Swingin'

I've always had a theory that whenever guys and gals start swinging, they begin to lose interest in conquering the world. They just want a comfortable pad and stereo and wheels, and their thoughts turn to the good things of life -- not to war. They loosen up, they live and they're more apt to let live. Dig?
-- Frank Sinatra (The Playboy Interview, February 1962)

Dug, baby. Anybody longing for some moral clarity, or just for a time when people could reasonably be said to "start swinging," should study the text of Sinatra's Playboy interview, helpfully posted by a site called This Is Sinatra! (The exclamation point is theirs, not mine, which seems entirely appropriate.) Sinatra weighs in on the peculiar demands of performing, of course: "...an audience is like a broad -- if you're indifferent, endsville." But he also holds forth on racism (against it), disarmament (for it, with one swingin' catch), fatherly responsibility ("I didn't tell my daughter whom to marry, but I'd have broken her back if she had had big eyes for a bigot") and the chances for a Communist takeover of the US: "Khrushchev has as much chance of succeeding as he has of making 100 straight passes at the crap table." The fact that this turned out to be correct is much less interesting to me than the picture of the diminutive Soviet premier hunched over a crap table, signaling feverishly for more comped vodka and shouting "Seven come eleven, comrades! Niki needs a new pair of shoes!"

The interview is especially fascinating for the glimpse it provides into that long-gone postwar moment when liberalism had certitude and swagger, and its own boy prince on the throne. It was surely the last time in recent memory that the Left was sexy. (The college girls may have loved Gene McCarthy, but that was ideological, not vascular.) Looking back two years to the presidential candidacy of John Kerry and two years ahead to a probable run by Hillary Clinton, one has to wonder where the zazz went.  In the meantime, there's always nostalgia. "When GUM department store in Moscow starts selling bikinis, we've got a fighting chance, because that means the girls are interested in being girls and the boys are going to stop thinking about communes and begin thinking connubially," Sinatra told Playboy, showing a gift for nuanced geopolitical thinking that's sorely lacking in today's celebrities.

Endsville.