Suspicion breeds confidence

That's a slogan from Terry Gilliam's film “Brazil”, a comic take on Orwell's “1984” but with the same gruesome ending (they own his mind). Where to begin, with Orwell of course and what he saw coming before the NSA, drones, listening devices and wiretaps. What he saw was the emerging of the managerial elite bred in WWII—the unelected, unaccountable “experts” who are now in charge of our government. The head of the NSA, the arrogant James Clapper, was the kind of man Orwell feared most. Dave Eggers new novel, “The Circle”has a company credo “All that happens must be known”, which is Big Brother in the guise of Google and Facebook. I'm not on Facebok or Twitter, but my privacy has been hijacked just the same. Edward Snowden should get a medal (he won't) for revealing that the NSA is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world. The public blindness to the harm of our out-of-control technology is baffling. The NSA is there to petrify the population into a permanent state of war, or they say in Newspeak “War is peace”. The Pentagon has an annual budget of $650 billion while Congress cuts food stamps and guide dogs for the blind. American global ambition has reached a tipping point and it is backfiring. This security psychosis is no longer a stable basis for our society. On a more serious note, there is a controversy about renaming the Washington Redskins football team (not politically correct it seems). I have a wonderful, modern, new name for the team the “Washington Stealers”! Too subtle? Too close to the Pittsburgh Steelers? They ran a focus group of 500 million and it was suitable.

Meet the Texas Taliban

The saying is that Pakistan is not a country with an army but an army with a country. That's what we're becoming: a gun-owning army with a country. I saw a piece on MSNBC where four women were having lunch in Dallas to discuss gun control when, out of nowhere, a gang of people armed to the teeth congregated across the street brandishing their assault rifles, other weapons and crude signs about the Second Amendment. This is a scene I couldn't imagine happening in any civilized country. After little children have been gunned down in Newtown and there is a shooting rampage on the news every night, the nation is numb. After all, in 2010 11,078 Americans were victims of homicide with firearms and another 73,505 were intentionally shot and survived. Twenty five other countries with a larger combined population had 1300 homicides. Each of these countries has either removed or restricted the possession of handguns My advice is to keep the Stars & Stripes at half mast every day of the year. The NRA is calling the shots (pun intended) in this country.

There's bad news tonight

We're in the grip of our own failures. Our failure to understand the world we live in. Our failure to understand our own foolishness. A government shutdown with almost a million innocent people thrown out of work. A refusal to honor our debts. We are a dysfunctional, pompous, ignorant people led by a bunch of blowhards. Our insufferable vanity; our permanent ignorance. Our pointless wars, our little children forced to go hungry, or worse, be killed in their classrooms. The Tea Party keeps spiking our drinks with arsenic but we keep gulping it anyway. DeTocqueville wrote that whenever he met an American (in 1831) that he was told that our country was the greatest in the world and then that person would saunter off to contemplate himself. It would help if Americans would contemplate their vulnerability to chaos. Who are the voters in these red states? They seem to have no concept of bigger issues than owning guns and drinking corn liquor. And so we stumble across the world stage while other rising powers look back at us with pity. Don't blame Washington. Pogo Possum had it right when he said, “We has met the enemy and he is us.” We're too dumb to be governed.

The cynical Syrian circle of death

To bomb or not to bomb, that is the question. How do we get stuck in these tar babies? The wise John Adams said, “America does not go looking for monsters in the world.” He didn't count on a lethal lamebrain like George W. occupying the White House. Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to check out the history of Syria. I started with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916. The British and French would divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire...sort of carving up Turkey. It had the assent of Tsarist Russia who would get Istanbul as a leftover while Britain and France got big spheres of influence and could decide state boundaries. Great maps colored red, blue and light green decided over brandy and cigars in some London club. This undercut the promises made by Lawrence of Arabia to create an Arab homeland in Greater Syria. And in the movie they got Alec Guinness, Obi Wan Kanobe himself, as King Faisal but he was booted out. Ah, but what a tangled web we weave when first we aim to deceive. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power and they published the terms of the agreement and it is the fatal turning point in Western-Arab relations. Even in 2002 the British Foreign Office admitted “a lot of problems are a consequence of our colonial past”. So where do we come in: we didn't partition the Arab world, or help create Israel. In 1956 we were the good guys who paddled the backsides of Britain, France and Israel for invading Egypt. Why should we go into Syria with guns and missiles firing like we did in Iraq? Orwell was dismayed to hear American military leaders in WWII insist on a “Carthaginian Peace”, in other words total obliteration of the enemy. As for the use of chemical weapons, that's how they fight. A billion Arabs couldn't send a man to the moon. It isn't in the Koran. And as that compassionate dictator Joe Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”.

Jasmine French deserves our sympathy

She is the tragic heroine of Woody Allen's new movie, “Blue Jasmine”. It opens with her flying First Class, which she can't afford, from NY to live with her half-sister in San Francisco—someone who has never tasted First Class in her life unless McDonalds had a test of a Caviar McMuffin. Jasmine got in this fix of being homeless, husbandless and broke through her own jealous impulsiveness that toppled the house of cards built by her husband's shady financial dealings—today's villain du jour. But in my experience these beautifully coiffed and clothed Park Avenue women have always had more moxy and cunning than poor Jasmine. Woody has stacked the deck against her. No money, no family and no marketable skill and no sense or sensibility for the life ahead of her. Her only support is the sister who bags groceries and dubious lovers. Even her son and husband have abandoned her. The funniest scene is a bit of farce when the aptly-named Dr. Flicker, a dentist she works for, declares his love and makes a pass at her and she knocks him to the floor. She's not going to leave the Four Seasons lifestyle for The Olive Garden without a fight. There is no Mr. Right for her, including an unctious man who wants to run for congress. If Woody is detailing infidelity and divorce he's on sure ground he knows well. If he's showing us the gulf between the 1% and the 99%, he's not in the same league as George Bernard Shaw. I guess this is a story of modern manners and morals except you won't find either in the script. Woody leaves her broken, dispirited, alone and talking to herself on a park bench. Chekhov went backstage after one of his plays ended and found the actors in tears. He said, “but this is just a little comedy”. I suppose Blue Jasmine is just a little comedy where everybody loses, especially the husband who commits suicide in prison.

Planet of the Apps.

You like apps. So does the NSA, Google, Facebook and a thousand other mercenary locations. When you sign up for these seemingly harmless little programs you have landed on digital flypaper. I won't dwell on the Orwellian aspects of this surrender of your privacy other than to remind you that Thoreau said simplify, simplify, not complicate. You already have an iPod, an iPad an iPhone, isn't that enough distraction for one day? I know a young man who is selling an app for musicians, possibly to make guitars sound less appalling. Essentially, apps are for saps, a continuation of the “silicon snake oil” Clifford Stoll warned us of years ago. Anyway, don't let me stop you. Sign up, pay up and shut up. The marketing department is keeping tabs on you but since you are only the plankton of their analytics just keep feeding the relentless commercialization of our lives. Here's a little known fact: it all started back in the 1930's when an NHL hockey player won the rookie of the year as well as the trophy for sportsmanship and gentlemanly conduct on the ice. His name was Apps, Syl Apps.

No mercy for Morsi

Egypt is the nastiest place I've ever visited. Twenty five million rude and resentful people that we have been spoon-feeding for decades. This week's Time magazine says it well: “World's best protesters and world's worst democrats”. The military has now seen fit to pluck President Morsi from office:. Apparently he was under the delusion that he was “Ibis the Invincible” one of my Whiz comics heroes from the 1940's. Prince Ibis was a man of miracles who battled modern crime and evil with the aid of his magic Ibistick. Yes, they have pyramids, the Sphinx and the truly awesome Temple of Karnak but save your money if you're thinking of going there. Get the video instead. In Egypt the Arab spring has turned out to be Springtime for Morsi and the brotherhood, winter for everyone else. The funny thing is Morsi's from Ireland where he also played the lyre and wrote morose political songs. Rather than go to Boston he chose Egypt because they welcomed lyres. I guess he can always return to Dublin and resume his career. Wait a minute; am I thinking of Morrisey?

What's on telly?

The answer was “two stuffed penguins” sitting atop the TV set in a Monty Python skit. They're as interesting as anything on network television today. In a piece entitled “Serving up schlock”, Maureen Dowd decrys the same old regurgitated story lines year in year out. But that's all they've ever been. “Ben Casey” circa 1950's, is now “House”; “Mr. Peepers” is now “Bad Teacher”; “The Defenders” is now “Law and Order (or is it Ordure?” A network exec confesses to watching “Mad Men” on cable so he has some taste. “They're enslaved to tradition”, he says, “they should be bolder but there's a lot of timidity.” Cable is where the creativity is now, but to paraphrase the German I learned in the bars of Zurich, there is a cable service called Drecktv. Personally I watch Mad Men, The Simpsons and a foreign language channel called MhZ. The plots and the social setups are refreshing and the subtitles don't bother me, but I could use some on the Australian shows. Actually you don't need a fancy cable package and certainly not the overpriced HBO. You can get quality TV right on PBS, the service we own but the Republicans wish we didn't. So when you're asked, “what's on telly?” you can say, “Something good, as usual.”

Old Stanley Cup prefers warm sunny South

Who can blame it? Born in 1883 as a trinket of Queen Victoria's Canadian plenipotentiary, it has the scars and hard living that 130 years have given it. The NHL playoffs begin this week and the purists will tell you that the Cup belongs in Canada or Chicago or Detroit. But after last year's upset by the LA Kings you have to believe it's happy elsewhere. There was a snarky diatribe in the NY Times this weekend that the NHL Southeast division had the worst winning percentage in the four major North American pro sports leagues. But in this 6 column diatribe there is a single sentence that says, 'the Southeast did win two Stanley Cups—Tampa Bay in 2004 and Carolina in 2006. And how many do the Canucks have, Buffalo, Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minnesota, anyone? Anyone? I think I've made my point. As for the NY Rangers what do they have...one Cup in 74 years...the Islanders won 4 in a row but that was decades ago. Meanwhile you have Anaheim, Dallas, LA, Tampa and Carolina hoisting the Cup. By the way my wife's name is engraved on it from 2006 (you can look it up) P.LaViolette (Peggy LaViolette using her maiden name). The Cup is a hefty 35 lbs. It stays in shape by removing the oldest band of the barrel and attaching the latest. You won't see the Seattle Metropolitans, the first US team to win it or the Victoria Cougars or the Vancouver Millionaires (although the Canucks did wear the Millionaires uniform this year to see if some luck would rub off.) Sipping champagne from the Cup is an annual tradition for the winners. But of late there have been Margaritas to imbibe and heaven forbid, even Mint Juleps!

You can't repeat the past

“Of course you can Old Sport.” Yes, that's Jay Gatsby, the elegant roughneck, inveterate dreamer and immensely wealthy young man answering his neighbor (and our narrator) Nick Carraway. A new film version opens next month (May) directed by Baz Luhrman with his usual panache. It will be a big improvement on the stilted black and white film starring Alan Ladd and most certainly bigger and gaudier than the one with Robert Redford. The casting will be a concern since a mere movie star can only hope to encompass the yearning and mystery of Gatsby, content simply to portray the glamour. The lovely and feckless Daisy seems to come off better in the movies. She is just an illusion after all even though Gatsby loves her and will eventually die for her. The new film will have a lavish sound track but the music I find most evocative of the era is in the four impressionistic piano solos written and played by Bix Beiderbecke, especially “In a mist”. How does it end—like so many American stories, he is shot and killed by a minor character, the same type of nonentity that kills Presidents, mayors, litte school children and thousands of others every year in our gun-loving republic. As for Daisy and her husband Tom, they will just disappear back into their money and continue to bicker like a loveless couple in a Strindberg play. Fitzgerald said that the greatest thing life can give you is youth. That is, if you can dodge the assault rifles and bombs long enough to enjoy it.

Mad Men and me

The sixth and final season of “Mad Men” starts tomorrow (April 7) on AMC. It's my favorite show for many reasons because it depicts the golden age of advertising when legends like David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mary Welles were turning out iconic campaigns; when Bert Stern and Irving Penn were shooting memorable pictures including my favorite model, the beautiful Suzy Parker. And yes, I was part of it as an agency creative director like Don Draper. The only difference was that I was in London and he was in New York. Yes. I drank and smoked the way he did, I had my suits made on Savile Row, but I didn't have a couch in my office so I didn't have all of his adventures. I still get the Eric Idle “nudge-nudge wink-wink” but I was happily married to Peggy (Don & Peggy!!!) and living quietly in St. John's Wood with our two children. The show has elements of a soap opera that's definitely one for grownups but the advertising plots are 100% accurate. In fact I find myself yelling at the screen when I see the thing that got me fired and the double cross that led me to quit. Rolling Stone calls it, “The greatest TV drama of all time”. And I call it “my greatest job of all time”.

Lawrence of Arabia--the new Broadway musical

The opening line of one of Joe Queenan's culture commentaries is, “CATS is very, very, very, very, very bad.” And he's being generous. I saw Les Miserables in London and it was very, very miserable. I know better than to see Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Stardust Express and CATS no matter how much money they make for Andrew Paine Webber, I mean Andrew Lloyd Webber, I was thinking of his bank account. Phantom has done $5.6 billion, with a B. I can't object to Sir Andrew's golden touch, I just think the source of these musicals is wrong. They are built on a financial model. There are no “stars”, no memorable score, just high-priced tickets and buses unloading the middle-aged groups from the burbs. They're beautiful and dead, certainly joyless.These sort of pretentious productions were spoofed wonderfully by Mel Smith in his film “The Tall Guy” where, if you can believe it, they put on a musical of the poor crippled Elephant Man. Someone asked Stephen Sondheim if he didn't approve of these more operatic musicals and he said, “no, I don't, all that recitative with a song stitched in every now and then isn't the kind of musical I like...a song has to appear at precisely the right time with memorable music and lyrics.” By the way, it was Sir Andrew who called “My Fair Lady” the perfect musical. Now we have a London production of Lawrence of Arabia*. It's about an American girl, Sarah Lawrence who ventures into the desert to find her long lost lover Sandy Hill. It has a love song “Dancing Sheik to Sheik”; a light number “Put on a happy fez”and a rousing show stopper: “The camels are coming, hooray, hooray”. How stuff like Billy Elliott made lt in America I'll never know. It's about a foul-mouthed brat who wants to show off in dancing shoes. Nothing from over there can match the witty lyrics of Larry Hart or Ira Gershwin or the brilliant score of “West Side Story” or the score and lyrics of Frank Loesser.. While I'm at it I'll relate an incident from a toney Manhattan salon recital. I volunteered a story about Irving Berlin sending a note to Cole Porter on the opening of “Kiss Me Kate”. Turning one of his hit songs from “Annie Get Your Gun” inside out he wrote “Anything I can do you can do better”. The lady across the table from me smiled and said, “yes, daddy used to tell us about that”. It was one of Berlin's daughters echoing the immortal voice of the true Broadway. *At least in my mind.

You can't be a Catholic and a grownup

That's one of Orwell's “hard truths”. It's in the same vein as Marx's “religion is the opium of the people” and Freud's assertion that religious believers display a “persistent neurosis”. But hey, we must always look on the bright side as the Monty Python group sang. Woody Allen, a latter day philosopher said once, “traffic in midtown Manhattan is very congested today, is the Pope or some other show business personality in town?” So now we have the first Francis but it could have been otherwise. We could have had Francis Albert Sinatra. Don Rickles says that he and Dean and Sammy worked tirelessly to get Frank made Pope. “That way,” he said, “we'd only have to kiss his ring.”

You become what you behold

That ominous insight is from cultural guru Marshall McLuhan, and if true we are in big trouble. Our television and movie fare is red in tooth and claw now. Time magazine says that TV dramas have become addicted to blood. It is drowning in dumb, mindless violence. Cinemax's “Strike Force” has already stacked up 208 corpses in one season. Time also diagnoses the creative ways of the grim reaper: impaling, knifing, poisoning, stabbing and in “Game of Thrones” strapping buckets of rats to prisoner's chests, stolen from Orwell's torture scene in “1984”. The NY Times says that gore flows freely in both broadcast and cable. It also points out that it is absurd to pretend that a gun culture is unrelated to popular culture. Is this how we escape from boredom? The late Neil Postman said we were “amusing ourselves to death”. We're not amused. This is our living rooms we're talking about and I, for one, have disinvited these monsters into our home. The Times says that Americans love to watch death, even when it's real. “Some can gaze and not be sick, But I could never learn the trick. There's this to be said for blood and breath, They give a man a taste for death.” A.E Housman

A nicer sort of murder

In Orwell's essay “Decline of the English murder” he details how murder seemed to be changing and becoming an “ordinary” event. Murders had moved from poisoning, mainly by the middle class (see Agatha Christie) to murders done with the utmost callousness and brutality. No more deeds done for insurance money or marital affairs or just good old fashioned envy. In another essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” he chronicles the descent from Raffles, the charming jewel thief, to poor Miss Blandish who is raped and killed in a cold-blooded way. He attributes this to modern events such as mass killing of innocent civilians, hostages, torture, flogging and treachery as normal and morally neutral events. Today these events are seen as admirable when done by the CIA. We now live in a country that worships guns, especially the weapons of mass destruction used in places like Newtown. They're consecrated in the Constitution, the same document that offers the pursuit of happiness. If you watch television today you are treated to a visit to the morgue or a ghastly autopsy with your dinner or late night snack. Too many corpses; too many sex crimes, too much Freud and Krafft-Ebbing without the redeeming things Orwell said these plots should be about such as real social wrongs, economic injustice and plain decency and justice. On the nightly news 6 year olds are gunned down and a pimp firing shots on the Vegas Strip kills 3 innocent people. I have found an escape from this dreadful drivel to a foreign language channel called MHZ. It features a cop named Brunetti in Venice, Maigret in Paris and DeLuca, a tenacious policeman who has to do his job in WWII Italy. There's even a detective priest named Don Matteo whose only weapons are compassion and human insight. The writing is better because the stories are from literature and always have a moral point of view, not the stuff the overhyped TV hacks serve up today. And the narrative is not constantly interrupted by commercials. These men have to walk down the same mean streets as Phillip Marlowe and Harry Bosch but the boulevards and canals are a lot less mean. These men have charm, intelligence and dedication to justice and they very rarely carry firearms. It's just a safer, saner place over there. So, if you hear an Englishman say, “I could murder some Chinese”, don't take alarm, it only means that he'd like to attack a plate of Moo Goo Gai Pan.

New national symbol to replace American Eagle

Both houses of Congress as well as Fox News and MSNBC agree: our new symbol is the Carp. Yes, it's a large Asian fish who lives in sluggish waters and is often raised for food. But the real meaning is more political. To carp means to find fault and complain. Some Tea party people wanted the mastodon or sabre tooth tiger but it was pointed out that they had died just before Republicans were created. Speaking of outspoken creatures, there is now a comic strip named Mallard Fillmore, a right wing duck who carps about Obama and Hillary. After the funny and witty Donald and Daffy, this is a lame duck indeed. And a quack. This started with W in Texas with his inane figures of speech and his lethal call to arms. It has continued with the tongue-tied Governor Rick Perry and the blithering neophyte senator Ted Cruz. Their limitations are boundless. What's with Texas anyway? It reminds me of my favorite doctor joke. A doctor tells a colleague his patient has had a stroke, slurs all his words and nothing he says makes any sense. “Well,” the other doctor says, “he can always move to Texas”. At least we now have a President who is a real orator, maybe not Lincoln, but Lincolnesque. Do I carp? Probably. Long ago Mort Sahl said that a politician's safest statement was, “The future lies ahead”. Oh yeah? Who says?

The NRA and controlled insanity

There is a vast system of mental cheating in the US. It starts with a misreading of the 2nd Amendment, completely ignoring the phrase “a well-regulated militia” into guns for everyone including nuts. What we get is more gun deaths in America than in any other civilized country. The term “controlled insansity” is from the thesis for Orwell's “1984” called “The theory and practice of Oligarchial Collectivism” by Emanuel Goldstein. I read it last week. It's a thick and detailed treatise that leads from doublethink to Ignorance is Strength. The people you can trust with guns are the police and maybe some hunters (although Dick Cheney hits people as well as ducks). I grew up in Canada so I don't understand guns. I've never owned one and the only time I've ever used a rifle was to bring down clay pigeons. I suppose there'll be an effort to control these lethal automatics that can spray enough bullets to kill 20 innocent kids in a few minutes but the NRA is locked and loaded for anyone who challenges them. Homer Simpson, that everyman savant on Fox, summed it up with his remark when he joined the survivalist movement: “If Jesus had had a gun he'd be alive today”. Amen.

Actor Depardieu follows Napoleon into Russia

Eta ekonomicheskiya zadacha (It's an economic thing), using his new language to renounce his French citizenship and join Putin's brand of Liberte, egalite et fraternite. Gerard objects to the tax rate in France. Why didn't he just go to Montreal where taxes are low and they speak a rough form of French, and it's a whole lot warmer than the Russian Riviera. Actually the Russians I've met are a lot friendlier than your average waiter in Paris. I would also put any ballerina from the Bolshoi against any woman in France. Well, maybe not Catherine DeNeuve or Marion Cotillard or...you know what I mean. Usually it's artistic Russians like Stravinsky and Nabokov who head west to France. Still, we might get a new artistic combination. Scho idyat vi kino cevodnya vecherom? (What's playing at the movies tonight?) Gerard Depardieu in “Tovarich Mon Amour”

Fiscal follies? It's a no Boehner.

Yes, death and taxes are inevitable even for Republicans. Luckily we have a President and a Senate to protect the people and do the right thing. Frankly I'm sick of all of it. The NHL is on strike and baseball season is still months away. I'm certainly getting plenty of reading done and that's a plus. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization”. You can look it up.