What a Dick & Bogart's North Korean Blowout

I recently watched the infamous Nixon interview (Is it redundant to call something Nixon infamous?). Not the movie of the play based on the interview, but the original.

There’s no way Nixon could be a politician now. His speech, mannerisms, and sweaty odd-looking face would be enough to make people not vote for him—besides the crap that comes out of his mouth, not limited to the stuff Hitchens writes below.

I’ve heard it plenty before that even in his first loss to Kennedy in ‘60 was due to the discrepancy in their TV images, that Jack knew how to work it and Dick didn’t. But supposedly that must have been countered by the time he won two in a row. Whatever coaching they did, wouldn’t be enough today. The sweating thing especially: in old movies I’ve seen, there are these incredibly sweaty guys, sometimes the main character—think Carl Malden or Gene Hackman. Unless they’re in the jungle or playing sports (or having sex) stars don’t sweat, not naturally and thus uncontrolled. But just that face, too. That shit is old school.

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Hitchens on Richard Nixon from his column at Slate.com:

The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon's mind was not "compartmentalized" between one issue and another. For example, like most "family values" Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court's finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape." The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.

As so often, his remarks about black Americans are crude and often sexual, while his innuendoes about his Jewish fellow citizens are more sinister. And, as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time—February 1973—the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don't seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record—disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. "What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up." To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism "in this country" is not located all that "deep down," since it's being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, "It may be they have a death wish. You know that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries."

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Here's my impression and paraphrasing of Hitchens at a talk/interview he gave recently. I found the video at this pretty cool site: FORA.tv (thanks Allan).

(I know this poster is Chinese, but as close as I can get. Relax.)

Attempting, what he thinks an impossible task, to describe what life is like inside contemporary North Korea, Christopher Hitchens, after already likening the nation to that of George Orwell’s 1984, draws one contrast. While there is no mention of religion in the book, the state having taken the place of all things, the purported irreligious communistic country, North Korea, is, rather, similar to a particular western faith: Christianity. The president, the country’s founder, and his son, the current leader of the commi-esque party and the military, not president, are fused into one identity. Only, the president has been dead fifteen years. Hitchens quips, “It’s only one short of a trinity.”

Apparently, he's almost here. Won't that be a lot of fun. Actually, though, I feel better now that I know, like most heirs apparent of even anti-western countries, he was educated in liberal European schools. Sure, know your enemy. But now matter how careful and restrictive, they will encounter more people and things that counter the homegrown isolationist tendency.



Just look at what Europe did to Bogey.

Recess

Fuck it, I’m gonna open this thing up. I was reminded that if you’re going to bother to say it, then you might as well shout it. Shout it out loud. Okay, Kiss was the original, but I heard it said in relation to writing, recently—and it wasn't about coming out, either (although I suppose it would encompass that, too, but alas not here). And since I like to consider my self a poly-aesthete, then I’ll put my output where my mouth is—er, make that creativity, or something, where my mouth is.

Yeah, so, in this spirit, here’s a short story I wrote recently about a little boy who can’t sleep.

Recess

Ben’s tired, but not his brain. Head hums like the big, old computers at school, used only when newer, better ones weren’t working; the pushing, pulling spin of warm air through ancient-dust caked vents: cobwebbed dartboards forgotten in basements. Inside closed eyes glare TV screens. Eyes opened again. Better just to look into the dark. Spastic legs kick-off sheets, soon wrapped again, as Egyptian mummies. Ben saw a museum exhibit of a pharaoh in his tomb, hidden deep in a pyramid, surrounded by a lot of stuff. Food, water and even pets were buried in the tomb with the pharaoh. Why would he need these things when he’s dead? All is uncomfortable and nothing seems to work right.

Earlier, Ben escaped from recess. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go outside with the rest of the kids. It was just—well, his stomach hurt. He hadn’t felt like eating breakfast or much lunch. What he was able to shove down was barely warm and unrecognizable. Just before the end of lunch, he went to the bathroom. When he was done, instead of making a left and going back to the cafeteria, he took a right, and walked towards the double-doors at the end of the hall—flat, cold black cheeks below a pair of thin glass eyes crisscrossed with wire, each a lower eyelid: sets of curved, hanging arms holding dull metal bars. Above the doorway a light-box never lit read “Emergency Exit Only, Alarm Will Sound.” Ben had never heard it go off before. He opened one of the doors, waited a couple of seconds, and walked out onto the loading dock behind the cafeteria. Ben could hear the school janitor talking on the other side of the big garbage cans.

Ben likes the janitor. He has a small hoop earring in each ear, a jerry-curl and cool tattoos. The janitor, or School Superintendent, like it’s painted on the parking space filled by his sparkly-blue van, is the coolest adult at school. He gets to wear a uniform with his name on it: “Mean” Joe Green. That’s what all the kids call him, and, just like the jolly-green giant, he towers over them.

The janitor was talking to one of the lunch-ladies about things Ben was used to hearing grownups talk about: their jobs, their kids, and money. But he was cussing, too, which Ben wasn’t used to hearing from adults, at least not in real life—they cussed all the time on cable. “Mean” Joe was talking about a “big mess” that “poor folk” had to “clean up.” What big mess? Was the janitor poor? Ben heard him say Wall Street. Wasn’t that where his dad works? Recently, Ben’s dad had been picking him up from school, something his mom had usually done. He thought he heard the lunch-lady say, “stalks.” Like beanstalks? Hopefully they were having beans for lunch tomorrow. No, she said “stocks,” like socks. Ben didn’t know what stocks were, but they sounded familiar too. His heart beat loudly in his ears. The janitor wasn’t being nice at all. Sick and hungry at the same time, his stomach still hurt. Making sure the door didn’t slam shut behind him, Ben went back inside. He ran down the hallway towards the playground, the blacktop, and recess.

A week late, but who's counting?

July 4th 2009. Louis Armstrong on the radio. It’s his birthday too.

Reading The Great Gatsby, again. Jonathan Franzen on NPR says he revisits the book every year or two. I’ve always leaned toward This Side of Paradise, though Gatsby is possibly, as the people on the radio had been proposing, the American Novel. More true lately, with the rise and fall of big things. The stock market, gangsters, bond-traders, “self-made” people, indulgence, arrogance, and tragedy shared, or not.

A good story tendrilled to today, Gatsby props up American myths to stand or fall against the winds of human frailty and liability. The land of opportunity; to do what? Somewhere to re-invent yourself, start over. That’s kind of what Agniezska, my friend, recently-citizened, whose validity I gladly vouched for to the proper authorities, said. Besides the, perhaps, more common conflation of “opportunity” and money-making, she says, to leave all you’ve known and what’s been expected of you can too be a compelling a reason to come to America.

I’ve decided to stay put today. I’m staying on the block. Not as much action as I would expect, but it’s still early. 1:52 pm.

A Louis classic is playing, a slower romantic one. He’s singing something about giving him your lips. “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” that’s the Armstrong title.

On the corner of Gates and Marcy, the next cross street up from here at Monroe, stands the Louis Armstrong Public Houses. I wonder if anyone over there is listening to this sweet, indulgent daylong-plus retrospective of the erstwhile jazzman. It’s one of the least attractive, though they’re still common, places I’ve seen in Bed-Stuy; at least that’s within spitting distance of my place and sometimes crossed in normal route.

Firecrackers and some small fireworks have been going off for days. Today there are more, gladly. Just a bit rebellion, and not just for the metaphor of artillery, fireworks that fit well with the underlying ethos of the day: don’t tell us what to do. A silly law easily broken, a way to, more than just let off work-a-day-steam by indulging in ritual, convenient and relatively safe. We need this. For America, born of rebellious teenage-logic—like, the battle of attrition—law breaking for the sake of it, anti-authoritarianism just because, is part of its creation myth.

Triangulated by a milk-mouthed jazz radio voice, car stereos throbbing whoomps, and the tinny jangle of tiny speakers in windows turned street-ward, I woke up from a nap. Then a new theme is introduced: the ice cream man’s Scottish-jig-something-or-other-ditty playing on and on, and forever; just beneath, an aftertaste of subtle but substantial lawnmower-roar of the truck’s refrigeration.

Black Power-fists exchanged for Barack Obama portraiture on t-shirts, the now iconic image made by a white man of a man half-white. Beneath the shirt still angry, but anger more stilled, more patient and, perhaps, more optimistic; perhaps there’s more reason to be.

Fountains of silver and orange fill front steps of brownstones, whistle-crack. Night has come. Whistle-boom. The sun has gone. Whistle-crackle-fizzle. Darkness only broken up occasionally by—crash, like metal doors thrown off rooftops onto sidewalks below.

Thunder? Or the low rumble of far dark sky disturbed. Pop, pop: go the smaller firecrackers kids get to set off.

Momentary anarchy. Insurgent ritual. Rebellion distilled.


Yes, that's an Hassidic cop.

Re-edit of Spring, you bastard

As opposed to fakin' the funk, and just going back to edit or update the previous post, I thought I'd include you in the "creative" process. So, here is my new (final) version of this poem. Happy 4th of July.

Spring, you bastard:
Give it up already.
Calendar summer has nearly begun,
and you're still here.
Cool and blustery,
no hint of humidity--
though we will curse it when there is.

Perhaps I spoke too soon.

Like so much else,
we like you when you're gone,
want you when you're
fleeting,
retreating.
The way
New Yorkers want
nothing more than to escape—
till we do, then can't wait
to return to
your sweltering
embrace,
your suffocating
comfort,
your painful
familiarity.

For years now,
you've had barely a week,
sliding from winter to summer
graceless as the city itself.
So maybe you're not a bastard,
born of slovenly winter
and wandering summer.
Maybe, finally, like a
phoenix born from the ashes of fall,
summer grants winter custodial rights,
and brief spring, you
come for
court ordered visitation.



Interestingly similar shape as the graph I posted with the original version of the poem, showing that more people now believe global warming is not man made. Seems at odds with this graph above in some way. Hm.

The Fonzi Scale

Perhaps a reaction to my economics schooling, I’ve had the habit lately of thinking about things quantitatively. Recently, when two friends—yes, still have a few—were talking about the pot consumption; e.g., how much they need, want, can afford, and my brain started graphing consumer demand curves, morphing with the discussion.

So, from this inclination, I give you the Fozi Scale. Pretty much a rip—off of the +/- point system that The City Paper’s of D.C. and Philadelphia use to score how well (or not) their cities are doing, Newsweek’s up, down, and horizontal arrows.

Please forgive the more than usual reliance on The Economist, my inputs have narrowed lately. I’ll try to do better.

Thumbs Up:

--India’s government announced that it wanted to withdraw troops from the inhabited areas it controls in the divided region of Kashmir. Hundreds of thousands of troops are stationed in Kashmir, which has suffered two decades of insurgency. –The Economist

--Peru’s government said it would repeal two decrees facilitating investment in the Amazon jungle, after two months of protests in which 24 police and perhaps 30 Indians died. Yehude Simon, the prime minister, said he would resign once calm was restored. –The Economist

--A judge allowed a civil lawsuit to proceed against John Yoo, an official in the Bush administration who helped form policy on the treatment of suspected terrorist detainees. José Padilla, an American citizen who has been sentenced on terror conspiracy charges, is suing Mr Yoo for $1 and for an admission that his incarceration as an enemy combatant was unconstitutional. –The Economist

--Russia’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial of three men acquitted of being accomplices in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist whom Vladimir Putin described as a “marginal” figure. None of the men are accused of the actual killing. –The Economist

--Al Franken (yes, from SNL) finally declared Minnesota’s newest Senator by the State Supreme Court. Democrats now have a filibuster-free majority of 60 in the Senate. Kinda.

--Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, caused a stir when he disappeared for five days. His staff said he had gone hiking in the Appalachians. In fact, Mr Sanford had been in Argentina. On his return he admitted to an extramarital affair with a woman there. –The Economist

It’s just really funny: Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, the NPR show, has coined the phrase “gone hiking in the Appalachians,” meaning “I’m leaving town unannounced to shack up with my infidelity.”


Thumbs Down:

--In Northern Ireland more than 100 Romanians, mostly Roma (gypsies), fled their homes in south Belfast after a spate of racist attacks. The deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, called the attacks a “totally shameful episode”. –The Economist


Splitting the Difference:

--Iran’s Revolution-revolution; crazy good, crazy scary.

But: Neda Agha-Soltan—the beautiful woman shot and killed in front of her father, completely caught on video, in the aftermath of Iran’s presumably fraudulent presidential election. If you want to cry while wanting to throw up, you can catch it on YouTube. It’s really haunting me.


--Mr Obama signed an order that extends benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees.

But: Health insurance is not included, provoking more criticism from gay groups that the president is not fulfilling his promises to them. –The Economist

--“Public Option” part of American universal health-care; to soon to tell if either it’s any good or if it will fly. From what I’ve heard, though, it still seems tied to work or pay-roll taxes: what about unemployed?

But: Single payer health-care option for health-care reform is off the table, according to the administration.