Guy Ritchie If He Was Japanese

Title: Bullet Train

When it first came out, it seemed that Bullet Train had more than its share of critical hate. I checked Rotten Tomatoes, and sure enough, it got at best mediocre reviews. I wasn’t particularly motivated to see it when it was in theaters but when it came up on my Netflix feed I decided to give it a shot. To my surprise, I quite enjoyed it.

When I did a bit of research, I discovered that it was based upon a Japanese novel. I did a quick check and, sure enough, it was available at the library, so not only did I watch the film but I just finished reading the book.

There are several differences between the novel and the film, but at a high level, they both share a common plot thread. The main protagonist, named Ladybug (played by Brad Pitt in the film), is an underworld figure that has been contracted to board a train, steal a bag, and then get off at the next stop. Sounds easy, right? What could go wrong?

Well, basically everything. The two men that he steals the bag from are themselves dangerous underworld operatives on a mission. A very dangerous gangster chief’s son has been kidnapped. Their job was to retrieve the son and the bag holding the ransom. They’re successful and are on their way back when the son is mysteriously murdered by poisoning and Ladybug steals their bag, so they’re understandably concerned that the gangster chief will not be amused by any of this. They’re after Ladybug. There’s another hitman on board that poisoned the chief’s son. There’s yet another hitman on board that has an existing grudge on Ladybug. The novel and the film have additional different characters of ill repute loitering around on the train. There’s a snake running amok. Because of all of this, Ladybug cannot get off the train no matter how hard he tries.

In both the novel and the film, Ladybug appears to be cursed by bad luck. In the film, he’s seemed to have had a couple of jobs recently go bad. As a result, he clearly has been in therapy to regain his self-confidence. Throughout the film, he tries to center himself through self affirmation. He uses psycho-babble with the other hitmen that he fights. It’s very amusing.

In the novel, Ladybug is just chronically unlucky. Every job that he’s ever been on, no matter how simple, becomes horrendously complicated. At this point, he just has a fatalist point of view. What go wrong will go wrong and he just has to live with it. He’s actually quite philosophical about it. Although a different take, it’s still amusing.

In the novel, another main character is a seemingly innocent but sociopathic teenage boy. He likes to manipulate and threaten people. Convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else, he tries to control every situation. In the film, the other main character is a seemingly innocent teenage girl that everyone underestimates but who proves to be quite formidable. Although it appears that she’s on the train by chance, it turns out that she’s a key player in the whole plot.

In both the novel and the film, the two hitmen that rescued the kidnapped gang leader’s son are named Tangerine and Lemon. Tangerine is the thoughtful, careful one while Lemon is much more carefree and tries to associate everyone he meets to a character from the Thomas the Tank Engine show. In the novel, they are not brothers but look so much alike that people assume that they’re brothers. In the film, one is white and the other is Black but the two are actually brothers that grew up together. The two of them have a rapport quite reminiscent of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction.

Although I just made a Tarantino reference, as I watched the film, the director that I kept coming back to was Guy Ritchie. Not his Sherlock Holmes films but his gangster films like Snatch, RocknRolla, The Gentlemen, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. As with the Ritchie films, the bad guys are smart, funny, loquacious, and violent. The plot has many twists and turns as the protagonist gets the upper hand, loses it, gains it again, and loses it again. You keep watching the film wondering where the protagonist will land.

Having said that, this film does not quite rise to the level of Guy Ritchie. Even so, if you’re a fan of such films, I’d recommend both the novel and the film. If you have to choose one, this is one time where I’d probably recommend the film over the novel. I enjoyed both, but Brad Pitt brought great charisma, humor, and charm to the role of Ladybug. I also found the female teenager in the film more interesting than the male teenager in the novel. Tangerine and Lemon had great rapport in the film. On the other hand, the ending of the film devolved into a Speed-like out of control train climax out of character with the preceding plot while the ending of the novel was more satisfying and true to the spirit of what came before.

There’s A Mrs Dalloway In All Of Us

Title: The Hours

Rating: 5 Stars

The title of this blog is also what I wrote as my Goodreads review. Somehow the title feels right even though I’m not sure what it means. As I write this, I’ll try to see if I can actually figure that out.

This book is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. A couple of years ago, I read Mrs Dalloway and wrote about it here (with a similarly possibly profound / possibly nonsensical title of Don’t Cross The Streams Of Consciousness). A very simple description of the novel is that it is a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway as she plans a party. Along the way, ideas of death, suicide, mortality, aging, love, love lost, and forbidden love all bubble up in a then innovative stream of consciousness.

If you’ve read that post, you’ll know that I wasn’t exactly blown away by Woolf’s novel. It was interesting and challenging but I didn’t find it particularly engaging.

Given my somewhat lukewarm enthusiasm for Woolf’s novel, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to read The Hours. However, I am kind of a list obsessed kind of guy and The Hours did win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By now, I’ve read newly every prize winner since 1970. The only ones that I had left were The Hours and The Goldfinch, so I kind of felt obligated to read The Hours (and I’ve got my eyes on you too now Donna Tartt!).

The Hours tells three different stories that share the common thread of being related to the novel Mrs Dalloway. First of all, set in the 1920s, there’s Virginia Woolf herself trying to figure out her new novel (the yet unwritten Mrs Dalloway). Set in the 1940s, Laura Brown, a young housewife pregnant with her second child and feeling stifled by domestic life, is trying to find time in her day to read the novel Mrs Dalloway. Finally, set in the 1990s, there’s Clarissa Vaughn, a sophisticated New Yorker planning a party for Richard, an award winning poet and Clarissa’s lifelong friend and once lover that is now dying of AIDS. Long ago, Richard has taken to calling her Mrs Dalloway.

In all three stories, Cunningham stays true to the basic literary framework of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. In each, the events take place over one day. In each, the story is told in a stream of consciousness form from multiple viewpoints. Even though the story is told over one day, the stream of consciousness allows for periodic Proustian reveries of memory as a character encounters a scent, a person, or any other trigger.

The same themes that, due to the time in which was written, were subtly implied in Woolf’s novel become much more explicit in this one. In the Woolf novel, Mrs Dalloway obliquely refers to an aborted youthful love affair with a young woman named Sally. Here,  Clarissa Vaughn (by the way, Clarissa was Mrs Dalloway’s name in Woolf’s novel) is in a long term lesbian relationship with a woman named Sally. Several characters in that thread are openly gay (and being the 1990s, affected in various ways by the AIDS epidemic). Laura Brown shares a unexpected but pleasurable kiss with one of her neighbors.

Death, mortality, and suicide figure predominately in all three stories. In fact, the novel’s prologue starts with a description of Virginia Woolf’s actual suicide. The character Virginia Woolf is planning on having her character Mrs Dalloway commit suicide but eventually changes this focus to another character. Clarissa is coming to grips with the fact that she is a middle aged woman. The dying poet that Clarissa Vaughn is planning a party for commits suicide. Laura Brown, desperate to leave her trapped domestic life, contemplates suicide. 

The three different plots ultimately do come together in an unexpected way. Even though it is a twenty-five year old novel and a film was made of it, I won’t ruin it here. Suffice to say that I found it extremely well done.

Reading this was odd to me because, as I’ve mentioned, the stream of conscious nature of the novel Mrs Galloway actually left me feeling somewhat disengaged. Although it’s a fairly slim novel, I found myself struggling to finish it.

This was not the case with The Hours. I’m not exactly how or why, but Cunningham’s approach pulled me in. I was engaged with the three main characters. I cared about them and what was going to happen to them. Not only that, but as I read, the memories that the characters surfaced triggered my own personal memories. In so doing, I found myself relating closely with all three women.

I think that’s what I mean when I say that there’s a Mrs Dalloway in all of us. Reading this book and the themes that it discussed triggered my own personal thoughts on the sensitive subjects raised by the novel.

An Amuse-bouche Of History

Title: The United States of Absurdity

Rating: 4 Stars

When I read a nonfiction book, oftentimes it’s a dense book on some weighty subject. This year I read Gotham, which is a 1200 or so page history of New York City (only up to 1898!). Some years ago, I read The Power Broker, which is an even longer biography of Robert Moses. I’ve read pretty in-depth histories on wars, racism, sexism, and struggles for equality and against injustice.

This is not one of those books. This is an extremely lightweight book written by two comedians. They write about a couple of dozen odd episodes in US history. No episode takes more than four or five pages (most are about three pages).

To me, that’s a good thing. Not everything has to be serious and weighty. Each vignette is written from a humorous point of view, even if the actual outcome is not at all funny. People do die in some of these events.

This book has a soft spot in my heart because it is reminiscent of how I fell in love with history in the first place. It’s not like I have some natural affinity with the dates and people that normally populate a typical school history textbook. When I was young, I had a weird predilection for trivia. My parents, wanting to nourish their budding nerd, would buy me random trivia books. From these books, I learned wacky, weird things that I found amusing. I learned that history can be more than just memorizing dates and places. History is alive with action, mystery, humor, and just plain old oddness. Ultimately, that small spark led me to reading seemingly interminable tomes that I now for some reason find fascinating.

I had some familiarity with probably about half of the episodes described in the book. Even those that I’d read about before, encountering them here was like greeting old friends.

What kinds of historical events are described here?

Well, there’s the story of Mike Malloy. Malloy was an alcoholic lurking about a dive bar during Prohibition. Seeing what a beaten down drunk he was, the owner of the dive bar and his friends took out a number of life insurance policies on him. The bar owner then gave Malloy unlimited drinks, thinking that he’d quickly drink himself to death. Unfortunately for the owner, Malloy apparently had an unlimited capacity for alcohol. Failing that, he started giving Malloy straight shots of wood alcohol (you know, poison). Nothing doing. They started giving him free sandwiches soaked in wood alcohol and full of rotting seafood. Malloy collapsed. They thought he was dead. Instead, he started snoring. Their attempts to kill him got even more desperate and more outlandish, verging on the comical. He proved harder to kill than Rasputin. 

If that doesn’t capture your interest, how about the Straw Hat Riots? In the early 20th century, hats were considered standard attire for men. Straw hats were popular but there was definitely rules around the wearing of them. Straw hats were only to be worn between May 15th and September 15th. In New York City, this rule was strictly enforced. Starting around September 13th, youth gangs would roam the streets looking for men wearing straw hats. At a minimum, the gang would knock the hat off the man’s head and destroy it. Sometimes, the men would be beaten. The straw hat wearing men did not take kindly to this treatment. This led to riots that had to be broken up by the police. Men ended up in the hospital. One man was killed. All this over wearing a straw hat slightly late in the season.

Let’s not forget about John Brinkley. Starting around 1920, he was a doctor (well, he purchased a medical degree) specializing in male sexual dysfunction. He had a brilliant inspiration. Everyone knows the phrase “randy as a goat”. Well, what if he took goat testicles and transplanted them into men? He tried it and claimed all kinds of success (and some forty deaths that he didn’t advertise quite so openly). It probably didn’t help matters that he frequently performed surgeries drunk and with unsterilized instruments.

That’s just a quick selection. If none of those catch your fancy you can read about a meat shower, one of the all time great baseball pitchers that would go running off the mound whenever a fire engine drove by, the time when people in Rhode Island thought that vampires were spreading tuberculosis (and the somewhat extreme measures that they took in response), and the real reason why George Washington might have died (hint, doctors really, really didn’t know what they were doing in those days).

If you have a free hour or two to kill and would like to learn about some of the smaller, darker corners of American history, this book would be well worth your time. 

 

 

A Cold War Assassin Revenge Comedy Buddy Series

Title: Kleo

Rating: 5 Stars

I don’t often write about television series. Usually books, films, and history are my jam. Every now and then, one does catch my fancy. So it goes with Kleo.

First of all, a word of caution. It is a German series, so it is subtitled. Hopefully that won’t scare you off. Jella Hause stars as Kleo. Set in the late years of East Germany, Kleo is an efficient and brutal East German secret police (Stasi) assassin. One night she infiltrates West Germany and successfully kills her assigned target. Once she comes back to East Germany, she finds herself unexpectedly arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Pregnant, she loses it in a prison fight. Now she has lost everything and it appears that she will wither and die in jail.

Things change when the Berlin Wall falls and, shortly after that, the East German government itself collapses. All political prisoners are released. Kleo, now free, with her ruthless implacable efficiency, seeks to discover who imprisoned her and to exact revenge upon them.

At the same time, there is a West German police officer named Sven (Dimitrij Schaad). He’s a sweet natured, bumbling, low level officer. Having been at the disco where Kleo assassinated her last victim, he becomes obsessed with finding her. In so doing, he loses his job and his wife.

Over time, the paths of Sven and Kleo begin to cross. After almost killing Sven, Kleo decides that the two of them should team up. Sven, once convinced of the larger truth that Kleo is trying to discover, agrees and the final third or so of the series are the two of them working together to understand why Kleo was betrayed by her own government. Ultimately, they stumble upon a top level conspiracy that could blow apart the fragile Cold War peace.

Why do I like it so much? After all, it just seems to be just another grim graphic revenge action series. Make no mistake about it, many people die. Kleo is a one woman wrecking dynamo.  It kind of sounds like Kill Bill or John Wick.

There are two things that put it a cut above the rest. The first is that, surprisingly enough, it’s actually quite funny. Sure, Kleo is a killing machine, but over time she does it all with what can only be described as impish humor. She seems to always be on the verge of a wry smile flickering across her face. Her eyes light up with delight as the adventure continues. Hause brings significant charisma to a role that could have been deadly (if not boringly) serious. Similarly, Sven, with his borderline competence, is also quite funny. A peaceful man, once he teams up with Kleo, he is hilariously appalled by her terminator behavior. The two of them together are a delight to watch.

There are other characters that are also quite fun. There is the West German Thilo (Julius Feldmeier) that somehow ends up living with Kleo. He is determined to start a nightclub featuring techno music so that he can be teleported back home to his home galaxy to save some princesses (yes, you did just read that correctly). There is the East German Uwe (Vincent Redetzki), a dorkish assassin out to get Kleo. Everyone seems to be having fun.

The second reason is about some of the other characters in the series. One of the characters that Kleo must track down and kill is Erich Mielke. The leader of East Germany during this time is Erich Honecker. A character in this series is supposedly his wife (named Margot). Here, Margot is evil in a communist state apparatchik kind of way and has improbably purple hair. For some apparently random reason, much of the series is set in Chile.

Here’s the thing. None of that is random. Mielke was head of the Stasi. Clearly, in real life, he wasn’t murdered by Kleo (he was sentenced to prison but ultimately was released due to ill health and died in a nursing home), but he is a historical figure. Even weirder, Honecker did have a wife named Margot. Margot led the forced adoption of children of dissidents and created prison like conditions for children. So, yes, she was kind of evil in a communist state apparatchik kind of way. Not only that, but Margot was known as the “Purple Witch” due to her purple dyed hair. Finally, when East Germany finally fell, leaders looking for asylum for some reason did seem to flock to Chile.

I did not know any of this. As a history geek, being exposed to this little known (at least to me) side of history was quite interesting. Also, this mixing of reality within a revisionist revenge story is reminiscent of Inglorious Basterds.

For all of these reasons, a series that I came to with very limited expectations hit the ball out of the park.

 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ve Read Repeatedly

Title: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Rating: 5 Stars

David Foster Wallace leaves a complicated legacy. For one, his life and death are tragic. Beset by mental illness, in his younger years he was hospitalized under psychiatric care. Finally, he found a suite of drugs that managed his condition. This allowed him to lead a productive, seemingly happy life. Apparently, his drugs forced him to very closely manage his diet. After a bad experience, his doctor told him that there were recent pharmaceutical developments that mitigated this side effect. So, he abandoned the prescription regime that had been working for him and tried fresh varieties. None of these proved effective. After trying for some time, he decided to go back to his original medicines. Tragically, these also were no longer effective. I can only imagine the despair that he must have felt knowing that he abandoned a situation that was difficult but manageable only to find himself in a situation where nothing worked. In despair, he took his own life.

Another part of his legacy is his treatment of women. He had a relationship with the memoirist, Mary Karr. Among other things, she claimed that he threw her out of a car, climbed into her house, and followed her five year old son home.  If he was still alive, the #meToo movement very easily could have netted him.

Of course, the large part of his legacy is his writing. The novel Infinite Fiction is generally considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century. I remember the absolute tsunami of publicity and critical praise that was unleashed upon its release. For those that haven’t read it, it’s a novel encompassing over 900 pages of heavily footnoted material. It’s got everything in it, from tennis to AA to wheelchair assassins to underground filmmakers to mathematical equations. It’s a brilliant, funny, strange, pretentious novel that at the same time is almost compulsively readable.

One tragic (at least to the literary world) consequence to writing such a novel is that apparently Wallace developed some kind of a writer’s block that kept him from completing another novel. I can empathize. It’s hard to imagine how you’d follow that up. After his death, his editor essentially scrap booked another novel (The Pale King) from snippets of text that Wallace left around. Needless to say, it was no Infinite Jest.

If it wasn’t enough that Wallace wrote one of the all time great novels, he was also a brilliant author of essays and short stories. A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again is his first collection of essays. These essays generally fall into two categories. The first is where he takes on what would be a typical journalist assignment. Examples include here a week on a cruise ship, attending the Illinois state affair, and following along with a middling but still world class tennis player. The second is cultural criticism. These include essays on television and an analysis of critical literary theory.

I keep using this word, but, in both categories, he writes brilliantly. In the essay on television, he writes about the voyeuristic nature of television viewing, the bizarre ability of actors to quite consciously act naturally, and how televisions utter embrace of irony leaves it essentially immune to serious criticism and has a severely (possibly fatally) deleterious impact upon the future of literature. It’s an essay that needs to be read to be believed.

The journalist assignments are quite postmodern. Wallace inserts himself aggressively into all of these essays. There is no impersonal description. He is a character in the essay. Especially in the cruise and the state fair essays, he comes to them from an elitist, cultured, sophisticated perspective. He writes, at times, in what can only be described as a snide manner about the people that are unironically enjoying these events. On the one hand, it’s essays like these that make ‘real’ Americans hate the coastal elites with their condescending sneers. Wallace himself recognizes this and, as a character in the essay, portrays himself as a hapless, clueless, overly analytical, and frankly, ridiculous figure. At the same time, he’s making quite insightful comments regarding the state of our culture and country. They’re also, in some cases, incredibly funny. The description of the carnage that takes place during the baton twirling competition at the state fair, again, needs to be read to be believed.

His essay on taking a luxury cruise in the Caribbean took on a special resonance for me because I read the essay while on my own luxury cruise in the Caribbean. I was able to relate to and enjoy the essay so much more as I personally experienced it.

I believe that there was a bit of controversy regarding some of the journalistic essays. Expecting him to abide by typical journalistic ethical practices, people seem to expect absolute truth in his reporting. In my opinion, this is misguided. Although clearly describing events that took place, it seems equally clear to me that these are also works of fiction. The fact that possibly every conversation did not take place exactly as he reported it seems of little consequence to me. Again, this is postmodern fiction. A blending of reality and fiction just seem to be par for the course.

Although I gave it five stars, I did so primarily because this, over the past twenty years, is at least the third time that I’ve read these essays. If you’re approaching them for the first time, I’d hazard that you would not give them the same rating. First of all, these essays are dated. They were all written in the 1990s. For example, the essay on television has no concept of the streaming revolution that was coming its way. Even so, I’d argue that the central ideas that Wallace is arguing within it still hold true. Another consequence is that language and sensibilities also change over time. You will come across some jarring phrasing such as the use of oriental to describe people. There are a few other examples that reminded me that the world has changed while these essays have not.

On a similar note, especially considering what we know of Mary Karr’s experiences with Wallace, some of his description of women now seem problematic. Especially in the state fair and cruise essays, Wallace attributes characteristics to women via the shortcut of negative descriptions of their appearance, which isn’t a great look considering.

One final note is not at all the fault of Wallace. He makes extensive use of footnotes in several of these essays. I read this collection on my Kindle. Users of Kindles knows that its use of footnotes leaves a bit to be desired. If you do read the collection, I’d strongly recommend that you read a hard copy version.

With all of those caveats, I have to once again use the same adjective when describing this collection. It is brilliant. His other collection, Consider the Lobster, is outstanding as well. Over the years, I’ve read many other essay writers and there are very few that even comes close to this level of excellence.

Catnip For President Geek

Title: Accidental Presidents

Rating: 5 Stars

For those long term readers of this blog, you’ll know that I have a weird obsession with US Presidents. I live with two young children who are, I wouldn’t say impressed, but slightly amused (bemused?) by the fact that if they throw out a random year that I can very easily tell them who was President then.

Therefore, this is a book basically designed for someone like me. In US history, there have been eight Vice Presidents that have succeeded to the Presidency after the death of the President. Jerry Ford, who succeeded not due to the death of a President but to Nixon’s resignation, is an exception and so is excluded. It seems that Ford, along with the nonsequential Grover Cleveland, is always fated to be considered a Presidential exception.

This book tells the stories of these eight Vice Presidents. For each, there is a very brief biography, a discussion of how they were selected to be a Vice Presidential candidate, and how, once sworn in, their Presidency unfolded.

There are a couple of themes that seem to cross all of these VPs. First of all, there’s the emptiness of the Vice Presidential role. Other than during the very rare times of intense partisanship and an exactly divided Senate (ie now) where their vote in the Senate matters, there simply isn’t a lot of constitutional meat to the role. Dick Cheney certainly was a strong VP during Bush’s terms and Joe Biden’s legislative experience was useful during Obama’s terms, but generally speaking, they’re more of an exception than a rule.

As a consequence, Presidents usually don’t put a lot of thought into their VP selection. In fact, during the days when the actual political conventions mattered, Presidents would often leave the matter up to the convention delegates. After all, generally no one spends a lot of time contemplating the probability that they’re going to die in the next four years.

Maybe they should because die they do. In fact, they had a weird habit of dying about every twenty years or so. Every President elected in a year ending in zero (eg 1840, 1860) between 1840 and 1960 (inclusive) died in office. The one President that died in office that was not elected in such a year (Zachary Taylor) died in a year ending in zero (1850).

Eight Presidents died over a span of about 120 years. Still, no one thought too much when selecting their potential replacements. Many times, it was done for purely election reasons. Abraham Lincoln pushed to get Andrew Johnson selected as his VP precisely because he was a Southern Democrat. In a similar manner, John Tyler was selected as William Henry Harrison’s running mate when he was barely even a member of the Whig party (even though nominally a Whig, he was against their highest priorities). One of James Garfield’s big issues was to take on the so-called spoils system of patronage. On the other hand, his running mate, Chester Arthur, was one of the biggest abusers when it come to handing out patronage.

Unsurprisingly, when some Vice Presidents took office, they didn’t just blindly follow their predecessors policies. In the case of Tyler, he proved to be so unpopular that the Whig party essentially excommunicated him from the party. During his first year, there were riots, fist fights on the Congressional floor, and impeachment attempts.

Similar events transpired during Andrew Johnson’s term. It wasn’t going to be easy to succeed Abraham Lincoln under any circumstances. Before he became President, Johnson was actually a heroic figure. Even though from Tennessee and a slave owner, he was devotedly pro-Union. During the Civil War, he served as the civil head of a military government in Tennessee. There were many threats on his life and he took to carrying a gun everywhere he went. He was absolutely fearless in his defense of the Union. If his story ended there, he’d be still remembered as a hero. Unfortunately, once the war ended, the threat to the Union was over, and he assumed the Presidency, his true opinions came out. An unrepentant racist, he fought against all attempts at reconstruction. He pardoned thousands of Southern rebels, up to and including such men as the Confederate VP Alexander Stephens, who promptly resumed his Senate seat in the country that he’d just tried to overthrow. Radical Republicans were able to override his vetoes, impeached him, and came within a vote of convicting him.

A second theme in the book is the lack of constitutional clarity when it comes to succession. When the first President died (Harrison), there was some talk of whether the VP is the President or some kind of acting President. The Constitution is silent on this. Tyler basically just decided that he was now President. He refused any letters sent to him that were not addressed in this manner. His action set the precedent that is still followed today.

The whole succession originally was a mess. For instance, once a VP became President, there was no process to nominate a new VP. When a Vice President ascended to the Presidency,  a gaping hole was left in the succession. After he succeeded upon Zachary Taylor’s death, this left a bizarre situation during the first part of Millard Fillmore’s term. Previously being the VP, he now had no VP. Usually the next two in line were the President Pro Tempore or the Speaker of the House. Well, the Pro Tempore was no longer a senator and the then Speaker of the House was too young to be President. For that period of time until Congress met, there was no line of succession, and it seemed like everyone was kind of OK with that.

There was also concern around Franco Delano Roosevelt. When he decided to run for a fourth term, it was pretty clear to everyone that saw him that he wasn’t going to survive his term. Even during the election cycle, he was a dying man. He ended up dying within 90 days of his inauguration. If instead, he’d died a couple of months earlier, before his inauguration but after the election, what would have happened? It was not a given that the electors would have just switched their Presidential votes to Harry Truman. The one previous time that this happened, it wasn’t such a big deal because the President candidate that died (Horace Greeley for you hard core President history geeks) lost in a landslide. However, the precedent was set to release all of his electors to vote for their own preference. Obviously, in 1944, with the US fighting Nazis and the Japanese and preparing for the upcoming Cold War against USSR, this could have been catastrophic.

That brings us to the third theme. Vice Presidents are, for the most part, monumentally unprepared to become President. In my lifetime, I remember this during the VP debates starring that great VP nonentity, Dan Quayle. When asked, during a VP debate, what specific things that he’d do if he was asked to assume the Presidency, Quayle totally got the deer in the headlights look and muttered something about a prayer.

Despite the fact that it was obvious that FDR was dying, that he was in the middle of leading the WWII war effort, planning a postwar future, in the middle of the development of atomic weapons, and trying to manage the looming, problematic USSR relationship, Truman was kept completely in the dark on all of these subjects. This wasn’t just FDR’s fault. Truman was apparently quite happy just being the guy that went to dinner parties. FDR made no effort to keep Truman informed and Truman made no effort to be informed. Therefore, when FDR suddenly died, Truman was immediately thrown into an impossibly complex situation. The fact that Truman managed to get up to speed quickly does not diminish how dangerous that could have been.

As expected, this post was way longer than I thought it was going to be and I left out a whole bunch of stuff. If Presidential history is of interest to you, then I’d highly recommend this book. If nothing else, you learn interesting facts about Presidents like John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Chester Arthur that most histories pass right by.

Our Secular Bibles

Title: Americanon

Rating: 4 Stars

When we think of what is means to be American, many of us have specific ideas in mind. How were these preconceptions formed? Who was behind them?

McHugh takes a look through our history and has identified thirteen books that were critical to the development of the American identity. She makes a pretty convincing case that the massive publishing successes of these books led to their messages somehow permeating our collection American subconscious. Most of the books in her list sold tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of copies. At their peak, they rivaled sales of the Bible.

These books were often used used by immigrants as a blueprint to assimilate into American culture. Even so, more often than not, the books were actually used to negatively differentiate them from the mainstream white Protestant American narrative. Fear of immigration, especially fear of immigration from Catholic countries and the belief that they owed allegiance to the Pope above their adopted country, was at least an indirect reason why several of these books were written.

To the shock of, I’m guessing, no one, most of these books were written by white men. The remaining were written by white women. Native Americans, Black Americans, and others were not give a voice in the forming of our national character.

Instead of discussing each in detail, I’ll just list the most significant books (in my opinion) and how they contributed to our concept of the American ideal.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac

This fostered the myth of the American yeoman farmer. When I mean yeoman farmer, I’m talking about the white, New England variety. Working diligently on his small plot of land, he was beholden to no one.

The almanac included other things than just farm data. Versions of it included the full text of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and even a listing of all federal employees and their salaries. Even if the farmer was isolated on his own plot of land, he was still part of the country and an active citizen of it with a right to express his own political opinions.

The first version of the almanac was published in 1792. It’s interesting that, in the year 2022, there are still many of us who think that farmers are considered to be the real true Americans, even though they make up less than one percent of all Americans. It shows how pervasive and long lasting the power of an idea can be.

Webster’s Speller and Dictionary

In the early years of our independence, Noah Webster was concerned about the lack of unity among the American people. I’ve written about it before, but the US colonies were formed over a long period of time by religious dissenters, Dutch traders, slave holders from Barbados, Scots-Irish borderlanders, and British aristocrats, among others. Once independence was established, how were all of these desperate people going to be integrated?

Webster took on the challenge by formalizing an American language. He wrote his Speller and his Dictionary. He wanted the American people to move away from Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary. In case you’re wondering why we in the US write honor while the English write honour, well, blame it on Webster. Seriously, one guy just said get that ‘u’ out of here and it stuck. Now that is some serious soft power.

Amazingly enough, it worked. Webster’s Speller and his Dictionary became a common presence in homes across all states of the US. Even if we spoke in different dialects, we spelled consistently. It was crucial to the development of a common American language.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

Included in his autobiography was Franklin’s discussion of the thirteen virtues (eg temperance, silence, frugality, tranquility, chastity, humility). His discussion of how he mastered these virtues served as our first self help book.

In his rags to riches story, you see the American myth of the self made man. Here you see the story of a man who started from nothing and successfully pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

In Franklin’s description of himself, such characteristics as being self-taught, a non-zealous patriot, and a practical scholar are all attributes that we recognize in our American ideal.

The McGuffey Readers

Before the 1830s, education in the US was pretty ad hoc. Usually educated at home, most education consisted of memorization of biblical verses.

Inspired by Webster’s Speller, William McGuffey wanted to change that. As part of a push to create common schools, McGuffey wrote a series of schoolbooks. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Some 130 million copies of his books were sold. Their ubiquity created a nationwide standardization of education and dramatically increased literacy.

McGuffey, similar to Webster, feared immigration and the possibility of Catholic influence. Therefore, like Webster’s Speller and Dictionary, his books were heavily biased towards Protestant values. They served as a guide to American mythology, morals, and social mores (eg habits like hardwork and self-reliance). Probably needless to say, the books were silent on topics such as slavery or treatment of Native Americans.

A Treatise on Domestic Economy / The American Woman’s Home

A Treatise on Domestic Economy was written in 1841 and The American Woman’s Home was written in 1869. Both were written by Catharine Beecher. Her sister, famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe, helped on the latter book.

These books established the woman’s place in American society. They place women at the center of American morality, making them responsible for the preservation of the physical, moral, and economic health of the country. Beecher’s goal was to elevate women’s role and to demonstrate how much expertise was required for them to be successful.

Beecher believed that a woman’s responsibility stopped at the doorstop. She was adamantly opposed to such ideas a women voting.

At the same time, with the rise of the textile industry, women were beginning to make the transition into manufacturing jobs. So, even as Beecher was advocating for this home focused life, the world was already moving on.

It’s even more interesting that Beecher did not live any of what she wrote. She never married. She never had children. She actually lived with Harriet’s family. In fact, she widely toured the country advocating that women should stay at home.

Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home

Written in 1922, a century later most Americans have at least heard of Emily Post. If nothing else, they know that she’s responsible for etiquette. If someone ever worries about causing offence when choosing between a salad fork and a dinner fork, they can thank Emily Post.

After World War I, society was in a state of flux. Remember that this was the time of flappers wearing bobbed hair, wearing thin dresses, smoking cigarettes, drinking outlawed alcohol, and dancing the Charleston. Also, a significant percentage of Americans were immigrants looking to fit in. Finally, the middle class was on the rise, trying to move on up.

In all of this change, there was a need for some consistency. There was a need for a guidebook for how to act. With her book, Emily Post filled this need. In the pages was a vision for how a good American should act.

You’d think that the elite would be horrified when this book was published. After all, it was describing the secrets of their behavior. However, they were able to use it for their own good use. They could pretend to ignore a person’s skin color or their ethnicity and still condemn them for not behaving like a ‘proper’ American.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Inspired by Franklin’s autobiography, this is the classic self help book. Many of what we consider stereotypical American behaviors are described here. When we think of Americans and their positive attitudes, open honesty, and can-do spirit, the template is coming from this book.

Also embedded is the idea of the American meritocracy. You are responsible for your own destiny. If you’re a failure, then it must be your fault.

In closing, this was an entertaining read of the American cultural canon. I found the personalities behind these books to be pretty fascinating. To think that such a relatively small number of people had such a profound impact upon our culture is pretty amazing to contemplate.

Trenches, Hospitals, The Common Grave

Title: All Quiet on the Western Front

Rating: 5 Stars

As promised, after watching the 2022 and the 1930 films, I went ahead and re-read the novel. The novel more than holds up its own against the two films. If anything, it has a stronger anti-war message than either of the two films.

The 1930 film is closer to the source novel than the 2022 film. As discussed in the earlier post, the 2022 film includes the additional subplot of the German general brutally ordering additional, brutal, fruitless attacks when, not only is the war known to be lost, but it is known that the armistice is about to be signed. The novel and the 1930 film include the subplot of Paul returning home on furlough, experiencing the cognitive dissonance of civilian peaceful life, and almost eagerly returning back to what he now considers his true home and family, the barracks and his army compatriots.

The novel brings out the hopeless disillusion that all of the soldiers feel. They’ve lost all connection to their previous home life. As a student, Baumer fancied himself an intellectual. He carefully built up a library of important literature. Only a couple of years later, now a twenty year old wizened soldier, it all seems pointless. Why read philosophy when it would have been better if he’d been taught how to survive a bombardment?

When he’s home on leave, Baumer can barely stand it. He immediately wants to take off his uniform, but his father wants to parade him around in it. While in uniform, some reserve officer berates him and makes him perform pointless military drills. Only the knowledge that he’d be thrown in prison keeps him from thrashing the man. The local older men, confident that the troops are well fed and equipped, convince each other that, if the soldiers just have one more push, they can drive the Allied powers to Paris. Baumer knows that the other side has tanks, flamethrowers, and ample supplies of food while the German soldiers are starving in rags and that their artillery barrels are so worn that the shells often fall short and land in German bunkers. Baumer is bereft of any hope that his future contains anything other death, or if he’s extremely lucky, an ignominious surrender.

You would think that the modern, more explicit film making of 2022 would render the horrors of war more effectively than a novel, but that’s not the case. The descriptions of the bombardments and the pointless dashes across fields, braving a hail of bullets just to inevitably be driven back to their starting point, is harrowing to read.

Even so, there are moments of life if not joy. Baumer and his compatriots are effectively a family. Whether it’s he and Kat going out to scrounge food or three of them trading sex with young French women for food or the time they spend guarding an abandoned town where they can gorge themselves on leftover food and sleep on beds with pillows, they feel alive and close to each other.

The novel is beautifully written. It’s written in the first person from the viewpoint of Baumer. The language is spare and simple. It feels like something a twenty year old hardened veteran of trench war that once fancied himself an intellectual might write.

Although it is written in the first person, Remarque is not Baumer. Yes, Remarque served in World War I. He went into combat for the first time in June of 1917 at the age of nineteen. During a battle in July of 1917, he was injured by shrapnel. He was evacuated to a hospital and never saw combat again. In the succeeding years, he worked as a teacher, librarian, and businessman. The novel was not published until 1928.

Although it’s an astonishing work of German literature, it’s probably not unsurprising that its anti-war message did not exactly resonate with the rising Nazi power in Germany. By 1933 it’d been declared unpatriotic and banned in Germany. Remarque was forced to move to Switzerland before ultimately landing in the United States.

In some ways, this reminds me of that other great novel that places the reader in the middle of war, The Red Badge of Courage. Set during the Civil War, veterans of that war that read it assumed that the author must also be a veteran. Written thirty years after the war was over, such veterans were shocked to meet Stephen Crane. Not only was he not a veteran of the war, but he was born in 1871, years after the war was over. With both novels, when you read them, you feel that the author of such works must have some actual experential connection to what they are writing about. It’s a tribute to both of their imaginative powers that they did not. 

This is indeed a great novel. In a bleak, hopeless, despairing, and fatalistic situation, the characters that find themselves in it somehow manage to keep a flicker of their humanity alive. That is, until the war inevitably extinguishes it.

To quote a line from the book: “Trenches, hospitals, the common grave – there are no other possibilities.”

What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing

Title: All Quiet on the Western Front

The new version of All Quiet on the Western Front is available on Netflix. That in turn inspired me to watch the 1930 classic film. It’s been such a long time since I’ve read the source novel that I’ve requested it from the library. Hopefully, I’ll read it in the next week or so. We’ll see if that inspires a blog entry as well.

For those not familiar, All Quiet on the Western Front is about German soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I. The basic plot of both films follows the structure of the novel. The protagonist is the young, recently graduating student Paul Baumer. A professor / teacher gives an impassioned speech that inspires Paul and his classmates to immediately enlist.

Sent to the front, their illusions are immediately destroyed when confronted with the reality of warfare. Some die immediately. A grizzled soldier Kat Katczinsky becomes their mentor. They become experienced soldiers and eventually become the grizzled veterans for a fresh crop of ever younger soldiers. As the war rages on and they suffer from flooded ditches and dwindling rations, they lose hope of returning home. One by one, the war takes them.

Given that the overarching plot and theme are the same, what are the differentiating points between the two? First of all, the 2022 version is a German film while the 1930 is American. Therefore, the later film is subtitled. By now, I’m comfortable with subtitled films but just be prepared. Also, not shocking, but the 2022 film is in color while the 1930 film is in black and white.

I’m always struck by the differences in acting between current actors and those from earlier generations. Whether it’s because method acting is the default for all actors today, actors in the 1930 film seem more stilted or artificial.

The production values in the 2022 film are, unsurprisingly, much higher. The violence is much more graphic and explicit. Soldiers end up covered in blood, mud, and gore such that the whites of their eyes seem incandescent. The horror of trench warfare is brought much more to life. The death of Tjaden is horrific.

Perhaps with the advent of better makeup and lighting, you see the soldiers age during the 2022 film. At the beginning, Paul is a fresh faced young man. By the end, his face is haggard with creased lines.

Even so, since the 1930 film was made pre-code, for its time it’s much more graphic and explicit than you would expect of a film from 1930. Famously, there’s an explosion while someone is trying to climb a barb wire obstacle. When the smoke clears, all that’s left of the soldier are two hands still gripping the fence.

Also, the 1930 film seems to have a temporal immediacy. The film was made a scarce dozen years after World War I, so the actors playing the roles, although too young to have served, would have a greater sense of the war than those coming along a century later. That puts me in mind the great World War II film, Best Years of our Lives, released in 1946, the year after World War II ended. The actors in the key parts were all recent war veterans coming to terms with the themes that the film was actually exploring.

Because of this temporal immediacy, the absurdity of the war is more apparent in the 1930 film. The battles shown involve a group of soldiers making a mad dash to the enemy soldiers’ trenches. There, they desperately engage in hand to hand fighting to win control of the trench. There is then an immediate counterattack from the enemy forces that drives them out from the trench that they just occupied back to their original trench. Untold numbers of soldiers die to end up exactly where they started. In a lull between action, the soldiers sit around and try to figure out, unsuccessfully, exactly how and why they are fighting. The waste of it all is obvious.

Other than the soldiers’ time in the trenches, the films take two different paths for the secondary plot. The 1930 film seems to hew more closely to the novel (at least what I can remember) by also focusing on the home front during WWI. At one point, Paul gets leave to visit his home town. After years on the front, he is realistic regarding Germany’s chances in the war. However, at home, everyone is in complete denial. They’re assuming that the soldiers have everything they need at the front (when actually they’re starving and their clothes are in tatters). His father and friends argue passionately over where the final winning push should be made to seal Germany’s victory. Even worse, he sees the same teacher making the same speech (that inspired him to enlist) to the latest class of young men. He tries to warn the young men of the futility of war and is scorned as a defeatist. Knowing that he no longer belongs there, he terminates his leave early so that he can go back with his fellow soldiers at his real home, the front line trenches.

The 2022 film, if anything, is even more caustic. The 2022 film intentionally takes place later in the war. While in the 1930 film, Paul enlists in the first rush to war (ie probably in 1914), in the 2022 film Paul enlists in 1917. The bulk of the film takes place in the last week or two of war. By now, the Germans know that they have lost. The recently formed German civilian government, taking over from the deposed Kaiser, is being forced to accept onerous surrender terms from the French. With tens of thousands of soldiers dying each week and with more American pouring in, the Germans know that they must accept. In these last days, even though they know that they’ve lost, German generals insist upon continuing offensives for no strategic reason. They wage war because that’s all they know how to do. Thousands of lives are lost in this folly.

Paul’s different death in the two films show these two perspectives. In the 1930 film, back at home, Paul was an avid butterfly collector. At one point, during an apparent break in the fighting, Paul sees a butterfly. From the trench, he reaches out to it, perhaps in remembrance of some similar time from his peaceful past. He’s shot as he reaches for it.

In the 2022 film, the armistice is due to go into effect at 11:00 AM. A German general, insistent upon capturing one last piece of territory, orders an attack at 10:45. In brutal hand to hand fighting, right before 11:00 strikes, Paul is bayonetted in the back.

For those of you who are World War II history geeks, you’ll know that one of the reasons why the Nazi party was able to rise to power was because the German military promulgated the belief that they didn’t actually lose WWI. Their claim was that the civilian government sold them out during the armistice. They called this alleged betrayal a stab in the back. Since very little of the fighting during WWI took place on German soil, the German civilians found this plausible. So, the fact that the later German film had Paul dying by literally getting stabbed in the back while fighting a pointless battle ordered by a vainglorious general is an interesting way to ridicule that misplaced belief.

Just like the novel, these films are a brutally realistic perspective of the folly of war. Young men fight and die because old men argue.