane and I leaped from the couch. He is a war criminal and Rebney has it right. (Of course, in the grand history of USA there never have been war criminals, unimaginable–sure).There is an attitude to the aging and the old here which youth reflects; I know because I can taste it. (Zuckerberg is great as an entrepreneur but as a former shrink who can and could read people he is a putz on several levels.) I am wondering if you too feel the ethics when filming the people you did film. I found the director intrusive. In many ways there was no need for the film and Rebney is right about questioning those who found it important to trail and track him. It says some savage things about this intrusive culture. Issues of privacy came to my mind. Hilarious in places, of course, but it raises larger issues. Apparently in this country you can’t be a curmudgeon and live alone — something wrong about that and un-American? I value my privacy and solitude very much and the film irked and troubled that part of me. All is well in this country, don’t rock the boat and don’t bite the hand that feeds you — fuck that. All is rotten and I don’t own a Winnebago. This is grandiose but if we had a short film between Jack and I (or between the director and I) good sparks would fly over how he has been used, although he is blind and does need people about him; nevertheless, I know he sees through some of this shit.
Boy, did you get me started
Dad
Pastiche and that Mormon Thing
Since my last blog I’ve been preoccupied with editing This Mobius Strip of Ifs, which is a mixture of essays and memoirs on education, Existentialism, writing, family, movies, death, living, separation, attachment and psychological abandonment as well as societal conditioning. Whew! After pretty well “scrubbing” the text, Jane and I still found about 50 corrections to make, some requiring re-phrasing, others making the text more felicitous. All tedious and necessary. It is a sturdy book; if better than that, I leave it to reviewers. I have sent out a copy to a contest as well as other work as well. I am a believer in contests, all so Darwinian. Concomitant with all this, I’ve made lists of literary bloggers and have posted queries to about 150 sites and I expect to get a small sampling back. You just have to keep scouring directories, Yahoo, New Pages, etc for sites that suit your genre, in this case memoir/essay. Although not a joiner, I did sign up at bookblogs.ning.com which deals with all kinds of variations, including non-fiction work.
While all this is going on my next book is at the starting gate, “I Truly Lament,” a collection of short stories on various aspects of the Holocaust, a follow up to The i Tetralogy.” It has been edited very well, quite spiffy, and except for a few final touches it will go out to a major contest within a week or so as a word document or PDF, as some reviewers are willing to do that — the writing world is changing as I write. I will coddle this book, hopefully acquiring a publisher rather than self-publishing. It has stainless steel balls, for 10 stories have been published in 2010-2011 from the collection. As usual I go out on the limb in this book.
I lurch daily from editing, seeking out bloggers for possible reviews, making lists of potential things to do to push the book, worrying about deadlines for this and that and squeaking in here and there a book to read, which in this case is American Massacre by Sally Denton, the sordid tale of the Mountain Meadows Massacre committed by the theocratic state of the Mormons. Let me be clear here: it was the most significant atrocity ever committed on American soil until the bombing by Mcvey in Oklahoma. I have read at least three able books about the Mormons, one on the massacre itself and it wasn’t until I read Denton’s work that I got a more complete understanding of what had happened. A previous blog on Fanny Stenhouse will bring you up up to date, for I’d rather give my emotional response to what I read without giving all the details — that is your task if interested.
Observations: Brigham Young was a crypto-fascist, wrong word to use, but in all aspects he was; he did not collude in the massacre of an emigrant wagon train of settlers from Arkansas. He was directly responsible as much as Hitler was responsible for Dachau. One does not have to turn on the gas to be responsible for the act. The Mormon “church,” if that is what it is, has spent over a century in a cover up, in one fashion or another for the killing of at least 140 men and women, the rape of one girl if not two by R. D. Lee, the enrapt and obeisant follower of Young. What I am about to say is the crux of it all. The mental conditioning, the cult-like behavior within the church’s own doctrines and the theocracy which ruled Utah was so despotic and corrosively and psychologically invasive of its people it led to the classic “in” group versus the “out” group, in this case Mormons versus the Federal government. When you read about this group you sense that it is like reading about Jim Jones, except in this instance, the Mormons externalized their rage and fears on an innocent group. I conclude it is a church of followers; consequently I doubt in the forseeable future any great art emanating from this insular group.
I am at the point when I was first learned about the Holocaust — appalled, enraged, furious, angered, hateful, disgusted, seeking some punishment for the perpetrators. Until very recently the Mormons stonewalled any efforts to reveal the total truth, these so-called people of the book. The worst hypocrites are religious people, for they are ruled and dominated by a doctrine and they are in no way free of their conditioning. They revel in their blindness. When unearthing fragments of bones, skulls, and the like, archaeologists were pressured by the Mormon church to cease and desist, an old tradition in that church; the scientists were furious and rightfully so, for their preliminary results pointed directly at white men and not Indians responsible for the killing. In short, historically the church has taken miniscule steps to allow true inquiry into its role in that massacre. And historically, like all good white men of the day, they blamed the local Indians for the deed, although in fact Mormon men dressed and painted up as the Indians controlled and carried out the act, and that act was deliberately carried out through a chain of command going back directly to Brigham Young who used what we would today call, “plausible deniability.” Corrupt, venal, cut-throat, base, coarse, rude and vulgar, he wrapped himself in the relgious cloak of infallibility and let his henchmen take the rap. Years later after two trials only one man, R.D. Lee, was executed. By the way, the U. S. government did collude in not pursuing the case for all kinds of political reasons. A few very honorable human beings did protest, crypto-Schindlers. Ah, the repetition compulsion of the human race.
Like the Nazis, who collected the luggage, shoes, hair and gold teeth from their victims at the extermination camps, after the massacre wagons were loaded up with the dresses of the slain women, their earrings, personal items, their shoes, undergarments, and the clothing of the men as well as the stock they had driven from Arkansas, their wagons — the bodies were left stripped and nude and observers saw wolves feasting on their carcasses for weeks after. In short, all the paraphernalia was collected and driven back to Salt Lake City in wagons where women were employed to wash out the blood from the garments, press and iron them. I associated to how the Germans cleansed human hair and wove them into blankets for their troops on the eastern front. The few very young children who were eight or younger were allowed to live because of some decrepit Mormon doctrine and often assigned to the homes of the very slayers of their parents!The personal trauma was astounding, haunting them for the rest of their lives and their descendants as well. In one grotesque and horrific incident, R. D. Lee heard his young “adopted” girl see his wife and say that it was the dress her mother had and so were the earrings; with that Lee got up and cut her throat. So she was psychologically killed once and now he killed her forever. I give you one of the high officers of the church.
Denton writes in a measured voice, for she is an investigative journalist; it all sneaked up on me, the culminatively arraying of facts so that conclusions are more powerful because they are not driven home. I’m at that point that I am ready to debate any Mormon I find in Nevada about the hideousness of his past, for I do believe that we all have to metabolize our personal and collective pasts if we are to move ahead in some way toward a better life or existence. The Mormons, I believe, are a frozen collective, and in many aspects are a cult much like Scientology. It is brain control of a significant kind. Jane is not a “Jack Mormon,” which according to a definition is a Mormon who does not follow the church but has a measure of devotion to it. Jane is an apostate, thank “god,”a tried and blue atheist and she sees through her Mormon upbringing with a laser eye. I will only say, perennial shrink that I am, here and there, like a stone on the road I catch Jane’s conditioning , which I point out to her. It often takes the shape of obeisance. And sometimes with love and sometimes with anger, I go after that, for I detest enslavement of any kind, especially mind conrol from a church.
Only recently Jane received a call from a Mormon elder asking if she was interested in…You can fill it in. Jane thought about it and said no. She informedme that they never let go, or stop trying. In any case I think to test her mettle she thought it might be very interesting if she invited the elder back to discuss her reentry into the church. I questioned her about her motives, but she wanted this and saw through to herself. In any case two men arrived, one older than the other, dressed in black, and I was informed by Jane they come in twos. After two hours with them, I returned home because she had requested I leave, knowing that I would have gone at them fast and furious about other things. What had happened? The same old crap, but this time she argued evolution and gave them her considerable knowledge about this and that and as she told me this her eyes rolled up because it was all so useless. I could have saved her the time. When you are a zombie, aspirin doesn’t help and sweet reason does not stay the hand at the oven’s door. A few days letter a note on yellow foolscap, folded in four, was at my doorstep, addressed to Sister Holt, her maiden name, asking her if she would like to attend the next church meeting, etc. Note that Jane tells the story while in a temple in Utah she asked one of the tour guides what was her first name as they were addressing one another as sister. Jane was told this was natural and normal; however, when asked what was the first name of her companion guide, she could not(!) give it because she did not know it. I give you a slave.
Probably the most hated, the most loathed symbol to a Mormon is the question mark.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture
Tagged Brigham Young, Fanny Steinhouse, Mormonism, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sally Denton