The glib pen races ahead of the emotionally true thought, trying to outdistance it.

Articles today about the Johnson and Kennedy tapes remind me that Nixon was not the first, remind me of hearing LBJ cajole a barber into cutting his wife's and daughter's and secretary's hair for free, poor-mouthing him as a civil servant when he was in fact already a millionaire, remind me of hearing DeLillo talk about the modern obsession with capturing moments on tape and then re-playing them endlessly (sometimes I feel like cursing DeLillo for unearthing some of my favorite themes while a generation older), remind me of how recording favors history, reveals the double-cross, gives control over the past, remind me of Arlo Guthrie's updated Alice's Restaurant Massacree monologue, in which he points out that the gap in the famous Nixon tapes is 18 and 1/2 minutes, exactly the length of his record, remind me about bootlegs and pornography.