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IN "THE CRACK-UP," F. Scott Fitzgerald said that to effectively negotiate life, you had to be able to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time.
Which brings us to Hal Riney.
Riney loved characters, individuals, people who thought for themselves. I'm not so sure he loved mankind all that much in the larger sense.
He was famously grumpy and irascible. But to get inside his friendship was to be in one of the most predictable places imaginable.
He was able to capture optimism about this country that bordered on sentimental. In this place were all too many dogs and pickup trucks and distant harmonicas on the wind. It was an unrealistically nostalgic portrait, but I'm convinced that Hal believed this optimistic readiness was still inside each of us somewhere, even today. It was something that, as an American, you wanted to believe in so badly it ached.
Hal, of course, took advantage of that weakness in us, as Ronald Reagan would many years later. Riney embodied the Reagan Revolution long before Reagan was a national figure, except that Hal merely sold us beer.
Yet attendant with this optimism was always a healthy, even debilitating skepticism. In Riney's cosmology, we'd always fall somewhere short of the Promised Land because we were prone to shortcuts, tempted by quick fixes, longing for mail-order miracles. We were all too ready to fall asleep at the switch, to leap at harebrained schemes, to trade the family cow for a handful of beans.
Hal was always wary of these things in us. It is, of course, where his humor came...