Our Unfinest Hour

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: “Never in the history of US governance have so many been betrayed by so few”. The chance of a default draws ever closer. The rating agencies are ready to pounce on our credit rating. Meanwhile, John Boehner and his Republican Student Council do nothing but pose and posture for Fox News. Dunkirk preceded the Battle of Britain (Our finest hour time). Here in the US we may be playing the same tape out of sequence—the Battle of the Budget is lost and then followed by our own Dunkirk with a massive defeated army of the middle class stranded on the beach waiting valiantly for Election Day 2012. Who can save us? Not the Congress. Not the White House. They represent themselves. Who’s left, just us. The Las Vegas Sun published a letter I submitted this week. It’s theme was that adversity is often the birthplace of successful change. Let’s hope it is and let’s hope we grow up.

Guns or butter. One or the other.

The usually obtuse Hermann Goering , coined the phrase, “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat,” when he was, well, buttering up Dem Deutschen Volke for the blitzkrieg he and his Nazi pals were planning for Europe in 1936.
Guns or butter is an apt phrase for the situation we now face in the US, but as usual our exceptional country doesn’t want to choose. We want our cake and eat it too.
So, with an annual Pentagon budget of $680 billion, three endless wars, over a million foreclosures and massive unemployment, merrily we roll along towards the cliff, American lemming style.
If you remember the opening of “Rebel without a cause” two guys are playing chicken by racing their cars towards a cliff. One of the guys is James Dean so you know he’s not going to die (at least until his Porsche crashes a year later).
However, the other guy’s sleeve gets caught in the door handle and he goes over the cliff. We’re the other guy now, and James Dean later. Fiscal death is just down the road apiece while Congress is checking the rearview mirror. We’re not Greece but we’re not Switzerland either. We have to choose.
The pudgy Goering, who never saw a strudel he could resist, really meant that both the guns and the butter were for the top Nazis. “Ich war Die zwarte!” he kept shouting from the dock at Nuremburg. “I was the Second!” (after Hitler), the kind of thing Donald Rumsfeld would bark if we had such trials today. We don’t, and we won’t.
The answer is in the lyrics of a song from the 1940’s.
“If you don’t spend, you bank,
If it ain’t Bing, it’s Frank,
Gotta be this or that”
A buttered scone for me, please.

Geoff Dyer, literary magician

I first caught his act in 1996 reading “But Beautiful”, his ode to jazz. He didn’t stick to the music but the musicians and he moved a long way from the plodding and pedantic “History of Jazz” done by Ken Burns. It wasn’t a conventional book on jazz which is usually all enthusiasm and record dates. This was mostly about the madness and sadness of the scene. This hit the right note with me since I cherish the damaged angels Lester Young and Billie Holiday. I once closed up Birdland at 4 am stuffing my head with Bud Powell, the mad pianist nobody could surpass.
Then I turned to other things and didn’t revisit Dyer until just now when I read “Jeff in Venice. Death in Varanesi’ (get it, not Death in Venice). Pretty soon I was laughing out loud, a rare event for me I moved on to his “Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it”. Does this give you some idea of his style?
Dyer is an intellectual protégé of John Berger, the art and cultural critic. I discovered Berger way back in the late 1960’s. He said that advertising didn’t meet our real needs in a caption underneath a picture of some poor people walking past a billboard promoting glamorous jet travel. Of course advertising meets everyone’s needs, especially mine. There is no discourse like this in America. This was a new and provocative thought environment for me and worth considering..
Time to revisit Mr. Dyer. I read through “Out of sheer rage” (Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence) one of my favorite authors in college. I had the misfortune of telling this to the doyenne of Manhattan writers, Joan Didion, one evening in Greenwich Village. She sneered and pushed an imaginary custard pie in my face. Actually nobody reads either one of them today. Literature has given way to “names” such as James Patterson and Nora Roberts, who are not really writers but grocers, I mean grossers.
Dyer’s writing is hard to describe: elusive, witty, astute, digressive. I used to go to Magic Castle in LA I liked the all the sleight-of-hand but I especially liked Vito Scotti, a character actor in the movies who did stand-up magic. He did a modern version of Commedia dell-arte, the comedy of types such as Arlechinno, the mischievous servant. His act was the clever magician but he never used props, cards or rabbits, it was all pantomime. “It’s in the act”. the juggler said if he dropped a ball on stage.
Do I digress? That’s Dyer’s great trick and one of his great pleasures, digression. When he takes off the Commedia mask he becomes the articulate, serious and erudite literary critic as in his essay and review collection: “Otherwise known as the human condition”. He quotes Phillip Larkin, one of my favorites and a master of skepticism. I confess that skepticism has become my refuge from the All American avalanche of good feelings and good news now that we’re in three endless wars and essentially broke. We need a new song: “Brother can you spare a Food Stamp?”
One quick Dyer quote: “Writers always envy artists, and would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. For the writer, work is characterized as the absolute cessation of physical movement (all movement is an evasion and distraction from the job at hand).
In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business.”

. On the cover of “Out of sheer rage” is a blurb from Steve Martin saying: ‘This is the funniest book I’ve ever read”. There you have it; two wild and crazy guys, both writers, both magicians, both brilliant.