I had just finished watching Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero on Sunday (damn you, TCM, for keeping me from my appointed rounds with entrenched political blowhards on Sunday talk shows!) when I heard the first suggestion that the California man in the out-of-control Toyota Prius might have faked the whole incident.

The original story, which broke in the wake of all of Toyota’s other stuck-accelerator problems, was that James Sikes was behind the wheel on a freeway near San Diego when the Prius — a top-of-the-line Toyota model with no previous problems reported — took off at speeds exceeding 90 mph. Sounds like normal driving in CA but it took several frantic 911 calls and a savvy Highway Patrol driver to steer the untamed beast to safety.

Maybe.

Since then Toyota technicians have not been able to reproduce the malfunction and are openly questioning Sikes’s story. And reports have surfaced about the man’s sketchy business dealings (he’s $700K in debt!), followed by speculation that he was just hoping to sue the car company, or maybe just wanted publicity. Recordings of the 911 calls are riveting — perhaps more so if the whole thing was a hoax.

But why? In the Sturges film, Eddie Bracken pretends to be a war hero to get his fellow Marines a free meal or two, and things go wildly out of control (he ends up running for mayor). But people want to be war heroes, or certainly did after WWII. Who wants to be celebrated as a victim? Some people thought of the balloon boy hoax but that guy wanted a TV show. This reminds me more of the James Frey imbroglio; as one wag remarked, “Remember when people used to get in trouble for lying about having not gone to jail?”

Or maybe it was something other than a publicity stunt. In a fascinating OpEd in the NY Times a few weeks ago it was revealed that accelerator problems claimed by Audi drivers in the eighties arose from people stomping on the gas when they were convinced it was the brake. The mind is a dangerous thing, and stubborn as hell. Perhaps Sikes, who sounds like kind of a sap in his public pronouncements (“I’ve had things happen in my life, but I’m not making up this story!”), was just obeying his unconscious mind which said: hey, the rest of your life is out of control, pal! Enjoy the ride. What, I wonder, what Sturges have said?

Ken Kesey used to say that he did not want to see the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest any more than he wanted to pay to see his daughter raped in a parking lot. Whatever the merits of Milos Forman’s film and its relationship to Kesey’s book (I think the author mostly objected to the casting of Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy, where he envisioned someone who looked more like Paul Newman, or himself), I kind of feel the same way about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.

Not that she’s my child, but I may be one of hers.

For Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, were the books that brought me to reading. So sick was my mother of reading them to me that she finally said, “If you want to hear these again, you’re going to have to learn to read yourself.” So I did. I’m sure I didn’t start with Alice — I had the usual Dr. Seuss stops along the way — but she was the goal, and to this day the John Tenniel illustrations are imprinted on my brain.

It’s obvious from the trailers, and the generally awful reviews, that Burton’s film has roughly the same relationship to the original books that Billy the Kid vs. Dracula had to its source material, which has not stopped it from having boffo box-office ($116 million its  opening weekend! Biggest 3-D movie ever!). As Anne Thompson put it in her Indiewire blog, the film’s success “proves yet again why studio marketers keep chasing the perfect match: branded family title + proven visual master + global movie star = blockbuster.”

What the mathematically inclined Charles Dodgson (aka Carroll) would have made of this equation is anybody’s guess. As Manohla Dargis pointed out in her generally despairing review in the Times, studios have tried to crack Alice’s code for years and have been mostly flummoxed. “Alice has no character,” said a writer who worked on the 1951 animated Disney version. “She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics.”

“Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in Wonderland and in the sequel,” Dargis added,  “which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination.”

I may be in the minority in finding most of Tim Burtons films rather inert: visually arresting, dramatically arrested. And I’m not sure you could make a good movie of the Alice books: my daughter came home confused, which is sort of the point, even after Burton tried to add some return/revenge angle to the proceedings. The logical author, in a sort of valentine to the girl he was illogically obsessed with, wrote a paean to a world beyond logic.

Of course we didn’t have these great FX when I was my daughter’s age. We had to create our own. Which brings us back to Kesey…

I picked up the Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV at the library yesterday, which despite having been published just a few months ago contains interviews as old as 1954 (William Styron) and as recent as 2009 (Marianne Robinson). The journal has a fine tradition of publishing interviews with notable writers that run the gamut from the louche to the illuminating, and this collection is no exception.

From 1968 there is a rambling wreck of an interview with Jack Kerouac, who was deep in his cups at that point and living with his mother in Florida. At first mere Kerouac tries to scare off the interlocutors (Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton), mistaking them for hippies come to lay flowers (or whatever) at the feet of their hero. Once she is assured that this is a literary enterprise she allows them to stay and get drunk with Kerouac as he free-associates his way past their questions.

Despite the sometimes maudlin self-congratulation in some of his answers, there are moments of luminosity and even a pointed riposte when Berrigan asks, “How come you’ve never written about Jesus?” to which Jack sputters, “I’ve never written about Jesus? In other words, you’re an insane phony who comes to my house…and…all I write about is Jesus.”

He  still had some of his wits about him, but it’s depressing to see these acolytes smothering him with the very substances — fame & alcohol — in which he ultimately suffocated.

Contrast this with the interview Gerald Clarke did with PG Wodehouse in 1974. Wodehouse was 91 then, and still going strong. “How about the Beats?” Clarke asked him. “Someone like Jack Kerouac, for instance, who died a few years ago?”

“Jack Kerouac died!” said the Master, clearly shocked. “Did he?”

“Yes.”

“Oh… Gosh, they do die off, don’t they?”

‘Deed they do. And while it may sound like sacrilege to some, I return to The Code of the Woosters with far more enthusiasm than I do anything by Kerouac. Which proves nothing, of course.

Both men were born writers. “Did you always know you would be a writer?” Clarke asked Wodehouse, who had written nearly a hundred books by then.

“Yes, always,” he replied. “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

In the other words of another born writer: Take it easy, but take it.

Buried deep in John Heilemann & Mark Halperin’s best-selling Game Change is an epitaph for McCain’s campaign, and as good a single example of why Obama won as I’ve seen in print. The book, in case you missed it, is a kind of pot-boilerish account of the ’08 election, chock-full of cliches, gossip, a lot of stories you remember all too well — but absolute buttered popcorn for politics lovers.

At the end of September of that year, in the midst of complete meltdown of our financial system, JMC suspended his campaign — and then returned to Washington for a White House summit that he asked for and then failed to lead. Obama throughout was calm — while McCain seemed increasingly passive and confused. Jim Wilkinson, who was working as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s chief of staff, is quoted saying:

“I’m a pro-life, pro-gun Texas Republican. I worked all eight years for Bush. I helped sell the Iraq War. I was in the Florida recount. And I wrote a letter to John McCain asking for my five-hundred-dollar contribution back, when he pulled that stunt and came back to DC. Because it just wasn’t what a serious person does.”

Wilkinson was more than your average Bushie: he appears in Mission Al Jazeera (the book I wrote with former Marine captain Josh Rushing) as a serial propagandist, practically a dirty trickster of the Nixon stripe. He strutted around Centcom during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, wearing a three-star general’s uniform. And he wasn’t just “in the Florida recount”; he helped orchestrate the Brooks Brothers riot, one of the key roadblocks to a legitimate tally of votes in that state’s primary.

“To his amazement,” the authors write, “Wilkinson determined he would be voting for Obama.”

What, I wonder, does Wilkinson make of McCain’s current denial that he asked for that meeting at the White House? The senator, facing a challenge from JD Hayworth, a Tea Party radio host in the GOP AZ primary, is trying to s say he was “misled” by Paulson, Bush, the whole TARP thing. But as he likes to say of his opponent (and as someone like Wilkinson can remind him) “facts are stubborn things.”

There’s a fascinating story buried inside today’s Wall Street Journal about the negotiations inside the White House around the health-care proposal Obama unveiled yesterday (and that Republicans have essentially already rejected). According to this anonymously sourced report — which cites “one person close to the White House deliberations” — the version the president is putting before the GOP, and the nation, represents a “victory for those in the White House who want to press ahead with ambitious legislation,” and a rebuttal to the small-change crowd pressing for what they called “a skinny bill.”

Chief among the skinny kids is WH Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who seems to favor of passage of a health care bill — any health care bill, regardless of if it does anyone any good — as more important than achieving the goals most Democrats agree on: insuring the millions of uninsured; regulating the profits of health care insurers; eliminating the pre-existing conditions clause that allows insurers to reject those that need insurance the most.

I was among those excited by Emanuel’s appointment to chief of staff, at least at first. A lot of the president’s Chicago team seemed too wonky and not sufficiently wise to the ways of insider Washington. Rahm had the rep — he was combative and obscene; he sent an opponent a dead fish once and was nothing if not willing to fight.

But fight for what? If the change Obama promised (and has been hard-pressed to deliver, due as much to Republican intransigence as discombobulation on the Democrats’ part) is going to be worth anything, especially when it comes to a system as big and broken as health care, it’s going to have to be painful for some people — which is why insurers, and even some doctors and pharmaceutical companies are crying about the president’s proposal (which is essentially a more liberal version of the Senate bill, even though it still does not include the public option).

Emanuel and the skinny bill crowd want the passage to be painless; they just care about getting the numbers on the board, it seems. In Ryan Lizza’s 2009 New Yorker profile, Emanuel famously bashed Paul Krugman’s criticism of giving the GOP tax cuts to pass the stimulus bill. “How many bills has he passed?” he sneered of the Times columnist — unconsciously echoing Joseph Stalin’s remark about the Pope, “How many divisions has he got?”

You can imagine the chief of staff grabbing his manhood and saying, “I got your moral authority right here!” But it seems the president has gone with the conscience crowd on this one, and is not simply weighing the chances of getting a bill passed (slim, even via “reconciliation”) but is asking the question: Why are we here if not to fight for what’s right?

This time, anyway.