Just Another Trag-Hist-Myth-Com

Title: Troilus and Cressida

Rating: 4 Stars

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that I have really missed during the pandemic is live performances. I’ll take anything at this point, so when I heard that Seattle Shakespeare was offering up what basically mounted to a live virtual table read of Troilus and Cressida, I was on it. It’s one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays. I’ve never seen it performed live. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve even seen it offered live anywhere. Seattle Shakespeare is making its way slowly through all of Shakespeare’s plays, so I have already had opportunities to see obscure plays like Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens. I wasn’t going to miss this.

They were planning on performing it live until the pandemic hit, so it’s not really fair to call it a table read. Not all of the original cast was able to perform, so there were some that were pretty clearly reading from a script, but for the most part, it was a pretty polished presentation, albeit with no costumes whatsoever and in the actors’ homes.

It was performed over Zoom. I do find it amusing to see the characters’ name appear in their respective Zoom window (it actually is quite helpful). Seeing Achilles, Agamemnon, and Ulysses all labeled and speaking in Zoom windows like they’re in a corporate staff meeting makes me realize how the Trojan War would have been fought in the year 2021. Being held over Zoom, it goes without saying that one of my favorite lines from the play is, “Nestor, thou art on mute.” Oh boy, Nestor, can I relate.

Troilus and Cressida is an odd play. That possibly might be one of the reasons why it’s not played often. It’s classified as one of Shakespeare’s problem plays (along with All’s Well That Ends Well (which Seattle Shakespeare also staged not that long ago) and Measure for Measure).

The main problem with Troilus and Cressida is…what is it? Is it a love story about Troilus and Cressida? Well, except that Cressida gets separated by her forever love Trojan Troilus and promptly takes up with the Greek Diomedes. Is it a tragedy? Troilus and Cressida are still alive at the end, but the most noble character in the play, Hector, is dead. However, he dies at best ignominiously and he’s not really that significant of a character in the play. Is it a history? Despite the play being called Troilus and Cressida, the bulk of the plot is about the Trojan War, which is believed to be a historical event. Much like his other histories, after a lot of talking, in Act V there is certainly a significant amount of fighting. Still, if anything, it feels more like mythology than history. Is it just a comedy? You wouldn’t think so, but Thersites is possibly the greatest insult comic that Shakespeare ever invented and Greek’s great hero Ajax is as dumb as a box of rocks.

It simply is all over the map, and in my opinion, this plot anarchy kind of falls to pieces in Act V. There are just too many things going on and it doesn’t tie them all together by the end.

There are a couple of plot threads. One of them is the love story between the Trojan Troilus and Cressida. Troilus is hopelessly in love and Cressida plays hard to get. It takes the contrivances of Pandarus to bring the two together (and thus from his name, the verb to pander originates). Alas, as soon as they share their bliss, Cressida’s father, who has betrayed the Trojans and is now in the Greek camp, makes a deal to swap a prisoner for his daughter so that he won’t be alone in the camp. With both brokenhearted, Cressida leaves to be with her father. Shortly thereafter, while Troilus is spying on her, she takes up with the Greek Diomedes, sparking Troilus’ great jealous rage.

The other plot thread is the Trojan War itself. As is well known, the Trojan Paris kidnapped the Greek King Menelaus’ wife Helen and brought her to Troy. The Greeks have laid siege to Troy to win her back. They’ve been at it for seven years with little result. In fact, they’ve barely been fighting. When wondering why, all point to the great Greek hero Achilles, who is languidly refusing to fight. His refusal has infected the rest of the Greek troops. How can Agamemnon and the wily Ulysses conspire to get Achilles motivated to fight again?

That’s the gist of it. Since Shakespeare wasn’t really into the whole plot invention business, most of the basic plot was lifted directly from Chaucer. Before you feel too bad about Chaucer, he stole his plot from Boccaccio. That’s the way playwrights rolled in those days. If Shakespeare was alive today, he’d be rebooting Spider-Man. 

As is typical before I watch Shakespeare, I read the play the day before. That really helps me to get level set on the plot so that I can pay more attention to the language. Having done that consistently, the difference between reading the words flat on the page versus acted out, even in a table read, becomes stark. It really is night and day.

The actor playing Thersites was hilariously acidic while spewing his venom. Ajax was a dumb bodybuilder, constantly flexing while alternating between befuddlement and steroidal rage. Ulysses, not a warrior, was playing three dimensional chess with his cunning ways. Paris and Helen spent their time clubbing. Pandarus was an oily, lecherous, snivelly pander. 

Achilles, that great Greek warrior legend, does not come off well here, especially in comparison to his Trojan counterpart Hector. Hector was all grace, bravery, and honor. Here Achilles was slightly smarmy, living off the laurels of his previous heroics.

When they finally do first meet in battle, Hector refuses to engage Achilles because Achilles is not armed. It would not be honorable to fight an unarmed man. Later, when Achilles and his collection of myrmidon warriors come upon Hector while he is changing armor, there is no such honor. Not only does Achilles take advantage of Hector’s disadvantage, but he doesn’t even do the deed himself. He orders his myrmidons to close in and kill him. After they kill him, then Achilles ties Hector’s dead body to his horse and drags his corpse around the battle field for all of Troy to see. What a great warrior.

In Goodreads, I gave the play three stars. The live staging of it raised it to four stars.

I can’t wait for live theater to start again!

Buccaneers Keelhaul The Senate

Title: Kill Switch

Rating: 4 Stars

From the outside, it’s a puzzle. By and large, a majority of Americans hold fairly progressive beliefs. A majority of Americans support ideas like increased availability of health care,  a woman’s right to choose, reasonable gun control, paid maternity leave, subsidized child care, and free college tuition.

We currently have a Democratic President and majority in both the House of Representatives and in the Senate. President Biden has indicated interest in moving fast on progressive issues such as these. The House regularly passes progressive legislation. All that’s needed is for the Democratic controlled Senate to take up these bills, debate them, and approve them for the President’s signature.

Seems easy, right? 

Well, it turns out that, as illogical as it sounds, it’s actually the minority that controls the Senate. If any given senator decides that they don’t like a bill, they can anonymously put a hold on it. Once the hold is put on a bill, unless the Senate can come up with sixty votes, there is no way that it can be pushed (I’m not talking about reconciliation bills right now). Given the state of our current toxic political environment, the chances of getting sixty votes on anything progressive is essentially zero.

Most Americans that follow politics understand that, as weird as it sounds, this is the way that things work and are pretty much resigned to it. Even though bills are begging to be passed that could benefit tens of millions of Americans and could start redressing the centuries of racist, classist, and sexist wrongs of our history, some random old white guy in a safe Senate seat from a state that takes active steps to suppress minority votes can make a phone call and stop any sign of progress.

How did we get to this place? Is this what the founders envisioned?

In a word, no. The obstructionists love to quote James Madison, the founder that was very concerned with making sure that the minority had a voice in the legislative process. Other than selectively cherry picking his quotes, there is no way that Madison wanted what we have now. Yes, he wanted to make sure that minority voices were heard. However, the goal was that these voices would be give the opportunity to change the mind of the majority. It was in no way in his mind that the minority had some kind of veto power over the voice of the majority.

In fact, all of the founding fathers had experience with this perverse form of government during the Articles of Confederation. Under Confederation rules, any act required the approval by at least nine of the thirteen states. Regardless of size, each state got one vote. These two rules made passing laws virtually impossible and were the primary reasons why the Articles were discarded.

At the Constitutional Convention, the original plan was to only have the population apportioned House of Representatives. The smaller states kicked up such a fuss that the Senate was created as a sop to them. This was known as the Great Compromise. Madison was one of the founders that vociferously fought against the formation of the Senate. He was worried that the smaller states could band together and stop the will of the majority. That problem is even more apparent now.  For example, the population of California is now equal to the population of the 22 smallest states.

In the early days of the republic, the Senate functioned pretty much as planned. Senators actually worked at their desk on the Senate floor. Bills came to the floor and were passionately debated. Everyone was given an opportunity to express their views. After everyone had their say, senators voted. It was as simple as that.

And then came John Calhoun.

A fierce defender of the South and its peculiar institution (slavery), Calhoun used Senate rules to thwart any looming threat that he saw to it. For instance, Calhoun saw the attempt to charter a US bank as an attack on slavery. Calhoun organized a group of Southern senators in opposition. This was the first filibuster. Even though it failed, it created a pattern for future obstruction. For those that don’t know, filibuster was a phrase current in the 1840s. It was a term used to describe a group of people that would unlawfully invade a foreign land. They were basically pirates.

After this inauspicious start, Calhoun proceeded to filibuster multiple times over the years. Every single one was in support of slavery. By the end of his career, he had moved so far from majority rule that he believed that any state had the right to ignore any federal law that it didn’t believe.

Fast forward a hundred years. 

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Richard Russell of Georgia was a huge force in the Senate. Like Calhoun, he was a master of the Senate’s rules and was able to bend its rules to his whim. And he had a very simple whim: white supremacy. He was very open about it. Any law that appeared to threaten white supremacy was filibustered. For instance, he organized filibusters against anti-lynching bills. He held up progress on civil rights bills for over a decade. When the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed over his filibuster, he called the cloture vote stopping his filibuster a lynch mob. Yes, he was a lovely man.

For those of you that think that filibusters aren’t racist in nature, keep in mind that every single successful filibuster from 1877 to 1964 was to stop civil rights progress.

At the same time that filibustering became a sacrosanct Senate birthright, power was shifting in the Senate. For most of its history, the Senate was a group of individuals. There was no real central authority. It was during Lyndon Baines Johnson’s tenure in the 1950s that the position of Majority Leader became a center of power. This power became even more centralized during Harry Reid’s tenure. 

Party discipline now trumps individual beliefs. If a senator desires a plumb committee assignment, the expectation is that they must toe the party position on all votes. The Senate is now a top down institution. Given how rare it is for one party to win 60 seats, this pretty much guarantees that any filibuster will be successful. All a senator has to do now is to signal that they will filibuster and that serves to kill the bill.

This brings us to Mitch McConnell. He has no interest in legislating. He is only interested in becoming and staying Majority Leader. With support of white conservatives and wealthy business interests, he understands that he doesn’t have to appeal to an American majority. In fact, he has no interest in doing so.

The remedy is simple. We should tell conservatives that they are right. We should follow the beliefs of our original founders. They all strongly believed in the principle of majority rule. They believed that the Senate was designed for debate. We should allow senators to debate on the merits of the bill. The minority should be given a voice in the debate. Once the salient points have been made, then the senators vote. The current state that allows the minority (even a minority of one!) to stifle the voice of the majority must end.

Stop the filibuster!

Desert Island Book

The question is simple. If you’re trapped on a desert island for the rest of your life and you’re only allowed one book, what would it be? I’m going to change the question slightly (for a reason that will be apparent later below). If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?

First of all, it can’t be your favorite conventional book. For example, for many years Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon was my favorite book. By now, I’ve probably read it five or six times. I probably don’t need to read it again.

Another option that I’ve contemplated is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I find it to be a fascinating novel that changes every time I read it. Sometimes it’s a scathing indictment of Russian poverty. I’ve read it as a philosophical treatise filled with ideas that predate Nietzsche. It’s a psychological novel that dives deep into Raskolnikov’s disturbed mind. Often I’ve read it as an extremely dark comedy. Finally, it’s a page turning crime story featuring a detective that acts just like Columbo. It’s an awesome read. Even so, I can’t imagine reading it say, one hundred more times.

So, it has to be a book of sufficient length, complexity, and density that rewards repeated readings. Right now, my choice would probably be Infinite Jest or House of Leaves.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have a new contender. Having just finished Antland, it checks all of the boxes and then some. Let me explain.

First of all, it’s funny. I’m sure that the humor will eventually pale, but it has such a breadth and depth of humor ranging from slapstick style pratfalls to intricate film theory that I could see myself still smiling at even a decade or more later.

It is absolutely chock full of trivial arcana. For instance, ever hear of the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876? It happened, it’s real, and it’s a plot point here. How about the language spoken in Turkey that consists exclusively of whistles? Yep, that’s a thing and it comes up in Antland. How did Kaufman find all of this?

Even better, some of the trivia is pure bullshit. You all remember Citizen Kane, right? One of the greatest movies of all time, right? Well then, you must remember Judd Apatow’s version, named Citizen Funny Guy starring Seth Rogan as Charlie Kaneberg, right? You should after all since Judd Apatow is considered one of the all time great film makers.

Everyone remembers the Abbott and Costello comedy duo. Well, did you know that Costello was a serial murderer who killed off all of their comedy duo competitors?

Sure, that’s some obvious bullshit. How about some non-obvious bullshit? In one part of the novel, Kaufman quotes from the poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Sounds like bullshit, right? Well, guess what? Bizarrely enough, that is a real poem written in Scots by MacDiarmid. So, this is a true fact then, right? Well, I read the poem and nowhere in it is the fragment that Kaufman references. Kaufman chose a real poem by a real poet and inserted bullshit into it. That’s some quality bullshit!

And that’s a major factor in Antland’s favor. That’s also why I had to change the parameters of the question a bit. I think that I could spend years fact checking Antland and figure out what is true or not. However, to do that, I would need access to the internet. I’m guessing most desert islands don’t have wi-fi.

I know that I already mentioned this, but the book is seriously funny. For instance, Kaufman takes no prisoners in his criticism of himself. Rosenberg, the protagonist art critic, ruthlessly criticizes Kaufman, at one point calling him ‘Godzilla with dentures”. At various times in the novel, he mercilessly attacks the films that he has made. Rosenberg regularly falls into uncovered manhole covers to emerge covered in filth. He becomes convinced that his creator hates him. Well, when you consider that his creator is Kaufman and that he absolutely trashes Kaufman at every opportunity, perhaps this is Kaufman’s revenge on critics everywhere?

Speaking of humor, how about Donald Trump? Here, we see Trump in all of his unbounded glory. He goes to Disney World. He meets his animatronic doppelganger bound for the Hall of Presidents. Disney is shall we say, ‘tremendously’ successful in the Trump robot. In fact, it is so good that Trump demands that they make him one.  They do and bring him to the White House. Trump and his robot immediately become best friends. In fact, they become such best friends that they kiss, disrobe, and give each other handies. Ultimately, an army of nuclear tipped Donald Trump robots try to take over the world.

Strewn throughout the entire book are pretty deep ideas. What is the nature of creativity? What is the relationship between a creator and their creations? Is their a difference between dreaming and reality? What is memory? Does memory decay over time, and if so, how does this manifest? What is the nature of time? Can the future somehow be discretely predicted if a powerful enough computer and algorithm are developed? What is the cultural relevance of those people that never make a public appearance in said culture (the unseen)?  In a war between crass capitalism, autocracy, or faith, who would emerge victorious? What will the future look like in a million years, after the human species has long been exterminated?

If this was the only book left to me, these (and many more) ideas are ones that I could see keeping myself occupied for years, if not decades. It’s just too bad that there are so many other books that I still need to read.

A Nonlinear Cabinet Of Curiosities

Title: Antkind

Rating: 4 Stars

I’m going to write a follow-on post shortly that will dive deeper into some of the vagaries of Antkind. Here are my impressions of it.

I have no idea how to even start. I’ve written several times of the genius of Charlie Kaufman. My most recent post about him was my own personal WTF rankings of his films. I knew that he’d just completed a novel. I read enough about it to know that it was going to be a wild ride. I knew that it was a monster to read at over 700 pages.

I knew that I was going to have to read it. In all honesty, I was dreading it. Was it going to be like reading Ulysses and I would be, for the most part, wandering around lost? Was it going to be like Gravity’s Rainbow, where I could only read twenty or thirty pages at a time because my brain would get overloaded?

I shouldn’t have worried. As weird as his writing is, it is always (at least to me) entertaining. So it was here. Believe it or not, there was at least a little something on nearly every page that made me laugh. This could have been something clever, something silly, something that was blatantly bullshit, or even some good old fashioned slapstick (the protagonist falls into many, many open manholes).

Although I wouldn’t put it at the same level as Infinite Jest or Houses of Leaves, it’s in the same neighborhood. The clever (sometimes too clever) writing, propulsive (if mostly meandering) plot, and humor made it almost compulsively readable. Broken into bite size chapters, I was always left at the end of a chapter hungering for another one.

The only reason why it didn’t get five stars is because, yeah, as some of the other reviews that I’ve read commented, he probably could have used a stronger editor. I’m guessing that a hundred or so pages could have been edited out of it. Having said that, Kaufman, at least as a novel author, falls into the maximilist branch of postmodernism. Far be it for me to try to cut a maximilist’s output down to a reasonable size. It kind of defeats the point.

The plot, on its surface, is quite simple. B Rosenberger Rosenberg (definitely not Jewish!) is an underappreciated, pretentious, so so painfully woke (I have a black girlfriend!), neurotic film critic. In Florida he seemingly accidentally encounters an ancient Black man named Ingo Cutbirth. Cutbirth had spent the previous ninety years working on a silent, stop motion film that has a three month running time. Rosenberg is thrilled to view the film, seeing it as an opportunity to ride the coattails of this oppressed minority’s outsider art to critical fame and glory.

He watches the entire film (it has pre-scheduled bathroom, meal and sleep breaks). Midway through Cutbirth dies. Rosenberg, according to his process, must watch it a total of seven times (including once backwards and another time upside down). Accordingly, he packs up all of the film canisters and proceeds to head back to New York City where he’ll watch it obsessively, write about it, and become immortal.

Unfortunately, his plan goes awry when his truck goes up in flames at a fast food restaurant parking lot. He tries to save the film but succumbs to the smoke. When he comes out of his coma (suspiciously, three months later), he discovers that only one frame of the film has been saved. It becomes his life’s mission to resurrect the entire film from that frame.

From here, the plot unfolds. As you can probably guess, there are way more questions than answers. Did the film really exist (or did he imagine the entire thing while he was in a coma)? Did Cutbirth exist? If so, was he even black (sometimes he appears Swedish)? As Rosenberg undergoes deep hypnotherapy to try to rediscover the film, are the memories that he’s recovering even real? Being a film critic, Rosenberg references well over a hundred films. Which ones are real? Every page contains an obscure fact or two. Which facts are real and which ones are absolute bullshit? Will the novel end with closure (yeah, right)? Of all of the Rosenbergs that make their appearance, which is the real one and which are the clones?

As you can tell from all of this, we’re definitely living in a postmodern fictional world. Whether you enjoy it or not depends entirely upon how you feel about spending time in such a world. I don’t mind an occasionally good mind fucking, and this novel left my mind well fucked.

Regarding the blog title, this novel reminded me of a cabinet of curiosities. Centuries ago, before museums were really a thing, wealthy nobility would gather semi-random artifacts from all over the world and display them for their guests amusement and amazement. Since there really was no scientific rigor applied to these collections, they invariably were an assortment of real and fake things. After all, if you’ve never seen a picture of either, who’s to say whether a skeleton of a giraffe or of a unicorn seems more reasonable?

There are a couple of museums that still present themselves in this way. They contain artifacts that could be real or false. It is up to the museum patron to make their own decisions. I find them to be pretty wonderful places. If you ever get a chance, check out the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Venice or the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities in London.

As I read Antkind, I had a similar experience. Films, novels, poems, and trivia references are strewn throughout the novel. Some I know to be true, some I know to be false, and some I have no idea. In the novel, it’s all presented the same. It’s up to you to define your own reality.

Just like being in a cabinet of curiosities.

Taking A Bite Out

Earlier this week, I had an epiphany. I had to restart my iPhone for some reason. When it does, the first thing that comes up on the screen is the Apple logo. No big deal. I’ve seen it innumerable times. As I was mindlessly staring at it, it hit me. Why does the apple have a bite out of it? This started a research project and some very deep navel gazing.

First the research. According to the person that actually designed the logo (yeah, like he’d know, right?), it was there for scale. The logo needed to be easily recognizable and identifiable regardless of the device that it was actually placed on. It turned out that indeed the logo did appear in a number of different form factors. You can see it on everything from a Mac to an iPhone to an iPod. On the smaller devices, it could easily have been misidentified as something like a cherry. Putting a bite on it provides it a sense of relative scale. Regardless of the device, you see a fruit with what can only be assumed to be a human sized bite, you can identify the fruit as an apple.

That’s the most logical (and probably correct reason). Apparently at Apple itself, a different creation story is told. Alan Turing was one of the great mathematical minds of the twentieth century. He did critical work code breaking the Nazi Enigma machine during WWII. After the war he created one of the first designs for computers. He invented a mathematical computing model still called a Turing Machine. He’s considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. He developed the idea of the Turing Test.

He’s kind of a big deal in the computing world. He was also gay. The 1940s and 1950s were not friendly times to be gay. He was arrested and chemically sterilized. In 1954, he committed suicide by cyanide poisoning. Next to his bed was a half eaten apple. Although never tested, it was theorized that he laced the apple with cyanide before eating it.

The legend around Apple is that the bite taken out of the logo is some kind of tribute to Turing. It’s clever and has kind of a geeky allure to it, but really? Apple is going to backhandedly acknowledge one of the mathematical greats by including a nod to his suicide in their logo? It seems doubtful.

The third alternative that I found was another geeky inside joke, although by now the term is so ubiquitous it’s not that inside anymore. The basic unit of storage (either memory or disk) is byte (think megabytes or gigabytes). The logo is actually a ‘byte’ taken out of the apple. That’s almost a dad level joke, certainly not something that an iconically cool customer like Steve Jobs would countenance.

Based upon my research, it looks like the bite for scale makes the most sense.

But then I started thinking…

What is the most famous apple of all time? Of course, it’s the apple of the creation story. OK, fine, it’s not really an apple, but that’s what I was taught as a child a long time ago and even now most people think of it as an apple.

For you Godless heathens that weren’t correctly indoctrinated as a child, God created Adam and gave him dominion over the Garden of Eden. Adam got lonely, so God created Eve using one of his ribs. There they were to live together in eternal happiness.

There was one rule. Neither of them could eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. All was fine until a serpent (yes, I know it wasn’t necessarily a serpent, but bear with me) seduced Eve with smooth flowing words into tasting the forbidden apple. Eve then gave it to Adam to taste.

The Old Testament God is pretty much a law and order, one strike and you’re out, hang ’em high kind of judge. He finds out and he casts Adam and Eve out of paradise. They will no longer be mortal. Eve is even more severely punished. For her role, she must forever give birth in pain and must submit to Adam’s rule.

So, the Apple logo is an apple with a bite taken out of it. Given what I just said, is there a different interpretation?

After all, what are computers but knowledge? Especially with the internet and the omnipresent mobile devices that we keep constantly on our person at all times, theoretically all of our world’s knowledge is now literally at our fingertips. Is there a more appropriate device than an iPhone to signify our obsession with seeking out knowledge?

And don’t devices like an iPhone expose the problems with that obsession? After all, knowledge isn’t absolute like a commandment from God. There are false gods like QAnon that lead seekers astray. We are not even true in our thirst of knowledge. We’re only interested in acquiring new knowledge that has already been filtered through our own pre-existing world view.

Finally, how do we spend our time with devices like iPhones? Walking around this beautiful land blind to it all as we keep our heads down reading our phone. By doing so, have we not exiled ourselves from this paradise that we live in?

So, that’s my thesis. The apple logo with the bite taken out represents technology that is both the tree of knowledge and our exile from paradise.

I think it’s a perfect theory. I’m just not sure if the serpent is Steve Jobs or Woz. Let me take another dose of ayahuasca and I’ll get back to you.

The Big Lie

As a history geek, I always find it interesting when I stumble upon events from the past that echo to the present. Right now I’m hearing all kinds of echoes around ‘The Big Lie’.

The most obvious and famous is The Stab in the Back. Let’s set the stage. It’s World War I. Germany has invaded Russia, Belgium, and France. After achieving significant success, their drive stalls and the stalemate of bunker warfare commences. This goes on for four years. During this time, Germany is slowly being drained of resources and manpower.

In 1918, after one last failed offensive, the German army effectively collapses. Over the preceding four years, layers of defenses have been built by the Germans in depths of more than 100 miles. These defenses seemed impregnable. However, with the German army collapsing, these defenses are rapidly falling.

Germany is losing the war. The head of the army, Erich Ludendorff, suffers a nervous breakdown. He recovers sufficiently to tell the German civilian government that all hope is lost. An armistice must be negotiated or the country will be destroyed.

The civilian government heeds his warning and negotiates the armistice under ruinous terms. Germany’s war machine is effectively shut down. The resulting oppressive Treaty of Versailles is forced upon the Germans, who really have no choice but to submit.

With the war over and the danger of destruction passed, Ludendorff changed his story. He started claiming that it was the German civilian government that insisted on the armistice. He claimed that the German army was not defeated. It was the German government that betrayed her citizens by ‘stabbing them in the back’ with the ruinous armistice.

The German people, not aware of Ludendorff’s earlier desperate plea and never actually having been occupied by a foreign power (all fighting took place outside their borders) believed this big lie. This led pretty directly to the fall of the civilian government and ultimately to the rise of Hitler and his ardent militarism.

The other historical big lie is the Civil War.  After four years of desperate fighting, the Confederacy was decisively defeated. Its land was occupied by the hated Yankees. Its government was in shambles. Its economy was ruined. A generation of men were dead.

The urgent question of the day was, what’s next? How do we re-integrate this third of the nation that had rebelled against our nation and flag?

The answer was The Lost Cause. The premise of The Lost Cause was that the war was just. The Confederacy was justified in trying to secede from the United States. Slavery was a just and merciful institution that served both whites and blacks equally well. In fact, the war wasn’t even about slavery. It was about state’s rights. It was about fighting off an overbearing all powerful North that was trying to exert its will over the Southern states. It was a war that the Southern states fought with honor. They would have prevailed and should have prevailed if it wasn’t for the material might of the North and the overwhelming manpower (the hated ‘mechanics and mudsills’) that the North was able to bring to bear.

In fact, none of this is true (well, except for the fact that the North did have a significant material and manpower advantage). The Southern states seceded precisely because of slavery. If you don’t believe me, simply read the Confederacy Constitution, which is pretty close to a copy of the US Constitution except that the institution of slavery is forever enshrined in it. Read the Confederacy’s Vice President Alexander Stephen’s Cornerstone speech, which was considered the clearest statement of purpose for the rebellion. It explicitly says that the secession was precisely about slavery. Not only was the federal government not oppressing the Southern status, due to electoral systemic inequality (much like exists today with the Republican party), the Southern states held most of the reigns of power. Keep in mind that Lincoln’s platform didn’t even call for the abolition of slavery. He just didn’t want it extended beyond the boundaries of where it already existed. Even this provision was enough to propel the Southern states into rebellion.

Despite this, The Lost Cause narrative carried the day. Southern politicians that had supported secession were able to worm their way back into power. Once in power, they continued on with their previous policies, just under another name. Statues were raised to soldiers that had sworn allegiance to our country but then took arms against it. De facto slavery continued to be practiced. The white power structured survived and thrived. 

This narrative carried the day for decades. My favorite example still is Buster Keaton’s silent film The General. It’s based on the true story of Union soldiers (OK, technically scouts) that stole a Confederate train and headed North, wreaking havoc as they went. Ultimately, all soldiers were captured and executed by Confederates. They were the first recipients of the Medal of Honor.

When Keaton remade the film, he was told that it was unbelievable that Northern soldiers could be so brave and that Southerners could be villains. He therefore changed it so that it was a Southerner that stole the train and was the hero. This was directly as the result of entire generations of Americans being brought up with The Lost Cause.

These things seem so unbelievable to me. Clearly the German army was being destroyed. The German civilian government took the only option available to them. Even a cursory reading of history would tell you that the Southern state leaders took arms against the United States of American to defend the right to own human beings.

How can anyone, let alone millions and millions of people, believe such an obvious lie? Not only believe it but in believing it allowed a horrible chain of events to unfold.

This brings us to the current day. In the 2020 Presidential election, Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden.

It wasn’t even that close. Voter turnout was the highest in over one hundred years. Biden won by over four percent. He won by more than seven million votes. He won by the same electoral college margin that Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by (a victory that Trump was extremely proud of and often remarked upon).

Yes, there were a couple of states where the margin was close, but even so, most of them were outside the victory margin that would have required a recount. This is not to mention the fact that no state was anywhere close to the 2000 Bush / Gore election results in Florida or the 2004 Bush / Kerry results in Ohio. In both cases, party loyalists called foul, but ultimately the democratic process won out and both Gore and Kerry conceded.

Not Donald Trump. Even now, in April of 2021, he is still crying foul. 

This is despite the fact that there is not even a shred of evidence of mass fraud taking place. In an election in which 150 million votes are cast, there will always be a couple of hundred or so questionable votes, but there is no evidence of anything more than that. No, Hugo Chavez did not rise from his grave to malignantly infect electronic voting machines.

Trump’s campaign filed over sixty lawsuits and lost all but one minor one. Trump’s lawyers, out in public crying fraud, once under oath in a courtroom confessed that they found no fraud. A defamation suit has been filed against Sidney Powell, the most fervent of Trump’s defenders. Her lawyers are using the defense that no reasonable person would believe her. Fox News, under threat of a defamation lawsuit, was forced to repeatedly show a video explaining that there was no evidence of fraud on exactly the shows that claimed that such evidence existed. Some states, under extreme pressure, agreed to do manual recounts even in cases where it wasn’t even warranted. Such recounts only nominally changed vote totals.

Even so, the lie persists. Millions of people continue to believe that somehow Biden managed to steal votes from the tens of millions of absentee ballots and the over one hundred thousand polling precincts in our country. A recent poll said that some 55 percent of Republicans believe that the election was stolen or rigged. That is literally tens of millions of people that think that the election was stolen. 

So I’m living in a time that I’m quite certain that future historians will consider yet another instance of a big lie. Even living in it, I have to admit that I don’t understand how it’s possible. 

What I’m most afraid of is, what will be the ramifications? Already, we have seen our national legislative buildings overrun by a mob threatening to execute our Vice President and our Speaker of the House. Is that the end? I’m afraid not. Because of this lie, what else lies in our future?

An Honest Villain?

Title: Agent Zigzag

Rating: 3 Stars

This is the story of Eddie Chapman, an unlikely English spy during World War II.

Chapman joined the army, got bored, and went AWOL. He was caught, sentenced to military prison, and was given a dishonorable discharge. Later working as a bartender, he fell into a life of crime. He became a safe cracker for a gang of thieves. Arrested in Scotland, he was let out on bail and he fled to the island of Jersey. There, he barely escaped from detectives that were in hot pursuit. Later that night, he committed a burglary for which he was caught. He was sentenced to serve two years. It looked like a life of crime was going to be his future.

But then fate intervened. Jersey is one of the Channel Islands. The Nazis invaded it and occupied it as a prelude to a possible invasion of England. Chapman was still in prison on the island. He was transferred to a horrible Nazi prison in occupied France. He volunteered to spy on behalf of the Nazis.

Freed from prison, he underwent significant training with Abwehr, the German intelligence organization. After completing his training, he was parachuted into England to start his spying / saboteur career for the Nazis. Instead he promptly surrendered to British authorities. Unsure what to do with him, he was interrogated by the internal security service MI5 for several days.

Convinced that he was sincere, MI5 decided to use him as a double agent. They wanted to send him back to the continent to gather intelligence on their behalf. He made radio contact with the Nazis. To make it seem more authentic, MI5 faked an explosion at an airplane manufacturing plant to make it seem as if he fulfilled his primary mission.

Chapman then reinserted himself back into France. Greeted as a hero, he was awarded an Iron Cross. Now trusted even more, he was able to gain even more intelligence. He convinced the Nazis that he would be more valuable gathering intelligence back in England. He was then flown back and he parachuted back again into England.

There he was a fount of knowledge about German intelligence. This was during the time of the V-1 bombs. Communicating via a wireless supplied by the Nazis, he was able to feed false information to them regarding where the bombs were actually landing to trick them into changing the bombing trajectory to less populated or valuable areas.

By the end of the war, some people in MI5 had become tired of Chapman’s rapscallion ways. Ultimately, he was abruptly cashiered from the service.

While never quite reverting completely back to a life in crime, it’s fair to say that he didn’t exactly live on the straight and narrow. There were several times that he got in scrapes that MI5 quietly squashed to keep him happy and quiet.

In his later years, aware of his somewhat checkered life, he claimed to at least be ‘an honest villain’.

So that’s Eddie Chapman’s story. How was the book?

It was kind of a meh. The story was interesting. Chapman is, on the one hand, an interesting character. How could someone that was living on the fringes of society end up risking his life multiple times in the service of his country? What impelled him? Macintyre theorizes that Chapman had a nearly insatiable desire to lead an interesting, exciting, and dangerous life. That led him to his life of crime. Being a double agent during a world war would seem to be the ultimate expression of such a life.

On the other hand, he really is kind of an asshole. In England he had a woman that bore his child that he planned to marry. He convinced MI5 to supply a monthly fund to provide for her. Later in Norway, he met another woman that he planned to marry. Even worse, in Norway everyone thought he was a Nazi, so the woman was scorned by her fellow Norwegians for being a corroborator. He convinced the Abwehr to provide her a monthly stipend. Once the war was over, he ignored both of those women and ended up marrying a woman that he met on Jersey. They stay married even though apparently he was an inveterate philanderer.

During the war, the person that he was closest to was probably the Nazi that was head of his section in France. Even so, this was the person that he used and betrayed the most. Relationships to Chapman seem to have mostly a transactional element to them. He is not a person that I would trust with anything that I hold valuable.

The three star rating is for a couple of reasons. First of all, I actually didn’t find his story really all that engaging. He had a few moments of derring do, but there seemed to be a lot of sitting around, drinking, and womanizing. That part just wasn’t that engaging to me.

More importantly, Macintyre seemed to be enchanted with Chapman. Even though Chapman was clearly a morally dubious person, the book had a boys will be boys attitude in excusing him.

This might just be a facet of Macintyre’s writing. I’ve also read Operation Mincemeat, A Spy Among Friends, and The Spy and the Traitor. In all of these works, the protagonists were consistently presented with a roguish charm. Macintyre seems to be in thrall to those that ply the spycraft trade. I find such overt partiality while reading a history, even one that is a mass market narrative, to be a bit off key.

Coolest Film Of All Time?

Title: Elevator to the Gallows

Rating: 5 Stars

If I’m being honest, this isn’t really all that great of a film. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy it. The reason why I’m giving it such a high rating is that it is just about the coolest film that I’ve ever seen. If you’re ever at a cocktail party (that is, if we ever gather again in groups more than five) with cinephiles, you can drop a few facts about this film and, by the power of transference, you too will become just a tad bit cooler.

The plot is just a bit out of control. Florence Carala is married to the industrial magnate and apparent arms trader Simon Carala. Julien Tavernier works for the magnate.  He’s also having an affair with Florence. The two lovers conspire to kill Simon and make it appear to be a suicide. He successfully kills Simon, exits the building, starts his car, and realizes that he left some incriminating evidence behind. He leaves his car, still running, and takes an elevator back up to remove the evidence. As he does so, power to the elevator is shut off and he gets stuck with no way out. Meanwhile a local young thug and his girlfriend see Julien’s fancy car just sitting there, idling. They impulsively jump into it and take off. They head off on an adventure that ends with the young man killing a German couple. Since they were driving Julien’s car and wearing his clothes, suspicion falls on Julien. Once Julien manages to escape from the elevator, the police pounce on him, not for the actual murder of his boss but for the murders of the German couple. Florence desperately tries to clear Julien. In so doing, she does stumble upon evidence of Julien’s innocence of the couple’s murder but also evidence of Florence’s and Julien’s affair. At the end, it appears that both Florence and Julien will be arrested and convicted.

Got all that? Like I said, a bit out of control.

Let’s count all of the ways that this film is cool. Let’s start with the title. Can anyone come up with a cooler name than Elevator to the Gallows (the UK name, Lift to the Scaffold is a pretty damn good name too)? It is the perfect name for a crime noir film. Mentioning crime noir, there are few things cooler than a 1950s black and white crime noir film. It’s all about shadows, mood, and sex.

Louis Malle’s debut film, it’s part of the French New Wave movement. Without a doubt, that is a very cool cinematic movement. One of the most influential movements in cinematic history, it had a significant influence on such American auteurs as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, and Warren Beatty.

Being a French film, the actors are, of course, primarily French. They walk around in their coolly sophisticated clothes. The young couple is all about youthful nihilistic rebellion. The sullen boy lounges in his James Dean leather jacket. The young woman charms in her pixie haircut. Everyone smokes. Everyone is so cool.

What would a cool film be without cool cars? Julien is driving a 1952 Chevrolet Styleline Convertible. That is a cool car, but in coolness it pales next to the German couple’s car, a Mercedes Benz “Gullwing” 300 SL. Yes, it has doors that lift up like a DeLorean. Recently, such a car was sold for over $4,000,000.

All that is very cool, right? Well, that is nothing to what I’m about to say next. The music for the film was performed by, wait for it, Miles Davis. Yes, I’m talking about the great jazz trumpet player. If that’s not cool enough allegedly Davis recorded the entire set of music in one session, from 11PM to 5AM, while sipping champagne with Louis Malle.

His music is, by far, the best thing about the film. Having listened to it, I’m left to wonder why every 1950s black and white crime noir film didn’t feature Miles Davis. It is the perfect complement to the film. 

At the end of the film, Florence knows that she’s about to go away for a very long time and will never see Julien again. She softly whispers some words about life and death and the agelessness of love. It sounds like she’s reciting a beatnik poem at a 1950s era coffee house. As she does, you hear Davis’ mournful, soulful trumpet playing in the background.

And there’s nothing cooler than that. 

Accidental Immortality

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rating: 3 Stars

This is the story of Henrietta Lacks. Suffice to say she did not have an easy life. Born Black in Virginia, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child when Henrietta was four. Staying with her maternal grandfather, a poor tobacco farmer, she shared a room with her cousin. Pregnant by that cousin, she gave birth at fourteen. Later marrying the cousin, she ended up giving birth to five children, including one with development disabilities. Shortly after giving birth to her last child, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was treated for it at a segregated hospital but ultimately died a painful death at the age of 31. Her story might have ended there as just another story in a innumerable series of poverty and racism in the Jim Crow South.

The segregated hospital that she was being treated at was Johns Hopkins. There were researchers there that were trying to figure out how to keep cell cultures alive. Previously these cultures had only survived a day or two. As the doctor was treating Lacks, he took a culture of her cervical cancer cells and sent them to a researcher. Fully expecting them to die like all of the others, he was astonished that not only did the cells survive but they flourished and multiplied, seemingly with no end in sight. The cells were effectively immortal.

This had enormous consequences. First of all, this was in the 1950s during the desperate search for a polio cure. Jonas Salk had a possible vaccine but estimated that they’d need to experiment on two million monkeys to validate its safety and effectiveness, thus making it prohibitively expensive. Being able to perform these tests on thriving cell cultures was a leap in technology. To accommodate these new exciting developments, factories were created to culture and grow these cells (now known as HeLa). They proved to be so robust that quite literally trillions of cells were grown. Everyone was using them in their biological research. It was estimated that if all cells were laid end to end that they would encompass the planet several times over. HeLa cells were used in everything from cancer research to nuclear energy to space programs. Over ten thousand patents refer to them. They were the workhouse of biological research.

They were so robust that they caused industry problems. Traces of her cells were found in contaminated samples. In one particularly disturbing study, ten samples from different animals were collected under extremely rigorous conditions and yet some eight of them proved to have DNA markers of a black woman. This contamination caused millions of dollars of damage and brought several studies into question.

While all of these exciting developments were happening in the biological research world, the Lacks’ family continued on obliviously. They had no idea that her mother’s or grandmother’s cells were being used. In fact, Henrietta Lacks was never asked and she never consented to the use of her cells. Although not allowed today, that was considered standard practice in the 1950s. The Lacks family continued to live in poverty. All of Lacks’ children had an assortment of health problems (cousins really shouldn’t marry). One of her children was horribly abused after her death by the woman raising him. He ended up with severe anger issues that played a part in the murder that he ultimately committed. Several other descendants also ended up performing criminal acts and/or landing in jail. Lacks’ developmentally disabled child ended up at a segregated institution. It seems clear that several painful and dangerous brain experiments were performed on her (including one where all of the fluid is drained from her brain to allow a clear scan). Tragically she died at fifteen.

The book follows those parallel paths. At the same time that you read all about these scientific breakthroughs, you read of the Lacks’ family struggles. Until the contamination issue arose and researchers needed blood samples from surviving relatives for DNA comparison, no one gave any thought at all to the family. Billions of dollars in profits were made while the Lacks lived in grinding poverty and poor health.

The author developed an emotional bond with the family and did help bring about a measure of acknowledgment if not closure from the scientific community to the Lacks’ family. Some of the current generation have gone on to higher education with the goal of understanding and furthering the legacy of their ancestor.

Regarding the three star rating, I found that the scientific part to not have answered a couple of crucial questions. It did explain why the cells were immortal. Normal cells have a counter that decrements as it multiplies. Once it reaches the end, the cell dies. Cancer cells essentially reset the counter so they never die. Even so, one thing that is not clear is what makes Lacks’ cells especially robust in comparison to other cancer cells. Secondly, if they were worried about being so reliant upon one cell culture, why not just harvest cells from other cancer victims? It’s still not clear to me exactly why Lacks’ cells were particularly unique.

This might be just a personal preference, but I was a bit discomfited by the voyeuristic nature of the Lacks’ family part of the book. There was a much too intimate description of one of the Lacks’ relatives having a very personal spiritual experience with Henrietta’s daughter, Deborah. I also found the, again very personal, descriptions of Deborah’s physical and, more importantly, emotional problems to be intrusively voyeuristic. I’m sure that she gave consent but she is pretty clearly not exactly stable. When you consider that the author was a young white woman, it just seems somehow exploitative in of itself.