A Tale Of Two Plays

Back in the dark ages (two years ago), I’d go to a play about once a month or so. I was lucky in that I lived downtown in a large city where I had more than a dozen of professional theaters to choose from. I’d probably see around ten plays a year.

The pandemic put the kibosh on that. Not only that, but I moved. I now live about an hour away from a large city. I knew that this was going to pretty severely limit my theatrical possibilities.

Now that, at least where I live, most people have been vaccinated and are pretty good about wearing masks, things are opening up a bit more. This weekend I saw two theatrical productions. One was a high school production of Clue and the other was a university production of The Triangle Factory Fire Project.

Like I said, my theatrical possibilities are now limited.

The high school production was surprisingly good. The theatrical production in based upon the film, which in turn was based upon the board game. Therefore, sophisticated nuance was not expected.

It’s a murder mystery farce. The suspects (yes, they have names like Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, etc) have gathered at a mansion. During the course of the evening, the host (Mr Boddy) is mysteriously murdered. The suspects must solve the crime of who killed the host before the police arrive. As the night progresses, bodies begin to pile up and the characters begin to become more frantic and manic. It’s madcap silliness.

Hamlet is not being done here, but the actors did well with their parts. The stage crew deftly managed the ever changing stage. Everyone, both in the crowd and the troupe, were masked. The actors were wearing a clear mask, so you could see who was talking and all facial expressions. It was an enjoyable night out.

We went to a matinee the next day at the university. As you could probably guess, the play is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. This was an infamous fire in New York City in 1911. A garment factory located in the upper floors of a building caught on fire. Doors to stairwells and fire escapes were locked / blocked to prevent unauthorized breaks and theft. Workers (mostly young women) could not escape the blaze. With nowhere else to go, many people jumped to their deaths. Nearly 150 people, mostly women, perished. This resulted in workplace safety reforms and strengthened the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU).

So, this wasn’t going to be a madcap farce.

There were several problems with the first half of the play. We left at the intermission. I don’t recall, having now seen hundreds of plays, ever leaving a play at the intermission before.

The first act dealt with the fire. The second act, if we’d stuck around, would have been about the trial of the factory’s owners.

The first act could have been a harrowing tale of survival. Instead, the format of the play was news headlines and reading letters from survivors (ie epistolary). So, instead of watching some gripping tale, we had actors striding across the page shouting semi-random headlines (“Bread now 6 cents!” “Fire department needs an upgrade”). When the letters of survivals were read, apparently to increase dramatic effect, the letters were interleaved with each other. That might have been OK, but actors were reading multiple letters with little change of their delivery, so I quickly lost the thread of whose story was being told.

Not only that, but as with the high school, all were masked, including the cast. The cast here chose to wear standard medical masks. This obscured their faces. Even though lighting tried to help, often I was having trouble figuring out who was actually talking. Since the mask covered up their faces below their eyes, I couldn’t pick out any emotions that the actors were trying to present. I felt no connection with the actors’ performances. I might as well have been listening to a radio show with poor quality sound. The fact that the play’s composition was essentially entirely expository did not help matters. Show Not Tell would have been a really helpful idea to keep in mind.

It made for a production that seemed interminable. Doing some research after the play, it turns out that the trial part of the play would been court proceedings. Assuming that they followed the same pattern, I definitely made the right decision in abandoning at the intermission.

This brings up interesting issues for theatrical presentations in this pandemic twilight in which we’re apparently going to be endlessly living. Allowances must be made if mask wearing is a requirement. Not all plays lend themselves to this environment. Every possible tool must be provided to actors that allow them to be successful.

It would have been tough to do in the high school since vaccinations are just getting underway for children, but at least at the university, where I believe that vaccinations are required to attend classes, requiring the audience to show proof of vaccination status does not seem unreasonable. If so, that could mitigate the mask requirement. That was successfully done at the local theater in the borough. The audience wore masks and the performers did not.

I don’t know the answer, but what the university attempted to do was not it. I’ve written in some earlier posts about watching some theatrical productions that were done over Zoom. As weird as that was, I’d take that over what I just watched.

An Erudite Guttermouth

Title: Nine Nasty Words

Rating: 5 Stars

I should start with this post with a profanity trigger warning. It’s going to be hard to write this without using bad words, so be forewarned.

One of the main reasons that I read this book was because of the author. John McWhorter has several courses available on Great Courses. I’ve taken two of them. McWhorter is a linguist that seems to have at least facile knowledge of an astonishing array of vocalizations, languages, and linguistic theory. I really enjoy his lecturing style. He dresses and acts quite prim with a wry sense of humor. Being a linguist, it’s probably not unsurprising that he speaks in a clear, concise, precise manner. His talks are a flowing stream of perfectly formed sentences. Given his mild mannered, Mr Flanders presentation style, I was fascinated how he was going to approach writing the most profane words that English has to offer. 

It was worth it. I’m saying that not just because one of the chapters written by the staid McWhorter was called “A Motherfucking Addendum”. That was just the cherry on top of the sewer sundae. He wrote linguistic derivatives, historical usages, and current usages for hell, damn, fuck, shit, ass, cock, dick, pussy, and bitch. He also discussed, in depth, three words that I, as a cis white male, cannot say. I don’t even like saying the child like replacement words that people use that signify those words. Let’s just say that one is a racial epithet, one is a very crude term for female genitalia, and the other is a gay slur.

The racial epithet is undoubtedly the most divisive and controversial. It’s interesting, at the outset of that chapter, that McWhorter, in case you didn’t already know it, self identified as a black man. He doesn’t use it to excuse the fact that he’s writing the chapter. He accepts the reality that there is an extreme social stigma for a white person to use it, even academically. 

Since this book is essentially a laundry list of obscenity, the best way to show the greatness of this work is to provide my own list of some of the things that I learned reading it.

It’s interesting how profanity has developed over time. In earlier times, the profane was related to religion. Damning someone to hell when you believed in the literal concept of hell was an outrageous oath. It was outrageous not only because you were symbolically condemning someone to eternal suffering but you were also speaking in the name of God, the sole arbiter of that punishment. From the words God, damn, and hell, the following ‘safe’ oaths were used as replacements: zounds, gadzooks, golly, gosh, gor blimey, cripes, jeepers creepers, gee whillikers, and darn. The word drat is arrived at via a truly byzantine linguistic morphing that started at God rot.

Words that we consider now profane have not always been so. Very amusingly, McWhorter dug up some very interesting English names. People once walked this earth with names like Roger Fuckbythenavel, Henry Fuckbeggar, and Simon Fuckbutter. Place names include Fuckinggrove and Gropecunt Lane.

During the Enlightenment, the age of the individual began. What was communal began to become private. Whereas before people defecated and fornicated in the relative open due to lack of alternatives, over time such acts became more private. As a result, words related to bodily functions began to become more private, and eventually profane. Hence, we no longer care too much about damn or hell but we are still uncomfortable with shit and fuck.

In my lifetime, we have become much more sensitive to racism and sexism. That has led us to the point where there are words that I am simply not allowed to say. In my childhood, such words were used broadly with impunity. Understand that I’m not at all complaining. It’s just a fact that such words cannot be in my vocabulary. Language evolves and  these are the most profane currently in use.

As words became profane, it caused other effects. For example, cock has been around since Old English. It referred to, among other things, a male chicken or a valve to control liquid. In some forms of English, this is still done. However, in American English, we have roosters, spigots and faucets. These are words that have developed fairly recently to save the speaker from potential embarrassment. Similarly, comey refers to a rabbit. The pronunciation of comey was too close to a slang term for female genitalia. The word rabbit was a later substitution.

I know that we sometimes think of past eras as being less profane. McWhorter finds numerous examples that put the lie to that. One of his favorite examples, and one that has long been mine as well, is Lucille Brogan. She was one of the first blues singers to be recorded. Her specialty was dirty blues. An awesome example of such a song is Shave ‘Em Dry. If you’re interested, it’s definitely worth listening to the song and googling the lyrics. Recorded in 1935, its lyrics would embarrass Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.

If you have an interest in how language develops and have prurient, possibly immature interests, then then this book is for you. 

The Not So Innocence Of Words

I’ve been reading Nine Nasty Words, by John McWhorter. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be writing more about the book when I finish it, but suffice to say that it’s quite entertaining to read an amusing, erudite linguist taking a deep dive into profanity. That got me to thinking about language in general. At the same time, I’m seeing legislatures passing laws forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory. The fact that CRT is an academic theory that is not being taught in our public schools has not dissuaded those fearmongers who are so convinced that the US is under some nefarious attack by the woke mob from passing laws that nearly make it impossible to teach race in any meaningful way. Some laws prevent teachers from even mentioning the concept of systemic racism.

I’m not sure if I’d even heard of CRT six months ago. Ironically enough, hearing so much about it since has inspired me to research it a bit. If systemic racism is really baked into our society, we should be able to see it reflected in, oh, I don’t know, say language. Are there common phrases in our language that we commonly use that have a racist heritage? Sure, some phrases are pretty obvious. Master bedroom, master/slave content management (if you’re an IT geek), and blacklist are all good examples.

Let’s try to find some less obvious ones. Here we go.

Grandfathered in

I know that I’ve used this phrase many times. It means that new rules have been created but if you were doing something in violation before the new rules were implemented, you can continue doing it.

Well, let’s travel back to the South after the Civil War. Constitutional amendments were passed that made formerly enslaved people citizens and granted them (and by them, of course, I mean men) the right to vote. That seems pretty clear cut, right?

Well, the Southern leadership that survived the Civil War and remained in power weren’t about to let that happen. They knew that they couldn’t discriminate based upon color of skin, so they had to be creative. Instead, they passed voting requirements that included literacy tests, poll taxes, residency requirements, and property requirements. Now, such laws would have ensnared a bunch of poorer, less educated, white voters. Well, that wouldn’t do. So, they passed the laws and excluded those ‘citizens’ whose ancestors could vote before the Civil War. Shockingly enough, all of those ancestors were white.

This exception became known as a grandfather clause. 

Cake Walk 

Once again, I know that I’ve used this phrase many times. It means that a task is absurdly easy. I guess, in my naivety, if I thought about it, I probably thought that walking holding a cake is not difficult. While true, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Now, this phrase is a bit more obscure than grandfather clause, but apparently it started when enslaved people would wear cast off clothes of the plantation owners and would hold mock dances. The plantation owners would be amused by the spectacle, and apparently, in some cases, award cakes to dancers.

From that beginning, the minstrel tours took it up. White people in blackface would do exaggerated dances to mock the black people that originally started the tradition to mock white people dancing.

The phrases ‘taking the cake’ and ‘piece of cake’ also come from this same practice.

Peanut Gallery

Usually, this is part of a phrase that is something like, ‘no comments from the peanut gallery’. It means people sitting in the cheap seats or that are otherwise somehow not closely involved with the issue at hand. 

This phrase comes from the days when the South was explicitly segregated. Maximizing the separate while minimizing the equal, the seats reserved for Black Americans were either at the very back of the venue or in the upper balcony. In case peanut gallery was not blatant enough, other names for the section were n****r gallery and n****r heaven.

Yeah.

Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

This is the first joke that many of us learn. Yep, this joke originated in minstrel shows. Minstrel shows were all about making jokes about how dumb Black people are, and oh yeah, they sure do like their watermelon and chicken, amirite?

So, yeah, the dumbness of the joke and the fact that it was a chicken that was crossing the road made it a goldmine for minstrel show comedians.

No Can Do; Long Time No See

English is equal opportunity when it comes to racist turns of phrases. I know that I’ve used the phrases ‘no can do’ and ‘long time no see’ many times without thought.

Well, ‘no can do’ came out of the nineteenth century. During a time of Chinese migration, Westerners first started using the phrase to mock the Chinese accent. Regarding the second phrase, you guessed it. The phrase ‘long time no see’ was first created to mock Native Americans.

How many of those did you know? How many more are out there?

Do you still think that systemic racism is not a problem in the US? Maybe, just maybe, we should provide our children an honest appraisal of our country?

A German Orphan And A French Blind Girl Meet Cute

Title: All The Light We Cannot See

Rating: 4 Stars

Every now and then I try to catch up on Pulitzer Literature winners. This is how I happened to chance upon All The Light We Cannot See. Pulitzer prizes are awarded to American writers. Most of the time, the characters are American and/or the setting is in the US. This novel is different in that, even though the author is American, the setting and characters are French and German.

There are two main threads. One surrounds Werner Pfennig. When we first meet him, he is a child living in an orphanage in a coal mining town in Germany. There is no future for him. Once he reaches maturity, it’s predestined that he’ll be sent to work in the coal mines.

What saves him is a natural propensity and curiosity concerning radios. He devours all technical information. He finds a broken radio and repairs it. He becomes known throughout the neighborhood for his expertise. He fixes the radio of a prominent Nazi in his area. The Nazi recognizes that his talent could be beneficial to the Reich.

He is sent to a special school for Nazi youth. He recognizes that this experience could be what will save him from dying early in a coal mine. However, the price is that he is trained and raised to serve the Nazi cause. His sister, also at the orphanage, realizes that this price is too high and tries to deter him. Still, he continues on, and during World War II, he is assigned to the army. The army makes use of his radio skills to track down underground partisans fighting the Reich. He is the indirect cause of many deaths.

The second story is Marie-Laure. Blind, she is raised by her father, an expert locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. A stone, named the Sea of Flames, is rumored to be stored at the museum. It is believed that it bestows immortality upon the owner at the cost of great tragedy to those that the owner loves. 

When the Nazis invade and Paris is about to be overrun, her father and Marie-Laure flee to Saint-Malo. There they live with Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne. We learn that, before the Nazis came, the museum made three copies of the Sea of Flames. Her father is entrusted with one of the four gems. He has no idea if he has the real one. The father is arrested and is sent to work in a German factory. 

Etienne, deeply traumatized by World War I, has not left the house in years. With the father arrested, Etienne, himself a radio expert, is now impelled to aid the resistance by transmitting coded messages.

Thus fate now begins to bring Werner and Marie-Laure together. Will Werner track down Etienne’s transmission? If he does, what will happen to Marie-Laure?

The story is told in a nonlinear fashion. The last four days before the culminating event are interwoven with the longer narratives of Werner and Marie-Laure. All comes to a climax near the end of the book.

Werner has the more interesting narrative. He’s essentially an innocent that just wants to escape with his sister from their predestined nasty, brutish, and short lives. He sees his gift with radios as his way out. In the Nazi training school, he sees their brutal ways. He doesn’t approve but understands that this is his only path. He tries to look the other way but sees the evil anyway. When he’s searching for partisan radio transmissions, he’s not the one that does the actual killing but is forced to see the aftermath. Something in him breaks when an innocent young girl is killed. His is the universal story of how seemingly good people end up involved with horrific acts.

Being blind, Marie-Laure is heavily reliant upon her father. Her father works hard to encourage her independence. When he is arrested, Marie-Laure becomes an active participant in the Resistance movement. Although her father has always tried to protect her, in this world of occupation, she must find her own way.

Before her father was arrested, he’d given Marie-Laure the stone. A Nazi soldier, Reinhold von Rumpel, is dying of cancer. Knowing of the stone’s reputation for bestowing immortality, he seeks it. Knowing its importance, Marie-Laure is determined to keep him from it.

The story is beautifully, even lyrically told. I found it almost compulsively readable. 

Death, Denial, And Acceptance

Title: Lincoln in the Bardo

Rating: 5 Stars

It’s 1862. Willie Lincoln has just died in the White House of typhoid fever. Abraham Lincoln, destroyed by his beloved son’s death and with the war going poorly, doesn’t know if he can continue. Willie, stuck in something akin to purgatory, does not understand that he’s dead. He doesn’t understand why his father doesn’t respond to him. Will Abraham Lincoln find the will to continue living and to lead his country at its worst moment? Will Willie be able to leave this in between world before the demons from below rise up and anchor him there permanently?

From what I’ve read in other reviews, this novel was inspired when Saunders learned that Lincoln made a secret trip to Willie’s tomb to hold his dead body in his arms one more time.

Although death, grief, and acceptance are all themes here, the novel is not as dark as might be expected. Saunders has chosen an interesting literary device. I found it often humorous and at times oddly compelling, but fair warning that others that have read this work have been massively annoyed by it.

He tells the story by using over one hundred different narrative voices. Some of these are from memoirs. Some are from letters. Some are first hand witness accounts. Some of these are real. Most of them are fictional.

Most of the narration comes from beings that are in the state of bardo. Bardo is a Tibetan state of being that is between death and rebirth. In this case, these are beings that inhabit the cemetery that Willie is buried in. Their corporeal bodies are buried there. The people refuse to acknowledge that they’re dead. They refer to their coffins as sick-beds. They believe that at any moment they will regain their health or that their loved ones will come along and rescue them.

Most of them have unfinished business from their life. There is Hans Vollman, a much older man who has married a much younger woman in a marriage of convenience. Over time the relationship has blossomed into love. On the verge of finally consummating their relationship, he is struck by a beam. There is a man named Roger Bevins III. A gay man, he has attempted suicide in despair. Having changed his mind, he fell down stairs and landed in the kitchen, waiting for someone to come and rescue him. There are many, many other characters, each having their own voice and their own story that they feel the need to obsessively share.

Into all of this lands Willie. Not understanding that he’s dead, he’s decides to wait for his father to return. The others, aware that he will not come, unsuccessfully try to convince Willie to move on. Imagine their surprise when Abraham Lincoln arrives. In fact, he opens the coffin in which Willie lies and gently holds him. This causes a shock wave among the other bardo souls.

Later Abraham leaves the tomb but stays on the cemetery grounds. Willie begins to be ground down from demons. Desperate, Vollman and Bevins seek to somehow influence Lincoln so that Willie can be convinced to leave bardo. They do so by inhabiting Lincoln’s body. Modestly successful in influencing Lincoln, they find themselves being influenced by Lincoln, causing them to rethink their own decisions to stay in bardo.

This is a difficult novel to describe. One thing that I have not been able to communicate is how funny the novel is. The inhabitants of bardo go to great lengths to justify their belief that they’re not dead and that they are imminently on the verge of being returned back to normal life. A wide variety of people are represented in these pages. There are brutal slave owners, slaves, young women, old women, gay men, party boy bachelors, scientists, businessmen, clergy, uncouth mudsills, and many others.

I found it a bit difficult to get started with it, but I found myself quickly getting into rhythm with it. The many varied voices ended up weaving a tapestry of death, grief, denial, and ultimately acceptance.

Got The Devil Inside Me

Title: Rosemary’s Baby

Rating: 3 Stars

Let’s get this out of the way right now. Rosemary’s Baby is consistently listed as one of the all time great horror films. Here’s the thing. It’s not scary. It’s not shocking. At best it’s psychologically unsettling. Compared to other horror films that have followed it, it’s really not even all that unsettling.

Hence, even though it’s a classic, I can’t give it a top rating. What keeps it from getting an even lower rating is the historical context in which it resides.

It’s a fifty year old film, but for those that haven’t seen it, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) Woodhouse are a young couple in love. They move into a stately apartment building. They strike up a friendship with a couple of nosy neighbors named Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman (Sidney Blackmer) Castevet.

Suddenly, Guy, previously a modestly successful actor, experiences good luck. The lead in a play has gone mysteriously blind and Guy now takes over.

One night, after eating a suspiciously tasting dessert that Minnie made, Rosemary hallucinates that she’s been raped by a demon. She wakes up the next morning with scratches on her body. Guy claimed that he had rough sex with her while she was unconscious. Shortly thereafter, Rosemary discovers that she’s pregnant.

Guy and the Castevets take over Rosemary’s life. They force her to change her pediatrician. They force her to take home made remedies. They don’t want her to even leave the apartment. 

An old friend tries to warn Rosemary that the Castevets are actually witches but he mysteriously dies before she can talk to him. She tries to escape but they capture her and they bring her back to the apartment. She goes into labor.

When she wakes up, they tell her that her baby has died, but she hears crying. Investigating, she discovers her baby boy in the Castevets’ apartment, but the baby has non human eyes. The Castevets and their friends are a coven of Satan worshipers. Satan has impregnated her and her child is destined to lead his legion. Although horrified, hearing the baby’s cries, Rosemary begins to slowly rock his cradle. 

So, that’s the plot. Now let’s talk about some context.

Released in 1968, the Satanic plot was controversial. In 1966, Time magazine released its infamous Is God Dead cover story. Rosemary reads it in a doctor’s waiting room. In this context, religious leaders were upset over the Satanic plot and the film was roundly condemned. More tragically, in 1969, Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and others were murdered by the ‘family’ of Charles Manson. The ritualistic aspects of the murders bred fears of a satanic conspiracy.

This spawned an entire period of satanic panic. People were convinced there were satanic groups kidnapping and murdering children. Most famous was the McMartin preschool prosecution. When I was living in Washington, a similar case erupted in the small town of Wenatchee. Poor and mentally handicapped people were coerced into pleading guilty. After the panic subsided, there was no proof of any Satanic groups. A 1996 investigation of 12,000 accusations resulted in no cases that could be corroborated.

Fast forward to 2021 and we have QAnon and their accusations of Satanic ritual abuse. We have apparently learned nothing.

Another significant issue in Rosemary’s Baby is misogyny. Considering Roman Polanski’s own, shall we charitably say, checkered personal experience, this might seem surprising.

At the beginning, Guy and Rosemary are in love. Although somewhat childlike, she does seem to have a bit of liberty. Once she becomes pregnant, all of it is taken away from her. She can’t choose her doctor. She can’t choose her diet. Guy is uncomfortable when she has friends over. As this continues, she becomes even more wan. She cuts her hair into a tight pixie. Rosemary’s sharp cheekbones and very short haircut reminded me of the tragic heroine from the 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arch. She looks about fourteen. All attempts to escape are futile. She is foiled at every turn. She has no control over her body.

Now, here we are in 2021, where states like Texas allow bounty hunters to collect reward money if they turn in abortion providers. 

And I haven’t even mentioned the rape. When she wakes up the next morning with scratches all over her body, Guy just offhandedly mentions that he was drunk, overcome with desire, couldn’t control himself, and had rough sex with her unconscious body. Her response is essentially passive disappointment in his behavior. In 2021, a scene like that would be front and center in any film. Here it is barely even fleshed out.

Finally, the film’s ambiguity of whether Rosemary is paranoid or is truly in danger is interesting. Until the end of the film and all is revealed, the viewer is kept in suspense. Are the Castevets really sinister or are they just busy bodies? Is Guy really in league with them or is he just stressed out from his new role? Is her pediatrician really the best in the city or is he part of the coven? Of course, no one believes her and, in several scenes, she seems to have trouble believing herself.

Now, we live in the world of QAnon. Just this week, a large number of people gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas to wait for John F Kennedy Jr to make an appearance. Yes, that JFK Jr that died in a plane crash over twenty years ago. Why he would reappear at the sight that his father was assassinated at is not clear. Apparently, the plan is for Trump and JFK Jr to run together in 2024?

A majority of Republicans believe that Trump, who lost by seven million votes, was somehow cheated out of an election. Various theories include Chinese generated ballots and Italian satellites. This is the same election in which Republicans actually gained seats in the House. Apparently, Democrats are only marginally competent at large scale voter fraud.

So, even if, by 2021 standards, it’s at best a marginal horror film, it does bring up issues like: women and their lack of control over their bodies, consent, satanic conspiracies, and American paranoia.

All of that makes it a significant film, even if not a great horror film.

Rupert Lear

Title Succession

Rating: 5 Stars

What would happen if King Lear changed his mind? What if Cordelia was just as much of a monster as Goneril and Regan?

Well, you’d have Succession.

Logan Roy is the head of a conservative media and entertainment empire (Rupert Murdoch, anyone?). Advanced in years, he’s been grooming his eldest son, Kendall, to succeed him. At the last minute, on the day of the transition announcement, he announces that he’s changed his mind and will stay on for some period of years. This understandably shocks and disappoints Kendall. Later, Logan collapses and is incapacitated.

Into the void steps Kendall, his younger sister Shiv (Siobhan), and the youngest brother Roman. They fight amongst themselves for control. Eventually, Logan regains consciousness and takes back the helm. Having tasted power, the three siblings conspire, sometimes competitively, sometimes collaboratively, against their father as Logan fights to maintain his control.

In a nutshell, that’s the plot. Various plots are hatched to gain control. Counterattacks are launched to protect turf. It’s a constant, everchanging soup of alliances and betrayals. 

I honestly didn’t really enjoy the first season as much as I could have because I was watching it wrong. In most series of this kind (in its essential form, it’s seemingly equivalent to such potboiler melodramatic series from long past like Dallas or Dynasty), there is a good guy protagonist going up against a mustache twirling nemesis. I spent a good chunk of season one trying to figure out who I should be rooting for.

That was my flaw. All of these people suck. Even the characters not part of the immediate family suck. Shiv’s husband Tom is way out of his depth compared to the Roy family but is himself a people pleaser deluded by ambition. The Roy’s nephew Greg is a young awkward neophyte that still manages to steal documents to protect himself and that could be used to bring down Logan. The main executives are all sycophants willing to do nearly anything to keep their job titles and prestige.

The Roy family surpasses all of them. Kendall, fighting and occasionally succumbing to his drug addiction, is pure ambition and is full of corporate buzzwords but seems unable to close the deal. Shiv, resenting the fact that she’s living in a misogynist corporate world, is willing to do anything, even if it means talking an abused woman out of going public, to appear tough enough to be the top dog. Roman, the youngest, horribly insecure, never taken seriously, desperately is seeking the top job in some pathetic bid for approval. The oldest sibling (from an earlier marriage), Conner, lives a life of utter, useless leisure until, spurred by mysterious impulses, decides to run for US President.

A couple of things puts this above the run of the mill potboiler. One is that the characters, so nakedly ambitious and devoid of conventional morality, are themselves obviously broken. Raised by a seemingly omnipotent father and an emotionally distant mother, the three siblings are desperate for love and validation. Even as you watch their coldly calculated plans come to fruition and ultimately implode, at times you find yourself feeling sorry for them.

Even Logan, the patriarch that is the seeming architect of this family tragedy, is broken. He knows that his children fear him. It is only their ambition for his empire that keeps them obediently at his side. 

Logan truly is King Lear. Like Lear, he demands his children’s overflowing protestations of love and fidelity, even if, at moments of clarity, he understands the emptiness of their fealty. That must be the reason for his change of heart. Logan fears ending up like Lear. Once he gives up his power, his children will, at best, humor him or, at worse, infantilize him. What makes this worse is that Logan knows that he has no sweet, loving Cordelia that loves him unconditionally. He is surrounded by ruthless Gonerils and Regans. He knows that he can never relinquish power.

The other great thing about this series is the dialog. These are incredibly rich, incredibly well educated people using erudition, of both a low sort and a high sort, to wreak damage upon each other. Growing up together, spending years together, the characters know each other’s weaknesses and are ruthless in exploiting every vulnerability left exposed. This leads to caustic dialog that is quite hilarious to listen to. No one talks like this, but that doesn’t diminish its power. This is the best dialog that I’ve heard since Deadwood, David Milch’s stew of Shakespearean gutter mouth.

This currently has the reputation of being one of the best series streaming today. From what I’ve seen so far, this reputation is well deserved.

Man Plans And Zombies Laugh

Title: Zone One

Rating: 4 Stars

Colson Whitehead has been on a roll. He’s just released the novel Harlem Shuffle. His two previous novels, The Nickel Boys and the Underground Railroad, both won Pulitzer prizes. Underground Railroad has been adapted into a searing Emmy nominated miniseries on Amazon Prime. With the library wait list being so long for Harlem Shuffle, I thought that I’d take the opportunity to catch up on one of his older novels.

One of the things that’s fascinating about Whitehead is his literary range. Harlem Shuffle is a mystery set in 1960s Harlem. Underground Railroad is a magic realism novel that visualizes the Underground Railroad as a real railroad, complete with train stations and conductors. The Intuitionist posits a world in which elevator inspectors are an exalted profession caught up in the midst of an intense philosophical schism. The Nickel Boys is about the horrors of growing up in a juvenile facility. If that’s not enough range, he also wrote The Noble Hustle, a nonfiction book about his experience playing in the World Series of Poker. 

Zone One certainly displays more of that range. It’s set in a post apocalyptic dystopian zombie world. Years after a Last Night, when the zombies became feral and started feasting, civilization is just now possibly beginning to reemerge. Even so, it’s still under existential zombie threat. There are two types of zombies. One is the type that we’re all familiar with from previous films / novels. They are the dangerous attackers / eaters. The other type, known as stragglers, seem to be caught in an infinite loop of inaction. One will just be standing in front of a copier machine. Another will be aimlessly staring into a deli case. It’s not clear how they ended up at their destination. Do these places have some secret hold? Was it the last time they knew happiness? 

The federal government, battered but not destroyed, currently resides in Buffalo, New York. One part of New York City has been reclaimed from the zombies. This is the eponymous Zone One. Marines have previously cleared it of nearly all of the vicious zombies. Now, civilian sweepers do a block by block, building by building, room by room inspection to clear out the seemingly harmless stragglers.  

The protagonist is a man named Mark Spitz. He’s not The Mark Spitz. It’s the moniker that’s been assigned to him in honor of one of his near escape zombie exploits. He’s now one of the sweepers in Zone One. Over a three day period, as his three person team moves from building to building clearing out sweepers, in a non-linear, semi stream of conscious manner, you slowly learn his back story.

Starting with Last Night, when he stumbled upon his mother eating his father, he’s been constantly on the run. Starting by sleeping in trees, he sporadically ends up in seemingly secure buildings with a few other survivors. Sometimes he develops a close relationship with them, but eventually he understands the fragility of existence. Every safe haven that he’s ever occupied has inevitably been overrun, after which point he is once again interested purely in his short term survival. None of his relationships survived.

That is, until he ends up at this base in New York City, which is protected by high impregnable walls and impressive military might. With the stragglers being so harmless and easy to dispatch, the work here is easy. Once the zone has become cleared of the stragglers, the hope is that people will then move into the zone and begin to rebuild some semblance of the life that they had before. The government in Buffalo seems to be making great progress. Some crops are starting to come in. There have been advances in protective gear. Even children are now being born.

Will these young green shoots take hold and bring out a new civilization? Or is this just one more seemingly unassailable bastion of safety and security that will just inevitably be overrun?

Mark Spitz is an interesting character. He’s no hero. He’s no genius. He’s no athlete. In fact, he describes himself as being perfectly mediocre, a B student at everything. In the constrained world in which he now lives, he believes that this mediocrity is his greatest strength. Since the world itself is at best mediocre, it’s his very mediocre thoughts, actions, and dreams that allow him to function in it as well as he does.

Whitehead is a literary author. He is not a genre horror author. Therefore, if you expect a typical zombie horror novel, you will be disappointed. As I said, it’s nonlinear. There are parts of the novel that will not make sense when you read them but will become clearer many pages later. Even though the novel takes place over three days, memories from months or even years back bubble up in Spitz’s mind as they are triggered by what’s happening in the current moment. It’s not always immediately clear whether the action is taking place in the present or the past.

None of this is particularly difficult. It requires fairly careful, attentive reading. If you put in the effort, I think that you’ll find it interesting and thought provoking.

The American Dalit

Title: Dirty Work

Rating: 4 Stars

None of us want criminals running wild in the streets. None of us want mentally ill people pulling their hair out and screaming in our front yard. Few of us are willing to forsake reasonably priced pork, chicken, or beef. Even though we are worried about climate change, electric cars are still too expensive and its supporting infrastructure too weak.  Those of us who live in an area with poor mass transit do need gas in our cars just to get out of the house. None of us want completely unprotected borders open for everybody. We all fear terrorism and want to feel safe.

Here’s the thing. We want all of that, but we really don’t want to pay too much for it. Not only that, but we don’t want to think too much about it and we certainly don’t want to see it in our neighborhood.

And that’s the problem. There is now an entire class of people who perform these roles that we take for granted, don’t want to ever think of, and don’t want to ever see. In fact, even though they perform services that we know are absolutely vital, we actually kind of hold these people in contempt. Even worse, since we hold them in contempt, they also hold themselves in contempt.

That is the theme of Dirty Work. The author, Eyal Press, focuses on those occupations that dare not speak their names. We hear first hand stories of what it is like to work these jobs.

As you can guess, it’s not pretty. In India, there is the Dalit caste, which previously was known as the untouchable caste. These are people that perform jobs (eg that work with dead animals) that would defile an upper caste. There is no escaping from this caste. Born into it, you will die in it. Although there has been work to remove the Dalit stigma, even to this day it holds true. As I was reading Dirty Work, I was thinking of the Dalit caste and how much they seem to have in common with the people working the jobs that Press describes.

Careers discussed here include prison guard, oil roughneck, drone warfare occupations, border patrol, and meat packing factory workers.

Since there is no official caste system in the US, it’s easy to just think to yourself, well, these people chose those jobs, so they just need to suck it up and work there or go get another job.

If it was only that easy. By design, companies that perform these low caste type of work set up operations in rural areas with very limited economic opportunities.  Although they don’t pay much, they do pay better than other jobs in the area. They do provide some semblance of benefits. At meat packing factories, employers, if not actively encouraging, at least turn a blind eye to hiring undocumented workers. They do so knowing that they’ll work at a cheaper wage and cannot complain about working conditions. The bottom line is that it’s hard to quit a job when there are no other jobs available.

This also holds true for the military. On the surface, it seems that moving to an all volunteer army is a good thing. No one is forced to commit to military service. The military is composed of people that want to be there.

It’s not a coincidence that the military recruits most successfully from economically disadvantaged areas. Because we are becoming increasingly economically segregated, those of us fortunate enough to have some affluence have few friends or families that serve in the military. Our country has spent twenty years at war but, off the top of my head, I’m not sure if I can name an acquaintance that served during that time.

As long as the military works to keep US casualties down, it rarely makes headlines. It minimizes casualties by raining death from above in unmanned drones. Even if unmanned, there still are legions of analysts that have to identify potential targets and operators that fly the drone and fire the missiles. Death from a couple of thousand miles away still leaves a mark on those doing the killing. One operator tells the story of how proud he was to wait until a target’s young son left the room before firing the missile. Afterwards, he watched as the young son came back and carefully put back together the dismembered target’s body. Even with all of our technology, there is still great room for interpretation. Many times, missiles were fired on at best sketchy intelligence.

Back before the 1980s, we used to warehouse our mentally ill. They’d be shut away in institutions to be treated poorly. Think Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. There was an outcry over that and such institutions were justifiably condemned. Instead of actually trying to solve the root problem, the end result was that mentally ill people ended up on the streets where they could be a danger both to themselves as well as to others. With nowhere else to put them, such people end up getting arrested and being sentenced to prison. This was done when neither the prison system nor the prison guards were prepared to accommodate them. We are now in a situation where the mentally ill are certainly not being treated for their condition but instead are being horribly mistreated and sometimes killed.

I think that we can all agree that this is horrible. We seem to lack the collective will to try to do better. As long as this continues to take place in the rural shadow land of the US using people of limited economic mobility, there’s a good chance that we never will. There’s some very rich corporations betting on the fact that we will not rend this veil of deniability.

Meet The New Dynasty, Same As The Old Dynasty

Title: Superpower Interrupted

Rating: 4 Stars

Several months ago, when I was talking about Michael Beckley’s book, Unrivaled (here to read it), I talked about how paranoid the US is about foreign adversaries that it thinks are on the verge of eating our collective lunches. We went through waves of fear about Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union. Right now, we seem to be cresting the China wave. As Unrivaled tries to convince, these fears, like the other fears, are probably dramatically overstated. 

That got me to thinking though, what do I really know about China? I vaguely know about Chairman Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. I’ve read about the horrors that they experienced during WWII. I’m less aware of people like Sun Yat-Sen and events like the Boxer Rebellion. I figured, as some seem to fear, that if I’m going to be forced to learn Mandarin at the feet of my future Chinese overlords, then I should try to learn just a little bit more about China.

Superpower Interrupted is a great one volume introduction to the history of China. Since it is one volume, and not a significantly sized one at that, by no means is it a robust history.

The first thing that you’ll be impressed with is the span of Chinese history. For those of us in the US, our history starts (and just ignore all of those people that were already here) in 1619. That’s a pretty impressive 400 years. Well, the Qing dynasty (the last of ten!) in China started in 1644. The first, the Shang, started in 1554 BC. It’s not as if those early dynasties were insignificant to later history. The Chinese writing system was started in the Shang dynasty. The second dynasty, the Zhou, created philosophy, literary, and government traditions that were still dominant over a thousand years later.

George Washington was elected President in 1789. So, our government has been in its current form for 230 years. Well, that’s impressive, but the Shang dynasty lasted 500 years, the Zhou dynasty lasted 800 years, the Tang dynasty lasted 300 years, the Song dynasty also lasted 300 years, 300 years again for the Ming dynasty, and 350 years for the Qing dynasty.

Until China encountered the West, it saw itself as the dominant power on Earth. There were no regional competitors even close to it. That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be conquered militarily. In fact, many times it was. There were several episodes where the Chinese dynasty essentially paid tribute to barbarians on its borders to keep them appeased. Both the Mongol and the Manchus not only conquered China but actually created their own dynasties. 

Even if it didn’t always dominate militarily, Chinese culture ruled supreme. Even when the Mongol and Manchus set up their own dynasties, they eventually adopted Chinese customs. Not just in China, but in the entire region it was a given that China was the superior culture. Neighboring countries adopted variations of Chinese writing, government, and philosophies. These same countries would periodically visit to pay tribute to whomever was the current emperor.

It wasn’t just the long length of several of the dynasties that led the Chinese people to appreciate stability. The interval between dynasties could be a dangerous time as one dynasty fell and the next one arose. Entire cities could be devastated in the struggle. In some cases, there could be 50 years of chaos before the next dynasty arose. In fact, there was one 350 year period in Chinese history simply known as the Period of Disunion where there was no central political authority. Still, even during these times of chaos, Chinese culture was still unquestionably dominant.

There are many things that were first used in China that we rely upon today. People probably know about things like silk, porcelain, paper, and gunpowder. Well, the Chinese also developed the first compasses to aid them on their sea journeys. The first printing presses with movable types were created in China. Paper money, backed by what was essentially a central bank, were first issued by China over a thousand years ago.

Today we primarily think of China’s mass manufacturing power. Well, that’s not exactly a new power. A thousand years ago, they could produce products at a rate that was nearly unimaginable, and they could do so cheaper than anyone else. In fact, setting a trend that continues today, China could manufacture the product and ship it vast distances cheaper than it could be produced locally.

China finally met its match in the great cultural conflict with the West. When the first Western traders came, the Chinese felt that these would be just more people that would kowtow to the emperor and eventually start emulating the Chinese culture. It took a long time for the Chinese to understand that the Western powers had their own philosophy and culture and were not interested in becoming more Chinese.

By the time that China woke up to the dangers of the West, it was nearly too late. As with most other trading partners, China had a massive trade imbalance with the West. China would ship out its products and would receive in turn silver. This worked out while the Western nations were plundering the silver mines of the New World. Eventually the West became tired of emptying out their treasure and sending it to China.

This was particularly bad for England. Tea mania had hit England. Tea exports dwarfed all other exports. England hit upon a particularly unsavory way to not only equal but to completely invert the trade imbalance with China. England, under the auspices of the East India Trading Company, exported unimaginable amounts of opium to China. At one point, it was estimated that some twenty percent of the Chinese population was addicted to it. 

The Chinese government, realizing that it had a problem, tried to stop the opium trade. Incensed at this attempt to restrict trade, the English responded by sending in warships. This led to the First Opium War. Two thoughts, first if in something called the Opium War, you’re on the side of opium, you’re probably in the wrong. Secondly, if there is a First Opium War, then that implies that there was a Second Opium War. If you’re fighting on the side of opium in not one but two wars, well, now you’re nothing but an asshole. This does kind of lead one to think about our futile attempts to interdict trade through our own drug wars.

These actions, among others, exposed the weakness of the Chinese governments. Seeing that weakness, the Western powers (and Japan!) saw opportunity and effectively took over huge chunks of China. There were various uprisings against this oppression (see Boxer Rebellion) but to little effect. This brought to an end the last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, in 1912.

This brought on another of those rough periods of Chinese history where much was chaos. The Chinese were brutalized by the Japanese during WWII. However, at the end of WWII, China came out of it as one of the victors (with a cost of fifteen to twenty millions lives). There was a civil war between Kai-Shek’s nationalists and Mao’s communists. Despite being nearly wiped out, ultimately Mao emerged the victor. The chaos wasn’t over yet. There was Mao’s Great Leap Forward, designed to forcibly move to a communist society, which resulted in deaths of between 15 to 55 million (many of them due to famine). The Cultural Revolution is also believed to have led to millions of deaths.

After Mao’s death, eventually Deng Xiaoping took on the mantle of leadership. Understanding that communist principles were failing, he embraced the growth of capitalism and trade with other nations. Having set China on that path in the 1980s, by the time 2021 came around, China was once more a superpower. Not content with just being an economic superpower, it is aggressively building its military and is trying to have a larger soft influence in the world via projects like the Belt and Road initiative. Its current president, Xi Jinping, has managed to remove term limitations on the office and is centralizing the decision making.

It appears that an 11th dynasty, the Communist Party, with Xi as its emperor, is in place and is ready to rule. It remains to be seen how that will unfold.

One thing that I did find interesting is that these two books, Unrivaled and Superpower Interrupted have both flown under the radar. On Goodreads, it’s not that unusual for a best seller to have over 1,000,000 ratings and over 100,000 reviews (where people took the time to actually write their thoughts on what they just read). For these two books, they both have less than 200 ratings and less than 50 reviews. Granted, it’s not exactly nail biting summer time reading, but you’d think that if people were really worried about our future with China, that books like this would be a valuable resource to help inform you.

Nah, it’s probably just better to let loud talking heads scare and enrage you on topics that they know little about so that you continue to watch their show so that some dude can sell more of his pillows.