George Smiley Gone To Seed

Title: Slow Horses

Rating: 5 Stars

Usually I compare novels to films. Since the third season of Slow Horses on Apple TV has been getting such rave reviews, I decided to see what the fuss is. I’ve started and have just completed the first season. That season corresponds to Mick Herron’s novel Slow Horses.

The setting is the secret service MI5 in London. The center of MI5’s activity is located at Regent’s Park. It is a sleek ultra modern building that is constantly abuzz with activity for the purpose of keeping England safe from all attacks.

And then there’s Slough House. Located further away, in an unfashionable part of London, it is a dank, decrepit structure with a faulty door. The people that work here are still MI5, but just barely. Everyone that works at Slough House has failed the MI5 in some way. One person failed a training evaluation. Another left top secret material on public transit. One person is so obnoxious that no one wants to work with him.

In all cases, these washouts have been sent to Slough House. There they work mundane, monotonous, brain dead tasks until they are finally driven to quit in desperation. As a play on the house name, the people that work there are called Slow Horses.

The biggest washout of them all is their head, Jackson Lamb. Once a renowned, battle tested field agent, now he slovenly lounges in his office, smoking, drinking, belching, and farting. He is bitter and caustic to everyone.

This is the place that careers go to die. That is until a young Muslim man is kidnapped by a British white nationalist organization that threatens to behead him in a matter of hours. Considering the fact that the young man in question is the nephew of a high ranking member of the Pakistani intelligence service, this has the makings of a major international incident.

All of this would be far from the normal remit of the Slow Horses, but it appears that someone at the bright shining headquarters of MI5 has it in for Slough House and is setting them up to be the patsies when it all apparently starts going South.

It is up to Jackson Lamb and his island of misfit toys to save themselves from the frame up and, along the way, to save the young man from execution.

Usually, I end these blogs with a comparison between the two content forms. Here, it’s a bit strange because there is very little daylight between the novel and the series. I watched the series first and then read the novel. The novel came very close to serving as the screenplay for the series. The ending is a bit different in the series in that the Slow Horses have a bit more of a heroic role to play, but considering the medium, this choice makes sense as a more visually appealing option.

Even though not really the protagonist, Jackson Lamb is what makes the novel so outstanding. An apparently drunk washout, when he senses danger afoot, his highly honed instincts, experience, and training come into play and he becomes a masterful strategist. Even though never giving up his boorish manner, he effortlessly outwits the fancy suits that look upon him with ill disguised contempt.

In the series, Gary Oldman brilliantly plays Lamb. Now late in his career, Oldman is at the point where he simply embodies characters such as these. Reading the novel, it’s tough to envision any other actor doing as well as Oldman. The series is outstanding on other merits, but simply watching Oldman’s performance is worth it just on its own.

Slow Horses is as far from the sleek James Bond as you can get. In fact, this is pretty far from the much more realistic John le Carré’s George Smiley novels. I found it interesting that Gary Oldman actually played Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Although certainly not flashy, Smiley is also not slovenly like Lamb. Smiley is almost unfailingly polite whereas I can’t remember a single instance where Lamb isn’t overtly rude. Oldman was outstanding in both roles.

There was an article in The Atlantic a bit ago that theorized that Slow Horses is a manifestation of the decline of England. Once England held the world enthralled. Its intelligence gathering operation was considered to be absolutely world class.

Those days are long past it. They are now consciously exiting continental treaties for nationalist reasons that result in nothing more than self-inflicted pain. Their PM’s are a joke, whether it be the actual buffoon Boris Johnson or the cartoonishly incompetent Liz Truss or the hapless milquetoast Rishi Sunak. Reading the decline from the sophisticated suaveness of Ian Fleming to the clear eyed realism of John le Carré to the decrepit collapse of Mick Herron, England is in a spiral from which escape seems impossible.

Reading / watching Slow Horses gives you front seats to the unfolding spectacle. Bring out the popcorn!

Life Lessons From Dolls

Title: Barbie

Rating: 5 Stars

Yes, I know that I’m very late to this party, but it showed up on Max, so I thought that I’d give it a shot. It really was very good. The sets are terrific. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling perfectly inhabit the characters of Barbie and Ken. Since so much has already been written about how awesome the film is, I’m not going to waste too much time discussing that. This is a good test for the Academy Awards. The academy does not have a great record recognizing comedies like this. Will the fact that there’s be substantial turnover in academy membership mean that there will be a greater appreciation for well made comedies? We’ll know in a couple of months.

One thing that I found interesting is the reaction to the film. Since this is clearly a film about female empowerment and the struggles of being a woman, it’s not surprising that women love it. Possibly not surprising is the negative reaction that many men have had to it.

I would expect such negativity from, shall we say, more traditional men that sees equal rights as some kind of zero sum gain where if women feel more empowered then that makes men less empowered. It is somewhat strange because the film makes a point of highlighting that Ken also ends up with a better life as well. After being nothing more than an appendage to Barbie, by film’s end, Ken is eagerly beginning to figure out the next stage in his journey.

So, while the incel outrage at the film did not surprise me, what did surprise me is that one of my more progressive male friends hated the film.  He normally puts out a social justice warrior vibe but simply could not understand why his wife could love the film as much as she did. He seemed to have a nearly visceral reaction to the film. I found it interesting that such a positive film could trigger such a strong reaction in an unexpected quarter.

I’m also interested in the history of the film. Mattel had been trying to get a Barbie film made since the 1980s. Somewhat hilariously, they apparently started with Cannon Films. In case you don’t know, Cannon Films is somewhat infamous for making action schlocky films (think Chuck Norris films, ninja films, and Death Wish sequels). Cannon made and released a Masters of the Universe film. When it flopped, Cannon lost the appetite for films based on action figures and gave up.

Over the next decades, there were various fits and starts. Several directors and actors were attached and detached. A couple of movie studios had options and let them lapse. The rights reverted back to Mattel.

The Mattel CEO met with Margot Robbie. I’m not sure if this is the best way to green light a film featuring female empowerment, but one of the reasons why he went with her was because he thought she looked so much like Barbie.

Be that as it may, Robbie got Greta Gerwig attached to the project to write the script. After she wrote the script with her husband, Noah Bambach, Gerwig lobbied to direct it as well.

One reason why I wrote about all of this is that Mattel was pretty deeply involved in the entire process. Whatever original idea they might have had in mind for a Barbie film, I can pretty much guarantee that what they ended up with was not what they expected. After all, in the film, the Mattel executives are all white men in suits. They are clueless about what women or girls want. They are not very smart. They travel in a pack and seemingly engage in nothing but sycophantic group think. After all, Will Farrell plays their CEO. It is much to the Mattel executives’ credit that they were willing to be comedy fodder if not an actual metaphor for managerial incompetence in late stage capitalism.

The final thing that was unexpected was their use of deep cut Barbies and Kens. Sure, you know there’s going to be a President Barbie and a Doctor Barbie and a Lawyer Barbie. Did you know that Barbie had a friend named Midge that was pregnant?  Or that there was a Barbie that had a video screen in her back? Or that there was a Growing Up Skipper (Barbie’s little sister) doll where, if you messed with her arm, she grew breasts?

On the Ken side, things are even weirder. People might remember Ken’s friend Allan (hilariously played as a lost, slightly forlorn soul by Michael Cena). There is an older friend named Sugar Daddy Ken. That was his name. He had a dog named Sugar. However, in that case, you’d think his name would be Sugar’s Daddy Ken, but nope. And let’s not forget about Magic Earring Ken. Released in the 90s with, yes, an earring, but also a lavender shirt and matching pleather vest, this Ken proved to be quite popular in the gay community.

The fact that these little known members of the Barbie universe made it into the film is pretty awesome.

So, yes, although quite late, I’m on the Barbie bandwagon.

The Lily-Whites Vs The Black-And-Tans

Title: Back AF History

Rating: 5 Stars

When I was growing up, American history was very white.  Sure, in my school textbooks, there might be a side bar about Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglas or George Washington Carver, but that was about it. Nowadays, history taught in school is somewhat better, although there are certainly people that are apparently uncomfortable with the fact that our children are taught that slavery is bad and that maybe we shouldn’t have just taken land from people that were already living on it.

Well, if they are uncomfortable with the slightly more diverse narrative that our schools now teach, they’d be apoplectic to read Black AF History. It is, as the title promises, Black AF. Harriot pulls no punches.

One theme that he highlights to is that the colonies would have failed if it wasn’t for the imported enslaved Africans. That might not seem to be all that extreme of a position, but his argument goes beyond just their labor.

Sure, raising crops like rice or cotton was grueling, backbreaking work that required a virtually limitless supply of free labor. More important than that is the fact that the colonists that came from Europe didn’t have the technical understanding of how to actually raise crops. For example, it was the African workers that knew how to grow rice.  Rice, along with tobacco, was one of the first cash crops that allowed the colonists to grow and flourish. This could have never happened without African expertise.

He dispels the myth that enslaved Black people were just passively waiting to be freed. Many of the enslaved were warriors in their African home. They often schemed together and laid complex plans to overthrow their slavers. It was precisely because some of these attempts were so serious that the most draconian slave laws were passed. Laws passed that prohibited slaves from growing their own food, learning to write, or to assemble in any nontrivial numbers without a white person present were direct expressions of the enslavers’ fear.

The conflict between slaver and the enslaved had an impact upon US culture that reverberates today. There are numerous examples of this.

There was an escaped convict named Forest Joe. He led his cohorts on many raids on plantations. For several years, he terrified the white population. Eventually Joe was tracked down by the local militia and he was killed in battle. In direct response to the threat of Joe, in 1823 a group of white people met to discuss and to collect funds to apprehend runaways, specifically mentioning Joe. A slave hunting squad was formed. The name of this organization was the Pineville Police Association. Yes, fifteen years before Boston created the first municipal law enforcement agency in the US, South Carolina had its nascent police force. Its sole job was to apprehend runaway slaves.

Another courageous Black man that relatively few people have heard of is Denmark Vesey. A free man, his wife and children were still enslaved. Unable to purchase their freedom, he planned a slave revolt. He recruited thousands but was ultimately betrayed by slaves that feared the repercussions of the revolt. Vesey was arrested, tried, and executed by a secret court in Charleston.

Terrified by the extent of Vesey’s plan, the Charleston government created an organization to put down future slave insurrections. It built a facility to train slave catchers and to serve as an arsenal to store weapons and ammunition. Known as the South Carolina State Arsenal, it eventually became The Citadel, a public military training college that is one of six senior military colleges still extant in the US.

Also in Charleston, they wanted to make sure that the enslaved were disciplined effectively. A municipal building called the “sugar house” was used as a destination for recalcitrant slaves. The city actually had a menu and a price list for ‘services’ offered at this facility. For a small fee, authorized people would inflict punishments to correct the behavior of belligerent slaves. The official name of this building was, yes, the Department of Corrections.

Some of Harriot’s stories defy belief. Most people know that the US abolished the slave trade in 1808. That was over two hundred years ago. Do you know that on youTube today there is actually a video made in 1938 of a woman named Redoshi that was brought to the US on a slave ship? You can see it here.

That seems impossible, right? Well, get ready for a batshit insane story. Despite the fact that the slave trade was outlawed in 1808, in 1860 a wealthy Southern plantation owner named Timothy Meaher bet his friends that he could sneak in a shipment of slaves into the country. Fifty-two years after it was made illegal, a ship named Clotilda sailed into Mobile. 112 slaves were onboard. To cover up the crime, the ship was burnt and scuttled.

Enslaved until the end of the Civil War in 1865, the now free Africans pooled their money and formed a small town called Africatown, which still exists today. In 1938, the USDA interviewed Redosha and filmed her story of her passage, enslavement, and emancipation. Lost for decades, in 2019 a British researcher unearthed the footage.

In case you’re wondering if Meaher ever got into trouble for importing slaves fifty years after it was made illegal, here’s a hint. In Alabama, still today, there is a Meaher State Park.

One of Harriot’s big themes is that, even as the political parties morph over time, there is really only ever two political groups. There is the white political party and then there’s the other political party. Understanding that explains how the Democratic party dominated the South until the rise of FDR, and then later, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now that the Democratic party was affiliated with civil rights, it was only natural that the Republican party would pivot and become the party for white people.

This two party struggle forms the basis for my blog title. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Black voter registration dramatically rose in the South. Black voters held clear majorities in some Southern states and accordingly, accumulated political power. That’s the reason why the first Black senators and governors were all from the South.

In response to that, within the Republican party arose a group that opposed Black civil rights. They called themselves the Lily-white faction. The opposing Republican Black-and-tan faction fought to preserve the hard fought Black civil rights. You have to give the 1870s and 1880s credit. They definitely made their faction names crystal clear in their objectives. Over time, as the overtly white rights Democratic party gained dominance in the South (specifically after the Black supported presidential candidate Rutherford B Hayes agreed to give up on Reconstruction as the price to be paid to gain his tainted presidency), the Black-and-tan faction of the Republican party faded away.

This is an important book to read. It is, by design, not a typical history. It is carefully footnoted and sourced, but an irreverent humor runs throughout the entire work. I’m sure that Harriot would claim that, given the centuries of suffering and pain that Black Americans have gone through, that bitingly sarcastic humor is the only appropriate response.

A Wes Anderson Joint

Title: Asteroid City

Rating: 4 Stars

Directors’ styles are interesting. Think about Stanley Kubrick and his films. His most famous films include Spartacus, The Shining, 2001, Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange, Dr Strangelove, and Eyes Wide Shut. It’s hard to believe that one person directed all of those films. Some are black and white. Others are color. Some are science fiction, some are comedies, some are horror, and then there’s whatever Eye Wide Shut is. Whatever the subject matter is, Kubrick was able to lose himself in it and express his genius in myriad forms.

And then there’s Wes Anderson. Without any advance knowledge, you can watch any one of his films for five minutes and you’re like, this is a Wes Anderson film. His films have lines that are nearly sterile in their precise crispness. All of his colors are in very specific shades. His actors deliver their lines in a deadpan manner. In fact, the same actors, especially Bill Murray, appear in many of his films.

So it is with Asteroid City. A father whose wife has recently deceased is traveling with his four children when his car break downs. His father-in-law comes to pick them up. While there, his eldest boy, a budding genius, participates in a science contest with other prodigies that demonstrates outrageous experiments. The film takes place in Asteroid City, so named for an asteroid that landed there many years ago. While all meet for the purpose of handing out the contest award, an alien descends in their midst and absconds with the asteroid. This prompts a governmental quarantine and an information blackout over the entire area. Even so, one of the kids gets in contact with his high school newspaper and the alien contact becomes world wide news. This breaks the quarantine and everyone disperses.

That is the gist of the story, but there’s so much more to it.

First of all, it’s a staggering cast. Among the many stars are Tom Hanks, Edward Norton, Scarlett Johansson, Margot Robbie, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Liev Schreiber, Bryan Cranston and Steve Carell. Note that Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, and Matt Dillon didn’t even make my first cut. Not only that, but Jeff Goldblum even shows up for a second. The only reason Bill Murray didn’t make an appearance was because he caught COVID before filming began.

It’s kind of astounding that Anderson can come up with a cast like that. It’s not like it’s a several hundred million dollar Marvel movie. It was actually modestly budgeted. I read somewhere that Scarlett Johansson was paid something like four thousands dollars a week for her time. Anderson must have a fantastic reputation among actors to be able to draw that kind of talent in a labor of love.

In describing the plot, I dramatically oversimplified the overall structure of the film. The conceit of the film is that it’s actually a 1950s era television play. The film opens with a Rod Serling like narrator (Cranston) describing the opening scene of a writer hammering out a screenplay. Acknowledging that watching a screenwriter type out a play isn’t particularly compelling, it segues into the sets being built, actors being cast, and a director (Brody) orchestrating the play.

As the film unfolds, we get called out of it regularly to show that we’re just watching a play. There are interstitials that announce the upcoming act / scenes. At various points, the actors talk to the director. At one point, the narrator awkwardly realizes that he’s in the shot and tries to inconspicuously exit. The actor playing the father of the children meets up with a woman that was cast to be his dying wife but whose lines have been cut. As actors acting, they go over their lines one last time. In another section, the playwright is blocked writing a scene and asks an acting class to improvise actions to help him break the impasse.

Obviously, all of this is very meta. You have a narrator talking about the screenwriter of the film that you’re watching. You see the lead actor get cast. You see how the soon to be ex-wife of the director inspires one of the scene choices.

Anderson is doing all of this to expose the artifice of the film making process. If you watch some of his other films, you get the idea that he’s been doing this all along. Some film makers strive to create, as much as they can, films that mimic the grim, dirty reality in which we live (think of the 1970s auteur films like Taxi Driver).

Anderson is not at all interested in recreating realism. His films are cleanly pristine and have crisp colors seen nowhere in reality. Watching his films in many ways seems somewhat akin to watching a play. In Asteroid City, he’s making that connection explicit.

Now, how you feel about a director doing that will dictate how you feel about his films. His films are so divorced from reality that coming away with a feeling that they’re much too precious is a perfectly acceptable response. An adjective that I’ve seen ascribed to Anderson’s work is twee (ie quaint, dainty, cute, precious). That’s not an unfair characterization.

To me, what saves Anderson and makes him enjoyable is his consistency. If you come into a Wes Anderson film expecting a Wes Anderson film, guess what? You’re going to get a Wes Anderson film. As long as you come in with that expectation, you should enjoy it.

His films have the flavors of cinematic candy, the acting is understated but very well done, and the dialog is dryly clever. He bucks the latest trend of films going on for three hours or more. Most of his films are between 90 to 110 minutes. That makes the dose of twee that comes as part and parcel of a Wes Anderson film very easy to swallow.

Hijacking On A Whim

Title: The Skies Belong To Us

Rating: 4 Stars

A bit ago, I wrote a post about hijacking in the 1970s. At the time I said that most of the information from that post came from a book. Well, this is that book.

The book is centered around a hijacking that took place in 1972. The hijackers were a disgruntled PTSD stricken Vietnam vet named Roger Holder and his girlfriend, the prototypical hippie flower girl Cathy Kerkow.

Holder was the mastermind. Kerkow went along with it because she was in love with Holder, trusted his genius, and seemingly had nothing else really going on.

I used the word mastermind, but I’m not exactly sure how much of Holder’s mind that he’d actually mastered. He saw some serious combat duty during multiple tours in Vietnam. Despite this, the military somewhat cursorily gave him a dishonorable discharge and brig time for drug use. Given what we know now about the Vietnam War, it does seem to be a pretty heavy-handed reaction to a very common crime.

To escape the punishment, Holder went AWOL and adopted a new name. It was then that he met Kerkow, although weirdly enough, they apparently met once as children in a small Oregon town. In short order, they fell in love and began to live together.

Holder really didn’t have any income and the money that Kerkow was making as a stripper and as a very small time drug dealer couldn’t make ends meet. They needed a solution. After spending some months smoking marijuana and lost amidst his thoughts, Holder decided that hijacking a plane for $500,000, whisking away the noted Black activist Angela Davis (currently on trial for supplying guns used in a courtroom takeover), and then flying to North Vietnam to what he thought would be a hero’s welcome was what the universe had in store for him.

So, that’s what he did (or at least tried to do). He rigged up a suitcase to look like a bomb. He then gave a note to a flight attendant to pass onto the pilot. In the note, he laid out his demands, heightening the threat by claiming that there were four members of the notorious underground terrorist group The Weathermen on the plane with their own bombs.

As I mentioned in my previous post, at this time, the attitude among the airlines were to cooperate fully with the hijackers. They were terrified that, if flyers were too inconvenienced or if anything were to happen to their customers that they’d completely swear off flying. Therefore, they resisted all attempts to tighten security. For instance, at one time, TWA attendants were told, before each flight, to check all first aid kits on the plane. Any grenades found in the kits were to be deposited into an unused lavatory.

Because of that, no one in authority questioned whether or not Holder really had a bomb or if there were really Weathermen on board. To further the farce, Holder would occasionally get on the plane’s PA system and give cryptic instruction to his non-existent Weathermen allies (eg “we are now on page 14, step c of the checklist”).

By the time 1972 rolled around, airlines were pretty adept at getting cash quickly, so they were able to come up with $500,000 in short order. They lied to Holder and told him that Angela Davis had just been acquitted, so that demand was now moot (Davis, unsurprisingly, when informed of the hijacking, wanted nothing to do with it).

The big snag was North Vietnam. Western Airlines did not have a plane in their fleet with that kind of range. Again not surprising, no other airlines were willing to offer up their long range airplanes.

During this time, which took place over a span of hours, Holder usually sat alone in first class smoking copious amounts of marijuana. Told that North Vietnam was not feasible, in his foggy haze, Holder had a sudden flash of insight and demanded to be taken to Algeria.

While Algeria is about as far from North Vietnam as you can get, it did make a certain amount of sense. Eldridge Cleaver, a key member of the Black Panther Party, had fled the US and ended up in Algeria, where he set up the international branch of the Black Panthers. This branch of the Black Panthers was always eager for money, so they started salivating at the idea of the $500,000. The Algerian government, being staunchly anti-colonialist, had no problem giving a black eye to Uncle Sam by giving hijackers sanctuary.

Algeria became the new plan. Western airlines delivered the $500,000 to Holder. They switched out pilots who could go the longer distance. They flew first to New York. At that point, Holder let all of the other passengers out. At this point, Kerkow could have just gotten off. Up to that point, Holder and Kerkow had kept separate the entire flight. Kerkow had played no role in the hijacking. Despite the change of plans, she decided to stay on the plane. After the plane took off, she called Holder to the back of the now empty plane and they had sex in one of the passenger rows.

When the plane landed in Algeria, they were greeted by Algerian officials and Black Panthers. The Algerians made sure to be first so that they could confiscate the $500,000. Neither the two hijackers nor the Black Panthers that were so eagerly counting on that money ever saw it again.

Things went well for a while. Ultimately, the international Black Panthers collapsed, scattered to various parts. Cleaver ended up back in the US, where he became, among other things, a Moonie, a Mormon, and a conservative Republican.

Holder and Kerkow, armed with expertly faked passports, ended up in Paris. Even though they were home free, able to live anonymously, Holder was not able to keep quiet. He gave an interview to a journalist, confessing his true identity. Having resurfaced to an extraditable country, the US tried to get them back. However, the French government wasn’t having any of it and protected them from extradition.

Eventually, the French government decided to try the two on much lesser chargers. Even this lesser charge was too much for Kerkow and she vanished. Holder was convicted and given a suspended sentence but was forced to stay in France for several years. Desperate to get back to the states to see his children, Holder contacted Cleaver. Cleaver, a born again Christian at this point in his life, worked channels to get Holder back. When Holder returned back to the US, he was immediately arrested.

Given the passage of years, the US wasn’t that interested in heavily prosecuting Holder. He ended up pleading guilty to a much lesser charge and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Once out, he tried to reunite with his children but that did not work out. Through a pretty textbook example of entrapment, Holder got caught up in yet another plot to hijack a plane. Diagnosed by doctors with PTSD, bipolar disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia, he was a physical and mental wreck. The judge saw through the entrapment and ordered him released. Even so, his remaining years were a physical and mental struggle. He died in 2011 at the age of sixty-two.

Kerkow is a more interesting case. A hijacker at the age of twenty-one simply because she was in love and had nothing else to do, over time she matured into a sophisticated multi-lingual young woman that beguiled wealthy Europeans. She vanished in February of 1978. Since then, there has literally been not a single clue regarding her whereabouts. Is she still in Europe? Did she sneak back into the US? Is she even still alive? No one knows. If you go to the FBI wanted site, you can still see her poster. The FBI has apparently not given up the hunt, even though 45 years have gone by since she’s vanished. Amusingly enough, according to the poster, she’s still considered armed and dangerous, even though she really didn’t even play a part in the hijacking, let alone ever been seen carrying a weapon of any kind.

Fly Me Away

Every now and then I read a history book on a subject that I’m at best marginally familiar with and I learn things that blow my mind. A really good example of this is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call. It is a history of Prohibition. I learned so many things about that era of which I had no idea (I wrote about it here way back in 2016). I find myself furiously taking notes about things that I find interesting, amazing, and/or amusing.

I’m only about a third of the way through The Skies Belong to Us and I already feel that way about it. I hope that it keeps up its momentum. It is the true story of two hijackers in the early 1970s.

The primary reason why I got so excited reading this book isn’t necessarily about the two hijackers (although they are interesting). At the same time that it tells the story of that specific hijacking, it discusses the rise of airplane hijacking generally.

Let me tell you, in the story of hijackings, insanity abounds. Just because I’m so full of weird, wonderful information right now, I felt the need to spew it out before I forget.

First of all, let’s just start with the term hijack. I’ve never really thought of the derivation of it. What does the word hijack have to do with stealing a transport? Well, it turns out that stealing freight trucks was a popular pastime for organized crime (ie the mafia). Apparently, when a truck was stopped, one of the criminals would leap on board and announce his presence and intention to steal the truck by calling out to the driver, Hi Jack. I have no idea if that’s true. Sometimes derivations like this are too cute to be true, but regardless, I like it.

Another thing that I learned is that the airlines didn’t really seem to mind if its planes got occasionally hijacked. What they were way more terrified of was making the airplane experience so uncomfortable or inefficient that flyers would no longer want to fly. It was actually the airlines that pushed back hard against federal regulations to install metal detectors or hire additional security.

This resistance to increased security was taken to an extreme by Eastern Airline. One of their more profitable runs was from New York to Florida. A number of organized crime figures regularly flew that route. Since these criminals were adamant about always carrying guns, Eastern was worried that if laws were passed banning guns from planes, that the criminals would then just drive from New York to Florida. Eastern did not want to lose that revenue stream. I’m not only having trouble wrapping my brain around the fact that guns were legal to carry on planes but that airlines actively fought to keep it that way.

In fact, up through the early 1970s or so, flying was ridiculously easy. There were no security checks at all. In fact, during that time, some airlines let you just walk on board and buy your ticket once you got on. A perk of working for the airlines was that, if there was an empty seat, any one of your random friends could just climb on and fly for free. I’m old but I’m not that old. I flew for the first time sometime in the 1970s. Even by that point, I remember there being a metal detector.

The airlines had specific rules in place to completely cooperate with any hijackers. When I was growing up, there were lots of comedians making jokes about hijacking a plane and taking it to Cuba. In fact, that happened. A lot.  There seemed to be some delusion that Castro would welcome hijackers to his socialist paradise with open arms. In fact, hijackers usually ended up in prison or, even worse, brutal work camps. Castro would charge an airline a return fee for the plane. The airlines figured, even with inconveniencing all of the passengers on the flight and paying the Castro fee, it was cheaper for them to do that than worry about hassling passengers with additional security. To sweeten the pot, some airlines even had preparations in place, if one of their airplanes was hijacked to Cuba, to put up the hijacked passengers up in fancy Cuban hotels. It was all just part of the business of running an airline.

And then there’s the hijackers! They were, for the most part, nuts. Here is just a subset.

There was a fourteen year old boy that kidnapped an eighteen year old ballerina and tried to hijack a plane to Stockholm. A problem was that the plane that he hijacked didn’t have the capacity to cross the Atlantic.

There was an alcoholic used car dealer that hijacked a plane to Havana. He hijacked it wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals so that he could hit the beach after landing.

There was the West Virginian miner, dying of black lung, who hijacked a plane to go to Tel Aviv to work on a Kibbutz as some kind of attempt to placate God.

Let’s talk a moment about Arthur Gates Barkley. Fired by his job, he sued his company for back wages. He then sued the IRS because he thought they miscalculated his taxes. He tried to bring his case to the Supreme Court. When they refused to hear his case, he was enraged.

His apparent solution was to hijack a plane. Hilariously, he didn’t want fly to Havana but to an airport that was only thirty miles from the original destination. He then demanded, and this was in 1970, $100 million dollars, to be paid by the Supreme Court. First of all, that’s nearly a billion dollars in 2023 dollars. Secondly, why would the Supreme Court have that much money? Remember that airline policy in those days was total cooperation with the hijackers. TWA scraped and scraped and managed to come up with $100,000 in cash, hoping to appease Barkley.

Barkley, discovering that he was shortchanged (by only a factor of a thousand), went ballistic. He insisted that the pilots take off again. He’d brought a can of gasoline on the flight (seriously? he was allowed to bring on board a can of gasoline? What the actual fuck?). It looked like he was seriously considering carrying out his threat of pouring gasoline all over the passengers and setting the plane on fire. He talked about, when committing suicide, that it was much better to take as many people with you as possible. I’m really not sure if it works that way.

Finally, the FBI got involved. They lined the runway with one hundred bags that they claimed each contained a million dollars (spoiler alert: it was newspaper), At the plane landed, an FBI sharpshooter shot out its tires. In the ensuing chaos, someone was able to kick open an exit door and the passengers all escaped. Barkley, in the cockpit, had no idea. The FBI stormed the plane, shot, and captured him.

All of this was because Barkley thought that he’d gotten shortchanged by the company that fired him and then by the IRS. Specifically, he believed that his company owed him nineteen days of sick leave and he disputed a $471.78 tax bill.

There’s a ton of other hijacking stories like this one. I know that I often write about how crazy the times that we are currently living in seem to be. When I read about the 1960s and 1970s, I think that they might have us beat in the craziness department.

Comedy Is Dead, Long Live Comedy

Title: Comedy Book

Rating: 5 Stars

I enjoy reading about comedy. Before this book, the best book on comedy that I’d ever read was Kliph Nesteroff’s The Comedians. Written in 2015, it covered the span of comedy history from vaudeville to radio to clubs to television. If you’re interested in learning about comedy history, I highly recommend reading this book.

Comedy Book takes a slightly different approach. On the one hand, it also is a history about comedy. It’s pretty sparse when it comes to vaudeville and all of that. That’s fine because Nesteroff’s book already had that covered. For the most part, it talks about comedy in the twenty-first century.

This book has two advantages over the Nesteroff book. First, it was published this year, so it’s much more current. Nesteroff’s book leaves off at comedians like Marc Maron while Fox’s book uses Maron’s generation of comedians as pretty much the starting point. For that reason, Nesteroff and Fox make for perfect companion books.

Secondly, while Nesteroff seems to take more of a historical interest in comedy, Fox seems to be much more analytical. What is funny? Why is it funny? How has funny changed over time?

Fox is clearly a deep thinker on this issue of comedy. As a self professed comedy journalist, this has been his beat for years. For many years, he’s had a podcast called Good One. For each episode, he focuses on one part of an comedian’s act, as chosen by the comedian. On the episode, the clip is played and then, in an interview with the comedian, Fox dissects / deconstructs the clip to understand how the comedian built the act and what their purpose in doing so was.

This is actually fascinating to listen to. First of all, the comedians are surprisingly erudite when discussing their craft. Since comedy is kind of their obsession, perhaps this shouldn’t surprise me. Even so, listening to Bert Kreischer, who’s a big burly man that usually prances around on stage shirtless like a wild man calmly describing the actually quite subtle comedic choices that he has made for his Machine story, a story about him getting drunk with the Russian mafia while on a school trip in Moscow, was quite interesting.

The podcast is also interesting because you learn the various approaches that comedians take to build their latest hour. Most comedians workshop on stage at comedy clubs, gradually building up to an hour. Other comedians laboriously write down their jokes, word for word, and essentially memorize their acts (once honed, Anthony Jeselnik calls his act an unchanging movie that he performs from city to city). Weirdly, Katt Williams is so obsessed with joke theft that he never workshops his material in clubs. He builds up his act privately. He rehearses his act in empty spaces. Literally the first time that he publicly performs his act is in front of an arena sized crowd. He has that much confidence in understanding what’s funny that he doesn’t need a crowd to give him validation.

Just as a quick aside, by far my favorite Good One episode is the late Gilbert Gottfried being interviewed about his Aristocrats joke. If you’ve never heard of the Aristocrats joke, it’s one of the filthiest jokes that comedians perform. He most famously did it in the aftermath of 9/11. Listening to Fox very earnestly ask questions like “when the father was fisting the daughter, what was the significance of saying that he had forearms like Popeye” while Gottfried is laughing hysterically at having to answer such a question is truly great podcasting.

I know that I haven’t even started discussing the book yet. The point is that, if you found any of the above interesting, then you should definitely buy this book.

His chapters are broken up into the constituent components of comedy. There are chapters on  audience, timing, politics, truth, laughter, and context. In each chapter, he deconstructs what each component means and how crucial it is comedy. This is a person that has done some seriously deep thinking on comedy and it shows here. This is his magnum opus. As a comedy journalist, he has talked to hundreds of comics and he captures many of their thoughts in this book.

One of his ideas that I’ve found most compelling is how comedy is evolving. This evolution is in response to a couple of factors. One is what I’ll call the Louis CK factor. Now disgraced (and allegedly canceled, even though he’s sold out Madison Square Garden and has won an Emmy since, so I question how canceled he really is), at one time, not that many years ago, he was the summit of comedy. He had a comedic style that was so embarrassingly true to himself that it was almost cringe inducing. However, it was a performance. His stage truth, even though presented as some kind of raw truth, was actually a performative truth that was carefully curated for maximum humor.

Younger comedians raised in the shadow of this understood the hypocrisy of performed truth. Instead, they’ve chosen to expose the framework of their performances so that they communicate to the audience their understanding that their performance is just a performance and is to be understood in this way. Their goal is to be honest about the falseness of performing their truth on stage.

The second major development is the rise of youTube shorts and TikTok. What this means is that humor and laughter is now available to all in bite size chunks twenty-four hours a day.

On the one hand, you might think that this might be the death of performed comedy. After all, if someone can be constantly fed algorithmically customized laughs to the device in their pocket, why go to comedy shows at all?

Fox’s thesis is that, instead of killing comedy, that this has liberated comedy. He compares it to oil paintings and the rise of photography. Before photography, the bulk of oil paintings were portraiture because that was pretty much the only way to carry forth likenesses from generation to generation.

With the rise of photography, oil portraits became kind of superfluous. Instead of killing off oil painting, it freed up painting to be many other things. Now, a century later, we have impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism, and so on.

Fox sees that in comedy as well now. With shows like Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, comedy shows no longer have to be a three jokes a minute laugh factory. It can explore deeper issues while still existing within the framework of a comedy show.

While traditionalists (just like they did with oil painting) will decry what comedy has turned into, a new generation of comedians are leading the charge into a brighter, more interesting, and more inclusive future.

Best Worst Days

A little while ago, I wrote about a book that described ten days that unexpectedly changed the US. I said that, if I got a chance, that I’d throw in my thoughts regarding different days that could fall under this category as well.

I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. I came up with three more dates. One is obvious, the other two not so much.

Let’s start with the most obvious date, 09/11/2001. A massive terrorist attack under a Republican conservative administration, there were some changes that were definitely going to happen and so were expected. Clearly, the US was going to invade Afghanistan, the host country of Al Qaeda. Given the semi-obsession that Bush / Cheney had with Saddam Hussein, it wasn’t exactly a shock that the US invaded Iraq, even though clearly Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.

There was some fallout from 9/11 that I did not expect (although in hindsight, I probably should have). I did not expect that my civil rights would almost immediately start eroding. Within two months of 9/11, the PATRIOT act was passed. Suddenly the wall that prevented our foreign intelligence services from investigating US citizens on US soil vanished. Once that ball started rolling, it never stopped and it’s still rolling now. In the 1970s, the East German secret police, the Stasi, was the most feared organization in terms of collecting data about its citizens. Well, after 9/11, the Stasi look like incompetent stumblebums. We learned from Edward Snowden about the myriad of ways that our government now keeps watch over us.

And it wasn’t just the government. Bolstered by this new environment in which we seemed to have voluntarily given up our right to privacy, private corporations have also gotten into the data vacuuming business. This is inarguably worse because the government at least theoretically operates under our authorization (the whole We The People thing). Our right of privacy is gone, never to be seen again.

The other unexpected result from 9/11 that I did not see coming (although again, maybe I should have) was the militarization of the police. I still remember when policeman wore light blue uniforms and were considered peace officers. Now, all the police that I ever see are dressed in black and are bulked up wearing flak jackets

The US military accelerated this process by making its equipment widely available to law enforcement. Suddenly, the police have what certainly appear to be combat vehicles. They have state of the art weaponry. At one time, the LAPD somehow ended up with grenade launchers.

You give men new toys to play with and, guess what, they’re going to play. SWAT no-knock warrants are up over an order of magnitude compared to before 9/11 and no, I seriously doubt that our country is ten times more violent now than then.

In many neighborhoods, the police now function more as an occupying force than trying to keep the peace. If the terrorists wanted to change our way of life, it’s hard to say that they did not succeed.

A date that few people will recognize is 11/21/1969. That was the date that the first two computer sites were permanently linked via ARPANET.

For those of you that are not computer geeks, ARPANET is the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was a Department of Defense project. Looking at its wiki page, its original purpose was a bit murky. The story that I heard was that the DoD wanted to build a distributed computing network that could survive a nuclear attack. Some people claim that wasn’t its original purpose. The DoD simply recognized that each of its distinct research projects had its own silo of immense computing power and they wanted to develop an efficient way of sharing resources.

Be that as it may, it was the first network that followed the TCP/IP network. Essentially, those two nodes were the first two of what would eventually be known as the internet.

Talk about unexpectedly changing the world. Whether it was originally intended to survive a nuclear war or just to more efficiently manage resources, the internet today, for good or bad, has fundamentally changed the world in ways that could never have been imagined. Whether its porn or toilet paper on demand or having one application be shared by nearly three billion users or having nearly all of the world’s information available in your pocket or, as mentioned in the 9/11 consequences, a near complete loss of privacy, the internet has fundamentally changed the world, not just the US.

Here’s another date that I pretty much guarantee that no one will recognize. The date is 04/30/2011. Barack Obama is president. This was during the nonsense when the latest right wing conspiracy theory was that Obama was not born in the US. There were demands to see his birth certificate. Leading this charge was Donald Trump. Trump had, in the past, flirted with running for president but had always demurred. Trump’s two priorities were (are) to grift as much money as possible from unsuspecting suckers and idolatrous adulation. Occasionally threatening to run for president apparently scratched both itches and he’d back out once he was sated.

Well, on 04/30/2011, justifiably annoyed at Trump’s fanning the flames of the birth certificate conspiracy, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama mocked Trump. Trump was in the audience and was humiliated by the laughter that greeted Obama’s jokes. If you believe Roger Stone (and you should really never believe Roger Stone, but…), that was the moment that Trump decided that he was really going to run for president.

If true, that was truly an unexpected result. A couple of jokes quite literally changed the course of history. If Trump didn’t run, there was a whole stable of Republican candidates ranging from the son/brother of a President (Jeb Bush) to a Black man (Ben Carson) to a Hispanic man (Marco Rubio) to a woman (Carly Fiorina) to the guy whose father took part in JFK’s assassination (Ted Cruz, if you believe Donald Trump, and you should definitely never believe Trump). In 2012, after the debacle of losing, what to the Republicans was a very winnable election, there was a whole playbook about broadening the Republican constituency. This could have led to a Republican party that maybe even could have found some room for me.

Instead, we got Trump spewing hatred to predominately older white voters. We got the laziest, most ignorant, and most incompetent President in our country’s history. Because his ego refused to recognize that he lost, we now have tens of millions of people that believe that our democracy is rigged. It’s no exaggeration to say that our future as a democratic nation is now at risk.

All because of a couple of jokes.